Episode thirty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis Presley, and is part three of a trilogy on the aftermath of Elvis leaving Sun, and the birth of rockabilly. 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 “The Flying Saucer” by Buchanan and Goodman.
Also, it came too late for me to acknowledge in the episode itself, but I have to mention the sad news that Dave Bartholomew died today, aged 100. He will be missed.
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Episode thirty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Walk The Line” by Johnny Cash, and is part two of a trilogy on the aftermath of Elvis leaving Sun, and the birth of rockabilly. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
Patreon backers also have a thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on “Don’t Be Angry” by Nappy Brown .
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Episode thirty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Blue Suede Shoes” by Carl Perkins, and is part one of a trilogy on the aftermath of Elvis leaving Sun, and the birth of rockabilly. 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 “Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots” by the Cheers .
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Episode thirty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, and at the terrible afterlife of child stardom. 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 “Space Guitar” by Johnny “Guitar” Watson.
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Episode thirty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Tutti Frutti" by Little Richard, and at the rather more family-unfriendly subject the song was originally about. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
Also, a reminder for those who didn't see the previous post -- my patreon backers are now getting ten-minute mini-episodes every week, and the first one is up , and I guested on Jaffa Cake Jukebox this week, talking about the UK top twenty for January 18 1957.
Resources
As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.
Most of the information used here comes from The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorised Biography by Charles White , which is to all intents and purposes Richard's autobiography, as much of the text is in his own words. A warning for those who might be considering buying this though -- it contains descriptions of his abuse as a child, and is also full of internalised homo- bi- and trans-phobia.
This collection contains everything Richard recorded before 1962, from his early blues singles through to his gospel albums from after he temporarily gave up rock and roll for the church.
Patreon
This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon . Why not join them?
Transcript
There are a handful of musicians in the history of rock music who seem like true originals. You can always trace their influences, of course, but when you come across one of them, no matter how clearly you can see who they were copying and who they were inspired by, you still just respond to them as something new under the sun.
And of all the classic musicians of rock and roll, probably nobody epitomises that more than Little Richard. Nobody before him sounded like he did, and while many later tried -- everyone from Captain Beefheart to Paul McCartney -- nobody ever quite sounded like him later.
And there are good reasons for that, because Little Richard was -- and still is -- someone who is quite unlike anyone else.
[Excerpt: Little Richard, "Tutti Frutti", just the opening phrase]
This episode will be the first time we see queer culture becoming a major part of the rock and roll story -- we've dealt with possibly-LGBT people before, of course, with Big Mama Thornton and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and with Johnny Ray in the Patreon-only episode about him, but this is the first time that an expression of sexuality has become part and parcel of the music itself, to the extent that we have to discuss it.
And here, again, I have to point out that I am going to get things very wrong when I'm talking about Little Richard. I am a cis straight white man in Britain in the twenty-first century. Little Richard is a queer black man from the USA, and we're talking about the middle of the twentieth century. I'm fairly familiar with current British LGBT+ culture, but even that is as an outsider. I am trying, always, to be completely fair and to never say anything that harms a marginalised group, but if I do so inadvertently, I apologise.
When I say he's queer, I'm using the word not in its sense as a slur, but in the sense of an umbrella term for someone whose sexuality and gender identity are too complex to reduce to a single label, because he has at various times defined himself as gay, but he has also had relationships with women, and because from reading his autobiography there are so many passages where he talks about wishing he had been born a woman that it may well be that had he been born fifty years later he would have defined himself as a bisexual trans woman rather than a gay man. I will still, though, use "he" and "him" pronouns for him in this and future episodes, because those are the pronouns he uses himself.
Here we're again going to see something we saw with Rosetta Tharpe, but on a much grander scale -- the pull between the secular and the divine.
You see, as well as being some variety of queer, Little Richard is also a very, very, religious man, and a believer in a specific variety of fundamentalist Christianity that believes that any kind of sexuality or gender identity other than monogamous cis heterosexual is evil and sinful and the work of the Devil. He believes this very deeply and has at many times tried to live his life by this, and does so now. I, to put it as mildly as possible, disagree. But to understand the man and his music at all, you have to at least understand that this is the case. He has swung wildly between being almost the literal embodiment of the phrase "sex and drugs and rock and roll" and being a preacher who claims that homosexuality, bisexuality, and being trans are all works of the literal Devil -- several times he's gone from one to the other. As of 2017, and the last public interview I've seen with him, he has once again renounced rock and roll and same-sex relationships. I hope that he's happy in his current situation.
But at the time we're talking about, he was a young person, and very much engaged in those things.
[Excerpt: Little Richard, "Tutti Frutti", just the opening phrase]
Richard Penniman was the third of twelve children, born to parents who had met at a Pentecostal holiness meeting when they were thirteen and married when they were fourteen. Of all the children, Richard was the one who was most likely to cause trouble. He had a habit of playing practical jokes involving his own faeces -- wrapping them up and giving them as presents to old ladies, or putting them in jars in the pantry for his mother to find.
But he was also bullied terribly as a child, because he was disabled. One of his legs was significantly shorter than the other, his head was disproportionately large, and his eyes were different sizes. He was also subjected to homophobic abuse from a very early age, because the gait with which he walked because of his legs was vaguely mincing.
At the age of fourteen, he decided to leave school and become a performer. He started out by touring with a snake-oil salesman.
Snake oil is a traditional Chinese medicine, about which there have been claims made for centuries, and those claims might well be true. But snake oil in the US was usually a mixture of turpentine, tallow, camphor, and capsaicin. It wasn't much different to Vicks' VaporRub and similar substances, but it was sold as a cure-all for serious illnesses.
Snake-oil salesmen would travel from town to town selling their placebo, and they would have entertainers performing with them in order to draw crowds. The young Richard Penniman travelled with "Doc Hudson", and would sing the one non-religious song he knew, "Caldonia" by Louis Jordan:
[Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Caldonia"]
The yelps and hiccups in Jordan's vocals on that song would become a massive part of Richard's own vocal style.
Richard soon left the medicine show, and started touring with a band, B. Brown and his orchestra, and it was while he was touring with that band that he grew his hair into the huge pompadour that would later become a trademark, and he also got the name "Little Richard". However, all the musicians in the band were older than him, so he moved on again to another touring show, and another, and another. In many of these shows, he would perform as a female impersonator, which started when one of the women in one of the shows took sick and Richard had to quickly cover for her by putting on her costume, but soon he was performing in shows that were mostly drag acts, performing to a largely gay crowd.
It was while he was performing in these shows that he met the first of his two biggest influences. Billy Wright, like Richard, had been a female impersonator for a while too. Like Richard, he had a pompadour haircut, and he was a fairly major blues star in the period from 1949 through 1951, being one of the first blues singers to sing with gospel-inspired mannerisms:
[Excerpt: Billy Wright, "Married Woman's Boogie"]
Richard became something of a Billy Wright wannabe, and started incorporating parts of Wright's style into his performances. He also learned that Wright was using makeup on stage -- Pancake 31 -- and started applying that same makeup to his own skin, something he would continue to do throughout his performing career.
Wright introduced Richard to Zenas Sears, who was one of the many white DJs all across America who were starting to become successful by playing black music and speaking in approximations of African-American Vernacular English -- people like Alan Freed and Dewey Phillips.
Sears had connections with RCA Records, and impressed by Richard's talent, he got them to sign him. Richard's first single was called "Every Hour", and was very much a Billy Wright imitation:
[Excerpt: Little Richard, "Every Hour"]
It was so close to Wright's style, in fact, that Wright soon recorded his own knock-off of Richard's song, "Every Evening".
[Excerpt: Billy Wright, "Every Evening"]
At this point Richard was solely a singer -- he hadn't yet started to play an instrument to accompany himself. That changed when he met Esquerita.
Esquerita was apparently born Stephen Quincey Reeder, but he was known to everyone as "Eskew" Reeder, after his initials, and that then became Esquerita, partly as a pun on the word "excreta".
Esquerita was another gay black R&B singer with a massive pompadour and a moustache. If Little Richard at this stage looked like a caricature of Billy Wright, Esquerita looked like a caricature of Little Richard. His hair was even bigger, he was even more flamboyant, and when he sang, he screamed even louder. And Esquerita also played the piano.
Richard -- who has never been unwilling to acknowledge the immense debt he owed to his inspirations -- has said for years that Esquerita was the person who taught him how to play the piano, and that not only was his piano-playing style a copy of Esquerita's, Esquerita was better.
It's hard to tell for sure exactly how much influence Esquerita actually had on Richard's piano playing, because Esquerita himself didn't make any records until after Richard did, at which point he was signed to his own record deal to be basically a Little Richard clone, but the records he did make certainly show a remarkable resemblance to Richard's later style:
[Excerpt: Esquerita: "Believe Me When I Say Rock And Roll Is Here To Stay"]
Richard soon learned to play piano, and he was seen by Johnny Otis, who was impressed. Otis said: "I see this outrageous person, good-looking and very effeminate, with a big pompadour. He started singing and he was so good. I loved it. He reminded me of Dinah Washington. He did a few things, then he got on the floor. I think he even did a split, though I could be wrong about that. I remember it as being just beautiful, bizarre, and exotic, and when he got through he remarked, “This is Little Richard, King of the Blues,” and then he added, “And the Queen, too!” I knew I liked him then."
Otis recommended Richard to Don Robey, of Peacock Records, and Robey signed Richard and his band the Tempo Toppers. In early 1953, with none of his recordings for RCA having done anything, Little Richard and the Tempo Toppers went into the studio with another group, the Deuces of Rhythm, to record four tracks, issued as two singles:
[Excerpt: Little Richard and the Tempo Toppers with the Deuces of Rhythm: "Ain't That Good News"]
None of these singles had any success, and Richard was *not* getting on very well at all with Don Robey. Robey was not the most respectful of people, and Richard let everyone know how badly he thought Robey treated his artists. Robey responded by beating Richard up so badly that he got a hernia which hurt for years and necessitated an operation.
Richard would record one more session for Peacock, at the end of the year, when Don Robey gave him to Johnny Otis to handle. Otis took his own band into the studio with Richard, and the four songs they recorded at that session went unreleased at the time, but included a version of "Directly From My Heart To You", a song Richard would soon rerecord, and another song called "Little Richard's Boogie":
[Excerpt: Little Richard with Johnny Otis and his Orchestra, "Little Richard's Boogie"]
Nobody was very happy with the recordings, and Richard was dropped by Peacock. He was also, around the same time, made to move away from Macon, Georgia, where he lived, after being arrested for "lewd conduct" -- what amounted to consensual voyeurism. And the Tempo Toppers had split up. Richard had been dumped by two record labels, his father had died recently, he had no band, and he wasn't allowed to live in his home town any more. Things seemed pretty low.
But before he'd moved away, Richard had met Lloyd Price, and Price had suggested that Richard send a demo tape in to Specialty Records, Price's label. The tape lay unlistened at Specialty for months, and it was only because of Richard's constant pestering for them to listen to it that Bumps Blackwell, who was then in charge of A&R at Specialty, eventually got round to listening to it.
This was an enormous piece of good fortune, in a way that neither of them fully realised at the time. Blackwell had been a longtime friend and colleague of Ray Charles. When Charles' gospel-influenced new sound had started making waves on the charts, Art Rupe, Specialty's owner, had asked Blackwell to find him a gospel-sounding R&B singer of his own to compete with Ray Charles.
Blackwell listened to the tape, which contained two songs, one of which was an early version of "Wonderin'", and he could tell this was someone with as much gospel in his voice as Ray Charles had:
[Excerpt: Little Richard, "Wonderin'"]
Blackwell and Rupe made an agreement with Don Robey to buy out his contract for six hundred dollars -- one gets the impression that Robey would have paid *them* six hundred dollars to get rid of Richard had they asked him.
They knew that Richard liked the music of Fats Domino, and so they decided to hold their first session at Cosimo Matassa's studio, where Domino recorded, and with the same session musicians that Domino used. Blackwell also brought in two great New Orleans piano players, Huey "Piano" Smith and James Booker, both of whom were players in the same style as Domino. You can hear Smith, for example, on his hit "The Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu" from a couple of years later:
[Excerpt: Huey "Piano" Smith, "The Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu"]
All of these people were veterans of sessions either for Domino or for artists who had worked in Domino's style, like Lloyd Price or Smiley Lewis. The only difference here was that it would be Bumps Blackwell who did the arrangement and production, rather than Dave Bartholomew like on Domino's records.
However, the session didn't go well at all. Blackwell had heard that Richard was an astounding live act, but he was just doing nothing in the studio. As Blackwell later put it "If you look like Tarzan and sound like Mickey Mouse it just doesn’t work out."
They did record some usable material -- "Wonderin'", which we heard before, came out OK, and they recorded "I'm Just a Lonely, Lonely, Guy" by a young songwriter called Dorothy LaBostrie, which seemed to go OK. They also cut a decent version of "Directly From My Heart to You", a song which Richard had previously recorded with Johnny Otis:
[Excerpt: Little RIchard, "Directly From My Heart to You"]
So they had a couple of usable songs, but usable was about all you could say for them. They didn't have anything that would make an impact, nothing that would live up to Richard's potential.
So Blackwell called a break, and they headed off to get themselves something to eat, at the Dew Drop Inn. And something happened there that would change Little RIchard's career forever.
The Dew Drop Inn had a piano, and it had an audience that Little Richard could show off in front of. He went over to the piano, started hammering the keys, and screamed out:
[Excerpt: Little Richard, "Tutti Frutti", just the opening phrase]
On hearing Richard sing the song he performed then, Bumps Blackwell knew two things pretty much instantly. The first was that that song would definitely be a hit if he could get it released. And the second was that there was no way on Earth that he could possibly put it out.
"Tutti Frutti" started as a song that Richard sang more or less as a joke. There is a whole undercurrent of R&B in the fifties which has very, very, sexually explicit lyrics, and I wish I was able to play some of those songs on this podcast without getting it dumped into the adult-only section on iTunes, because some of them are wonderful, and others are hilarious.
"Tutti Frutti" in its original form was part of this undercurrent, and had lyrics that were clearly not broadcastable -- "A wop bop a loo mop, a good goddam/Tutti Frutti, good booty/If it don't fit, don't force it, you can grease it, make it easy". But Bumps Blackwell thought that there was *something* that could be made into a hit there.
Handily, they had a songwriter on hand. Dorothy LaBostrie was a young woman he knew who had been trying to write songs, but who didn't understand that songs had to have different melodies -- all her lyrics were written to the melody of the same song, Dinah Washington's "Blowtop Blues":
[Excerpt: Dinah Washington, "Blowtop Blues"]
But her lyrics had showed promise, and so Blackwell had agreed to record one of her songs, "I'm Just a Lonely Lonely Guy", with Richard. LaBostrie had been hanging round the studio to see how her song sounded when it was recorded, so Blackwell asked her to do a last-minute rewrite on “Tutti Frutti”, in the hope of getting something salvageable out of what had been a depressing session. But there was still a problem -- Richard, not normally a man overly known for his modesty, became embarrassed at singing his song to the young woman.
Blackwell explained to him that he really didn't have much choice, and Richard eventually agreed to sing it to her -- but only if he was turned to face the wall, so he couldn't see this innocent-looking young woman's face.
(I should note here that both Richard and LaBostrie have told different stories about this over the years -- both have claimed on several occasions that they were the sole author of the song and that the other didn't deserve any credit at all. But this is the story as it was told by others who were there.)
LaBostrie's new lyrics were rudimentary at best. "I got a girl named Sue, she knows just what to do". But they fit the metre, they weren't about anal sex, and so they were going to be the new lyrics.
The session was running late at this point, and when LaBostrie had the lyrics finished there was only fifteen minutes to go. It didn't matter that the lyrics were trite. What mattered was that they got a track cut to salvage the session. Blackwell didn't have time to teach the piano players the song, so he got Richard to play the piano himself. They cut the finished track in three takes, and Blackwell went back to California happy he at last had a hit:
[Excerpt: Little Richard, "Tutti Frutti"]
"Tutti Frutti" was, indeed, a massive hit. It went to number twenty-one on the pop charts. But... you know what comes next. There was an inept white cover version, this time by Pat Boone.
[excerpt: Pat Boone, "Tutti Frutti"]
Now, notice that there, Boone changes the lyrics. In Richard's version, after all, he seems interested in both Sue and Daisy. A good Christian boy like Pat Boone couldn't be heard singing about such immorality. That one-line change (and a couple of other spot changes to individual words to make things into full sentences) seems to be why a songwriter called Joe Lubin is also credited for the song. Getting a third of a song like "Tutti Frutti" for that little work sounds like a pretty good deal, at least for Lubin, if not for Richard.
Another way in which Richard got less than he deserved was that the publishing was owned by a company owned by Art Rupe. That company licensed the song to Specialty Records for half the normal mechanical licensing rate -- normally a publishing company would charge two cents per record pressed for their songs, but instead Specialty only had to pay one cent. This sort of cross-collateralisation was common with independent labels at the time, but it still rankled to Richard when he figured it out.
Not that he was thinking about contracts at all at this point. He was becoming a huge star, and that meant he had to *break* a lot of contracts. He'd got concert bookings for several months ahead, but those bookings were in second-rate clubs, and he had to be in Hollywood to promote his new record and build a new career. But he also didn't want to get a reputation for missing gigs. There was only one thing to do -- hire an impostor to be Little Richard at these low-class gigs. So while Richard went off to promote his record, another young singer from Georgia with a pompadour and a gospel feel was being introduced with the phrase “Ladies and gentlemen—the hardest-working man in showbusiness today—Little Richard!”
When James Brown went back to performing under his own name, he kept that introduction...
Meanwhile, Richard was working on his second hit record. He and Blackwell decided that this record should be louder, faster, and more raucous than "Tutti Frutti" had been. If Pat Boone wanted to cover this one, he'd have to work a lot harder than he had previously.
The basis for "Long Tall Sally" came from a scrap of lyric written by a teenage girl. Enotris Johnson had written a single verse of lyric on a scrap of paper, and had walked many miles to New Orleans to show the lyric to a DJ named Honey Chile. (Bumps Blackwell describes her as having walked from Opelousas, Mississippi, but there's no such place -- Johnson appears to have lived in Bogalusa, Louisiana). Johnson wanted to make enough money to pay for hospital for her sick aunt -- the "Aunt Mary" in the song, and thought that Little Richard might sing the song and get her the money.
What she had was only a few lines, but Honey Chile had taken Johnson on as a charity project, and Blackwell didn't want to disappoint such an influential figure, so he and Richard hammered something together:
[Excerpt: Little Richard, "Long Tall Sally"]
The song, about a "John" who "jumps back in the alley" when he sees his wife coming while he's engaged in activities of an unspecified nature with "Sally", who is long, tall, and bald, once again stays just on the broadcastable side of the line, while implying sex of a non-heteronormative variety, possibly with a sex worker. Despite this, and despite the attempts to make the song uncoverably raucous, Pat Boone still sold a million copies with his cover version:
[Excerpt: Pat Boone, "Long Tall Sally"]
So Little Richard had managed to get that good clean-cut wholesome Christian white boy Pat Boone singing songs which gave him a lot more to worry about than whether he was singing "Ain't" rather than "Isn't". But he was also becoming a big star himself -- and he was getting an ego to go along with it. And he was starting to worry whether he should be making this devil music at all. When we next look at Little Richard, we'll see just how the combination of self-doubt and ego led to his greatest successes and to the collapse of his career.
Welcome to episode thirty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . This one looks at “Mystery Train” by Elvis Presley. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
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Welcome to episode thirty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . This one looks at “I Got A Woman” by Ray Charles. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
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Welcome to episode thirty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . This one looks at “Only You” by the Platters. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
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Welcome to episode thirty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . This is the last of our three-part look at Chess Records, and focuses on "Bo Diddley" by Bo Diddley. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
Resources
As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.I accidentally used a later rerecording of "I Wish You Would" by Billy Boy Arnold on the playlist, but I use the correct version in the podcast itself. Sorry about that.
As this is part three of the Chess Records trilogy, you might want to listen to part one, on the Moonglows , and part two, on Chuck Berry, if you haven't already.
Along with the resources mentioned in the previous two episodes, the resource I used most this time was Bo Diddley: Living Legend by George R. White , a strong biography told almost entirely in Diddley's own words from interviews, and the only full-length book on Diddley.
This compilation contains Diddley's first six albums plus a bunch of non-album and live tracks, and has everything you're likely to want by Diddley on it, for under ten pounds.
If you want to hear more Muddy Waters after hearing his back-and-forth with Diddley, this double CD set is a perfect introduction to him.
Patreon
This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon . Why not join them?
Transcript
Welcome to the final part of our trilogy about Chess Records. Last week, we looked at Chuck Berry. This week, we're going to deal with someone who may even have been more important.
One of the many injustices in copyright law -- and something that we'll have a lot of cause to mention during the course of this series -- is that, for the entire time period covered by this podcast, it was impossible to copyright a groove or a rhythm, but you could copyright a melody line and lyric. And this has led to real inter-racial injustice.
In general, black musical culture in the USA has emphasised different aspects of musical invention than white culture has. While white American musical culture -- particularly *rich* white musical culture -- has stressed inventive melodies and harmonic movement -- think of, say, Burt Bacharach or George Gershwin -- it has not historically stressed rhythmic invention. On the other hand, black musical culture has stressed that above everything else -- you'll notice that all the rhythmic innovations we've talked about in this series so far, like boogie woogie, and the backbeat, and the tresillo rhythm, all came from black musicians.
That's not, of course, to say that black musicians can't be melodically inventive or white musicians rhythmically -- I'm not here saying "black people have a great sense of rhythm" or any of that racist nonsense. I'm just talking about the way that different cultures have prioritised different things.
But this means that when black musicians have produced innovative work, it's not been possible for them to have any intellectual property ownership in the result. You can't steal a melody by Bacharach, but anyone can play a song with a boogie beat, or a shuffle, or a tresillo... or with the Bo Diddley beat.
[Very short excerpt: “Bo Diddley”, Bo Diddley]
Elias McDaniel's distinctive sound came about because he started performing so young that he couldn't gain entrance to clubs, and so he and his band had to play on street corners. But you can't cart a drum kit around and use it on the streets, so McDaniel and his band came up with various inventive ways to add percussion to the act. At first, they had someone who would come round with a big bag of sand and empty it onto the pavement. He'd then use a brush on the sand, and the noise of the brushing would provide percussion -- at the end of the performance this man, whose name was Sam Daniel but was called Sandman by everyone, would sweep all the sand back up and put it back into his bag for the next show.
Eventually, though, Sandman left, and McDaniel hit on the idea of using his girlfriend's neighbour Jerome Green as part of the act.
We heard Jerome last week, playing on "Maybellene", but he's someone who there is astonishingly little information about. He doesn't even have a Wikipedia page, and you'll find barely more than a few paragraphs about him online. No-one even knows when he was born or died – *if* he died, though he seems to have disappeared around 1972. And this is quite astonishing when you consider that Green played on all Bo Diddley's classic records, and sang duet on a few of the most successful ones, *and* he played on many of Chuck Berry's, and on various other records by Willie Dixon, Otis Spann, the Moonglows... yet when you Google him, the third hit that comes up is about Robson Green and Jerome Flynn, a nineties soft-pop duo who span out of a soap opera.
At first, Jerome's job was to pass the hat around and collect the money, but McDaniel decided to build Jerome a pair of maracas, and teach him how to play. And he learned to play very well indeed, adding a Latin sound to what had previously been just a blues band.
Jerome's maracas weren't the only things that Elias McDaniel built, though. He had a knack for technology, though he was always rather modest about his own abilities. He built himself one of the very first tremelo systems for a guitar, making something out of old car bits and electronic junk that would break the electronic signal up. Before commercial tremelo systems existed, McDaniel was the only one who could make his guitar sound like that.
The choppy guitar, with its signal breaking up deliberately, and the maracas being shook frantically, gave McDaniel's music a rhythmic drive unlike anything else in rock and roll.
McDaniel and his band eventually got their music heard by Leonard Chess at Chess Records. Chess was impressed by a song called "Uncle John", which had lyrics that went "Uncle John's got corn ain't never been shucked/Uncle John's got daughters ain't never been... to school"; but he said the song needed less salacious lyrics, and he suggested retitling it “Bo Diddley”, which also became the stage name of the man who up until now had been called Elias McDaniel.
The new lyrics were inspired by the black folk song "Hambone", which a few years earlier had become a novelty hit:
[Excerpt: "Hambone", Red Saunders Orchestra with the Hambone Kids]
Now, I have to be a bit careful here, because here I'm talking about something that's from a different culture from my own, and my understanding of it is that of an outsider. To *me*, "Hambone" seems to be a unified thing that's part song, part dance, part game. But my understanding may be very, very flawed, and I don't want to pretend to knowledge I don't have. But this is my best understanding of what “Hambone” is.
"Hambone", like many folk songs, is not in itself a single song, but a collection of different songs with similar elements. The name comes from a dance which, it is said, dates back to enslaved people attempting to entertain themselves. Slaves in most of the US were banned from using drums, because it was believed they might use them to send messages to each other, so when they wanted to dance and sing music, they would slap different parts of their own bodies to provide percussive accompaniment.
Now, I tend to be a little dubious of narratives that claim that aspects of twentieth-century black culture date back to slavery or, as people often claim, to Africa. A lot of the time these turn out to be urban myths of the "ring a ring a roses is about the bubonic plague" kind. One of the real tragedies of slavery is that the African culture that the enslaved black people brought over to the US was largely lost in the ensuing centuries, and so there's a very strong incentive to try to find things that could be a continuation of that. But that's the story around “Hambone”, which is also known as the “Juba beat”.
Another influence Diddley would always cite for the lyrical scansion is the song “Hey Baba Reba”, which he would usually misremember as having been by either Cab Calloway or Louis Jordan, but was actually by Lionel Hampton:
[Excerpt: Lionel Hampton, “Hey Baba Reba”]
But the important thing to note is that the rhythm of all these records is totally different from the rhythm of the song "Bo Diddley". There's a bit of misinformation that goes around in almost every article about Diddley, saying "the Bo Diddley beat is just the 'Hambone' beat", and while Diddley would correct this in almost every interview he ever gave, the misinformation would persist -- to the point that when I first heard "Hambone" I was shocked, because I'd assumed that there must at least have been some slight similarity. There's no similarity at all.
And that's not the only song where I've seen claims that there's a Bo Diddley beat where none exists. As a reminder, here's the actual Bo Diddley rhythm:
[Very short excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Bo Diddley”]
Now the PhD thesis on the development of the backbeat which I talked about back in episode two claims that the beat appears on about thirteen records before Diddley's, mostly by people we've discussed before, like Louis Jordan, Johnny Otis, Fats Domino, and Roy Brown.
But here's a couple of examples of the songs that thesis cites. Here's "Mardi Gras in New Orleans" by Fats Domino:
[Excerpt: "Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Fats Domino]
And here's "That's Your Last Boogie", by Joe Swift, produced by Johnny Otis:
[Excerpt: Joe Swift, "That's Your Last Boogie"]
As you can hear, they both have something that's *sort of* the Bo Diddley beat, but not really, among their other rhythms. It's most notable at the very start of "That's Your Last Boogie"
[Intro: "That's Your Last Boogie"]
That's what's called a clave beat -- it's sort of like the tresillo, with an extra bom-bom on the end. Bom bom-bom, bom-bom. That's not the Bo Diddley beat. The Bo Diddley beat actually varies subtly from bar to bar, but it's generally a sort of chunk-a chunk-a-chunk a-chunk a-chunk ah. It certainly stresses the five beats of the clave, but it's not them, and nor is it the "shave and a haircut, two bits" rhythm other people seem to claim for it.
Most ridiculously, Wikipedia even claims that the Andrews Sisters' version of Lord Invader's great calypso song, "Rum and Coca Cola", has the Bo Diddley beat:
[Excerpt: "Rum and Coca Cola", the Andrews Sisters]
Both records have maracas, but that's about it. Incidentally, that song was, in the Andrews Sisters version, credited to a white American thief rather than to the black Trinidadian men who wrote it. Sadly appropriate for a song about the exploitation of Trinidadians for "the Yankee dollar".
But none of these records have the Bo Diddley beat, despite what anyone might say. None of them even sound very much like Diddley's beat at all.
The origins of the Bo Diddley beat were, believe it or not, with Gene Autry. We've talked before about Autry, who was the biggest Western music star of the late thirties and early forties, and who inspired all sorts of people you wouldn't expect, from Les Paul to Hank Ballard. But Diddley hit upon his rhythm when trying to play Autry's "I've Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle".
[excerpt, Gene Autry, "I've Got Spurs that Jingle Jangle Jingle"]
No, I don't see the resemblance either. But this ties back into what we were talking about last week, with the influence of country musicians on the blues and R&B musicians at Chess.
And if you become familiar with his later work, it becomes clear that Diddley truly loved the whole iconography of the Western, and country music. He did albums called "Have Guitar Will Travel" (named after the Western TV show "Have Gun Will Travel") and "Bo Diddley is a Gunslinger". Diddley's work is rooted in black folklore -- things like hambone, but also the figure of Stagger Lee and other characters like the Signifying Monkey -- but it should be understood that black American folklore has always included the image of the black cowboy.
The combination of these influences – the “Hambone” lyrical ideas, the cowboy rhythm, and the swaggering character Diddley created for himself – became this:
[Excerpt: “Bo Diddley” by Bo Diddley]
The B-side to the record, meanwhile, was maybe even more important. It's also an early example of Diddley *not* just reusing his signature rhythm. The popular image of Diddley has him as a one-idea artist remaking the same song over and over again -- and certainly he did often return to the Bo Diddley beat -- but he was a far more interesting artist than that, and recorded in a far wider variety of styles than you might imagine. And in "I'm A Man" he took on another artist's style, beating Muddy Waters at his own game.
"I'm A Man" was a response to Waters' earlier "Hoochie Coochie Man":
[Excerpt: "Hoochie Coochie Man", Muddy Waters]
"Hoochie Coochie Man" had been written for Muddy Waters by Willie Dixon and was, as far as I can tell, the first blues record ever to have that da-na-na na-na riff that later became the riff that for most people defines the blues.
"Hoochie Coochie Man" had managed to sum up everything about Waters' persona in a way that Waters himself had never managed with his own songs. It combined sexual braggadocio with hoodoo lore -- the character Waters was singing in was possessed of supernatural powers, from the day he was born, and he used those powers to "make pretty women jump and shout". He had a black cat bone, and a mojo, and a John the Conqueror root.
It was a great riff, and a great persona, and a great record. But it was still a conventionally structured sixteen-bar blues, with the normal three chords that almost all blues records have.
But Bo Diddley heard that and decided that was two chords too many. When you've got a great riff, you don't *need* chord changes, not if you can just hammer on that riff. So he came up with a variant of Dixon's song, and called it "I'm a Man". In his version, there was only the one chord:
[Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "I'm a Man"]
Willie Dixon guested on bass for that song, as it wasn't felt that Diddley's own bass player was getting the feeling right. There were also some changes made to the song in the studio -- as Diddley put it later: "They wanted me to spell 'man', but they weren't explaining it right. They couldn't get me to spell 'man'. I didn't understand what they were talking about!"
But eventually he did sing that man is spelled m-a-n, and the song went on to be covered by pretty much every British band of the sixties, and become a blues standard. The most important cover version of it though was when Muddy Waters decided to make his own answer record to Diddley, in which he stated that *he* was a man, not a boy like Diddley. Diddley got a co-writing credit on this, though Willie Dixon, whose riff had been the basis of "I'm a Man", didn't.
[Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "Mannish Boy"]
And then there was Etta James' answer record, "W.O.M.A.N.", which once again has wild west references in it:
[Excerpt: Etta James, "W.O.M.A.N."]
And that… "inspired" Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller to write this for Peggy Lee:
[Excerpt: Peggy Lee, "I'm A Woman"]
Of course, none of those records, except Muddy Waters', gave Bo Diddley a writing credit, just as Diddley didn't credit Dixon for his riff.
At the same session as the single was recorded, Diddley's harmonica player, Billy Boy Arnold, recorded a single of his own, backed by Diddley and his band. "I'm Sweet on you Baby" wasn't released at the time, but it's a much more straightforward blues song, and more like Chess' normal releases. Chess were interested in making more records with Arnold, but we'll see that that didn't turn out well:
[Excerpt: Billy Boy Arnold, "I'm Sweet on you Baby"]
Despite putting out a truly phenomenal single, Diddley hit upon a real problem with his career, and one that would be one of the reasons he was never as popular as contemporaries like Chuck Berry. The problem, at first, looked like anything but. He was booked on the Ed Sullivan Show to promote his first single.
The Ed Sullivan Show was the biggest TV show of the fifties and sixties. A variety show presented by the eponymous Sullivan, who somehow even after twenty years of presenting never managed to look or sound remotely comfortable in front of a camera, it was the programme that boosted Elvis Presley from stardom to superstardom, and which turned the Beatles from a local phenomenon in the UK and Europe into the biggest act the world had ever seen.
Getting on it was the biggest possible break Diddley could have got, and it should have made his career. Instead, it was a disaster, all because of a misunderstanding.
At the time, the country song "Sixteen Tons" by Tennessee Ernie Ford was a big hit:
[Excerpt: "Sixteen Tons", Tennessee Ernie Ford]
Diddley liked the song -- enough that he would later record his own version of it:
[Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Sixteen Tons"]
And so he was singing it to himself in his dressing room. One of the production staff happened to walk past and hear him, and asked if he could perform that song on the show. Diddley assumed he was being asked if he would do it as well as the song he was there to promote, and was flattered to be asked to do a second song.
[Excerpt: Ed Sullivan introducing "Dr Jive", with all the confusion about what words he's using]
When he got out on to the stage he saw the cue card saying "Bo Diddley Sixteen Tons", assumed it meant the song "Bo Diddley" followed by the song "Sixteen Tons", and so he launched into "Bo Diddley". After all, why would he go on the show to promote someone else's record? He was there to promote his own debut single. So of course he was going to play it.
This was not what the production person had intended, and was not what Ed Sullivan wanted. Backstage, there was a confrontation that got so heated that Diddley had to be physically restrained from beating Sullivan with his guitar after Sullivan called Diddley a “black boy” (according to Diddley, “black” at that time and in that place, was a racial slur, though it's the polite term to use today). Sullivan yelled and screamed at Diddley and told him he would be blacklisted from network TV, and would certainly never appear on Sullivan's show again under any circumstances. After that first TV appearance, it would be seven years until Diddley's second.
And unlike all his contemporaries he didn't even get to appear in films. Even Alan Freed, who greatly respected Diddley and booked him on his live shows, and who Diddley also respected, didn't have him appear in any of the five rock and roll films he made. As far as I can tell, the two minutes he was on the Ed Sullivan show is the only record of Bo Diddley on film or video from 1955 through 1962.
And this meant, as well, that Chess put all their promotional efforts behind Chuck Berry, who for all his faults was more welcome in the TV studios. If Diddley wanted success, he had to let his records and live performances do the work for him, because he wasn't getting any help from the media.
Luckily, his records were great. Not only was Diddley's first hit one of the great two-sided singles of all time, but his next single was also impressive. The story of "Diddley Daddy" dates back to one of the white cover versions of "Bo Diddley". Essex Records put out this cover version by Jean Dinning, produced by Dave Miller, who had earlier produced Bill Haley and the Comets' first records:
[Excerpt: Jean Dinning, "Bo Diddley"]
And, as with Georgia Gibbs' version of “Tweedle Dee”, the record label wanted to make the record sound as much like the original as possible, and so tried to get the original musicians to play on it, and made an agreement with Chess. They couldn't get Bo Diddley himself, and without his tremelo guitar it sounded nothing like the original, but they *did* get Willie Dixon on bass, Diddley's drummer Clifton James (who sadly isn't the same Clifton James who played the bumbling sheriff in "Live and Let Die" and "Superman II", though it would be great if he was), and Billy Boy Arnold on harmonica.
But Billy Boy Arnold made the mistake of going to Chess and asking for the money he was owed for the session. Leonard Chess didn't like when musicians wanted paying, and complained to Bo Diddley about Arnold. Diddley told Arnold that Chess wasn't happy with him, and so Arnold decided to take a song he'd written, "Diddy Diddy Dum Dum", to another label rather than give it to Chess. He changed the lyrics around a bit, and called it "I Wish You Would":
[Excerpt: Billy Boy Arnold, "I Wish You Would"]
Arnold actually recorded that for Vee-Jay Records on the very day that Bo Diddley's second single was due to be recorded, and the Diddley session was held up because nobody knew where Arnold was. They eventually found him and got him to Diddley's session -- where Diddley started playing "Diddy Diddy Dum Dum". Leonard Chess suggested letting Arnold sing the song, but Arnold said "I can't -- I just recorded that for VeeJay", and showed Chess the contract.
Diddley and Harvey Fuqua, who was there to sing backing vocals with the rest of the Moonglows, quickly reworked the song. Arnold didn't want to play harmonica on something so close to a record he'd just made, though he played on the B-side, and so Muddy Waters' harmonica player Little Walter filled in instead. The new song, entitled "Diddley Daddy", became another of Diddley's signature songs:
[Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Diddley Daddy"]
but the B-side, "She's Fine, She's Mine", was the one that would truly become influential:
[Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "She's Fine, She's Mine"]
That song was later slightly reworked into this, by Willie Cobbs:
[Excerpt: Willie Cobbs, "You Don't Love Me"]
That song was covered by pretty much every white guitar band of the late sixties -- the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Allman Brothers, Steve Stills and Al Kooper... the list goes on. But Cobbs' song itself was also slightly reworked, by Dawn Penn, in 1967, and became a minor reggae classic. Twenty-seven years later, in 1994, Penn rerecorded her song, based on Cobbs' song, based on Bo Diddley's song, and it became a worldwide smash hit, with Diddley getting cowriting credit:
[Excerpt: Dawn Penn, "You Don't Love Me (No, No, No)"]
And *that* has later been covered by Beyonce and Rhianna, and sampled by Ghostface Killah and Usher. And that's how important Bo Diddley was at this point in time. The B-side to his less-good follow-up to his debut provided enough material for sixty years' worth of hits in styles from R&B to jam band to reggae to hip-hop.
And the song “Bo Diddley” itself, of course, would provide a rhythm for generations of musicians to take, everyone from Buddy Holly:
[Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Not Fade Away”]
to George Michael:
[Excerpt George Michael, “Faith”]
to U2:
[Excerpt: U2, “Desire”]
Because that rhythm was so successful – even though most of the success went to white people who didn't credit or pay Diddley – people tend to think of Diddley as a one-idea musician, which is far from the truth. Like many of his contemporaries he only had a short period where he was truly inventive -- his last truly classic track was recorded in 1962. But that period was an astoundingly inventive one, and we're going to be seeing him again during the course of this series. In his first four tracks, Diddley had managed to record three of the most influential tracks in rock history. But the next time we look at him, it will be with a song he wrote for other people -- a song that would indirectly have massive effects on the whole of popular music.
Welcome to episode twenty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . This is the second of our three-part look at Chess Records, and focuses on “Maybellene” by Chuck Berry. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
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Welcome to episode twenty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at The Moonglows and “Sincerely”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
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Welcome to episode twenty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at LaVern Baker and “Tweedle Dee”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
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Welcome to episode twenty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at Fats Domino and “Ain’t That A Shame”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
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Welcome to episode twenty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at “Earth Angel” by the Penguins. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
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Welcome to episode twenty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at “Ko Ko Mo” by Gene and Eunice. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
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Welcome to episode twenty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at “Pledging My Love” by Johnny Ace Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
Also, remember I’m three-quarters of the way through the Kickstarter for the first book based on this series.
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Welcome to episode twenty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at “The Wallflower” by Etta James. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
Also, remember I’m halfway through the Kickstarter for the first book based on this series.
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Welcome to episode twenty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at “Rock Island Line” by Lonnie Donegan. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
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Welcome to episode twenty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
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Welcome to episode nineteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we're looking at "That's All Right Mama" by Elvis Presley. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
Resources
As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.
Elvis' 1950s catalogue is, at least in the UK, now in the public domain, and can thus be found in many forms. This three-CD box set contains literally every recording he made from 1953 through 1955, including live recordings and session outtakes, along with a handsome book.
This ten-disc set, meanwhile, charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles, including all Elvis' five Sun releases in their historical context, as well as "Bear Cat" and a lot of great blues and rockabilly.
And this four-CD box set of Arthur Crudup contains everything you could want by that great bluesman.
I've relied on three books here more than any others. The first is "Before Elvis" by Larry Birnbaum. which I've recommended many times before. The other two are by Peter Guralnick -- Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll , and Last Train to Memphis . The latter is the first volume of Guralnick's two-volume biography of Elvis. The second volume of that book is merely good, not great (though still better than much of the nonsense written about Elvis), but Last Train to Memphis is, hands down, the best book on Elvis there is. (A content warning for both Guralnick books -- they use racial slurs in reported speech, though never in anything other than a direct quote).
Patreon
This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?
Transcript
Before I start, I just want to emphasise that in this episode I talk about some of Sam Phillips' ideas around race and how to end racism. I hope I make it clear that I disagree with his ideas, but in trying to be fair and present his thinking accurately I may have given a different impression. I'm sure people listening to this in the context of the series as a whole understand where I'm coming from, but I'm aware that this will be some people's first episode. There's a reason this comes after the episode on “Sh'Boom”. If you come out of this episode thinking I think the way to end racism is to have white people perform black people's music, go back and listen to that one. Anyway, on with the show...
The Starlite Wranglers were not a band you would expect to end up revolutionising music -- and indeed only some of them ever did. But you wouldn't have expected even that from them.
They were based in Memphis, but they were very far from being the sophisticated, urban music that was otherwise coming from big cities like that. Their bass player, Bill Black, would wear a straw hat and go barefoot, looking something like Huckleberry Finn, even as the rest of the band wore their smart Western suits. He'd hop on the bass and ride it, and tell cornpone jokes.
They had pedal steel, and violin, and a singer named Doug Poindexter. Their one record on Sun was a pure Hank Williams soundalike:
[excerpt of "My Kind of Carrying On" by Doug Poindexter and the Starlite Wranglers]
Again, this doesn't sound like anything that might revolutionise music. The single came out and did no better or worse than thousands of other singles by obscure country bands. In most circumstances it would be no more remembered now than, say "Cause You're Always On My Mind" by Wiley Barkdull, or "Twice the Loving" by Floyd Huffman.
But then something unprecedented in modern music history happened.
Sun Records was the second record label Sam Phillips had set up -- the first one had been a very short-lived label called Phillips, which he'd started up with his friend, the DJ Dewey Phillips (who was not related to Sam). After his experiences selling masters to other labels, like Modern and Duke and Chess, had caused him more problems than he'd initially realised, he'd decided that if he wanted to really see the music he loved become as big as he knew it could be, he'd have to run his own label.
Because Sam Phillips had a mission. He was determined to end racism in the US, and he was convinced he could do so by making white audiences love the music of black people as much as he did. So the success of his new label was a moral imperative, and he wanted to find something that would be as big as "Rocket 88", the record he'd leased to Chess. Or maybe even a performer as important as Howlin' Wolf, the man who decades later he would still claim was the greatest artist he'd ever recorded.
Howlin' Wolf had recorded several singles at Sam's studio before he'd started Sun records, and these singles had been leased to other labels. But like so many of the people he'd recorded, the record labels had decided they could make more money if they cut out the middle-Sam and recorded Wolf themselves. Sam Phillips often claimed later that none of the records Wolf made for Chess without Sam were anything like as good as the music he'd been making at 706 Union Ave; and he may well have been right about that. But still, the fact remained that the Wolf was elsewhere now, and Sam needed someone else as good as that.
But he had a plan to get attention – make an answer record. This was something that happened a lot in blues and R&B in the fifties -- if someone had a hit with a record, another record would come along, usually by another artist, that made reference to it. We've already seen this with "Good Rockin' Tonight", where the original version of that referenced half a dozen other records like "Caldonia".
And Sam Phillips had an idea for an answer song to "Hound Dog". There had been several of these, including one from Roy Brown, who wrote “Good Rockin' Tonight” -- "Mr Hound Dog's in Town"
[excerpt: Roy Brown “Mr Hound Dog's In Town”]
Phillips, though,thought he had a particularly good take. The phrase "hound dog", you see, was always used by women, and in Phillips' view it was always used for a gigolo. And the female equivalent of that, in Phillips' telling, was a bear cat. And so Sam Phillips sat down and "wrote" "Bear Cat".
Well, he was credited as the writer, anyway. In truth, the melody is identical to that of "Hound Dog", and there's not much difference in the lyrics either, but that was the way these answer records always went, in Phillips' experience, and nobody ever kicked up a fuss about it.
He called up a local Memphis DJ, Rufus Thomas, and asked him to sing on the track, and Thomas said yes, and the song was put out as one of the very first records on Phillips' new record label, Sun.
[excerpt of "Bear Cat" by Rufus Thomas]
What was surprising was how big a hit it became -- "Bear Cat" eventually climbed all the way to number three on the R&B charts, which was a phenomenal success for a totally new label with no track record.
What was less phenomenal was when Duke Records and their publishing arm came to sue Sam Phillips over the record. It turned out that if you were going to just take credit for someone else's song and not give them any of the money, it was best not to have a massive hit, and be based in the same city as the people whose copyright you were ripping off. Phillips remained bitter to the end of his life about the amount of money he lost on the record.
But while he'd had a solid hit with "Bear Cat", and Joe Hill Louis was making some pretty great blues records, Sam was still not getting to where he wanted to be.
The problem was the audiences. Sam Phillips knew there was an audience for the kind of music these black men were making, but the white people just wouldn't buy it from a black person. But it was the white audiences that made for proper mainstream success for any musician. White people had more money, and there were more of them.
Maybe, he started to think, he could find a white person with the same kind of feeling in their music that the black people he was working with had? If he could do that -- if he could get white people to *just listen* to black people's music, *at all*, even if it was sung by a white person, then eventually they'd start listening to it from black people, too, and he could break down the colour barrier.
(Sam Phillips, it has to be noted, always had big ideas and thought he could persuade the world of the righteousness of his cause if everyone else would *just listen*. A few years later, during the Cuban missile crisis, Phillips decided that since in his mind Castro was one of the good guys -- Phillips was on the left and he knew how bad Batista had been -- he would probably be able to negotiate some sort of settlement if he could just talk to him. So he got on the phone and tried to call Castro -- and he actually did get through to Raul Castro, Fidel's brother, and talk to him for a while. History does not relate if Phillips' intervention is what prevented nuclear war.)
So Sam Phillips was in the right frame of mind to take advantage when history walked into his studio.
Elvis Aaron Presley was an unlikely name for a teen idol and star, and Elvis had an unlikely background for one as well. The son of a poor sharecropper from Mississippi who had moved to Memphis as a young man, he was working as a truck driver when he first went into Memphis Recording Service to record himself singing a song for his mother.
And when Phillips' assistant, Marion Keisker, heard the young man who'd come in to the studio, she thought she'd found just the man Phillips had been looking for – the white man who could sing like a black man.
Or at least, that's how Keisker told it. Like with so many things in rock music's history, it depends on who you listen to. Sam Phillips always said it had been him, not Keisker, who "discovered" Elvis Presley, but the evidence seems to be on Keisker's side. However, even there, it's hard to see from Elvis' original recording -- versions of "My Happiness" and "That's When Your Heartaches Begin" -- what she saw in him that sounded so black. While the Ink Spots, who recorded the original version of "That's When Your Heartaches Begin", were black, they always performed in a very smooth, crooner-esque, style, and that's what Presley did too in his recording. He certainly didn't have any particular blues or R&B feel in his vocal on those recordings.
[excerpt: "That's When Your Heartaches Begin" -- Elvis Presley]
But Keisker or Phillips heard something in those recordings. More importantly, though, what Sam Phillips saw in him was an attitude. And not the attitude you might expect.
You see, Elvis Presley was a quiet country boy. He had been bullied at school. He wore strange clothes and kept to himself, only ever really getting close to his mother. He was horribly introverted, and the few friends he did have mostly didn't know about his interests, other than whichever one he shared with them. He mostly liked to listen to music, read comic books, and fantasise about being in a gospel quartet like the Jordanaires, singing harmony with a group like that.
He'd hang around with some of the other teenagers living in the same housing block -- Johnny and Dorsey Burnette, and a guy called Johnny Black, whose big brother Bill was the bass player with the Starlite Wranglers. They bullied him too, but they sort of allowed him to hang around with them, and they'd all get together and sing, Elvis standing a little off from the rest of them, like he wasn't really part of the group. He'd thought for a while he might become an electrician, but he kept giving himself electric shocks and short-circuiting things -- he said later that he was so clumsy it was a miracle that he didn't cause any fires when he worked on people's wiring.
He didn't have many friends -- and no close friends at all -- and many of those he did have didn't even know he was interested in music. But he was absorbing music from every direction and every source -- the country groups his mother liked to listen to on the radio like the Louvin Brothers, the gospel quartets who were massive stars among the religious, poor, people in the area, the music he heard at the Pentecostal church he attended (a white Pentecostal church, but still as much of a Holly Roller church as the black ones that SIster Rosetta Tharpe had learned her music from). He'd go down Beale Street, too, and listen to people like B.B. King -- young Elvis bought his clothes from Lansky's on Beale, where the black people bought their clothes, rather than from the places the other white kids got their clothes.
But he wasn't someone like Johnny Otis who fitted in with the black community, either -- rather, he was someone who didn't fit in anywhere. Someone who had nobody, other than his mother, who he felt really close to. He was weird, and unpopular, and shy, and odd-looking.
But that feeling of not fitting in anywhere allowed him to pick up on music from everywhere. He didn't own many records, but he *absorbed* songs from the radio. He'd hear something by the Ink Spots or Arthur Crudup once, and sing it perfectly.
But it was gospel music he wanted to sing -- and specifically what is known euphemistically as "Southern Gospel", but which really means "white Gospel". And this is an important distinction that needs to be made as we go forward, because gospel music has had a huge influence on rock and roll music, but that influence has almost all come from black gospel, the music invented by Thomas Dorsey and popularised by people like Sister Rosetta Tharpe or Mahalia Jackson. That's a black genre, and a genre which has many prominent women in it -- and it's also a genre which has room for solo stars. When we talk about a gospel influence on Ray Charles or Aretha Franklin or Sam Cooke, that's the gospel music we're talking about.
That black form of gospel became the primary influence on fifties rhythm and blues vocals, and through that on rock and roll. But there's another gospel music as well -- "Southern Gospel" or "quartet gospel". That music is -- or at least was at the time we're talking about -- almost exclusively white, and male, and sung by groups. To ears that aren't attuned to it, it can sound a lot like barbershop music. It shares a lot of its repertoire with black gospel, but it's performed in a very, very different style.
[excerpt: "Take My Hand, Precious Lord", the Blackwood Brothers]
That's the Blackwood Brothers singing, and you can hear how even though that's a Thomas Dorsey song, it sounds totally different from, say, Mahalia Jackson's version.
The Blackwood Brothers were young Elvis Presley's favourite group, and he was such a fan that when two of the group died in a plane crash in 1954, Elvis was one of the thousands who attended their funeral. He auditioned for several gospel quartets, but never found a role in any of them -- but all his life, that was the music he wanted to sing, the music he would return to. He'd take any excuse he could to make himself just one of a gospel group, not a solo singer.
But since he didn't have a group, he was just a solo singer. Just a teenager with a spotty neck. And *that* is the feature that gets mentioned over and over again in the eyewitness descriptions of the young Elvis, when he was starting out. The fact that his neck was always filthy and covered in acne. He had greasy hair, and would never look anyone in the eye but would look down and mumble. What Sam Phillips saw in that teenage boy was a terrible feeling of insecurity.
It was a feeling he recognised himself -- Phillips had already been hospitalised a couple of times with severe depression and had to have electric shock therapy a few years earlier. But it was also something he recognised from the black musicians he'd been working with. In their cases it was because they'd been crushed by a racist system. In Phillips' case it was because his brain was wired slightly differently from everyone else's. He didn't know quite what it was that made this teenage boy have that attitude, what it was that made him a scared, insecure, outsider. But whatever it was, Elvis Presley was the only white man Sam Phillips had met whose attitudes, bearing, and way of talking reminded him of the great black artists he knew and worked with, like Howlin' Wolf or B.B. King, and he became eager to try him out and see what could happen.
Phillips decided to put Elvis together with Scotty Moore and Bill Black, the guitarist and bass player from the Starlite Wranglers. Neither was an impressive technical musician – in fact at the time they were considered barely competent – but that was a plus in Phillips' book. These were people who played with feeling, rather than with technique, and who wouldn't try to do anything too flashy and showboaty. And he trusted their instincts, especially Scotty's. He wanted to see what Scotty Moore thought, and so he got Elvis to go and rehearse with the two older musicians.
Scotty Moore wasn't impressed... or at least, he *thought* he wasn't impressed. But at the same time... there was *something* there. It was worth giving the kid a shot, even though he didn't quite know *why* he thought that.
So Sam Phillips arranged for a session, recording a ballad, since that was the kind of thing that Elvis had been singing in his auditions.
The song they thought might be suitable for him turned out not to be, and nor were many other songs they tried, until eventually they hit on "That's All Right Mama", a song originally recorded by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup in 1946.
Arthur Crudup was a country-blues singer, and he was another of those people who did the same kind of record over and over -- he would sing blues songs with the same melody and often including many of the same lyrics, seemingly improvising songs based around floating lyrics. The song "That's All Right Mama" was inspired by Blind Lemon Jefferson's classic "Black Snake Moan":
[excerpt: "Black Snake Moan", Blind Lemon Jefferson]
Crudup had first used the line in "If I Get Lucky". He then came up with the melody for what became "That's All Right", but recorded it with different lyrics as "Mean Ol' Frisco Blues":
[excerpt: "Mean Old Frisco Blues", Arthur Crudup]
Then he wrote the words to "That's All Right", and sang them with the chorus of an old Charley Patton song:
[excerpt: "Dirt Road Blues", Arthur Crudup]
And then he recorded "That's All Right Mama" itself:
[excerpt "That's All Right Mama", Arthur Crudup]
Crudup's records, as you can hear, were all based on a template – and he recorded several more songs with bits of “That's All Right” in, both before and after writing that one. Elvis, Scotty, and Bill, however, didn't follow that template.
Elvis' version of the song takes the country-blues feel of Crudup and reworks it into hillbilly music -- it's taken at a faster pace, and the sound is full of echo. You have Bill Black's slapback bass instead of the drums on Crudup's version. It still doesn't, frankly, sound at all like the black musicians Phillips was working with, and it sounds a hell of a lot like a lot of white ones. If Phillips was, as the oversimplification would have it, looking for "a white man who could sing like a black one", he hadn't found it. Listening now, it's definitely a "rock and roll" record, but at the time it would have been thought of as a "hillbilly" record.
[excerpt “That's All Right Mama, Elvis Presley]
There is, though, an attitude in Presley's singing which is different from most of the country music at the time -- there's a playfulness, an air of irreverence, which is very different from most of what was being recorded at the time. Presley seems to be treating the song as a bit of a joke, and to have an attitude which is closer to jazz-pop singers like Ella Fitzgerald than to blues or country music. He wears the song lightly, unafraid to sound a bit silly if it's what's needed for the record. He jumps around in his register and sings with an assurance that is quite astonishing for someone so young, someone who had basically never performed before, except in his own head.
The B-side that they chose was a song from a very different genre -- Bill Monroe's bluegrass song "Blue Moon of Kentucky":
[excerpt: Bill Monroe "Blue Moon of Kentucky"]
Elvis, Scotty, and Bill chose to rework that song in much the same style in which they'd reworked "That's All Right Mama". There's nothing to these tracks but Elvis' strummed acoustic, Black's clicking slapback bass, and Scotty Moore's rudimentary electric guitar fills -- and the secret weapon, Sam Phillips' echo.
Phillips had a simple system he'd rigged up himself, and no-one else could figure out how he'd done it. The room he was recording in didn't have a particularly special sound, but when he played back the recordings, there was a ton of echo on them, and it sounded great.
The way he did this was simple. He didn't use just one tape recorder -- though tape recorders themselves were a newish invention, remember -- he used two. He didn't do multitracking like Les Paul -- rather, what he did was use one tape recorder to record what was happening in the studio, while the other tape recorder *played the sound back for the first recorder to record as well*. This is called slapback echo, and Phillips would use it on everything, but especially on vocals. Nobody knew his secret, and when his artists moved off to other record labels, they often tried to replicate it, with very mixed results.
But on "Blue Moon of Kentucky" it gave the record a totally different sound from Bill Monroe's bluegrass music -- a sound which would become known, later, as rockabilly:
[excerpt "Blue Moon of Kentucky", Elvis Presley]
Phillips took the record to his friend, the DJ Dewey Phillips, who played it on his R&B show. When Elvis found out that Dewey Phillips was going to be playing his record on the radio, he was so nervous that rather than listen to it, he headed out to the cinema to watch a film so he wouldn't be tempted to turn the radio on. There was such a response to the record, though, that Phillips played the record fourteen times, and Elvis' mother had to go to the cinema and drag him out so he could go on the radio and be interviewed. On his first media interview he came across well, largely because Phillips didn't tell him the mic was on until the interview was over – and Phillips also asked which school Elvis went to, as a way of cluing his listeners into Elvis' race – most people had assumed, since Phillips' show normally only played records by black people, that Elvis was black.
Elvis Presley had a hit on his hands -- at least as much of a hit as you could get from a country record on a blues label. Sadly, Crudup had sold the rights to the song years earlier, and never saw a penny in royalties – when he later sued over the rights, in the seventies, he was meant to get sixty thousand dollars in back payments, which he never received. I've seen claims, though I don't know how true they are, that Crudup's total pay for the song was fifty dollars and a bottle of whisky.
But it was at the band's first live performance that something even more astonishing happened, and it happened because of Presley's stagefright, at least as Scotty Moore used to tell the story. Presley was, as we've mentioned, a deeply shy young man with unusual body language, and he was also unusually dressed -- he wore the large, baggy, trousers that black men favoured. And he was someone who moved *a lot* when he was nervous or energetic -- and even when he wasn't, people would talk about how he was always tapping on something or moving in his seat. He was someone who just couldn't keep still.
And when he got on stage he was so scared he started shaking. And so did his pants. And because his pants were so baggy, they started shaking not in a way that looked like he was scared, but in a way that was, frankly, sexual. And the audiences reacted. A lot.
Over the next year or two, Presley would rapidly grow utterly confident on stage, and when you look at footage of him from a few years later it's hard to imagine him ever having stage fright at all, with the utter assurance and cocky smile he has. But all his stage presence developed from him noticing the things that the audience reacted to and doing more of them, and the thing they reacted to first and most was his nervous leg-twitching.
And just like that, the unpopular poor boy with the spotty neck became the biggest male sex symbol the world had ever seen, and we'll be seeing how that changed everything in future episodes.
