7
It is well if not widely understood that rhythm-and-blues, inspired by bands such as Louis Jordan’s and Lucky Millinder’s, arose out of swing music around the end of World War II. But jazz historians have generally dismissed R&B, in contrast to bebop, as an artistic dead end. “It was . . . a totally commercial music which permitted no fundamental stylistic deviations or advances,” writes Gunther Schuller. “And as such it played no further role creatively in jazz, although it provided often desperately needed employment for many otherwise idealistically motivated musicians.”[1]
The evolution of rhythm-and-blues—apart from doo-wop, which has it own loyal following—has consequently been given short shrift. As much attention has been paid to the means by which postwar R&B was disseminated—independent record labels, jukeboxes, disc jockeys, high-powered radio stations—as to the music itself. The only book devoted to the early development of rhythm-and-blues is Honkers and Shouters (1978) by Arnold Shaw, a former music-publishing executive who locates the roots of R&B more in blues than jazz. (The British writer Hugh Gregory covers some of the same ground in his 1998 book The Real Rhythm and Blues, a compendium of biographical sketches.)
The birth of rhythm-and-blues is associated with the breakdown of the big bands and the rise of small combos, but big jazz bands—including those of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Jimmie Lunceford, Andy Kirk, Erskine Hawkins, Lionel Hampton, Lucky Millinder, and Buddy Johnson—continued to have R&B hits in the immediate postwar years. Basie’s version of Jack McVea’s “Open the Door Richard!” became a No. 1 pop smash in 1947; failing to displace Louis Jordan’s “Ain’t Nobody Here but Us Chickens,” it topped out at No. 2 on Billboard’s Most-Played Juke Box Race Records chart, which had replaced the Harlem Hit Parade in 1945. But of the big bands, only Buddy Johnson’s extended its streak of hits beyond the beginning of the 1950s.
The genesis of R&B is also linked to the establishment of independent labels such as Specialty, Aladdin, and Modern on the West Coast at the end of the war. But East Coast and midwestern independents such as Savoy, King, and Apollo were founded at the same time or earlier, and many of the West Coast labels’ recordings were made in the East, Midwest, or South. It is true, however, that—like their western swing counterparts—some of the leading figures in the development of rhythm-and-blues were based in California and that many of them were originally from Texas or Oklahoma.
Arnold Shaw identifies Cecil Gant’s “I Wonder,” a No. 1 R&B hit in 1945 that briefly crossed over to the pop charts, as the song that “ignited the postwar blues explosion.” Although “I Wonder” is a wistful ballad rather than a blues, Shaw claims that its success on the white-owned Gilt-Edge label “fired the imagination of other would-be ‘indies’ and promoted the rapid rise of small record companies on the west coast.” Joe Bihari, explaining the 1945 founding of the Modern label in Los Angeles, told Shaw, “My brother Jules operated jukeboxes in all-black locations, and it was difficult to get R&B records at that time. His feeling of frustration was crystallized by the shortage of one particular record, Cecil Gant’s ‘I Wonder’. . . . Finally, one day he said, ‘Let’s make records ourselves.’”[2] Relying on Bihari’s account, Shaw may have exaggerated the impact of “I Wonder.”
Shaw writes that the Nashville-born Gant, then an army private, was playing piano at a war-bond rally in Los Angeles when he was discovered by Cliff McDonald, a Gilt-Edge associate. But according to Herb Abramson, who cofounded Atlantic Records, it was Gilt-Edge’s owner, Richard Nelson, who made the discovery.[3] Not until 1995 did it come out that Gant had originally cut “I Wonder,” his own composition, for a tiny black-owned Los Angeles label, Bronze, which had been founded around 1939 and taken over shortly afterward by Leroy Hurte.[4] According to Hurte, he produced the record after Gant, wearing his army khakis, walked unannounced into the Bronze studio in 1944 and auditioned.[5] The Bronze and Gilt-Edge versions of “I Wonder” were marketed simultaneously, but the Gilt-Edge disc, credited to “Pvt. Cecil Gant, the G.I. Sing-Sation,” was better distributed and outsold the Bronze record by far.
As Maurie Orodenker noted in Billboard, it was “the song itself rather than this sepia lad’s groaning” that made “I Wonder” a hit.[6] At a time when war kept many couples apart, lines such as “Will you think of me every day / Though I may be a million miles away?” had a special resonance. “I Wonder” was quickly covered by Louis Armstrong, Roosevelt Sykes, Woody Herman, and others, while Gant toured the country, performing in uniform.
The flip side of Gant’s Gilt-Edge “I Wonder,” “Cecil Boogie,” a straightforward piano boogie with no vocal, was also a hit (an earlier version of the piece was recorded by Bronze and released later as “Original Cecil’s Boogie”). Gant’s subsequent R&B hits—two more on Gilt-Edge in 1945 and three others on Bullet and 4 Star in 1948 and 1949—were all ballads, but none approached the popularity of “I Wonder.” Gant moved from Los Angeles to Nashville and back again, recording for such labels as Swing Time, Dot, and Imperial. His style was based on Leroy Carr’s, though his voice was harsher and he performed more modern material—blues, boogies, ballads, and jive songs. In 1950, he cut a crudely hard-rocking version of Wild Bill Moore’s “We’re Gonna Rock” for Decca under the name Gunter Lee Carr. Among his last-recorded singles was a cover of Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “The Shot Gun Boogie,” backed with the proto-rocker “Rock Little Baby.” As his career declined, he drank heavily, and he died in February 1951, at the age of thirty-seven.
Another seminal R&B smash, Joe Liggins’s “The Honeydripper,” was also cut for Bronze before being rerecorded for a different independent label. Liggins, born in Oklahoma, moved to San Diego as a teenager before settling in Los Angeles in 1939; he was playing piano with a band called the California Rhythm Rascals when he wrote “The Honeydripper” around 1942. Liggins later played in a band led by the trumpeter Sammy Franklin and tried to get Franklin to record the song, to no avail.[7] So Liggins put together his own combo and cut “The Honeydripper” as a two-sided single, first for Bronze, which never got around to releasing it, and then, in March 1945, for another black-owned Los Angeles label, Exclusive.
Exclusive had recently been founded by Leon René, whose brother Otis ran Exclusive’s sister label, Excelsior. Originally from Covington, Louisiana, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, the René brothers had moved to Los Angeles in the early 1920s. Otis became a pharmacist, while Leon, a pianist, formed his own band, with which Otis sometimes sang. The brothers also wrote songs together, enjoying their first success in 1931 with “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” which became Louis Armstrong’s anthem. Leon went on to write “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano,” a 1940 hit for the Ink Spots and for Glenn Miller. He produced the King Cole Trio’s first records for the Ammor label before launching Exclusive.
On “The Honeydripper,” over a two-note piano vamp reminiscent of “Shortnin’ Bread,” Liggins sings the jiving lyrics in a staccato cadence: “That cat can jam a riff or swing a hot lick / Boy, he sure does jump for joy / He’s a killer, a Harlem thriller / Hoy, hoy, hoy, hoy, hoy, hoy, hoy, hoy.” A series of instrumental solos follows, including James Jackson’s Illinois Jacquet–like tenor sax spot and Liggins’s Count Basie–style piano break. The song is plainly rooted in swing, but the sheer simplicity and insistent repetitiousness of the rhythmic piano figure give it a novel character, especially on the opening vocal section. Although it’s nearly as difficult to pin down the first rhythm-and-blues record as it is the first rock ’n’ roll record, “The Honeydripper,” which topped Billboard’s R&B chart for a record-setting eighteen weeks and crossed over to the pop list, is a good a choice as any.
Liggins had several more R&B hits on Exclusive, including one, “Got a Right to Cry,” that also made the pop charts, but all were more conventionally jazzy than “The Honeydripper.” Switching to Specialty, where his younger brother Jimmy was already established, he had a hit in early 1950 with “Rag Mop,” using practically the same arrangement as on Lionel Hampton’s version, only thinner, slower, and cruder-sounding. Later that year, he had a No. 1 R&B smash with “Pink Champagne,” a drinking song (one of many following the 1949 success of Stick McGhee’s “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee”) that rides the same piano vamp as Freddie Slack’s “Cow-Cow Boogie.” But Liggins would have only two more hits, “Little Joe’s Boogie” and “Frankie Lee,” both in early 1951: “Frankie Lee” is melodically similar to “Pink Champagne,” while “Little Joe’s Boogie” culminates a series of shuffle tunes that Liggins recorded, among them “Walkin’,” from 1946, and “Groovy Groove,” from 1947. (In October 1951, Liggins recorded what could be considered the definitive boogie shuffle, “Shuffle Boogie Blues,” but Specialty did not release it.)
Joe Liggins and his band, the Honeydrippers, continued to cut records for Specialty until 1954, including drinking songs, numbers featuring singer Candy Rivers, and remakes of his Exclusive hits. Meanwhile, he toured the country with such R&B luminaries as Amos Milburn, Roy Brown, and Bull Moose Jackson. He recorded for Mercury and Aladdin in the mid-1950s, but like other rhythm-and-blues veterans, he faced diminishing sales with the rise of rock ’n’ roll. He made an album for Mercury and a few singles for smaller labels before fading into obscurity, only to be rediscovered before his death in 1987. His song “Going Back to New Orleans,” which he recorded in 1952, was revived as the title track of a 1992 album by Dr. John.
After stints as a disc jockey and boxer, Jimmy Liggins became a chauffeur for his brother’s band, whereupon he began writing songs, learned to play guitar, and organized his own group, the Drops of Joy. He signed with Specialty in 1947, but his first single—the up-tempo boogie shuffle “I Can’t Stop It,” backed with the stomping “Troubles Goodbye”—failed to make the charts. His second single, “Teardrop Blues,” was an R&B hit in 1948; the flip side, “Cadillac Boogie,” formed the basis for Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88.” Liggins had two more jump-blues hits in 1949, “Careful Love” and “Don’t Put Me Down,” but an accidental shooting that year left him temporarily incapacitated. By 1950, he’d returned to the studio, cutting rollicking boogie shuffles such as “Saturday Night Boogie Woogie Man” and “Shuffle Shuck,” but he did not have another national hit until 1953, when he recorded his all-time best seller, the “Spo-Dee-O-Dee” knockoff “Drunk.”
In 1954, Liggins left Specialty and recorded four sides for Aladdin, including “Boogie Woogie King,” a thumping backbeat shuffle that easily qualifies as rock ’n’ roll. He produced his and other artists’ records for his own Duplex label over the next couple of decades, remaining active in various aspects of the music business until his death in 1983. His sound, more raucously aggressive and less jazzy than his brother’s, typified the rhythm-and-blues of the postwar era and helped pave the way for the rock revolution.
Another key figure in the advent of postwar R&B was Roy Milton, whose 1946 hit “R.M. Blues” made Specialty Records a going concern. Part Native American, Milton spent his early childhood on the Chickasaw reservation in Oklahoma before moving to Tulsa, where he sang with a band led by trombonist Ernie Fields (who would have a Top 5 pop hit in 1959 with a rocked-up version of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood”). When the group’s drummer was arrested during a tour, Milton took his place; from then on, Milton sang from behind a drum kit. After leaving Fields in 1933, Milton moved to Los Angeles and formed his own band, playing local nightclubs and in 1944 filming three Soundies with singer June Richmond. In September 1945, Milton made his first recordings, for Lionel Hampton’s Hamp-Tone label.
In December 1945, Milton and his band, now known as the Solid Senders, cut a pair of records, “Milton’s Boogie” and “R.M. Blues,” that were released on the new Juke Box label. (Milton also released the same two titles, with different flip sides, on his own Roy Milton label, illustrated with cartoon drawings.) Juke Box was run by Art Rupe, who’d grown up as Arthur Goldberg in a largely black neighborhood of Pittsburgh. After attending college in Ohio, he enrolled at the University of California at Los Angeles in the hope of breaking into the movie business and changed his name to Rupe. His cinematic ambitions stymied, he invested in Robert Scherman’s Atlas Records, the first label to record Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, but the company quickly foundered, and Rupe, with a different partner, founded Juke Box.
Rupe admired the big bands: “I remember being impressed by Lucky Millinder,” he told Arnold Shaw. “I was looking for the same sound with a smaller group. I couldn’t afford eighteen pieces, so I ended with two small acts. The first was only three pieces. . . . I called them the Sepia Tones. The other act consisted of six instruments—it was Roy Milton’s combo. And he succeeded in getting a sound which was as good, and even better than, Lucky Millinder’s. It was an uncomplicated sound, and yet it had the full harmonic range.”[8]
Sparked by Camille Howard’s florid piano, Hosea Sapp’s wailing trumpet, and Buddy Floyd’s moaning tenor saxophone, “R.M. Blues” spent nearly six months on Billboard’s R&B chart, kept out of the No. 1 spot only by Lionel Hampton’s “Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop.” Released just before “R.M. Blues,” “Milton’s Boogie” charted afterward; it’s essentially a retitled version of Jimmy Rushing’s “I May Be Wrong,” adding percussive horn riffs and shuffling drums, with Howard giving the boogie bass line more emphasis than Count Basie had. An influential hit, it makes a plausible candidate for first rock record.
Following the success of “R.M. Blues,” Rupe split with his partner and founded Specialty Records. Besides Milton and the Liggins brothers, Specialty recorded such R&B artists as Percy Mayfield, Lloyd Price, Marvin and Johnny, Guitar Slim, and Chuck Higgins; signing Little Richard, Don and Dewey, and Larry Williams in the mid-1950s, Specialty became a force in early rock ’n’ roll.
Roy Milton remained with Specialty until 1953, cutting nearly twenty R&B hits, many in a similar shuffling blues or boogie style, with prominent piano accompaniment, burly saxophone solos, and—increasingly as time went on—electric guitar breaks. His 1948 hit “Hop, Skip, and Jump” was covered by the Chicago blues pianist Little Johnny Jones in 1953 as “Hoy, Hoy”; the rockabilly singer Clyde Stacy covered “Hoy, Hoy” in 1957, and the Collins Kids, a teenage rockabilly brother-and-sister duo, followed suit (the Collins Kids also recorded a different song titled “Hop, Skip and Jump” in 1957). Milton, too, covered other artists’ hits, among them Paul Williams’s 1949 instrumental R&B smash “The Huckle-Buck,” to which Milton added lyrics, and Louis Prima’s 1950 pop hit “Oh, Babe!” a proto-rocking Prima composition also recorded that year by Kay Starr, the Ames Brothers, Benny Goodman, Ralph Flanagan, Lionel Hampton, Wynonie Harris, Jimmy Preston, and Larry Darnell.
Milton toured the country, appearing with the likes of Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, Johnny Ace, and Big Mama Thornton. Reviewing a 1952 show in Portland, Oregon, for Down Beat, Ted Hallock described Milton as “one squeal shy of Louis Jordan and a beat away from Lionel Hampton. . . . Mostly it’s frantic riffing, fair drums from Milton, heavy and repetitive ensemble behind screaming (or whistling) soloists. The excitement is engendered by nothing more than a beat.”[9] Later that year, Milton became one of the first rhythm-and-blues artists to tour Europe.
In 1955, Milton cut a session for DooTone, including the all-out rocker “You Got Me Reeling and Rocking”; the next year, he recorded the Little Richard–styled “One Zippy Zam” for King. He added singer Mickey Champion to his band, dueting with her on a cover of Huey “Piano” Smith’s 1957 hit “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu.” But like others of his generation, Milton could not compete with the younger rock ’n’ roll artists; his last two hits, both in 1961, were a rerecording of “Red Light” and a reissue of “Baby You Don’t Know,” both jump blues he’d originally cut years earlier. Milton recorded sporadically for small West Coast labels through the 1960s. He continued to make appearances in the United States and Europe before his death in 1983, recording a final album in France in 1977.
An outstanding blues and boogie pianist, Camille Howard moved to Los Angeles from Galveston, Texas. Though already a member of Milton’s Solid Senders, she cut “Try Try Again,” backed with “Widow Jenkins Blues,” with James Clifford’s band for the Pan-American label in 1946. The following year, Milton featured her piano on “Camille’s Boogie” and her voice on “Thrill Me,” a blues hit that prompted Art Rupe to record her under her own name in December 1947. The resulting “X-Temporaneous Boogie,” a vocal-less piano showcase, was also a hit, as was the flip side, “You Don’t Love Me,” where Howard sings an energized version of Paul Gayten’s languid 1947 ballad hit “True.” Her next release was “Barcarolle Boogie,” the first of several classical adaptations. But she would only have two more national hits, the faux-Latin “Fiesta in Old Mexico,” in 1949, and the swaggering “Money Blues,” in 1951. She left Milton in early 1950, touring and recording with her own trio, but rejoined his band before the year was out, remaining until the mid-1950s. She made a couple of records for the Federal label in 1953 and one more—“Business Woman,” backed with “Rock ’n Roll Mama”—for Vee-Jay in 1956, before devoting herself to gospel music. She died in 1993.
The emergence of new stars such as Cecil Gant, Joe Liggins, and Roy Milton around 1945 makes it convenient to date the dawning of rhythm-and-blues from that year. But other R&B luminaries began their careers earlier, and not just in big bands. Easily the most popular postwar rhythm-and-blues artist was Louis Jordan, who placed nearly fifty records on Billboard’s R&B chart between 1945 and 1951, fifteen of them in the No. 1 position. These hits included not only shuffle blues and boogies such as “Buzz Me” and “Boogie Woogie Blue Plate” but also jive songs such as “Reet, Petite and Gone,” ballads such as “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying” (revived in 1964 by the British rock group Gerry and the Pacemakers), songs about barnyard animals such as “Don’t Worry ’bout That Mule,” and comic recitations such as “Beware.” Jordan was also one of the first to bring calypso into the rhythm-and-blues arena with hits such as “Stone Cold Dead in the Market (He Had It Coming),” with Ella Fitzgerald, in 1946 and “Run, Joe” in 1948.
“Run, Joe” was composed by a doctor from the island of St. Vincent, Walter Merrick, who happened to be Jordan’s personal physician; the lyrics were by a Trinidadian immigrant, Joe Willoughby. “Stone Cold Dead in the Market,” about a woman who kills her husband, had been recorded as “He Had It Coming” in 1939 by its composer, the Trinidadian calypso singer Wilmoth Houdini. After the Jordan-Fitzgerald recording of “Stone Cold Dead in the Market,” Time magazine proclaimed the song to be “the biggest Calypso hit since Rum & Coca-Cola.”[10] Calypsos had been popularized in the United States after Roaring Lion and Atilla the Hun [sic] came to New York from Trinidad in 1934 for a recording session that produced Atilla’s “Graf Zeppelin” and Lion’s “Marry an Ugly Woman” (which became a No. 1 pop and R&B hit in 1963 after Jimmy Soul redid it as “If You Wanna Be Happy”). But the calypso craze really took off when the Andrews Sisters scored a No. 1 pop hit with “Rum and Coca-Cola” in 1945.[11]
Jordan kept touring and recording almost until his death in 1975 but never had a charted hit after 1951. One problem was that he formed a short-lived big band in 1951, just as established big bands were folding. More importantly, although his sound was the chief model for the R&B combo style, as well as the rock ’n’ roll of Bill Haley and Chuck Berry, his music—rustic lyrics notwithstanding—was too jazzy and sophisticated to suit the progressively coarsening tastes of rhythm-and-blues fans. Jordan’s arrangements were tight and swinging, his bluesy alto saxophone was sleekly expressive, and his voice exuded personality and charm, while his epigones sang or played roughly over ragged charts. Although many of his records crossed over to the pop market, Jordan—unlike Nat “King” Cole, another R&B hit maker who dabbled in Caribbean music—could not remake himself into a pop singer. By the time he jumped on the rock bandwagon with records such as “Rock ’n’ Roll Call” (RCA, 1955) and “Rock, Doc!” (Mercury, 1957), his time had passed.
Along with Nat “King” Cole and T-Bone Walker, Saunders King was one of the first West Coast rhythm-and-blues artists to record for an independent label. Born in Louisiana, King moved to Los Angeles as a child and was living in northern California by the mid-1930s, when he began singing with the Southern Harmony Four on the NBC-owned San Francisco radio station KPO. He took up guitar in 1938 and soon fell under the influence of Charlie Christian, who won fame with the Benny Goodman Sextet in 1939. King made his studio debut with his own sextet for Dave Rosenbaum’s Rhythm Records in June 1942, cutting the double-sided “S.K. Blues,” a groundbreaking record that failed to make the Harlem Hit Parade only because Billboard did not initiate that chart until October 1942. The song did make the magazine’s Most-Played Juke Box Race Records list in 1945 after Big Joe Turner covered it; it was Turner’s first charted hit.
King’s singing on the original “S.K. Blues” shows the influence of Turner, while his band plays in pure swing style. King’s music grew less jazzy after the war, when he recorded for such labels as Aladdin and Modern, as well as Rhythm. He scored a pair of hits in 1949, “Empty Bedroom Blues” and “Stay Gone Blues,” but faded in the 1950s and retired the following decade, dedicating himself to religion. In 1979, he sang and played guitar on a track of his son-in-law Carlos Santana’s album Oneness. He suffered a stroke in 1999 and died in 2000, at the age of ninety-one. His reputation rests almost entirely on “S.K. Blues,” whose impact was based less on its laid-back sound than on lines such as, “Come here, pretty baby, and put your fine, mellow body on my knee” and “Give me back that wig I bought you, baby, and let your head go bald.”
The laid-back blues sound—harking back to Avery Parrish’s “After Hours”—was popularized primarily by Charles Brown, the singer-pianist with Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers. Born in Texas City, Texas, between Houston and Galveston, Brown studied classical piano and sang in a church choir, meanwhile listening to the blues behind his disapproving grandmother’s back. He was in his teens, he later claimed, when he wrote “Drifting Blues,” which would become his signature song. His pianistic models included Art Tatum, Fats Waller, and Earl Hines; his main vocal influences were Pha Terrell, the crooner in Andy Kirk’s band, and Helen O’Connell, who sang with Jimmy Dorsey’s band. Brown majored in chemistry in college, but after briefly working at a federal arsenal in Arkansas, he moved to California, settling in Los Angeles in 1943. Johnny Moore was in the audience when he won an amateur contest at the Lincoln Theatre on Central Avenue; soon afterward he asked Brown to join his trio, with Eddie Williams on bass. By late 1944, the group was entertaining Hollywood stars at a whites-only Beverly Hills nightclub, performing mostly ballads in a style similar to the King Cole Trio’s. “We always kept ‘Drifting Blues’ as what they called our ‘race number,’” Brown told writer Chip Deffaa, “but we didn’t play many blues because Hollywood was kind of sophisticated.”[12]
In September 1945, Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, plus Johnny Otis on drums, recorded “Drifting Blues” for Eddie and Leo Mesner’s new Philo label (soon renamed Aladdin), and it became a major R&B hit. Brown’s relaxed, Cole-like singing is far removed from the dominant blues-shouting style of the period, expressing despondency with a world-weary sense of resignation. The rhythmic keyboard triplets with which he accompanies himself became a rock and pop fixture after first being adopted by piano-playing rhythm-and-blues singers such as Amos Milburn, Little Willie Littlefield, and Fats Domino. Early in his career, Ray Charles incorporated elements of Brown’s style. “I made many a dollar doing an imitation of his ‘Drifting Blues,’” Charles would recount.[13] Charles’s first R&B hit, “Confession Blues,” recorded with a trio in Seattle in December 1948 for the Los Angeles–based Down Beat label, clearly shows Brown’s influence.
Brown had a few more laid-back but not necessarily bluesy hits with Moore’s Blazers on the Exclusive and Modern labels, including “Merry Christmas, Baby,” which would become a holiday perennial, covered by everyone from Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley to Otis Redding, B. B. King, and Bruce Springsteen. But though Brown was the Blazers’ main attraction, it was Moore’s name that appeared on record labels and theater marquees. In 1948, following a financial dispute with Moore, Brown signed a solo contract with Aladdin and cut the ballad hit “Get Yourself Another Fool,” perhaps a veiled message to Moore. In 1949, he reverted to the “Drifting Blues” format, complete with piano triplets, and topped the R&B charts with “Trouble Blues.” His next hit, evincing the source of his sound, was an update of Leroy Carr’s 1935 recording “When the Sun Goes Down.” Brown’s last R&B chart-topper came in 1951 with “Black Night,” another bluesy dirge featuring triplet figures, this time played on guitar. He had his final hit for Aladdin in 1952 with the Leiber-Stoller composition “Hard Times,” after which he sued the label over royalties.[14]
Johnny Moore’s reconstituted Blazers recorded R&B hits on a variety of labels through the mid-1950s with a series of Charles Brown sound-alikes—Lee Barnes, Billy Valentine, Floyd Dixon, and Frankie Ervin. Brown, a chitlin circuit headliner during the late 1940s and early 1950s, kept touring until 1958 as his career wound down. In 1959, he recorded a duet with Amos Milburn, “I Want to Go Home,” that Sam Cooke transformed into the soul classic “Bring It On Home to Me” in 1961. In 1960, Brown had another holiday hit, “Please Come Home for Christmas,” which crossed over to the pop charts and was ultimately covered by Johnny and Edgar Winter, the Eagles, Willie Nelson, Aaron Neville, James Brown, Bon Jovi, Mariah Carey, and many others. He continued to perform and record but attracted little notice until 1979, when he began appearing at the New York nightclub Tramps. His 1986 album One More for the Road won rave reviews, as did his 1990 album All My Life, and his comeback flourished until his death in 1999.
Even before cutting “Drifting Blues,” Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers had backed Ivory Joe Hunter on the similar-sounding “Blues at Sunrise,” which was recorded for Hunter’s own Ivory label and became a national R&B hit in late 1945, after it was picked up by Exclusive. Born in East Texas and christened Ivory Joe, Hunter learned to play classical, gospel, and jazz piano, modeling himself after Duke Ellington and Fats Waller. He made his first recording for John Lomax in 1933, singing and playing “Stackolee” for the Library of Congress. He hosted a radio show in Beaumont and led a band in Houston before moving to California, where he met the Three Blazers while performing at a nightclub.
After “Blues at Sunrise,” Hunter started another label, Pacific (which leased some of its titles to 4 Star), recording blues and boogies with a combo that briefly included guitarist Pee Wee Crayton, soon to emerge as a blues star in his own right. In 1948, Hunter had a No. 1 R&B hit with “Pretty Mama Blues,” his soaring tenor complemented by his piano and Ernie Royal’s muted trumpet. By the time it charted, Hunter was recording for King with members of Duke Ellington’s band, crooning ballads such as the 1949 hit “Guess Who”; also in 1949, he foreshadowed his future direction with a cover of Tex Ritter’s country hit “Jealous Heart.”
Shifting to the MGM label, Hunter recorded the balladic blues “I Almost Lost My Mind” and the ballad “I Need You So”—both No. 1 R&B hits in 1950—followed shortly by a successful cover of Eddy Arnold’s 1947 country chart-topper “It’s a Sin.” But Hunter would not have another hit until he switched to Atlantic in the mid-1950s. In 1956, Pat Boone, imitating Hunter’s peculiar lilt but not his blue notes, covered “I Almost Lost My Mind” for a No. 1 pop hit. In response, Hunter recorded the similar “Since I Met You Baby” (backed with “You Can’t Stop This Rocking and Rolling”) and scored his final No. 1 R&B hit, this time crossing over to the pop charts. Hunter had a few more crossover hits before the end of the decade, the last a cover of Ray Price’s country smash “City Lights.” He recorded through the 1960s, with little success, for such labels as Capitol, Vee-Jay, and Stax. After Sonny James had a No. 1 country hit in 1969 with “Since I Met You Baby,” Hunter performed on the Grand Ole Opry and, before his death in 1974, recorded the album I’ve Always Been Country.
Hunter wrote many songs, a number of which—besides “I Almost Lost My Mind” and “Since I Met You Baby”—became hits for white artists. The McGuire Sisters charted with “It May Sound Silly” in 1955, Eddie Fisher with “No Other One” in 1956, Teresa Brewer with “A Tear Fell” in 1956 and “Empty Arms” in 1957, and Elvis Presley with “My Wish Came True” in 1959 and “Ain’t That Loving You Baby” in 1964. Although Hunter also recorded driving boogies and outright rock songs, he is remembered mainly for his blues-tinged ballads—melodic conflations of R&B, country, and mainstream pop that helped define the mellower side of the rock ’n’ roll era.
At his first recording session, in September 1946, Amos Milburn echoed “Drifting Blues,” piano triplets and all, on his own “After Midnight.” At the same session, Milburn cut his propulsive take on “Down the Road a Piece,” as well as the equally hard-rocking “Amos’ Boogie.” Five years younger than Charles Brown, thirteen years younger than Ivory Joe Hunter, and twenty years younger than Roy Milton, Milburn played with a heavier touch and a bluesier feel than any of them, although he, too, was grounded in swing. He continued to record Charles Brown–style blues and up-tempo numbers, but his reputation rests on his boogies and drinking songs.
Born into a large, poor family in Houston, Milburn taught himself piano as a child and, after a wartime hitch in the navy, led his own band in Houston and San Antonio. He was discovered by Lola Anne Cullum, a dentist’s wife and aspiring talent agent who took him to Los Angeles, where he was rejected at Modern—“They offered me so little money ’til she [Cullum] refused it,” Milburn told the German writer Norbert Hess—but signed by Aladdin.[15] (Milburn claimed to have discovered Lightnin’ Hopkins, who made his recorded debut for Aladdin in November 1946 after Cullum brought him to Los Angeles from Houston.)[16]
Milburn cut over a dozen sides for Aladdin, several arranged by the tenor saxophonist Maxwell Davis, before hitting pay dirt with “Chicken Shack Boogie,” where he recites lyrics similar to those of “Down the Road a Piece” to a more relaxed beat. Recorded in November 1947, it hit the Billboard R&B chart a year later, rising to the No. 1 spot. Before the end of 1948, Milburn charted with what would become his second No. 1 hit, a melodically altered version of Tommy Dorsey’s 1938 ballad hit “Bewildered.” (The song, also a No. 1 R&B hit in 1948 for an obscure singer named Red Miller, would chart again in 1949 for Billy Eckstine and in 1961 for James Brown.)
Milburn was the top rhythm-and-blues artist of 1949, with nine hits on the Billboard chart. He generally stuck with familiar formulas, emulating Charles Brown on “Empty Arms Blues” and “Let’s Make Christmas Merry, Baby” and reworking the “Down the Road a Piece” pattern on the No. 1 hit “Roomin’ House Boogie,” where he talk-sings a line—“We gonna send down to the corner and get another fifth / And everybody else in the house is gonna take a little nip”—that would turn up two years later, slightly modified, on “Rocket 88.” On “A and M Blues,” Milburn appropriates the “Yancey Special” bass line of Sonny Thompson’s 1948 hit “Long Gone”; on “In the Middle of the Night,” he combines “Drifting Blues” with Lonnie Johnson’s 1948 hit “Tomorrow Night.”
At the end of 1950, Milburn scored his final No. 1 hit, “Bad, Bad Whiskey,” the first in a series of drinking songs that included “Just One More Drink,” “Thinking and Drinking,” “Let Me Go Home, Whiskey,” “One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer” (later revived by John Lee Hooker as “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer”), “Vicious, Vicious Vodka,” and “Juice, Juice, Juice.” He last made the charts with “Good, Good Whiskey” in 1954, fading thereafter partly because he lived the life he sang about. “I was a heavy drinker,” he told Nick Tosches. “I loved that Scotch.”[17]
Milburn’s 1952 recording of “Rock, Rock, Rock,” featuring Maxwell Davis’s wailing saxophone, anticipated the sound of classic rock ’n’ roll (unlike his easygoing 1951 hit “Let’s Rock a While”), but though he performed with the likes of Fats Domino and Bo Diddley on a number of mid-1950s package shows, his music did not appeal to the growing teenage market. He cut a single with Charles Brown for the Ace label in 1959 and kept recording through the following decade for such labels as King and Motown, with little success. After a pair of strokes left him disabled, he cut a final album, released in 1977 as Volume 10 in Johnny Otis’s Great Rhythm & Blues Oldies series, on which Otis played the left-hand piano parts. Milburn died in 1980.
Born in El Campo, Texas, near Houston, Little Willie Littlefield took up piano as a child, inspired first by Albert Ammons and later by Charles Brown and Amos Milburn. In 1948, at age sixteen, he cut his first single, the breakneck keyboard showpiece “Little Willie’s Boogie,” for Eddie’s Records in Houston, following it with the similar “Littlefield’s Boogie” on the rival Freedom label. Discovered at a Houston nightclub by Jules Bihari of Modern Records, he moved to Los Angeles and in October 1949 recorded “It’s Midnight (No Place to Go),” a substantial R&B hit. With its piano triplets and habanera horn vamp, that song forms the obvious model for Fats Domino’s 1950 hit “Every Night About This Time,” the first of many Domino recordings in the same basic mold, including “Ain’t It a Shame,” “Blueberry Hill,” “Blue Monday,” and “Walking to New Orleans.”
Littlefield had only two more national hits, the bluesy ballad “Farewell,” in late 1949, and a balladic duet with Little Lora Wiggins, “I’ve Been Lost,” in 1951. He also recorded the up-tempo rocker “Rockin’ Chair Mama,” where he pounds the piano like Jerry Lee Lewis, but it didn’t chart. In 1952, he signed with the Federal label and recorded the Leiber-Stoller composition “Kansas City” for producer Ralph Bass, who changed the title to “K.C. Loving.” A hit around Los Angeles, the song didn’t make the national charts until 1959, when Wilbert Harrison redid it under the original title, scoring a No. 1 pop and R&B hit that was covered by Bill Haley, Little Richard, the Beatles, and James Brown, among many others. Although Harrison’s version—with its assured vocal, ska-like shuffle-boogie beat and nearly psychedelic Wild Jimmy Spruill blues guitar break—is plainly superior, Littlefield’s halfheartedly sung original, with its oddly popping backbeat and greasily suave Maxwell Davis saxophone solo, has its own shuffling charm.
Littlefield was backed by an R&B vocal-harmony group called the Mondellos on the doo-wop-flavored “Ruby-Ruby,” one of several sides he cut for the revived Rhythm label in 1957 and 1958. He played San Francisco Bay Area clubs in the 1960s but did not record again until the following decade, when his comeback began. He toured and recorded in Europe through the 1980s and 1990s, then retired in the Netherlands, returning to the stage in 2006.
As a musician, bandleader, talent scout, producer, disc jockey, and record label owner, Johnny Otis played a key role in the propagation of West Coast rhythm-and-blues. Born in Vallejo, California, to Greek immigrant parents, he was raised in nearby Berkeley, where his father ran a grocery store in a mostly black neighborhood. From an early age, he embraced African American culture; although white in appearance, he managed to pass as black, marrying a black woman and changing his surname from Veliotes. He first played drums professionally with an Oakland-based combo led by the white trumpeter and trombonist Willard Marsh, but around 1940, he began drumming in a jump band led by the black boogie and blues pianist Count Otis Matthews.
Hitting the road, Otis played with the black territory bands of George Morrison in Denver and Lloyd Hunter in Omaha, formed a short-lived band in Omaha with the alto saxophonist Preston Love, and then joined Harlan Leonard’s Rockets at the Club Alabam on Central Avenue in Los Angeles, after Leonard moved to L.A. from Kansas City in late 1942. Following a stint with Bardu Ali’s group at the Lincoln Theatre, Otis organized his own big band—with pianist Bill Doggett, saxophonist Paul Quinichette, and bassist Curtis Counce—which served as the house ensemble at the Alabam. He modeled his sound on Count Basie’s, using some of Basie’s charts, as well as Lucky Millinder’s.[18]
Otis and his band made their first records in September 1945, for Otis René’s Excelsior label, with Jimmy Rushing singing on the risqué “My Baby’s Business” and on a cover of Wynonie Harris’s “Around the Clock,” which Harris had cut that July with a combo led by Otis. But the most successful recording of the session was a jazzy instrumental, “Harlem Nocturne,” which the white trombonist Earle Hagan had written in 1939 as a tribute to Duke Ellington’s alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges. Otis’s slowed-down rendition, featuring the white alto saxophonist Rene Bloch, brought out the tune’s exoticism and inspired numerous covers, notably the 1953 version by Herbie Fields, a white saxophonist with a bent for rhythm-and-blues, and the 1959 version by Viscounts, a white rock group with a penchant for guitar tremolo.[19]
On the strength of “Harlem Nocturne,” Otis performed across the country in 1946, opening for Louis Jordan in Detroit and New York; early the next year, he toured with the Ink Spots. But soon afterward, he had to replace his big band with a combo, including tenor saxophonist Big Jay McNeely and guitarist Pete Lewis; McNeely went solo after recording his hit “The Deacon’s Hop” in late 1948, but Lewis—a T-Bone Walker disciple who prefigured Chuck Berry’s style—would remain in Otis’s band until 1957. “I used two saxes, trumpet and trombone, and piano/bass/drums/guitar. This became like the standard rhythm-and-blues ensemble,” Otis told Arnold Shaw. “It surely wasn’t big band; it wasn’t swing; it wasn’t country blues. It was . . . a hybrid form that became an art in itself. It was the foundation of rock ’n’ roll.”[20]
In late 1947 or 1948, Otis and Bardu Ali opened their own nightclub, the Barrelhouse, in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles; while there, Otis discovered Little Esther Phillips, Mel Walker, and the Robins, who would sing on many of his records. (In 1955, the Coasters split off from the Robins.) In 1948, Otis scored his first nationally charted hit backing the obscure singer Joe Swift on “That’s Your Last Boogie,” an adaptation of “Your Red Wagon” that rocks to a Cuban beat. After Ralph Bass signed him to Savoy Records, Otis had a No. 1 R&B hit in early 1950 with “Double Crossing Blues,” an urbane blues tinged with doo-wop that features the Robins harmonizing behind Little Esther while Otis plays vibraphone with a quintet. Otis followed with nine more R&B hits that year, all featuring Little Esther and/or Mel Walker, most in a similar downbeat vein, with such proto-rocking exceptions as “Cupid’s Boogie” and “Wedding Boogie.”
Also in 1950, Otis put together one of the first touring R&B package shows, known at various times as the Savoy Barrelhouse Caravan, the California Rhythm & Blues Caravan, and the Johnny Otis Show. He continued to score hits through 1952, including the Latin-flavored “Mambo Boogie” and the hard-rocking “All Night Long.” He switched to Mercury in late 1951 but had only one hit for the label, a Charles Brown–style cover of Floyd Dixon’s “Call Operator 210”; he then signed with Peacock, where he produced and played on Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog” and Johnny Ace’s posthumous R&B ballad smash “Pledging My Love” (on Peacock’s affiliated Duke label), as well as a 1953 session with Little Richard, but had no hits of his own.
At a talent show in Detroit in 1951 or 1952, Otis discovered Jackie Wilson, Little Willie John, and a vocal group called the Royals; Otis wrote the rhythmic ballad “Every Beat of My Heart” for Wilson, but the Royals recorded it instead.[21] The song was not a hit until Gladys Knight covered it in 1961, but the Royals, after adding lead singer Hank Ballard and changing their name to the Midnighters, had a No. 1 smash in 1954 with “Work with Me Annie,” whose raunchy lyrics—“Annie please don’t cheat / Give me all my meat”—stirred considerable controversy. There followed a string of sequels—“Annie Had a Baby,” “Annie’s Aunt Fannie”—and answer songs—Hazel McCollum and the El Dorados’ “Annie’s Answer,” the Midnights’ “Annie Pulled a Hum-Bug,” Danny Taylor’s “I’m the Father of Annie’s Baby,” Linda Hayes and the Platters’ “My Name Ain’t Annie,” and the Nu-Tones’ “Annie Kicked the Bucket,” among others. In November 1958, Ballard and the Midnighters would record “The Twist,” which Chubby Checker turned into a trendsetting pop smash in 1960.
In 1954, Otis discovered the teenage Etta James in San Francisco and took her to Los Angeles, where she recorded “Roll with Me Henry”—her answer to “Work with Me Annie”—as a duet with Richard Berry, the future composer of “Louie Louie.” Released on the Modern label under the more seemly title “The Wallflower,” James’s record was a No. 1 R&B hit in early 1955, but it was quickly eclipsed by the white singer Georgia Gibbs’s adaptation “Dance with Me Henry (Wallflower),” which soared to the top of the pop charts. Too square to pass for rock ’n’ roll, despite a hard backbeat and such lyrics as “Roll, roll, roll / rock, rock, rock,” Gibbs’s hit cleared the path for Bill Haley’s breakthrough with “Rock Around the Clock” just weeks later. “Rock ’n’ roll was a direct outgrowth of R&B,” Otis told Shaw. “It took over all the things that made R&B different from big band swing: the afterbeat on a steady four; the influence of boogie; the triplets on piano; eight-to-the-bar on the top-hat cymbal; and the shuffle pattern of dotted eighth and sixteenth notes.”[22]
In the mid-1950s, Otis acquired his own Dig record label and began working as a disc jockey on the Los Angeles radio station KFOX, which soon led to a television show on KTTV. He signed with Capitol Records in 1957 and the following year sang on “Willie and the Hand Jive,” drawing its shave-and-a-haircut rhythm from Bo Diddley’s namesake 1955 hit, which is based in turn on Red Saunders’s 1952 recording of “Hambone.” Otis’s record crossed over to the pop charts, prompting him to cut several commercially oriented songs with a Bo Diddley beat—to his later regret, as they diminished his credibility among R&B fans.[23] Still, they were potent rockers, and one of them, the hoodoo-themed “Castin’ My Spell,” was popular among British groups of the mid-1960s.
Otis recorded for King in the early 1960s, without success, then turned to politics, working as an aide to the Trinidadian-born California legislator Mervyn Dymally. He returned to the studio in 1968 to record Cold Shot! for the Kent label, the first of many albums featuring his son Shuggie on guitar. Signing with Epic, he cut a live double album at the 1970 Monterey Jazz Festival with a lineup of former rhythm-and-blues stars including Joe Turner, Roy Milton, Roy Brown, Pee Wee Crayton, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, and Ivory Joe Hunter. He toured internationally with his R&B revue and produced the Great Rhythm & Blues Oldies series of albums on his own Blues Spectrum label, each showcasing a different R&B veteran backed by Otis’s band. He also founded the nondenominational Landmark Community Church in Los Angeles, which he served as pastor.
Otis cut The New Johnny Otis Show for Alligator in 1981 and toured afterward with his revue; he recorded an album of swing standards, Spirit of the Black Territory Bands, for Arhoolie in 1990. In the 1990s, he bought a farm north of San Francisco, where he ran a natural-food market and blues club. He also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, broadcast on the Berkeley-based radio station KPFA, started a new record label, founded a new church, and published a couple of semi-autobiographical, semi-political books, plus a cookbook and a book of his own paintings and sculptures. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as a nonperformer, and the Blues Hall of Fame, as a performer. He died in 2012, at the age of ninety.
Otis spent his career trying to popularize rhythm-and-blues, but it was another California native, the saxophonist Jack McVea, who was responsible for early R&B’s greatest crossover success. As the February 10, 1947, issue of Time magazine reported: “Every radio blared Open the Door, Richard! Five record versions were on sale, and 13 more (by Louis Jordan, Dick Haymes, the Pied Pipers, etc.) were being rushed to market. A quartet known as The Yokels sang it in Yiddish. Bing Crosby . . . Bob Hope, Fred Allen and Bea Lillie had only to mention the word Richard on the air to put their studio audiences in stitches.”[24]
Born in Los Angeles, McVea made his professional debut in a band led by his father, the banjo player Satchel McVea. He played under a succession of local bandleaders—Dootsie Williams, Charlie Echols, Lorenzo Flennoy, Claude Kennedy, Cee Pee Johnson, and Eddie Barefield—through the 1930s before joining Lionel Hampton’s band in 1940.[25] He led his own combos from 1944, recording as a leader and in accompaniment to T-Bone Walker and Wynonie Harris. He appeared at the first Jazz at the Philharmonic concert in July 1944, playing alongside the shrieking Illinois Jacquet on “Blues.” Together with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, he backed Slim Gaillard on a December 1945 session for the short-lived Bel-Tone label; just before Gaillard introduces McVea’s Coleman Hawkins–like tenor-sax solo on “Slim’s Jam,” drummer Zutty Singleton plays a knocking beat and says, “Open up the door, Richard!”
During McVea’s tenure with Lionel Hampton, Hampton often worked with the black vaudeville comedian Dusty Fletcher, who, pretending to come home drunk without his house key, would climb a ladder on stage and shout, “Open the door, Richard!”[26] McVea may also have seen Pigmeat Markham, another old-time black comedian who worked in blackface, do a similar act at the Club Alabam or Lincoln Theatre.[27] Louis Jordan alludes to the routine on his March 1944 V-Disc recording of “How High Am I?” yelling, “Hey, Richard, come on down here, boy, and open this door!” McVea set Fletcher’s line to music and around September 1946 recorded “Open the Door Richard!” with producer Ralph Bass for the Black & White label. The record takes the form of a casual conversation among McVea and his sidemen over a relaxed beat, interrupted by sung choruses. The song fades out at the end, a significant innovation; Ralph Bass later explained that the skit simply ran too long.[28]
By early 1947, “Open the Door Richard!” had swept the nation. McVea’s version crossed over to the pop charts, as did those of Count Basie, the Three Flames, Dusty Fletcher, the Charioteers, and Louis Jordan. The song was also recorded by white artists ranging from Hank Penny to the Merry Macs, but only the Pied Pipers charted. Dusty Fletcher’s stereotypical portrayal of a drunken, shiftless black man outraged civil rights advocates even as “Open the door, Richard!” became a catch phrase for opponents of segregation.[29]
The song’s success provoked lawsuits by Fletcher and another vaudevillian, John “Spider Bruce” Mason; both claimed to have written the original sketch, and each was awarded a share of the composer’s credit. But in the end, “Open the Door Richard!” turned out to be the creation of Bob Russell, a black vaudeville producer and performer whose career dated back to the 1890s. Pigmeat Markham, who’d worked with him toward the end of Russell’s life, said Russell had written the piece for a show called Mr. Rareback, where it was performed by John Mason. Mason said he’d performed the routine as early as 1919, reprising it a decade later in the Broadway revue Bamboola, which also featured Dusty Fletcher.[30]
The “Open the Door Richard!” fad ended as quickly as it had begun. McVea recorded a sequel, “The Key’s in the Mailbox,” which flopped, as did several answer songs. Black & White Records soon folded, but McVea continued to record for a series of labels through the 1950s, never scoring another hit. From the mid-1960s until his retirement in the 1980s, he played clarinet in a Dixieland band at Disneyland. He died in 2000.
Instrumentalists, especially saxophonists, played a prominent role in postwar rhythm-and-blues, including some who also sang, such as the alto saxophonist Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson. A Houston native, Vinson played alongside Illinois Jacquet and Arnett Cobb in territory bands led by Chester Boone, Milton Larkins, and Floyd Ray. Inspired by Big Joe Turner, he began to shout the blues during intermissions. He picked up songs from Big Bill Broonzy, with whom he toured the South accompanying singer Lil Green. After Jay McShann’s band had a hit with Walter Brown singing “Confessin’ the Blues” in 1941, trumpeter Cootie Williams, having left Duke Ellington, recruited Vinson to sing the blues with his own newly formed big band.
In January 1944, Williams’s band, with Bud Powell on piano, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis on tenor saxophone, and Vinson playing alto sax and singing, cut “Cherry Red Blues,” which Big Joe Turner had recorded in June 1939 with a combo including Pete Johnson and Hot Lips Page. On lines such as “Rock me, mama, till my face turns cherry red,” Vinson’s voice leaps into a creaky falsetto, giving him a distinctive yodel-like sound and helping make the record a major R&B hit that crossed over to the pop charts. Vinson cut two more R&B hits with Williams’s band in August 1944, singing without the falsetto creak on a cover of Louis Jordan’s “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t (Ma’ Baby)” and with it on a chart-topping adaptation of Casey Bill Weldon’s 1936 recording “Somebody’s Got to Go,” which Big Joe Turner had adapted somewhat differently in 1941.
Vinson toured the country with Williams on a bill with Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots, then formed his own big band and in 1945 signed with the new Mercury label. He reduced his band to a septet before recording his only Mercury hit, the double-sided 1947 smash “Old Maid Boogie”/“Kidney Stew Blues,” where Vinson keeps his vocal creak under greater control. Switching to King, he had has last hit in 1949 with “Somebody Done Stole My Cherry Red.” By this time, he was known as “Cleanhead,” having shaved his scalp after a botched hair-straightening attempt.
A first-rate jazz musician who jammed with Charlie Parker, hired John Coltrane for his band, and wrote a pair of tunes (“Tune Up” and “Four”) that Miles Davis recorded, Vinson was promoted primarily as a blues singer. When he did play saxophone, he was compelled to follow the histrionic conventions of the R&B honkers, strutting down theater aisles or atop tavern counters. “You had to blow and jump up and down,” he acknowledged, “but I never did like it.”[31] His rhythm-and-blues career faded even before the emergence of Elvis Presley, and he returned to jazz, briefly rejoining Cootie Williams and later recording with saxophonist Cannonball Adderley and with members of Count Basie’s band. But his fortunes did not revive until the late 1960s, when he began to tour Europe and hooked up with Johnny Otis’s revue in Los Angeles. He performed at festivals and recorded for Norman Granz’s Pablo Records and other labels, both playing jazz and singing the blues until his death in 1988.
Like Vinson, Benjamin “Bull Moose” Jackson started off as a saxophonist but became better known for his singing. Born in Cleveland, he sang in church and studied violin as a child; after switching to saxophone in high school, he joined a band led by trumpeter Freddie Webster. Jackson moved to Buffalo, New York, around 1942, then returned to Cleveland, where he was discovered by Lucky Millinder while playing in the house band at the Cedar Gardens club. He had to be coaxed into singing with Millinder’s band when Wynonie Harris failed to perform at gig in Lubbock, Texas, but “after I got out there, I loved it,” he recalled.[32]
Jackson first recorded with Millinder for Decca in June 1945, playing tenor saxophone; soon afterward, when the band performed in Cincinnati, Syd Nathan approached Millinder and his trumpeter/arranger Henry Glover about recording for him. Millinder was under contract to Decca but agreed to let several band members record for Nathan under Jackson’s name. Cut in August 1945, the resulting four sides, with Jackson singing on “Bull Moose Jackson Blues,” were the first to be issued on King Records’ short-lived Queen rhythm-and-blues subsidiary. The session also marked the beginning of Glover’s association with King.
Jackson continued to play and record for Decca with Millinder’s band while recording for Queen with Millinder’s musicians under the name Bull Moose Jackson and His Buffalo Bearcats. “I Know Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well,” cut in December 1945, was Jackson’s—and Queen’s—first hit. Unlike Wynonie Harris, Jackson could croon as well as shout, and after doing a session for Irvin Feld’s Super Disc label, he recorded the syrupy ballad “I Love You, Yes I Do” for King in August 1947. It became a No. 1 R&B hit and crossed over to the pop charts, establishing Jackson as a star and King as a force to be reckoned with in the rhythm-and-blues market. “I Love You, Yes I Do” was credited to Glover and Sally Nix, but their authorship was successfully challenged in court by the songwriters Guy B. Wood, Sol Marcus, and Eddie Seiler, who in 1944 had copyrighted a similar ballad, “Tonight He Sailed Again,” which Millinder, with Glover and Jackson in the band (but with Paul Breckenridge singing), recorded in October 1947.[33]
Jackson had a string of hits in 1948, including “Sneaky Pete,” “I Want a Bowlegged Woman,” and his all-time best seller, the ballad “I Can’t Go On without You.” He also sang “I Love You, Yes I Do” with Lucky Millinder’s band that year in the movie Boarding House Blues, starring Dusty Fletcher and Moms Mabley. He charted in 1949 with the ballads “Little Girl Don’t Cry” and “Don’t Ask Me Why,” as well as the country cover “Why Don’t You Haul Off and Love Me,” but he did not have a national hit after that until 1961, when he rerecorded “I Love You, Yes I Do” for the 7 Arts label. Although they were not big sellers at the time, Jackson is remembered today for such raunchy proto-rockers as “Nosey Joe” (written by Leiber and Stoller) and “Big Ten Inch Record,” both from 1952. By then, Jackson no longer played saxophone on his own recordings; the honking solos on “Nosey Joe” are by Big John Greer, while those on “Big Ten Inch Record” are by Red Prysock and/or Rufus Gore.
Jackson performed together with such artists as Joe Liggins, Buddy Johnson, Larry Darnell, and Chuck Berry, plus the doo-wop groups the Clovers, the Drifters, the Orioles, and the Ravens. He recorded for King into 1955, then cut an unreleased session for Chess, followed by records for the independent Encino and Warwick labels, but after 1958 he made his living primarily in the catering business. He moved to Washington, D.C., working for a caterer while playing occasional gigs until he was rediscovered in 1983 by Carl Grefenstette, the leader of the Pittsburgh-based R&B revival band the Flashcats. In 1985, Jackson cut his final album (with the Flashcats), played Carnegie Hall, and toured Europe with Johnny Otis. He kept performing until shortly before his death in 1988.
One of the first honking-saxophone hits was Wild Bill Moore’s “We’re Gonna Rock,” which charted briefly in July 1948. Born in Houston, Moore grew up in Detroit, where he boxed and played saxophone, switching from alto to tenor. He first recorded in 1944 with pianist Christine Chatman, the wife of blues pianist Memphis Slim, on a Decca session that also marked the studio debut of singer Big Maybelle. By 1945, he was in Los Angeles, where he recorded with Helen Humes (playing the jazzy tenor-sax solo on “Be-Baba-Leba”), Slim Gaillard, and Big Joe Turner. His signature record, “Wild Bill,” was excerpted on Ralph Bass’s short-lived Bop! label from a historic July 1947 concert showcasing Moore’s band alongside such rising modern-jazz stars as Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray, and Sonny Criss at the Elks Auditorium on Central Avenue. Moore himself played the blues with an occasional bebop tinge.
Moore moved back to Detroit later in 1947 and in December recorded “We’re Gonna Rock” for Savoy with a sextet including the baritone saxophonist Paul Williams (the label credits “Bill Moore, featuring Paul Williams – Bar. Sax”). After Moore’s brief tenor-sax introduction, T. J. Fowler plays boogie piano as Moore growls, “Ah, get it, Mr. Piano Player”; the musicians then shout in chorus, “We’re gonna rock, we’re gonna roll.” For the rest of the number, Moore blows a honking, wailing solo over a boogie bass line, with Williams barely heard except possibly for a few honks toward the end. In 1948, Moore cut “Rock and Roll” for Modern—a similar saxophone vehicle with a more elaborate vocal part sung by (probably) Scatman Crothers. Moore’s “Rock and Roll” was reportedly one of the first records played by Alan Freed on his Cleveland rhythm-and-blues radio show.[34]
Before the 1940s ended, Moore turned toward straight-ahead jazz, recording through the mid-1950s for Regal, King, and other labels with such sideman as trumpeter Jonah Jones, saxophonist Paul Quinichette, bassist Doug Watkins, and pianists Walter Bishop and Barry Harris. In the early 1960s, he made soul-jazz albums with pianist Junior Mance and organist Johnny “Hammond” Smith. He played on Marvin Gaye’s 1971 album What’s Going On, taking a long solo on the smash single “Mercy Mercy Me (the Ecology).” Moore eventually returned to Los Angeles, where he died in 1983.
Like “Open the Door Richard!” Paul Williams’s “The Huckle-Buck” helped bring rhythm-and-blues into the popular mainstream, but with a longer-lasting impact. Born in Tennessee, Williams spent his childhood in Kentucky and his teenage years in Detroit, where he began playing alto saxophone. He formed his first band with a high school friend, performing for white audiences at the Morris Café; by the end of World War II, he was working in trumpeter Clarence Dorsey’s band, playing for black audiences at the Sensation Club. He made his first recordings with a band led by trumpeter James Poe under the name King Porter, with whom Wild Bill Moore also recorded. After checking out Porter’s group at a Detroit nightclub, Herman Lubinsky, the owner of Savoy Records, sent for producer Teddy Reig; more impressed by Williams than by the rest of the band, Reig urged him to play baritone saxophone instead of alto and to simplify his style. “He kept telling me not to play a whole lot of notes. He kept saying, ‘Honk! Honk! Honk!’” Williams related. “I had come up in the swing tradition listening to Jimmie Lunceford, Andy Kirk and Duke Ellington. . . . And here’s this guy telling me to honk!”[35]
Nevertheless, Williams played alto sax on the first recordings he made for Savoy under his own name in September 1947. He played baritone the following month on his first R&B hit, the bluesy instrumental “Thirty-Five Thirty,” which is loosely based on “Red Top,” a 1947 hit for saxophonist Gene Ammons that saxophonist Ben Kynard had written for the Lionel Hampton band a couple of years earlier. Blowing over a boogie-woogie bass line, Williams builds momentum on “Thirty-Five Thirty” without doing much honking, but he honks up a storm on his second hit, “The Twister,” recorded in March 1948 with a band including Wild Bill Moore. After two jazzier hits, “Waxie Maxie” and “Walkin’ Around,” both featuring Moore, Williams had a No. 1 R&B smash with “The Huckle-Buck,” recorded without Moore in December 1948. It literally made his name: from then on, he was billed as Paul “Hucklebuck” Williams.
Earlier in 1948, at a rehearsal for a show with Lucky Millinder’s band, Williams had heard Millinder perform “D’ Natural Blues” and decided to play it with his own group. Written by the jazz composer Andy Gibson, the tune incorporated the theme from one of the more straightforward of Charlie Parker’s bebop anthems, “Now’s the Time,” which Teddy Reig had produced for Savoy in 1945. (Gibson’s composition has been confused with the “‘D’ Natural Blues” recorded in 1928 by Fletcher Henderson’s band, but those two numbers have little in common besides the punned title.) At his band’s next engagement, Williams later recalled, “The place was packed; it looked like an ocean of people—a wave of dancers. I decided to try the new tune, and the people started doing a dance I had never seen. . . . I called out, ‘What is that dance?’ ‘This is “The Hucklebuck,”’ they answered. So that’s what we called it.”[36]
Millinder did not record “D’ Natural Blues” for RCA Victor until January 1949, a couple of weeks after Williams cut “The Huckle-Buck” for Savoy, with both records crediting Andy Gibson as composer. Both made Billboard’s R&B chart, but though Millinder’s version, with its “Yancey Special” bass line and exciting Slim Henderson tenor-sax solo, is livelier than Williams’s, with its “Weary Blues” bass line and tepid baritone-sax and trumpet solos, “The Huckle-Buck” was a much bigger hit, holding the No. 1 position for fourteen weeks, while “D’ Natural Blues” only reached No. 4. After lyrics were added—“Wiggle like a snake, waddle like a duck / That’s the way you do it when you do the hucklebuck”—the song became a 1949 rhythm-and-blues hit for Lionel Hampton (sung by Betty Carter) and Roy Milton and a pop hit the same year for Tommy Dorsey (sung by Charlie Shavers) and Frank Sinatra.
“The Hucklebuck” (as it is usually spelled) has since been recorded by everyone from Pearl Bailey with Hot Lips Page to Homer and Jethro with June Carter to Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, Georgia Gibbs, Chubby Checker (his next hit after “The Twist”), Annette Funicello, King Curtis, Bo Diddley, the Royal Showband (a No. 1 hit in Ireland), and Otis Redding. As sung by Kay Starr, it features prominently in the classic 1956 episode of The Honeymooners where Art Carney shows Jackie Gleason how to dance. That the song is partly based on a Charlie Parker tune was appreciated only by bebop aficionados; that it was popularized by a reluctant honker who idolized the pre-bop alto saxophonists Johnny Hodges and Benny Carter is an irony lost on the boppers as well.
Williams had three more hits in 1949 but never again approached the success of “The Huckle-Buck.” He was the only artist scheduled for Alan Freed’s first big concert, the “Moondog Coronation Ball” at the Cleveland Arena in March 1952, who managed to perform before a near riot prompted the authorities to abort the oversold show. His band accompanied the headliners in films such as Rhythm and Blues Revue in 1955 and on package tours such as “The Biggest Show of Stars for ’57.” After leaving Savoy, Williams recorded for various labels into the 1960s, then worked as a studio musician. In 1968, he opened a booking agency in New York, seldom performing before his death in 2002.
Around June 1948, tenor saxophonist Hal Singer made what is perhaps the definitive honking record, “Corn Bread,” for Savoy. While “We’re Gonna Rock” is basically a compendium of bluesy riffs, punctuated by deep honks, “Corn Bread” is largely a collection of percussive honks and wails, interrupted by simple bluesy riffs. Among the most conspicuous of these riffs is one suggestive of Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” that’s apparently lifted from the white bandleader Charlie Barnet’s 1942 recording “The Victory Walk.” Performed by a quintet including pianist Wynton Kelly, a future Miles Davis sideman, “Corn Bread” was a No. 1 R&B hit, and the saxophonist was known thereafter as Hal “Cornbread” Singer.
Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Singer studied violin before taking up clarinet and saxophone. He played in the bands of Terrence Holder, Geechie Smith, Ed Christian, Ernie Fields, and Nat Towles before traveling to Kansas City with Lloyd Hunter’s band and joining the bands of Tommy Douglas and Jay McShann there. Settling in New York in the early 1940s, he played with Willie “the Lion” Smith, Chris Columbus, Earl Bostic, Roy Eldridge, Big Sid Catlett, Don Byas, Trummy Young, and Henry “Red” Allen, recording with Eldridge and Byas.[37] In late 1947, he played alongside the tenor saxophonist Tom Archia in Hot Lips Page’s band, taking the saxophone solo on Wynonie Harris’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight.” Just as the solo begins, Harris shouts, “Rock, Oklahoma, rock!” referring to Singer by his pre-Cornbread nickname.
In the spring of 1948, Singer backed Brownie McGhee on “My Fault” for Savoy, his mellow saxophone lending the Leroy Carr–style blues a sophisticated feel that helped make it a major R&B hit. His first Savoy session as a leader yielded “Corn Bread,” which he followed with other food-themed instrumentals—“Rice and Red Beans,” “Jiblets,” “Neck Bones,” “Hot Bread,” “Buttermilk and Beans”—but only “Beef Stew,” from December 1948, made the national charts. Meanwhile, Singer passed through Lucky Millinder’s, Bull Moose Jackson’s, and Duke Ellington’s bands, leaving Ellington to tour with his own group after the success of “Corn Bread.”[38]
In early 1949, Singer’s band accompanied the vocalist Chicago Carl Davis on two proto-rocking sides of the same Savoy single, “Travelin’ Shoes” and “I Feel So Good,” the latter melodically similar to Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock.” In 1950, Singer cut his own “Rock Around the Clock” for Mercury, switching to the Coral label the following year and returning to Savoy the year after. In 1955, he recorded the frantically rocking instrumental “Hot Rod,” singing on the flip side, an adaptation of “Rag Mop” titled “Rock and Roll.” He toured nationally, often performing on rhythm-and-blues and rock ’n’ roll package shows, until 1958, when he joined the all-star Dixieland band at New York’s Metropole Cafe. After a European tour with Earl Hines’s band in the mid-1960s, Singer settled in France, recording a string of albums and touring as far as Asia and Africa. Although he mainly played jazz, he returned to rhythm-and-blues with the British R&B revival band Rocket 88 and on a 1991 album, Royal Blue, with the American boogie pianist Al Copley. He also appeared in the critically acclaimed 1990 Russian movie Taxi Blues. He has remained active into the 2000s.
Jimmy Forrest played tenor saxophone in Duke Ellington’s band for some months—longer than Hal Singer did—and the experience left a deeper impression on his style. Born in St. Louis, Forrest worked with Fate Marable, Jay McShann, and Andy Kirk before joining Ellington in 1949. He then formed his own combo in St. Louis, including the conga and bongo player Percy James, and in November 1951 recorded “Night Train” for the newly launched, black-owned, Chicago-based United label. “Night Train” combines the main melody from Johnny Hodges’s 1940 recording of “That’s the Blues Old Man” (accompanied by members of the Ellington band, including Ellington) and the shuffling theme from Ellington’s 1946 composition “Happy Go Lucky Local” (the fourth movement of Ellington’s Deep South Suite), with Forrest adding a few honks of his own. Forrest’s record was a No. 1 R&B hit in 1952; a cover version by the white trombonist and bandleader Buddy Morrow made the pop charts. Subsequent versions were recorded by Louis Prima, Chet Atkins, James Brown, and many others.
Forrest had another hit in late 1952 with the Latin-flavored “Hey Mrs. Jones,” featuring a vocal chorus by the band members as well as Forrest’s jazzy saxophone solo. He never made the national charts again, but unlike most other honkers, he was able to reclaim his jazz credentials, performing in the former Count Basie trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison’s quintet from 1958 to 1963 and in Basie’s big band from 1972 to 1977. Meanwhile, he recorded his own albums, displaying a talent for bebop in addition to blues and swing. Before Forrest’s death in 1980, he co-led a band with the former Basie trombonist Al Grey.
The most flamboyant saxophone honker was Big Jay McNeely, whose unabashed showmanship overshadowed his fervid musicianship. Born Cecil McNeely in the Watts district of Los Angeles, he began playing an older brother’s saxophone while in high school; one of his early mentors was Jack McVea. He formed a band with a pair of schoolmates who went on to careers as bebop musicians—saxophonist Sonny Criss and pianist Hampton Hawes—and befriended Charlie Parker during Parker’s postwar sojourn in California. Soon afterward, however, he turned to rhythm-and-blues. “I started playing jazz,” he allowed, “but then I started thinking I wanted to make some money.”[39] His primary inspiration was Illinois Jacquet’s impassioned 1942 solo on Lionel Hampton’s “Flying Home.” “Every saxophone player back then was trying to redo that solo on ‘Flying Home,’” he said. “Every time we picked up our horns we were just elaborating on that, trying to make it bigger, wilder, give it more swing, more kick.”[40]
After winning an amateur contest at Johnny Otis’s club, the Barrelhouse, McNeely joined Otis’s band but recorded only one session with that group before Ralph Bass recruited him for Savoy. It was Savoy’s proprietor, Herman Lubinsky, who dubbed the saxophonist “Big Jay,” although he was of no more than medium height and build. At McNeely’s second Savoy session, in December 1948, he cut “The Deacon’s Hop,” a raunchy adaptation of Count Basie’s 1940 swinger “Broadway” that features McNeely’s yelping, growling, honking tenor sax. “The Deacon’s Hop” spent a week atop Billboard’s R&B chart before being displaced by Paul Williams’s “The Huckle-Buck.” “Wild Wig,” from McNeely’s first Savoy session, followed “The Deacon’s Hop” onto the charts, but McNeely abruptly left Savoy and signed with Exclusive. He went on to record for Aladdin, Imperial, Federal, Vee-Jay, and other labels but did not have another national hit until 1959, after he cut the mellow blues “There Is Something on Your Mind” with singer Little Sonny Warner for the Swingin’ label. Some of McNeely’s recordings—such as “Real Crazy Cool,” made for Aladdin in January 1950 but not released until 1954—achieve an ecstatic frenzy that anticipates not so much rock ’n’ roll as the ululant free jazz of the 1960s.
McNeely was able to sustain his career through live performances rather than record sales, attracting growing numbers of white and Chicano listeners. Sometimes he would duel with saxophone rivals such as Joe Houston, who copied McNeely’s style. “When I heard ‘Deacon’s Hop,’ that just blew my wig wide open,” Houston confessed.[41] Other honkers also marched along bar tops, through audiences, and into the streets, but none was as ostentatious as McNeely, who would climax his shows by blowing feverishly while writhing on his back. Big Jim Wynn, the veteran Los Angeles saxophonist whose composition “Ee-Bobaliba” formed the basis for Helen Humes’s “Be-Baba-Leba” and Lionel Hampton’s “Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop,” claimed to have inspired McNeely’s stage act. “I was the first sax man in L.A. to lay on his back and play the horn,” Wynn told the British writer Bill Millar. “Jay McNeely was a little kid when he used to come in and watch me play at weekends. Two or three years later, he was laying on his back and playing.”[42] As McNeely remembered it: “I started walking, I guess, after I had my first hit recording in ’49. . . . I had a great band then, but nobody was responding. . . . I got on my knees; nothing happened. I lay on the floor and that did it. . . . And that’s how come I started lying on the floor.”[43]
In the mid-1950s, McNeely began painting his horn so that it glowed in the dark under ultraviolet light; he also used a strobe light and a static-electricity generator in his act. But though he toured with a doo-wop group, the Penguins, and in a 1956 package show with Little Richard, Big Joe Turner, Bill Doggett, and other rock ’n’ roll stars, his career faded, as saxophonists were relegated to sideman roles behind singers. His version of “There Is Something on Your Mind” was eclipsed by Bobby Marchan’s, a No. 1 R&B hit in 1960, and his live album, released on Warner Bros. in 1963, was indifferently promoted. He did make a lasting impression on the teenage Jimi Hendrix, however, at a Seattle show around 1959. In their Hendrix biography, Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeek write that “McNeely’s act was a blueprint for the game plan that Jimmy [sic] himself would use later on. Jimmy was also impressed by the power of the horn itself, . . . and he incorporated horn sounds into the matrix of his own style and technique.”[44]
By the end of the 1960s, McNeely had retired from music and taken a job as a mailman. In the early 1980s, he began his comeback; before long he was touring Europe, Australia, and Japan and cutting albums for British, German, Austrian, and Australian labels, as well as his own Big J imprint. His latest recording, the EP Mac’s Back, was released in 2011.
Other saxophonists considered honkers included Frank “Floorshow” Culley, Willis “Gator Tail” Jackson, Chuck Higgins, Sam “the Man” Taylor, and Big Al Sears. The Maryland-born, Virginia-bred Culley played alto sax alongside Hal Singer’s tenor on a December 1948 Wynonie Harris session for King. In January 1949, having signed with Atlantic, Culley cut “Cole Slaw,” a honking tenor-sax adaptation of Jimmy Dorsey’s 1942 hit “Sorghum Switch”; his next release was “Floor Show,” which interpolates the main theme of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.” Jesse Stone, who’d originally written “Sorghum Switch” for Doc Wheeler’s Sunset Orchestra in 1941, arranged “Cole Slaw” for Culley, adding a new bass line. “I designed a bass-pattern, and it sort of became identified with rock ’n’ roll—doo, da-doo, dum; doo, da-doo, dum—that thing,” Stone recalled. “The first record we used it on was ‘Cole Slaw’ by Frank Culley, the sax player.”[45] Culley also played what is perhaps the first tenor saxophone solo on a doo-wop record when he was featured on the Clovers’ first hit, “Don’t You Know I Love You,” in 1951. On subsequent sessions, the Clovers were accompanied by Willis Jackson or Sam Taylor.
Jackson, a Florida native, made his name and reputation with the two-sided “Gator Tail,” a jazzy Jacquet-style honking tune that he cut for Mercury in 1949 as a member of Cootie Williams’s band. On his own, he recorded for Apollo, Atlantic, and DeLuxe; a 1952 Atlantic side, “Rock, Rock, Rock,” anticipates not rock ’n’ roll but the organ-driven soul jazz that Jackson would soon embrace. Jackson also played on some Atlantic recordings of Ruth Brown, with whom he was romantically involved. From 1959 to 1964, he recorded soul-jazz albums for the Prestige label, often with organists such as Jack McDuff or Johnny “Hammond” Smith, guitarists such as Kenny Burrell or Pat Martino, and Latin percussionists such as Ray Barretto or Candido Camero. Although jazz critics generally ignored him, he continued to record albums for such labels as Verve, Cotillion, and Muse through the 1970s, remaining active until his death in 1987.
Chuck Higgins is remembered mainly for his first record, “Pachuko Hop,” one of the cruder examples of saxophone honking, which he cut for the fledgling Combo label in 1952. Higgins had switched to saxophone from trumpet after moving to Los Angeles from Gary, Indiana. His quavering, squealing instrumental—originally intended as the B-side of “Motorhead Baby,” sung by pianist John Watson (who would later reemerge as Johnny “Guitar” Watson)—became a local hit and an enduring favorite among Mexican-Americans, although it has no Mexican content other than the misspelled title reference to zoot-suited Chicano hipsters. Higgins kept recording for Combo, Aladdin, Specialty, and other labels but never made the national charts. He stopped performing in the 1960s but made a comeback the following decade and toured Europe in the 1980s before retiring in the 1990s.
Sam “the Man” Taylor, from Tennessee, took up the saxophone while attending Alabama’s State Teachers College. He joined Scatman Crothers’s band in the Midwest, then moved to New York, where he played for Doc Wheeler, Cootie Williams, Lucky Millinder, and Cab Calloway in the 1940s. In the 1950s, he worked as a studio musician, backing rhythm-and-blues singers ranging from Ray Charles to Louis Jordan to LaVern Baker for the Atlantic, Savoy, Apollo, Mercury, and Decca labels, as well as MGM, for which he also recorded under his own name. In August 1953, he recorded the swaggering tenor-sax solo on Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters’ first hit, “Money Honey.” In February 1954, he took a rollicking break on Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll”; a month later, he played the steamy solo on the Chords’ “Sh-Boom.”
Taylor played the tortuous lead part on “Cloudburst,” recorded for MGM in late 1954 by the guitarist Leroy Kirkland’s band under the name Claude Cloud and His Thunderclaps. Alan Freed spun the record on his radio program and featured Taylor, along with saxophonists Red Prysock and Big Al Sears and guitarist Mickey Baker, on his “Rock ’n Roll Easter Jubilee” show at the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre in April 1955. Afterward, Taylor replaced Count Basie as the leader of Freed’s house band, performing on Freed’s radio programs, stage shows, and recordings for the Coral label. Singer Jon Hendricks set lyrics to Taylor’s “Cloudburst” solo and recorded the song with Dave Lambert in 1955, laying the foundation for the “vocalese” jazz group Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. Taylor’s solo also anticipated John Coltrane’s modal-jazz classic “Giant Steps.”
While continuing to play rock ’n’ roll for Freed through the late 1950s, Taylor took a more mature direction on his own albums, recording with string orchestras or jazz combos. Although his big tone and expressive phrasing made him a standout among honkers, Taylor’s solo career never really took off. He performed and recorded in Japan in the 1970s, then faded into obscurity, dying in 1990.
Big Al Sears boasted one of the most extensive jazz résumés of any saxophone honker. Originally from Macomb, Illinois, he began playing professionally in Buffalo, New York, then moved to New York City in 1928 and replaced Johnny Hodges in Chick Webb’s band. After touring with the Fats Waller–James P. Johnson revue Keep Shufflin’, he led his own groups and played in the bands of Elmer Snowden, Andy Kirk, Lionel Hampton, Duke Ellington, and others, even jamming with Thelonious Monk at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem. When Johnny Hodges left Ellington to form his own band, Sears joined him, playing the lead on Hodges’s March 1951 recording of “Castle Rock.” On this most sophisticated of honking vehicles, Sears alternates wailing passages with soft, subtle lines, set off by a sleek modern-jazz arrangement. Hodges’s “Castle Rock” made both the R&B and pop charts, and with lyrics added by the white songwriters Ervin Drake and Jimmy Shirl, the song was a pop hit for Frank Sinatra and for the Fontane Sisters.
Sears had recorded a single under his own name in 1945; he cut two more singles for the Coral label in 1949 with a vocal/instrumental group called the Sparrows. After the success of “Castle Rock,” he recorded eight sides for King, adopting a more exuberant honking style than before. He switched to RCA Victor in 1952, turning toward mainstream pop, but though he continued to record as a leader for such labels as Herald, Baton, Groove, and Jubilee through the mid-1950s, he had little success as a solo artist. Instead, he acquired a formidable reputation as an accompanist on recording sessions and stage shows. In January 1955, he played the understated tenor-sax solo on Big Joe Turner’s “Flip Flop and Fly,” a follow-up to “Shake, Rattle and Roll”; soon afterward, he began an association with Alan Freed that lasted through the late 1950s. In 1960, he returned to jazz with the album Swing’s the Thing, also recording the first of three Dixieland albums with the Swingville All-Stars. After briefly participating in the rock ’n’ roll revival a decade later, he retired, dying at the age of eighty in 1990.
Three nonhonking alto saxophonists, Joe Lutcher, Tab Smith, and Earl Bostic, also made the rhythm-and-blues charts. Lutcher was born into a large musical family in Lake Charles, Louisiana, but moved to Los Angeles before World War II, following his older sister Nellie. After wartime service in the navy, he led his own band in Los Angeles; discovered by Art Rupe, he began recording for Specialty in 1947. But he quickly switched to Capitol, for which Nellie Lutcher was already recording, and that label released his first hit, “Shuffle Woogie,” before Specialty issued his previously recorded second hit, “Rockin’ Boogie.” (“Shuffle Woogie” was credited to Joe Lutcher’s Jump Band and “Rockin’ Boogie” to Joe Lutcher and His Society Cats, though the musicians on both discs are mostly the same.) While Lutcher sings on many of his other recordings, his first two hits are almost entirely instrumental—up-tempo boogie shuffles played in a jazzy jump-blues style and featuring Lutcher’s sleek alto sax. On “Rockin’ Boogie,” Lutcher sings a single blues verse: “We’re playin’ this boogie, and we’re playin’ it because it rocks (2×) / Yes, we’re playin’ this boogie, and we’re playing it for the bobby sox.”
Despite the success of “Shuffle Woogie,” Lutcher left Capitol in 1948, during the second musicians-union recording ban. In 1949, he signed with Modern, singing on his final hit, “Mardi Gras,” which forms the basis for Professor Longhair’s anthem “Mardis Gras in New Orleans,” first recorded by Longhair later in 1949 and covered by Fats Domino in 1952. Lutcher subsequently cut singles for Peacock, London, and other labels, but after 1953 he turned to religion, recording gospel music for his own Jordan label and giving spiritual counsel to Little Richard. He died in 2006.
Tab Smith, a North Carolina native, found his way to St. Louis, where he played in Eddie Johnson’s Crackerjacks and Fate Marable’s riverboat band; moving to New York, he worked in the Mills Blue Rhythm Band and the Count Basie and Lucky Millinder Orchestras. The smooth-toned Smith formed his own group in the 1940s, scoring his first hit in 1945 with the treacly ballad “I’ll Live True to You,” sung by guitarist Trevor Bacon. Smith backed Wynonie Harris on a November 1946 session but retreated from the music scene after a car crash in which Bacon died. He came back in 1951 with an instrumental version of the ballad “Because of You,” a 1940 Tin Pan Alley composition that was revived in the 1951 movie I Was an American Spy and became a No. 1 pop smash later that year for Tony Bennett. Smith’s record was a No. 1 R&B hit that crossed over to the pop charts, but despite dozens of subsequent singles on the United label and others on Atlantic, Premium, King, and Chess—plus tours with the gospel-flavored rhythm-and-blues group the “5” Royales and performances on R&B package shows—Smith never had another national hit, leaving the music business in the 1960s to become a real estate agent.
Smith’s more successful rival, Earl Bostic, played with a guttural tone but otherwise took a similar approach, refashioning old standards for the rhythm-and-blues market. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he attended Xavier University in New Orleans, then worked in various territory bands before coming to New York, where he played in Edgar Hayes’s, Don Redmond’s, and other groups, making his recorded debut with Lionel Hampton. He led a combo in the early 1940s, meanwhile composing and arranging for Louis Prima, among others, and jamming with the nascent beboppers in Harlem. After another stint in Hampton’s band, he played briefly with Hot Lips Page and began recording on his own, first in late 1945 with a big band and afterward with smaller groups. He had a national hit in 1948 with an instrumental version of “Temptation,” a song introduced by Bing Crosby in the 1933 movie Going Hollywood that would be a hit again for the Everly Brothers in 1961.
Bostic’s biggest hits were cut for the King label in 1951: “Sleep,” from 1921, had been the theme song of Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians; “Flamingo,” an R&B chart-topper, had been a pop hit for Duke Ellington in 1941, as sung by Herb Jeffries. Bostic’s huge, vibrant tone made his alto sax sound like a tenor, and his brilliant technique gave the instrument a vocal-like expressiveness. A number of outstanding jazz musicians passed through his band, including the tenor saxophonists Stanley Turrentine, Benny Golson, Teddy Edwards, and John Coltrane. “He showed me a lot of things on my horn,” Coltrane later said.[46] Bostic performed and recorded through the mid-1960s, turning from singles to albums after recovering from a heart attack in 1956. He attracted a considerable following among whites while maintaining an approach summarized by the title of his 1958 King album Bostic Rocks Hits from the Swing Age. But in 1965, while appearing in Rochester, New York, he suffered a second heart attack and died, at the age of fifty-two.
Tenor saxophonist Sil Austin cut his first hits in a honking style, then switched to syrupy ballads. A Florida native, he moved to New York as a teenager and worked with Roy Eldridge, Cootie Williams, and Tiny Bradshaw. After forming his own band, Austin began recording for Mercury in 1956, scoring a hit that year with “Slow Walk,” an adaptation of Bill Doggett’s “Honky Tonk” that crossed over from the R&B to the pop charts. His follow-up, “Birthday Party,” in a similar honking mode, became a pop but not an R&B hit in early 1957. Afterward, Austin recorded another album’s worth of honking material, but no hits resulted; so in 1959, accompanied by a string orchestra and chorus, he cut Sil Austin Plays Pretty for the People, an album of ballads that included such chestnuts as “Summertime,” “Stardust,” and what would be his final hit, “Danny Boy.” Taking a cue from Earl Bostic, Austin wrung the last drop of emotion from sentimental songs by using the same exaggerated vibrato and bluesy embellishments that he applied to up-tempo jump tunes. He continued to cut albums for Mercury through the mid-1960s, then moved to Atlanta and recorded for Shelby Singleton’s SSS International label. He died in 2001.
The last of the honkers, in a sense, was Curtis Ousley, known as King Curtis. He did not literally honk, unless one considers his rough bursts of notes honking, and other bawling tenor saxophonists came after him—most notably Junior Walker, who was actually three years older—but Curtis was the saxophonist who led the transition from rock ’n’ roll to the more emotive soul music of the 1960s. Born in Ft. Worth, Texas, he played in the same high school band as the pioneering free-jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman. At seventeen, he recorded four tunes for the Waco-based Humming Bird label, but they were not released. At eighteen, he traveled to New York and won the Wednesday-night amateur contest at the Apollo Theatre. Returning to Ft. Worth, he joined Lionel Hampton’s touring band, which took him back to New York before breaking up, whereupon Curtis again went back to Ft. Worth, returning to New York to stay around 1954. Beginning in 1952, Curtis recorded as a leader and sideman, performing jazz as well as R&B; he worked with the jazz pianist Horace Silver for a time and later played in Alan Freed’s rock ’n’ roll band.
Curtis did studio work for a number of labels but made his reputation on Atlantic, backing Chuck Willis, Big Joe Turner, Ruth Brown, LaVern Baker, and the Coasters, among others. Curtis was evidently influenced by Gene Barge’s gospel-edged tenor-sax solos on such Atlantic singles as Chuck Willis’s “C.C. Rider.” According to Barge, “the style that you hear King playing later is the style that he came up with after he heard my stuff.”[47] A March 1958 session with the Coasters yielded the R&B and pop chart-topper “Yakety Yak,” a comic Leiber-Stoller song featuring a stuttering solo by Curtis that gave rise to a riant style called “Yakety Sax” (after the title of a Curtis-inspired 1958 record by the country saxophonist Boots Randolph that became a pop hit in 1963 after Randolph rerecorded it). Later in 1958, Curtis played on a pair of Buddy Holly tracks, “Reminiscing” and “Come Back Baby.” Having already recorded under his own name with little success, Curtis scored a No. 1 R&B and Top 20 pop hit in 1962 on producer Bobby Robinson’s Enjoy label with “Soul Twist,” where he uses the “Yakety Sax” technique intermittently but blows mainly in the soulful Gene Barge style.
While continuing to record prolifically as a sideman, Curtis had more hits on his own, including “Serenade” on Capitol in 1964 (with Curtis on soprano sax), “Memphis Soul Stew” on Atlantic’s Atco subsidiary in 1967 (with Curtis verbally introducing the instruments as each comes in), and instrumental covers of rock or soul hits such as Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” Stevie Wonder’s “I Was Made to Love Her,” Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay,” and Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” Curtis hired Jimi Hendrix as his guitarist in 1966, led Aretha Franklin’s band through the late 1960s, and recorded on a couple of tracks for John Lennon’s Imagine album. But in August 1971, at the age of thirty-seven, he was stabbed to death outside a building he owned in New York City.
T-Bone Walker’s bluesy electric guitar emerged around the same time as Illinois Jacquet’s honking saxophone, but though the two instrumental styles developed in parallel, the saxophone remained more popular through the 1940s, with the guitar coming to the forefront in the 1950s. However inspirational Jacquet may have been for saxophonists, Walker was even more influential on guitarists, who often copied his licks note for note. Because Walker was Chuck Berry’s principal model, the playing of Walker’s earlier disciples resembles Berry’s, but whether Berry listened to any of them or just emulated Walker directly is moot.
One of the first of Walker’s followers to make the R&B charts was Pee Wee Crayton. Raised in Austin, Texas, Crayton moved to Los Angeles in 1935, settling in Oakland after World War II broke out. He was more than thirty years old when he took up the guitar, inspired by Charlie Christian’s records. When T-Bone Walker toured the San Francisco Bay Area, Crayton befriended him; he picked up pointers from Walker and from John Collins, who would later become Nat “King” Cole’s guitarist. In 1945, Crayton began playing with a trio in Oakland that included pianist David Lee Johnson. He made his first recordings accompanying Ivory Joe Hunter in 1946 and the following year cut the up-tempo “After Hours Boogie” under his own name for the 4 Star label, alluding more to Buddy Johnson’s “I Ain’t Mad with You” than to Avery Parrish’s “After Hours.”
“After Hours Boogie” was not a big seller, but Crayton’s next release, “Blues After Hours,” on Modern, topped the R&B charts in 1948. Here, Crayton stays closer to Parrish’s laid-back formula while replicating Walker’s sound, including the distinctive opening vamp from “T-Bone Blues.” Later the same year, he recorded another instrumental hit for Modern, “Texas Hop,” which rocks to a shuffle beat and a boogie bass line and features Buddy Floyd’s honking tenor saxophone along with Crayton’s Walker-like guitar. In 1949, he had his final hit, also on Modern, singing the ballad “I Love You So,” where he plays only a short guitar solo. On the strength of his Modern hits, he toured the country, playing the Savoy Ballroom in New York along with Buddy Johnson’s band.[48]
A 1950 session with the former Count Basie trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison’s band produced “Rockin’ the Blues,” an aggressive adaptation of Walker’s 1949 hit “T-Bone Shuffle.” In 1951, after Crayton left Modern, he recorded the Walker-ish slow blues “When It Rains It Pours” for Aladdin with Maxwell Davis’s band. His next studio date came in 1954, when he cut a pair of singles—reflecting the influence of Charles Brown and Nat “King” Cole as well as Walker—for the Los Angeles record-store owner John Dolphin’s label Recorded in Hollywood. Later in 1954 and in 1955, he recorded in New Orleans with Dave Bartholomew’s band for Imperial Records, adopting a rock ’n’ roll sound on such sides as “Do unto Others,” “I Need Your Love,” and “You Know, Yeah.” Around 1955, the rhythm-and-blues singer Billy “the Kid” Emerson took Elvis Presley to see Crayton perform at a club in Memphis. “He thought that was somethin’!” Emerson recounted. “He’d never seen him, and Pee Wee was good!”[49]
In 1956, Crayton moved to Detroit, where he engaged T-Bone Walker in a “Battle of the Guitars.” Crayton traveled to Chicago in September of that year to record “The Telephone Is Ringing” for Vee-Jay, sounding less like T-Bone Walker than like the Chicago blues guitarist Otis Rush, who that summer had recorded his only national hit, “I Can’t Quit You Baby” (covered on Led Zeppelin’s 1969 debut album). Crayton’s “I Found My Peace of Mind,” recorded for Vee-Jay in February 1957 with a doo-wop vocal chorus, is loosely based on Ray Charles’s “I’ve Got a Woman.” By this time, Crayton had stepped out of T-Bone Walker’s shadow with a more intense style of his own. But he couldn’t score a hit, drifting from one small label to another through the early 1960s, when he moved back to Los Angeles and took a job as a truck driver.
Crayton began a modest comeback in 1970 with an album for Vanguard and a performance with Johnny Otis at the Monterey Jazz Festival. He recorded an LP in Otis’s Great Rhythm & Blues Oldies series and accompanied Big Joe Turner on album sessions for the Pablo label. He visited Europe in 1980 but performed mostly around Los Angeles, often with the white blues harmonica player and singer Rod Piazza, with whom he cut his final pair of albums in the early 1980s for the small Murray Brothers label. He suffered a fatal heart attack in Los Angeles in 1985, just after returning from appearances at the Chicago Blues Festival and the Austin, Texas, blues club Antone’s.
Ironically, the most successful postwar West Coast blues guitarist owed relatively little to T-Bone Walker. Of partial Native American ancestry, Lowell Fulson grew up in Oklahoma among the Choctaw Freedmen, descendants of black slaves held by Indians. Four years younger than Pee Wee Crayton, he began playing earlier, inspired by records of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Boy Fuller, Peetie Wheatstraw, and Memphis Minnie. In 1938, he moved to Ada, Oklahoma, and joined a large string band led by the banjo player Dan Wright, playing mostly country music for white audiences. Around 1940, he traveled around western Oklahoma and West Texas accompanying the blues singer Texas Alexander; afterward he moved to Gainesville, Texas, north of Dallas, and became a short-order cook. Drafted into the navy in 1943, he was stationed in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he met Bob Geddins, who would produce Fulson’s first records after the war. Sent to the South Pacific as a steward, he spent less time cooking than performing, entertaining both servicemen and islanders.
Discharged in Oklahoma, Fulson moved to the Bay Area and renewed his acquaintance with Geddins, who recorded him for his Big Town label in 1946. Singing to the accompaniment of piano and bass on these sides, Fulson plays single-note runs on electric guitar but with more of a country-blues feel than T-Bone Walker. He soon adopted a more sophisticated approach, however, influenced by singers such as Jimmy Rushing and guitarists such as Walker and Pee Wee Crayton.[50] He had his first national R&B hit in 1948 with his own composition “Three O’Clock Blues” on Geddins’s Down Town label, featuring Fulson’s brother Martin on second guitar; the song would become a No. 1 rhythm-and-blues smash for B. B. King in 1951—King’s first hit.
Fulson scored his next hit in 1949 with a reworking of Walter Davis’s 1940 release “Come Back Baby,” itself a variation of Leroy Carr’s “How Long, How Long Blues.” Fulson’s record was issued on Jack Lauderdale’s Los Angeles–based Down Beat label, which soon changed its name to Swing Time; like Bob Geddins, Lauderdale was an African American record producer born in Texas. In late 1954, Ray Charles would redo Fulson’s “Come Back Baby” as “Come Back,” the flip side of “I’ve Got a Woman” and a Top 5 R&B hit in its own right.
Fulson had a Top 5 R&B hit on Swing Time in 1950 with “Everyday I Have the Blues,” based on Memphis Slim’s 1947 recording “Nobody Loves Me,” which is based in turn on Aaron Sharp’s 1935 recording “Every Day I Have the Blues.” The song was a hit for the jazz singer Joe Williams with King Kolax’s band in 1952 and for Count Basie’s band with Williams singing in 1955. It was also a 1955 hit for B. B. King and was covered by Jimmy Rushing, James Brown, Ray Charles, Billy Stewart, Eric Clapton, and many others. Fulson’s record was his first with the Texas-born, Los Angeles–based pianist Lloyd Glenn, a territory-band veteran who had accompanied T-Bone Walker on “Call It Stormy Monday.” Glenn would perform on and arrange many of Fulson’s records, including Fulson’s biggest hit, “Blue Shadows,” and the double-sided hits “Lonesome Christmas” and “I’m a Night Owl”—all from 1950 or 1951. Meanwhile, Glenn cut his own instrumental hits, “Old Time Shuffle Blues” and the chart-topping “Chica Boo,” on Swing Time with the same band. But Glenn refused to travel, so Jack Lauderdale, who produced Ray Charles’s first records, had Charles play piano in Fulson’s touring band, which also included tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine.
Fulson’s later Swing Time sessions produced no hits, nor did his single Aladdin session in New Orleans in 1953. But his first session for the Checker label, done in Dallas in September 1954, yielded the classic “Reconsider Baby,” a distinctive Fulson composition that anticipates the soul blues of Bobby Bland and Little Milton. Here, Fulson sings convincingly and plays a pair of fierce, modern guitar solos over a boogie bass line and shuffling backbeat, buoyed by the rich saxophone harmonies of David “Fathead” Newman and Leroy “Hog” Cooper, who would later play together in Ray Charles’s band. Elvis Presley recorded a rockabilly version of “Reconsider Baby” in 1960, with a tenor saxophone solo by Boots Randolph.
Fulson continued to record for Checker through the early 1960s, often with Lloyd Glenn, but had only one more national hit on that label, “Loving You (Is All I Crave),” in 1955. He toured with such artists as Big Joe Turner, Big Maybelle, and the Coasters, but his style did not appeal beyond the rhythm-and-blues market. Singing at the top of his range on “Tollin’ Bells,” from February 1956, he sounds like James Brown, who cut his first single, “Please, Please, Please,” the same month. Fulson moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s and began recording for Kent, a label established by the Bihari brothers after Modern Records went bankrupt. He had a hit in 1967 with “Tramp,” where he recites the verses, singing only on the refrain; the song, which Fulson wrote with the California-based blues singer and pianist Jimmy McCracklin, was a crossover hit the same year for Otis Redding and Carla Thomas, with Thomas handling the recitation.
Fulson had two minor hits on Kent in 1967 and a final hit on the Granite label in 1975—“Do You Love Me,” in an arrangement that owes much to Isaac Hayes’s “Theme from Shaft.” Before his death in 1999, he made albums for such labels as Jewel, Rounder, and Bullseye Blues, sticking mostly to the blues while recording such oddities as the Beatles’ “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” He was well received in Europe, where he began touring at the end of the 1960s, but never achieved the stateside recognition of Chicago blues guitarists such as Buddy Guy, at least among white listeners. But unlike those artists, he retained a measure of popularity among blacks, who regarded him as a soul singer as much as a bluesman.
Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown resisted categorization as a blues musician even more emphatically than Lowell Fulson. Born in southwestern Louisiana, he grew up in Orange, Texas, just across the Louisiana border. He took up guitar to accompany his father, a fiddler who played country and Cajun music; he also learned to play fiddle and drums. Despite his small-town southern background, he was attracted to big-band swing rather than country blues. “I heard the music of Blind Lemon Jefferson and the other backwards bluesmen, but I just didn’t like that caliber of music,” he told the writer Jas Obrecht. “I was influenced by people like Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, and Woody Herman.”[51]
Around 1940, Brown joined a local band called the Gay Swingsters, then toured with a troupe called the Brownskin Models.[52] After a wartime stint in the military, he performed at the Creole trumpeter and bandleader Don Albert’s club in San Antonio, billed as “the Singing Drummer.”[53] As Brown told it, he was invited to Houston in 1947 by Don Robey, the owner of the Bronze Peacock Dinner Club; when T-Bone Walker, the featured performer at the club, took ill, Brown picked up Walker’s guitar and improvised “Gatemouth Boogie” on stage, to the audience’s acclaim and Walker’s chagrin. But according to Evelyn Johnson, who booked the club for Robey, it was the stricken Walker who recommended that Brown be brought in from San Antonio to fill out his engagement.[54]
In any case, Robey signed Brown to a management contract and took him to Los Angeles in August 1947 to record four sides for Aladdin with Maxwell Davis’s band. On “Gatemouth Boogie,” after playing the guitar vamp from the Delmore Brothers’ “Hillbilly Boogie,” Brown sings, “My name is Gatemouth Brown, I just got in your town / [If] you don’t like my style, I will not hang around,” in a Jimmy Rushing– or Big Joe Turner–like shouting style. He plays a T-Bone Walker–style single-string guitar solo, followed by a different hillbilly-boogie vamp, then shouts the final verses as the band plays Count Basie’s “Boogie Woogie.” The other three Aladdin sides are in a similar jump-blues vein but more laid-back and without the country tinge—pre-rock rather than proto-rock, as they lack a backbeat or boogie-woogie bass line.
Frustrated when Aladdin delayed the release of Brown’s second single, Robey founded Peacock Records, with Brown as the label’s first artist.[55] In January 1949, Brown cut six sides for Peacock with Jack McVea’s band, the first four of which Robey released on three different discs, repeating “Didn’t Reach My Goal” and “Mercy on Me” on two discs each. He coupled the remaining two songs, “My Time Is Expensive” and “Mary Is Fine,” on a fourth disc, which became Brown’s only nationally charted hit. These early Peacock sides are fairly conventional jump blues, except for the frantic instrumental “Atomic Energy” and the up-tempo proto-rocker “Mary Is Fine,” the latter sporting a shuffling backbeat and boogie bass line. Brown’s hot guitar playing—his scorching solo on “Mercy on Me,” for example—draws from T-Bone Walker while pointing the way toward Chuck Berry and beyond.
Brown moves closer to rock ’n’ roll on his next Peacock session in late 1949, shouting the blues over a shuffling backbeat and boogie bass line on “I Live My Life,” “2 O’Clock in the Morning,” “Boogie Rambler,” “It Can Never Be That Way,” and “Just Got Lucky.” On “I’ve Been Mistreated,” one of two slow blues from the same session, Brown anticipates Eddie Boyd’s 1952 Chicago blues classic “Five Long Years” with the opening line “Have you ever been mistreated? / Then you know just how I feel” (Boyd sings, “If you ever been mistreated, / you know just what I’m talkin’ about”). Brown fully embraces proto-rock in 1951 and 1952 on such jumping numbers as “She Walk Right In,” “Too Late Baby,” “Baby Take It Easy,” “She Winked Her Eye,” and “Pale Dry Boogie.”
With Jimmy McCracklin on piano at a 1953 session, Brown rocks on “You Got Money” and plays wild guitar on “Dirty Work at the Crossroads.” Recording with trombonist Al Grey’s band later in 1953, Brown sizzles on the instrumentals “Boogie Uproar” and “Gate Walks to Board” (the latter composed by Brown and tenor saxophonist Johnny Board). The arrangements on a second session with Grey’s band in 1954 have even more of a rock ’n’ roll flavor. “Okie Dokie Stomp,” an instrumental recorded later in 1954 with trombonist Pluma Davis’s band, rocks hard, as does “Rock My Blues Away” from 1956, which refers to Deacon Jones and Elder Brown from Wynonie Harris’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight.” Yet despite aural evidence to the contrary, Brown later said, “I didn’t actually ever get into rock and roll. I refused getting into it, because to me it’s not the kind of music that is tasteful.”[56]
Whether or not Brown truly disdained rock ’n’ roll, white rock fans had little chance to hear him, as he performed mainly in segregated venues in the South and Southwest, at least until the 1960s, when he began playing country-western clubs. In 1959, after a three-year recording hiatus, he cut the instrumental blues “Just Before Dawn,” displaying the same sort of flashy technique on fiddle as he previously had on guitar. He also fiddles on his final Peacock single, “Slop Time,” in 1961. He made a few more singles for the obscure Houston labels Cue and Cinderella in 1964 and 1965, then covered Little Jimmy Dickens’s 1965 country smash “May the Bird of Paradise Fly up Your Nose” for the Hermitage label in Nashville. Hermitage’s owner, the white rhythm-and-blues disc jockey Bill “Hoss” Allen, featured Brown regularly on his short-lived 1966 television show, The !!!! Beat.
By the early 1970s, Brown was working as a deputy sheriff in Aztec, New Mexico. Rediscovered in France, he made his first European tour in 1971, appearing at the Montreux Jazz Festival and recording the first of several albums for the French Barclay and Black & Blue labels. He performed with Canned Heat at the 1973 Montreux festival and played on Professor Longhair’s 1974 album Rock ’n’ Roll Gumbo. In 1976, he took a State Department–sponsored tour of East Africa; the following year, he released the album Blackjack on the American label Music Is Medicine, playing fiddle, guitar, harmonica, mandolin, and viola while mingling blues and jazz with Cajun, country, western swing, and bluegrass. In 1978, he recorded the album Makin’ Music with the country star Roy Clark; afterward, he made a few appearances on Hee Haw, the long-running country-music television show that Clark cohosted.
Over the next two decades, Brown toured worldwide and received numerous honors; he cut a string of albums for Rounder, Alligator, and Verve, winning a 1982 Grammy award for Alright Again! on Rounder. He continued to perform even after being diagnosed with lung cancer in 2004; the following year, he evacuated his house in Slidell, Louisiana, just before Hurricane Katrina destroyed it, dying of heart failure days later. To the end, he refused to be labeled. “I’m not a blues player,” he told Jas Obrecht. “I’m a musician.”[57]
Mickey Baker was the most prolific studio guitarist of the early rock ’n’ roll era, a presence—if not always a prominent one—on dozens of rock and R&B hits. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, he was caught stealing at age eleven and sent to an orphanage, from which he repeatedly ran away. By the early 1940s, he had made his way to New York, a teenage hustler with dreams of becoming a jazz trumpeter. But he could only afford a guitar, and after lessons with guitarists such as Rector Bailey (who would record with Big Joe Turner in 1952), he joined a band led by pianist Jimmy Neely and traveled to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he saw Pee Wee Crayton perform. Impressed as much by Crayton’s wealth as by his style, he decided to switch from jazz to the blues. “I was starving to death and the blues was just a financial thing for me then,” he reflected.[58]
Returning to New York, Baker began recording as a sideman and bandleader. He displays the greasy, trebly, Latin-flavored post-Walker style he would later characterize as “slip and slide guitar” on his first record as a leader—“Guitar Mambo,” backed with “Riverboat”—cut for Savoy in August 1952 with a band including Hal “Cornbread” Singer.[59] Singing and strumming on his next record, “Love You Baby,” from November 1952, he anticipates Elvis Presley or Carl Perkins. But Baker made his reputation almost entirely by accompanying others: from 1952 to 1956, he backed Ruth Brown, Ray Charles, Amos Milburn, LaVern Baker, Little Willie John, Little Esther, Wynonie Harris, Sil Austin, Earl Bostic, Louis Jordan, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and many others for such labels as Savoy, King, Mercury, and Atlantic. Among the proto-rock classics on which he plays are Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters’ “Money Honey,” Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” and Big Maybelle’s “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” although his guitar can barely be heard on any of them.
As Big Red McHouston (his given name was McHouston Baker), he recorded the full-blown rocker “I’m Tired” with Sam “the Man” Taylor and singer Larry Dale for RCA’s Groove subsidiary in 1954. As Mickey “Guitar” Baker, he cut rock, jazz, and Latin instrumentals for Rainbow in 1955; he also played in several of Alan Freed’s New York stage shows that year.
Baker had accompanied “Little” Sylvia Vanderpool, to whom he’d previously given guitar lessons, on a 1953 single for Atlantic’s short-lived Cat subsidiary. Still a teenager, Vanderpool had been recording since 1950, when she sang bluesy duets with Hot Lips Page for Columbia. Seeking to replicate the success of Les Paul and Mary Ford, a white singing and guitar-playing duo, Baker enlisted Vanderpool to form Mickey and Sylvia. The two began recording together for Rainbow in 1955, then switched to Groove and in October 1956 cut the Caribbean-flavored “Love Is Strange,” which became a No. 1 R&B hit and nearly made the pop Top 10.
Baker claims to have taken “Love Is Strange” from Bo Diddley, who never recorded it, after Mickey and Sylvia toured with him.[60] But guitarist Jody Williams, who played in Bo Diddley’s band at the time, maintains that it was adapted from his composition “Billy’s Blues,” which he’d recorded with singer Billy Stewart earlier in 1956.[61] Stewart’s publisher, Arc Music, filed suit, but despite the obvious resemblance between Williams’s guitar riff on “Billy’s Blues” and Baker’s on “Love Is Strange,” the court ruled in Baker’s favor. The influence of “Love Is Strange” can be heard on such hits as Billy and Lillie’s “La Dee Dah,” from 1957, and Ike and Tina Turner’s “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine,” from 1961, for which Baker is said to have recorded the spoken parts attributed to Ike Turner.
Mickey and Sylvia had several lesser hits through 1961, more of them on the pop than the R&B charts. In 1962, the pair split up and Baker moved to Paris, where he worked as a studio musician, producer, and performer, reinventing himself as a traditional country bluesman. Still active today, he is best known for his jazz-guitar method books, the first of which he wrote in 1950 and had published in 1955. Sylvia Vanderpool recorded a string of disco-era hits under the name Sylvia, beginning with “Pillow Talk” in 1973. She and her husband, Joe Robinson, founded Sugar Hill Records and in 1979, at Sylvia Robinson’s instigation, released “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugar Hill Gang, the first rap hit.
Goree Carter never had a national hit, but the rediscovery of his 1949 recording “Rock Awhile,” with its Chuck Berry–like guitar part, brought him posthumous recognition as a rock ’n’ roll forefather. Born in Houston, Carter took up the guitar at thirteen, inspired by T-Bone Walker’s records. He was playing at a Houston club in a band led by the alto saxophonist Conrad Johnson five years later when he was signed to Freedom Records, a local label run by Solomon Kahal. Before recording for Freedom, Carter may have already cut a pair of Walker-style sides for Roy Milton’s Miltone label under the name Little T-Bone. Kahal urged him to continue in the same vein. “He just wanted me to sound mostly like T-Bone,” Carter recalled.[62]
Carter did just that on his first side for Freedom, “Sweet Ole Woman’s Blues,” which was coupled on the same disc with Little Willie Littlefield’s “Littlefield’s Boogie.” Carter’s next release was “Rock Awhile,” where he’s backed by Conrad Johnson’s band recording as the Hepcats. The opening guitar riff of “Rock Awhile” resembles the one on Chuck Berry’s “Carol,” while the mid-song solo suggests the one on “Roll Over Beethoven,” but it’s doubtful that Berry ever heard Carter’s record. Carter continued to record through 1954 for Freedom, Bayou, Imperial, Sittin’ In With, Modern, Jade, Coral, and Peacock, cutting proto-rockers such as the raucous “Let’s Rock,” from 1950 but never straying far from Walker’s shadow. After being drafted into the army, he quit playing music, working at various jobs until his death in 1990.
A similar foreshadowing of Berry’s style can be heard on Johnny Otis’s “Good Ole Blues” and “Boogie Guitar,” both from 1949 and both featuring guitarist Pete Lewis, whom Berry is more likely to have heard than Goree Carter. On “Good Ole Blues,” Lewis plays the same introductory part and later adds some of the same T-Bone Walker licks that Berry uses on “Johnny B. Goode.” Lewis stays in a Berry-ish groove on “Boogie Guitar,” accompanied by two other guitarists. Lewis performed on most of Otis’s records through the mid-1950s and recorded a few sides of his own for Federal as Pete “Guitar” Lewis in 1952 and 1953, singing the blues and playing Berry-like instrumentals such as “Louisiana Hop” and “Scratchin’.” He cut his last single in 1953 for Peacock, the label for which he also accompanied Big Mama Thornton and Johnny Ace. Almost nothing is known about Lewis’s life; he is said to have been born in Louisiana and to have died in the 1960s or 1970s. His replacement in Otis’s band was Jimmy Nolen, an Oklahoma-born, T-Bone Walker–inspired guitarist who went on to play the “chicken scratch” guitar parts in James Brown’s late-1960s band.
Although he was raised in Mississippi and based his career in New Orleans, Guitar Slim played Texas-style guitar, inspired mainly by Gatemouth Brown. Born Eddie Jones in Greenwood, Mississippi, he grew up in Hollandale, in the heart of the Delta, where his exuberant dancing attracted attention at a local club. After Jones left Hollandale in 1948, the blues guitarist Willie D. Warren hired him to dance with his band, later letting him sing with the group and teaching him to play guitar. In 1950, Jones moved to New Orleans, where he became friendly with a teenage pianist named Huey Smith and began calling himself Guitar Slim. Soon he was appearing at nightclubs such as the Dew Drop Inn, where his performance led the African American newspaper Louisiana Weekly to describe him as “an exact copy of Gatemouth Brown.”[63]
With Smith on piano, Slim cut four blues sides for Imperial in 1951; he recorded the gospel-tinged ballad “Feelin’ Sad,” soon to be covered by Ray Charles, for Nashville’s J-B label in 1952. He was recruited the following year by Johnny Vincent, a white Mississippian (born John Vincent Imbragulio) whom Art Rupe had hired to run the Specialty label’s New Orleans operation. Vincent had Ray Charles play piano and arrange for the October 1953 session that produced “The Things That I Used to Do,” where Charles lays triplet piano rhythms over a habanera horn vamp and Slim plays distinctively spiky guitar lines while ardently singing the poignant lyrics. Despite Rupe’s initial misgivings, the song, which Slim would claim had come to him in a dream, became a No. 1 hit, the biggest R&B seller of 1954.
Slim’s next single, “The Story of My Life,” recorded at the same New Orleans session, features a piercing guitar solo that influenced later rock guitarists such as Frank Zappa. But though Slim continued to record for Specialty through 1955, mostly in Los Angeles, and cut a few singles for Atco between 1956 and 1958, often recycling the “Things That I Used to Do” formula, the intensity of his guitar playing was never again captured in the studio, and he never had another national hit. Nevertheless, his flamboyant stage act made him a popular live attraction: he would dye his hair to match his brightly colored suits and shoes and, using a long guitar cord, would walk along bar tops and out into the streets like a saxophone honker. His trebly, overamplified guitar left a lasting impression on musicians such as the New Orleans singer-guitarist Earl King, who claimed that “Slim was gettin’ a fuzztone distortion way before anyone else.”[64] His heavy drinking impaired his health, however, and he died while on tour in upstate New York in early 1959.
An even more extravagant stylist was Johnny “Guitar” Watson, who was well ahead of his time when he first emerged in the 1950s, anticipating both psychedelic music and rap before reemerging as a funk star in the 1970s. Born in Houston, he began playing piano, then took up guitar. “I inherited my first guitar from my grandfather, who was a spiritualist preacher,” he said. “My grandmother told me not to play any blues on it, and that was the first thing I taught myself to play.”[65] He modeled himself after Gatemouth Brown and T-Bone Walker, performing in Houston clubs despite being underage. At fifteen, he moved to Los Angeles, where he successfully competed in amateur contests sponsored by Johnny Otis; he met Chuck Higgins at one such contest, leading to the 1952 recording session where he played piano and sang on “Motorhead Baby.” He rerecorded that song for Federal at a much slower tempo on his first session as a leader in January 1953, credited as Young John Watson. He played piano on three of the four sides he cut that day but played guitar on “Highway 60,” rapping the verses before singing the chorus to the tune of Amos Milburn’s “Bad, Bad Whiskey.”
After a later 1953 studio date where he played only piano, Watson came into his own as a guitarist on the February 1954 session where he recorded the instrumental “Space Guitar.” While still rooted in the blues of Gatemouth Brown and T-Bone Walker, “Space Guitar” is a harbinger of Jimi Hendrix, but with its furious bursts of notes, talking-guitar effects, jangling chords, jarring starts and stops, and wrenching blasts of echo and reverb, it was too freakishly futuristic to sell in its own day. After switching to Modern Records’ RPM subsidiary, Watson made his chart debut in 1955 with a fairly faithful cover of Earl King’s New Orleans–style hit “Those Lonely, Lonely Nights,” credited as Johnny “Guitar” Watson after the title of the 1954 Joan Crawford–Sterling Hayden western Johnny Guitar. But the clever originals he recorded for the label, where his slashing guitar is accompanied by Maxwell Davis’s band, were not big sellers, and RPM dropped him in 1956.
In November 1957, Watson recorded “Gangster of Love” for the new Keen label, revamping an unreleased recording he’d cut for RPM the previous year under the title “Love Bandit.” Following a pattern he’d used on earlier songs, he sings the choruses but raps such verses as “The sheriff said, ‘Is your name Johnny “Guitar” Watson?’ in a very deep voice / I said, ‘Yes, brother sheriff, and that’s your wife on the back of my horse.’” Not a hit, the song was revived by the white blues-rocker Steve Miller in 1968.
After unsuccessful sessions for several other labels, Watson had a hit on King in 1962 with the bluesy ballad “Cuttin’ In,” where he’s accompanied by a violin section. In the mid-1960s, he collaborated with the New Orleans singer Larry Williams, who’d had the rock ’n’ roll hits “Short Fat Fannie” and “Bony Moronie” in 1957. The two toured England and formed their own production company and record labels but had their biggest hit on OKeh with “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” in 1967. Written in 1966 as an instrumental by Joe Zawinul, then the keyboard player for the jazz saxophone star Cannonball Adderley, the tune was a surprise hit for Adderley. With lyrics added by Watson and Williams, the song was a hit not only for them but for the rhythm-and-blues singer Marlena Shaw and the white rock band the Buckinghams, whose version was the biggest seller by far.
In 1968, Williams and Watson had another hit, “Nobody,” backed by the psychedelic folk-rock band Kaleidoscope, with Solomon Feldthouse on sitar. But Watson did not return to the charts until the mid-1970s, after recording unsuccessfully again for several more labels. Signing with Fantasy Records, he scored a breakout hit in 1975 with the funky “I Don’t Want to Be a Lone Ranger,” sleekly produced, with minimal guitar, by Watson himself. A string of funk hits on the British DJM label followed, culminating in “A Real Mother for Ya” in 1977, as Watson assumed a broad-brimmed, bell-bottomed Superfly image to go with his new musical style. Following albums for A&M and Valley Vue in the early 1980s, Watson withdrew from the music scene until 1994, when he cut the album Bow Wow for Al Bell’s Bellmark label. He resumed touring but suffered a fatal heart attack during a 1996 performance in Yokohama, Japan.
None of T-Bone Walker’s other stylistic progeny—not even his indirect disciple Mickey Baker—had nearly the influence on rock music that Chuck Berry did. Making his recorded debut in May 1955 with “Maybellene,” Berry caught the first wave of the rock ’n’ roll tsunami and rode it into the genre’s pantheon, leaving his mark on virtually every guitar rocker who came after him. So great was his impact that other rhythm-and-blues guitarists came to be regarded as his precursors rather than as fellow Walker followers. Nonetheless, it is Walker rather than Berry who should be seen as the father of rock ’n’ roll—as well as modern blues—guitar.
The postwar trend for singers to take the spotlight from bandleaders was less pronounced in rhythm-and-blues than in pop music, and male R&B singers were more likely than their pop counterparts to play instruments. Two of the most prominent male R&B singers who did not play instruments or lead their own bands were the blues shouters Big Joe Turner and Wynonie Harris, who performed and recorded for various labels with pickup groups. Ironically, Turner, who was Harris’s idol, did not have a national hit between 1946 and 1950, only to experience his greatest success after signing with Atlantic Records in 1951, while Harris enjoyed his heyday in the late 1940s and early 1950s, scoring his final hit in 1952.
Harris had moved to Los Angeles around 1940 from his native Omaha, where he’d taken up blues singing after starting as a dancer. He made a name for himself at the Club Alabam with his brash personality and raunchy material; he also worked other clubs in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, sometimes engaging T-Bone Walker or Big Joe Turner in a “Battle of the Blues.”[66] He spent some six months with Lucky Millinder’s band in 1944, impressing the young Roy Brown when the band played Houston. “During my high school days I’d go and hear him and I’d always say if ever I was going to be a blues singer I’d like to be like that guy,” Brown said.[67]
After leaving Millinder, Harris recorded jump blues in a shouting style like Turner’s, only more intense, backed by groups led by Johnny Otis, Illinois Jacquet, Jack McVea, and the influential modern-jazz bassist Oscar Pettiford; he scored hits with “Wynonie’s Blues” and “Playful Baby.” Moving to New York in late 1946, he continued to record with various groups for King. “Lollipop Mama,” cut at the same session as “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” followed it onto the R&B charts (the song had been the flip side of Roy Brown’s original “Good Rocking Tonight”). But due to the second recording ban imposed by the American Federation of Musicians, Harris did not reenter the studio until December 1948, when he cut the double-sided hit “Grandma Plays the Numbers”/“I Feel That Old Age Coming On.”
His next session, recorded in April 1949 with the trumpeter Joe Morris’s band (including the jazz legends Johnny Griffin and Elmo Hope on tenor saxophone and piano), yielded the hit “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” and the No. 1 R&B smash “All She Wants To Do Is Rock,” Harris’s all-time best seller. With Harris singing to a backbeat as he had on “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” “All She Wants To Do Is Rock” can be regarded as the belated sequel to that song. Harris gives the word “rock” a more specifically sexual meaning, with a refrain that repeats the title line three times, followed by the hollered “rock and roll all night long.”
But Harris did not consistently pursue the rocking sound that inspired other artists and brought him his greatest success. His next hit, recorded prior to “All She Wants To Do Is Rock,” was “I Want My Fanny Brown,” a cover of Roy Brown’s “Miss Fanny Brown”; his next two hits after that were the risqué “Sittin’ on It All the Time” and “I Like My Baby’s Pudding,” both written by Henry Glover. Harris was being only partly facetious when he sang, “Gonna stop this rockin’,” on his May 1950 recording of “Rock Mr. Blues.” Among the few other rockers he cut during this period were “Bad News Baby (There’ll Be No Rockin’ Tonight),” a takeoff on “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” and “Lovin’ Machine,” his last national hit.
On the strength of his fifteen charted R&B hits (sixteen if one counts “Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well”), Harris toured widely, playing nightclub and theater dates on his own and in package shows, occasionally vying with Roy Brown in blues battles. His lyrical focus drifted from sex to alcohol, but as blues shouters gave way to vocal-harmony groups, his popularity diminished, and in 1954—shortly after he tried to jump onto a new bandwagon with the songs “All She Wants To Do Is Mambo” and “Good Mambo Tonight”—King dropped him. His abrasive personality and vulgar stage antics had alienated promoters, musicians, and audiences alike, and by 1955 he was nearly broke.[68]
Harris recorded a single on the Atco label in 1956, angling for the teenage market with an up-to-date arrangement of the Leiber-Stoller song “Destination Love.” King brought him back for two more singles the following year, but Harris, now in his forties, could no longer attract young fans. His voice gradually darkening, he continued to perform, revamping several of his earlier hits for Roulette in 1960, but he worked mostly outside the music business. After moving back to Los Angeles, he recorded his final session, for Chess, in 1964, but it was not released until 1971. In 1967, he appeared at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, along with Big Joe Turner, T-Bone Walker, Jimmy Witherspoon, and others; his last performance, in Santa Monica, came shortly afterward. He was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 1968 and died in 1969 before revivalists could rediscover him.
Harris inspired a number of imitators, notably Robert “H-Bomb” Ferguson, who “worshipped Wynonie and did his best to copy everything about him,” according to the record producer Bobby Robinson.[69] The son of a South Carolina minister, Ferguson learned to play gospel music on piano, turning to the blues against his father’s wishes. Still in his teens, he joined Joe Liggins’s Honeydrippers as they toured the South, then moved to New York, where, as Bob Ferguson, he made his first two singles for the Derby label in 1950. On “Wine Head” and its proto-rocking flip side, “Hard Lovin’ Woman,” he shouts the blues smoothly, suggesting Eddie Vinson as much as Wynonie Harris. By 1951, when he cut the blatantly rocking “Rock H-Bomb Rock” for Atlas, the rechristened H-Bomb Ferguson had perfected his gritty Harris impersonation.
After a one-off single for Prestige, Ferguson recorded four singles for Savoy in 1952, each pairing an up-tempo rocker—complete with backbeat and boogie bass line—with a slower jump blues. None made the national charts, but Harris was able to tour the South on package shows. He recorded one single each for Specialty and Sunset in 1953 and one side of a single for Decca with Andy Kirk’s big band in 1954. He moved to Cincinnati and between 1957 and 1961 cut a handful of singles for Finch, A.R.C., Big Bang, and Federal, among them such novelties as “No-Sackie-Sack,” from 1958, lamenting the vogue for loose-fitting sack dresses. He retired from music in the early 1970s but returned in the mid-1980s, wearing an assortment of outrageous wigs. He recorded several singles and albums, including Wiggin’ Out for the Chicago-based Earwig label in 1993. The last surviving blues shouter, he performed at music festivals in the United States and Europe nearly up to his death in 2006, the year that also saw the release of the documentary film The Life and Times of H-Bomb Ferguson.
As the careers of other shouters—Wynonie Harris, Jimmy Rushing, Eddie Vinson, Jimmy Witherspoon, Roy Brown—wound down, Big Joe Turner’s took off. Rushing briefly retired when Count Basie broke up his big band in 1950; when Basie re-formed the band for a show at the Apollo Theatre, Turner took Rushing’s place. The performance was not a success, and Basie cut back to a smaller combo, but Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records had been in the Apollo audience and signed Turner to a contract. Turner’s first Atlantic single, recorded with a band led by Vann “Piano Man” Walls, was “Chains of Love,” a slow blues composed by Ertegun. It was an R&B smash in 1951 that crossed over to the pop charts (and would be a Top 10 pop hit for Pat Boone in 1956), initiating a series of Turner hits on the label.
Although he recorded the hard-rocking “Bump Miss Suzie” at the same session as “Chains of Love,” Turner’s first four Atlantic hits were slow or mid-tempo blues (including “Sweet Sixteen,” later revived by B. B. King). Not until May 1953 did he cut the up-tempo “Honey Hush,” a No. 1 R&B hit that crossed over to the pop charts and became a rock ’n’ roll classic, covered by Johnny Burnette, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fleetwood Mac, Elvis Costello, and others. Written by Turner himself and recorded in New Orleans with Pluma Davis’s band, “Honey Hush” rocks from start to finish, propelled by a thumping backbeat, a boogie-ish bass line, and a rollicking piano. Davis’s trombone broadly counterpoints Turner as he sings, “Come in this house, stop all that yakety yak / Come fix my supper, don’t want no talkin’ back.” The melody and misogynistic attitude are similar to those of “Adam Bit the Apple,” a Turner original recorded in December 1949 with a Houston band including Goree Carter. The repeating chant of “hi-yo Silver” with which Turner closes “Honey Hush” is taken not from the 1938 number by that title sung by Roy Rogers and others but from a different “Hi-Yo Silver” that was cut by the Chicago R&B singer Harold Burrage in 1950 and covered by the Treniers in 1952.
Recorded in October 1953, Turner’s next hit, the mid-tempo blues “TV Mama,” features Elmore James on slide guitar; directly connecting the jazzy southwestern shouting tradition to the blues of the Mississippi Delta, it prefigures modern electric blues rather than rock ’n’ roll. Four months later came “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” an offshoot of “Honey Hush” that became one of the defining rock ’n’ roll songs. The personnel—Jesse Stone on piano, Wilbur DeParis on trombone, Sam “the Man” Taylor on tenor sax, Haywood Henry on baritone sax, Mickey Baker on guitar, Lloyd Trotman on bass, and Connie Kay on drums—were all steeped in jazz; but except for DeParis, who led a traditional band called the New New Orleans Jazz, and Kay, the longtime drummer for the Modern Jazz Quartet, all became better known for their work on rhythm-and-blues and rock ’n’ roll sessions.
Turner’s next four R&B hits, “Well All Right,” “Flip Flop & Fly,” “Hide and Seek,” and “The Chicken and the Hawk”—the first three recorded with Jesse Stone—followed the formula of “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” But at a time when rock ’n’ roll was conquering the pop charts, none of Turner’s records crossed over until he recorded a pop-style rock ’n’ roll arrangement of “Corrine Corrina” in 1956. Similar pop-rock arrangements were used on his last three R&B hits, “Lipstick, Powder and Paint,” “Love Roller Coaster,” and “Jump for Joy”—the last an update of “Roll ’Em Pete”—but none of them made the pop charts.
Having plied the R&B circuit in the early 1950s, Turner made the rock ’n’ roll scene with mid-1950s performances in Alan Freed’s “Moondog Birthday Ball,” “Rock ’n’ Roll Jubilee Ball,” and “Rock N Roll Second Anniversary” shows. He also appeared, along with Fats Domino, in the 1956 movie Shake, Rattle and Rock! singing “Feeling Happy,” which interpolates the chorus from Erskine Hawkins’s “Do You Wanna Jump, Children?” Hedging its bets, Atlantic also recorded Turner performing some of his older material with a band including his former partner Pete Johnson for the 1956 album The Boss of the Blues. In 1958, Turner and Johnson toured Europe and played the Newport Jazz Festival. In September 1959, Turner cut his last album for Atlantic, Big Joe Rides Again, a collection of standards featuring such mainstream jazz musicians as tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins and guitarist Jim Hall. Later the same month, Turner, with an ensemble including King Curtis plus a string section, rerecorded “Chains of Love” and “Honey Hush,” the latter reaching the lower echelons of the pop but not the R&B charts. It would be Turner’s final hit, and Atlantic dropped him in 1961, the year he turned fifty.
By the 1960s, Turner’s rootsy, rough-and-tumble rock ’n’ roll was passé; while striving for a contemporary sound on singles for the Coral, Ronn, and Kent labels, he mostly reverted to old-school jazz and blues, appearing at the Monterey Jazz Festival, performing in England with the trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton’s band, and touring Europe with the American Folk Blues Festival. Toward the end of the decade, he made albums for producer Bob Thiele on the BluesWay and BluesTime labels; in 1970, he recorded with Johnny Otis’s revue at the Monterey Jazz Festival. He cut a series of albums on Norman Granz’s Pablo label through the 1970s, some featuring jazz and blues stars such as Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Milt Jackson, Jimmy Witherspoon, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, and Pee Wee Crayton. In 1983, Turner recorded Blues Train for Muse, backed by the jump-revivalist band Roomful of Blues. Despite failing health, he kept performing almost until his death in 1985.
Although some female rhythm-and-blues singers bellowed, squealed, or growled, blues shouting had no real parallel among women. Jazzy vocalists such as Dinah Washington and Etta James extended their careers into the rock era by embracing pop and even country material, while bluesier singers such as Big Mama Thornton and Big Maybelle faded. Ruth Brown, the most successful postwar female R&B singer except for Washington, started her career as a romantic balladeer and had to be coaxed into recording the up-tempo songs that made her a star.[70]
Hadda Brooks, a Los Angeles native, was the first artist to record for the Modern label, scoring a regional hit in 1945 with her piano instrumental “Swingin’ the Boogie.” She recorded a string of blues and boogie instrumentals, including such classical adaptations as “Polonaise Boogie” and “Minuet in G Boogie.” But after making her vocal debut on the bluesy “You Won’t Let Me Go,” she scored her first national hit in 1947 singing “That’s My Desire,” which had been Frankie Laine’s first hit earlier that year.
In the 1947 movie comedy Out of the Blue, Brooks sang the torchy title song, which made the R&B charts the following year, followed shortly by another ballad, “What Have I Done?” She sang the standards “I Hadn’t Anyone Till You” and “Temptation” respectively in the Nicholas Ray–directed 1950 film noir In a Lonely Place (starring Humphrey Bogart) and the Vincente Minnelli–directed 1952 melodrama The Bad and the Beautiful (starring Lana Turner and Kirk Douglas). She also filmed several Soundies, including “Queen of the Boogie,” and briefly hosted her own West Coast television show.
Brooks left Modern in 1950, recording for London in 1950 and OKeh in 1952 and 1954 before returning to Modern in 1956, but had no other national hits. She toured Europe, sojourned in Hawaii, and spent the 1960s in Australia, retiring in Los Angeles in 1971. She began her comeback in 1987; her nightclub performances won her new fans in Hollywood, and she appeared in the Sean Penn–directed 1995 thriller The Crossing Guard (starring Jack Nicholson), as well as the 1999 science-fiction mystery The Thirteenth Floor and the 2001 family drama John John in the Sky. She released a new album on DRG Records in 1994 and another on Virgin in 1996, followed by a 1999 double album on Virgin that combined old and new recordings. She remained active as a performer until her death in 2002.
Born Ruth Jones in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Dinah Washington was raised in Chicago, where she sang and played piano in local churches, meanwhile idolizing Billie Holiday. Hired at age sixteen by the pioneering gospel singer Sallie Martin, she accompanied Martin on piano and sang with her group. After a couple of years, she quit to sing jazz in nightclubs and was discovered by Lionel Hampton when his band performed in Chicago in late 1942. Taking the name Dinah Washington, she toured with Hampton and, in December 1943, recorded four Leonard Feather compositions for the independent Keynote label with a Hampton-led septet including pianist Milt Buckner and saxophonist Arnett Cobb. Even on this debut session, Washington’s smoky voice is wholly distinctive; though not previously known as a blues singer, she shows an effortless feel for the idiom on “Salty Papa Blues” and “Evil Gal Blues,” her first hits.
Although she stayed with Hampton’s band until 1945, she sang on only one hit recorded under his name—“Blow-Top Blues,” where she invests Feather’s outré lyrics with more dignity than they deserve. In December 1945, after leaving Hampton, she recorded three sessions with Lucky Thompson’s All Stars for the Apollo label; the material, all blues, includes a pair of Slim Gaillard–inspired novelty songs, “My Voot Is Really Vout” and “No Voot, No Boot.” But despite Washington’s brilliant singing and the band’s sumptuously jazzy arrangements, the sessions produced no national hits. She began recording for Mercury in January 1946, mixing twelve-bar numbers such as “Postman Blues” with balladic standards such as “Embraceable You” and jiving novelty songs such as “A Slick Chick (on the Mellow Side).”
Her first Mercury hit, cut in November 1947, was “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” the Fats Waller classic. Around the same time, she recorded her first R&B chart-topper, “Am I Asking Too Much,” a ballad written by R. Dean Taylor and Deke Richards, two white men who would later affiliate with Motown Records. The flip side was “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman”; written by Leon and Otis René and first recorded in 1946 by the Basin Street Boys, that song would in 1962 become the first hit credited to the Blue-Belles (afterward known as Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles), although a different group, the Starlets, is actually heard on the record. Washington cut her second No. 1 hit, the bluesy “Baby Get Lost,” in March 1949; the flip side, a hit in its own right, was the raunchy “Long John Blues” (“You thrill me when you drill me,” she tells her dentist), recorded a year or two earlier.
Although she was called the Queen of the Blues, Mercury used Washington through most of the 1950s mainly—and quite successfully—to cover pop and country hits for the rhythm-and-blues market. From 1950 to 1955, her versions of recent hits by Sammy Kaye (“It Isn’t Fair,” “Harbor Lights”), the Andrews Sisters (“I Wanna Be Loved”), Kay Starr and Tennessee Ernie Ford (“I’ll Never Be Free”), Guy Mitchell (“My Heart Cries for You”), Tony Bennett (“I Won’t Cry Anymore”), Hank Williams (“Cold, Cold Heart”), Hank Snow (“I Don’t Hurt Anymore”), the Four Aces (“Tell Me Why”), the DeCastro Sisters (“Teach Me Tonight”), and Jaye P. Morgan (“That’s All I Want from You”) all made the R&B charts; of these, only “I Wanna Be Loved” and “Teach Me Tonight” charted pop. In early 1959, Arnold Shaw, then creative director of the Edward B. Marks Music Company, brought the ballad “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes” (written in 1934 by the Mexican-born composer María Grever as “Cuando Vuelva a Tu Lado”) to Mercury’s A&R director Clyde Otis as a possible crossover vehicle for Washington. Backed by a string orchestra, her rendition became a Top 10 pop hit, even though Mercury did not promote it to white audiences.[71]
From then until her death from an overdose of sleeping pills in 1963, Washington had more pop than R&B hits. Like “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes,” her versions of Nat “King” Cole’s 1951 hit “Unforgettable,” Clyde Otis’s composition “This Bitter Earth,” and the standards “Love Walked In” and “September in the Rain” made both charts, as did her rocking duets with Brook Benton, “Baby (You’ve Got What It Takes)” and “A Rockin’ Good Way (to Mess Around and Fall in Love).” Switching from Mercury to Roulette in 1961, Washington continued to record with orchestral accompaniments. Although she excelled in a number of styles, including rock ’n’ roll, she is remembered almost exclusively for her ballads and blues.
The singer and pianist Julia Lee made a successful transition from jazz to rhythm-and-blues. Born in Boonville, Missouri, she grew up in Kansas City, where she joined her brother George E. Lee’s band, a principal rival to Bennie Moten’s group. In 1923, she sang on the first recordings of Kansas City jazz, but the two sides were never issued. In 1927, she recorded two more sides with her brother for the short-lived Meritt label, singing a duet with him on one and playing a piano solo on the other. In 1929, she sang on another two sides with George’s group for Brunswick, “He’s Tall, Dark and Handsome” and the mildly risqué “Won’t You Come Over to My House.” She stayed with her brother’s band after it merged with Moten’s in 1933, going solo when the partnership dissolved at the end of 1934. She played a long engagement at Milton’s, a popular Kansas City nightclub, singing racy songs such as “Two Old Maids in a Folding Bed.” But she did not record again until 1944, when she redid “Won’t You Come Over to My House” with an all-star band assembled by the Capitol Records producer Dave Dexter; transforming the song from traditional jazz into streamlined swing, “Come On Over to My House,” credited to Jay McShann’s Kansas City Stompers featuring Julia Lee, did not make the Billboard charts but sold well enough to secure Lee a Capitol contract.[72]
After a 1945 session for the St. Louis–based Premier label (not the same Premier that changed its name to Atlas), Lee cut her first two charted hits for Capitol in August 1946. The second one, “I’ll Get Along Somehow,” is a ballad, but the proto-rocking “Gotta Gimme Whatcha Got” is a twelve-bar verse-and-refrain hokum song done in jazzy style, with stop-time verses, a boogie piano bass, and a light backbeat. In June 1947, Lee recorded the No. 1 R&B smash “(Opportunity Knocks but Once) Snatch and Grab It,” structured like “Gotta Gimme Whatcha Got” but even jazzier, with smooth trumpet, saxophone, piano, and guitar solos. In November 1947, she cut another No. 1 hit, “King Size Papa,” again in twelve-bar verse-and-refrain form, but like “Gotta Gimme Whatcha Got” and “Snatch and Grab It,” it’s less suggestive than its title would indicate.
“That’s What I Like,” a lesser hit from the same session as “King Size Papa,” follows a similar verse-and-refrain formula, with Lee playing a strong boogie-woogie piano solo. Recorded two days later, her next hit, “Tell Me, Daddy,” while also suggestive, is a shuffling jump blues. Lee had a minor holiday hit in late 1948 with the mournful blues “Christmas Spirits” and a bigger hit in 1949 with “I Didn’t Like It the First Time (the Spinach Song),” from the same November 1947 session; the latter song hints broadly at sex or—as Lee’s two recordings of “Lotus Blossom,” also known as “Sweet Marijuana,” would imply—drugs. She returns to the verse-and-refrain format on her last two hits, “Tonight’s the Night” and “You Ain’t Got It No More,” both recorded in April 1949. But Lee would not leave Kansas City to promote her hits, having survived a car crash while touring with her brother’s band. On one of her few trips away from home, she entertained President Harry Truman in Washington, D.C. She continued to record, albeit at a reduced rate, for Capitol and a couple of independent labels nearly until her death in 1958. Two of her songs are featured on the soundtrack of the 1957 movie The Delinquents, Robert Altman’s first feature film as director.[73]
Nellie Lutcher took Lee’s jazzy style to a jivier, more modern level with expressive singing and scatting as well as swinging piano that stopped just short of bebop. The eldest daughter out of fifteen children, Lutcher played piano with the Imperial Jazz Band in her early teens; later she toured with another band, the Southern Rhythm Boys. In 1935, she moved from Louisiana to Los Angeles, where she performed at Central Avenue clubs and befriended Nat “King” Cole. But she was not signed to Capitol Records until 1947, when she recorded her first hit, “Hurry On Down,” a jazzed-up adaptation of Julia Lee’s “Come On Over to My House.” Her next session, also in April 1947, yielded the still jazzier “He’s a Real Gone Guy,” her biggest hit. Her following, double-sided hit, “Do You or Don’t You Love Me?” backed with Irving Berlin’s “The Song Is Ended (but the Melody Lingers On),” is so jazzy, in terms both of Lutcher’s vocal styling and her piano playing, that it hardly sounds like rhythm-and-blues at all. But her next hit after that, “Fine Brown Frame,” while much jazzier than Buddy Johnson’s 1944 original, fits neatly into the R&B mold.
“Come On and Get It, Honey,” another 1948 Lutcher hit, follows the mildly risqué verse-and-refrain pattern of Julie Lee’s songs. Lutcher’s second double-sided hit that year coupled a jazzy interpretation of the Sons of the Pioneers’ “Cool Water” with the sprightly keyboard showcase “Lake Charles Boogie.” Her seventh and last song to make the R&B charts in 1948 was a cleverly humorous, semi-scatted update of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” Her popularity fell as quickly as it had risen, however, and her only hit in 1949 was “Wish I Was in Walla Walla,” written by the Down Beat columnist Sharon Pease, who also wrote several songs for Julia Lee. Lutcher had her final hit in 1950, a duet with Nat “King” Cole on a cover of Larry Darnell’s 1949 smash “For You My Love.”
Lutcher remained in demand as a live performer, playing theaters and nightclubs across the United States and Canada. In 1950 and 1951, she toured England to great acclaim; in 1951 and 1952, she recorded singles with Billy May’s and Harold Mooney’s orchestras. But then Capitol dropped her and she signed with Columbia, cutting a single for the subsidiary OKeh label in 1952 and a ten-inch LP that was released on the Epic subsidiary in 1955. She also recorded for Decca, Liberty, and Imperial into 1957 and for the drummer Lee Young’s Melic label in 1963. Cutting back her performance schedule, she served on the board of directors of the Los Angeles local of the musicians’ union. She enjoyed a late-career comeback, playing engagements at the Cookery in New York in l973 and 1980, but had retired by the 1990s and died in 2007.
Ruth Brown, born Ruth Weston in Portsmouth, Virginia, was exposed to white pop and country music before discovering such artists as Hadda Brooks and Una Mae Carlisle, a Fats Waller protégée who enjoyed her greatest popularity in the late 1930s and early 1940s.[74] Weston sang gospel music in church and jazz at local military bases; after winning an Amateur Night contest at Apollo Theatre in New York, she formed a duo with the singer-trumpeter Jimmy Earle Brown and took his surname. When they split up, she joined Lucky Millinder’s band, but after just a month she was fired and left stranded in Washington, D.C., where Blanche Calloway, Cab Calloway’s sister, hired her to sing at the nightclub she ran and became her personal manager. Ahmet Ertegun and his partner in the recently founded Atlantic label, Herb Abramson, saw her at Calloway’s club and agreed to record her; but on her way to an engagement at the Apollo in late 1948, Brown was badly injured in a car crash and did not enter the studio until April 1949.
Her second session, recorded in May 1949—a month before Billboard substituted the term “rhythm & blues” for “race” on its black-music charts—yielded her first hit, “So Long,” a 1940 ballad by the white bandleader, trombonist, and singer Russ Morgan that had been a pop hit that year for the Charioteers, a black vocal group. Brown’s version, with a white band led by the guitarist Eddie Condon, was closely modeled after the one recorded in 1946 by Little Miss Cornshucks, a Chicago-based rhythm-and-blues singer whom Ahmet Ertegun greatly admired.[75] But none of Brown’s next few releases charted. “The problem,” she later admitted, “was my resistance to singing anything but my first love, ballads.”[76]
To change her sound, Atlantic enlisted the tap dancer and actor turned songwriter Rudy Toombs, who composed the up-tempo torch song “Teardrops from My Eyes.” Recorded by Brown in September 1950, it was a long-running R&B chart-topper, covered by Louis Jordan, Wynonie Harris, Louis Prima, the pop singers June Hutton and Helen O’Connell, the country singers Rex Allen, Hawkshaw Hawkins, and Billy Jack Wills, and the duo of June Stafford and Gene Autry, among others. The innovative arrangement of Brown’s original version, with its honking saxophone solo, riffing horns, boogie-ish bass line, and heavy backbeat, resembles the rock ’n’ roll of the later 1950s more than the usual rhythm-and-blues of its own day. The record not only jump-started the careers of Brown and Toombs but helped establish the Atlantic label, which, in a play on the nickname of Yankee Stadium, became known as “the house that Ruth built.”
Brown followed with a succession of similar Toombs-composed R&B hits—“I’ll Wait for You,” “I Know,” “Daddy Daddy,” and the chart-topping “5-10-15 Hours,” which had originally been titled “5-10-15 Minutes (Of Your Love)” after the Dominoes’ “Sixty-Minute Man.” In December 1952, she recorded her best-remembered song, “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean,” a No. 1 R&B hit that crossed over to the pop charts. In April 1953, she cut the frantically rocking “Wild Wild Young Men.” Other female rhythm-and-blues singers recorded in a rocking vein during this period; for example, Eunice Davis cut “Rock Little Daddy,” based on Cecil Gant’s “Rock Little Baby,” with Freddy Mitchell’s band in 1951. But Brown’s rhythmic ballad style, spiced with a vocal squeal that Little Richard would later imitate, broke new ground, and she became the biggest-selling female R&B artist of the 1950s.[77]
Her next No. 1 hit, written by the R&B singer Chuck Willis and recorded in May 1954, was “Oh What a Dream,” a slow ballad featuring a soulful tenor sax solo by Arnett Cobb and a “Yancey Special” bass line sung by a doo-wop group. She followed in August 1954 with the faux-Latin “Mambo Baby,” another No. 1 hit. Although Brown would never top the charts again, she continued to score hits—six in 1955 alone, after which her records gradually lost popularity, although their arrangements reflect the commercial sounds of the late 1950s. The Leiber-Stoller composition “Lucky Lips,” a hit for Brown in 1957, borrows its melody from Rosemary Clooney’s No. 1 pop hit “This Ole House,” itself a cover of Stuart Hamblen’s country original, while Brown’s up-tempo 1958 hit “This Little Girl’s Gone Rockin’,” co-written by Bobby Darin, sports a yakety-sax solo by King Curtis. Several of Brown’s later hits crossed over to the pop charts, but she complained that white cover versions such as Patti Page’s “What a Dream,” Georgia Gibbs’s “Mambo Baby,” and Gale Storm’s “Lucky Lips” hurt her sales.[78]
In the 1960s, after her string of R&B hits ended and her Atlantic contract expired, Brown recorded for Philips, Decca, Mainstream, and other labels, but by the middle of the decade she’d been reduced to working as a domestic. She cut occasional albums for various independent labels through the 1970s, including one with the Thad Jones–Mel Lewis Orchestra and another produced by the soul singer Swamp Dogg. Her comeback began in 1975, when the comedian Redd Foxx gave her cameo roles on his Sanford and Son television show and had her cast as Mahalia Jackson in Selma, a musical theater production about Martin Luther King. In 1980, after a label in Sweden reissued some of her early recordings, she performed and cut a new album there. During the following decade, she worked nightclubs in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and New York and appeared on television programs such as The Jeffersons, in movies such as Hairspray, and in stage shows such as the Broadway revue Black and Blue, for which she won a Tony Award. She also took legal action against Atlantic for nonpayment of royalties, leading to a landmark settlement that helped compensate rhythm-and-blues veterans.
Brown kept recording through the 1990s. In 1993, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She suffered a stroke in 2000 but continued to perform until another stroke ended her life in 2006.
LaVern Baker was the niece of Merline Johnson, a blues singer who specialized in drinking songs. Born in Chicago, Baker started singing at the prestigious Club DeLisa as a teenager, then moved with her family to Detroit. There she performed under the name Little Miss Sharecropper (a rival to Little Miss Cornshucks, whose career had taken off in Chicago slightly earlier) at the Flame Show Bar, whose manager, Al Green, also managed her career. She began recording as Little Miss Sharecropper around 1948, releasing a pair of jump-style blues on RCA Victor in 1949. In 1950 or 1951, she cut four sides for the National label—three blues and the steamy twelve-bar verse-and-refrain song “I Want to Rock.” Under the name Bea Baker, she cut three more sides with Maurice King and the Wolverines, the house band at the Flame Show Bar, for Columbia and OKeh—two shouted blues and the mercenary “I Want a Lavender Cadillac.” As Lavern Baker, she cut four sides for King in 1952 with the Detroit-based pianist Todd Rhodes’s band—three ballads and the up-tempo novelty “Pig Latin Blues.”
In 1953, she signed with Atlantic and, as LaVerne Baker, recorded the gospel-flavored “Soul on Fire,” where her rough-edged voice, at once earthy and refined, presages the soul singing of the following decade. Her second, similarly soulful Atlantic single, “I Can’t Hold Out Any Longer,” from 1954 (where her name is finally spelled LaVern Baker), likewise failed to chart, but her third single for the label, the pop-oriented, Latin-tinged “Tweedlee Dee,” was a Top 20 pop and Top 5 rhythm-and-blues hit in early 1955. It might have been a bigger hit had Georgia Gibbs not covered it for a No. 2 pop hit, sounding whiter than Baker but otherwise imitating her version closely. Baker was so incensed that she tried unsuccessfully to have Congress ban the unauthorized copying of arrangements.[79] Winfield Scott, who wrote “Tweedlee Dee,” was a member of Atlantic’s in-house vocal backing group, the Cues (called the Gliders on Baker’s records); later he would write or cowrite songs for Elvis Presley, who recorded “Tweedlee Dee” live in 1955.
Baker followed “Tweedlee Dee” with the double-sided R&B hit “Bop-Ting-A-Ling”/“That’s All I Need”; another Scott composition, “Bop-Ting-A-Ling” anticipates later rock songs with lines such as “Great day in the mornin’, I’m givin’ you warnin’” and “Doo wah diddy, you walk so pretty.” But none of her next few R&B hits—not the soulful “Play It Fair” or the “Tweedlee”-like “Get Up, Get Up (You Sleepy Head)”—crossed over until “Jim Dandy,” an R&B chart-topper, made the pop Top 20 in early 1957. With its strong rhythm-and-blues feel and inane lyrics centering around the line “Jim Dandy to the rescue,” the song is a rock ’n’ roll landmark but attracted few covers (among those few was Black Oak Arkansas’s minor hit version in 1974). However, the flip side, “Tra La La,” another “Tweedlee Dee” knockoff, was quickly covered for a pop hit by Georgia Gibbs. Baker’s next single, “Jim Dandy Got Married,” milked the same “Jim Dandy” formula but with much less success.
Baker performed in Alan Freed’s concerts and appeared with Freed in the movies Rock, Rock, Rock! (1956) and Mister Rock and Roll (1957). “Humpty Dumpty Heart,” from Mister Rock and Roll, its melody drawn from the English folk song “Frog Went A-Courtin’,” made Billboard’s pop but not its R&B chart in 1957, while the scatted “It’s So Fine” charted R&B but not pop in 1958. At the end of 1958, Baker entered both charts with the country-tinged “I Cried a Tear,” perhaps her all-time best seller. The same year, she released the album Lavern Baker Sings Bessie Smith, pointing up her resemblances to as well as her differences from the classic blues singer. She also recorded the hard-rocking, Phil Spector–produced “Voodoo Voodoo” in 1958, but it was not released until 1961, as the B-side of “Hey Memphis,” Baker’s answer to Elvis Presley’s “Little Sister.”
A string of minor hits followed, extending into the early 1960s. One was the Jesse Stone–arranged “Bumble Bee” (1960), which the English pop idol Billy Fury covered in 1963 and the English rock band the Searchers covered in 1965. Another was the duet “You’re the Boss” (1961), a Leiber-Stoller composition that Baker performed with Jimmy Ricks and that was recorded by Elvis Presley and Ann-Margaret for (but not included in) the 1964 movie Viva Las Vegas. There was also the gospel-rocker “Saved” in 1961 and an update of “See See Rider” in late 1962. But though she’d paved the way for the soul music of the 1960s, Baker could not capitalize on the soul phenomenon. Her last Atlantic hit was the standard “Fly Me to the Moon” in 1965; the following year, she had her last national hit with “Think Twice,” a duet with Jackie Wilson on Brunswick.
On a trip to Vietnam to entertain American troops, she fell ill; remaining in Asia after her recovery, she operated a nightclub near the American naval base at Subic Bay in the Philippines for some twenty years. On her return in 1988, she performed in the gala concert at Madison Square Garden to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Atlantic Records. In 1990, she replaced Ruth Brown in the musical Black and Blue and recorded “Slow Rollin’ Mama” for the soundtrack of the movie Dick Tracy. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991, she kept performing even after suffering strokes and having her legs amputated due to diabetes. She died in 1997.
Varetta Dillard, a Harlem native, was singing on Amateur Night at the Apollo in 1951 when she was discovered by Lee Magid, then a producer for Savoy. Dillard’s voice could suggest either Dinah Washington or Ruth Brown, and she scored her first R&B hit in a distinctly Brownian vein in 1952 with “Easy, Easy Baby,” a mid-tempo Rudy Toombs composition set to a heavy backbeat. The song was covered the same year by Eileen Barton, a white pop singer best known for her 1950 smash “If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake.” Dillard appropriated Brown’s squeal as well as her beat on her next hit, “Mercy, Mr. Percy,” in 1953. Her final hit came in 1955 with “Johnny Has Gone,” a ballad mourning the rhythm-and-blues singer Johnny Ace, who accidentally shot himself to death at the age of twenty-five.
In 1956, Dillard switched from Savoy to Groove, for which she cut doo-wop-tinged rockers such as “Skinny Jimmy” as well as the James Dean tribute “I Miss You Jimmy.” When RCA folded Groove, she was picked up by the parent label, briefly working with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. But although Dillard, like Ruth Brown, embraced the pop-rock formulas of the day, she had no further national hits. She recorded for the Triumph and Cub labels into 1961, then joined her husband’s gospel group. In her heyday, she toured with the likes of Wynonie Harris and performed in such shows as Alan Freed’s “Rock ’n’ Roll Jubilee Ball,” but by the time of her death in 1993, she was all but forgotten.
“Hound Dog” was Big Mama Thornton’s only hit. Her first two sessions for Peacock in 1951 were in a more conventional jump-blues style, as were most of the other recordings she made at the 1952 session that produced “Hound Dog”—the sole track from that date to omit the horn section. “They Call Me Big Mama,” from the same session, is a brassy jump blues, more jazz than rock, but Thornton wails, “I can rock, baby, I can roll / I can rock and I can roll and I can really go to town.” After “Hound Dog,” however, her Peacock sides often featured bluesy guitar and guttural vocals. In the early 1960s, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and recorded for several independent labels; in 1965, she toured Europe with the American Folk Blues Festival and cut an album in England for Arhoolie Records. The following year she recorded another Arhoolie album with Muddy Waters’s band.
In 1967, Janis Joplin burst upon the national rock scene with a performance of Thornton’s composition “Ball and Chain” at the Monterey Pop Festival; Thornton did not record the song until 1968. Thornton cut a pair of albums for Mercury in 1969 and 1970, an album each for Backbeat and Pentagram in 1970 and 1971, and another pair for Vanguard in 1975. She toured Europe and North America, playing festivals and nightclubs, often dressed in men’s clothing. Heavy drinking caused her health to decline in the 1980s, and she died in 1984; her final album, Quit Snoopin’ Round My Door (on Ace), was released posthumously.
Like Thornton, Big Maybelle began recording in a jazzy jump-blues vein before adopting a grittier style. Born Mabel Smith in Jackson, Tennessee, she sang in church as a child. Discovered by the promoter Dave Clark, she toured with the all-female International Sweethearts of Rhythm. In 1944, with Christine Chatman’s band, she cut “Hurry, Hurry!” a cover of singer Savannah Churchill’s swinging blues hit with Benny Carter’s band. Afterward, she toured with Tiny Bradshaw’s band, which accompanied her on her first recordings for King (as Mabel Smith) in November 1947; she was backed by Hot Lips Page’s band on her next session the following month. But the records did not do well, and her career languished until Fred Mendelsohn saw her perform in Cincinnati and signed her to OKeh, dubbing her Big Maybelle.
Maybelle’s material was bluesier and her voice raspier on OKeh than on King. Her first two OKeh sessions, both of them in October 1952 with a band led by guitarist Leroy Kirkland, produced her first three hits. On the grinding “Gabbin’ Blues,” Rose Marie McCoy, who cowrote the song with Kirkland, supplies sarcastic spoken commentary. “My Country Man” rocks to a shuffling backbeat and boogie bass, while “Way Back Home” sways slowly to the same bass line that Huey “Piano” Smith sped to mid-tempo on his 1958 New Orleans rocker “Don’t You Just Know It.”
Although she toured widely and appeared on R&B package shows, Big Maybelle had no other hits on OKeh, but a couple of her records for the label had an indirect impact. Her “One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show,” cowritten by Rose Marie McCoy and recorded in September 1954, was among the first of several songs by that title (preceded in 1950 by Stick McGhee’s “One Monkey Don’t Stop the Show”), including a 1965 hit by Joe Tex that was covered by the Animals and Bette Midler. Her “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” from March 1955, formed the basis for Jerry Lee Lewis’s 1957 smash, though Lewis may not have heard Maybelle’s original.
On Big Maybelle’s recording of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” the composer’s credit is given solely to Dave Williams, also known as Curly or Curlee Williams, an African American songwriter from Kentucky. But the white hillbilly-boogie pianist Roy Hall claimed to have cowritten the song, although only Williams is credited on the label of Hall’s own September 1955 Decca recording. While substituting guitar for horns and dispensing with the heavy backbeat of Maybelle’s version, Hall repeats all but her most incomprehensible lyrics, including the introductory line “Twenty-one drums and an old bass horn / Somebody beatin’ on a ding dong,” but his melody sounds more like Lewis’s. (“Beatin’ on the Ding Dong” is the title of a 1954 country record by Jim Reeves.) “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” was recorded soon afterward by the white singer Doris Fredericks, who gives it a mainstream pop treatment, and by the Commodores, a white vocal group whose style might be described as rockabilly doo-wop (Darrell Glenn, their lead singer, had recorded the original “Crying in the Chapel”).
Jerry Lee Lewis briefly played piano at a Nashville club owned by Roy Hall, but by the time he heard Hall’s “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” he was working in a band led by the disc jockey Johnny Littlejohn at a club outside Natchez, Mississippi, across the Mississippi River from Lewis’s home town of Ferriday, Louisiana.[80] In late 1956, he left Littlejohn’s band and traveled to Memphis to audition for Sun Records. The audition resulted in Lewis’s first record, a rocking adaptation of Ray Price’s country smash “Crazy Arms.” Afterward, he worked as a sideman on a number of Sun recordings, among them Billy Lee Riley’s rockabilly classics “Flyin’ Saucers Rock & Roll” and “Red Hot.” In February or March 1957, Lewis cut his second Sun single, “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On,” with guitarist Roland Janes and drummer Jimmy Van Eaton from Riley’s band, crediting Hall, under the pseudonym Sunny David, along with Williams as composers.
Lewis’s rendition, propelled by his driving boogie piano and Van Eaton’s pounding backbeat, brings the song fully into the rock ’n’ roll idiom, eliminating the corny introduction, streamlining the lyrics, and adding a lasciviously spoken interlude near the end. Some radio stations banned the record because of its supposed salaciousness, although there is nothing explicitly lewd about it; other stations refused to play it because they thought Lewis was black.[81] Nonetheless, Lewis’s “Whole Lot of Shakin’” became a No. 1 hit on both Billboard’s country and R&B charts, rising to No. 3 on the magazine’s pop chart.
Big Maybelle’s “Whole Lotta Shakin’” session was her last for OKeh. When the label failed to renew her contract, Fred Mendelsohn took her to Savoy and in 1956 produced her version of “Candy,” which had been a No. 1 pop hit in 1945 for Johnny Mercer (who did not write it) with Jo Stafford and the Pied Pipers. Backed by a lushly arranged big band, Maybelle sang the ballad like a growling Dinah Washington, scoring a substantial R&B hit that reinvigorated her career. She kept recording for Savoy until 1959, cutting rock songs, blues, and ballads, but had no other hits on the label. Her boisterous performance of “I Ain’t Mad at You” at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival was captured in the documentary film Jazz on a Summer’s Day.
Big Maybelle cut albums and singles for such labels as Brunswick, Scepter, Chess, and Rojac through the 1960s, scoring minor hits with her 1966 recordings of “Don’t Pass Me By” and “96 Tears.” But her performances became infrequent as her health deteriorated due to heroin addiction, and she died in 1972 after falling into a diabetic coma.
The decline of the blues shouters coincided with the rise of male harmony groups. The Mills Brothers and Ink Spots enjoyed their greatest success around time of World War II, as did lesser-known groups such as the 5 Red Caps, the Delta Rhythm Boys, and the Charioteers.
Founded in 1930 as the Harmony Four by a professor at Wilberforce University in Ohio, the Charioteers renamed themselves after the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Adding secular songs to their sacred repertoire, the group performed on the same Cincinnati radio station that gave the Mills Brothers their start, then began broadcasting in New York. Between 1935 and 1939, they recorded for Decca, Brunswick, Vocalion, and Columbia, on their own and in accompaniment to such artists as pianist Eddie Duchin and singer Mildred Bailey. The Charioteers had their first hit with “So Long” in 1940; they would not have another hit until after the war, but in the meantime they appeared in the Broadway revue Hellzapoppin and the Hollywood comedy Road Show, backed Bing Crosby on his Kraft Music Hall radio show, recorded V-Discs for the armed forces, and cut four sides with Frank Sinatra, including the 1945 hit “Don’t Forget Tonight Tomorrow.”
In late 1947, the Charioteers recorded with Pearl Bailey on the rhythmic ballad “Don’t Ever Leave Me” and with the white pop singer Buddy Clark on the pseudo-world-music hit “Now Is the Hour (Maori Farewell Song).”[82] From 1946 to 1949, they had half a dozen pop hits of their own, among them “Open the Door, Richard” and a cover of Perry Como’s Italian novelty smash “Chi-Baba, Chi-Baba (My Bambina Go to Sleep).” In a reversal of the usual situation, only one of their hits, the ballad “A Kiss and a Rose,” made the R&B charts. But while the group appealed to white pop fans, their smooth harmonies also anticipated the mellower sounds of the doo-wop era.
By 1950, the Charioteers’ lead tenor, Billy Williams, had left to form his own quartet, which appeared on Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca’s television program Your Show of Shows. Ending their dozen-year association with Columbia and acquiring a new lead singer, the Charioteers recorded for several labels through 1957 but had no further hits. Williams, recording for MGM, Mercury, and Coral, covered everything from Doris Day’s pop hit “(Why Did I Tell You I Was Going To) Shanghai” to Eddie Arnold’s country smash “Cattle Call” to the Chords’ “Sh-Boom” but had only minor success until 1957, when he made both the pop and R&B Top 10 covering Fats Waller’s 1935 hit “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter.” In August 1957, he appeared on the first national broadcast of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand show. Williams had a few more minor pop hits but stopped performing in the 1960s and died alone and penniless in 1972.[83]
Like the Charioteers, the Delta Rhythm Boys started off as a student quartet at a historically black college, in this case Langston University in Oklahoma. In 1936, two years after forming, the group transferred to Dillard University in New Orleans, but after a successful South American tour, they dropped out of school and moved to New York, performing in Broadway shows and on radio before signing with Decca in 1940. Jazzier than the Charioteers, the Delta Rhythm Boys recorded jive songs such as “Gimme Some Skin” as well as standards such as “Stardust” and spirituals such as “Dry Bones,” which became their signature song. In 1945, they recorded their only hit, “Just A-Sittin’ and A-Rockin’,” for which the group’s bass singer, Lee Gaines, had set his own lyrics to Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s subtly swinging (but not rocking) 1941 tune. Gaines sang the lead on “Just A-Sittin’ and A-Rockin’,” setting a precedent for other vocal-group basses, notably Jimmy Ricks of the Ravens.
Despite their paucity of hits, the Delta Rhythm Boys maintained a relatively high profile. They recorded with such jazz musicians as Jimmie Lunceford, Charlie Barnet, and Les Paul and as accompanists to such singers as Mildred Bailey, Fred Astaire, Ella Fitzgerald, and Ruth Brown. They gave radio performances on Amos ’n’ Andy and The Abbott and Costello Show and appeared in some dozen movies and as many Soundies. They first toured Europe in 1949, proving so popular in Sweden that they later cut an album’s worth of material in Swedish. They recorded for Decca, RCA Victor, Atlantic, and Mercury through the mid-1950s, then moved to France and recorded for Barclay and Vega. The group remained in Europe for the next three decades, finally dissolving after the death of Lee Gaines in 1987.
Unlike most other vocal-harmony groups, the 5 Red Caps supplied their own instrumental accompaniment. They formed around 1940 as the Four Toppers, comprising the “top” members of three other Los Angeles–based groups, all of which made movie appearances. From the Basin Street Boys (not the same Basin Street Boys who recorded “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman”) came the bass singer and guitarist Steve Gibson; from the Five Jones Boys, the lead tenor and drummer Jimmy Springs; from the Four Blackbirds, the baritone and bassist Richard Davis and the second tenor and bassist-guitarist David Patillo. The Four Toppers appeared in a few movies and recorded with the bandleader Larry Breese for the Ammor label. In 1942, they moved to New York, replacing Richard Davis with the bassist Doles Dickens and adding the baritone and pianist Romaine Brown. In 1943, they changed their name to the 5 Red Caps, referring to the headgear worn by railroad porters, virtually all of whom were African American.
The name change may have been an attempt to get around the musicians’ union recording ban; in any case, the 5 Red Caps, all instrumentalists and thus union members, began recording for Beacon and other labels run by the independent record producer Joe Davis in 1943, during the ban.[84] Taking an almost entirely secular approach and dividing the vocal leads among the different singers, they sounded more like a 1950s doo-wop group than the Charioteers or Delta Rhythm Boys did. Although they recorded jive songs such as “Boogie Woogie on a Saturday Night” and “Mary Had a Little Jam,” they had greater success with ballads such as the Joe Davis composition “I Learned a Lesson, I’ll Never Forget,” their first and biggest hit. Favorably reviewing that record in the January 22, 1944, issue of Billboard, Maurie Orodenker describes the Red Caps as a “carbon copy” of the Ink Spots, noting Jimmy Springs’s high tenor lead and Steve Gibson’s talking bass.[85]
Of the Red Caps’ four R&B hits, all charting in 1944, three were sentimental ballads. Their only up-tempo hit was “Boogie Woogie Ball,” which begins with a “Down the Road a Piece”–style dialogue over Romaine Brown’s boogie piano, then continues in stride rhythm except during Brown’s stomping boogie piano break. In October 1944, Romaine Brown, Steve Gibson, and Doles Dickens, inspired by the King Cole Trio, recorded such jive songs as “Get Off of That Kick” for the Joe Davis label as the Red Caps Trio. (The trio also backed George “Bon Bon” Tunnell on a number of recordings.) The full Red Caps group cut four sides for Savoy as the Toppers in December 1944 but returned to Davis’s fold after he took legal action. They began recording for Mercury in 1946 as Steve Gibson and the Red Caps, scoring a pop (but not R&B) hit in 1948 with a hip version of “Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up (That Old Gang of Mine).” A Tin Pan Alley standard introduced in 1929 by Gene Austin, the song would be revived in 1954 by the white harmony quartet the Four Aces and again in 1956 by Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps. Gibson and the Red Caps also cut “Blueberry Hill” for Mercury in 1949, the same year Louis Armstrong recorded it.
In 1950, the Red Caps signed with RCA Victor; the following year, Damita Jo joined the group as featured singer. In 1952, she sang the lead on the Red Caps’ recording of Jessie Mae Robinson’s waltz-time composition “I Went to Your Wedding,” a pop hit that was eclipsed by Patti Page’s chart-topping cover version (not to mention Hank Snow’s country rendition). A verse from the song, “You came down the aisle, wearing a smile, a vision of loveliness / I uttered a sigh, then whispered goodbye, goodbye to my happiness,” prefigures one from the Penguins’ landmark 1954 doo-wop smash “Earth Angel”—“I fell for you and I knew the vision of your loveliness / I hope and pray that someday I’ll be the vision of your happiness.” In 1954, Gibson and Damita Jo were married.
The 5 Red Caps played theaters and nightclubs nationwide, performing for white as well as black audiences, and appeared in movies and on television. Although they had no more hits after 1952, the group recorded for RCA Victor through the mid-1950s, then switched to ABC-Paramount, for which they cut “Rock ’n’ Roll Stomp” in 1956. Sounding almost like a parody of rock ’n’ roll, the song shows how out of touch with the teenage market the Red Caps had become. Still, they remained a popular live act and continued to record through the end of the decade for independent labels run by Al Browne, who sold some of the group’s recordings to ABC-Paramount.
In 1961, the Red Caps split into two groups: one, led by Steve Gibson, stopped recording in 1962 but kept performing until 1968; the other, called the Modern Red Caps, recorded until 1967 and then disbanded.
Although only one of their records made the Billboard charts, the Treniers, having participated in the transition from swing to rock ’n’ roll, helped introduce rock to a wider public through nightclub, movie, and television appearances. The identical twins Claude and Cliff Trenier grew up in a musical family in Mobile, Alabama. Both enrolled at State Teachers College, the same school Erskine Hawkins and Sam “the Man” Taylor attended, but left to pursue musical careers. Claude joined Jimmie Lunceford’s band as a singer, making his recorded debut in February 1944. Then Cliff joined the band, and the two sang together on Lunceford’s February 1945 recording of “Buzz Buzz Buzz,” featuring a bawling tenor saxophone solo by Joe Thomas, but the record was not issued until 1949. Later in 1945, Claude recorded “Buzz Buzz Buzz” with Big Jim Wynn’s band for the 4 Star label; he also sang on Wynn’s recording of “Ee-Bobaliba,” by which time Helen Humes had already cut her hit adaptation, “Be-Baba-Leba.” In December 1945, Claude recorded “Young Man’s Blues” with the Lamplighter All Stars, including clarinetist Barney Bigard, bassist Red Callender, and drummer Zutty Singleton. In January 1946, he sang on three progressive-jazz sides with bassist Charles Mingus’s band for the Exelsior label, among them the disquieting “Weird Nightmare”; in April, he sang on two more sides with Mingus for 4 Star.
With a band including two other State Teachers College alumni, pianist Gene Gilbeaux and alto saxophonist Don Hill, Claude and Cliff Trenier recorded “Buzz Buzz Buzz” for Mercury in February 1947, credited on the label as the Trenier Twins and Gene Gilbeaux’s Orchestra. (The song would be adapted into a pop and R&B hit in 1957 by the Hollywood Flames, a rhythm-and-blues vocal group that included Bobby “Rock-in Robin” Day; the Flames’ “Buzz Buzz Buzz” would in turn be covered by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Rusty Draper, the Cadillacs, Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, the Blasters, Huey Lewis and the News, and Doug Sahm, as well as the early British rocker Vince Eager.) By the end of 1947, the Trenier Twins had cut five records for Mercury, in a jazzy vein often leavened with jiving humor.
But they did not record again until January 1950, when they cut “Everybody Get Together,” backed with “Why Did You Get So High, Shorty?” for the London label. In the meantime, they had established a reputation for high-spirited live performances in Los Angeles clubs and theaters, as the Billboard review of their London single indicates. “On wax, their antics lose something,” the reviewer comments, noting that the “lack of sight factor detracts.”[86] On their first, May 1951 session for OKeh, the Treniers, as the label credits them, recorded their lone hit, the hard-rocking “Go! Go! Go!” featuring Don Hill’s saxophone. They followed in August with the slower “It Rocks! It Rolls! It Swings!” where the twins chant “It rocks, it rolls, it swings, it jumps” while Hill wails on sax over a boogie-woogie bass line and a shuffling backbeat. In January 1952, they recorded the similar “Rockin’ on Sunday Night,” with a more emphatic backbeat; in October, they cut “Rockin’ Is Our Bizness,” a reworded take on Jimmie Lunceford’s 1935 smash “Rhythm Is Our Business” fitted with a backbeat and boogie bass line, plus a squealing saxophone solo in the manner of Illinois Jacquet on “Blues, Pt. 2.” Having crossed paths with Bill Haley while playing a gig in Wildwood, New Jersey, they cut his composition “Rock-a-Beatin’ Boogie” in September 1953, two years before Haley recorded it.
During the same period, the Treniers recorded “Hadacole [sic] That’s All” and “Poon-Tang!” skirting the censors with the sung explanation, “Poon is a hug, tang is a kiss.” Ironically, it was the flip side of “Poon-Tang!” that had to be dropped when The Lone Ranger, Inc., claimed a copyright violation for the song “Hi-Yo Silver!” which was then replaced by “The Moondog,” a tribute to Alan Freed.[87]
The twins’ younger brother Milt, who’d already cut a few singles of his own as a singer, joined the group around 1954, just as the act made its television breakthrough. As early as 1949, the Trenier Twins had appeared on Cavalcade of Stars, the predecessor of The Jackie Gleason Show, but in 1954, the Treniers appeared on The Jackie Gleason Show, the Colgate Comedy Hour with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town; they would subsequently perform on television shows hosted by Frankie Laine, Perry Como, Steve Allen, Patti Page, and Dean Martin, among others. The Treniers also appeared in four movies, The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), Don’t Knock the Rock (1956), Calypso Heat Wave (1957), and Juke Box Rhythm (1959). By the time they made Calypso Heat Wave, an older brother, Buddy Trenier, had joined the group as its fourth singer.
Movie and television clips display the Treniers doing choreographed routines involving all the band members (though the twins are most prominent), with rubber-legged dancing, comic voicings, and histrionic gestures. The dynamism of their live shows made them a fixture in Las Vegas, where they first performed in the late 1940s. Ultimately, they would play nearly all the lounges and showrooms on the city’s legendary Strip, enduring segregation policies that weren’t abandoned until 1960.
Despite the popularity of their stage act, the Treniers’ records were not strong sellers, not even such seemingly sure things as “Say Hey (The Willie Mays Song),” recorded for Epic in July 1954 with a spoken part for the New York Giants’ star center fielder and a band directed by Quincy Jones. A final Epic session in December 1955 yielded “Rock ’n’ Roll Call”; written by Jack Hammer (who went on to cowrite “Great Balls of Fire” with Otis Blackwell for Jerry Lee Lewis) and Rudy Toombs in an apparent effort to capitalize on the rock ’n’ roll craze, it does not sound much different from the Treniers’ earlier proto-rock songs. The Treniers went on to record for Vik, Brunswick, Hermitage, Dot, Ronn, Dom, Steel City, Mobile, TT, and other labels into the 1970s. They toured worldwide and performed regularly in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and other resort areas into the 2000s. After Cliff died in 1983, a nephew, Skip Trenier, took his place as Claude’s stage partner until Claude’s death in 2003. Milt Trenier left the group in the 1960s to pursue a solo career and later ran a Chicago nightclub, Milt Trenier’s Lounge.
Although similar in style to the Delta Rhythm Boys, the Ravens are generally considered the first true R&B vocal group, if only because their rise coincided with the inauguration of Billboard’s “rhythm & blues” chart. More certainly, they started the fashion for avian group names (Cardinals, Falcons, Flamingos, Hawks, Larks, Penguins, Robins, Sparrows, Swallows, Wrens, et al.), their own name neatly making the transition from racially oriented designations. Blacker-sounding than most of the African American harmony groups that preceded them, they influenced many that followed, but their style remained unique, due mainly to the presence of Jimmy Ricks, whose extraordinarily deep, rich bass could not be duplicated.
The Georgia-born, Florida-bred Ricks formed the Ravens in New York in 1946 with the baritone Warren Suttles and the tenors Leonard Puzey and Ollie Jones. They recorded their first six sides in June 1946 for the Hub label (owned by their manager, Ben Bart), with Ricks singing the lead on two numbers (including “Bye Bye Baby Blues,” the only song with more of an R&B than a pop feel) and sharing the lead on a third. The following year, the Ravens signed with National Records, whose A&R director was Herb Abramson; by that time, Ollie Jones had been replaced by Maithe Marshall, whose high tenor would be featured on many of the group’s ballads. Their first release on National was “Mahzel (Means Good Luck),” a Yiddish-based novelty song that’s since been recorded by everyone from Benny Goodman and Louis Prima to the avant-garde guitarist Gary Lucas and the Late Night with Conan O’Brien television puppet Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.
Recorded in September 1947 with Ricks singing the lead, “Write Me a Letter” was the Ravens’ first nationally charted hit. The Ravens established their sound with their next hit, “Ol’ Man River,” which they had recorded and released before “Write Me a Letter.” Written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II for the 1927 musical Showboat, “Ol’ Man River” is best known from Paul Robeson’s performance in the 1936 movie version. The Ravens jazzed the song up, with Ricks delivering a more sonorous bass than the renowned Robeson.
Although they recorded a number of other standard ballads during the same period—“Summertime,” “Until the Real Thing Comes Along,” “September Song,” Irving Berlin’s “Always”—the Ravens’ next hit, “Send for Me If You Need Me,” was, like “Write Me a Letter,” an original jump blues. It was followed on Billboard’s R&B chart by the similar “Bye Bye Baby Blues,” which King Records had purchased from Hub and reissued. Next to chart was the Ravens’ cover of the Orioles’ “It’s Too Soon to Know”; the bluesy flip side, “Be on Your Merry Way,” was also a hit. The holiday pairing of “Silent Night” and “White Christmas” completed the Ravens’ octet of 1948 R&B hits.
In January 1949, the group appeared on Ed Sullivan’s new Toast of the Town television show; that November, they were featured on the cover of Billboard. They continued to record such standards as “Deep Purple,” “Tea for Two,” “Without a Song,” and “Moonglow,” but the only hit they would have in 1949 was “Rickey’s Blues,” another original jump song. The following year saw their final hit on National, “I Don’t Have to Ride No More,” again in a jump-blues vein. In March 1950, they recorded the ballad “Count Every Star,” a pop hit that year for the white middle-of-the-roaders Hugo Winterhalter, Ray Anthony, and Dick Haymes. Although it did not chart, the Ravens’ version was highly influential. “It is no overstatement to say that ‘Count Every Star’ is the recording which set in stone the basic black vocal group style for the next forty years,” writes the music historian Billy Vera.[88]
In September 1950, as their National contract neared expiration, the Ravens signed with Columbia.[89] The next month, Jimmy Ricks sang the first half of the Benny Goodman Sextet’s bebop-tinged version of “Oh, Babe!”; the white singer Nancy Reed sang the second half, duetting with Ricks at the end. But after a hitless year with Columbia and its OKeh rhythm-and-blues subsidiary, often recording with jazzy accompaniment, the Ravens disbanded. Ricks put together a new Ravens quartet, which began recording for Mercury in October 1951 and scored the Ravens’ final hit in 1952 with “Rock Me All Night Long,” a generally overlooked but not unreasonable candidate for first rock record, with its twelve-bar verse-and-refrain structure, stop-time breaks, shuffling backbeat, and boogie-woogie bass line.
The Ravens recorded for Mercury into 1953, but Ricks left the group in 1954, returning in time for their first sessions for the Jubilee label in early 1955. Ricks left for good a year later, recording on his own for some dozen labels through the 1960s without much success, then singing with Count Basie’s band before his death in 1974. A re-formed Ravens—of whom only Joe Van Loan, Maithe Marshall’s replacement, had previously been in the group—cut several singles for Chess’s Argo subsidiary in 1956 and 1957. They gave their final performance at the Apollo Theatre in December 1958, but the Top Rank label issued a pair of singles by a different group under the Ravens name in 1959.
The Ravens were the model for many later doo-wop groups, which assimilated both Jimmy Ricks’s cavernous bass and Maithe Marshall’s falsetto tenor. The Ravens are also said to be the first vocal group to incorporate dance steps into their stage act, launching a trend that culminated in Cholly Atkins’s choreography for the Miracles and Temptations in the 1960s. Although most of the Ravens’ hits were up-tempo and bluesy, it is mainly their ballads that inspire the devotion of today’s collectors.
Many R&B vocal groups had spiritual roots, but the Orioles had less of a gospel background than even the Ravens, as Jimmy Ricks had sung in a church choir as a teenager. Nonetheless, the Orioles injected their material with enough gospel flavor to appeal to African American listeners. The group’s charismatic lead tenor, Sonny Til, sang with a trio in a Baltimore high school and then in USO shows while in the army. In 1946, he began competing in amateur shows at a Baltimore nightclub, the Avenue Cafe, where he met the other future Orioles. In 1948, inspired by the Mills Brothers, the Ink Spots, Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, the King Cole Trio, and the Cats and the Fiddle, Til formed a quintet called the Vibra-Naires, who acquired Deborah Chessler, an eighteen-year-old white songwriter, as their manager. Chessler arranged for the group to appear on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, a nationally broadcast prime-time television and radio contest, where they lost to the blind English jazz pianist George Shearing but proved popular enough to be invited back to New York to perform on the Arthur Godfrey Time morning show, which was also broadcast simultaneously on television and radio.[90]
Returning to New York once more, Chessler played the group’s demos for Jerry Blaine of Jubilee Records, making such an impression that the label set up the It’s a Natural subsidiary just for them. Before their first session, the Vibra-Naires renamed themselves the Orioles, after Maryland’s state bird. In July 1948, they recorded Chessler’s composition “It’s Too Soon to Know,” their first and only release on It’s a Natural; subsequent Orioles records were issued on Jubilee. Animated by Til’s dreamy tenor, the languorous ballad was a No. 1 R&B hit that crossed over to the pop charts. The song was quickly covered by Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald, the Charioteers, and the Deep River Boys, as well as the Ravens; it would later be recorded by Johnny Otis, Pat Boone (for a Top 5 pop hit in 1958), Etta James, Irma Thomas, Little Esther Phillips, and Roy Orbison, among others.
The Orioles had their second hit later that year with the ballad “(It’s Gonna Be a) Lonely Christmas,” followed in the spring of 1949 by the chart-topping “Tell Me So,” a Chessler ballad that Savannah Churchill and Dinah Washington had already recorded. The Orioles scored four more hits in 1949, all ballads: “A Kiss and a Rose,” a cover of the Charioteers’ hit; “I Challenge Your Kiss,” released around the same time by the Four Jacks; “Forgive and Forget,” another Chessler composition; and “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve,” the 1947 Frank Loesser standard, which the Orioles first popularized. The group had an unusual predilection for the slow and sentimental; according to the rhythm-and-blues historian Marv Goldberg, “of the Orioles’ first twenty records, only four sides were uptempo.”[91]
The Orioles established a much-imitated formula, more amateurish-sounding than previous groups’ styles, that featured Til’s romantic tenor, occasionally relieved by George Nelson’s rougher baritone rather than Johnny Reed’s bass, with Alexander Sharp singing wordless falsetto counterpoint. At once passionate and nonchalant, Til’s slightly stilted crooning drove young female fans to screaming, crying, fainting hysteria, as Frank Sinatra’s voice had and Elvis Presley’s would.
In February 1950, the Orioles became one of the first rhythm-and-blues groups to record with a string orchestra. They toured widely that year, but in November a car crash in Baltimore killed the group’s guitarist and second tenor, Tommy Gaither, and injured George Nelson and Johnny Reed.[92] The surviving members quickly returned to the stage and studio but did not record another hit until September 1951, when they cut a harmonized adaptation of Big Joe Williams’s 1935 blues classic “Baby Please Don’t Go”—a singular transformation of Mississippi blues into doo-wop. Williams’s song would later be recorded by Muddy Waters, Billy Lee Riley, Them, AC/DC, and Aerosmith, among many others, but it was the Orioles version that probably inspired James Brown’s “Please, Please, Please.”
George Nelson left the Orioles shortly before they recorded “Crying in the Chapel”—their all-time best seller—in June 1953. The group had an R&B hit in a similar vein later that year with the wistful ballad “In the Mission of St. Augustine,” a pop hit for Sammy Kaye. They tried to mine the same lode with songs such as “In the Chapel in the Moonlight,” a 1936 Billy Hill composition that was revived in 1954 by the white pop singer Kitty Kallen, but scored no further hits. The Orioles disbanded in 1955, but Til recruited another harmony group, the Regals, to perform with him under the Orioles’ name. In 1956, the Orioles switched from Jubilee to Vee-Jay, but though they adopted a more modern, pop-oriented sound, their records no longer sold. Til recorded for Roulette as a solo artist in 1958 and rerecorded a few of the Orioles early hits for Jubilee in 1959. The second Orioles group broke up at the end of 1959, but Til cut a few more sides for Jubilee on his own.
In 1961, Til put together a third Orioles, who performed as an oldies act and recorded mostly remakes of earlier material. Til formed a fourth Orioles in 1966; in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he recorded for RCA under his own name. By 1978, Til was singing in a group that billed itself as the Orioles or the Ink Spots, as the occasion demanded. In the late 1970s, he assembled yet another Orioles group, which recorded an album of pop standards. Although his health was failing, Til continued to perform until 1981, when he suffered a fatal heart attack.
One reason for the decline in the Orioles’ popularity was the rise of the Dominoes and their stratospherically pitched lead singer, Clyde McPhatter, who replaced Sonny Til as the foremost black teen idol. The group was put together by Billy Ward, who was born Robert Williams in Savannah, Georgia, and raised in Philadelphia. The son of a minister, he sang and played organ in church as a child; later, he studied music at the Juilliard School in New York. In the late 1940s, he changed his name to Billy Ward and got a job as a pianist for Rose Marks, a white songwriter and Broadway talent agent. At Marks’s urging, Ward formed a racially mixed vocal group called the Dominoes, which was unsuccessful and disbanded in early 1950. Ward then formed an all-black group called the Ques, which also disbanded quickly. Around September 1950, Ward formed a second Ques, comprising the lead tenor Clyde McPhatter, the second tenor Charlie White, the baritone William Joseph Lamon, and the bass Bill Brown—all of whom had performed in gospel groups—plus Ward himself, who played piano and sometimes sang. Ward and Marks jointly managed the group and wrote many of their songs.[93]
After winning on Amateur Night at the Apollo Theatre and on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, the Ques changed their name to the Dominoes and signed with King Records’ new Federal subsidiary. Ralph Bass, who ran Federal, later said that when he first heard them, “Billy Ward was writing pop music, not R&B. They didn’t sound like a black group to me.”[94] Bass would assert that he was the one who steered them in a new direction; according to Clyde McPhatter, however, “We had patterned ourselves after the Ink Spots because I had such a high voice, but I just didn’t believe in trying to sound like Bill Kenney [actually Kenny], and that’s how we started the gospel stuff.”[95] In any case, the Dominoes’ first recordings, from November 1950, have a strong gospel flavor, especially “Do Something for Me,” their first hit, which features McPhatter’s melismatic singing. Although other artists—Sister Rosetta Tharpe, for one—had injected gospel music into rhythm-and-blues—the Dominoes can be credited for giving doo-wop a pronounced gospel feel.
In December 1950, the Dominoes recorded “Sixty-Minute Man,” with Bill Brown singing the lead. Released in March 1951, it became that year’s best-selling rhythm-and-blues record, topping Billboard’s R&B chart for fourteen weeks and crossing over to the pop list, even though radio stations refused to play it. It was not, as is sometimes claimed, the first rhythm-and-blues crossover record, but it may have been the first with such an overtly sexual theme. “Looka here, girls, I’m tellin’ you now, they call me Lovin’ Dan,” sings Brown. “I rock ’em, roll ’em all night long, I’m a sixty-minute man.” Dispelling any doubt about his meaning, Brown adds, “There’ll be fifteen minutes of kissin’, then you’ll holler, ‘Please don’t stop!’ / There’ll be fifteen minutes of teasin’, and fifteen minutes of squeezin’, and fifteen minutes of blowin’ my top.”
The reference to “Lovin’ Dan” roots the song in an older tradition. In December 1936, the blues singer Georgia White had recorded “Dan the Back Door Man,” a song covered in March 1936 by a black vocal-harmony group, the Four Southerners. In July 1930, Bessie Smith had cut “Hustlin’ Dan,” singing, “Talk about your lovers, he could more than satisfy me.” In December 1923, the Black Dominoes (probably a pseudonym for the all-white Original Memphis Five) had recorded the Dixieland instrumental “Dancin’ Dan.” And in 1921, Albert von Tilzer and Lew Brown had published “Dapper-Dan the Ladies Man from Dixie Land,” indicating on the sheet-music cover that Eddie Cantor (pictured in blackface) had introduced the song that year in the show Midnight Rounders.[96]
Although it was hardly the first salacious rhythm-and-blues song, “Sixty-Minute Man” certainly pushed the envelope, launching a wave of increasingly licentious material that would prompt a music-industry backlash in 1954. It also demonstrated that there was a white market for R&B, which King vainly tried to exploit with cover versions by the York Brothers, a country duo, and the Elliot Lawrence Orchestra, a swing band. There were also covers by Clarence Palmer and the Jive Bombers and by Hardrock Gunter and Roberta Lee. “Sixty-Minute Man” spawned a number of spinoffs, among them the Swallows’ “It Ain’t the Meat” (from 1951), the Du Droppers’ “Can’t Do Sixty No More” (from 1952), the Checkers’ “Don’t Stop Dan” (from 1954), the Robins’ “The Hatchet Man” (from 1954), and the Cadets’ “Dancin’ Dan” (from 1956).
For all its broad popularity, “Sixty-Minute Man” has been disparaged by rock historians. “‘Sixty-Minute Man’ met with unprecedented white acceptance for two reasons,” writes John A. Jackson. “First, it reinforced the white stereotype of a slow-witted, sexually obsessed black man. Second, and more important, the song, with Brown’s sexual braggadocio blatantly overstated, was not taken very seriously by most whites. To them, Brown posed no more of a threat than did ‘Amos ’n’ Andy.’”[97] Jim Dawson and Steve Propes concur: “Despite its national popularity, ‘Sixty Minute Man’ didn’t break down the barriers between R&B and pop in 1951. When all was said and done, the song was a novelty, a throwback to minstrel songs like ‘Open the Door, Richard,’ in which black performers winked and rolled their eyes. Brown’s delivery was more humorous than sincere or threatening, more in the ‘coon-shout’ tradition of years earlier than the soulful R&B tradition that was to follow.”[98]
But while “Sixty-Minute Man” may have been old-fashioned in conception, it was cutting-edge in execution, with its hard backbeat, spiky guitar, bass lead vocal, and wordless falsetto background singing à la the Orioles’ Alexander Sharp. Unlike “Open the Door Richard!” it cannot accurately be described as a throwback to minstrelsy, and its sexual braggadocio was no less threatening in its day than the sexual braggadocio of “Rapper’s Delight” was nearly thirty years later. In its beat, its bold sexuality, and its use of the words “rock” and “roll,” “Sixty-Minute Man” was a signal smash that helped light the fuse for the rock ’n’ roll explosion soon to come.
In May 1951, the Dominoes cut “I Am with You,” a hit ballad featuring Clyde McPhatter’s emotive tenor and Bill Brown’s talking bass. Recorded at the same session, the rocking “That’s What You’re Doing to Me”—with McPhatter wailing, “I’m gonna rock, I’m gonna roll”—did not chart until April 1952. “Have Mercy Baby,” recorded in January 1952, closely followed “That’s What You’re Doing to Me” onto Billboard’s R&B chart, spending a couple of months in the No. 1 spot. Although it follows the twelve-bar blues form and features a honking saxophone solo, “Have Mercy Baby” is essentially a call-and-response gospel shout, with McPhatter repenting his ways—“I’ve been a good-for-nothin’ / I’ve lied and cheated, too”—while improvising churchy melodic embellishments.
Ahmet Ertegun would adapt the song into “What’cha Gonna Do” (not the same song as Bill Haley’s “Whatcha Gonna Do”), which McPhatter recorded with the Drifters and which formed the basis for Hank Ballard and the Midnighters’ “The Twist.” (Ballard first used the “What’cha Gonna Do” melody on the Midnighters’ “Is Your Love for Real,” a year before “The Twist.”) “Have Mercy Baby” also inspired Little Richard’s “True, Fine Mama.” But as one of the first heavily gospel-inflected R&B hits, it had a more pervasive impact, influencing everyone from the “5” Royales to James Brown (who recorded “Have Mercy Baby” in 1964) and laying the groundwork for the soul music of the 1960s.
After “Have Mercy Baby,” the group’s records were credited to Billy Ward and His Dominoes. Their next hit, “I’d Be Satisfied,” though less urgent than “Have Mercy Baby,” was also in a gospel groove, with McPhatter singing, “Heavenly Father up above / Send me a bigger share of love.” As he had at the end of “Have Mercy Baby,” McPhatter sobs hysterically on “The Bells,” a funereal 1953 hit; the flip side, a variation of “Sixty-Minute Man” titled “Pedal Pushin’ Papa,” also charted. The Dominoes’ update of the 1936 standard “These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)” was their final hit with McPhatter. In the spring of 1953, fed up with the domineering Ward, who went so far as to bill him as “Clyde Ward,” his younger brother, McPhatter quit (or, by one account, was fired) and was quickly signed to Atlantic by Ahmet Ertegun.[99] The other members of the group also left and were replaced during the same period.
McPhatter’s replacement, the powerhouse tenor Jackie Wilson, turned out to be another rhythm-and-blues legend. A Detroit native, Wilson sang in church as a youth and briefly pursued a boxing career, returning to music while still in his teens. After King Records declined Johnny Otis’s recommendation to sign him, he cut his first record, as Sonny Wilson, for Dizzy Gillespie’s short-lived Dee Gee label in 1952—a florid version of “Danny Boy,” a song he performed throughout his career, backed with the feverish “Rainy Day Blues.” When the Dominoes played Detroit the following year, Billy Ward auditioned Wilson, who joined the group shortly before McPhatter departed. In June 1953, Wilson and the other new Dominoes cut the gospelly hit “You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down”; later in 1953, Wilson’s soaring lead propelled the group’s cover (on King rather than Federal) of Tony Bennett’s pop smash “Rags to Riches” to the No. 2 spot on the R&B charts. Subsequently, however, there would be no further hits on King, Federal, or Jubilee, for which the Dominoes cut two singles.
At Ward’s instigation, the group turned increasingly toward mainstream pop, performing in Las Vegas and signing with Decca. Recorded in April 1956, “St. Therese of the Roses,” featuring Wilson accompanied by an orchestra and chorus, charted pop but not R&B. By this time, the Dominoes had already made their mark on rock ’n’ roll, having been on the bill of Alan Freed’s abortive “Moondog Coronation Ball” in 1952 and having actually performed at the “Moondog Maytime Ball” later that year, at the “Second Annual Moondog Birthday Party” in 1953, and at the “Moondog Jubilee of Stars under the Stars” in 1954.
Elvis Presley saw the Dominoes’ show in Las Vegas around November 1956. Describing Wilson’s performance to his companions Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash at the December 1956 jam session dubbed the “Million Dollar Quartet,” Presley says, “There’s a guy out there who’s done a takeoff of me, ‘Don’t Be Cruel.’ He tried so hard until he got much better, boy, much better than that record of mine.” Elvis then mimics Wilson singing “Don’t Be Cruel.” “I went back four nights straight and heard that guy do that,” he adds. “Man, he sung the hell out of that song.”
But in early 1957, Wilson quit the Dominoes to pursue a solo career. With Gene Mumford, formerly of the Larks, singing lead, the Dominoes recorded the Hoagy Carmichael–Mitchell Parish classic “Star Dust” (adding a “Yancey Special”–like bass line) for Liberty Records in March 1957. It proved to be their all-time best seller, making both the pop and R&B charts; the group’s last two hits—the standard “Deep Purple” and a cover of the kooky 1958 novelty hit “Jennie Lee” (by Jan & Arnie, the predecessor of the surf-music duo Jan & Dean)—only charted pop.
Billy Ward and His Dominoes stayed with Liberty until the end of the 1950s, recording mostly pop and religious songs while continuing to change personnel. In 1960, they recorded four sides for ABC-Paramount, but these sold poorly, and by the middle of the decade the group was moribund. In 1965, Ward reformed the Dominoes, who cut four last sides for King before finally disbanding.
After leaving the Dominoes, Jackie Wilson sang at the Flame Show Bar in Detroit and came under the management of Al Green, who had also managed the careers of LaVern Baker and Johnnie Ray. Green arranged for Wilson to record for Decca, but just as the contract was about to be signed, Green died, and his assistant Nat Tarnopol became Wilson’s manager. Decca assigned Wilson to its Brunswick subsidiary, which Tarnopol eventually took over. Wilson’s first release, “Reet Petite,” was cowritten by Berry Gordy, who went on to found Motown Records. Recorded in July 1957, it was a minor pop hit (and a Top 10 pop hit in England) but did not make the R&B charts. Nevertheless, with its whooping, trilling, bawling vocal, brassy horn arrangement, and boogie-woogie bass line, “Reet Petite” was a historic record that bridged the gap between rock ’n’ roll and soul music.
Wilson’s next release, the soaring ballad “To Be Loved” (also cowritten by Gordy), made both the pop and R&B charts in the spring of 1958. By early 1959, his gospel-flavored “Lonely Teardrops” (again cowritten by Gordy) had topped Billboard’s R&B chart and made the pop Top 10. “Lonely Teardrops” clearly inspired the Isley Brothers’ first hit, “Shout,” released later in 1959, and the song’s Latin-like beat, plucked on muffled guitar strings, was widely imitated.
From that point until the mid-1970s, Wilson had some fifty pop and R&B hits, including five more R&B chart-toppers. Several of his songs, among them the hits “Night,” “Alone at Last,” and “My Empty Arms,” are based on classical melodies, the better to display his operatic power. Perhaps his best remembered hit is “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher,” from 1967, which, as its title implies, showcases Wilson’s remarkable range. Wilson toured the country, playing to screaming, largely female audiences, and appeared in movies and on television. Years of drinking, drug abuse, and womanizing took their toll, however, and in September 1975, Wilson collapsed on stage while touring with Dick Clark’s “Good Ol’ Rock ’n’ Roll Revue.” He remained comatose until his death in January 1984.[100]
Having left the Dominoes, Clyde McPhatter formed his first Drifters group in May 1953. McPhatter had a gospel background: his father was a minister and his mother a church organist. Growing up in North Carolina, he’d sung in a church choir; after his family moved to Harlem, he joined the Mount Lebanon Singers, from which he later drew three of the original Drifters. In June 1953, the Drifters recorded four songs at their first session for Atlantic, only one of which, the doo-wop blues “Lucille,” was ultimately released. Dissatisfied with the sound, Atlantic prompted McPhatter to replace the other singers, so he recruited three different gospel veterans, plus a bass singer, and in August 1953 cut five numbers—three remakes of songs recorded at the first session and two new ones. The new ones, “Money Honey” and “The Way I Feel,” were coupled on the group’s first single, credited to Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters; “Money Honey” written by Jesse Stone, shot to the top of the R&B charts. (One of the remakes, the hard-rocking “Let the Boogie Woogie Roll,” is apparently the first issued recording to actually feature the vocable “doo-wop,” but it was not released until 1960.)
“Money Honey” is certainly a rock ’n’ roll song, or at any rate it became one when Elvis Presley covered it at his first recording date for RCA in January 1956. Hank Ballard and the Midnighters had already adopted the Drifters’ chant of “ah-ooh, ah-ooh” for their “Work with Me Annie” in January 1954. The melody of “Money Honey” is similar to the one on Roy Orbison’s first Sun record, “Ooby Dooby,” from March 1956; the resemblance is even more obvious on the slower “Ooby Dooby” recorded previously by Orbison’s band, the Teen Kings. The chorus of “Money Honey” is similar to the one on Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” from May 1956, and the verse is similar to the one on Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Hanky Panky,” recorded in 1964 but not discovered by the public until 1966. The mercenary theme of “Money Honey” would later be taken up on other songs, notably Barrett Strong’s 1959 hit “Money (That’s What I Want),” which the Beatles covered in 1963.
Recorded in November 1953, “Such a Night,” with a Latin-ish bass line taken from Eddie Heywood Jr.’s 1944 version of “Begin the Beguine,” was the Drifters’ next hit, backed with “Lucille,” from their first session. Although there is nothing sexually explicit about “Such a Night,” at least one radio station banned it, characterizing the song as “suggestive trash.”[101] After that came another R&B chart-topper, the calypso-flavored “Honey Love” (recorded in February 1954), which crossed over to the pop charts. Meanwhile, McPhatter was drafted into the army, but as he was stationed in Buffalo, New York, he could still record and perform with the group while on leave. By this time, however, he had already cut what would be his last three hits with the Drifters—the suggestive rocker “Bip Bam,” a Ravens-style “White Christmas,” and the group’s third version of “What’cha Gonna Do,” a song they’d recorded at both their first two sessions.
In 1955, McPhatter split from the Drifters, although he still occasionally performed with them. He continued to record for Atlantic as a solo artist (and in duets with Ruth Brown), scoring some dozen pop and rhythm-and-blues hits, including three R&B chart-toppers: the ballads “Treasure of Love” and “Long Lonely Nights” and the more rhythmic “A Lover’s Question.” In 1959, he switched to the MGM label and scored a few minor pop hits; the following year, he moved on to Mercury, scoring several more hits, the biggest being “Lover Please,” which made the pop Top 10 in 1962 but did not chart R&B. By the mid-1960s, McPhatter’s career was on the rocks; he recorded without success for the Amy label, moved to England and cut two singles for Deram, then returned and cut two more for Decca. Embittered, he turned to drink, dying in 1972 at the age of thirty-nine. Although he’d been nearly forgotten, McPhatter left his mark on a generation of rhythm-and-blues singers.
The Drifters carried on, replacing McPhatter first with David Baughan and then with Johnny Moore (not the guitarist/leader of the Three Blazers). Moore sang the lead on such R&B hits as “Adorable,” a cover of the Colts’ original, and “Ruby Baby,” a Leiber-Stoller composition that became a pop hit for Dion in 1963. He also sang the lead on Leiber and Stoller’s “Fools Fall in Love,” a 1957 Drifters hit that Elvis Presley covered in 1966. But Moore had been drafted and replaced by Bobby Hendricks by April 1958, when the group recorded Leiber and Stoller’s “Drip Drop,” which, like “Ruby Baby,” would be a much bigger hit for Dion than for the Drifters.
In June 1958, the Drifters’ manager, George Treadwell, fired all the singers and hired a different vocal group, the Crowns, to assume the Drifters’ name. The new lead singer, Ben E. King, wrote the song “There Goes My Baby,” which became a No. 1 R&B and No. 2 pop hit in 1959 after Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller produced it for Atlantic using a string section and a Brazilian beat. The recording served as a template not only for subsequent Drifters hits—including “Dance with Me,” “This Magic Moment,” and the No. 1 pop smash “Save the Last Dance for Me”—but for a host of elaborate 1960s soul productions for other artists. One producer who adopted the new approach was Phil Spector, whom Atlantic hired as an assistant to Leiber and Stoller in 1960 and who cowrote Ben E. King’s first solo hit, “Spanish Harlem,” with Leiber that year after King left the Drifters.
The Drifters cut a steady stream of hits through the mid-1960s, among them “Up on the Roof,” “On Broadway,” and “Under the Boardwalk, with Rudy Lewis or the returning Johnny Moore singing lead. With material furnished by such Brill Building songwriters as Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, Gerry Goffin and Carol King, Cynthia Weill and Barry Mann, Bert Berns, and Burt Bacharach, the group dispensed with gospel inflections and took a pure pop stance, recording such rock-era gems as “Please Stay,” “Sweets for My Sweet,” “When My Little Girl Is Smiling,” and “At the Club.” They kept recording for Atlantic, their sound growing increasingly formulaic, until 1970, when they disbanded, after which several groups featuring former members continued to perform as the Drifters. Virtually the only group to survive the transition from doo-wop to soul music (although they survived in name only), the Drifters made a significant impact in both eras.
The most popular rhythm-and-blues vocal group of the early 1950s, however, may well have been the Clovers, who had twenty R&B hits between 1951 and 1956.[102] Formed around 1946 by high school classmates in Washington, D.C., the group was influenced by the Charioteers, Ravens, and Orioles, among others. Discovered in 1950, they recorded the standard “Yes Sir! That’s My Baby” for Rainbow Records in an Ink Spots–like style. Ahmet Ertegun heard them in Washington but didn’t care for their pop-ish repertoire, so he wrote them the bluesy “Don’t You Know I Love You,” which they recorded at their first Atlantic session in February 1951. With its habanera bass line and the added novelty of Frank Culley’s saxophone, the song became a No. 1 R&B hit. At their second session in July 1951, the Clovers cut the blues “Fool, Fool, Fool,” another chart-topping Ertegun composition. Kay Starr had a pop hit with her cover of “Fool, Fool, Fool” in 1952, and Elvis Presley made an unreleased acetate recording of the song at a radio station in Lubbock, Texas, while on tour in early 1955. Curiously, Presley uses the same bland substitution as Starr for the Clovers’ risqué line “There goes my meat.”
In December 1951, the Clovers recorded “One Mint Julep,” a comical Rudy Toombs composition about the perils of alcohol that Vann Walls invigorates with a descending piano vamp. A No. 2 R&B hit for the Clovers, the song was covered in 1952 by Louis Prima and by Buddy Morrow, who had a minor pop hit with it. Chet Atkins’s 1959 instrumental version was also a minor pop hit, while Ray Charles’s 1960 instrumental version (with Charles playing organ) made the pop Top 10 and topped the R&B chart. Various rock, pop, jazz, soul, country, and Latin versions followed, including many instrumentals—ironically enough, since the original depends heavily on vocal harmonies and amusing lyrics.
The group’s next hit, the chart-topping “Ting-A-Ling,” from March 1952, typifies the original Clovers sound—mid-tempo and bluesy, with spare instrumental accompaniment and rhythmic accents on just the second beat of each measure. The up-tempo “Hey, Miss Fannie,” a No. 2 R&B hit recorded in August 1952, is a true rocker, complete with backbeat and boogie-woogie bass line. Both “Ting-A-Ling” and “Hey, Miss Fannie” were written by Ertegun, and as with “One Mint Julep,” the flip sides also charted. Buddy Bailey sang the lead on all the Clovers’ early hits, but after the session that produced “Hey, Miss Fannie” and the group’s following hit, the Rudy Toombs drinking song “Crawlin’,” Bailey was drafted and replaced by Charlie White, formerly of the Dominoes. With White singing lead on the rocking hits “Good Lovin’,” “Little Mama,” and “Lovey Dovey” (the last covered for a pop hit by Bunny Paul in 1954, by Clyde McPhatter in 1958, and by Buddy Knox in 1960), Bailey was hardly missed.
But White had personal problems and was fired not long after cutting “Lovey Dovey” and “Little Mama” in September 1953. His replacement, Billy Mitchell, sang the lead on Jesse Stone’s clever composition “Your Cash Ain’t Nothin’ but Trash” in April 1954; an R&B hit for the Clovers, the song made the pop charts in 1974 when it was redone by the white blues-rocker Steve Miller. Mitchell remained with the group even after Buddy Bailey returned in May 1954, following his army discharge. Bailey sang lead on the Clovers’ next hit, a cover of Tony Bennett’s 1951 ballad hit “Blue Velvet,” which Bobby Vinton would revive for a pop chart-topper in 1963. He also sang lead on Rudy Toombs’ 1955 soft-drinking song “Nip Sip” (“I go for soda and root beer, too”) and the pop-oriented “Devil or Angel,” an R&B hit in 1956 that Bobby Vee covered for a pop hit in 1960. Recorded with an added vocal chorus in March 1956, the saccharine “Love, Love, Love” was even more pop-oriented, and it became the first Clovers release to cross over to the pop charts. Both “Nip Sip” and “Love, Love, Love” were covered by the Diamonds, a white Canadian doo-wop group that would have its biggest success in 1957 with a cover of the Gladiolas’ “Little Darlin’.”
At the Clovers’ final Atlantic session in July 1957, they rerecorded “Down in the Alley,” which they had originally cut, but not released, in 1953. For this composition, Jesse Stone set up-to-date lyrics—“Just rockin’ and reelin’, we’ll get that feelin’”—to the tune of Leroy Carr’s “How Long, How Long Blues.” But though “Down in the Alley” became something of a cult classic, it never charted. Even before the Clovers’ Atlantic contract expired, their manager, Lou Krefetz, had established his own Poplar label, hiring Jesse Stone as musical director. In 1958, Poplar released two Clovers singles and an album, The Clovers in Clover, consisting largely of pop standards. In 1959, Krefetz sold the Poplar catalog to the new United Artists label, for which he became national sales manager.
Produced by Leiber and Stoller, the Clovers’ first United Artists session, in June 1959, yielded the R&B and pop hit “Love Potion No. 9,” a humorous Leiber-Stoller composition similar to ones the pair were writing for the Coasters. The song became a bigger hit in 1964 when it was covered by the Searchers. In 1961, the Clovers left United Artists and cut a single for Winley Records, owned by the brother of their bass singer, Harold Winley, but it was not successful, and the group broke up. Former members then put together various Clovers groups, which continued to record through the 1980s and perform on the oldies circuit into the 2000s. Although blacker-sounding than most doo-wop groups, at least until the mid-1950s, the Clovers appeared on a number of Alan Freed’s early rock ’n’ roll shows and made a significant impact on the nascent rock scene.
Another important doo-wop group, the Charms, made a practice of covering other artists’
records and were covered themselves in turn. Formed in Cincinnati around 1952, the
group was soon joined by the sixteen-year-old Otis Williams (not the Temptations’
founder), who became the lead singer. In 1953, the Charms cut their first single,
the sour-noted original ballad “Heaven Only Knows,” for Henry Stone’s Rockin’ label.
Stone soon became partners with King’s Syd Nathan in DeLuxe, an established independent
rhythm-and-blues label that Nathan had acquired; the revived label absorbed the Rockin’
catalog and reissued “Heaven Only Knows” as its first release. Four more unsuccessful
singles followed before the Charms, at Nathan’s behest, recorded a cover of the Jewels’
“Hearts of Stone” in September 1954. The Charms’ version has an amateurish feel, but
it almost completely eclipsed the Jewels’ even cruder original, rising to the top
of Billboard’s
R&B chart and crossing over to the pop Top 20. Notwithstanding the strong rhythm-and-blues
flavor of the Jewels’ and Charms’ renditions, a square-sounding cover by the Fontane
Sisters, Perry Como’s backup singers, became a No. 1 pop smash, and Red Foley’s cover
made the country Top 5. Other white covers included those by the singer Vicki Young
and the comic group the Goofers. Elvis Presley sang “Hearts of Stone” on the Louisiana Hayride in January 1955; an acetate recording of the performance was first issued on the
1999 double CD Sunrise.
In November 1954, again at Nathan’s urging, the Charms recorded a cover of the Five Keys’ “Ling, Ting, Tong,” which plays on the supposed resemblance of the song’s nonsensical refrain to Chinese. “I went to Chinatown / way back in old Hong Kong / to get some egg foo young / and then I heard a gong,” goes the first verse. This time the Charms’ version, while still an R&B and pop hit, sold no better than the original; the flip side, a cover of “(Bazoom) I Need Your Lovin’”—a Leiber-Stoller composition that was originally a pop hit for the white group the Cheers—also made the R&B charts. “Ling Ting Tong” was covered for a minor pop hit by Buddy Knox in 1961.
The Charms’ next release paired a cover of Gene and Eunice’s late-1954 recording “Ko Ko Mo” with a cover of the Robins’ “Whadaya Want?” (another Leiber-Stoller song); but amid “Ko Ko Mo” covers by Perry Como, Louis Armstrong and Gary Crosby, the Crew-Cuts, the Flamingos, Marvin and Johnny, Bill Darnel and Betty Clooney (Rosemary’s sister), the Hutton Sisters (Betty and Marion), the Dooley Sisters, Hawkshaw Hawkins and Rita Robbins, Goldie Hill and Red Sovine, Jack Cardwell, Tito Rodríguez, and Andy Griffith (the actor), the Charms’ version was lost in the shuffle. (Although it was released and covered by pop, rhythm-and-blues, country, and Latin artists before Bill Haley’s or Elvis Presley’s breakthrough, Gene and Eunice’s “Ko Ko Mo,” with its habanera bass line and Caribbean lilt, has somehow been overlooked as a possible first rock ’n’ roll record. The Los Angeles–based duo of Gene Forrest [born Forest Gene Wilson] and Eunice Levy deserves recognition not only for their epochal debut single but for later recordings such as “Bom Bom Lulu” that were popular in Jamaica and influenced the development of reggae.)
The Charms’ poppy original composition “Two Hearts” had been recorded in September 1954 and issued that November, but it did not chart until March 1955, whereupon it was covered by Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Gisèle MacKenzie, the Crew-Cuts, the Lancers, the 5 De Marco Sisters, and Pat Boone, becoming Boone’s first hit, just before “Ain’t That a Shame.” But at the height of the Charms’ success, the other singers left Otis Williams and legally challenged his right to use the Charms name; Williams recruited new members for what would be credited on the label of his next DeLuxe release, the Rudy Toombs composition “Gum Drop,” as His New Group. Meanwhile, Henry Stone split with Syd Nathan and began issuing records by the departed Charms on his own new Chart label. The dispute was resolved in Williams’s favor, and his next hit, the Rudy Toombs song “That’s Your Mistake,” was first credited to Otis Williams and His New Group and then relabeled as by Otis Williams and His Charms.
In February 1956, Williams and His Charms covered the white pop singer Cathy Carr’s
hit ballad “Ivory Tower” (also covered by Gale Storm) and the black female harmony
trio the Cookies’ R&B hit “In Paradise.” The two songs were issued on the same single,
and “Ivory Tower” made both the
R&B and pop charts. Williams’s group scored their last R&B hit in 1957 with a cover
of the Love Notes’ doo-wop ballad “United.” After shifting from DeLuxe to the parent
King label, they barely made the pop Hot 100 with “Little Turtle Dove” and “Panic”
in 1961. Williams made his final recordings for King in 1963; turning to soul music,
he cut four singles for OKeh in 1965 and 1966. Williams then worked as a barber in
Cincinnati until 1969, when he took a job as a booking agent and talent scout in Nashville.
The steel guitarist Pete Drake persuaded Williams to record pair of LPs for his Stop
label—The Greatest Hits Of Otis Williams in 1970 and the country album Otis Williams and the Midnight Cowboys in 1971. Williams later ran his own First Note Cafe in Cincinnati. He re-formed the
Charms in the 1990s, touring internationally, and continued to perform into the 2000s.
Two of the most influential doo-wop records were the only hits for the New York groups that cut them. The Crows “Gee” and the Chords “Sh-Boom” were both B-sides that became No. 2 rhythm-and-blues hits while crossing over to the pop charts. Each has been proposed as the first rock ’n’ roll record or inaccurately cited as the first R&B crossover hit, but because each charted in 1954, the year Elvis Presley cut “That’s All Right” and Bill Haley cut “Rock Around the Clock,” both were harbingers of the rock ’n’ roll revolution.
The Crows formed in Harlem around 1951; in 1952, after seeing them win the Amateur Night competition at the Apollo, the talent agent Cliff Martinez got them recording sessions on Jubilee backing the singer-trumpeter Frank “Fat Man” Humphries and the singer-pianist Viola Watkins. In 1953, Martinez took Watkins and the Crows to Rama, a new rhythm-and-blues label established by George Goldner, whose Tico label recorded such Latin artists as Tito Puente. Two singles were cut at an April 1953 session: the Crows accompanied Watkins on the first one, a cover of Georgia Gibbs’s country-flavored pop hit “Seven Lonely Days” that was backed with the Crows’ cover of the Carlisles’ country smash “No Help Wanted”; Watkins played piano behind the Crows on the second single, the ballad “I Love You So,” which was backed with “Gee.”
At first, “I Love You So” was the more popular side, but by the end of 1953, “Gee” had begun to take off, with help from the white disc jockey Dick “Huggy Boy” Hugg, who broadcast from the window of the Dolphin’s of Hollywood record shop in South Central Los Angeles. Written in a matter of minutes by the Crows’ baritone, Bill Davis, “Gee” could hardly have been simpler or less controversial, with the chorus “Oh-ho-ho-ho gee, my oh-oh gee, well oh-ho gee, why I love that girl.” The sole touch of sophistication is the jazzy guitar solo, probably by Tiny Grimes, who briefly quotes the familiar Scottish air “The Campbells Are Coming.” The ending of “Gee” would be copied on Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers’ 1956 doo-wop smash “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” released on Goldner’s Gee label. “Gee” was covered in 1954 by the white pop singer June Hutton, on Capitol; by another Harlem doo-wop group, the Skylarks, on OKeh; and (as an instrumental) by the Latin pianist Joe Loco, on Tico. None of these charted, but Jan & Dean’s surprisingly faithful 1960 rendition did make the low end of Billboard’s Hot 100, as did the Pixies Three’s 1964 take; the Hollywood Flames’ 1961 version made the R&B list.
The Chords were formed around 1951 by members of three other vocal groups in the Morrisania section of the Bronx. With influences that included such white groups as the Four Freshmen, the Chords leaned toward mainstream pop. In 1953, they wrote “Sh-Boom,” filled with nonsense syllables, and auditioned for Bobby Robinson’s Red Robin label, but Robinson turned them down. The following year, they came to the attention of the Atlantic producer Jerry Wexler, who was looking for someone to cover Patti Page’s hit “Cross Over the Bridge.” In March 1954, the Chords recorded four songs for Atlantic’s new Cat subsidiary, including “Cross Over the Bridge” and “Sh-Boom,” which were paired on the same single, with “Cross Over the Bridge” as the A-side. It soon became evident, however, that “Sh-Boom” was the breakout side, helped along, as “Gee” had been, by “Huggy Boy” Hugg. By the time “Sh-Boom” charted in July, Atlantic was pressing it with a different flip side in order to avoid paying publishing royalties for “Cross Over the Bridge.”[103]
“Sh-Boom” launched a wave of R&B nonsense songs that included the Platters’ “Voo Vee Ah Bee,” the Harptones ’ “Oobidee-Oobidee-Oo,” Arthur Lee Maye and the Crowns ’ “Oochie Pachie” (“When the clock strikes three, we’re gonna have a ball / We’re gonna rock ’n’ roll and that ain’t all”), and the Jac-O-Lacs’ “Sha-Ba-Da-Ba-Doo.” “Sh-Boom” was covered by the Billy Williams Quartet and by the country artists Bobby Williamson and Leon McAuliffe; Stan Freberg’s parody, mocking the Chords’ supposedly unintelligible lyrics, was a hit in its own right. But the cover version by the Crew-Cuts, a white Canadian quartet, became a long-running No. 1 pop hit, far outselling the Chords’ original. With its pop-style horn arrangement (by Mercury Records’ musical director, David Carroll), clean-cut harmonies, and crisply enunciated lyrics, the Crew-Cuts’ “Sh-Boom” scarcely suggests rock ’n’ roll at all, but it certainly raised public awareness of doo-wop, in Britain as well the United States. The Chords’ version is cruder but hardly less pop-oriented; the blackest thing about it is Sam “the Man” Taylor’s saxophone solo. The Crows’ “Gee” is blacker-sounding, but only slightly.
After “Gee,” the Crows had several other releases on Rama and other Goldner labels, but none was successful, and the group disbanded in 1955. The Chords were threatened with legal action by a preexisting group with the same name and by the end of 1954 were calling themselves the Chordcats; in 1955, they became the Sh-Booms. With no further hits on Cat, the group, after some personnel changes, released a single on RCA’s Vik subsidiary, then broke up. The original quintet reunited to cut a single for Atlantic in 1960.
Two other noteworthy doo-wop songs were recorded around September 1954, the Moonglows’ “Sincerely” and the Penguins’ “Earth Angel.” The Moonglows were formed in Cleveland around 1951 by Harvey Fuqua; at first, they called themselves the Crazy Sounds and performed vocalese, a jazz style where singers set lyrics to instrumental jazz solos. Hearing them sing doo-wop, not vocalese, Alan Freed was so impressed that he became their manager and started his own Champagne label to record them, renaming them the Moonglows. After cutting a one-off single for Freed, who claimed composer’s credit for the two songs they’d written, and appearing on Freed’s “Big Rhythm and Blues Show” in the summer of 1953, the Moonglows signed with the Chicago-based Chance label.[104] In September 1953 and January 1954, they recorded five singles for Chance, including a pair of Christmas songs, a cover of Doris Day’s smash “Secret Love,” the proto-rocking “Ooh Rockin’ Daddy,” and the bluesy “219 Train.” The melody on the verses of “Real Gone Mama,” the flip side of “Secret Love,” anticipates that of Little Richard’s “Tutti-Frutti,” and one line, “Hey, Miss Blue, yes, she knows just what to do,” prefigures Richard’s “I got a girl named Sue, she knows just what to do.” On these sides, Freed took only partial composer’s credit for the original material. But despite heavy airplay on his radio show, none of the records charted nationally.
By the time Chance folded in late 1954, the Moonglows, still under Freed’s management, had switched to Chess Records. Their first Chess release, recorded in September or October, was “Sincerely,” a ballad composed by Fuqua (with a bridge lifted from the Dominoes’ “That’s What You’re Doing to Me”) for which Freed claimed half credit. Released in October or November, “Sincerely” became a No. 1 R&B hit, displacing “Earth Angel,” and crossed over to the pop charts. It might have been a bigger pop hit if not for the McGuire Sisters’ chart-topping cover version. Unlike the Moonglows, who set off Bobby Lester’s tenor lead with innovative background harmonies, the three McGuire Sisters harmonize the melody together, leaving instruments to play the background parts; the effect is to turn doo-wop into vocal vanilla.
At the height of the rock ’n’ roll craze, the Moonglows performed on Freed’s and other package shows and appeared in the movie Rock, Rock, Rock! along with Chuck Berry, the Flamingos, Jimmy Cavallo and His House Rockers, the Johnny Burnette Trio, LaVern Baker, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, and Alan Freed. Their mid-1950s recordings virtually defined the classic doo-wop sound. They had another R&B hit with the ballad “Most of All” in 1955 and three more in 1956, including the teen-oriented “We Go Together,” a minor pop hit for Jan & Dean in 1960, and “See Saw,” which crossed over to the pop chart and, like “Most of All,” was covered by the veteran white pop singer Don Cornell; Harvey Fuqua’s chants of “whoa-oh-oh” on “See Saw” anticipate Sam Cooke’s on Cooke’s first hit, “You Send Me.” In 1957, the Moonglows’ cover of Percy Mayfield’s 1950 R&B chart-topper “Please Send Me Someone to Love” made the R&B Top 5 and the lower ranks of the pop charts. In 1958, the group, under the name Harvey and the Moonglows, scored their last hit, “Ten Commandments of Love,” with guitarist Billy Johnson reciting the commandments after Fuqua sings them. Though it made the R&B Top 10 and crossed over to the pop charts, “Ten Commandments of Love” was hardly the Moonglows’ biggest seller, but it may be their best-remembered record after “Sincerely.”
In 1959, Fuqua replaced the other Moonglows with a group from Washington, D.C., that included the young Marvin Gaye, adding the bass singer Chuck Barksdale. But the new Moonglows soon disbanded, and Fuqua moved to Detroit, becoming a producer and A&R man for Motown. Bobby Lester re-formed the Moonglows in 1970; two years later, with Fuqua on board, RCA Victor released the album The Return of the Moonglows. Lester revived the group again, without Fuqua, from 1978 until his death in 1980; Fuqua led a Moonglows group at the 1983 Grammy Awards and a 1986 show at Radio City Music Hall. The last surviving original member, Fuqua died in 2010.
The Penguins were formed in Los Angeles in 1953 by Curtis Williams and Cleveland “Cleve” Duncan. By that time, Williams, who had recently left the Hollywood Flames, was already working on “Earth Angel” with his former Flames colleague Gaynel Hodge. The melody resembles that of Jesse and Marvin’s 1953 R&B hit “Dream Girl,” written by Jesse Belvin, a mentor to Williams and Hodge, while the bridge is adapted from “I Went to Your Wedding,” which the Hollywood Flames had recorded as demo for its composer, Jessie Mae Robinson. The piano introduction is taken from the Flames’ 1953 recording of “I Know,” and the chord structure reflects that of the 1934 Rodgers and Hart standard “Blue Moon.”[105]
Duncan’s uncle Ted Brinson, a former big-band musician, ran his own recording studio, which Dootsie Williams used for his DooTone label. The Penguins recorded a demo for DooTone, which the label issued as their first single. They recorded a second demo, coupling the rhythmic “Hey Senorita” with the balladic “Earth Angel (Will You Be Mine).” Again DooTone released the rough demo as a finished product, with “Hey Senorita” as the A-side, but it was “Earth Angel” that took off, topping Billboard’s R&B chart and making the pop Top 10. A number of white artists quickly covered it, including Gloria Mann, Pat O’Day, and Les Baxter, but the Crew-Cuts’ version was the most successful, reaching the pop Top 5. Like their “Sh-Boom,” the Crew-Cuts’ “Earth Angel” lacks rhythm-and-blues or rock ’n’ roll feeling.
After a dispute with Dootsie Williams over royalties, the Penguins engaged the white songwriter and musician Buck Ram as their manager. Ram got them a contract with Mercury, the Crew-Cuts’ label, while insisting that Mercury also sign the Platters, another group that Ram managed. The Platters first single for the label, Ram’s composition “Only You (and You Alone),” was a No. 1 R&B and Top 5 pop hit, after which Mercury and Ram gave the Penguins short shrift. With no hits on Mercury, the Penguins switched to Atlantic, scoring an R&B hit with “Pledge of Love” in 1957, but the group soon split with both Atlantic and Ram and returned to DooTone. They reorganized when Curtis Williams departed but left DooTone in 1960, cutting a final single for the Sun State label in 1962 before disbanding. Cleve Duncan put a new Penguins group together and cut a pair of mid-1960s singles for Original Sound, one of which, “Memories of El Monte,” was written by Frank Zappa and the future Mothers of Invention singer Ray Collins. Duncan continues to lead a Penguins group, sometimes billed as the Fabulous Penguins, as of 2010.
The relationship of doo-wop to rock ’n’ roll is problematic. Some doo-wop records of the 1940s and 1950s feature backbeats, boogie-woogie bass lines, and other typical rock characteristics, but others are simply harmonized pop songs, including many slow ballads. Perhaps this is why white pop artists were more likely to cover doo-wop hits than jump blues. Nonetheless, doo-wop was received as an integral part of the rock ’n’ roll phenomenon before fading in the 1960s, represented by such genre-defining hits as the Cadillacs’ “Speedoo,” the Platters’ “The Great Pretender,” Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers’ “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” and the Diamonds’ “Little Darlin’” (the last being one of the few white covers to improve on the black original). Doo-wop groups appeared on rhythm-and-blues and rock ’n’ roll shows alongside the honkers and shouters. Elvis Presley cut at least half a dozen doo-wop songs, including “Earth Angel” (informally recorded during his army hitch in Germany) and the Clovers’ “Down in the Alley.” Presley was just one of the solo rock singers who recorded ballads as well as up-tempo songs, but it was largely the doo-woppers who made slower material a staple of the early rock ’n’ roll repertoire.
New York and Los Angeles may have been the most important doo-wop centers, but New Orleans contributed at least one influential group, the Spiders, who began around 1947 as a gospel quintet called the Zion City Harmonizers (not to be confused with the Zion Harmonizers). After changing their name to the Delta Southernaires, they were discovered by Phyllis Boone, who worked for Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Recording Service and offered them an audition there. They performed gospel songs for Matassa, but he was looking for rhythm-and-blues, so they returned to the studio with two songs written by the singer and guitarist Adolph Smith—a member of another New Orleans group known first as the Mellow Drops and then as the Monitors—and landed a contract with Imperial Records.
Renamed for secular purposes, the Spiders recorded Smith’s “I Didn’t Want to Do It” and “You’re the One” with Dave Bartholomew’s band in December 1953, and both sides of the single made the R&B Top 10. “You’re the One” is a straightforward ballad, while “I Didn’t Want to Do It” is a bluesy rocker, complete with backbeat and “Yancey Special” bass pattern. The first line, “Fine little mama came knockin’, knockin’ on my front door,” anticipates the El Dorados’ 1955 doo-wop smash “At My Front Door,” which opens with “Crazy little mama come knockin’, knockin’ at my front door”; another line refers to “rockin’ and a-rollin’ all around the clock,” four months before Bill Haley cut “Rock Around the Clock.”
The Spiders continued to sing gospel music as the Delta Southernaires until a local disc jockey exposed them, whereupon they were banned from performing at their church. Recorded in April 1954, their next hit, the Dave Bartholomew composition “I’m Slippin’ In,” has a strong gospel feel, although the jiving lyrics are about a man coming home drunk late at night. Lew Chudd, the owner of Imperial Records, tried to persuade the Spiders’ lead singer, Chuck Carbo, to go solo, causing bad blood within the group even though Carbo declined. Chuck Carbo did leave the Spiders soon afterward, and his brother Chick Carbo sang the lead on the group’s next hit, “21,” an update of Jewel King’s Bartholomew-composed 1950 hit “3×7=21.” But after three subsequent Spiders releases failed to chart, Chuck Carbo returned and in August 1955 cut the hit “Witchcraft” with the group. Written by Dave Bartholomew and Earl King, the song has a melody on the verses that mirrors the habanera bass line beneath it. Elvis Presley had a pop hit with “Witchcraft” in 1963.
The Spiders toured from coast to coast, recording through 1956, though on some sessions Chuck Carbo sang most of the lead and harmony parts himself. The group then disbanded, reuniting to cut a final single in 1960. Chuck Carbo pursued a solo career, recording a pair of singles for Imperial before moving on to Rex and Ace, while Chick Carbo recorded on his own for Atlantic, Vee-Jay, and Instant. Chuck recorded sporadically in the 1970s and 1980s, making a comeback with two mid-1990s albums on Rounder, Drawers Trouble and The Barber’s Blues.
Rhythm-and-blues may have first emerged in Los Angeles, but New Orleans R&B played a crucial part in the development of rock ’n’ roll. In January 1947, just as Jack McVea’s “Open the Door Richard!” was making its initial breakthrough, Paul Gayten recorded “True,” an update of Don Albert’s 1936 ballad “You Don’t Love Me” that is now generally recognized as the first national R&B hit by a New Orleans artist. (Recorded in New Orleans a few months afterward, Annie Laurie’s “Since I Fell for You,” with Gayten on piano, charted slightly earlier, but Laurie was not a native New Orleanian.) The brothers David and Jules Braun, who formed the DeLuxe label in Linden, New Jersey, in 1944, had discovered Gayten and Laurie on a scouting trip to New Orleans that also resulted in the first recordings by Dave Bartholomew and Smiley Lewis. Gayten kept recording for DeLuxe and Regal (the label the Braun brothers started with Fred Mendelsohn after selling DeLuxe to Syd Nathan) but only had three more R&B hits, two featuring Laurie. Besides ballads, Gayten also sang blues, up-tempo proto-rockers such as Louis Prima’s “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” and Latin-tinged New Orleans–style numbers such as “Hey, Little Girl,” which Professor Longhair later appropriated.
Born in New Orleans, Gayten began playing piano in Kentwood, Louisiana, the birthplace of Little Brother Montgomery, his uncle.[106] After moving to Jackson, Mississippi, at age fourteen, he toured with a local band and with a carnival and a tent show before forming his own jazz sextet, including the future bebop saxophonist Teddy Edwards. He led an army band during World War II, then moved back to New Orleans and began recording for DeLuxe. In 1949, he wrote the jump blues “For You My Love” for Larry Darnell, a young singer who’d moved to New Orleans from Columbus, Ohio; Darnell recorded the song for Regal with Gayten’s band, and it became a No. 1 R&B hit. Gayten also accompanied Chubby Newsome on her signature hit “Hip Shakin’ Mama.”
Gayten toured the country through the early 1950s, together with Laurie, Darnell, Newsome, and Little Jimmy Scott. In 1951, he began recording in New York for OKeh, but by 1953 he was back in New Orleans leading a new band that featured the Denver-bred tenor saxophonist Lee Allen at a club called the Brass Rail. “It Ain’t Nothing Happening,” recorded in May 1953 for OKeh, finds Gayten in a rocking groove, with Allen playing a fierce solo. Gayten’s version of “Cow Cow Blues,” cut the same month, sounds like the model for Ray Charles’s “Mess Around,” recorded a few days later.
In 1954, Gayten began working for Chess as a producer and A&R man, recording Bobby Charles’s “Later Alligator” and Clarence “Frogman” Henry’s “Ain’t Got No Home.” He also cut his own records for Chess’s Checker and Argo subsidiaries into the late 1950s with bands that included such New Orleans studio stalwarts as saxophonists Lee Allen and Red Tyler, guitarists Ernest McLean and Edgar Blanchard, drummers Earl Palmer and Charles “Hungry” Williams, and bassist Frank Fields. He had a minor pop hit in 1957 with the rock ’n’ roll instrumental “Nervous Boogie” and another in 1958 with “Windy,” a cover of “Tom Hark,” a hit in England for the South African kwela band Elias and His Zig-Zag Jive Flutes. Gayten’s last hit, recorded for the Chess-distributed Anna label in Detroit in 1959, was a cover of Bobby Peterson’s funky instrumental “The Hunch.” Moving to Los Angeles, he ran Chess’s West Coast operations through the 1960s, then started his own Pzazz label, which had little success. Retiring from the music business, Gayten remained in California until his death in 1991.
A New Orleans native, Roy Brown was raised in Eunice, Louisiana, where he sang in church. He began writing his own songs, influenced by the spirituals he heard his fellow field workers sing as he harvested cotton, rice, and sugar cane. After attending high school in Houston, he moved to Los Angeles and boxed professionally, then won an amateur singing contest, crooning in the style of his idol, Bing Crosby. In 1945, he returned to Houston, where a nightclub owner heard him and, intrigued by the idea of a black singer who sounded white, booked him for what turned out to be a long engagement in Shreveport. He went on to Galveston, performing with his own combo on a local radio station; he wrote “Good Rocking Tonight” but, since he sang only ballads, had trumpeter Wilbert Brown sing it on the air. One night, Wilbert took sick, so Roy sang the song himself, shouting instead of crooning.[107]
Back in New Orleans, he offered “Good Rocking Tonight” to Wynonie Harris, who brusquely turned him away. The same night, he took the song to Cecil Gant, who had him sing it over the telephone to Jules Braun of DeLuxe Records. When Braun came to New Orleans for a Paul Gayten session at the J&M Recording Service in the early summer of 1947, he cut Brown singing “Good Rocking Tonight” with drummer Bob Ogden’s combo. The record was an immediate local hit. “It seemed like Roy Brown’s ‘Good Rockin’ [sic] Tonight’ was the first instance where New Orleans felt there was such a thing as black music,” said Vernon “Dr. Daddy-O” Winslow, the city’s first African American radio disc jockey. But it did not make the national R&B charts until the middle of 1948, after Wynonie Harris’s version charted.[108] Brown’s original doesn’t rock as hard as Harris’s cover: although it sports a shuffle rhythm and a boogie bass line, it lacks a backbeat; tenor saxophonist Earl Barnes leans closer to jazz than to rhythm-and-blues; and Brown’s high-pitched, smoothly melodic shouting is carefully enunciated.
Recorded in December 1947, Brown’s next hit, “’Long About Midnight,” topped Billboard’s R&B chart in the fall of 1948 and established Brown’s trademark vocal style, a gospel-tinged, intensely emotional way of crying the blues that was closely copied by black singers such as Larry Darnell and partially assimilated by white ones such as Johnnie Ray and Elvis Presley. According to the rock historian Charlie Gillett, Brown’s singing also influenced B. B. King, Bobby Bland, Little Richard, Jackie Wilson, and James Brown, among others.[109] Between 1949 and 1951, Brown had a dozen national hits, all roughly in the mold of either the rollicking “Good Rocking Tonight” or the plaintive “’Long About Midnight.” Over this period, his accompaniment became noticeably more modern, manifested in part by the increasing presence of backbeats and guitars. The hardest-rocking of these hits is “Boogie at Midnight,” from 1949, but the biggest seller was the wailing “Hard Luck Blues,” a No. 1 R&B hit in 1950.
From late 1949 through 1955, Brown did most of his recording in Cincinnati, where King Records was headquartered, but the company did not shift him from its DeLuxe subsidiary to the parent label until 1953. Although he toured the country through the mid-1950s, he claimed he was blackballed by the music industry because of a 1951 dispute over royalty payments, and he did not have another hit until 1957, after he was dropped by King and signed by Imperial.[110] Brown’s last two hits—“Party Doll,” a cover of Buddy Knox’s rockabilly smash, and “Let the Four Winds Blow,” which became a rock ’n’ roll classic after Fats Domino recorded it in 1961—both crossed over to the pop charts.
Although he wrote what is arguably the first rock ’n’ roll song in 1946 and sang in an authentically hard-rocking style as early as December 1952, when he recorded the frantic “Hurry Hurry Baby,” Brown was yet another casualty of the rock revolution. He returned to the King label for a couple of sessions in 1959 and recorded for a number of small labels through the 1960s but was reduced to selling encyclopedias door to door to make a living. After appearing with Johnny Otis at the 1970 Monterey Jazz Festival, he cut a pair of singles for Mercury and an album for ABC-BluesWay but gained little career traction until the end of the decade, when he performed in Europe following an LP reissue of some of his King material. He died of a heart attack in May 1981, shortly after headlining at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
Smiley Lewis sang in a style bluesier than but otherwise comparable to Fats Domino’s yet never enjoyed anything close to Domino’s success. Born Overton Amos Lemons in DeQuincy, Louisiana (near the Texas border), in 1913, he moved to New Orleans as a youth and learned to play guitar.[111] He was in his twenties when he sang and played in a band led by trumpeter Thomas Jefferson that included pianist Isidore “Tuts” Washington and bazooka player Edward “Noon” Johnson (the bazooka, invented and popularized by the white comedian Bob Burns, was a kazoo-like novelty horn that gave its name to the World War II antitank weapon).[112] During the war, Lewis worked in a band with Washington and clarinetist Kid Ernest Moliere in Bunkie, Louisiana; after the war, he worked with Washington and drummer Herman Seale in New Orleans.
Lewis’s powerful singing, in a Big Joe Turner–like shouting style, attracted a following, and in September 1947, Dave Braun recorded him for DeLuxe, accompanied by Washington’s boogie piano; but of the two singles listed in the label’s catalog, only one seems to have been issued. Lewis did not record again until March 1950, when Dave Bartholomew produced four sides for Imperial with Lewis’s group, augmented by Bartholomew himself on trumpet and two saxophone players from his band. The first release, “Tee Nah Nah,” borrows the melody of Fats Domino’s first hit, “The Fat Man,” with lyrics supplied by Washington. “That’s a song that the boys used to sing up in the penitentiary,” Washington claimed.[113] It became a regional hit, with help from the disc jockey Dr. Daddy-O, and has since become New Orleans standard.
Imperial and its Colony subsidiary released five more bluesy Lewis singles, replacing his musicians with Bartholomew’s until only Washington remained, before scoring a hit in 1952 with “The Bells Are Ringing,” a reworded adaptation of Lloyd Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy.” Washington then departed, irked that Lewis had become “big headed.”[114] After that, Lewis’s guitar was deemphasized, and his recorded repertoire, once confined almost entirely to blues, grew more varied, often resembling Fats Domino’s material. A case in point is “Blue Monday,” a Bartholomew composition that Lewis cut with Domino on piano in December 1953 and that Domino covered in March 1955 for a smash hit when it was finally released in 1957.
But Lewis did not have another hit until 1955, when he recorded “I Hear You Knocking,” a song written by Bartholomew and Earl King (under the name Pearl King) that sets the slightly altered refrain from the various “Keep A-Knockin’” songs to a different, slower melody (not unlike the tune of “Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” or of Fats Domino’s “Ain’t It a Shame,” recorded some two months earlier) and adds new verses. Like many of Lewis’s records, it features piano triplets (played by Huey Smith) and a “Yancey Special” bass line. It rose to No. 2 on Billboard’s R&B chart but never crossed over, eclipsed by Gale Storm’s mannered cover version. Many other versions followed, including Fats Domino’s, but the biggest seller was the one recorded in 1970 by the Welsh singer-guitarist Dave Edmunds, which reached the pop Top 5.
Lewis’s next R&B hit, “One Night,” also written by Bartholomew and King, met a similar fate when Elvis Presley’s version made the pop Top 5 in late 1958, more than two and a half years after the original charted. Presley had cut a reasonably faithful but unreleased cover of “One Night” in January 1957, a month before recording the reworded version that was ultimately issued, where he sings “One night with you / is what I’m now praying for” instead of Lewis’s “One night of sin / is what I’m now paying for” and climaxes with the stop-time verse “Now I know that life without you / has been too lonely too long” instead of “Now I know that bad and wild life / will cause me nothin’ but harm.”
Although Lewis’s following Imperial releases contained strong material, well performed and produced, Lewis would have only one more hit, “Please Listen to Me,” from 1956—a sweet tune propelled by piano triplets and a “Yancey Special” bass line. Even the driving rocker “Shame, Shame, Shame,” featured on the soundtrack of the 1956 movie Baby Doll, failed to chart, though it may just have been ahead of its time. Aerosmith’s rendition, on the group’s 2004 album Honkin’ on Bobo, replaces horns with guitars but is otherwise surprisingly similar to Lewis’s, if somewhat stiffer. Lewis’s output declined after 1957, and Imperial dropped him at the end of 1960. He continued to perform in the New Orleans area, recording for the OKeh, Dot, and Loma labels into the mid-1960s, when he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. He died in 1966.
Virtually alone among postwar rhythm-and-blues artists, Antoine “Fats” Domino successfully made the transition to rock ’n’ roll and maintained his popularity through the rock era without altering the basic character of his music. A lifelong New Orleans resident, he was influenced as much by the sounds he heard on the radio, the record player, and the jukebox as by the storied musicians of his home town. He learned to play piano with the help of an older brother-in-law, guitarist Harrison Verrett; his keyboard models included Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, Meade “Lux” Lewis, Charles Brown, and especially Amos Milburn. Invited to sit in at a Paul Gayten concert in 1947, shortly after forming his first band, he played Ammons’s “Swanee River Boogie,” one of the first pieces he’d mastered.[115] He then joined a combo led by the bass player Billy Diamond, who gave the short, chubby pianist the nickname “Fats.”
Domino formed another band and was performing at a Ninth Ward club called the Hideaway in late 1949 when Lew Chudd stopped in. Chudd had started Crown Records in New York in 1945, then moved to Los Angeles and founded Imperial, recording Mexican artists at first; soon he was recording rhythm-and-blues, country-western, and an assortment of ethnic music. On a trip to Houston in 1947, he saw Dave Bartholomew’s band perform at the Bronze Peacock Dinner Club; Don Robey had booked Bartholomew after seeing him in New Orleans. When Chudd, on the recommendation of the white New Orleans R&B disc jockey Duke “Poppa Stoppa” Thiele, went to see Domino at the Hideaway, he brought Bartholomew along.
Domino had previously sat in with Bartholomew’s band but left Bartholomew unimpressed.[116] A trumpeter who’d cut his teeth on traditional jazz, Bartholomew formed his own jump-style combo in 1946. By September 1947, when he made his recorded debut for DeLuxe, his group included bassist Frank Fields and drummer Earl Palmer—the consummate New Orleans R&B rhythm duo. His next and last DeLuxe session, in April 1949, yielded his biggest hit, “Country Boy,” featuring the habanera horn vamp that would become a Crescent City rhythm-and-blues trademark.
Bartholomew recorded his first session for Imperial at the J&M studio in November 1949, backing the New Orleans blues shouter Tommy Ridgley and the Texas-born singer Jewel King. In December, Bartholomew’s band—including Earl Palmer, Frank Fields, guitarist Ernest McLean, and saxophonists Herb Hardesty and Red Tyler—played on Fats Domino’s debut session, which produced the hit “The Fat Man.” At the Hideaway, Domino had performed “Junker Blues,” which the New Orleans–born blues singer and pianist Champion Jack Dupree recorded in 1941, having learned it from his early idol Willie “Drive ’em Down” Hall. On “The Fat Man,” Bartholomew’s rewrite of “Junker Blues,” Domino refines and accelerates Dupree’s crudely pounding piano style while singing Bartholomew’s lyrics, substituting “They call me the fat man, ’cause I weigh two hundred pounds” for Dupree’s druggy “They call me a junker, ’cause I’m loaded all the time.” In place of Dupree’s piano solo, Domino does a falsetto-voice trumpet imitation. The song’s melody would show up again on Smiley Lewis’s “Tee Nah Nah,” with Dupree’s first model, Tuts Washington, on piano; Lloyd Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” with Domino on piano; and Professor Longhair’s “Tipitina.”[117]
Following the success of “The Fat Man,” Domino toured the western states with Bartholomew’s band, forming a new band of his own after returning to New Orleans. Domino cut the hit “Every Night About This Time” with Bartholomew in September 1950 and toured with his band again before the trumpeter left Imperial. With his own band, Domino recorded his next hit, the chugging blues “Rockin’ Chair,” in April 1951 and his first R&B chart-topper, “Goin’ Home,” that November. With its prominent habanera horn line, “Goin’ Home” inspired Guitar Slim’s “The Things That I Used to Do”; its flip side was “Reeling and Rocking,” a mid-tempo, triplet-driven lament whose title refers to the singer’s despondency since “my baby went away and left me.”
Domino had two more hits in 1952, “Poor Poor Me” and “How Long,” the latter featuring a guitar solo by Harrison Verrett. Both songs are emotionally downbeat, paving the way for a bigger hit the next year, the suicidal blues “Going to the River,” which was successfully covered by the Atlanta-born rhythm-and-blues singer Chuck Willis. Domino sang “woo woo woo” through much of his next hit, the rollicking “Please Don’t Leave Me,” which rose nearly as high on the R&B charts in 1953 as “Going to the River.” Revived at the height of the rock ’n’ roll craze, “Please Don’t Leave Me” was recorded in 1956 by Johnny Otis, the Fontane Sisters, Johnny Burnette, and the Four Lovers, the doo-wop group that evolved into the Four Seasons.
Another of Domino’s 1953 hits, “Rose Mary,” looks back to “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” while “Something’s Wrong” anticipates “Ain’t It a Shame” with piano triplets, a “Yancey Special” bass line, and the phrase “ain’t that a shame” in the lyrics. His next three hits—“You Done Me Wrong,” “Thinking of You,” and “Don’t You Know”—recycle the keyboard triplets, habanera vamps, and shuffling backbeats of his earlier songs; “You Done Me Wrong” even reprises the wordless singing of “Please Don’t Leave Me.” By 1955, when the term “rock ’n’ roll” came into vogue, Domino’s style was fully formed. Domino performed at Alan Freed’s “Rock ’n’ Roll Jubilee Ball” at the beginning of that year, but there is no essential difference between his subsequent rock ’n’ roll hits and the rhythm-and-blues hits that preceded them.
In March 1955 in Los Angeles, Domino recorded “Ain’t It a Shame,” his breakthrough smash. “Goin’ Home” and “Going to the River” had already crossed over to the pop charts, but “Ain’t It a Shame,” a long-running No. 1 R&B hit, made the pop Top 10, with help from disc jockeys such as Bill Randle, who spun Domino’s singles on his pop-oriented Cleveland radio show. It was Randle who passed an advance copy of “Ain’t It a Shame” to Randy Wood of Dot Records, who had Pat Boone cover it with the title “Ain’t That a Shame”; Boone’s version entered Billboard’s pop chart a week before Domino’s and rose to No. 1, both competing with and drawing attention to the original.[118] Although his “Ain’t That a Shame” sounds hopelessly square today—he’d first tried to sing “isn’t that a shame”—it made the R&B charts, and Boone would later claim that before he began appearing on national television, “a lot of disc jockeys and record fans around the country thought I was black.”[119]
Written by Domino, “Ain’t It a Shame” was arranged by Dave Bartholomew, who had returned to Imperial in 1952 and would continue to collaborate with Domino for decades. The song’s “Yancey Special” riff, as played by guitarist Walter “Papoose” Nelson, has an up-to-date feel, as does the jaunty tenor saxophone solo by Herb Hardesty, but the most strikingly contemporary touch is Domino’s stop-time phrasing at the beginning of each verse. At the same session, Domino modernized Big Bill Broonzy’s “All by Myself” with a bouncy New Orleans second-line rhythm that he would use again on such songs as “I’m in Love Again,” a Top 5 pop and No. 1 R&B hit in 1956, and the ska-like “My Girl Josephine,” from 1960.
With “Ain’t It a Shame,” Domino became the first black rock ’n’ roll artist to connect with a mass white audience, preceding Chuck Berry and Little Richard. In the fall of 1955, he recorded two songs with a distinct country-western sound: “I Can’t Go On,” a takeoff on Berry’s “Maybellene,” was an R&B hit, while “Bo Weevil,” featuring a mandolin-like guitar solo by Ernest McLean, crossed over to the pop charts and was covered by the white pop singer Teresa Brewer. Adding a second-line beat to a pair of to a pair of old standards, Domino crossed over again in 1956 with “My Blue Heaven,” a 1928 smash for Gene Austin, and “When My Dreamboat Comes Home,” a 1937 hit for Guy Lombardo that Kay Starr revived in 1953.
Together with Ruth Brown, Little Richard, the Cadillacs, the Clovers, and Little Willie John, Domino performed for mostly black audiences on the touring “Rhythm and Blues Show of 1956”; later the same year, he performed for mostly white audiences on Alan Freed’s nine-day “Rock N Roll Second Anniversary” show at the Brooklyn Paramount, along with Big Joe Turner, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the Cleftones, the Harptones, the Moonglows, and the Penguins. Also in 1956, he appeared on the televised Steve Allen Show and Ed Sullivan Show and in the movies Shake, Rattle and Rock! and The Girl Can’t Help It.
In June 1956, Domino cut “Blueberry Hill,” which had been recorded in 1940 by Sammy Kaye, Gene Krupa, Glenn Miller, Kay Kyser, Russ Morgan, Gene Autry, Connee Boswell, and Jimmy Dorsey and in 1949 by Louis Armstrong with the white bandleader Gordon Jenkins. Domino’s keyboard introduction has the sort of slicked-up country flavor that pianist Floyd Cramer would soon make part of the Nashville sound; the rest of the song is propelled by a sharp backbeat and a strong “Yancey Special” vamp, played in octaves on guitar and bass, with rhythmic triplets played together on piano and cymbal. It’s a masterly arrangement by Dave Bartholomew, who excelled at varying the instrumentation of the same few basic motifs so that similar songs sounded slightly different. But Bartholomew did not think much of the recording, and “Blueberry Hill,” slapped together out of unfinished takes, was released as the B-side of “Honey Chile.”[120] It turned out to be Domino’s biggest hit, covered by Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, Little Richard, and many others.
The year 1957 was a high point for Domino. He made television appearances on The Perry Como Show and Dick Clark’s new American Bandstand, filmed a performance for the movie The Big Beat, and toured North America twice with Irvin Feld’s “The Biggest Show of Stars”—first in the spring with an all-black program featuring Bill Doggett, LaVern Baker, Clyde McPhatter, and Chuck Berry and then in the fall on an integrated bill that included Buddy Holly and the Crickets, the Everly Brothers, Eddie Cochran, and Paul Anka. Domino also played Alan Freed’s “Christmas Jubilee of Stars,” along with Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, and a dozen other top rock acts; over Lewis’s objections, Domino closed the show.[121]
Domino scored nearly a dozen pop and rhythm-and-blues hits in 1957 (mostly but not all the same ones on both charts). Sporting a habanera horn line and piano triplets, “Blue Monday” became a No. 1 R&B hit after being featured in The Girl Can’t Help It; cut almost two years later, “I’m Walkin’,” with Earl Palmer drumming a furious parade-ground backbeat, was also a 1957 R&B chart-topper. Ricky Nelson made his musical debut singing “I’m Walkin’” on his family’s TV show, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and the record that followed was his first hit. Nelson made a much more credible rocker than Pat Boone, but his “I’m Walkin’” couldn’t rival the intensity of Domino’s original. A June 1957 Time magazine article on Domino reported that “his reputation rivals that of Elvis Presley with rock ’n’ roll fans,” but Lew Chudd, taking note of Presley’s visual allure, signed Nelson, a handsome white teenager, to Imperial in August.[122]
Domino’s career began to wind down in 1958, as Chudd pressured him to record more pop-oriented material, but he still had a half-dozen R&B and pop hits, including the timeless rocker “Whole Lotta Loving.” In 1959, with Elvis Presley in the army, Buddy Holly killed in a plane crash, and Alan Freed caught up in a payola scandal, Domino continued to score hits, including a pair of old standards, “When the Saints Go Marching In” and “Margie,” that made the pop but not R&B charts, as well as the rock ’n’ roll classics “I’m Ready,” “I Want to Walk You Home,” and “I’m Gonna Be a Wheel Some Day,” the last a rhythm-and-blues chart-topper.
Accompanied only by a rhythm section, Domino celebrates rock ’n’ roll to a torrid second-line beat on “I’m Ready” (“I’m ready, I’m willin’, and I’m able to rock ’n’ roll all night”), with handclapped rhythms counterpointing the drums in Afro-Caribbean style. The lyrics (“Don’t send me no letter ’cause I can’t read”) underscore the music’s visceral impact, at opposite poles from the intellectual rock that would emerge in the 1960s.[123] “I Want to Walk You Home,” a rudimentary tune with a relatively orthodox boogie bass line in place of Domino’s customary habanera vamp, was his final No. 1 R&B hit. The flip side, “I’m Gonna Be a Wheel Some Day,” had been submitted by the Louisiana songwriter Roy Hayes to Dave Bartholomew, who first produced it in 1957 for Imperial with the New Orleans R&B singer Bobby Mitchell and his band, the Toppers.
The contrast between Mitchell’s stiff reading and Domino’s easy delivery—as well as the much livelier rhythms of Domino’s studio band—helps explain Domino’s enduring appeal. In a sense, he was the anti-Elvis, with his unimpressive appearance, unassuming personality, and unaffected musicianship, yet his artless singing and piano playing conveys the spirit of rock ’n’ roll with a deep-dyed authenticity few others could match. Although fights and even riots had broken out at his shows almost from the beginning of his career, he was seen as nonthreatening, an artist who won audiences over with his musical ingenuousness rather than personal charisma.
In the 1960s, Domino had more than twice as many pop as R&B hits, including covers of old standards and country songs. He made the pop Top 10 for the last time in 1960 when Bartholomew added strings to his production of Bobby Charles’s ruefully nostalgic composition “Walking to New Orleans.” Domino reached the No. 2 spot on Billboard’s R&B chart in 1961 with “Let the Four Winds Blow,” which he’d written with Bartholomew but which Bartholomew had first recorded under his own name as “Four Winds” in 1955; Bartholomew also produced Roy Brown’s hit version in 1957. Roy Montrell’s clipped guitar chords give Domino’s “Let the Four Winds Blow” the feeling of second-line ska.
Domino switched to the ABC-Paramount label in 1963, scoring several minor hits through 1964. After a stint on Mercury, he had one more hit in 1968 with a cover of the Beatles’ “Lady Madonna,” a song originally inspired by Domino.[124] Although his heyday was over, he never fell from fame, and he continued to tour and record, maintaining a tight band as younger players gradually replaced the veterans. He headlined rock ’n’ roll revival shows, played Las Vegas, performed in Europe and Japan (he was especially popular in England), and cut albums for Mercury, Reprise, Atlantic, United Artists, and other labels. In 1980 he appeared in the movie Any Which Way You Can, starring Clint Eastwood; Domino had his final hit when his soundtrack recording of “Whiskey Heaven” was released as a single and made the country charts.
Domino pared down his touring and recording schedule in the 1980s and 1990s, spending more and more time at home in New Orleans. One of the few early R&B artists who retained his royalty rights, he was able to live comfortably on the proceeds from his many reissue albums. When he did perform, however, he was still able to summon up the old magic, his rhythmic grooves and New Orleans drawl as irresistible as ever. He was in the first group of artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, and he was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987, although he’d never been nominated for a regular Grammy. In 1993, he released a rare major-label album, Christmas Is a Special Day, on EMI. Fears that he’d perished during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, followed by news of his rescue, brought Domino more attention than he’d had in decades. Showered with additional honors, he rebounded with the 2006 album Alive and Kickin’, recorded mostly before the hurricane, and with a 2007 performance at Tipitina’s in New Orleans.
Lloyd Price is another New Orleanian who made a successful transition from rhythm-and-blues to rock ’n’ roll. Born in the suburb of Kenner, Louisiana, he sang along with the records of Louis Jordan, Charles Brown, Amos Milburn, and Rosco Gordon on the jukebox of his parents’ shop, then formed a band in high school. According to Lew Chudd, the teenage Price was singing at the Hideaway in New Orleans, accompanied by Fats Domino, when he visited in 1949, but Chudd was only interested in Domino.[125] Three years later, Dave Bartholomew heard Price singing a song he’d made up, based on a catchphrase used by the local radio disc jockey James “Okey Dokey” Smith, and invited Price to audition for Art Rupe, who was making his first trip to New Orleans in search of new talent. By Rupe’s account, Price began to cry when told that Rupe only had time to listen to one song, but Rupe was so impressed by Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” that he canceled his flight to Los Angeles and stayed in New Orleans to record it.[126] By Price’s account, Rupe returned to New Orleans some weeks later for the recording.[127]
In March 1952, Price cut “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” with Dave Bartholomew’s band at Cosimo Matassa’s studio. Sitting in on piano, Fats Domino plays the distinctive introduction, after which Price shouts essentially the same melody as on Domino’s “The Fat Man,” with drummer Earl Palmer playing a heavy, shuffling backbeat. The record was a long-running No. 1 R&B hit, and though it never made the pop charts, it is said to have sold unusually well to whites.[128] Elvis Presley recorded “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” in 1956, and it was issued on the flip side of his “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” Roy Orbison’s Teen Kings group and Frankie Valli’s Four Lovers group also cut “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” in 1956, and Price’s cousin Larry Williams included it on his 1959 album Here’s Larry Williams. Many others covered the song in the ensuing years, among them Little Richard, the Beatles (in a medley from the 1970 film Let It Be), Led Zeppelin (in concert, 1970–1972), Fats Domino, and Bill Haley.
Recording again with Bartholomew’s band, Price reused the “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” melody on his 1952 hit “Restless Heart,” which was outsold by its flip side, “Oooh-Oooh-Oooh.” Price had another double-sided hit for Specialty in 1953 with the remarkably percussive “Tell Me Pretty Baby” (from the same session that yielded “Oooh-Oooh-Oooh”), backed with “Ain’t It a Shame,” which despite its New Orleans–style piano triplets and “Yancey Special” bass line was recorded in Los Angeles. But then Price was drafted and spent two years in the army, mostly in Korea and Japan, his career on hold. He returned in late 1955, just as Little Richard’s first hit, “Tutti-Frutti,” entered Billboard’s R&B chart. Ironically, it was Price who was responsible for putting Richard in touch with Art Rupe, but after a few new singles failed to chart, Price and Specialty parted company.[129]
Price then founded his own KRC (Kent Record Company) label in Washington, D.C., which in January 1957 issued its first single, Price’s “Just Because.” Price later admitted to have borrowed the melody from the New Orleans rhythm-and-blues duo Shirley & Lee, evidently from their 1956 Aladdin release “A Little Word,” which is based on the famous aria “Caro nome” from Verdi’s 1851 opera Rigoletto.[130] As Price tells it, Larry Williams, who got his start as Price’s chauffeur and valet, took “Just Because” to Art Rupe in Los Angeles, claiming to have written it, and recorded it for Specialty. But according to the Specialty producer Bumps Blackwell, Williams covered the song at Rupe’s instigation.[131] Unable to compete with the larger label, Price leased his record to ABC-Paramount, whose rerelease of “Just Because” made both the R&B and pop charts, outselling Williams’s Specialty disc, which only charted R&B.
Rupe quickly pressed Williams into service as a less flamboyant Little Richard imitator. Williams had already cut the rock ’n’ roll hits “Short Fat Fannie” and “Bony Moronie”—as well as “Slow Down,” later popularized by the Beatles—by the fall of 1957, when Richard renounced rock ’n’ roll to pursue religion. Williams had one more hit the following year, “Dizzy, Miss Lizzy,” which was also covered by the Beatles; the two sides of another 1958 Williams single, “Bad Boy” and “She Said Yeah,” were covered respectively by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. But though he continued to record for a number of labels after Specialty dropped him following a narcotics arrest in 1959, he would not have another hit until 1967, when his collaboration with Johnny “Guitar” Watson on “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” charted. As the West Coast producer for the OKeh label, Williams fashioned a couple of albums for Little Richard, who had returned to secular music. From the late 1960s to the late 1970s, he withdrew from the music scene, involving himself in drugs and prostitution, but did act in a few movies. Around 1977, he threatened to shoot Little Richard over a drug debt.[132] In 1978, he released a poorly received funk album on Fantasy, with songs such as “Bony Moronie (Disco Queen).” In 1980, he was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head at his Los Angeles home.
After “Just Because,” Lloyd Price reorganized his KRC label, signing a distribution deal with Atlantic’s Atco subsidiary; he cut several singles, but none was successful, so in 1958 he agreed to record directly for ABC-Paramount. Late that year, he released his “Stagger Lee,” a slick arrangement of the folk song “Stagolee” featuring the Ray Charles Singers, a white chorus that chants “Go, Stagger Lee!” Both lyrics and melody are similar to those on the New Orleans pianist Archibald’s 1950 R&B hit “Stack-A’Lee,” and Archibald ultimately succeeded in winning a share of the composer’s credit, along with Price and his manager, Harold Logan—a valuable acknowledgement, as the record, originally intended as the B-side of “You Need Love,” was a No. 1 smash on both the pop and R&B charts.
Price next charted in 1959 with “Where Were You (on Our Wedding Day)?” which was covered by Billy Joel for the soundtrack of the 1999 movie Runaway Bride. He followed with the even more mainstream-oriented “Personality” and “I’m Gonna Get Married,” both arranged by Don Costa (who would win recognition as an arranger for Frank Sinatra) and featuring the Ray Charles Singers; both were No. 1 R&B and Top 5 pop hits, but “Personality” is much better remembered and became Price’s signature song. A string of lesser hits in the same poppy mold followed, but though some dozen of his ABC-Paramount sides made the charts between 1958 and 1960, none did subsequently. After another couple of years, Price formed his own Double-L label, scoring a pair of hits in late 1963 and early 1964 with an oddly phrased version of the jazz standard “Misty” and an adaptation of “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?” titled “Billie Baby.” But Price had no further hits on Double-L, which folded in the mid-1960s, nor on Monument, Reprise, Hurd, Ludix, or JAD, for which he also recorded during that decade.
In the late 1960s, Price opened his own Midtown Manhattan nightclub and formed another record label, both called Lloyd Price’s Turntable. In 1969, he had a minor hit on Turntable, “Bad Conditions,” recorded in Jamaica in a psychedelic-soul style inspired by the Temptations’ “Cloud Nine.” But then Harold Logan was murdered, and Price, who’d previously traveled to Ghana on business, began spending time in Africa. During this period, Price met Don King, with whom he would promote the “Rumble in the Jungle” championship boxing match between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali in the Congo in 1974; Price also produced the Zaire 74 music festival, which was documented in the 2008 film Soul Power. He recorded for a number of labels in the 1970s, then moved to Lagos, Nigeria, returning to the United States in 1984. In 1993, he toured Europe with Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and Gary U.S. Bonds; in the 2000s, he performed in the “Four Kings of Rhythm and Blues” tour with Jerry Butler, Gene Chandler, and Ben E. King. He published a biography written by his associate William “Dollar Bill” Waller, Lawdy Miss Clawdy: The True King of the 50’s, The Lloyd Price Story, in 2010 and planned to stage a musical based on the book.
Eddie and Leo Mesner of Aladdin Records made their first trip to New Orleans in the fall of 1951, ahead of Art Rupe. In 1952, Cosimo Matassa played Eddie a demo tape that a group of teenage singers had paid him two dollars to record. Mesner recruited the lead singers, Shirley Goodman and Leonard Lee, to redo their song, “I’m Gone,” for Aladdin that June with Dave Bartholomew’s band.[133] Riding a distinctive “Yancey Special”–like bass line that Bo Diddley would reuse on his 1959 hit “I’m Sorry,” “I’m Gone” alternates Lee’s down-to-earth tenor with Goodman’s shrill soprano, creating a sort of lovers’ dialogue—an approach later copied on Jamaican ska and reggae records. “I’m Gone” was a No. 2 R&B hit for Shirley & Lee, as the duo was credited. Although their real-life relationship was strictly platonic, they were billed as the Sweethearts of the Blues, and they continued their lyrical courtship on songs such as “Shirley Come Back to Me,” “Shirley’s Back,” and “The Proposal,” all with similar bass lines. But they didn’t chart again until 1955, when they cut the No. 2 R&B hit “Feel So Good,” which extends the romantic theme and responsive format of the preceding singles but with a different, descending bass line and in a more exultant mood. The white singer Johnny Preston had a pop hit in 1960 with a cover version titled “Feel So Fine.”
“Feel So Good” set the stage for Shirley & Lee’s “Let the Good Times Roll,” a No. 1 R&B smash that crossed over to the pop charts in 1956. “Let the Good Times Roll” borrows the introductory riff from “Feel So Good” but uses it more extensively, along with a more conventional boogie bass line. With its rollicking Lee Allen saxophone solo, the record has a strong New Orleans feel, but the song has become more than just a Crescent City anthem, covered by everyone from Conway Twitty to Barbra Streisand to the Animals; the Philadelphia singer/producer Bunny Sigler had a pop and R&B hit in 1967 with “Let the Good Times Roll & Feel So Good.” Shirley & Lee’s next hit, “I Feel Good,” crossed over from R&B to pop later in 1956, but their popularity diminished thereafter, and they released their last Aladdin single in 1959. They had a few minor hits for the short-lived Warwick label, including a 1960 remake of “Let the Good Times Roll,” and cut several records for Imperial, but by 1963 they had broken up.
Shirley Goodman moved to Los Angeles, where she sang on sessions for Dr. John, the Rolling Stones, and others. She recorded with Jessie Hill as Shirley & Jessie and with Brenton Wood as Shirley and Alfred, again alternating rather than harmonizing with her male partner. Leonard Lee remained in New Orleans, recording for such labels as Broadmoor and Trumpet. In 1972, the two reunited for an oldies concert at Madison Square Garden. In 1974, Sylvia Robinson invited Goodman to record for Robinson’s Vibration label; the result was “Shame, Shame, Shame,” credited to Shirley (And Company)—a No. 1 R&B hit in 1975 that crossed over to the pop charts and spurred the nascent disco craze. After another minor hit or two, Goodman moved back to New Orleans and withdrew from the music scene. Lee, who’d become a social worker, died of a heart attack in 1976, at the age of forty. Goodman engaged Lee’s survivors in a long legal battle over the composer’s royalties for “Let the Good Times Roll”; having suffered a stroke, she moved to California, dying some ten years later in 2005.
Although he grew up in Macon, Georgia, Little Richard recorded most of his classic rock ’n’ roll hits at Cosimo Matassa’s studio in New Orleans, accompanied by musicians from Dave Bartholomew’s band. Born Richard Penniman, he sang gospel songs as a youth; his favorite singer was Sister Rosetta Tharpe, but he took his falsetto whoops from another gospel diva, Marion Williams. As a teenager, he began singing in traveling minstrel and medicine shows, sometimes dressed as a woman. At a theater in Atlanta, he met Billy Wright, a local blues shouter who had several national R&B hits between 1949 and 1951. By Richard’s admission, he was heavily influenced by Wright, who wailed the blues like Roy Brown and wore makeup, loud clothing, and a high-piled hairdo.[134]
Around the same time, Richard also met a flamboyant singer, Esquerita (né S. Q. Reeder), who taught him to play piano. Wright put him in touch with the white Atlanta rhythm-and-blues disc jockey Zenas “Daddy” Sears, who got him a contract with RCA Victor. Little Richard cut four sides for the label at an Atlanta radio studio in October 1951, backed by the trumpeter Roy “Willie” Mays’s band; one of them, “Every Hour,” became a regional hit, helped by airplay from Sears. The flip side, “Taxi Blues,” contains an eight-bar couplet on the bridge—“I can’t stand to see my gal tonight / When I beat her up, she’s an awful sight”—that’s set to the same melody as the verses of “Blue Suede Shoes.” On these tracks, Richard copies Wright’s style; Wright reciprocated by covering “Every Hour,” altering the lyrics and changing the title to “Every Evenin’.”
Little Richard did a second RCA session in the same jump-blues vein in January 1952, but it produced no hits, so he returned to Macon and performed in clubs. After his father was killed, he took a day job washing dishes but soon became the lead tenor in a vocal-harmony quartet called the Tempo Toppers, who were accompanied on trumpet, organ, and drums by a married couple calling themselves the Duces of Rhythm. Booked around the South by the Macon promoter and club owner Clint Brantley (or Brantly), the Tempo Toppers sojourned in New Orleans, where Richard absorbed the influence of Earl King, then moved on to Houston, where Don Robey signed them to Peacock, possibly at Lloyd Price’s instigation.[135] In February 1953, the Tempo Toppers recorded four sides, backed by the Duces of Rhythm and Roy Montrell’s band. Blending blues with gospel music and doo-wop, songs such as the Dominoes-influenced “Fool at the Wheel” (“Slippin’ and slidin’ all over the road / because he’s drivin’ a brand new Ford”), while not full-fledged rock ’n’ roll, certainly qualify as proto-rock. But Little Richard’s mature style, if one can call it that, is hardly in evidence.
Richard had a rocky relationship with Don Robey, who once beat him so badly he later need a hernia operation.[136] Still, Robey afforded him another studio session in October 1953, where he recorded his last four sides for Peacock with Johnny Otis’s band and without the Tempo Toppers. Not released until 1956, after his breakthrough with “Tutti-Frutti” on Specialty, “Little Richard’s Boogie” is more jump-blues than boogie-woogie, with a boogie bass line that’s mostly tacit. The flip side, Richard’s composition “Directly from My Heart to You,” has the same melody as his classic 1957 hit “Lucille,” only slower. The shuffling blues “I Love My Baby,” backed with the ballad “Maybe I’m Right,” was not released until 1957, by which time Richard had already rerecorded “Maybe I’m Right” and “Directly from My Heart to You” for Specialty.
Parting with Peacock, Little Richard formed his own band, the Upsetters, and toured the South for Clint Brantley performing songs by Roy Brown, Fats Domino, B. B. King, Little Walter, and Billy Wright, plus such originals as “Tutti-Frutti.”[137] In 1954, Richard and the Upsetters accompanied the Nashville singer Christine Kittrell on a pair of driving rhythm-and-blues sides for the Republic label, “Lord Have Mercy (I’m So Lonely)” and “Call His Name.” After meeting Lloyd Price, Richard made a demo tape of the gospelly ballads “Wonderin’” and “She’s My Star” (or “He’s My Star”) and sent it to Specialty, where the Seattle-born African American producer Bumps Blackwell heard it and urged Art Rupe to sign Richard. “The songs were not out-and-out gospel, but I could tell by the tone of his voice and all those churchy turns that he was a gospel singer who could sing the blues,” Blackwell remembered. “And that’s what Art Rupe had told me to find.”[138]
Although Little Richard was based in Macon and Specialty in Los Angeles, the label decided to record him in New Orleans with a studio band including Lee Allen and Red Tyler on saxophones, Justin Adams on guitar, Frank Fields on Bass, and Earl Palmer on drums. “They were Fats Domino’s session men,” said Bumps Blackwell.[139] On his first two Specialty dates, September 13 and 14 of 1955, Richard began by cutting gospelly material such as “Wonderin’” and the Dorothy LaBostrie composition “I’m Just a Lonely Guy” and blues such as Leiber and Stoller’s “Kansas City” and Richard’s own “All Night Long.” Here his voice sounds rougher and more emphatic than on his Peacock or RCA records, but except on the shuffling “Kansas City,” complete with falsetto whoops, the sound is more soul than rock ’n’ roll.
As Blackwell tells it, “Tutti-Frutti” was the last song recorded at the September sessions, since LaBostrie needed time to rewrite the lyrics.[140] The original words, “Tutti frutti, good booty / If it don’t fit, don’t force it / You can grease it, make it easy,” apparently refer to anal sex, although they may derive from Barrel House Annie’s “If It Don’t Fit (Don’t Force It),” which avoids anal insinuations but was still too raunchy to release when it was recorded in 1937. LaBostrie, however, claimed she came up with the song on her own. “Little Richard didn’t write none of ‘Tutti Fruitti’ [sic],” she told the writer Jeff Hannusch.[141] But Phil Walden, who co-founded Capricorn Records, recalled seeing Richard perform “Tutti-Frutti,” with the refrain “Tutti frutti, good booty,” at a show in Macon around 1953.[142] “Tutti-Frutti” was the only song from Richard’s September 1955 sessions where he played piano; the others featured Huey Smith.
Facing tough competition from the Platters’ “The Great Pretender” and the Cadillacs’ “Speedoo,” Little Richard’s “Tutti-Frutti” topped out at No. 2 on Billboard’s rhythm-and-blues chart. It also made the pop Top 20 but was quickly eclipsed by Pat Boone’s cover version, for which the British-born songwriter Joe Lubin was hired to further scrub the already cleaned-up lyrics. For example, Lubin replaced “She knows how to love me, yes indeed / Boy, you don’t know what she do to me” with “She’s a real gone cookie, yessiree / Pretty little Susie is the gal for me.” The beat behind Boone is much stiffer than on the original, but ultimately it’s his foursquare singing that gives his version its flat-footed feel. Elvis Presley, singing LaBostrie’s lyrics, is much more convincing on his version of “Tutti-Frutti,” released in March 1956 on his first album, Elvis Presley. Yet even Elvis can’t match Little Richard’s vocal richness or effortless fervor—Richard’s, after all, was the voice that inspired Otis Redding and James Brown.
Arriving before Carl Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes” or Presley’s “Hound Dog,” “Tutti-Frutti” helped define the rock ’n’ roll sound, raising the bar for rock intensity—what seemed at the time to be mere wildness, although every note is firmly controlled. It also transformed Little Richard from gospel-blues shouter to rock ’n’ roller, setting the frantic tone for his ensuing hits. His next hit, recorded in February 1956 with Edgar Blanchard replacing Justin Adams on guitar, was the even more frenetic “Long Tall Sally,” which Blackwell had Richard accelerate in order to keep the likes of Pat Boone from covering it—unsuccessfully, as it turned out. According to Blackwell, a teenage girl from Mississippi named Enortis Johnson had written crude lyrics—“Saw Uncle John with Long Tall Sally / They saw Aunt Mary comin’ / So they ducked back in the alley”—to which Blackwell and Richard added additional words and a melody.[143]
“Long Tall Sally” was Little Richard’s all-time best seller, topping the R&B charts and making the pop Top 10. With its twelve-bar verse-and-refrain structure, suggesting a hopped-up hokum song, and its chugging beat, similar to the guitar rhythm Chuck Berry would use on such songs as “Sweet Little Sixteen” and “Johnny B. Goode,” “Long Tall Sally” typifies rock ’n’ roll even more than “Tutti-Frutti” does. Like “Tutti-Frutti,” it was covered by both Pat Boone and Elvis Presley: Boone’s rendition, again with bowdlerized lyrics, is even lamer than his “Tutti-Frutti,” and this time Richard outsold him; Presley’s version, released on his second album, Elvis, is much livelier than Boone’s but more strained and less energetic than Richard’s. The Beatles cut “Long Tall Sally” in 1964, with Paul McCartney imitating Richard’s falsetto wail. Others who covered the song include Wanda Jackson, the Kinks, Led Zeppelin, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, and Jerry Lee Lewis.
The flip side of “Long Tall Sally” was “Slippin’ and Slidin’ (Peepin’ and Hidin’),” recorded at the same February 1956 session. Little Richard may have adapted “Slippin’ and Slidin’” from “I’m Wise,” recorded for the Apollo label the same month by singer-pianist Eddie Bo and for Imperial’s subsidiary Post label in January by singer Ruth Durand. Jivier but less nonsensical than “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” “I’m Wise” more explicitly rebukes a cheating lover. Bo and Durand both sing, “Oh, you big conniver, two-timin’ jiver”; Bo follows with, “Been told a long time ago,” Durand with, “Been told that a long time ago.” Richard sings, “Oh, big conniver, nothin’ but a jiver / I done got hip to your jive.” The melody for “I’m Wise” was taken from Al Collins’s 1955 single “I Got the Blues for You,” the very first release on Johnny Vincent’s Ace label, on which Eddie Bo plays piano. But Little Richard also recorded three rough takes of “Slippin’ and Slidin’” in November 1955 that were not issued until many years later.
All the “Slippin’ and Slidin’” variations, from Collins’s to Richard’s, were recorded in New Orleans, all ride habanera bass lines, and all feature similarly shuffling, Latin-like second-line drumbeats, with the backbeat becoming more pronounced on successive versions. Earl Palmer said that “the only reason I started playing what they come to call a rock-and-roll beat came from trying to match Richard’s right hand [on piano]. . . . Little Richard moved from a shuffle to that straight eighth-note feeling.”[144] Palmer claimed to have played a shuffle on “Tutti-Frutti” and then switched to a “rock beat” on subsequent Little Richard sessions. But “Long Tall Sally” and “Slippin’ and Slidin’” clearly exhibit shuffle rhythms, while Palmer’s alleged shuffle on “Tutti-Frutti” is difficult to discern.
The same session that produced “Long Tall Sally” and “Slippin’ and Slidin’” also yielded the relatively relaxed “Miss Ann,” where Earl Palmer plays a backbeat over what he calls Richard’s “straight eighth-note” piano, as well as the raucous “Rip It Up,” with wilder lyrics (“Well, it’s Saturday night and I just got paid / Fool about my money, don’t try to save”) than music. Richard’s next session, in May, produced “Ready Teddy,” faster than “Rip It Up” but similar in melody and lyrics. Both songs were composed by songwriter John Marascalco (with Bumps Blackwell also credited), both feature stop-time sections and Lee Allen saxophone solos, and both were released on the same single, with “Rip It Up” topping Billboard’s R&B chart, “Ready Teddy” making the Top 10, and both crossing over to the pop chart. “Rip It Up” was covered by Bill Haley and Elvis Presley in 1956, by the Everly Brothers in 1958, and by Chuck Berry in 1961, but only Haley’s version charted. Curiously, only the Everly Brothers alter Richard’s line “I’m gonna rock it up, and ball tonight,” changing it to “I’m gonna rock it up, have a ball tonight.” “Ready Teddy” was covered by Presley in 1956, by Buddy Holly in 1957, by Gene Vincent in 1958, and by the British rock idol Cliff Richard in 1959.
At end of July 1956, Little Richard returned to the J&M studio and recorded the frantic “Heebie-Jeebies,” with Lee Allen soloing over Richard’s percussive eighth-note piano. The song, written by John Marascalco and Maybelle Mae Jackson, is derived from “Tutti-Frutti, as evidenced by an alternate take where Richard sings, “wop-bop-a-leema-lama-wop-bobba-loo.” In September, Richard cut “She’s Got It,” a version of his own previously recorded (but subsequently released) composition “I Got It,” a sort of street-vendor’s song that Marascalco reworded for Richard to perform in The Girl Can’t Help It, along with “Ready Teddy” and the title track. The movie has Jayne Mansfield sashaying past a nightclub owner she’s trying to impress just as Richard, on stage with his band, sings the inaccurate description “big blue eyes, long black hair.” At Richard’s insistence, “She’s Got It” was recorded in Los Angeles with his touring group, the re-formed Upsetters. “I told Art Rupe that my band was . . . better than those studio musicians from New Orleans,” he said. “I didn’t see why the Upsetters couldn’t back me on my records the same way as they did on the stage.”[145] Still, the New Orleans studio band on “I Got It”—Edgar Blanchard, Frank Fields, Lee Allen, Red Tyler, and Earl Palmer—rocks considerably harder than the Upsetters on “She’s Got It.” Richard’s voice is the primary instrument on both tracks, carrying not only the melody but much of the rhythm, most noticeably on the stop-time sections. “She’s Got It” is one of the clearest examples of the twelve-bar verse-and-refrain structure in Little Richard’s repertoire, with Richard singing the melody of a boogie-woogie bass line in the third and fourth measures of each verse. It was issued on the same single as “Heebie-Jeebies,” and both sides made the R&B Top 10.
Little Richard’s next session, in New Orleans in October 1956, yielded three rock ’n’ roll classics. The first to be released was “The Girl Can’t Help It,” heard over the opening credits of the movie; written by Bobby Troup, who also wrote “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66,” and recorded with the vocal group the Robins in addition to the usual New Orleans musicians, it made the R&B Top 10 and the pop Top 50 in early 1957. “Jenny, Jenny,” paired on a single with “Miss Ann” (with both songs credited to Little Richard and Enortis Johnson), was released in May 1957 and made the R&B and pop Top 10. “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” credited to Maralasco and Blackwell but with a piano introduction inspired by Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88,” was not released until February 1958 (after an accelerated, Blackwell-produced version by the Valiants, a black vocal quartet, was issued on the Keen label) and also made both charts’ Top 10. All three songs would be repeatedly covered, “The Girl Can’t Help It” by Conway Twitty, Bobby Vee with the Crickets, the Animals, Wayne Fontana, and others; “Jenny, Jenny” by Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Sonics, and, as part of “Jenny Take a Ride,” by Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels; and “Good Golly, Miss Molly” by Jerry Lee Lewis, the Astronauts, the Swinging Blue Jeans, Gene Vincent, the Everly Brothers, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and, adapted into Spanish as “La Plaga” (“The Plague”), by the pioneering Mexican rock band Los Teen Tops.
“Lucille,” recorded with the Upsetters in January 1957 but released before “Jenny, Jenny,” was a No. 1 R&B hit, though it didn’t quite make the pop Top 20. Based on Little Richard’s composition “Directly from My Heart to You,” “Lucille” is credited to Richard and Al Collins, who provided the melody for “Slippin’ and Slidin’.” “Keep A Knockin’,” recorded at the same session as “Lucille” and released a few months after “Jenny, Jenny,” reached the No. 2 spot on the R&B chart and made the pop Top 10. The song was originally credited to Little Richard alone, but shares of the composer’s credit were later given to Bert Mays and to J. Mayo Williams, who produced Mays’s “You Can’t Come In” for Vocalion in 1928. Nevertheless, Richard almost certainly got the idea for “Keep A Knockin’” from Louis Jordan’s 1939 version. Unlike other early versions, Jordan’s contains the verse “I hear you knockin’ but you can’t come in / I know you been drinkin’ gin”; according to Richard’s biographer Charles White, “one verse with the words ‘I’m drinkin’ gin and you can’t come in’ was . . . deleted from [Richard’s] final release.” White also says that the original track, less than a minute long, was repeated more than once to create the record as issued.[146] In any case, Richard’s stripped-down, speeded-up “Keep A Knockin’,” sung in a hoarse shriek to a tune distinct from that of any previous version, is the one best remembered today.
Little Richard had his heyday in 1956 and 1957, when he recorded some sixteen pop and R&B hits, performed in three movies (The Girl Can’t Help It, Don’t Knock the Rock, and Mister Rock and Roll), and headlined rock ’n’ roll package shows. His concerts brought black and white fans together, whipping them into a screaming frenzy. In an era when even a performer as obviously gay as Liberace could deny his homosexuality and get away with it, Richard’s perceived threat to social mores was mainly his sexual appeal to teenage white girls. “We decided that my image should be crazy and way-out,” he said, “so that adults would think I was harmless.”[147]
But at the height of his fame, while touring Australia in October 1957, Little Richard abruptly abandoned rock ’n’ roll to become a preacher. On his return to the United States, he cut one more session for Specialty with the Upsetters, which produced the fiery hit “Ooh! My Soul.” After a farewell concert at the Apollo Theatre, he enrolled at a religious college, toured the U.S. as an evangelist together with Joe Lutcher, and recorded gospel songs for several labels. Although he had stopped performing secular music, he had three hits in 1958, “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” “Ooh! My Soul,” and “Baby Face,” the last a second-line version of the 1926 standard recorded at the same session as “The Girl Can’t Help It,” “Jenny, Jenny,” and “Good Golly, Miss Molly.”
Booked for what he thought would be a gospel-singing tour of England in October 1962, Little Richard was prevailed upon to sing his rock ’n’ roll hits, to the overwhelming approbation of the audience. He finished the tour with the up-and-coming Beatles as his opening act, then spent a month playing clubs in Hamburg, Germany, with the four Liverpudlians who idolized him. He recorded a single secular track for Specialty, keeping open the option of returning to gospel music, before returning to Britain in October 1963, where he toured with the still-little-known Rolling Stones. “I couldn’t believe the power of Little Richard on stage,” said Mick Jagger. “He was amazing.”[148] At the end of the tour, Richard filmed the performance documentary It’s Little Richard for Granada Television.
Back in Los Angeles, Little Richard recorded his final Specialty session in April 1964 with a hornless band including Don “Sugarcane” Harris on bass and violin, Harris’s duo partner Dewey Terry on guitar, and Earl Palmer on drums. The label released the single “Bama Lama Bama Loo,” patterned after Richard’s 1950s hits, but it peaked disappointingly at No. 82 on the Hot 100 chart (Billboard did not publish an R&B chart in 1964). Nevertheless, Richard put a new band together, including the unknown Jimi Hendrix on guitar, and toured the country performing rock ’n’ roll. Signing with Vee-Jay Records, he mostly rerecorded his own and other artists’ old rock hits, but in 1965 he cut the soul-style “I Don’t Know What You’ve Got but It’s Got Me—Part 1,” written by Don Covay. Released not long before Vee-Jay went bankrupt, it was a pop and R&B hit.
Little Richard then recorded a pair of albums for Modern, mostly reprising earlier hits, and another pair for OKeh—one of contemporary material, the other of old hits, both produced by Larry Williams and featuring Johnny “Guitar” Watson. The contemporary album, The Explosive Little Richard, yielded the minor 1966 R&B hit “Poor Dog (Who Can’t Wag His Own Tail),” propelled by a distinctive bass line midway between Motown and funk. In 1967, Richard cut three soul-style singles for Brunswick, but none was successful. He did not record again until 1970, but he maintained a hectic performance schedule, touring throughout North America. Meanwhile, he led an orgiastic lifestyle, drinking heavily and growing increasingly dependent on cocaine.
In 1970, Little Richard cut a swamp-rock album for Reprise, The Rill Thing, which generated two minor hits, “Freedom Blues” and “Greenwood Mississippi.” He also appeared on many television shows that year. In 1971 and 1972, he recorded two more Reprise albums, King of Rock and Roll, including covers of songs by the likes of Hank Williams, Martha and the Vandellas, and the Rolling Stones, and The Second Coming, flavored with New Orleans funk. Without another hit, Richard moved on to the United label, cranking out the quickie soul album Right Now! in 1973. He cut singles for the Greene Mountain, Manticore, and Mainstream labels before recording another new album of his old hits for the “as seen on TV” company K-tel in 1976. Although many of his post-Specialty recordings were in a contemporary rhythm-and-blues vein, his audience, once predominantly black, had become overwhelmingly white.
His paranoia fueled by drug and alcohol abuse, Little Richard returned to religion in 1977 after several people close to him died. Renouncing sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, he traveled the country as an evangelist and bible salesman. In 1979, he recorded a gospel album, God’s Beautiful City, for the World label. Setting spiritual lyrics to a rock ’n’ roll beat, he cowrote the quasi-religious song “Great Gosh A’Mighty! (It’s a Matter of Time)” with organist Billy Preston; featured in the 1986 movie Down and Out in Beverley Hills, it was Richard’s final hit.[149] In 1989, he sang “Lucille” at an AIDS benefit hosted by Cher, marking his return to rock.
In the 1990s, Little Richard cut a children’s album for Walt Disney Records and appeared in movies, television shows, and music videos. He remained active through the following decade, performing live, making television appearances (including commercials), and recording album tracks. In 2009, he underwent hip surgery. Although he sings rock ’n’ roll, he has put debauchery behind him and still sometimes functions as a minister.
His long career notwithstanding, Little Richard’s reputation rests almost entirely on the records he made for Specialty between 1955 and 1957. Together with Fats Domino’s hits, these gave early rock ’n’ roll a distinct New Orleans tinge. But Richard’s gritty, pitch-perfect voice, conveying rhythm as much as melody, trumps his instrumental accompaniment and transcends geography.
No one, not even Elvis Presley, had a greater impact on the sound of rock ’n’ roll than Little Richard, whose songs were covered by Bill Haley, Carl Perkins, Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, Gene Vincent, and Jerry Lee Lewis, as well as Presley and Pat Boone. Among the better-known black artists who imitated Richard, besides Larry Williams, were Etta James, whose “Tough Lover” was issued in 1956; Marvin Phillips of the duo Marvin and Johnny, who released “Have Mercy Miss Percy” under the name Long Tall Marvin in 1956; Richard Berry, who recorded “Yama Yama Pretty Mama” in 1956; Lowell Fulson, who recorded “Rock This Morning” in late 1957; Dee Clark, who did “24 Boy Friends” in 1957 and “Oh, Little Girl” (accompanied by the Upsetters) in 1958; Joe Tex, whose “You Little Baby Face Thing” came out in 1958; Don Covay, who joined Richard’s entourage in 1957 and released “Rockin’ the Mule” as Pretty Boy in 1958; Otis Redding, who did “Fat Girl” around 1961; and Ike and Tina Turner, whose “This Man’s Crazy” came out in 1963. Lesser-known imitators included Big Danny Oliver, Big Al Downing, Little Ike, Ronnie Molleen, Ba Ba Thomas, Wild Child Gibson, Earl Wade, Rockin’ Bradley, Cledus Harrison, Tommy Louis (aka Kid Thomas), Ricky Ricardo, and Bunker Hill—the last a former gospel singer (born David Walker) whose 1962 recording of “The Girl Can’t Dance” (backed by Link Wray and the Raymen) is so raucous that, in the words of one listener, “This guy makes Little Richard sound like Pat Boone.”[150] (Screamin’ Jay Hawkins cut what sounds like a Little Richard imitation, which wasn’t released for decades, but in fact his recording of “What That Is” dates from January 1955, eight months before Richard’s “Tutti-Frutti” and twenty months before Hawkins’s breakthrough hit, “I Put a Spell on You.”)
Unlike Fats Domino, whose brand of rhythm-and-blues was simply reclassified as rock ’n’ roll when that term gained currency, Little Richard abruptly switched from jump blues to rock ’n’ roll when he recorded “Tutti-Frutti.” By then, Bill Haley, Domino, and Chuck Berry had already broken through with “Rock Around the Clock,” “Ain’t It a Shame,” and “Maybellene”; Elvis Presley’s first national hit, “Baby Let’s Play House,” had already made the country charts, although his first national pop hit, “Heartbreak Hotel,” had yet to be released. But Richard’s “Tutti-Frutti” sounded wilder than any previous rock song. Pat Boone’s toned-down version helped raise awareness of Richard’s original, even as it cut into Richard’s sales. Presley, the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, gave the song his royal imprimatur by covering it after Richard’s and Boone’s records had already been released. But Presley could not eclipse Richard as he had Big Boy Crudup or Big Mama Thornton.
Contrary to the opinion of Little Richard’s biographer David Kirby, Richard did not give birth to rock ’n’ roll, though he did raise its energy level to a degree seldom, if ever, equaled since.[151] Following World War II, rhythm-and-blues songs with verse-and-refrain hokum structures, backbeats, shuffle rhythms, boogie-woogie bass lines, and other characteristics of early rock ’n’ roll became prevalent; after Wynonie Harris’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” songs with the word “rock” in the title and/or lyrics proliferated. By the early 1950s, the sound that would soon be known as rock ’n’ roll was solidly established.
When rock ’n’ roll made its bombshell impact on the white pop market in 1955, the music’s rudimentary phase as a form of rhythm-and-blues ended. Rock songs, by white as well as black artists, attracted black listeners for a few more years; for example, Elvis Presley’s “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear” and “Jailhouse Rock,” Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On,” Paul Anka’s “Diana,” Jimmie Rodgers’s “Honeycomb,” and the Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up Little Susie” were all No. 1 R&B hits in 1957. But with the rise of soul music in the 1960s, rock songs and white artists practically vanished from the R&B charts.
The black rock ’n’ roll era, beginning at least half a dozen years before the white one, lasted little more than a decade, divided almost evenly between pre- and post-Elvis periods. The black rock artists who, like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, or the Coasters, emerged after Presley, or who, like Fats Domino and Little Richard, continued to have hits after Presley’s rise, remain well-known today. Those whose peak years preceded Presley, such as Joe and Jimmy Liggins, Amos Milburn, Wynonie Harris, and the Orioles, have been largely forgotten. Yet it was during the pre-Elvis years that the foundations of rock ’n’ roll were laid, and a good deal of the superstructure erected. While not all postwar rhythm-and-blues qualifies as rock ’n’ roll, much of it is rock in all but name. The distinction between the two genres—at that time, at least—seems mainly racial.
1. Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 391.
2. Arnold Shaw, Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues (New York: Collier/Macmillan, 1978), 89, 195.
3. Herb Abramson, “The Birth of Rhythm and Blues,” Rhythm and Blues, December 1952, quoted in Big Al Pavlow, The R&B Book: A Disc-History of Rhythm & Blues (Providence, RI: Music House Publishing, 1983), 16.
4. Ed Pickering and Jim Dawson, “Bronze,” Goldmine, May 12, 1995, 48, 52.
5. “Central Avenue Sounds: Leroy Hurte,” interview by Steven L. Isoardi, tape number 1, side 2 (July 12, 1995), 46, 47, http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb4m3nb6cj;NAAN=13030&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00016&toc.depth=1&toc.id=&brand=calisphere.
6. M. H. Orodenker, “Pop Record Reviews,” Billboard, January 6, 1945, 69.
7. Jim Dawson and Steve Propes, What Was the First Rock ’n’ Roll Record? (Winchester, MA: Faber and Faber, 1992), 5, 6.
8. Shaw, Honkers and Shouters, 183, 184; Sherrie Tucker, “West Coast Women: A Jazz Genealogy,” Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology 8, no. 1 (Winter 1996/1997): 9, 11, www.ethnomusic.ucla.edu/pre/Vol1-10/Vol1-10pdf/PREvol8.pdf. Rupe probably did not name the Sepia Tones, originally an all-female trio comprising violinist Ginger Smock, pianist Mata Roy, and organist Nina Russell. The Sepia Tones group that recorded for Juke Box, however, was apparently a quartet, with Roy, Russell, clarinetist and tenor saxophonist Paul Howard, and drummer George Vann. Before Roy Milton joined the label, Vann also recorded for Juke Box as “The Blues Man,” singing to the accompaniment of the other Sepia Tones, while Marion Abernathy recorded as “The Blues Woman,” backed by the Buddy Banks Sextet.
9. Ted Hallock, “Roy Milton’s One Squeal Shy of Jordan, a Beat from Hamp,” Down Beat, May 21, 1952, 16.
10. “Coca in Calypso,” Music, Time, January 29, 1945, 75.
11. “Rum and Coca-Cola” had been written in 1943 by the Trinidadian calypso singer Lord Invader, using a melody borrowed from “L’Année Passée,” a song written in French Creole as early as 1906 by the Trinidadian bandleader Lionel Belasco. Later in 1943, the American comedian Morey Amsterdam, now remembered mostly for his 1960s television role on The Dick Van Dyke Show, heard “Rum and Coca-Cola” while entertaining American servicemen stationed in Trinidad. (The song is a veiled commentary about Trinidadian women prostituting themselves for the Yankee troops.) Returning to New York, Amsterdam gave “Rum and Coca-Cola” to the singer Jeri Sullavan [sic], who introduced it in her nightclub act. Amsterdam then copyrighted it his own name; following the Andrews Sisters’ smash, however, he agreed to share the publishing credits with Sullavan and her arranger, Paul Baron. Lord Invader and Lionel Belasco each filed suit for copyright infringement, and in separate trials (with Belasco’s case argued by the famous attorney Louis Nizer), both prevailed. But as part of the settlement, Amsterdam paid to retain the copyright.
12. Chip Deffaa, Blue Rhythms: Six Lives in Rhythm and Blues (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 110.
13. Ray Charles and David Ritz, Brother Ray: Ray Charles’ Own Story, 2nd pbk. ed. (New York: Da Capo Press, 2003 [orig. Dial Press, 1978]), 44.
14. Deffaa, Blue Rhythms, 122.
15. Norbert Hess, “Obituaries: Amos Milburn,” Living Blues, Spring 1980, 92.
16. Steve Tracy, “That Chicken Shack Boogie Man,” Blues Unlimited, July 1971, 7, 8.
17. Nick Tosches, Unsung Heroes of Rock ’n’ Roll (New York: Scribner’s, 1984), 52.
18. Pete Welding, liner notes to The Original Johnny Otis Show, Savoy 2230 (1978).
19. Lionel Hampton with James Haskins, Hamp: An Autobiography, 1st pbk. ed. (New York: Amistad Press, 1993 [orig. Warner Books, 1989]), 90. Herbie Fields played in Lionel Hampton’s band in 1945. According to Hampton, Fields was “the first white cat I had in my band. When we performed onstage, he wore makeup to darken his face so he didn’t stand out so much.”
20. Shaw, Honkers and Shouters, 161.
21. Shaw, Honkers and Shouters, 168; Tony Douglas, Jackie Wilson: The Man, The Music, The Mob (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2001 [orig. published as Lonely Teardrops: The Jackie Wilson Story, London: Sanctuary Publishing, 1997; also published as Jackie Wilson: Lonely Teardrops, New York: Routledge, 2005]), 27.
22. Shaw, Honkers and Shouters, 165.
23. George Lipsitz, introduction to Upside Your Head! Rhythm and Blues on Central Avenue, by Johnny Otis (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), xxvii.
24. “Open the Door, Richard,” Music, Time, February 10, 1947, 45.
25. Jim Dawson, Nervous Man Nervous: Big Jay McNeely and the Rise of the Honking Tenor Sax! (Milford, NH: Big Nickel Publications, 1994), 19–21.
26. Ted Fox, Showtime at the Apollo (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983), 96.
27. RJ Smith, “Richard Speaks! Chasing a Tune from the Chitlin Circuit to the Mormon Tabernacle,” This Is Pop, ed. Eric Weisbard (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 79.
28. Dawson and Propes, What Was the First Rock ’n’ Roll Record? 22, 23.
29. Smith, “Richard Speaks!” 82–84.
30. Smith, “Richard Speaks!” 78; Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 303; Frank Cullen with Florence Hackman and Donald McNeilly, Vaudeville, Old and New: An Encyclopedia of Variety Performers in America (New York: Routledge, 2007), 388; “Pigmeat” Markham with Bill Levinson, Here Come the Judge! (New York: Popular Library, 1969), chapter 9, no pagination. Smith, citing a 1947 story in the Baltimore Afro-American weekly newspaper, gives the 1919 date for Mason’s first performance of the “Open the Door, Richard!” sketch, but Abbott and Seroff note that a new show called Oh You, Mr. Rareback was produced by Bob Russell in 1923. Smith gives 1928 as the date for Bamboola, but Cullen and other sources say it was 1929.
31. Larry Birnbaum, “Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson,” Down Beat, October 1982, 30.
32. Peter Grendysa, “Musin’ with the Moose: Bull Moose Jackson,” Goldmine, November 1979, 16, cited in Jon Hartley Fox, King of the Queen City: The Story of King Records (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 23.
33. Northern Music v. King Record Distributing, 105 F. Supp. 393 (S.D.N.Y. 1952), http://cip.law.ucla.edu/cases/1950-1959/Pages/northernking.aspx.
34. John A. Jackson, Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll (New York: Schirmer/Macmillan, 1991), 42, 43.
35. Teddy Reig with Edward Berger, Reminiscing in Tempo: The Life and Times of a Jazz Hustler (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press and the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, 1990), 98.
36. Reig, Reminiscing in Tempo, 100.
37. Arlette and Hal Singer, Hal Singer: Jazz Roads (Paris: Edition 1, 1990), 283–286; Hal Singer as told to Albert J. McCarthy, “The Hal Singer Story,” Jazz Monthly 4, no. 11 (January 1959): 12, 13, 31.
38. Singer, Hal Singer, 286.
39. Dawson, Nervous Man Nervous, 15.
40. Dawson, Nervous Man Nervous, 11.
41. Dawson, Nervous Man Nervous, 87.
42. Bill Millar, “Big Jim Wynn: Saxman,” Let the Good Times Rock! A Fan’s Notes on Post-War American Roots Music (York, England: Music Mentor Books, 2004 [orig. published in Record Mirror, November 4, 1972]), 167.
43. Clora Bryant, Buddy Collette, William Green, Steven Isoardi, Jack Kelson, Horace Tapscott, Gerald Wilson, and Marl Young, eds., Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 188.
44. Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeek, Jimi Hendrix: Electric Gypsy (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995 [orig. William Heinemann, 1990]), 41.
45. Tosches, Unsung Heroes of Rock ’n’ Roll, 15.
46. John Coltrane with Don DeMicheal, “Coltrane on Coltrane,” Down Beat, September 29, 1960, 26.
47. Larry Birnbaum, “Daddy G!” Reader, June 22, 1984, 12.
48. Ellen Blau with Dick Shurman, “Living Blues Interview: Pee Wee Crayton,” Living Blues, Spring 1983, 11.
49. Jim and Amy O’Neal, “Living Blues Interview: Billy ‘The Kid,’ Emerson,” Living Blues, Spring 1980, 35.
50. Shaw, Honkers and Shouters, 109, 110.
51. Jas Obrecht, “Clarence Gatemouth Brown: 40 Years on the Road as Picker, Fiddler, Bluesman, Jazzer,” Guitar Player, May 1979, 44.
52. Obrecht, “Clarence Gatemouth Brown,” 45. Brown told Obrecht, “I joined an old road band called W. M. Bimbo & The Brownskin Models,” but the only references to W. M. Bimbo are in articles about Brown. There was, however, a well-known touring review called Irvin (or Irwin) C. Miller’s Brown Skin (or Brownskin) Models.
53. Obrecht, “Clarence Gatemouth Brown,” 45; Christopher Wilkinson, Jazz on the Road: Don Albert’s Musical Life, pbk. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 221, 222. Obrecht writes that Brown played at Albert’s club—known as Don’s Keyhole, the Keyhole Club, or the Key Hole—for two years with a twenty-three-piece band led by a French-horn player named Hort Hudge. Other sources—all pertaining to Brown—give the bandleader’s name as Hart Hughes, Hoyt Hughes, or Hoyt Huge, but there seem to be no non-Brown-related references to this musician or band. Wilkinson, citing the San Antonio Register, an African American newspaper, writes that “on August 30 [1946], Dave Ogden and his seven-piece band, ‘direct from Club Bali, New Orleans, La.,’ began a month-long engagement [at Don’s Keyhole], with blues man Clarence ‘Gate Mouth’ Brown joining the show on September 20.” Wilkinson keeps a fairly detailed record of Keyhole bookings during this period but makes no other mention of Brown.
54. Obrecht, “Clarence Gatemouth Brown,” 45; John Nova Lomax, “So Long, For Now So Long: RIP, Gatemouth Brown,” Houston Press, September 29, 2005, www.houstonpress.com/2005-09-29/music/so-long-for-now-so-long.
55. Shaw, Honkers and Shouters, 479.
56. Obrecht, “Clarence Gatemouth Brown,” 46.
57. Jas Obrecht, “Gatemouth Brown,” in Rollin’ and Tumblin’: The Postwar Blues Guitarists, ed. Jas Obrecht (San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books, 2000), 82.
58. Stefan Grossman, “Whatever Happened to Mickey Baker,” Guitar Player, January 1976, 10.
59. Bill Dahl, “Mickey Baker: The King of the Slip and Slide Guitar,” Living Blues, November–December 2000, 40.
60. Dahl, “Mickey Baker,” 45.
61. David Whiteis, “Jody Williams: An Unsung Guitar Hero Returns,” Living Blues, February 2002, 15, 17.
62. Neil Slaven, liner notes to Boogie Uproar: Texas Blues and R&B 1947–1954, disc C, JSP Records (2006).
63. Jason Berry, Jonathan Foose, and Tad Jones, Up from the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music since World War II (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 82, 84.
64. Jeff Hannusch, “Eddie ‘Guitar Slim’ Jones 1926–1959,” Guitar Player, March 1984, 60.
65. Jas Obrecht, “Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson: Razor-Blade-Totin’ Guitar,” Guitar Player, February 1982, 69.
66. Tony Collins, Rock Mr. Blues: The Life and Music of Wynonie Harris (Milford, NH: Big Nickel Publications, 1995), 29–39.
67. John Broven, “Roy Brown, Part 1: Good Rockin’ Tonight,” Blues Unlimited, January/February 1977, 6.
68. Collins, Rock Mr. Blues, 116, 117.
69. Aaron Fuchs, liner notes to The Shouters: Roots of Rock ’n’ Roll Vol. 9, Savoy 2244 (1980).
70. Ruth Brown with Andrew Yule, Miss Rhythm: The Autobiography of Ruth Brown, Rhythm and Blues Legend (New York: Donald I. Fine Books, 1996), 60, 62, 63, 78, 79.
71. Arnold Shaw, liner notes to Dinah Washington, A Slick Chick (on the Mellow Side): The Rhythm & Blues Years, EmArcy Jazz Series 814 1841 (1983).
72. Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddix, Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop—A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 124, 132, 220.
73. Driggs and Haddix, Kansas City Jazz, 132, 257.
74. Brown, Miss Rhythm, 36.
75. Ahmet Ertegun with Perry Richardson, Greil Marcus, et al., What’d I Say: The Atlantic Story, Fifty Years of Music (New York: Welcome Rain Publishers, 2001), 15.
76. Brown, Miss Rhythm, 60.
77. Brown, Miss Rhythm, 123.
78. Brown, Miss Rhythm, 76, 77, 110.
79. “Lavern Baker Seeks Bill to Halt Arrangement ‘Thefts,’” Billboard, March 5, 1955, 13.
80. Nick Tosches, Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story (New York: Delta/Dell, 1982), 89, 95.
81. Myra Lewis with Murray Silver, Great Balls of Fire: The Uncensored Story of Jerry Lee Lewis (New York: Quill, 1982), 72, 73.
82. “Now Is the Hour” originated as a piano piece titled “Swiss Cradle Song” that was published in Australia in 1913, credited to Clement Scott. In New Zealand, Maori words were written to the opening theme, and the song, now called “Po Atarau,” was sung as a farewell to Maori soldiers serving in World War I, leading to the mistaken belief that it was of folkloric provenance. The Maori singer-songwriter Maewa Kaihau added new lyrics in both English and Maori, and the resulting “Haere Ra Waltz Song” was heard by the English singer Gracie Fields on a visit to New Zealand in 1945. Fields’s adaptation, “Now Is the Hour,” was a worldwide hit and was covered in the United States by Bing Crosby, Margaret Whiting, Eddy Howard, Kate Smith, and others.
83. “Billy Williams Sings Blues in His Death,” Jet, November 2, 1972, 58.
84. Marv Goldberg, “Yesterday’s Memories: The Red Caps,” Discoveries 4, no. 11 (November 1991): 120, 121.
85. M. H. Orodenker, “Popular Record Reviews,” Billboard, January 22, 1944, 19, 61.
86. “Record Reviews,” Billboard, March 25, 1950, 115.
87. “Treniers Stymied on ‘Hi Yo, Silver,’” Billboard, January 24, 1953, 18.
88. Billy Vera, liner notes to the Ravens, Their Complete National Recordings 1947–1950, Savoy Jazz SVY 17304 (2003).
89. Marv Goldberg, “The Ravens,” Discoveries 93 (February 1996): 23, 24.
90. Goldberg, “The Ravens,” 27.
91. Marv Goldberg, “Marv Goldberg’s R&B Notebooks: The Orioles—Part 1, The Early Jubilee Years 1948–1951,” www.uncamarvy.com/Orioles/orioles1.html.
92. Goldberg, “Marv Goldberg’s R&B Notebooks: The Orioles—Part 1.”
93. Marv Goldberg, “Marv Goldberg’s R&B Notebooks: The Dominoes—Part 1,” www.uncamarvy.com/Dominoes/dom01.html (orig. published in Discoveries 89 [October 1995]).
94. Fox, King of the Queen City, 92.
95. Charlie Gillett, The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock ’n’ Roll, 3rd pbk. ed. (New York: Laurel/Dell, 1978 [orig. Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, 1970]), 167.
96. G. A. Moonoogian, “Wax Fax,” Record Collector’s Monthly, November/December 1991, 21.
97. Jackson, Big Beat Heat, 7.
98. Dawson and Propes, What Was the First Rock ’n’ Roll Record? 95.
99. Charlie Gillett, Making Tracks: Atlantic Records and the Growth of a Multi-Billion-Dollar Industry (New York: E. F. Dutton, 1974), 93.
100. Douglas, Jackie Wilson, 214–241, 250–252.
101. “WXYZ Bars Versions of ‘Such Night,’” Billboard, March 20, 1954, 19.
102. Marv Goldberg, “The Clovers: ’50s Rhythm and Blues,” Discoveries 113 (October 1997): 30.
103. Marv Goldberg, “Marv Goldberg’s R&B Notebooks: The Chords,” www.uncamarvy.com/Chords/chords.html.
104. Peter Grendysa liner notes to the Moonglows, Blue Velvet: The Ultimate Collection, Chess/MCA CHD2 9345 (1993), cited in Robert Pruter, Doo-Wop: The Chicago Scene (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 35, 39, 269.
105. Dawson and Propes, What Was the First Rock ’n’ Roll Record? 159, 160.
106. John Broven, liner notes to Paul Gayten and Annie Laurie, Creole Gal, Route 66 KIX-8 (1979). Most sources give Kentwood as Gayten’s birthplace, but Broven quotes his own 1975 interview with Gayten where Gayten states, “I was born January 29, 1920 at Charity Hospital, New Orleans.”
107. Broven, “Roy Brown, Part 1,” 4–6; Jeff Hannusch, I Hear You Knockin’: The Sound of New Orleans Rhythm and Blues (Ville Platte, LA: Swallow Publications, 1985), 73, 74; John Broven, Rhythm & Blues in New Orleans, 1st pbk. printing (Gretna, LA: Pelican, 1983 [originally published as Walking to New Orleans: The Story of New Orleans Rhythm and Blues, Bexhill, Sussex: Blues Unlimited, 1974]), 22. Hannusch quotes the Galveston pianist Candy Green as saying of “Good Rocking Tonight,” “No, Roy [Brown] didn’t write that tune. He had a pianist named Joel Harris who wrote it. Joel wasn’t a full-time musician, he was a schoolteacher who just moonlighted for some extra bread. He wrote it and gave it to Roy.” Broven also notes Harris’s claim to authorship, adding that “Roy strongly denies this.”
108. Hannusch, I Hear You Knockin’, 124.
109. Gillett, The Sound of the City, 140, 141.
110. John Broven, “Roy Brown, Part 2: Hard Luck Blues,” Blues Unlimited, March/June 1977, 15, 16.
111. Hannusch, I Hear You Knockin’, 245. Earlier sources say that Lewis was born in Union, Louisiana, in 1920, but Hannusch, who got his information from Lewis’s first wife, says that the Union location and 1920 date were given by Lewis’s second wife and are “certainly not true.”
112. Hannusch, I Hear You Knockin’, 246; George A. Moonoogian, “Blues with a Smile!” Whiskey, Women, and . . . , November 1982. Hannusch states that Lewis joined Thomas Jefferson’s band in the mid-1930s, while Moonoogian has him playing with Jefferson in the late 1930s. Jefferson was born in 1920, which would make him a teenager when he supposedly led his band with the considerably older Lewis and Tuts Washington (born in 1907).
113. Hannusch, I Hear You Knockin’, 250.
114. Hannusch, I Hear You Knockin’, 251.
115. Rick Coleman, Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock ’n’ Roll (New York: Da Capo Press, 2006), 24, 25.
116. Coleman, Blue Monday, 27.
117. In 1951, an obscure rhythm-and-blues singer, James “Wee Willie” Wayne, recorded a related song, “Junco Partner,” with a habanera bass line and Caribbean-style percussion. Louis Jordan covered “Junco Partner” in 1952, and the white middle-of-the road singer Richard Hayes made it an unlikely pop hit the same year. The white New Orleans R&B singer Roland Stone reworked the song as “Preacher’s Daughter” in 1959, and the Holy Modal Rounders did it as “Junko Partner” in 1965; by the 1970s, “Junco Partner” had become a Crescent City standard, recorded by James Booker, Professor Longhair, and Dr. John. In 1980, the British punk band the Clash set it to a reggae beat.
118. Coleman, Blue Monday, 105.
119. Pat Boone, Pat Boone’s America: 50 Years (Nashville: B&H, 2006), 43, 44.
120. Coleman, Blue Monday, 125, 133.
121. Jackson, Big Beat Heat, 178, 179.
122. Jackson, Big Beat Heat, 165, 322; “Fats on Fire,” Music, Time, June 10, 1957, 71.
123. Coleman, Blue Monday, 194, 326. Surprisingly, “I’m Ready” is the product of professional songwriters, although it’s not clear which ones. Some sources, including the label on the original Imperial 45 rpm disc, attribute the song to Domino, Sylvester Bradford, and Al Lewis. Bradford was a black New York doo-wop singer, and Lewis was a white lyricist who cowrote “Blueberry Hill” (Bradford and Lewis also wrote Little Anthony and the Imperials’ 1958 breakthrough hit, “Tears on My Pillow”). Coleman, citing a conversation with the author Colin Escott, says that the upstate New York rockabilly singer Ersel Hickey “was offered ‘I’m Ready’ on a demo sung by Bobby Darin.” Other sources credit “I’m Ready” to three New Orleanians: Ruth Durand, an R&B singer who recorded mostly in a duo with Al Reed; Pearl King, a pseudonym used by Earl King; and Joe Robichaux, a traditional jazz pianist whose band had employed the teenage Dave Bartholomew.
124. Barry Miles, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now (New York: Holt, 1988 [orig. Secker and Warburg, 1997]), 449.
125. Shaw, Honkers and Shouters, 261.
126. David Booth, “Lloyd Price: Mr. Personality,” Goldmine, May 17, 1991, 108.
127. Seamus McGarvey, “Lloyd Price: Mr. Personality” [same as above title], Juke Blues, no. 24 (Autumn 1991): 6.
128. Shaw, Honkers and Shouters, 188; Dawson and Propes, What Was the First Rock ’n’ Roll Record? 110; Booth, “Lloyd Price,” 110; Peter Guralnick, Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke (Boston: Little, Brown, 2005), 87.
129. Charles White, The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Quasar of Rock (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994 [orig. Harmony Books, 1984]), 40, 41, 47; Booth, “Lloyd Price,” 110. Price claims to have recommended Little Richard both to Don Robey, for whose Peacock label Richard recorded in 1953, and to Art Rupe. But as David Booth points out, Price said, “I had met Little Richard just before I went into the service [in late 1953], and I introduced him to Don Robey,” for whom Richard first recorded in February 1953. Little Richard told Charles White that “I talked to Lloyd Price and he told me to send a tape to a guy called Art Rupe at Specialty Records in Los Angeles,” then said that he sent Rupe a demo tape he’d recorded in February 1955 and that Specialty waited ten months to respond. Rupe, however, said, “We received the tape about seven or eight months before we recorded.” Richard’s first Specialty session was in September 1955.
130. Booth, “Lloyd Price,” 112.
131. Booth, “Lloyd Price,” 112.
132. White, The Life and Times of Little Richard, 188, 189.
133. Broven, Rhythm & Blues in New Orleans, 41, 42.
134. White, The Life and Times of Little Richard, 26, 39; James Brown with Bruce Tucker, James Brown: The Godfather of Soul (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 68.
135. Booth, “Lloyd Price,” 110.
136. White, The Life and Times of Little Richard, 37, 38.
137. White, The Life and Times of Little Richard, 39, 40.
138. White, The Life and Times of Little Richard, 46.
139. White, The Life and Times of Little Richard, 47.
140. White, The Life and Times of Little Richard, 50.
141. Hannusch, I Hear You Knockin’, 222.
142. Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 138.
143. White, The Life and Times of Little Richard, 60, 61; Eugene Chadbourne, “Enotris Johnson: Biography,” www.allmusic.com/artist/enotris-johnson-p306206/biography; Phillip Ramati, “Little Richard Benefactor Dies at 82,” Macon Telegraph, January 18, 2007, http://rollcallblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/little-richard-benefactor-dies-at-82-by.html. White quotes Bumps Blackwell telling how “a big disk jockey called Honey Chile” called him about Enortis Johnson, a girl who’d “walked all the way from Appaloosa, Mississippi, to sell this song to Richard.” Chadbourne, however, identifies Enotris Johnson (not Enortis, as White spells it) as a white man who adopted Little Richard as a youth and whom Richard credited as co-composer of “Long Tall Sally,” as well as “Miss Ann” and “Jenny, Jenny,” simply out of generosity toward his adoptive parent. Other sources give Johnson’s first name as Johnny and state that he and his wife, Ann, ran the Tick Tock Club in Macon, where Richard supposedly made his professional performance debut. All these accounts are dubious, Blackwell’s because there is no such place as Appaloosa, Mississippi, and because there seems to have been no prominent disc jockey called Honey Chile, Chadbourne’s because neither Richard nor any of the other Penniman family members interviewed for White’s biography mentions an adoption. According to Ramati’s obituary of Ann Howard, it was she who owned the Tick Tock Club—actually Ann’s Tic-Toc, Macon’s first openly gay bar. Howard, whose husband was named Johnny, is said to have inspired “Miss Ann.”
144. Tony Scherman, Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999), 90, 91.
145. White, The Life and Times of Little Richard, 74.
146. White, The Life and Times of Little Richard, 239.
147. White, The Life and Times of Little Richard, 65, 66.
148. White, The Life and Times of Little Richard, 119.
149. “Morning Report: Movies,” Los Angeles Times, February 5, 1987, http://articles.latimes.com/1987-02-05/entertainment/ca-1259_1; “Entertainment: Pop/Rock,” Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1987, http://articles.latimes.com/keyword/richard-penniman; “Little Richard Sues over Ownership of New Hit Song,” Jet magazine, March 9, 1987, http://books.google.com/books?id=qrMDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA59&lpg=PA59&dq=%22matter+of+time%22+preston+penniman&source=bl&ots=LrxgcZnVB5&sig=RD-4HClMoHCJh_NUdjkL1ZrTX5A&hl=en&ei=Tgb4TOvUOIT7lwf81v2PAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CBoQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22matter%20of%20time%22%20preston%20penniman&f=false. Billy Preston, Sylvia Smith, and John Schuller claimed that Little Richard adapted “Great Gosh A’Mighty! (It’s a Matter of Time)” from a song they wrote. Richard sued them, maintaining that he had written the song himself and had only agreed to split the composer’s credit with Preston after Preston suggested the phrase “Great gosh a’mighty.” Preston, Smith, and Schuller then countersued for copyright infringement.
150. David J. Gallagher, comment posted on (and since removed from) the web page “Bunker Hill—The Girl Can’t Dance” at www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlHO7OEzHQk.
151. David Kirby, Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll (New York: Continuum, 2009), 4.