Happy Birthday Bob Lind

Born in Ohio on the 25^th of November 1942; singer songwriter Bob is best known in the as the writer of The Elusive Butterfly. Remembering that song Bob said:

“A lot of drugs were involved. Most of my songs of my songs from that period of time came from the line between sleep and wakefulness. That’s where Elusive Butterfly was written.”

Strange then that in the UK, at least, it became best known in a version by becardiganed stalwart of 70’s Sunday night TV, the squeaky clean Val Doonican:

“There were people who were outraged at that. They thought he was stealing food out of my children’s mouths…About a dozen pop stars of the-Cilla Black, Dusty Springfield, Eric Burdon-took out a full page add in one of the trades saying that mine was the real and best version. I thought that was a kind gesture, but really unnecessary; because people can make up there own minds. As it happens, Val Doonican and I both ended up in the charts. The British press built up a rivalry but I had no beef with Val. I never did get to talk to him, but I contacted his managers. His version was different from mine, but I kinda liked that.”

Growing up in Denver with his mother and step father, Bob Lind had been a fan of Hollywood singing cowboys like Tex Ritter and Gene Autry before discovering R&B in seventh grade.

“My first paying gig was in Denver at a used car lot. My friend Jerry and I formed a duo. I played guitar and we sang R&B. Now they call it doo wop but nobody it called it that then. It was rhythm and blues – dark and dangerous.”

On graduating Lind briefly studied theatre at western State College in Gunnison Colorado before dropping out to pursue music in the coffee houses of first Denver then, in 1964 in San Francisco before taking a tape of five songs recorded live at Al Chapman’s coffee house to Los Angeles.

Once there Lind contacted Liberty Records:”I just went to Liberty because it was the first on my list. I gave them the tape and they said ‘Yeah we’d like to sign you’. I was amazed. It was that easy.”

Liberty had also signed Lind to there music publishing company, Metric Music which is how Lind came to meet Jack Nitzsche who was looking for material. Nitzsche liked what he heard:

“He turned to Lenny (Waronker – head of Metric Music) and said: ‘you finally got yourself an honest writer’…So I played a few more and he said ‘Boy, this guys really good’.”

As a result of this meeting Lind and Nitzsche became housemates, friends and collaborators:

“It was an Odd Couple kind of a deal. Jack and I both loved to drink and to get high. We had a beautiful friendship.” recalls Lind.

The two albums they made together are the sound of a coffee house folkie honeymooning with pop nouse on the west coast.

Not so difficult for Lind to take on board anyway, for as he said : "If you wanted to work coffee houses , you had to call yourself a folk singer, but I enjoyed doing pop songs in a folk style"

The first recording session in 1965 yielded four tracks; You Should Have Seen It, my favourite Truly Julies Blues (I’ll Be There), Cheryl’s Goin’ Home and Elusive Butterfly.

In November 1965 Cheryl’s Goin’ Home was issued as a single with Elusive Butterfly on the flipside.

It went nowhere. A Florida DJ started to play Elusive Butterfly and it caught on.

Lind returned to the studio to record the further eight tracks that would make up his classic first album: Don’t Be Concerned:

“I think the Don’t Be Concerned album took about three sessions. The songs were ones I already had for the most part. I knew nothing about writing music, but I had this post- adolescent gush – all this sap and passion.” says Lind.

In May 1966 Verve Folkways released an album, cobbled together from an acetate Lind had recorded as a seventeen year old for Denver based Bandbox label, called The Elusive Bob Lind.

Speaking of it now Lind says: “I should be flattered that some people like the album, but it’s a terrible piece of shit.”

In spring 66 Nitzsche and Lind returned to the studio to record their second album together: Photographs Of Feeling .It was to be the last they collaborated:

“Jack had his demons,” explained Lind, “And he had a hard, cynical side. Just when you’d think he and I would be closest, rifts started forming.”

Without Nitzsche, Lind began to drift:

“I was a drunk, I was an abuser of drugs…I just wanted to go to the desert and get my head straight, but Santa Fe ended up being the place where I did my worst drinking and using so go figure.”

It was during this time that he wrote the songs for his 1971 Capitol released album Since There Were Circles which features Gene Clark on harmonica, Doug Dillard on banjo and Sneaky Pete Kleinow on pedal steel guitar. It was reissued by RPM in 2006.

Sober since 1977 Lind concentrated on writing. This included writing five novels and an award winning screenplay, and features for the now defunct wacky US supermarket magazine Weekly World News:

"I wrote, made up stories and had a wonderful time. There were days when I'd leave that newsroom and my face hurt and my stomach would hurt because I was around funny people." Lind told ABC News recalling his time on the staff of Weekly World News.

In 1998 he purchased a saxophone and was once again bitten by the music bug:

“I learned how to read music and I learned how to make chord charts.” He says “My melodic scope started to open and I started to write more jazz orientated stuff songs. I thought people had to hear these things so I started gigging again.”

Pulp’s 2001 album We Love Life featured a track called Bob Lind (The Only Way Is Down) which has helped to lead to something of a career revival.

Last year Lind released Bob Lind Live at the Luna Star Café available through his website:

“The music business is different now – its not so company controlled. This new CD of mine, Live at the Luna Star Café, there’s no label involved. I just put it out myself. It was never that simple before.” explains Lind.

In June this year Lind played his first UK gigs since 1966 partly in support of Elusive Butterfly - The Jack Nitzsche Sessions, the sleeve notes of which provided most of the quotes here.

I saw him at that most wonderful of venues, The Luminaire, were he played some old stuff and some new stuff including Perspective ,written in January of 2006, a new song every bit the equal of his earlier stuff.

The picture accompanying this piece shows, on the right, Bob Lind whose birthday it is today, and me, and by happy coincidence I am also celebrating my birthday today.

Happy Birthday Nancy Sinatra

Born into showbiz royalty on the 8th of June 1940 in Jersey City, New Jersey, Nancy Sinatra is 67 today.

Although Nancy began making records on father’s Reprise label in 1961 it is fair to say she didn’t really hit her commercial, or creative, stride until 1965 when Reprise records producer Jimmy Bowen coaxed a reluctant Lee Hazlewood to produce her.

Jimmy Bowen had tasted some chart success himself as a member of Buddy Knox’s Rhythm Orchids in 1957 with I’m Sticking With You, originally the flipside of Buddy Knox’s big seller Party Doll.

1957 was also the year that one Tommy Sands got his break. He was cast as the lead in a television play, The Singing Idol, and of the back of that had a hit with Teenage Crush. He was subsequently signed to Capitol, where he enjoyed several smaller hits. Sands’ was enlisted into the military, and on September 11 1960, dressed in his air force uniform, married a twenty year old Nancy Sinatra.

In December 1960 Frank Sinatra announced the formation of Reprise Records with an artist roster that included pals Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. Nancy joined the label in 1961, having previously appeared in her Dad’s 1960 show to welcome Elvis Presley home from the army.

Bowen joined Reprise in the early sixties where, never much of a singer, he enjoyed his greatest success as a producer, including in 1965, Houston a hit for Dean Martin penned by Bowen’s neighbour Lee Hazlewood.

Hazlewood had already enjoyed some success as a writer and producer first with Sandford Clark with whom he had written and recorded The Fool which sold 800,000 copies and later, as a producer, with Duane Eddy. In 1963 he had quit the music industry in disgust:

“Everything you heard on the radio was Beatles, Beatles, Beatles. Not only that, but they were hailed as innovators when they were doing things that were done four years earler by the Everly Brothers” he told a radio interviewer in 1968.

Bowen coaxed his neighbour out of premature retirement and, in 1965, Hazlewood produced the hit I’m a Fool for Hollywood brat pack Dino, Desi & Billy. Hazlewood did not enjoy his time working with Dean Martin and Desi Arnez’s spoilt sons and was not, therefore, particularly thrilled when approached to work with Nancy who he saw as just “another second generation act”.

"He was part Henry Higgins and part Sigmund Freud," recalled Nancy Sinatra, who had, by that time divorced Tommy Sands, for The New York Times in January this year. She continued "He was far from the country bumpkin people considered him at the time. I had a horrible crush on him, but he was married then."

Describing working with Nancy, Hazlewood wrote in the introduction to his clumsily titled book Lee Hazlewood’s The Pope's Daughter-His Fantasy Life with Nancy and Other Sinatra's:

“What’s it like to work with a Nancy Sinatra? It’s a visit to Disneyland, only your father owns all the rides. It’s an evening in the medicine cabinet of Edgar Allen Poe’s mother… It’s a Las Vegas stage, sitting on a two-dollar stool in front of a fifty-two-piece orchestra, next to a lady in a five thousand-dollar gown; you’re singing a little flat and wondering if the fly is open on your eight-dollar ‘jeans’. It’s Beauty and the Beast selling a ‘fix’ to the Mickey Mouse People. It’s frustrating, foolish, Falstaffian, freaky, fucked-up and fun.”

After several hitless years on Reprise Nancy was open to Hazlewood’s suggestions, some of which must have appeared a little out there to a showbiz princess:

"Sugar Town was about LSD, Some Velvet Morning is about drugs and sex, and we had a quirky thing going with that stuff. Sand is one of the sexiest songs ever made." she told The Guardian in April 2005.

Hazlewood changed Nancy’s singing style and it paid immediate dividends when So Long Babe became a modest chart hit:

“She was singing too high for one thing and for another she was trying to be Goody Two Shoes which was not her natural style.” said Lee in the sleevenotes to his solo 1966 album The Very Strange World Of Lee Hazlewood.

The following year Nancy traded those goody two shoes for boots.

Written in 1963 Hazlewood was initially reluctant to play These Boots Are Made For Walking for Nancy because in its early incarnation the song contained the word “fuck.”

“But Nancy was in love with the song. It really needed her, by the way, we changed it around and I wrote a third verse for it. Didn't have that until the day of the session because I had forgotten all about it." Hazlewood told Noel Mengel of the Courier Mail.

These Boots Are Made For Walking was an instant smash, backed by that legendary coterie of Los Angeles session musicians known as The Wrecking Crew, Nancy reached number 1 in February 1966.

More hits followed including How Does That Grab You Darlin’? and the aforementioned Sugar Town. The former, incidentally, provided the title for Nancy’s second album which included her version of Sonny Bono’s song Bang, Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) that Quentin Tarantino used as the theme for the Kill Bill 1 opening credits.

Kill Bill was not Nancy’s first foray in to soundtracks. Tucked away on the flipside of the US single How Does That Grab You Darlin’? is The Last Of The Secret Agents. It was the title song to a spy spoof of the same name that starred comedy duo Marty Allen and Steve Rossi alongside Nancy. Produced and written by Hazlewood it is basically a reworked Boots with riffs from John Barry’s Thunderball theme welded on.

The following year Nancy had the opportunity to record a Bond theme proper when the producers of You Only Live Twice decided they didn’t like theme song as it was originally sung by one Julie Rogers so approached Frank Sinatra about the job. Sinatra Snr passed on it but suggested they use his daughter Nancy. It was not an easy gig.

"You Only Live Twice was a real stretch for Nancy," John Barry, the songs composer recalled for Eddi Fiegel's book John Barry A Sixties Theme, "as a song it's kind of all over the place, and the bridge is particularly difficult, so all in all it was a bit of a reach for her. whats now in the movie was made up of about twenty-four takes. It was a real masterpiece of editing. There was just no way we'd have got it in one take. She'd get one bit right the first time but then she'd get another bit wrong. So that was what we call 'a glue job'. She knew. She'd say 'That's a good bit there, you can cut that in, John, can't you?' She didn't have any illusions about it."

Still 1967 was a big year for Nancy, not only did she sing that years Bond theme but she conceived and produced an Emmy winning television special called Movin’ with Nancy. Besides featuring a great version of Lionel Bart's Who Will Buy? it saw the unveiling of Nancy and Lee’s undisputed masterpiece: Some Velvet Morning.

"I particularly love Some Velvet Morning. It's a beautiful song, but also melancholy and dark, because that was Lee. He was funny and clever and talented, but he also had a dark side, which added something special to the songs we did together."Nancy told New Zealand's The Sunday Star Times in April 2008

Nancy and Lee had first sang together the previous year on Summer Wine, the flipside of Sugar Town:

“We started together… out of absolute greed on my part.” Hazlewood told Richard Hawley for The Observer Monthly Music Magazine in October 2006.

Written for Movin’ with Nancy, a TV special, Hazlewood anticipated that Some Velvet Morning, a druggy reverie, would cause problems with the censor. He recalled in the sleeve notes to 2002 tribute album Total Lee- The Songs Of Lee Hazlewood:

“We did it and then you submit it to the censor at NBC and I thought, of course, they’re going to find something with this one that they don’t like, really they’re going to find something! The man questioned the line “and how she made it in”, I. N. and I said “No, it’s E.N.D”…And when I told the guy that he goes “Oh, well that’s fine then, that’s OK.” And I didn’t say what about anything . Somebody said “What is the song about?" and I said “It’s about three and a half minutes that’s about all I can tell you.” But it worked.”

Also in 1967 Frank Sinatra earned his first US gold record with the bizarro Somethin’ Stupid, a wildly inappropriate duet with Nancy produced by Bowen and Hazlewood. Nancy sounds cramped and miserable on the record, a sulky teen reluctantly singing along with dad. Perhaps, like me, she found the whole concept a bit creepy.

In 1968 Nancy appeared as Susan Jacks, a part originally intended for Petula Clark, in the movie Speedway with Elvis Presley. She had a solo number, Your Groovy Self, making her the only singer ever to have a solo song appear on an Elvis soundtrack (prior to his death).

In 1970 Hazlewood decided to up sticks and move to Sweden, shattering the partnership with Nancy.

"It was crazy," Sinatra said in The New York Times . "And he really left me in the lurch. He kept shooting himself in the foot all the time, and I never knew why. He was always his own worst enemy."

Nancy never really went away though. She recorded throughout the 70’s and 80’s including, in 1981, a country album with Mel Tillis called Mel and Nancy but she never again recaptured the brilliance of those late Sixties Reprise recordings.

"I knew this music was unique when we were making it and the proof is that 40 years on, people are still listening to it." she told The Guardian in 2005.

In 1995 Nancy relaunched herself with the One More Time album and, at 54 years of age, a Playboy photoshoot which according to her website “demonstrated once again that sexuality and feminism are not mutually exclusive”.

In 2004 Nancy’s career underwent something of a revival as she was discovered by a new generation of fans, including Morrissey who invited her to take part in Meltdown at the Royal Festival Hall that year. It was Nancy’s debut live performance in London.

I saw Nancy that night and well remember the hysteria that greeted Sugar Town. You can view some of it here courtesy of Richard Gibson.

In May last year Nancy's Sinatra’s star was added to the Hollywood Walk of Fame and next month Nancy will be presented with the President’s Award For Excellence In The Arts by National President John Rowan.

Happy Birthday Pee Wee King

When Carl Perkins’ Blue Suede Shoes became the first ever record to appear simultaneously in the country, pop and R&B charts a slew of cover versions quickly followed. Elvis Presley’s is probably the best known of these but accordion player Pee Wee King with his Western swing outfit The Golden West Cowboys, were there first. King had something of a headstart on rival s having been given a prerelease acetate of the song by Perkins himself when they played the same bill in Memphis. The Golden West Cowboys' version was recorded on February 7th 1956 and featured Walter Hayes, the band's fiddle player, on vocals. It is, in truth, a workmanlike and unconvincing reading of Perkins’ classic.

King made an altogether better stab at rock ‘n’ roll later that same year with vocalist Dick Glasser. Ballroom Baby and Catty Town, both of which Glasser had a hand in writing, are very pleasing examples of early rock ‘n’ roll. Pee Wee King recalled: “(Dick Glasser) was a very good rock ‘n’ roll singer …he fit into our group like the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle. The first two recordings we did with him were a smash. The people at RCA Victor thought I was going nuts with our new sound. I said ‘No. I’m an entertainer and we have to change with the times. Rock ‘n’ roll is changing American music, and that includes country music.’”(from Hell-Bent for Music Wade Hall)

King was not altogether the rockin’ virgin that this would suggest though. Nearly a decade before the Glasser recordings King had, with the band's regular singer Redd Stewart, written and recorded Ten Gallon Boogie which features the rockin’est accordion solo ever. It was the Golden West Cowboys contribution to the hillbilly boogie craze that swept country music in the late forties and early fifties, and which helped to lay the foundations of rock ‘n’ roll. Indeed King’s friend, Bill Haley, had recorded a number of hillbilly boogies before he discovered rock ‘n’ roll. Jolly Joyce, Haley’s booking agent, tried to persuade King to change the name of his act so that he could book him overseas as a rock ‘n’ roll act: “ I said, ‘Nothing doing! I’ve worked hard to make our name mean something and I’m not about to change it. Anyway, why should I want to become a rock ‘n’ roll band? I can play rock ‘n’ roll any time I want and still call our band the Golden West Cowboys” (from Hell-Bent for Music Wade Hall).

However it is not as a rock ‘n’ roll pioneer that King is best remembered, nor as the man whose band introduced the electric guitar to the Grand Ole Opry, nor yet as a pioneer of television, although in November 1948 Pee Wee King’s was the first show on the state of Kentucky’s first television station, but rather as the composer of one of the biggest hits in music history: The Tennessee Waltz.

Pee Wee King was an unlikely candidate for country stardom. Born on February 18^th 1914 in Milwaukie of Polish stock he was christened Frank Julius Anthony Kuczynski and his favoured instrument, the accordion, was not regarded as a ‘proper’ country instrument at that time.

In 1929 the 15 year old Kuczynski formed his first band and in 1930 he met saxophonist and band leader Wayne King, who was himself from a Polish background, who gave him this advice: “You need a catchy name…Now remember: K-I-N-G. Nobody can misspell it. Nobody can mispronounce it. That’s your hook. You say your name is Frank. Call yourself Frankie. It has a better ring. Frankie King that’s a name nobody will forget” (from Hell-Bent for Music Wade Hall). Thus Frankie King and the Kings Jesters were born.

In 1934 a stroke of good fortune brought Gene Autry into King's life. Frankie King and the Kings Jesters were playing the Polish–American Hour on WJRN in Racine. Gene Autry together with his band, The Range Riders and their agent were touring southern Wisconsin when they were forced to pull up at a garage in Racine to have a fender straightened on their car. Whilst they were waiting for the repair to be completed they heard Frankie King’s band on the service stations radio. Autry’s agent, Joe.L. Frank, was impressed enough to ask King to join The Range Riders, for the remainder of the tour.

“I wasn’t with the group long before I got my nickname. There were too many Franks in the band so Mr Frank said we had to have nicknames to tell us apart. He first wanted to call me Shorty, but I didn’t like that one, so we settled on Pee Wee” (from Hell-Bent for Music Wade Hall).

Autry left for Hollywood shortly after the tour ended and the Range Riders disbanded. Joe Frank invited Pee Wee King to join a new band he had put together, the Log Cabin Boys, who performd on WNOX in Knoxville. The steady income it provided enabled King to marry Joe Frank's stepdaughter Lydia Frank in December 1936.

In January the following year King and his new wife moved to Louisville. Joe Frank was already there and organising a new band for King to lead. Pee Wee King and the Golden West Cowboys , as the band were known, auditioned successfully for The Grand Ole Opry in 1937 and were regulars for the next ten years.

Throughout the band's thirty year lifespan, The Golden West Cowboys underwent several line up changes and at one time or another featured such luminaries as Cowboy Copas and Eddy Arnold.

Redd Stewart first joined The Golden West Cowboys in 1940 before being drafted into the Army and Stewart's return from the armed services ushered in what Pee Wee King thought of as the golden age of The Golden West Cowboys.

It was whilst driving back to Nashville from a show in Texarkana, Texas in December1946 that King and Stewart wrote The Tennessee Waltz

“We were getting close to Memphis and had the radio playing…when we heard the disk jockey say ‘I want you folks to hear Bill Monroe’s new song dedicated to his home state of Kentucky. It’s called The Kentucky Waltz’. While the record was playing Redd said ‘Pee Wee, I’ve got an idea for a song. Trade places with me and drive and I’ll get that kitchen matchbox that I light my cigars from out of the glove compartment and we’ll write a song about Tennessee. After all I was born in Ashland City, Tennessee and we both live there now. We can write a Tennessee waltz” (from Hell-Bent for Music Wade Hall).

The melody already existed, King having devised it as the Cowboys theme song though at that time it was known only as No Name Waltz:

“Redd sat there writing the words on the matchbox as we both hummed the melody we knew so well. We’d hum along and Redd would write a word down. Every once in a while he’d say ‘How does this sound?’ and he’d sing the words to the melody. Finally we had the words pretty much the way everybody knows them today”(from Hell-Bent for Music Wade Hall).

It was recorded in 1948 in Chicago and proved a hit for the Golden West Cowboys selling half a million copies. Despite a verbal agreement to the contrary, Cowboy Copas - a former Golden West Cowboy - cheekily released his version on King Records just ahead of Pee Wee King's and had a sizable hit with it too. It seemed almost from the start that Tennessee Waltz was a country music standard.

When Ernest Tubb recorded The Tennessee Waltz and published a sheet music edition, he did so without the permission of either of the song's composers. Not only that but the songwriter's credits on both the record and sheet music went to the Short Brothers (presumably referring to James Erwin Short and Melvin Leon Short - members of Tubb's band in the '40s) .

King recalled: "It was all a big stink and I didn't like it at all...we remained friends with Ernest throughout the lawsuit... We didn't get any damages but we put an end to their pirated record and sheet music. Most important we didn't make enemies out of our friends. I didn't hold a grudge against Ernest even though his company recorded and published the song illegally. Ernest and the Short Brothers made a mistake but I don't think it was an honest one. I believe they knew that they were doing something morally wrong and illegal. They were putting us to the test to see if they could get away with it. I've never heard the Short Brothers recording. I don't know how it sounded and I don't want to know" (from Hell-Bent for Music Wade Hall).

Other covers followed. On hearing Cowboy Copas' version, Tuxedo Junction composer and jazz trumpeter Erskine Hawkins was inspired to record his own version in 1950 . It was this version that caught the ear of a young Billboard columnist and jazz buff Jerry Wexler.

So when in October that year Jack Rael, pop singer Patti Page’s manager, was looking for a flip side for her Boogie Woogie Santa Claus Wexler suggested The Tennessee Waltz.

“‘Patti knew the song’ said Jack. ‘I didn’t. She said ‘That’s my daddy’s favourite song.’ We did it with five pieces. The baritone player from Ellington’s band was on the date. We copied the arrangement from Erskine Hawkins. Joe Reisman wrote it out for us” (from Road Kill on the Three Chord Highway Colin Escott).

Page used an overdubbing technique that she had previously employed succesfully on a her 1948 hit Confess.

"You recorded onto an acetate , then played it back into one microphone while overdubbing into another microphone. The engineer would mix the overdub with the original (itself no mean feat), then cut the results onto another acetate. If the singer flubbed just one note or the engineer messed up the balance they'd have to start over"(from Road Kill on the Three Chord Highway Colin Escott).

Described by James Miller, in his book Almost Grown, as "a tricked up, technologically evolved sort of pseudo folk song", Page's version was a phenomona selling in excess of six million copies. The song had transcended its roots, it was no longer simply a country song, indeed for the twenty six weeks Page's version spent on the charts, it became the country's song. In other words simply a great American song.

Everybody from Jo Stafford to James Brown has recorded The Tennessee Waltz.

On February 17th 1965 it was adopted as the official song of the state of Tennessee.

Pee Wee King and Redd Stewart were elected to the Songwriters Hall Of Fame in 1970 and Johhny Cash was on hand to present the award when King was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1974.

King died of a heart attack aged 86 on March 6th 2000.

Happy Birthday Wanda Jackson

Described by Nick Tosches as “simply and without contest the greatest menstruating rock ‘n’ roll singer whom the world has ever known” (Unsung Heroes Of Rock ‘N’ Roll) Wanda Jackson, The Queen of Rockabilly, was born on 20 October 1937 in Maud, Oklahoma.

Those who saw Wanda at The Luminaire last month can testify that she is still a great rock ‘n’ roll/rockabilly singer. Remarkably, just a month shy of 69, Wanda Jackson was still capable of those feral whoops and guttural yelps that typify her finest work.

But then Wanda Jackson has always been a remarkable woman.

In 1953, whilst still a schoolgirl, Wanda had her own radio show; in spring the following year Hank Thompson (of Humpty Dumpty Heart fame) heard it and invited her to tour with him and his Brazo Valley Boys. With Hanks patronage she was signed first to Decca, for whom she recorded from 1954 to 1956, then to Capitol.

In 1955 Wanda toured with Elvis Presley. Wanda, like everyone and everything else, was changed by Presley.

"Elvis had been talking to me about trying to sing this new rock 'n' roll or rockabilly - I don't think we even had a name for it yet - and I didn't think that I could. I told him, no, I'm just a country singer but it seemed like he knew something I didn't know. He said: 'you can do this, I know you can and you need to!' So... we were working in Memphis and one afternoon he picked me, took me to their house, the one on Audubon, the small house. And we went there and we played records all afternoon, we sang and he was trying to give me the feel for this, the way he sang songs. I was impressed that he just really seemed to care about my career" (Wanda Jackson I Remember Elvis)

Her first record for Capitol, I Gotta Know, prevaricates between country waltz and rockabilly dynamite. It is, I think, a fascinating audio snapshot of a time before rock ‘n’ roll became such a knowable thing. It prickles with mistrust and intrigue. A then unknown Buck Owens played rhythm guitar on it.

From 1956 to 1961 Wanda cut some of the finest rockabilly music you could wish to hear and, in 1957, toured with the racially mixed band Bobby Poe and the Poe Kats who featured Big Al Downing on piano.

‘“Bobby and I would do solo spots,” Downing told Bill Millar, “warming up the audience before Wanda came on. Frankly, there wasn’t as much prejudice as you’d expect even though I’d stand beside her and sing with her. She liked my playing and would introduce me to the audience, which helped.”’ (from Roadkill On The Three-Chord Highway Colin Escott)

It was with the Poe Kats, in 1958, that Wanda recorded the album for Ken Nelson that included Lets Have A Party which eventually became a surprise Top 40 hit in August 1960, by which time Wanda was playing Vegas lounges.

In 1961 she released the self penned country song Right Or Wrong (the flipside Funnel Of Love is now a live favourite amongst Wanda’s fans) followed by In The Middle Of A Heartache for which Wanda wrote the lyrics. Both are appealing Patsy Cline-ish numbers and both dented the Top 30.

In October that year Wanda married Wendell Goodman, who also became her manager in 1970. They became born again Christians in 1972 and Wanda wished to become a country gospel singer. Capitol were less enamoured of the idea and Wanda was released from her contract. She then pursued her vocation as a singer and Christian on small specialist labels such as Word and Myrrh.

With Capitol from 1961 to 1973 Wanda was a regular on the country charts. Although these tracks tend to lack the coruscating urgency of Wanda’s rockabilly sides they amply demonstrate the breadth of her talent as she adapted to changes in country fashions. It is these tracks which make up the Ace CD The Very Best Of The Country Years and it was the promotion of said CD which saw Wanda rockin’ up a storm at a packed Luminaire. Watch some of it here, courtesy of Richard Gibson .

Further reading here and here.

Happy Birthday Hank Williams

Hank Williams was born in Mount Olive Alabama on 17th September 1923. He died just 29 years later. Had he lived he would have been 83 today. Imagine him sitting politely through yet another birthday special, coming to you live from Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium with, say, The Dixie Chicks presenting a ghastly parade of contemporary country luminaries paying insincere tribute to the Grand Old Man of The Grand Ole Opry, (all that earlier sacking business and other unpleasantness conveniently forgotten)? Actually it IS quite easy to imagine, country audiences love bad boys and the country music establishment, with whom Hank had fallen out shortly before his untimely demise, were quick to claim him after his death. But I prefer to believe Hank would have remained too ornery for any cheesy all star tribute.

Your Cheatin’ Heart is my favourite Hank Williams song. In fact Your Cheatin’ Heart is quite possibly my favourite song of all time. I can’t think of a version of it I don’t like. Presley’s 1965 version with The Jordanaires isn’t great.Elvis refused to overdub it, deeming it unfit for release and in truth the King turns in a performance that borders on self parody. A missed opportunity but the song survived it.

Your Cheatin’ Heart was recorded at Hank's last ever recording session on 23rd September 1952. Williams' second wife claimed that he wrote the song about his first wife, Audrey, from whom he had split in January 1952 after a passionate, and sometimes torturous, relationship.

‘Hank started telling me about his problems with his ex-wife, Audrey. He said that one day her cheatin' heart would pay. Then he said, "Hey, that'd make a good song! Get out my tablet, Baby; me and you are gonna write us a song!" Just about as fast as I could write, Hank quoted the words to me in a matter of minutes.’ (Sing Your Heart Out,Country Boy Dorothy Horstman)

In August of 1952, Hank had been fired from The Grand Ole Opry having been deemed unreliable. In October of that year he wed his second wife, Billie Jean Jones, not once but three times (twice before a paying audience at a sold out Municipal Auditorium in New Orleans).Sometime on 31st December 1952/1st January 1953, Hank Williams passed away in the back of his Cadillac. His funeral was held in Montgomery, Alabama on 4th January 1953. The following month MGM issued Kaw Liga with Your Cheatin’ Heart on the flipside. Both sides became number 1 hits.

On 7th January 1953 Joni James recorded Your Cheatin’ Heart for MGM. The next day Frankie Laine recorded the song for Columbia Records. Laine's version was released in the wake of James', which hit number 2 in the Billboard pop charts, but nevertheless it reached a respectable number 18.

This was the version of Your Cheatin' Heart I first heard. I think it was some time in the mid- seventies, on The Best of Frankie Laine (Hallmark Records HM 515) an album my parents had bought on cassette tape to play in the car. Laine’s robust singing style didn’t much appeal to me then but Your Cheatin’ Heart struck an immediate chord, though it confused as much as it delighted me.

Your Cheatin’ Heart is a confusing song. The confusion starts right with the opening three words: “Your cheating heart…” Hank himself seems to weigh each word more or less equally but others have greater difficulty. Frankie Laine requires an enormous whooshing breath before he can bring himself to sing these words, Gene Vincent stutters, singing “Your cheat, cheatin’ heart…” whilst in his 1962 version Nat 'King' Cole, perhaps uncomfortable with the words accusatory tone, opts out altogether leaving the opening lines to a bland chorus of girl singers before finally joining in at line three, “But sleep won't come the whole night through...”.

Once one gets inside this song it becomes apparent what a strange, clever and frankly quite nasty piece of work it is. Initially it seems a fairly standard exercise in self pity but, in fact, Your Cheatin’ Heart is a cuckold’s feverish revenge fantasy. The singer wishes pain and heartache upon their former lover but in so doing only confirms their own misery and loneliness: “You'll walk the floor the way I do…” It is impossible to escape the feeling that the sufferings detailed in the song are actually those of the narrator not their subject. These are future events, wished for rather than actual: “Your cheatin' heart will pine some day”, it says though in the songs present it does not seem as if the faithless ex suffers at all.

Incredibly Hank's career really lasted only five short years but in that time he enriched The Great American Songbook with songs as breathtaking as Cold Cold Heart , I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry and, of course, Your Cheatin' Heart.

Hear Hank's timeless version here .
I'm not Sure Hank Would've Done It This Way but I love this 1969 version by James Brown.