10 Records That Changed The World Part 1

The June issue of Mojo magazine featured a list of 100 Records That Changed The World.

Inspired by this Testify presents, in two parts, 10 records NOT included in the Mojo list that, nontheless, changed the world.

Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys – Ida Red

No list of influential records is complete without reference to Bob Wills. Together with Milton Brown, Wills was a founding member of the Fort Worth Doughboys and their sole recording, Sunbonnet Sue/ Nancy Jane in February 1932, provided the blueprint for a hybrid form of dance music that became known as Western Swing.

Incorporating elements of Big Band music, old time fiddle music and the blues Western Swing was a raucous sound that caught the ear of, amongst others, Chuck Berry.

Berry’s audition tape for the Chess brothers featured his take on an old traditional number called Ida Red.

As Berry recalled in his 1987 autobiography: “I’d heard it (Ida Red) sung long before when I was a teenager and thought it was rhythmic and amusing to hear. I’d sung it in the yard gatherings and parties around home when I was first learning to strum the guitar in my high-school days.”

Probably the earliest recording of this song was by Fiddlin' Powers & Family on August 19, 1924 (issued December 1924). Bob Wills' first recording of Ida Red, and the one which provided the inspiration for Berry, was in November 29, 1938 in Dallas, although it wasn’t issued until October the following year. Wills cut another, souped up, version in 1950 called Ida Red Likes The Boogie.

Leonard Chess suggested Berry write new lyrics for Ida Red and speed it up a bit and thus the rock ‘n’ roll staple Maybellene was born.

Also listening to Bob Wills was Elvis Presley whose 1954 Sun recording of Milk Cow Blues grafted verses from Wills’ 1946 recording Brain Cloudy Blues onto Kokomo Arnold’s original.

Bill Haley and his Comets - Rock Around The Clock

Prior to 1951 Haley had recorded Western Swing inflected country songs.

Then, in 1951, Bill Haley and the Saddlemen cut a version of Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats kickin’ R&B track Rocket 88.

The following year he changed the band personnel and christened them the Comets and, in 1953, with Crazy Man Crazy, recorded the first white rock hit.

On the strength of this they were signed to Decca in 1954 and (We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock was released in May of that year. It was a flop.

Until, that is, the movie Blackboard Jungle was released in 1955. Intended as an examination of delinquency in America’s city schools Blackboard Jungle was the first film to use a rock ‘n’ roll song as part of its soundtrack.

It pitted solid decent English teacher Rick Dadier (Glen Ford) against North Manual High Schools teenage rabble,as the opening credits faded (We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock blared out over images of general juvenile delinquency. By the time the movies chief juvenile delinquent, Artie West (Vic Morrow), was seen trashing the beloved jazz records of a liberal maths teacher the link between rock ‘n’ roll and a kind of violent nihilism had been forged. By the end of 1955 (We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock had sold six million copies.

Johnny Ace – Pledging My Love

Recorded with the Johnny Otis Orchestra Pledging My Love was Johnny Ace’s seventh record and was released in the first week of 1955. It reached number 1 in the R&B charts immediately and hit the pop top twenty in February.

It was also rock ’n’ roll’s first posthumous hit. On December 24th 1954 backstage at the Houston City Auditorium Johnny Ace became the founding member of what Kurt Cobain’s mother called “that stupid club”, apparently whilst playing Russian roulette. He was only 25 years of age.

Hound Dog chanteuse Big Mama Thornton, who witnessed the event, recalled: “that kinky hair of his shot straight out like porcupine quills”. (whilst Johnny Otis noted: “He was used to playing a kind of controlled Russian roulette, but this time he made a fatal mistake because the hammer fell on a loaded chamber” Well, duh!).

Elvis Presley was a fan and had Johnny Ace’s 1955 single in his record collection.

In June 1977 when RCA issued the single Way Down, as a taster for the Moody Blue album nobody could have known it would be the last single released during Elvis Presley’s lifetime. On its flipside was Elvis’ cover of Pledging My Love.

Carl Perkins – Blue Suede Shoes

Carl Perkins was an aspiring musician playing a tough Hank Williams inspired brand of honky tonk in the bars of Jackson, Tennessee in 1954, when his wife first heard Presley’s recording That’s All Right (Mama). She was moved to comment “Carl, that sounds just like y’all”

When Perkins found out that it was recorded in Memphis, a short drive away from Jackson, he went to Sun studios and waited and waited until Sam Phillips, the labels founder and Elvis’ first mentor, agreed to see him.

Perkins classic was inspired by a real incident. As Perkins recalled on the 706 ReUnion album:
“I heard a boy tell a girl, he said ‘Uh- Uh don’t step on my suede’s, I was playing a little club in Jackson, Tennessee.”

The song was recorded on December 19th 1955 and was issued in January the following year with Honey Don’t on the flip side.

Blue Suede Shoes went to number 1 in the Country charts, number 2 in the Pop charts and then on March 17th 1956 Carl Perkins made history, and sold over a million records in the process, when he became the first country artist to reach the national Rhythm and Blues chart.

Wanda Jackson – Honey Bop

Following the success of (We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock and Blue Suede Shoes the floodgates opened.

Former country singer Jackson became the first girl singer, inspired by Presley’s example, to cut an out and out rock ’n’ roll record.

Having already dabbled with rock ‘n’ roll with I Gotta Know, a song which featured as much country as it did rock ‘n’ roll, Wanda went the whole hog in September 1956 with Honey Bop which, incidentally, was co-written by Mae Axton, who had also co- written Heartbreak Hotel. Although by no means Jackson’s finest work and not particularly commercially successful it nevertheless blazed the trail that other women would follow.

It is a disgrace that the Rock ‘n ‘ Roll Hall Of Fame is yet to recognise Jackson’s pioneering contribution to the music it purports to support.

Regular readers of Testify (ho-ho) already know what a fan of Wanda Jackson I am and it only remains for me to remind you of Wanda Weekend at The Luminaire next month.

You can read the rest of this list here.

The picture accompanying this post shows Wanda Jackson and Bob Wills at the Showboat in Las Vegas in 1959, some show eh?

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.

Ain't Am Clean?

A moment from the Wattstax festival:

As Larry Shaw, vice president of advertising and publicity at Stax Records and assistant director of the movie version of Wattstax, gazes out across the Los Angeles Coliseum his face is etched with anxiety. To protect the Los Angeles Rams’ pitch the grass is off limits to the reported 112,000, largely African American, crowd packed into the stadium. Yet, despite security being provided by three black organisations (The Watts festival, The Sons Of Watts and the Watts Rangers) people are flooding onto the pitch.

Seven years earlier, in August 1965, Watts had seen an African American uprising during which the L.A. district had been engulfed by flames for five days. That day, in 1972, as the August sun once more beat down, Shaw must have wondered if this “rare opportunity that lets you do something corporately valuable without being guilty of exploitation” that he had written of in the press release was about to turn ugly.

The difference between triumph and disaster is a small fifty-five year old showbiz veteran in a fuchsia pink safari jacket and short pants … The Prince of Dance, the funkiest man alive, the world’s oldest teenager: Mr Rufus Thomas!

Since 1965 all Stax notepaper had borne the legend The Memphis Sound. Thomas, as much as anyone, had helped conceive the sound of Memphis providing the first sizable hit not only for Stax records but also, in 1953, for Sam Phillips fledgling Sun label.

Billing himself as Rufus ‘Hound Dog’ Thomas Jr, Sam Phillips' legendary label enjoyed its first chart success with Bear Cat – a fun answer record to Big Mama Thornton’s classic Hound Dog.

“Me and Sam Phillips? We were tighter than the nuts on Brooklyn Bridge – then.” Thomas told Peter Guralnick in Lost Highway.

Fun though it was Bear Cat prompted a lawsuit from Don Robey owner of Peacock Records which had released Big Mama Thornton’s Hound Dog a month earlier and Sam Phillips was obliged to part with a substantial sum of money to appease Robey.

The following year Presley hit his stride and it marked the end of Thomas’ recording career at Sun:

“When Presley and Carl Perkins and Cash came along just like he (Phillips) catered to black, he just cut it off and went to white.” Thomas remembered (Lost Highway: Peter Guralnick)

Thomas’ roots in Memphis show business ran deep though. He had worked tent shows with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels in 1936:

“I started actually as a tap dancer. That’s how my good timing came about. I was a tap dancer and I used to do some scat singing like Louis (Armstrong), you know all those kind of things. Really I did it all. If it came under the heading of show business I did it.”(Lost Highway: Peter Guralnick).

In the 1940s Thomas hosted the now legendary Amateur Show at the Palace Theatre on Beale Street. Tenor Sax player Herman Green of the Palace Theatre house band recalls:

“Rufus had a partner called ‘Bones’ and they would warm up the audience with an act called ‘Rufus and Bones’. They were kind of a black Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, with Rufus doing the straight lines and ‘Bones’ doing all kinds of crazy things.” (Waking Up In Memphis: Andria Lisle and Mike Evans)

After eleven years, and having witnessed most of the major players in black music at that time take the stage, Thomas left Amateur Hour in a dispute over money:

“I wanted more but I couldn’t get Bones to go ask for it with me. So the man got with Bones and asked him would he work with someone else…he said yes and I got fired.”(Lost Highway: Peter Guralnick).

Still Thomas had other irons in the fire including hosting another amateur show at the Handy Theatre, still with Bones, and perhaps more significantly broadcasting on WDIA The Mother Station of the Negroes.

In 1948 WDIA had introduced a policy of all black announcers playing mostly black music. A 1952 survey showed “that radios, once beyond the means of the average black family had become a standard appliance- in Memphis alone 93 per cent of black households owned a radio and 30 per cent owned two.” (Almost Grown: The Rise Of Rock James Miller).

It was in an attempt to reach that audience that Jim Stewart, head of Satellite (soon to be Stax) records first met Thomas in 1959 whilst pitching The Veltones Feel I’m In Love/ Someday at that point Satellites sole foray into R&B in a catalogue that included You Drive Me Crazy/Say Anything But Not Goodbye by Ray Scott who had authored Billy Lee Riley’s Flying Saucers Rock ‘n’ Roll.

In 1960 Jim Stewart leased the old Capitol Theatre on the corner of College and McLemore Ave in Memphis and set about converting it into a recording studio.

Rufus was amongst the first people to arrive at the new studio and brought with him a tape of Cause I Love You, a song that he had written and that he and his daughter Carla performed as a duet. Stewart liked it enough to record it with Booker T Jones on baritone sax and Marvell Thomas, Rufus' son, on piano.

Cause I Love You/Deep Down Inside was issued in 1960 and it forever changed the direction of Jim Stewart’s label and life.

Stewart recalled “Prior to that I had no knowledge of what black music was about. Never heard black music and never even had an inkling of what it was all about. It was like a blind man who suddenly gained his sight. You don’t want to go back, you don’t even look back.” (Soulsville USA Rob Bowman).

Previous Satellite releases had met with indifference but this one actually sold. Indeed it sold well enough to bring Satellite to the attention of Jerry Wexler who leased the track for Atlantic records pop subsidiary Atco and led to a deal whereby Atlantic acquired first refusal on distribution rights for ALL Satellite, and later Stax, recordings.

In 1963 Thomas delivered the track that would set the template for the rest of his career. The Dog was a dance craze record and was quickly followed by Walking The Dog and Somebody Stole My Dog. Although these had all been reasonable sized hits, by 1969 Thomas could have been forgiven for feeling a little neglected at Stax. As Rob Bowman notes in Soulsville USA: “ He had not been invited to go on the Stax /Volt tour of Europe in 1967, he was not asked to perform on the labels 1969 television special and his album, May I Have Your Ticket Please was not finished for the big LP push of spring 1969. He felt that many in the company did not take him seriously as an artist.”

In December of 1969, however, Thomas was put together with the producer Tom Nixon, whom Stax had recently recruited, and immediately the partnership hit with Funky Chicken. This was another dance craze record and the first in a series of records that saw the Nixon/ Thomas partnership chart six times. As Dean Rudland points out in his sleeve notes to The Funkiest Man, at fifty-three, Thomas was ”on the hottest streak of his career”.

It was this recent career revival that ensured Thomas’ presence at Wattstax . . .

When the crowd first start trailing onto the pitch at the end of Breakdown, Thomas lightly remonstrates with them:

“I don’t want nobody on the field – not yet. When I tell you to get on the field then you get on the field and I just might get on the field with you.”

Thomas then goes into the aforementioned Funky Chicken beginning:

“Y'all come on in now
Come right on down front
I got something I want to show you”

Maybe people take this to be the invitation that Thomas had teased them with because what had been a trickle of people turns into flood.

Al Bell, who by 1972 was effectively running Stax records and was the most senior label executive present at Wattstax, recalls:

“The only time I became concerned was when they started coming over the fences and coming out on the field because I didn’t know what that could possibly result in. And Shaw was concerned. I expressed it to Shaw, I said ‘Shaw I’m concerned right here, but the only way were going to get these people off this field is Rufus Thomas. Because Rufus Thomas can control the crowd so you (Larry Shaw) gotta go out there and tell Rufus to talk these people back off this field ‘cause he can do that or we’re gonna have to close the show down.”(Wattstax DVD commentary)

This is exactly what Shaw does, then tensely watchs, as Thomas begins. The music stops and a little hesitantly at first Thomas starts rapping: “Power to the people, let's go to the stands…” some in the stands echo him but it seems distant and half hearted. Nevertheless, the crowd on the pitch is starting to thin. Thomas spots a man waving an inside-out umbrella, more an act of high spirits than a threat, and spotlights him “He don’t mean to be mean he just wants to be seen” he mocks. It turns into a routine “Yeah that’s a brother alright, but I be damned if he be my brother”. Umbrella Man is now alone on the grass mugging trying to extend his moment, but it’s gone and only he doesn’t know it. Thomas has won the crowd, “Now y’all get him off” he orders and once more people flood the pitch but only to jostle Thomas’ anonymous stooge off the grass so the show can go on.

It’s the work of a master and, I suspect, a glimpse of Thomas the tent show minstrel. Only somebody drawing from a deep well of experience could have played a crowd so effectively.

As Al Bell says in his commentary to the DVD edition of Wattstax

“We could always be certain that when Rufus Thomas hit the stage as they say, quote, that he was gonna get the house and he got the house at Wattstax. I mean did he ever get the house at Wattstax! Get the house and control the crowd.”

After Wattstax things were never the same at Stax and the company collapsed in 1975.

Thomas recorded irregularly after the demise of Stax.

1996 saw a sort of bringing together of his two great dance craze songs when he recorded Chicken Dog with The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Its hard to believe, when listening to this track, that the former Rabbits Foot Minstral and oldest living teenager was 79 at the time of recording particularly when you hear, right at the start of the track, Thomas leering “I know where I’m going now”.

On 15^th December 2001 at St Francis Hospital, Memphis, Rufus Thomas died of heart failure and with him a whole tradition of entertainment.

Further reading here.

In deference to the season you can listen to Rufus Thomas' I'll Be Your Santa, Baby here.

Happy Christmas.