FOtB Colin Escott (pictured here with Eddie Bond* in 1971) has written the definitive history of Sun Records, Good Rockin’ Tonight, as well as the touring Broadway hit, Million Dollar Quartet (see it when it comes to your home town). Bear Family’s recent release of Colin, Martin Hawkins, and Hank Davis’ revised versions of their epic Sun Blues and Sun Country box sets, will be the subject of a future blog. Like many true historians, neither Peter nor Colin can remember when they first met.
*We’re sorry to report that Eddie Bond, the self-styled Rockin’ Daddy, died on March 20, 2013.
I wrote a by-god Broadway show, Million Dollar Quartet, and one company criss-crosses North America. Usually, the cast handles local media requests, but newspapers occasionally ask for the director, music director, or me. Inevitably, the questions are much the same and the responses trip off our tongues, but sometimes I’m thrown a curve. A lady from the Patriot News in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, asked when and where I’d first heard rock ‘n’ roll. The stumbling silence must have been disorienting after the easy loquaciousness of my earlier well-rehearsed answers.
I was six years old in 1956, and we lived in what the British call council housing and Americans call public housing. The houses were hastily built after World War II so that returning servicemen would have a place to raise us. Mr. and Mrs. Edwards lived next door. They were older, but their house had been flattened during the War. Their son, Mike, had a motorcycle, a record player, and five or six records. “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Hound Dog” vexed my parents more than the others. I can’t say I loved those records, but I’m pretty certain I first heard them coming through the wall. Lonnie Donegan’s “Rock Island Line” and Tommy Steele’s jaunty but ultimately vapid cover of Marty Robbins’ “Singin’ the Blues” were in steady rotation on the other side. The other record lodged in memory is Johnny Duncan’s “Last Train to San Fernando.”
Donegan and Duncan were branded as Skiffle. American spell-check doesn’t recognize skiffle (even though its provenance is American) and I know just one American, Todd Everett, who professes to love it. What impresses itself upon me nearly sixty years later is how resourceful Donegan must have been to find some of the blues and hillbilly songs he recorded. After buying every ultra low-run British pressing, he went to the American Embassy to hear Library of Congress recordings. In 1954, how many Americans knew the Carter Family’s “Wabash Cannonball,” Hank Snow’s “Nobody’s Child,” and Washboard Sam’s “Diggin’ My Potatoes”? Donegan recorded them all that year. That same year, Elvis Presley magicked the same music into something startlingly new. Donegan sang the faster songs with British vaudeville chirpiness; otherwise, he mimicked the originals quite closely. If only the music equaled the diligence.
Johnny Duncan was an American serviceman stationed in England, who claimed to have worked with Bill Monroe. (Don’t confuse him with the minor league country star of the same name who charted some records in the ‘70s and ‘80s). Originally from Oliver Springs, Tennessee, Duncan married an English woman and stayed. He fell into the orbit of Donegan’s producer, Denis Preston. A cousin of Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, Preston launched Lansdowne Studio in 1956. The first Lansdowne hit, Humphrey Lyttleton’s “Bad Penny Blues,” was liberally adapted by the Beatles into “Lady Madonna.” Preston was eclectic. He produced James Cotton’s first solo recordings after the Sun records, and later ventured into Indian-jazz fusion.
A Trinidadian calypso, “Last Train to San Fernando” was a Road March song from the Carnival of 1949 or ’50. Originated and first recorded in Trinidad by Mighty Dictator, it was revived in the States around 1952 by Duke of Iron. Ostensibly, it was about trying to get the last train from Port of Spain back to San Fernando, but after hearing the West Indian versions, I came to believe that a woman was offering herself for one last fling before getting married the following day. Bill Millar derides this interpretation, but calypso is rich in allegory and I’m sticking with it.
Preston was married to a West Indian woman, so she might have played the song to him. It came around again when the American calypso craze of 1956 – ’57 brought many older songs back into circulation. Ray Lang and His Jamaican Room Orchestra released “San Fernando” on American Decca and British Brunswick in 1957. Atlantic Records crooner Bobby Short latched onto it around the same time. Preston could have heard Lang, Short, or the even the Duke of Iron. In the studio, he paired Duncan with some British jazz men. They rapidly came up to tempo on the intro, and slowed down the outro, much as Meade Lux Lewis had slowed down the outro to “Honky Tonk Train Blues.” Guitarist Denny Wright wanted to be Django Reinhardt (nothing wrong with that; I’d be Django if I didn’t have to smoke Gitanes and lose two fingers). As the band jumped to a South American rhythm on the break, Wright played one of the most joyous solos in all popular music. Duncan sang nut-clenchingly high like Bill Monroe. “Last Train to San Fernando” was a cross-cultural collision like no other: calypso, skiffle, tango, jazz, rockabilly, and bluegrass. Duncan did what Donegan didn’t—create something truly new out of something old. Problem was, he never did it again.
