Don Covay wrote “It’s in the Wind” after the plane crash that killed his friend Otis Redding. Today this wistful, melancholy ode sadly serves as Don Covay’s own epitaph.
Born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, Don migrated to Washington D.C. and
joined some doo-woper friends in The Rainbows. Somehow he latched on to Little Richard, who briefly took Don under his wing, nicknaming him Pretty Boy and producing his first solo record, “Bip Bop Bip,” backed by the Upsetters. After several years as a Richard wannabee and a bunch of boogity shop singles, Covay found his footing in the emergence of ‘60s soul. After advice from his singing and songwriting idol, Sam Cooke, he developed a keen, narrative songwriting style that found early success with Gladys Knight (“Letter Full of Tears”) and particularly Solomon Burke (“Tonight’s the Night,” “I’m Hanging Up My Heart for You” and “You’re Good for Me”), who became a buddy and partner in mischief.
His own records, first on Rosemary/Atlantic as Don Covay and the Goodtimers, were extraordinary, idiosyncratic gems. They were passionately sung tales framed with trademark choppy, guitar-led syncopation and highlighted by the oft-covered smash “Mercy, Mercy.” Covay seemed to thrive in Jerry Wexler’s Atlantic universe, despite only achieving two subsequent hits of his own: “See Saw” (recorded with Booker T and the MG’s at Stax) and “Sookie Sookie.”
His singles were singular in style, rich in storytelling drama, and delivered with absolute conviction: “Take This Hurt Off Me,” “Temptation Was Too Strong,” Watching the Late, Late Show,“ House on the Corner” I Stole Some Love" and The Soul Clan (Solomon Burke, Arthur Conley, Ben E. King, Joe Tex and Don) opus “That’s How It Feels.” He delivered perfectly calibrated, classic songs for Wilson Pickett (“Three Time Loser,” “I’m Gonna Cry”), Little Richard (the epic wrenching, recitation “I Don’t Know What You Got (But it’s Got Me),” Otis Redding (another beautifully crafted, “begging” classic,“Think About It,” which was only released posthumously), and Aretha Franklin (“Chain of Fools). Later, in 1973, at Mercury, Covay clicked with the half-whispered, half-sung infidelity tale "I Was Checkin’ Out (While She Was Checkin’ In).”
Before his debilitating 1992 Stroke, Don Covay was an irrepressible force, never lacking for a song, an idea, a plan, a scheme (the Soul Clan was one of his best) or a bright new day. On a personal note, our paths happily crossed often in 1974 and '75, and I hosted him on my WBCN radio show where he proudly premiered the glorious, Dixie Hummingbirds style rave-up, “It’s Better to Have and Don’t Need (Than Need and Don’t Have).” Today, Don Covay is in the wind.
The artists on the recently released set, The Soul of Designer Records, are true voices in the shadows. They’re the “little people,” in the phrase that Boston record store entrepreneur Skippy White (“Mass. Records: Home of the Blues”) once used to describe the underheralded underclass of ‘60s soul singers. The “little people” who recorded for the Memphis, Tennessee, Designer label, were church singers, locals from the Memphis area or pilgrims from Cincinnati, Detroit or South Carolina, who came to one-time Jerry Lee Lewis guitarist Roland Janes’ Sonic Studio to record a 45 rpm record, something to sell on the weekend programs that they played in churches, auditoriums, wherever they might find a venue for their music.
“New talent needed all the time!” read the opening of a Designer Records ad, and new talent was the thirst for Designer owner Jesse Corbett Graham, who opened shop in 1964, fishing for hits in the rockabilly and country pond. He christened himself J.C. Wooten first, and spontaneously nicknamed himself “Style”….Style Wooten, a jack of all trades who soon, with the help of Roland Janes, found his calling in black gospel music.
Style’s concept was cash and carry. For $469 (or less depending on circumstances), a custom record was pressed, usually 25 or 50 copies, with Janes providing the studio and as often as not most of the musicians. As the ad stated, “We furnish our recording staff…" Once word got out, Sonic Studio became a hotbed of Designer gospel sessions. As Janes is quoted in the liner notes, "See, these gospel guys, man, were doing it for the love of what they were doing. They used to get in their cars – maybe two or three carloads of them, say, from Detroit – and they’d come down south and work down here all Friday night and Saturday and Sunday, they might miss a day’s work, probably two days. They were doing it ‘cause they loved it, man.” As for Style: "He felt that he was performing a service, and he was…He didn’t cheat nobody, he treated everybody right.”
The Soul of Designer Records is four CDs of custom 45s, 101 songs, packaged in a record-album gatefold. Some of the artists, like the Soul Superiors of Detroit or the Shaw Singers, used Designer as a springboard for other records and further career advancement. Most of these artists disappeared back home to the local church, with a box or two of records as a physical document of faith, a moment of glory for the parish to hear.
My favorite moments here come out of unexpected borrowings from radio hits of the day: James Brown, Dyke and the Blazers, Ollie and the Nightingales are each annexed, as are Tyrone Davis (the Foster Brothers crib the unmistakable guitar line from “Can I Change My Mind”) and Little Junior Parker (the Dynamic Hughes Gospel Singers neatly graft the opening guitar notes of “Mystery Train” as the hook for “Beautiful City”). There’s an emotional, uptempo cover of the Staple Singers’ “Why Am I Treated So Bad” by the Spiritual Harmonizers of Senatobia, Mississippi, and even a crude but highly compelling Jimi Hendrix guitar nod by Elgie Brown. The real standout for me, though, is a pair of songs by Joe Townsend, recorded with solo guitar, and, it seems, live in church. Townsend, who must be from Mississippi, with a few changes in words, could very well be taken for an early label mate of Muddy Waters at Aristocrat Records. The guitar is thick, the voice empowered, and the line between gospel and blues blurred.
The Soul of Designer Records is the music of Skippy White’s “little people.” But the power of voice, soul and inspiration, recorded by Roland Janes and given a home by Style Wooten on Designer, is as big as it gets: a heart full of love and a forever shout through the universe.
Jimmy Scott was a singer. Though his musical support was mostly jazz-powered, he was not your typical jazz singer but instead sang ballads and sang them as if the delivery of each syllable was an extraction of precious metal. Scott sang sad songs from the the songbooks favored by Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra, two artists who shared his deep, mature and naked emotional investment. On stage, Jimmy Scott bled for his audience and, more likely, himself. Motherless at 13 and afflicted with Kallmann Syndrome (a condition that prevented him from reaching puberty), Scott inhabited an often harrowing, unwelcoming universe. Jimmy Scott always stood on the outside looking in.
My own connection with Jimmy Scott began in college with an album on Atlantic Records called The Source (1969). The Source was produced by Philadelphia jazz DJ turned record man Joel Dorn. It was jazz but it wasn’t quite, featuring stalwarts Jr. Mance, Ron Carter and David Newman as support. The music was otherworldly to a college freshman; a raw, bittersweet emotion that was soul music of the deepest kind but buttressed by a fragrant unit of NYC jazz players. And the voice pouring into each song was hypnotic, the fragile cry of a lonely spirit calling out hauntingly in “On Broadway” and “Our Day Will Come,” among others. It was not quite male, but then not female (although close your eyes and he sounds a little like Nancy Wilson, to me anyway).
Our paths crossed remarkably enough at Sire Records in 1991. Over a period of five years Scott recorded a trilogy of albums for us, All The Way (Tommy LiPuma), Dream (Mitchell Froom) and Heaven (Craig Street), that remain very personal to me. But this not my story. These three projects would certainly not have happened without Seymour Stein and Bill Bentley, and probably not without the death of Jimmy’s friend and champion Doc Pomus, whose funeral service occasioned Scott’s solo delivery of “Someone to Watch Over Me,” a riveting moment that stunned the assembled, including Seymour and myself. The Sire albums, each its own uniquely conceived masterpiece, enabled Jimmy Scott to perform regularly for the rest of his life.
Sometimes it’s hard for me to listen to a Jimmy Scott album all the way through, much as it was seeing him live. One song is often so draining, requiring an undivided emotional investment. I think Jimmy Scott was a genius, a very mortal man who gave everything for the cause. He was born on July 17, 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio and died on June 12, 2014 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Jimmy Scott was indeed a singer.
The “5” Royales were always at the heart of the discography of my book, Sweet Soul Music. As one of their album titles proclaimed, their music represented “the roots of soul.” Long before the internet made it possible to have the world at your fingertips, Joe and I discussed such matters long into the night. There was never any question in our minds that the “5” Royales should have been one of the first groups inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame – if there were any justice (if James Brown had truly ruled the world, as it seemed for a while he might), they would have been voted in by acclamation. It wasn’t so much the vast influence of their performances and compositions, for which Joe makes so eloquent a case, as the striking originality, the still-startling “presentness” of their music. But let Joe tell you about it – and then just give yourself over to the music. (But don’t forget “The Slummer the Slum,” and “It’s Hard But It’s Fair,” and “Monkey Hips and Rice,” and…oh, once you start, you’re never going to stop.
– PG
Mr C:
“Soul and Swagger” is a bold and declarative title for the new Rockbeat five-CD set, The Complete “5” Royales (1951-67). It’s also cool and entirely appropriate. Soul and Swagger is pink-tinged and packaged in a user-friendly, 45-sleeve-size bound book, a design model used in the gorgeous The Complete Motown Singles series. To even a casual fan, it looks like something to own.
And of course it is, if only as an absorbing history of a group that had hits in the ‘50s hardscrabble rhythm and blues world but who also remained vital “voices in the shadows” (a 1963 single by the group is appropriately called “I’m Standing in the Shadows”), their remarkable talent and influence unduly unheralded.
For, ironically, some of the “5” Royales’ greatest songs (composed by the group’s all-everything, linchpin guitarist Lowman Pauling), are best known through the interpretations of others: "Dedicated to the One I Love" (a massive pop hit for both the Shirelles and The Mamas and Papas), “Think” (a hit twice, in two different versions by Royales’ acolyte James Brown), and “Tell the Truth”, plucked by Atlantic-period Ray Charles.
But now, with “soul and swagger”, the “5” Royales themselves are back…bad as they want to be!
A thumbnail sketch of the group has them planted in their hometown of Winston Salem, N.C., a regional gospel favorite originally known as the Royal Sons. A demo made its way to New York City’s Apollo Records, an independent with tentacles in black gospel music. Two Royal Sons’ singles were released, but Apollo was looking for rhythm and blues (think of the teenage Solomon Burke). The Sons, seemingly without protest, made the switch. Thus were the “5” Royales (changed from mere “Royals”) born. Within a year, the group had a smash, Pauling’s catchy, stop/start, jump blues “Baby Don’t Do It.” And off they went.
Singles followed, hits were bunched at the beginning, and a sound evolved, kicked off in the session following up the first hit. The song is a Lowman Pauling original, “Help Me Somebody,” the singer is the Royales’ formidable tenor, Johnny Tanner, a treasure of a vocalist who puts his heart and burrows his soul into the gospel-drenched, world-weary plea, with the group draped around him in support. It’s a seminal soul moment, you can hear the voice-to-come of the Atlantic Ray Charles right there. Of course there is no real birth-of-soul sunburst necessarily, it came in bits and pieces from all over. But the “5” Royales became a cornerstone, their minor-key, intense laments a big jumping-off point for James Brown and a cast of millions.
In 1954, with their career cruising along at a steady hum, the “5” Royales switched labels, moving to r&b powerhouse King Records. It’s a move that should have catapulted the band to even loftier heights. But here the story oddly stumbles.
The hits didn’t come. New York sessions with session ace Mickey Baker replacing Pauling on guitar didn’t click. And a steady output of singles yielded little magic.
That changed in February of 1957, when bang, Lowman Pauling re-emerged, his guitar suddenly thrust forward emphatically, with thick, rich bursts of obbligatos and penetrating solo blasts that became the core of the new “5” Royales sound. “Think” was recorded that day, as well as doo-wop delight “Tears of Joy”. In the months to follow, “Dedicated (to the One I Love)”, “Say It”, “Tell the Truth”, “Slummer the Slum” and so many more tumbled out. Yet with all of this creative flowering and signature music being created, outside of “Think” the music was scarcely on the radio. By 1960, even with such transformative songs as “I’m With You” and “Wonder When You’re Coming Home,” the “5” Royales were slipping off the charts, and it was the Shirelles and James Brown who were recasting Lowman’s music. In a last-ditch effort, Sam Cooke gave them a song, “Why,” a generous gesture but one that yielded no commercial result.
The 1960s saw the “5” Royales slide from record company to record company: Home of the Blues, Vee Jay, Smash, Todd, Hi, and others. Even the inspired production efforts of Willie Mitchell and James Brown came up bare. With soul music exploding (and Steve Cropper using Pauling’s licks to shape an entirely new tributary of Memphis R&B), the band inexplicably could find no beachhead. Finally Tanner left. Pauling soldiered on, mostly with longtime group pianist Royal Abbit by his side. But by the end of 1967, this foundational ensemble was no more. On December 26, 1973, working as a janitor at a Brooklyn synagogue, Lowman Pauling passed away, no doubt having heard JB’s third resurrection of “Think” on the radio that year.
One wonders if after all the years on the road, all the songs and all the shows, the words to one of his signature songs might have passed through Lowman’s thoughts:
Think about the sacrifices, that I made for you
Think of all the times, that I spent with you
Think of all the good things, that I done for you…
I met Joe McEwen (a/k/a Mr. C) in 1970 when Jake and Alexandra and I were selling tickets to a Lightnin’ Hopkins concert at the door. Jake was 2, and Joe was 18 or 19. “Did you mean what you said in that Solomon Burke article you wrote in Rolling Stone?” Joe said, without bothering to introduce himself. “Yes,” I said. We’ve been friends ever since.
Recently Joe came across this amazing Al Green clip and dropped by to tell us about it.
– PG
Mr C:
Al Green didn’t share peanut butter sandwiches with his grade school classmates. “I’ve always been a loner,” he tells interviewer Ellis Haizlip.
“I was always the fellow that was alone, by myself.”
This little bit of revelation is spoken without irony or pretense. In this remarkable performance/interview on the Soul! TV show aired on January 3, 1973, Al Green seems unburdened by the crush of success that has suddenly thrust this once lonely schoolboy into the guy that now everybody wants to know. He talks, but mostly sings, with full band and by himself, guitar in hand. Despite his owndisclaimer, Al is in great voice and fully engaged, seeming to enjoy Soul!’s inviting setting. For an hour, we’re absorbed by the full flowering of the mercurial Al Green.
Soul! was a PBS black culture hour, the brain child of Manhattan sophisticate Haizlip. It aired from September of 1968 to March of 1973, a Thursday night show that originally featured King Curtis as house bandleader. Guests ranged from Apollo stars like Joe Tex, Jerry Butler, and the Manhattans, to an array of such political and literary lights of the era as James Baldwin, Leroi Jones, Shirley Chisholm, and Julius Lester among others. It was ambitious and understated, a television show that succeeded without the flash of the moment. A small audience sat, café-style, at small tables, while Ellis Haizlip directed our attention. Looking at Soul! 40 years later, it’s wondrous that something as special and well-crafted as this managed to exist.
Like a future album title, Al Green Explores Your Mind, onthis January evening it was more a case of Al Green Exploring His Own Mind. And we get to ride along.
Colin and I would certainly have been friends even if we hadn’t had Howlin’ Wolf to bring us together. From the time we first met, we had so much to share. But as Sam Phillips always pointed out, there’s something uniquely spiritual about music – and there’s something uniquely spiritual about Colin. Listen to his solo albums. Listen to the records he’s produced. Listen to all those wonderful Blackie and the Rodeo Kings albums. Go out and hear him in person, whether he’s playing the Bourbon Street Blues and Boogie Bar in Nashville or on the road with Bob Dylan. Or check him out on the television show, Nashville, both for his cameo appearances and the music that he consistently contributes to the show. Colin always has something soulful to say. Howlin’ Wolf charged him with bringing everything he had to offer, all of his feeling and all of his humanity, to the music, and he has. So much of that feeling comes through in what he has written here about the Wolf – and about himself. Not to mention the picture that his mom took, which has traveled around with him in his wallet all these years.– PG
Meeting Howlin’ Wolf
By Colin Linden
Howlin’ Wolf was already 61 years old and an undeniable legend in the world of music when I first met him. I was an 11-year-old fat, white kid living in Toronto. But I felt, and still feel, that we forged a genuine bond that day. Though he was a hugely influential blues artist, he was, first and foremost, a hard-working, committed, devoted 6-nights-a-week-plus-a matinee-on-Saturday musician. And it was my fate and great fortune to have first met him at one of those Saturday matinees.
I was passionately connected to music–even as ayoung child, it was the thing for me. Records took me into a world of mystery. They captured my imagination, and overtook my thoughts. They made me feel connected to another universe, one where I felt I absolutely belonged. I started dreaming about playing and singing and making records. I was always drawn to the blue side of music. When I first heard the Wolf, on Labor Day of 1971, it was a life-changing experience. His voice jumped though the speakers–“ I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I ain’t got no diamonds, I-I-I-I-I-I-I ain’t go no gold, but I do have love to satisfy your soul….cause I’m built for comfort, I ain’t built for speed!” I had already heard many of his songs–the ones performed by rock artists like Cream, The Doors, The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds. But when I heard the Wolf, it was much more intense and raw and serious. He didn’t sound like a pop star. Even at age 11, I recognized that he was in a different league than his youthful devotees. I could tell that he was the original item.
And as I began to learn how to play guitar, I knew that it was blues music that I needed to learn.
When I heard that he was coming to play in Toronto, November 22-27 at the Colonial Tavern on Yonge Street, and that he was in fact playing a matinee on the Saturday, I knew I somehow had to go.
I got the number for the Colonial and called them up to find out if minors could get in. They told me that they had a balcony that was licensed as a restaurant, and yes, minors were welcome if they didn’t drink and didn’t venture downstairs. They assured me that I would be able to see and hear everything, that the show started at 3:30, but that the bar and restaurant opened at noon.
Then, I had to convince my Mother to take me down to a bar frequented by some of the most low-down characters of the Yonge Street scene. It didn’t take much convincing. My Mom always looked for the best in others, and she thought it would be a fun show to go to. When she realized that the Wolf was an elder statesman in music, she believed it would be good for me to see somebody who had spent their whole life in music.
As the date of the Wolf’s show approached, I must have called the Colonial a dozen times to make sure the show was happening. Finally, it was Saturday, I got my Mom to leave early enough to make sure there would be no problem getting in.
We got there at 12:30 for the 3:30 show. We walked up the stairs to the balcony and I immediately noticed that, across the room, there was another set of stairs that led down to the stage. In the corner, at the bottom of the stairs, I saw him. The Mighty Wolf! Just finishing up his lunch, he was planning on hanging around the club until show time. I made a beeline for the stairs, rushed down to the bottom, walked right up to him and said, “Mr. Wolf, you are my hero. I would love to talk with you, but I am only 11 years old, and they won’t let me downstairs. Would you come upstairs and talk with me?”
"Of course" he answered in the most gentle, rough-hewn voice. And with that, this massive man with the largest feet I had ever seen on a human being, followed me as I ran up the stairs.
For the next 3 hours, he sat with me, a cup of coffee in one hand and cigarette in the other, as I asked him questions about his past, where and how he learned and from whom. He was very happy to talk and seemed to sense how much it meant for me to know the answers. He told me that you have to play the same if you are playing for 3 people as you do if you’re playing for 3000. And treat everyone the same–all audiences– black, white, Puerto Rican, whomever. He told me about Charley Patton, and how good he had been to him when he was young. He said that to learn his music, I needed to listen to the people he had listened to. He was mindful of the fact that I was a kid–warning me to stay away from drugs and trouble–but he talked to me with respect and purpose as if I were already an adult.And already a musician.
After we had been sitting for a couple of hours, I went and got my mom, who was patiently sitting at a table across the room, and she took a picture of me and the Wolf. He said to her, “I’m very fond of your son.” That photograph has been traveling with me for the past 42 years.
When it was time for the Wolf to play, he took the stage and sat down in a chair. He had been in ill health for awhile, and had to make sure not to overdo it.Still, at a Saturday matinee in Toronto, he wound up and gave it everything. He sang “Sitting on Top of the World,”’ “44 Blues,” a great version of the Chuck Willis song, “Don’t Deceive Me,” and a handful of other classics. He took his time, he let the songs evolve on their own. He was jovial, joked with the waitresses, sang Happy Birthday to a fan. But the music was dead serious. He brought with him a gravitas and attention to detail that was evident in the way he led the songs and the band. They had a hushed reverence for him. He wasn’t fooling.
Afterwards, we spoke for a while longer.I got to meet Hubert Sumlin, Eddie Shaw, Sunnyland Slim, Andrew “Blueblood” McMahon, and S.P. Leary. I recognized their names from records made a couple of decades earlier.
I could tell that these men, like the Wolf, were in it for life.They weren’t kids. Meeting them planted the seed in me that playing music wasn’t something that you had to give up when you grew up. It could be a life-long calling.
Before I left, the Wolf told me, “ I’m an old man now and I won’t be around much longer. It’s up to you to carry it on.” I took that to mean me personally, and committed to him that day that I would. He may have been talking about my whole generation, I still take it personally. It is still my mission, my honor, and my lifetime goal.
Singer Sonny Green is the show tonight. He’s the focus and driving wheel behind the buoyant energy flowing through La Louisianne, a Los Angeles restaurant/lounge in the Crenshaw District. Sonny Green is at ease being the man.
Sonny’s singing style comes from the vocabulary of Bobby Bland and inhabits the gravel end of Bland’s voice. He sings slow, easy soul songs that tell a story, he is an interpreter of the hits of his contemporaries: Johnnie Taylor, Bobby Womack, his late friend ZZ Hill and, of course, the just-deceased master Bobby Bland. The sixty or so people around the bandstand know the words and happily sing chorus after chorus, led by the ever-engaging ringmaster. “That’s the Way I feel About ‘Cha,” “Running Out of Lies,” “Stop Doggin’ Me Around” (“That’s d-o-g-g-i-n”) roll off the tongues of the assembled, as Green strolls the floor, dancing, jiving and collecting tips.
Familiar faces are introduced; Dancing Ann, Huey the guitar legend, and all the women “in the house tonight” born under the sign of Cancer. Also brought forth are Hank Carbo and the sharply dressed man, Ed Wheeler, who owns the place and gets his own time in the spotlight singing an impassioned, heartfelt “The Things That I Used To Do." Everybody seems familiar. The place is alive., and the songs suddenly breathe a life much different from the records. They become a vehicle for a particular and comforting emotional grounding. The audience and performer, transplanted from the Deep South (posed as a question by Sonny with a predetermined answer) to Los Angeles have become one.
Many years ago, the great soul DJ, the Magnificent Montague, responded during a taped repartee with Sam Cooke: ” I see tonight you’re trying to gather some material for your soul, through mine.“ Those of us in the audience on a recent Monday night at La Louisianne did just that through Sonny Green. And at show’s close, we wandered off into the night, so much the better for it.
John Milward has a new book coming out this month Crossroads: How the Blues Shaped Rock ‘n’ Roll (and Rock Saved the Blues).The illustration is from the book and is one of many original images by Margie Greve. John’s been writing eloquently about music for years. Here he examines the genesis of ‘Catfish Blues.’
Determining who wrote a vintage blues song can be akin to casting a fishing line into very muddy waters. That’s because in the early decades of the last century, blues was an oral tradition, with songs and lyrics and guitar licks passed from one musician to the next. As Dave Van Ronk once said, “Theft is the first law of art, and like any group of intelligent musicians, we all lived with our hands in each other’s pockets.” Added folklorist and song collector Paul Clayton: “If you can’t write, rewrite. If you can’t rewrite, copyright.”
A vintage 78 rpm disc might give writer’s credit to a particular blues singer, but unless the song was copyrighted, he was unlikely to ever see publishing royalties. Talent recruited for so-called “race records” rarely thought in such terms, and typically took a one-time cash payment (Lightnin’ Hopkins did this throughout his long career). Skip James was paid $40 for the 18 sides he recorded for Paramount in 1931, and his songs weren’t copyrighted until his rediscovery in the early-‘60s. (James came into a late-life windfall when Cream covered his “I’m So Glad” on Fresh Cream; his heirs got serious scratch when “Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues” was included on the soundtrack to 2000’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?)
Robert Petway recorded “Catfish Blues” in 1941; he was cited as the writer but blues researchers say the song had long circulated around the Mississippi Delta and was in the repertoire (and perhaps composed by) a singer of his acquaintance, Tommy McClennan. Whoever wrote it, however, borrowed a lyrical motif found in a 1928 hit called “Jim Jackson’s Kansas City Blues Part 3” by a medicine-show entertainer named Jim Jackson (“I wished I was a catfish, swimming down in the sea; I’d have some good woman, fishing after me”).
“Catfish Blues” barely caused a ripple commercially, but it was no doubt familiar to one of Petway’s Delta neighbors, Muddy Waters, whom Alan Lomax recorded that same year for the Library of Congress. Muddy brought the song with him to Chicago, and cut it for Chess in 1950 with his ringing electric guitar representing a clear bridge from the country blues to the sound of the city. Muddy moved the “catfish” lyric to the top, added some new words, and put his name on a song whose title he changed to “Rollin’ Stone.” Here’s Waters playing the tune about a decade later, and not long before a British rhythm & blues quintet who idolized Muddy decided to call themselves the Rolling Stones.
Many others have covered “Catfish Blues,” with B.B. King giving Petway writing credit, John Lee Hooker taking it for himself, and Jimi Hendrix citing the song as a traditional. Hendrix undoubtedly learned the song via the Waters recording. “When I was a little kid,” Hendrix told Sharon Lawrence, “I heard a record playing at a neighbor’s house turned way up. That song called to me, and I left my yard, went down the street, and when the song was over, I knocked on the door and said, ‘Who was that playing?’ ‘Muddy Waters,’ the guy said. I didn’t quite understand. He repeated it and spelled it out– ‘M-u-d-d-y.’
“Catfish Blues” was not only a staple of Hendrix’s repertoire– he sometimes called it the “Muddy Waters Blues”– but also the clear inspiration for two classics from Electric Ladyland which confirmed that his roots were deeply sunk in the blues: “Voodoo Chile” and “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return).” Here’s the latter, in which Hendrix casts his line into outer space.
Keep on pushing, move on up, we’re a winner: these exhortations were at the forefront of the content and spirit of the music Curtis Mayfield recorded with his group, The Impressions, in the mid and late 1960s. If his record, “People Get Ready,” captured a more steady, righteous, nose-to-the-moral-grindstone tone, “We’re a Winner,” released in l967, lifted higher and aimed for a more liberating result.
The music matched the message and performance. Arranged and produced by Mayfield’s long-time, hugely undervalued creative partner, Johnny Pate, “We’re a Winner” explodes from the opening brass flourish. A live studio audience, recorded at Chicago’s Universal Studio, adds a kinetic energy throughout– right from the “Come on sock it to me!” shout-out that follows the two-note horn blast intro. This record demanded attention.
Still it’s the words that carry the day:
"I don’t mind leaving here,
To show the world we have no fear
‘cause we’re a winner
and everybody knows it’s true
we’ll just keep on pushing..“
"We’re a Winner,” rose to Number One on the black radio charts that year. The mood and emotional force it thrusts out, born of the Civil Rights Movement a few years before, was also directly carried forward in the increasingly aggressive speeches of Martin Luther King. 1967 was a tipping point in so much of American society – race riots, Vietnam the war, and the accompanying protests – the basic challenge of ‘what it was and what it is,’ to ‘what could be and what should be.’ The ceiling-breaking liberation that imbued “the message” got so ratcheted up that it had nowhere to go except burst. And it did, quickly. Still, these many years later the words bang around in my head. How that poetry must have been such an inspiration to the man that authored them.
Sam Cooke’s transcendent “A Change is Gonna Come” was born of the same era, and the same racial striving, as the Impressions records. Barack Obama has used both "A Change is Gonna Come" and “Keep On Pushing”, to powerful effect in major speeches. Currently, a Samsung commercial featuring basketball star LeBron James, in winningly relaxed engagement with family and friends, has “Keep On Pushing” as its music bed. The message of warmth, hope and resolve remains vital and stirring. “We’re a winner, and everybody knows it’s true” is more than a self-help mantra, it’s a primal declaration of basic civil and human rights. Keep on pushing indeed.
Bonus Extra Credit in the College of Musical Knowledge:
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.
