Crash Course Timeline, No. 32: The Mills Brothers, the Pride of Piqua, OH

Classic line-up.

Overall, the Mills Brothers’ story is one of a steady climb to success, if with a side of tragedy. Even the tragedy followed from their success, if accidentally.

The four Mills Brothers - from oldest to youngest, John Jr., Herbert, Harry and Donald - were born between 1910 and 1915 and into a family that ultimately included nine children. Their parents raised them in Piqua, Ohio, a town north of Dayton, in what sounds like a comfortable and musical environment. Their mother, Ethel, sang light opera and their father, John Mills, Sr., both ran a barbershop and sang in a barbershop quartet called The Four Kings of Harmony. John Sr. taught his boys everything he knew, but he had no way of knowing how far they’d take it. And, in the end, him.

They learned music singing in a pair of church choirs growing up (Cyrene African Methodist Episcopal and Park Avenue Baptist) and put that knowledge into practice at impromptu performances in front of their father’s barbershop with a kazoo for accompaniment. They officially formed the act in 1925 and started working around Southwest Ohio playing house/lawn parties, at music halls and supper clubs. If their official career started anywhere, it would be Piqua’s May’s Opera House where they found work singing between Rin-Tin-Tin features. When the same venue hosted an amateur contest, the Mills Brothers signed on - and stumbled into what became their, for lack of a better word, gimmick:

“They entered an amateur contest at May's Opera House but while on stage Harry realized he had lost his kazoo. He improvised by cupping his hand over his mouth and mimicking the sound of trumpet. The brothers liked the idea and worked it into their act. John, the bass vocalist, would imitate the tuba. Harry, a baritone, imitated the trumpet, Herbert became the second trumpet, and Donald the trombone. John accompanied the four-part harmony on ukulele and then guitar. They practiced imitating orchestras they heard on the radio.”

The Rin-Tin-Tin gig opened its first door in 1928, when the Mills Brothers traveled to Cincinnati with the Harold Greenameyer’s orchestra for an audition at WLW Radio; the station manager passed on Greenameyer & Co., but hired the Mills Brothers. Though they quickly established a solid local following and brought the entire Mills family to a new city, the Mills Brothers didn't wait long for their next big break. When Duke Ellington and His Orchestra passed through Cincinnati, someone arranged to have them sing for him. Impressed by what he heard, Ellington referred them to his New York contact at Okeh Records, Tommy Rockwell, who quickly signed them. That took them to New York and one small step from the national stage.

One Hit No More, No. 92: Sniff 'n' the Tears, in the Driver's Seat

Have I mentioned Roberts painted all the album covers?

The Hit
“…a few acoustic guitar strums and then pow, the musical gas is punched in the form of a single gunshot-styled snare drumbeat.”

“This revs things up instantly as the drumming intensifies and cocksure electric guitar riffs join in, followed by a set of gritty vocals that sound simultaneously guarded and vulnerable, all underscored by punctual synthesizer blips.”

Finding that description of Sniff ‘n’ the Tears “Driver’s Seat” on Vintage Rock spared me from trying to describe a song I still haven’t wrapped my head around. None of those adjectives - e.g., “gritty,” “guarded” and “vulnerable” - match what I hear in the song, but doing 91 of these posts has helped me appreciate the struggle of translating music into words.

Sniff ‘n’ the Tears landed a pretty damn big hit with “Driver’s Seat,” one big enough to lift the album it was on into the Top 40 on the Billboard (the single peaked at No. 15 on the singles chart), and it took them to a place or two…which, it bears noting, didn’t jive with expectations for some key members of the band. One, however, soldiered on, and for long enough to get some of those wayward members back into the fold. Circling back to Vintage Rock:

“Lyrically, the song is about picking yourself up after a breakup. Musically, it started as a riff; behind the riff was a revolving chord sequence. I abandoned the riff when I realized it was a bit similar to something else, but the acoustic pattern was unusual and led to a certain propulsive tension that suited the fragmented state of mind implied by the words.”

That’s Paul Roberts talking, who seems like exactly one of two people that you really need to pay attention to for this one…

The Rest of the Story
Sniff ‘n’ the Tears started in England’s pub rock scene, circa 1973, playing mostly night clubs. The band’s name came from Roberts - who had wrote a band named “The Tears” into “a dystopian novel” he’d “attempted" - and the band’s manager, who added the “Sniff” to the name as a nod to Roberts’ struggles with hay fever. They knocked around that scene for a year or two, gigging, even recording a dozen songs to shop as demos, but nothing took beyond some paying work. With what looked like nothing but deadends ahead, having a guitarist check out to join the military was all it took for that first line-up to disband. Roberts, for his part, relocated to France to “pursue his painting” according to a 2012 post on blog titled Riff Raf, a theory that, without confirmation, seems entirely reasonable in the grand scheme.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 31: The Boswell Sisters, Queens of Prog Swing

"Why don't you choke those Boswell Sisters?" Jesus...

“Why don't you choke those Boswell Sisters? How wonderful it would be if they sang just one song like it was written. Really when they get through murdering it, one can never recognize the original.”

“Please get those terrible Boswell Sisters off the station! You can't follow the melody and the beat is going too rapidly. And to me they sound like savage chanters!”

Consider that another installment in the “don’t let your grandparents tell you [_______] about how rude people have become these days.” Also, trust me: you will not understand where that anger comes from by the end of this post. Or even after one listen to the sampler.

Despite the rage-mail that haters sent to their employers and sponsors, the Boswell Sisters achieved remarkable renown in their prime - about 1930-1936 - and some of the biggest artists and bandleaders their era appreciated working with people who knew their way around music as well as they did. Unfortunately, that didn’t keep the musical world from forgetting them. As one of the first close-harmony singing groups in the recorded music/radio era, they opened space for contemporary competitors - e.g., the Three X Sisters and the Pickens Sisters - and paved the way for some famous imitators, most notably, the Andrews Sisters. Left-filed shit like “savage chanters” notwithstanding, those disgruntled fans had a point. From a long passage about some of their most famous recording sessions, quoted by Wikipedia (fwiw, my overwhelmingly primary source for this post):

“Some of the sessions with Dorsey Brothers' band musicians were notable in having the young Glenn Miller writing instrumental arrangements for his bandmates from Connie’s dictation. Melodies were rearranged and slowed down, major keys were changed to minor keys (sometimes in mid-song), and unexpected rhythmic changes were par for the course. The Boswells were among the few performers who were allowed to make changes to current popular tunes since, during this era, music publishers and record companies pressured performers not to alter current popular song arrangements.”

Now, the story of how the Boswell Sisters earned the right to tell music publishers and record companies to blow.

Crash Course, No. 37: Blur & Tumult

Totally missed the boy-band thing with them....

I’ll start with a confession: if it wasn’t “Song 2,” I couldn’t pick a Blur song out of a line-up. This past week’s deep dive showed a knew a couple more songs, but, and in my defense, Blur was always much, much bigger in their native UK than they ever got in the U.S….

…and “Song 2” wasn’t even their biggest U.S. single. That was “Girls & Boys” from 1994’s Parklife…which, for the record, started a string of six albums by Blur that topped the UK charts, everything between there and 2015’s The Magic Whip. As I said, much, much bigger in the UK.

And now, a crash course on their story. And anyone who wants to read more will find links to every source I used for this post at the bottom of it.

The Very Basics
“There’s Albarn, the intense workaholic who will collaborate with anyone from Malian kora players to cartoons; Coxon, the cripplingly shy guitar nerd who couldn’t cope with the band’s gigantic 90s fame; James, the party animal who subsequently reinvented himself as a gentleman farmer; and drummer Dave Rowntree, about whom people still know so little that they describe him as the “everyman” or “normal bloke” despite the fact he works as a criminal solicitor, has a pilot’s licence and stood as the Labour party candidate for the Cities of London and Westminster, which doesn’t seem very everyman.”

The flesh out the surnames in the above, that’s Damon Albarn (vocals/songwriting/control), Graham Coxon (guitar/earnest intensity), Alex James (bass/enthusiasm)…and the quote gives Rowntree’s (drums/drummer personality) full name: those were, and may yet continue to be, the members of Blur. Those original pieces fell in place over a two-month period when Albarn joined James’ band, Circus, in December 1988, two months after Rowntree and Coxon, who’d already joined in October. They played as Seymour - named after J. D. Salinger’s, Seymour: An Introduction - but landed on “Blur” a couple years later and from a list of alternatives pitched to them by Andy Ross, Food Records’ A&R rep.

They came up in the so-named “Scene that Celebrates Itself” of the London/Thames Valley (see also, Chapterhouse, Lush, Moose, Thousand Yard Stare, See See Rider, and Stereolab for further research/listening), but broke out of it, to borrow words from NME, as “the acceptable pretty face of a whole bunch of bands.” Related, I once read Coxon marvel bitterly about being packaged as something of a boy band. Their debut album, Leisure chased the fraying threads of the Manchester sound’s coattails, but Blur dug deeper into their English pop roots (The Kinks, Beatles and XTC get name-dropped) over the next several albums - from Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993) through The Great Escape (1995; here’s the discography). Coxon was not a fan (“Talking as a guitar player, Britpop for me was dull”), but the inspiration for the tonal switch came from a charming place: homesickness for England. Blur “discovered” they were in a ways in debt after Leisure and tried to recoup money on a U.S. tour where they “were forced to play their Anglocentric songs in tiny venues to bewildered crowds.”

Crash Course Timeline, No. 30: How Chick Met Ella

“This is it. I have a real singer now. That's what the public wants.”
- Chick Webb, NPR review of a Chick Webb box-set (2013)

No one really knows the year of William Henry “Chick” Webb’s birth - some say 1905, but they wrote 1909 on his tombstone - but he was born in Baltimore, MD. While he would become one of the most famous drummers of his era, the path he took to playing that instrument has to be rare in music history, if not unique. A spill down the household stairs as (according to Wikipedia) an infant crushed several vertebrae; tuberculosis crept into his spine furthering the damage, “leaving him with short stature and a badly deformed spine which caused him to appear hunchbacked.” In a diagnosis that sounds straight out of the times, a doctor suggested Webb pick up the drums in order to “loosen up” his bones. Whether medically-sound or not, doctor's orders paid off...but Downbeat Magazine’s 1937 edition used some tres passe phrasing to  hail Webb at the height of his success:

‘The Rise of a Crippled Genius”

Webb never let his childhood injury hold him back. He moved to Harlem at age 17, where he signed on to a number of tours and sustained other acts through residencies and generally established himself in one of jazz’s hottest scenes. It didn’t take long either, as noted in an article posted on the site Modern Drummer:

“In 1926, the drummer formed his first band and began performing at various NYC jazz clubs, including Black Bottom, Roseland, The Cotton Club, and the Strand Roof. As the ’20s came to a close, Webb’s band—dubbed The Harlem Stompers—gradually picked up more members, eventually growing into a full-size eleven-piece big band.”

By 1931, Webb established his orchestra as the house band for the Savoy Ballroom, a premier club in Harlem. Though unable to read music, he managed his band just fine by memorizing the arrangements and guiding them through from a platform in the middle of stage. His reputation grew through the early 1930s, but, per the quote up top, he thought it would take a star vocalist for him to breaktrough. Webb’s orchestra played behind a guy named Charles Linton, “an old-school crooner…with pre-jazz-age enunciation.” And then came 1935 and Ella Fitzgerald…

Crash Course, No. 36: Blondie, Definitely Important, but Also Better than I Thought

Not the inspiration, btw.

The format I used for the posts on Black Sabbath and Blitzen Trapper doesn’t feel like a good fit for this. It probably wasn’t a good fit for either of those, but there’s just…something about Blondie’s history that makes more sense of telling it all at once.

“Q: What do you think it is that makes your songs so appealing to so many generations?"

"[Chris Stein]: They’re cheerful. You know, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don't know. We tap into a lot of things from musical history when making the songs. They’re based on a lot of stuff that’s come before us so maybe that’s… You know, we got one review recently from one of those Canadian festivals. It [was] a really great glowing review, and she said that the band almost sounds psychedelic in its presentation, which I thought was great because I always think that, but I never really see it in print. There’s a lot of influences from the ’60s, ’70s, [and] later music in there, so I think maybe that clicks with people.”
- Time Magazineinterview with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein (2014)

A number of sources I read while researching this post praised Blondie’s genre-bending progress throughout the band’s short, original career. This comes from Wikipedia's section on their “style and legacy,” but something much like it topped several interviews:

“The band is known not only for the striking stage persona and vocal performances of Harry but also for incorporating elements in their work from numerous subgenres of music, reaching from their punk roots to embrace new wave, disco, pop, rap, and reggae.”

I get that and I don’t. The bulk of their eponymous debut listens like a throwbacks to an early-60s sound, if with a “bad girl” twist, and they did more or less leave that behind for the follow-up album, Plastic Letters, only to call it back now and again. There’s no question their music expanded and evolved - the distance between Plastic Letters and Autoamerican is wider than I knew going in - but it all sounds more like...Blondie than any one of the genres they dabbled in. To hit that from the other direction, it feels more natural to say someone else’s song sounds like Blondie than the other way around, even as it’s fair to acknowledge that most Blondie songs sound like something else.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 29: Basie, A Count and a King

Think of the date as beyond time...

This chapter introduces another member of jazz royalty (Duke Ellington, who's early days I covered earlier), if only to the first part of his long career. Even on that shortened timeline, the biography of the auteur in question touches so many members of his musical generation that it tells not just his story, but the story of his times.

William James “Count” Basie was born in Red Bank, New Jersey in 1904, son to Harvey Lee Basie, who worked as a coachman and a caretaker, and Lillian Childs Basie, who took in laundry; seeing how hard his parents worked (and quite possibly for who) motivated Basie to help them get ahead. Despite being a solid student, the younger Basie didn’t see education as the path for getting there; he dropped out after junior high school and started knocking around the Palace Theater in Red Bank, trading chores and odd jobs for free admission and learning things like changing the reels and working the spotlight for the live shows. His parents did play a part in his future as both of them played instruments, the mellophone for his dad, the piano for his mom. His mother took music seriously enough to pay a quarter a piano lesson.

Those lessons paid off in two ways. First, and to lift a good anecdote from his official bio, Basie volunteered to play the music to accompany a silent movie one afternoon when the regular player called in sick. The manager said no, but Basie snuck into the pit unnoticed and played through the movie; the manager invited him back to play the evening show. Second, and more consequential in the grand scheme, he preferred playing the drums…until he met, Sonny Greer, another Red Bank (or Long Branch; depending on the source) native destined for fame. Knowing he would never touch Greer on the drums, Basie doubled-down on the piano as his instrument.

For as long as Greer stuck around, he and Basie played as a duo at little gigs around town - they even landed a show at Asbury Park on the Jersey Shore - but Greer got called up to the bigs (New York City) before long and started his professional career - with Duke Ellington, no less. Basie wasn’t too far behind, moving to Harlem at the fresh-faced age of 16. He filled those years playing shows and rent parties with Greer and others, picking up stride piano from James P. Johnson and Fats Waller (profiled earlier) - who also taught him how to play the organ - and landing his first real work as a musician at a place called Leroy’s, where he sharpened his playing and steeled his nerves competing in cutting contests. Around the same time (1925), Basie started a two-year stint with an act called Kittie Krippen and her Kiddies, playing a revue called the Hippity Hop Show. Whether by luck or fate, the last tour he was on petered out in Kansas City, Missouri. Where big things would happen…

Crash Course No. 35: Blitzen Trapper, Origin Story to End(?)

Yep, just like he said.

While I came a couple years late to the Blitzen Trapper party, I geeked out hard first and most to the same album that everyone else did: 2008’s Furr. In fact, that album deserves as much credit as any other for guiding me toward more rustic sounds. Which I have always resisted more than most genres…though it helped it was leavened with lots and lots of rock...

And now, a crash course on their story.

The Very Basics
“I always thought that Blitzen Trapper, the sort of classic lineup, was like a benevolent psychedelic street gang. Not a scary street gang.”
- Eric Johnson (of Fruit Bats), Talk House interview, 2020

Blitzen Trapper semi-officially formed circa 2000 under the name Garmonbozia and self-released three albums. Nearly all of the original (and surprisingly stable) line-up hailed from the “outskirts of Salem, Oregon,” and included: Eric Earley (guitar/harmonica/vocals/keys), Eric Menteer (guitar/keyboard), Brian Adrian Koch (drums/vocals/harmonica…a lot of harmonica), Michael Van Pelt (bass), Drew Laughery (keys), and Marty Marquis (guitar/keys/vocals/melodica); Marquis counts as the geographic outlier, hailing from Yakima, Washington, and the band became a five-piece when Laughery left around 2010 - e.g., after the tour supporting Destroyer of the Void. A couple songs carried over from the Garmonbozia period (~ 2000-2003; e.g., a proto-version of “Sadie,” “The All Girl Team,” and “Reno”), but the sound that made them famous hadn’t taken shape point. A quote in Wikipedia’s write-up describes Garmonbozia’s sound like so:

“Many of the Garmonbozia recordings are experimental prog-rock and psychedelic songs, more concerned with creating interesting soundscapes than the tighter rock/soul/country/pop crispness of their later albums.”

The band switched it’s name to Blitzen Trapper in 2003. When reflecting on those earliest days with Eric Johnson (see the Talk House interview), Earley agreed they were fortunate to come up in “a good time to wander your way into things,” aka, posting songs on a MySpace page and getting signed to a label. And now feels like a good time to confess that my greatest disappointment in reading about Blitzen Trapper came with learning that Earley did nearly all the songwriting and that he conceived albums as far back as American Goldwing as solo projects. Going the other way (and I lifted this from a recent Street Roots feature on (again) Earley): “Holy Smokes could have easily been billed as an Eric Earley solo record, but that’s been true of every Blitzen Trapper album, the band always functioning more as a live organism.” (Or, from the Talk House interview: “A lot of Blitzen Trapper was trying to navigate those two realities, the recordings and the band.”)

Crash Course Timeline, No. 28: The Hal Kemp Orchestra & The Trumpetist He Launched

Think both are in there....

I’ll be running into the biggest, bandiest names of the 1930s soon enough, but what started as a quick study into a bandleader whose name I kept seeing wound up detouring into the more interesting story of a member of not just his band, but just about every big band of the day. To start with the bandleader.

James “Hal” Kemp was born in 1904 in Marion, Alabama, but he made his name in Charlotte, North Carolina. A precocious kid, he formed his first band, the Merrymakers, while still in high school; by age 19 he led the Carolina Club Orchestra, a band associated with the University of North Carolina. The university showed a surprising willingness to let its band tour, even internationally, and Kemp’s Carolina Club Orchestra drew attention on its tour to England. The press passed on word of the tour and the orchestra had the honor of the Prince of Wales, Edward VIII (the one who later abdicated) sitting in for a session (he loved both jazz and American women).

A fair number of the guys Kemp played with in the Carolina Club Orchestra stuck with him for much his career. They included Ben Williams and Horace “Saxie” Dowell (one guess what the latter played, and they both played it), but also John Scott Trotter, a pianist who served as Kemp’s long-time musical arranger, and Edgar “Skinnay” Ellis, a drummer who became the voice of the Hal Kemp Orchestra when it took its successful, final shape. Per the Big Band Library, that line-up first came together in 1925 with Kemp doing the composing, co-arranging, playing clarinet and, his favorite, alto saxophone (sometimes “through an oversized megaphone with holes cut in the sides so his hands could work the keys”). That first line-up started playing standard 1920s jazz, but they switched over to the “sweet dance” jazz by 1930.

Sources describe Kemp’s sound with adjectives like “distinctive” (Wikipedia) and “intricate,” but Big Band Library wrote the more efficient paragraph on it:

“For decades afterwards, his fans and his former musicians continued to cherish the unique sound of Kemp’s band, with its muted, staccato trumpets (playing phrases, accented by four-note clusters of dotted 16ths - like a typewriter) and intricate clarinet and saxophone ensemble passages.”

When they broke in as professional performers, they started in New York. Rather than bang out the path of his career in my own words, I’m going to quote a long paragraph from a site called Oldies.com, because it gives a helpful impression of how careers in music looked in the early 1930s:

One Hit No More, No. 91: The Sugarhill Gang's Gently-Borrowed, Ground-Breaking Hit

Acknowledging it was a touch commercial...

The Hit
Swear to God, I’ve already written a full post on The Sugarhill Gang - I certainly know the story, and not just from Hip Hop Evolution, Season 1, Episode 2 - but, these are the hazards of deleting half the things you write.

At any rate…

1979’s “Rapper’s Delight” took the world by storm when it came out and recycles through pop culture with enough regularity, even if it ain’t clockwork. Which is to say, who doesn’t know this song? As for liking it…

A stand-alone Wikipedia page gives a closer history of The Sugarhill Gang’s (borrowed) breakthrough hit - e.g.., the famous bass line came from Chic’s “Good Times” with writing credits going to co-founder Bernard Edwards, how the members of Sugarhill came on stage at a Bronx “hip hop event” and started freestyling with Fab Five Freddy when Chic started playing the that single, the fact the melody was interpolated, instead of sampled, etc. If you listen to the non-single version - something I’d done before but spaced - that opens with another interpolation from “Here Comes That Sound Again,” a single by a UK disco act called Love De-Luxe.

The lyrics are famous, the song’s origins infamous…I mean, what can I tell people in this post that they wouldn’t already know from watching Hip Hop Evolution?

Long story short, it was the first hip hop hit to crack the Billboard Top 40 (it only reached No. 36 in the U.S., but it climbed into the top 3 in several international markets), Henry “Big Bank Hank” Jackson lifted the lyrics from Grandmaster Caz (aka, Casanova Fly, aka, Curtis Fisher), and, yes, it was the Sugarhill Gang’s only major hit in the U.S. market, though, both “Apache” (pretty sure that one came from elsewhere; also, o ye gods, that fucking video, ) and “8th Wonder” (still, both better songs, for me) became solid UK hits. To sum up its origin and legacy in two quotes, respectively:

“There's this idea that hip-hop has to have street credibility, yet the first big hip-hop song was an inauthentic fabrication. It's not like the guys involved were the 'real' hip-hop icons of the era, like Grandmaster Flash or Lovebug Starski. So it's a pretty impressive fabrication, lightning in a bottle.”
- Oliver Wang, author of Classic Material: The Hip-Hop Album Guide

Crash Course Timeline, No. 27: Bennie Moten, the 20th-Century Kansas City Pioneer

Press!

In just about every way I can think of, Benjamin “Bennie” Moten rightly belongs in the 1920s. He formed his first band as early as 1918, his first recordings (for the ubiquitous Okeh Records) moved the New Orleans jazz sound to the Midwest, though another, even earlier influence from his native Missouri came in as well: ragtime. He enjoys a niche reputation to this day: according to Wikipedia’s entry on Moten, his 1923-25 recordings for Okeh count among “the more valuable acoustic jazz 78s of the era.”

Full disclosure, I dropped Bennie Moten in the 1930s for no better reason than overlooking him while digging into the 1920s. Still, he and his Bennie Moten Orchestra hit its peak the same year the decade started. More significantly, Moten carried forward the “riffing” approach to popular music and gave jazz a Midwest-inspired spin with the “stomping beat” then popular in Kansas City. A site called The Pendergast Years (one of the few sources for this post, sadly) sums up his beginnings and influence with this intro:

“On September 23, 1923, the Bennie Moten Orchestra made its first recording consisting of eight songs. By strict musical standards, the songs themselves were unrefined and not much removed from existing blues music. But the Bennie Moten Orchestra would soon build upon its earliest recordings to develop a distinct Kansas City style of jazz that later dominated the jazz scene in the late 1930s and 1940s.”

Those two innovations became foundations for a lot of the big band sound - including that of his protégé, and future member of jazz royalty, Count Basie. While I don’t think the phrase “stomping beat” confuses anyone, I want to pause here to confirm that, yes, “riffing” means about what a casual reader thinks it does. Wikipedia’s explainer on the subject gives people from the rock era some examples (e.g., Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or AC/DC’s “Back in Black”), as an aural hook for the basic definition:

“…it is a pattern, or melody, often played by the rhythm section instruments or solo instrument, that forms the basis or accompaniment of a musical composition.”

[Ed. - While that’s broad, digestible and accurate, I'm compelled to include this: “A riff is a short, repeated, memorable musical phrase, often pitched low on the guitar, which focuses much of the energy and excitement of a rock song,” because “excitement of a rock song.”]

Crash Course No. 34: For My First Time, More than One Black Sabbath

I can stare at this album cover for ages...

The Very Basics
Formed in Birmingham, England in 1968, with OG members Tony Iommi (guitar), Bill Ward (drums), Geezer Butler (bass) and Ozzy Osbourne. The inspiration for the name-change/sound came from watching people line up at a movie theater to see Boris Karloff’s Black Sabbath and a vision Geezer Butler had of a silhouetted figure standing at the edge of his bed; Ozzy and Butler wrote the lyrics for “Black Sabbath” and the band used “the Devil’s Interval” to lend the music an ominous sound. Just to note it, the cinema crowd anecdote come up in only one source: Wikipedia. Either way, thus was born heavy metal (at least in one telling).

Black Sabbath started as a six-piece group called the Polka Tulk Blues Band - so named “after the cheap brand of talcum powder Ozzy’s mother used.” They clipped that to Polka Tulk, then switched to Earth, and, after finding out another band used that name, and after writing the song (I think), eventually to Black Sabbath (they also cut a couple members, a saxophone player, I think, on the grounds they should have a full horn section or none at all). Even after discovering an audience existed for heavy, occult-themed music, their first manager, a Birmingham club owner named Jim Simpson, pushed them to play…something else. From a Rolling Stone remembrance of the band’s early days:

“One of those tunes a poppy, piano-driven number called ‘The Rebel’ that Simpson’s Locomotive bandmate Norman Haines had written. They also tried their hand at writing an original, titled ‘A Song for Jim,’ a jazzy, syncopated song, which featured Iommi on flute.”

Apparently, one can hear that…period on recording of a live show in Dumfries, Scotland, but the first, widespread exposure of the Black Sabbath sound came with a performance on John Peel’s Top Gear in 1970, where they played , “Black Sabbath,” “NIB,” “Behind the Wall of Sleep,” and “Sleeping Village.” Their general momentum bought them enough space to book a couple days (which, here, means literally two) to record their first full album of originals, which they released as an eponymous album on Friday, February 13, 1970. They recorded most of that material on the first takes (per Butler, “We never had a second run of most of the stuff”), but it still sold really well, hitting No. 8 in the UK and No. 23 in the U.S.

From that point until the end of the Ronnie James Dio era - and nothing after that will be included here, for the record - two themes run through Black Sabbath’s history: 1) steady, robust sales of their albums despite steady critical opprobrium and very little radio air-play; and 2) drugs. So many drugs. For as long as everything held together - until 1981, loosely, though Ozzy was out by 1979 (reunions excepted) - they did quite well as a band. As much as Ozzy gets credit for who/what they were, the (maybe?) official band bio credits Butler for the balance of the lyrics and Iommi as “the musical architect.”

One Hit No More, No. 90: Anita Ward, Disco Demolition Night and...the End of a Moment?

Plan A, apparently.

The Hit
Anita Ward was working as an elementary school teacher when she recorded her sultry, literal chart-topping single, “Ring My Bell” in 1979. After graduating from Rust University, majoring in Psychology, she had no intention of embarking on a music career, but, as Stereogum (helpfully!) noted in a 2020 entry in a series that shares the same theme as this series (Numbers Ones), a school administrator at Rust U. heard her audition for Godspell (I can just hear here on “Turn Back, Oh, Man”), and offered to become her manager. Said administrator put her in touch with Frederick Knight, a local celebrity in his own right, by way of his regional/Stax Records hit “I’ve Been Lonely for So Long.”

Knight had originally written “Ring My Bell” for Stacy Lattislaw, “an 11-year-old kiddie-R&B singer,” but he sexed up the lyrics for Ward, though Ward was, per Stereogum’s article, “a clean-living Christian girl.” [Ed. - Though, here, “sexed up” means loosely implying that sex is something that might happen when someone comes home from work.] It was the last song they recorded for Ward’s debut album, but it shot to No. 1 within two weeks. Ward even switched to substitute teaching just in case the single took off. And it very much did, hitting No. 1 in the U.S., the UK and Canada.

Another fun (probably) fact: “Ring My Bell” was the No. 1 single in America on the night of Chicago’s rightly infamous Disco Demolition Night, a detail that became the lede/nugget for Stereogum’s piece. To quote/contextualize in full:

“Disco was a form of underground music that had improbably risen up out of New York’s black and gay clubs to conquer the pop charts. It upended social norms, changed fashion and drugs, and moved the balance of music-business power away from the petty-aristocrat California singer-songwriters who’d been running things up until then. From a music-history standpoint, it’s possible to see disco as a great democratizing force, a push to turn pop music into something fun and silly and cheap and glamorous. When people like Chic’s Nile Rodgers describe Disco Demolition Night as a fascist rally, that’s what they’re talking about.”

For fans of podcasts, there’s a really good episode of You’re Wrong About on the same subject, for what it’s worth. Anita Ward does not make a cameo…

As a piece of music, it’s pure dance/disco, content with repetition - does that single-note pulse on the one ever let up? [Ed. - After the first verse, yes, it does…only to return around the third minute] - and even-keeled to a fault. It’s a song to get lost in, a mix of ecstatic and primal; a vehicle for the dance-floor. On the production side, it foregrounds the hooks, so you don’t really hear the rhythm, but, those backing vocals are one of your better hooks. It’s hard to believe something so hypnotic can only happen once for one artist…

One Hit No More, No. 89: Cheryl Lynn, Keeping It All the Way Real

Literally no better place to start...

The Hit
You know what’s on the second you hear the horns, but Cheryl Lynn’s “Got to Be Real” coasts into nice bubbling funk bass, warm pulses of electric piano and a beat so simple that the most two-footed dancer couldn’t lose from there. The bass gets a top-end through the bridge/chorus. If you listen to the extended version (as opposed to the radio edit), you get a long swinging bop passage with a treble piano part and a rising horn progression dancing over it.

Recorded in 1978, it has to rank near the top of the most famous songs of the disco era. For all that, it didn’t show up in nearly as many movie soundtracks as you’d expect - 1990s Paris Is Burning is the only one mentioned in Wikipedia’s entry for it - though Mary J. Blige and Will Smith covered it for 2004’s Shark Tale.

Lynn co-wrote it with a guy named David Foster and the Marty and David Paich songwriting team - the latter went on to become the keyboardist for Toto - and it launched her career. The original recording featured at least one more name/reference I knew besides Paich - Ray Parker, Jr. played guitar on it (to finish the thought, David Shields played bass and James Gadson hit the skins) - and Lynn would work with famous names throughout her fairly robust career.

With the single to carry it, Lynn’s eponymous debut album hit one million copies sold in a blink and topped out at No. 5 on the Billboard album charts. The single only reached No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100, but went all the way to No. 1 on Billboard’s R&B charts - another touchstone in her career. As noted in a glowing retrospective of her anthology on a site called The Second Disc, another single from her debut, “Star Love,” charted at No. 16 - a fact that, for me, rescues her from the (alleged) stain of being a one-hit wonder; count the R&B charts (and why wouldn’t you?), and she’s not even close.

Lynn’s smash has a hell of a legacy, as a guy named DJ Prince Language explains in his notes on Paris is Burning:

One Hit No More, No. 88: Walter Egan and the Muses Behind "Magnet and Steel"

Receipt.

The Hit
When he described the bones of his bigger hit, Walter Egan recalls having something very specific in mind: “a '50s throwback that was consciously in my mind. I was trying to write a song that had the Stroll beat, which is the snare hits every other one, that kind of 6/8 feel” - and you’ll definitely hear that (assuming you already haven’t). He hated his first pass at the lyrics, though, so he parked that part of the creative process and waited for inspiration. He found the first part while working with one of the producers on his first album, and the second while driving up the 101. As he recalled to a site called The College Crowd Digs Me in 2016:

“We had been doing recording sessions for Fundamental Roll...a song on there called ‘Tunnel O' Love.’ And Stevie was singing her wailing, banshee, background vocals. This was at Sound City. The now famous Sound City. And that was the night I just went...'oh my God, how am I so lucky?' Ya know, all the superlatives you could think of about someone falling for Stevie. In my young youth, at the time, it was just another girl who was very talented.”

His second muse was “one of those completely customized Continentals with the lights under it and the diamond window. We used to call it a Pimpmobile in those days.” He titled the song “Magnet and Steel” and, yes, the “Stevie” in that recollection was Stevie Nicks, who co-produced Egan’s debut album, Fundamental Roll, and who shows up all over it. He borrowed his second album’s title, Not Shy, from the vanity plate on that Continental and the phrase “with you I’m not shy” repeats throughout the song. Stevie Nicks wasn’t alone of the backing vocals for that track - Lindsey Buckingham, the other co-producer on his debut album (it’s a funny story), and a woman he’d worked with for years named Annie McLoone (or McLoon, depending on the interview) - but Buckingham put a lot of late-70s polish on the 50s chassis.

“Magnet and Steel” dropped around the same time as Fleetwood Mac’s notorious masterpiece, Rumours, and, as Egan told Classic Bands, “all of a sudden there was my record with Stevie's voice all over it and Lindsey's very precise production and playing on some of it, and so it was noticed because of that.” All that happened in late winter/early spring 1977 - Rumours was released in February 1977 - which pumped “Magnet and Steel” to No. 8 on the Billboard (No. 18 on the Easy Listening charts). Egan felt like he had a strong follow-up with a nostalgia-tinged “medium-rock” number called “Hot Summer Nights” - a song with a story of its own - and he recalls having a conversation with CBS Records’ Walter Yetknikoff, who assured him they’d push him just like they pushed Billy Joel, Springsteen, Les Dudek, and Boz Scaggs, all of whom Yetniknoff told him took four albums to break through. Egan would wait until the hot summer nights gave way to the long, cold nights of October…

Crash Course Timeline, No. 26: Blanche Calloway, as Big as Her Brother's Shadow, Maybe Bigger

Damn legend.

As noted in the prior chapter on Cab Calloway, he grew up in the shadow of his older sister, Blanche Calloway. Pulling from multiple sources, first quoted from a website called Jazz Rhythm:

“Cab Calloway borrowed key elements from his elder sister’s act -- her bravura vocal style and Hi-de-Ho call and response routines. His 1976 memoir acknowledges her influence, declaring Blanche ‘vivacious, lovely, personality plus and a hell of a singer and dancer,’ an all-around entertainer who was ‘fabulous, happy and extroverted.’”

Now, from a site called The LeEMS Machine:

“She is relentlessly written about as residing in the shadow of her younger brother Cab Calloway. However, scholars and researchers have pointed out that, at one point, Blanche Calloway had attained more fame and renown, helping her brother in his show business breakthrough and inspiring his famous style.”

She would wind up living in Cab's shadow by the end of the 1930s, but, all things considered, Blanche Calloway arguably had the bigger life; it wouldn’t surprise me if neither one of them cared one way or the other. He borrowed from her style, she borrowed phrasing and characters from his songs (see cameos by Minnie the Moocher and the King of Sweden in Blanche Calloway’s hit, “Growlin’ Dan”), and so on. Both Calloways made their mark during the period when white audiences finally woke up to what black artists had been doing for decades. In this chapter, the “Hi De Ho Man” makes room for the woman who started her famous “Just a Crazy Song” with “Hi Hi Hi.”

Like her younger brother, Blanche Calloway was born in Rochester, New York, only five years earlier, in 1902. The family returned to their real home, Baltimore, Maryland, when Blanche was a teenager, with their mother, Martha Eulalia Reed, and her second husband, an insurance salesman named John Nelson Fortune.A church organist, Ms. Reed taught her children to play and love music, while trying to steer them away from careers in music, and she failed with at least three of them. In Blanche’s case, the betrayal came at the hands of a music teacher who pushed her to audition with a local talent scout. After Blanche dropped out of Morgan State College in the early 1920s, she wouldn’t hold another straight job until somewhere around the end of World War II.

One Hit No More, No. 87: Through the Back Door of the Disco (Round) with Alicia Bridges

If you know the actors, you know the genre.

The Hit
Even people who haven’t seen Love at First Bite, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and The Last Days of Disco (strong recommend on the latter) have a 90% or better chance of knowing Alicia Bridges’ 1978 mega-hit “I Love the Nightlife (Disco ‘Round).” Now, for the things 90% of people don’t know…

For one, while Bridges and her songwriting and then-personal partner Susan Hutcheson made a conscious choice to write a song with the word “disco” in it, they did not did not sit down to write a disco hit. According to her Wikipedia entry, Bridges/Hutcheson had hoped to shape it into a Memphis Soul tune, while the producer of her debut album, Steve Buckingham, pushed for an R&B sound as well as suggesting she go with “I Love the Nightlife” for the title instead of the original “Disco ‘Round”; the decision to go full-disco came from her benefactor (with emphasis on “bene,” i.e., good), Bill Lowery, while the work of crafting the hit fell to a disco producer/DJ named Jim Burgess (who delivered other hits like The Doobie Brothers’ “What a Fool Believes” and KISS’s “I Was Made for Lovin’ You.”

Lowery guided the Bridges’ hit to its final version in other ways: Bridges/Hutcheson’s first draft had the song’s narrator making up with the man in the second verse, but, as Bridges shared with a site called Queer Music Heritage in 2008, Lowery pushed against that (“no, don’t make up with this joker”), while pushing for the specific line “make a man out of you.” A second-hand quote from Bridges posted in a Songfacts blurb undoes the rest of the origin story:

“That wasn't cut at all with disco in mind. Disco was just where I was gonna go after I'd told this man to leave me alone, it wasn't meant to be the theme of the song. We do love the nightlife in the sense that we love to be awake at night when its quiet and we can do some bizarre and productive thinking. But actually I don't care for discos at all.”

The song turned into a disco anthem, of course, if not one of the great disco anthems of all time. It peaked at No. 5, but parked in the Hot 100 for 27 weeks (over half a year, for those counting at home). The eponymous LP hung on even longer (35 weeks) and, in something you couldn't see coming, but for the times, the single crossed-over as a hit on the country charts as well.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 25: Cab Calloway, So Much More than the "Hi De Ho Man"

For those who first saw him in 1980.

“Cab Calloway is hip-hop.”
- Jon Landis, Director (The Blues Brothers, among others)

I’m a big fan of Landis, that movie and several others, but…yeah, that feels like a bridge too far to an anachronism. Related, raise your hand if The Blues Brothers was the first time you saw Cab Calloway perform. [Raises hand.]

At the same time, those few words from Landis hint at how unique, innovative and just plain massive Cab Calloway was in his 1930s-1940s heyday. As much as he had to claw (and disappoint his solidly-middle-class parents) to get there, once Calloway took over the house-band at the Cotton Club after Duke Ellington (profiled earlier) departed in 1931, he wouldn’t more than glance back for the next two decades. He hosted a twice-weekly radio, appeared in movies, wrote a succession of books on slang (1938’s Cab Calloway’s Cat-alogue was the first jive language dictionary available for circulation in New York’s public libraries), and featuring in a Bettie Boop cartoons (e.g., “Minnie the Moocher,” “The Old Man of the Mountain,” and “Snow White”) with his own dance moves translated to celluloid by the miracle of rotoscoping. In between all that, he invented The Moonwalk (though, as he remarked, “it was called the Buzz back then.”)

Calloway made a splash in every media available to him at his peak and, though racial discrimination was very much alive and unwell at that time, the hip ‘n’ high-brow felt the change in the air. When he starred opposite the then-fading Al Jolson (profiled earlier) in 1936’s The Singing Kid, film critic Arthur Knight saw a passing of the torch:

“…when Calloway begins singing in his characteristic style – in which the words are tools for exploring rhythm and stretching melody – it becomes clear that American culture is changing around Jolson and with (and through) Calloway.”

To think, had a followed his parents advice and gone to law school, none of that would have happened.

He was born Cabell Calloway III in Rochester, New York, in 1907 to two college graduates, his father, Cab Calloway, Jr., a lawyer with a sideline in real state, his mother, Martha Eulalia Reed, a teacher and church organist. (Not everyone who grows up with music in the household becomes a musician, but a lot of musicians grew up with music in the household.) The family relocated to Baltimore, Maryland when Calloway III was 11…which put him close to Pimlico, which gets a little closer to where his story begins. He skipped school often to work, selling newspapers, shine shoes and, when he could get out to the horse track, cool down horses after a race. A taste for gambling followed like a chaser and, after someone caught Calloway III “playing dice on the church steps,” his mother and stepfather (Calloway, Jr. died shortly after the move) shipped him to a reform school called Downington Industrial and Agricultural School.

One Hit No More, No. 86: Meri Wilson & Her Telephone Man

The Hit
The story of how Meri Wilson’s “Telephone Man” stumbled into daylight is without question the most interesting thing about it, so I’ll start there.

The tangled paths of her life (see below) led her to performing as the lead in a trio that played cabaret clubs Dallas, TX with names like Arthur’s Papillion, and (so good), Daddy’s Money. Somebody spotted her at one of them - Daddy’s Money, which, according to a site simply called Jon Kutner, was/is a Texas restaurant chain (indirectly confirmed), not a cabaret - and sources vary as to who saw her first: an obituary (mild spoiler) in Variety names producer Owen Castleman; Wikipedia goes with Jim Rutledge, the former front-man for a band called Bloodrock (a taste of them), who then introduced Wilson to Castleman; Jon Kutner provides the fullest story - and quotes Wilson directly (or claims to) - so I’m letting that be my truth on the question.

In Jon Kutner’s telling, the owner of the Daddy’s Money chain saw Wilson performing in Atlanta (Wikipediaagrees here, flagging “Underground Atlanta), liked what he heard, and told her to move to Texas to perform there. She’d been working some originals into her act and, with the encouragement of her backing band, she started playing a goofy (and true) little tune about an affair with an AT&T engineer. It got a decent reception from audiences, a completely different producer named Allen Reynolds among them, who recorded the first demo. That version was stripped down to acapella backed by finger-snaps, and it went nowhere. This circles back to the story noted above, only Jon Kutner agrees with Variety that Castleman saw her first, while calling Owen “Boomer” Castleman a musician, not a producer (and Wikipedia is the sole source for the nickname, “Boomer”).

That distinction between musician versus producer works better with the Jon Kutner narrative because, after getting “laughed out the door” by 17 different labels, Castleman decided to set up his own label, BNA, to market Wilson’s song. He hit up radio stations and record stores all over Texas, sometimes with Wilson tagging along. She recalled one occasion where they walked into a record store and heard “Telephone Man” playing over the speakers from a radio station, at which point they both called that station over and over pretending to be listeners begging to hear the song one more time. A little low-tech guerrilla marketing never hurt anyone’s career…

Crash Course Timeline, No. 24: The Cotton Club and The Duke

Hail, hail, the band's all here.

At some unknown date in 1923, but shortly after getting out of Sing Sing, a “prominent” bootlegger/gangster named Owney Madden bought a night club on the upper floor of a building on the corner of 142nd and Lenox Avenue in Harlem and renamed it the Cotton Club. It wouldn’t hit its prime for a couple years, but the venue would become synonymous with the Jazz era, and the glamor that surrounded it. For all the careers it launched and sustained - beyond counting, honestly, including the artist/legend featured in this post - life on the talent side of the stage looked very different from what audiences saw.

First, it’s easy to forget that the Jazz era coincided with Prohibition - a function of how many people ignored it, I imagine. Wikipedia’s entry on the Cotton Club notes that the authorities shut it down for selling liquor in 1925, but that’s the only hint that the authorities cared what went on inside. Madden plied the club’s well-to-do clientele with “his #1 beer” and a schedule of the biggest entertainers of the 1920s. It even hosted "celebrity nights" to give audiences a shot at something fresh, which expanded the baseline who’s who list to include (lifted straight from Wikipedia): Jimmy Durante, George Gershwin, Sophie Tucker, Paul Robeson, Al Jolson, Mae West, Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice, Langston Hughes, Judy Garland, Moss Hart, and Jimmy Walker, among others.

The regular programming at Cotton Club patrons were shows called “musical revues,” extended performances that featured singers, dancers, and comedians, all of it anchored with music by the house orchestra at the time. I imagine a space between vaudeville and the (early) modern variety shows aired on TV when I was a knee-high, only live and on stage. A guy named Andy Preer led the first orchestra, and for a while (1923-27), but the Internet recalls him only dimly. This was the musical revue's hey-day, when the hip and swell considered it a hot ticket, a detail that only makes the relationship between the entertainers and the entertained more coarse and distasteful. First, some framing:

“[The Cotton Club] reproduced the racist imagery of the era, often depicting black people as savages in exotic jungles or as ‘darkies’ in the plantation South. The menu depicts this imagery, with illustrations done by Julian Harrison, showing naked black men and women dancing around a drum in the jungle. Tribal mask illustrations make up the border of the menu.”

In keeping with that theme, the Cotton Club literally segregated the (largely? entirely?) black talent from its white clientele. The black singers, musicians and dancers - all of the latter cast to fit the “tall, tan and terrific” profile; “at least 5'6" tall, light-skinned, and under 21 years of age” - had to enter through a separate entrance and were barred from mingling with guests in the club itself. The superintendent’s basement at 646 Lenox was either offered or found as a place for the entertainers’ after-parties, “where they imbibed corn whiskey, peach brandy and marijuana.” Everything else reeked of spectacle and a cultural tourism bordering on outright exploitation. Wikipedia cobbled together a paraphrase of Langston Hughes’ contemporary notes:

One Hit No More, No. 85: Debby Boone Lights Up Everyone's Life

Snapshot from the origin story.

The Hit
I knew the chorus, of course, if from nothing more than hamming through it with my sisters back in late 1970s Ohio. The flash of recognition that hit when I heard the opening piano part for the first time in…shit, has three and a half decades, and then rolling right into, “so many nights, I’d sit by my window,” that surprised me.

It shouldn’t have. Like any sentient person who lived through the late 70s, I heard Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” scores, if not hundreds, of times. It haunted us all. Still, there’s a lot I didn’t know about it - starting with how goddamn massive it was. A 2017 interview in Goldmine Mag says that it remains the Warner Brothers label’s all-time biggest-selling single, but Wikipedia provides a fuller list of honors: when it dropped in 1977, it broke Billboard’s record for the longest stay at No. 1 when it stuck there for 10 weeks; after they did the math, Billboard ranked it at No. 7 all-time in the 50-year history of their Hot 100; it earned Boone a Grammy as Best New Artist of 1977 and an American Music Award for Favorite Pop Single for the same year; the guy who wrote it, Joe Brooks (more on him shortly), snagged Song of the Year awards from both the Grammys and the Oscars in 1978. And that’s the first pivot in the story.

Brooks wrote “You Light Up My Life” for a movie of the same name. Wikipedia’s muddles the timeline, but the movie/song came before Boone recorded it - a detail clarified in a 2019 interview/plug with Boone in a Virginia-based outlet called the Daily Presss. The female lead in You Light Up My Life, Didi Conn (Frenchie from the movie Grease, btw), lip-synched the song while another woman, Kacey Cisyk, sang the vocals. While the movie didn’t do so hot (may have bombed, factually), the song had legs to the point where the people involved could tell they had a hit on their hands. What happened next comes from two angles:

“It became clear the song would be a hit, but Brooks had a falling-out with Cisyk and her husband. He contracted Boone to re-record the vocals over the original recording, standing with her in the studio and demanding that every note Boone sang, every inflection, was an exact match to Cisyk’s original from the movie.”

Now, from Boone's perspective:

One Hit No More, No. 84: Dean Friedman and His Date with "Ariel"

The Hit
My guess is that, if someone told you “Ariel” was a Billy Joel song, you’d ask why his voice sounds off. It actually came from a guy named Dean Friedman, who, near as I can tell existed in his own orbit, but that loping bass/piano on the bottom and the structure/phrasing of the lyrics does sound very much of the times (1977).

It’s a cute little vignette, “Ariel.” A tale of a lazy day set in suburbia where boy-meets-girl, they do some random stuff and wind up doing it, it has a day in the life feel. It has surprisingly open references of drug use - which stand out, because I haven’t heard many in this series - plus highly-local shout-outs to the “deep in the bosom of suburbia” where Friedman grew up, Paramus, New Jersey - e.g., the waterfall at Paramus Park, the young girl in the song is collecting money for an area radio station and, at the song’s climax, when the new couple makes love “to the sound of bombs bursting in air” as “channel 2” (WCBS-TV) signs off for the night. Can’t think of the last time I heard someone talk about a channel signing for the night…

Asked about the inspiration for the song in an interview with the UK-based Songwriting Magazine - e.g., was there a real “Ariel” in his past? - Friedman gave an answer that gives a fair impression of everything else I heard by him:

“Actually it was sort of a composite story of teenage crushes mashed together. I was self-conscious at first, having written it, because, in terms of the plot, nothing much happens – boy meets girl, they go on a date and end up making out in front of the television. That’s such a typical suburban scene, I was worried there wasn’t enough drama going on. That was until I played it to some teenage girls on the block, and they accused me of going through their diaries! So it occurred to me that, even though it was a simple story, it was infused with detail so it was recognisable to a lot of people. I think that’s what helped it become the hit that it was.”

And, for people interested in the mechanics of a song:

“[‘Ariel’] was something I was writing when I had my first access to a TEAC four-track tape deck, and I took advantage of that by doing a lot of multi-tracking and stacking up my vocals. So it was the technology that inspired me to develop what became the chorus, with all the layered harmonies.”

Crash Course Timeline, No. 23: Introducing the 1930s, Conductors, Crooners, and Big Bands

The medium of the moment.

This post kicks off the exploration of bands and artists from the 1930s, which will extend over the next 21(?) posts in this series. Before digging the selected artist, I wanted to provide a little context for the decade to help put people in the mood for the music.

The 1920s ended with a literal crash, of course, when an overheated, over-leveraged stock market imploded in October 1929. The rot went deeper - farms had been struggling through the 1920s - and soon seeped into every corner of the economy, leading to insolvent banks and the collapse of the consumer economy. Decades of over-farming/grazing in habitats that couldn’t handle it (America’s Great Plains) created the infamous Dust Bowl (it was no spontaneous event), which expanded the misery still further and sent people scrambling to the cities and the coasts in search of work. A popular statistic notes that 25% of Americans couldn’t find work in the depths of the Great Depression, something that points to the long-standing, glass-half-empty that most people (myself flaming included) talk about the news - i.e., that means 75% of the country could. Belts tightened, but the world still turned, basically, as demonstrated by the series of details I mined out of a 1930s timeline.

1930 saw the invention of the analog computer by Vannevar Bush and Clarence Birdseye patented the quick-freezing process that made frozen food possible; the Empire State Building opened for business in 1931 and Congress and President Herbert Hoover made the “Star-Spangled Banner” America’s national anthem the same year; voters swapped Hoover for Franklin Delano Roosevelt the following year and Bruno Hauptmann kidnapped the son of (Nazi afficionado) Charles Lindbergh; the New Deal launched during FDR’s first 100 days in early 1933, which he promoted over the then-common radio with his famous Fireside Chats, and the country collectively decided it needed a damn drink and repealed Prohibition; the Securities and Exchange Commission launched in 1934, along with the Master’s Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club (dude who won it hit only four under par); Social Security started the next year, but wouldn’t pay out benefits until two years later, and Porgy & Bess (“the first distinctly American opera") opened, but Babe Ruth’s career ended; in 1936, a strong majority of Americans handed FDR a second term (he won 62% of the vote) and Jesse Owens took four giant, salutary shits on Hitler’s “master-race” delusion at the Berlin Olympics (one for each gold medal); San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937, first to pedestrians, then to cars; a National Minimum Wage was set at $0.25 in 1938 and Orson Welles broadcast his radio drama, War of the Worlds; and, finally, the United States held not one but two big, optimistic World’s Fairs in 1939, one in Queens, New York, the other, San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition: a lot of shit happened, and that’s just about a quarter of it.

Popular culture did what it could to soothe all the trouble and uncertainty by putting on a happy face. For instance:

“Hollywood responded to the economic anxiety that dominated the lives of Americans during the Depression by producing films that maintained a self-conscious optimism.”

One Hit No More, No. 83: Ram Jam & the Twice-Complicated Tale of Black Betty

The forgotten album, perfect framing.

The Hit
Because I saw it kicking around the internet a few years back, it feels fitting to start with the video for Ram Jam’s “Black Betty.” Most of the feedback I read trafficked in the “can you believe this shit?” vein - and the “star” of the video, Bill Bartlett, would very likely nod along to the commentary. As he noted in an absolutely delightful 2021 interview over the phone with a (striving) musician/(mostly) guy from Indiana named Ted Wray on a site called Steve Hoffman Music Forums, Bartlett was in New York working on Ram Jam’s debut album when he got a call directing him to show up at the studio in the morning, from whence they’d go to Hicksville, Long Island, NY, for a video shoot for “an English client.” Bartlett never saw so much as a play-back of the video until decades later, when the hygienists at a dentist’s office in Oxford, Ohio pulled it up and played it for him.

As Bartlett noted in the same video, the “Ram Jam” in the video wasn’t even the Ram Jam that played it - and I’ll get to that. First, more about the song.

I think most people know (or, like me, think they know) that Lead Belly recorded “Black Betty” back in 1939. According to research done by the interviewer for a 2017 audio interview on a site called RockTalkUSA with another Ram Jam member, Rick Santoro, the roots of the song dip back into the 18th century; it was a marching cadence back then and, fun twist, possibly about a flintlock rifle. Wikipedia’s entry on the song notes (the fairly obvious) that Lead Belly’s wasn’t even the first recorded blues version; musicologist/folklorist, Alan Lomax, first recorded a version by James “Iron Head” Baker at a Texas penitentiary in 1933: more to the point, both of those guys (think of the act they could have formed, but for prison) played a blues songs that knocked around for decades before the 1930s, with one player passing it on to another over all those years. Lead Belly (covered in a separate post/project) was just the first guy to copyright it. Back to the late 1970s…

Bartlett, who has a busy backstory all on his own, got hooked into a version of “Black Betty” played by the folk trio, Kerner, Ray and Glover (who covered Lead Belly's original 1:00 cut). Per a little history site hosted by Miami University called (per the url?) Project Oxford, he liked the song, but “thought there wasn’t enough to it.” So, he added some hand-claps larded it with guitar riffs, and, and generally worked it up with the members of his college-bar-band at the time, Starstruck (or Star Struck). The band released the song on their own label (TruckStar; clever) and started playing it at their shows. The reception reached a point where the crowd would call for “Black Betty” every time they played. Before long, it became a regional hit. Shortly thereafter, calls came in from industry people in New York…

Crash Course Timeline Music History Index: The 1920s, the 1930s & Early Popular Genres

The roots of this haphazard history of American popular music originally started about a year earlier and at least one music blog before this one. The former timeline started with the 1820s - when the United States as we (sort of) know it was just over 30 years old - and continued up to the 1920s. It introduced a multiplicity of themes and pathways, among them: the homesickness genre, a product of the Industrial Age and families scattered as wide as they’ve been in human history; the interaction between popular music and waves of immigration; the bloodthirsty/God-is-on-our-side anthems of America’s wars, both civil and others; the massive, popular, semi-utopian “Jubilee” concerts that followed; the noteworthy spasm of Christmas carols that bloomed alongside the commercialization of that holiday; the odd devotional number; marching bands and the arrival of modern brass instruments; the maudlin borderline hackery of the late Victorian era; the establishment and growth of Tin Pan Alley and its remarkable marketing machinery; and, perhaps more important than any of them in terms of what came later, minstrelsy. No less significant: literally all of that moved about the country by way of sheet music, the first conduit for the mass marketing of popular music.

All of that both informed and laid the foundation for much of what followed, but it also existed and operated in a vastly different and slower world. I think citizens of the 21st century can conceptualize, even appreciate those times, but actually wrapping one’s head around all that silence requires more imagination that most of us have. So, I took down those posts (twice, in fact) and restarted this follow-up project from a different foundation: the dawn of recorded sound, aka, the beginnings of a time when people could hear music without having friends who knew how to play it and, by the same devices, listen to a song until it either inspired them or made them puke.

Recordings existed well before the 1920s - singers ranging from John McCormack and Eddie Murray to the famous tenor Enrico Caruso (who recorded for one label's “high-class series”) - but I decided to start with the 1920s for several reasons. The ability to record sound came several decades before (by memory, the mid-1870s), but even 40 years later the sound remained limited - e.g., the recordings literally could not pick up pitches on the high end and some instruments all together - and, therefore, terrible. It took a decade or five for all the tinniness/recording-in-a-bucket-inside-a-box to the leech out, but recording and records (it’s all still 78 rpm at this point) reached the lofty heights of reasonable listening experience as early as the mid-1920s and continued to improve into the 1930s. Once film and radio arrived, they opened avenues for musical artists to spread their presence and influence across multiple mediums - i.e., the essence of modern stardom. That brings the story to the beginning of the modern era, at least in my mind. That said, keep in mind that the entire concept and culture of radio belongs to the 1930s - i.e., a time when the collapse of the consumer market made something one owns and turns on for entertainment the thriftier choice over something one buys and collects. As you’ll see if you read the posts below, a lot of them end with the Great Depression.

That gets ahead of the story, so, pulling back ten years, people call the 1920s the Jazz Age, but that does a real disservice to proliferation of genres that started and blossomed in jazz’s shadow. While none of them actually started in the 1920s, the way communications shrunk the world made once regional sounds available to a national audience - and one with resources to burn. That included the beginnings of country music - which, incidentally, came from the folk traditions of the 19th century - and at least three kinds of blues - e.g., 1) the female royalty of the early 20s, 2) the lone, often haunted blues men of the late 20s, and 3), at the tail-end, boogie-woogie. To back up even further, all of those borrowed something from ragtime - aka, the first “scary” (read: black) music to spook establishment white audiences - and Tin Pan Alley blended all that with popular sounds and themes from earlier eras, and that’s what the 1920s sounded like. Innovation meets mass-marketing, basically; strip away technologies that forever expand availability and accessibility and it’s not so different today.