One Hit No More, No. 70: Terry Jacks, The Scrivener

The Hit
Buckle up, because this one’s juicy.

A Belgian singer named Jacques Brel wrote the song that became Terry Jacks’ “Seasons in the Sun.” Moreover, it had a completely different story and vibe: Brel both wrote and set it in a Tangiers whorehouse. Titled “La Moribund" (and here's Brel performing it, with subtitles) it recorded the last words and final farewell by a heartbroken husband to his cheating wife and it featured verses like these (in French, obviously):

“Adieu, Francoise, my trusted wife,
without you I'd have had a lonely life.
You cheated lots of times but then I forgave you in the end,
though your lover was my friend.”

According to a wonderful, exhaustive 2014 interview on a site called Song Facts (again, just read that), Brel and Jacks met after the latter’s brighter re-working of the tune became an international hit; Brel even kept pushing Jacks to secure songwriting credit for his version, something the latter literally never got to it. Rod McKuen, another songwriter who re-wrote “Le Moribund,” did. Jacks, meanwhile, not only flipped the story into something earnest and innocent - fitting, seeing as he wrote it in memory of a close friend who died too young from leukemia - he added an entire extra verse and, if memory serves, changed the key. He does, however, own the rights to his version. Which became a big deal.

And yet, he never intended to record it. He first offered it to the Beach Boys, but it came during a turbulent phase for them. They flew Jacks down from Vancouver, BC, to produce it, but he could never get more than one Beach Boy at a time, they had to hide the tapes from Brian Wilson to keep him from dicking around with them, and he had to deal with rock-star bullshit to boot. As Jacks recalled:

“I remember Mike Love came in to do his lines in a guru outfit with some girl, and they were on a watermelon fast. His lines were like ‘We had joy, we had fun... Bom bom bombombom, bom bombombombaba.’ Typical Mike Love-type voice on that.”

Crash Course Time Line, No. 13: The Blues, Blind Willie McTell & the Father of the Guitar Solo

Thank you, Lonnie Johnson.

Like country and jazz, the blues evolved into its modern form just before the 1920s. Rather than attempt a declarative, “the blues are _________,” I’ll just flag a couple key ideas and refer interested parties to Wikipedia’s entry on a great American genre. They go further back, for one, kicking around possible connections to “blue devils” seen by drunks in the grips of alcohol withdrawal (but…pink elephants?), or even a related phenomenon like blue laws banning the sale of alcohol, which would also keep those blue devils at bay.

The form of the blues relevant to this post evolved in southern Black communities, mostly after the American Civil War and during the decades after the abolition of slavery. In the same way that good and healthy things grow out of manure, the roots of the genre extended into the slavery era in musical forms like spirituals, work songs, field hollers and old ballads. A 1997 Georgia public television documentary on Blind Willie McTell, one of the subjects of this post, gives a short, but more compelling take on how communal music like work songs evolved into the classic blues format of a lone singer and his guitar. In that telling, Black Americans moving around in search of both livelihoods and lost family members often wound up as solitary farmers (often sharecroppers), and they held those same songs in their collective memory. The second part involved Sears catalogs ubiquitous across the American south, a lot of which sold guitars, a fairly new instrument at that time; the guitar eventually evolved into the “response” in the “call-and-response” structure of old work songs - i.e., the singer sings the lines (or the story) and the guitar "calls back" in an alternating pattern.

A whole bunch of threads cross here - e.g., country music (with the banjo borrowed from African Americans), music from the popular minstrel shows - but (riffing a bit here) blues seemed to develop within Black communities, i.e., in isolation from the other two. Minstrelsy, in particular, held onto the slave days. Black amateur musicians moved the genre forward playing “juke joints” and making the songs more lyrically complex - e.g., from repeating the same three lines to the AAB pattern (line, line, concluding line) - and richer and more varied musically, until, by the beginning of the 20th century, blues started to sound like a stripped-down version of the popular songs of the 1920s and 1930s.

A man named Hart Wand published the first blues composition in 1912, with “Dallas Blues”; the same year saw W. C. Handy publish “St. Louis Blues” and “Memphis Blues” - none of which will register as "blues" to a modern audience; the mash-up of blues and jazz quickly differentiated (while ragtime became parody before it died before the 1920s).  Conveniently, the place names of those titles map a loose boundary around where the genre took root and grew. For reference, Wikipedia had this to say about Handy’s work: “his compositions can be described as a fusion of blues with ragtime and jazz, a merger facilitated using the Cuban habanera rhythm that had long been a part of ragtime.” The blues took a detour in the early 1920s, when female singers - e.g., Lucille Bogan, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith (both covered in this series) - dominated what was popularly called the blues. That was one version of what became known as “the Urban blues”; the one man and his guitar model formed the other branch. By the end of the 1920s, that became what comes to mind for most people when someone says, “the blues.”

One Hit No More, No. 69: David Essex, Who Is Massive in the UK, Honest.

He's a decent Che...

The Hit
This is a weird one in that I found nothing about David Essex’s international 1973 hit, the pulsing, sultry slow-jam, “Rock On,” beyond its bare existence. It went gold the following year, it hit either #3 or #5 on the Billboard Hot 100, it gave him his only hit single on the Cash Box Top 40, and that song is probably the only thing any American knows anything about him. I don’t think 99% of Americans don’t know his name, never mind pick him out of a two-person line-up.

Then again, does it matter? He’s a staple of UK pop culture, high and low.

The Rest of the Story
David Essex was born David Albert Cook in 1947 to an East End docker and “a self taught pianist and Irish Traveller” (an Irish subculture similar, but not related, to the Roma). He grew up poor and as an only child, a tough situation made harder when his father, Albert, contracted tuberculosis when he was very young. That made them effectively homeless and dependent on relatives to survive, but they did and eventually found their feet.

Over time, the family gravitated to outer London, first to Canning Town then to Chadwell Heath, where they had a little more room indoors and out, and where young David Cook could indulge his first love, football (which, here, means soccer). He took that love seriously enough to tank the placement exam for secondary school (the Eleven plus exam) so he could attend Shipman County Secondary - a school that took its football seriously - and earned himself a place with the West Ham Juniors (aka, the junior team for English Premier League regulars West Ham United). He walked that path until he discovered a new, second love, music. As he told the Guardian:

“I played football for West Ham Juniors, but when I was 13 I went to Soho and walked into an R&B club called the Flamingo, which was full of black American GIs and I decided that I wanted to be a musician.”

Essex decided on drums as his instrument - as he put it, he could “hide behind the cymbals.” His father hated the drums, but he still let him practice in their modest council house; Essex remembers his dad having a “proper stand-up fight” with a neighbor who complained about the noise. Essex eventually crossed paths with a writer, Derek Bowman, who would become the mentor who started him in show business. According to an outlet called Great British Life, Bowman encouraged David Cook to join a band called Equity; that band already had a David Cook, and that’s when he switched his name to David Essex - a name he chose as an homage to his home county…and here’s where the narrative hiccups.

One Hit No More, No. 68: Stories & the Story of Brother Louie

So fucking 70s...

The Hit
Fans, even former ones, of Louis C.K.’s TV show know Stories’ “Brother Louie” - which assumes they didn’t before. The bigger question, how many people know the song’s subject?

“She was black as the night
Louie was whiter than white
Danger Danger when you taste brown sugar
Louie fell in love overnight”

If you guessed a mixed race couple, you win! Also, if the line about “brown sugar” squicks you out, the next two lines - “Nothin’ bad it was good/Louie had the best girl he could” - makes clear the songwriter was all for it. The rest of the song, on the other hand, gets into large parts of the world…at large was less supportive. Like Brother Louie’s parents. Given that the song came out about six years after the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v Virginia, that shouldn’t surprise anyone.

Close readers might have noticed I used the generic “songwriter” instead of singling out anyone - never mind any member of Stories. They didn’t write it: the UK funk/soul band Hot Chocolate wrote it, who are better known States-side (I’m pretty sure) for “Sexy Thing.” If, like me, you’ve never heard Hot Chocolate’s version, that happened by a combination of accident and design. While Stories’ career hadn’t exactly stagnated, the A&R guy at the band’s label, Buddah Records, wanted to give them a little nudge, so he had Ian Lloyd (more later) to come to the office and listen to a bunch of songs to see if he could find something to release as a single to goose sales. In a circa-2013 interview with the ever-reliable Classic Bands, Lloyd recalled spending a couple days listening to one song after another…until he heard “Brother Louie.” He said “this one,” and that’s the song Stories recorded and released. There’s a whole story about that moment, which I’ll get to, but I got a kick out of Lloyd’s memory of the moment:

“But the fact that I had really been listening for two days to all this stuff and then heard that and said ‘This is a number one record,’ when it finally went to number one, I was surprised. I was kind of like, ‘Wow! I was right!’ It was exciting.”

Crash Course Time Line, No. 12: Roy Acuff & Bob Wills, a Pair of Kings

Hear the echoes.

Because the subjects of this third and final chapter in this mini-series on early country music provide context all on their own, I don’t need to pad this as much as I did the last two. Both served as bridges to the growth and future of the genre and people called both of them kings….or they just laid claim to the throne. Let’s get to it.

Roy Acuff, the King of Country Music
“Stylistically, his clear, heartfelt vocals modernized the era’s predominantly stringband sound just enough to seem innovative and traditional at the same time.”

That quote from Roy Acuff’s biography on the Country Music Hall of Fame website (hereafter, “CMHoF”) caught my eye for two reasons. First, it speaks to the particular weight of tradition in the genre, i.e., innovation can’t happen without giving tradition its due. Second, I’ve heard Acuff’s voice enough to know that does it justice.

Roy Claxton Acuff was born into a prominent family in Maynardville, Tennessee in 1903. He had a Tennessee state senator hanging from his family tree, just one generation back, and his parents’ home was a popular spot for community entertaining; the young Acuff pitched in by balancing farm tools on his chin. Athletics interested him more than music growing up - just about every source I read noted he was a “three-sport standout” - but Acuff did sing in his school’s chapel choir and performed in “every play they had” during his high school career. His first pass at a career saw him try out for the Knoxville minor-league baseball affiliate to the (then) New York Giants in 1929, but Acuff collapsed during tryouts - “an after-effect of earlier sunstroke” according to the CMHoF - which resulted in what all accounts term “a nervous breakdown” that lasted into 1930. Music would carry him out of it.

Acuff learned to play the fiddle during his convalescence by listening to Fiddlin’ John Carson and Gid Tanner records and kept working from there. He started playing patent medicine shows (in blackface), and Wikipedia credits his experience working with no microphones for developing a clear and powerful voice; when he and his bandmates landed their radio gigs, that voice cut through the static nicely as well as carrying over the instruments. That backing band, the Tennessee Crackerjacks, featured Jess Easteray on guitar and a Hawaiian guitarist named Clell Summey, but became the Crazy Tennesseans with the addition of bassist Red Jones and upon being introduced as such by a radio announcer named Alan Stout (WROL was one station they worked, WNOX the other).

Crash Course, No. 15: Big Star and Misaligned Stars

From humble beginnings. Sort of. Somehow apt.

As a member of the musical tribe I fell in with, I came late to the Big Star party. A friend passed them on as one of scores of artists burned to CDs and passed on to me back in the old “ripping” days; I’d say he put 60 bands on there, most with multiple albums. He didn’t single out Big Star or any other band - not that it would have mattered because, me being me, I started at the top of the alphabet and methodically worked through it. Getting to the “Bs” didn't take long, obviously.

I did recognize the name, though. When another friend and his wife got married, they created wedding playlist CDs as a party favor and tucked all the way that bottom was Big Star’s “I’m in Love with a Girl,” a short little song I loved the second I heard it. That sharpened the anticipation of getting to them, but I was in love with Big Star by the time I got to “Thirteen” on #1 Record on the first listen.

Who They’re For: Fans of 70s rock, for one, but they have a barrier of entry or two - lightly pinched vocals, for one, but I also wonder how many people hear that damn-near signature guitar sound and think the songs all sound the same. But I’m going to borrow something to help explain them:

"Though the Fab Four are an audible influence on the albums, it’s generally more White Album–era Beatles being drawn upon than A Hard Day’s Night, along with such disparate elements as Led Zeppelin’s swaggering hard rock, Kinks leader Ray Davies’ brooding introspection, and the sweet soul music of Big Star’s Memphis hometown.”

It’s not necessarily complex music, but it runs from busy, full of layering, dueling melodies to songs so stripped down and simple that they almost walk around naked. The mood can turn on a dime within the same album, sometimes song to song. It’s dramatic lyrically, but on a very personal, almost insular level. If it speaks to you, it speaks loudly.

One Hit No More, No. 67: B.W. Stevenson, (Co-)Writing Bigger Hits for Others

For purposes of pilgrimage...

The Hit
When I heard B. W. Stevenson’s “My Maria” for the first time - and that would have been this week - I didn’t quite know how to read it. It has a whiff of country to it, especially in the vocal phrasing, but the rest of it - from the basic rhythm to a mini-chorus singing the second half of the verses to the Laurel-Canyon-esque strains in the rhythm guitar - sounds more like the era’s pop-rock. It left me wondering where B. W. Stevenson would go on the rest of his fair-sized catalog.

I couldn’t find any particularly great stories about either the song or the circumstances of its recording. A short history in the Oakcliff Advocate gives a little more background, at least, mostly quotes and memories. Most come from Daniel Moore, the guy who co-wrote the song with Stevenson - or, more accurately, the guy who brought a song he’d been working on for two years to Stevenson. As Moore relates, Stevenson only needed about 15 minutes to fine-tune the song into the Top 10 hit it ultimately became. The same article notes how people just assumed Stevenson wrote another song - one was titled “Shambala” - when he didn’t have much to do with it. Here’s Moore on that:

“’I busted him for taking credit for writing “Shambala.” He had this big grin on his face and said, “I never said that I wrote it,” Moore told [radio DJ Robynn] James. “Then his grin got bigger, and he said, ‘But I also never said that I didn’t write it.’”

The story that article tells about “Shambala” arguably gets closer to the story of B. W. Stevenson’s career…

The Rest of the Story
“I do have several good ‘war stories’ about chuck. I'll say this all the time he was in the Air Force he kept saying he was going to make it. He said it was like a roller coaster. He's been going up hill so long that the once he reaches the top it will be smooth sailing.”

Crash Course Timeline, No. 11: Barn Dances, Oprys & Three Western Gals

Fun, accidental mash-up...

Due to poor artist selection, I’m going to have to pad this post a little. Who knew the Girls of the Golden West left such a thin history?

I took a stab at a short history and light theorizing about country music in the first post in this mini-series, so I thought I’d fill that in by talking a bit about two of the iconic vehicles for popularizing the genre during the 1920s through 1940s. Those would be, in order, the National Barn Dance, which broadcast out of Chicago, Illinois, and the show that became the Grand Ole Opry, which broadcast out of Nashville. WLS-AM carried the former, WSM-AM carried the latter and both were “clear-channel” stations, 50,000 watt behemoths with almost unimaginably powerful signals in today’s radio market. As noted in the Wikipedia entry on the National Barn Dance:

“…because the clear-channel signal of WLS could be received throughout most of the Midwest and even beyond in the late evening and nighttime hours, making much of the United States (and Canada) a potential audience.”

A guy named Edgar L. Bill started the National Barn Dance in 1924 - which, incidentally, predates the alleged birth of country music, 1927’s famous Bristol Sessions (see the first post in the series) - and he started it on a hunch:

“Having lived on a farm, he knew how people loved the familiar sound and informal spirit of old-fashioned barn dance music.”

After starting as a one-off (“an impromptu sustaining program”), it became a fixture once an “avalanche of phone calls and letters” confirmed an audience existed for Bill’s kind of programming. Both shows lasted for hours at some point during their runs - four hours for the Grand Ole Opry and 6:30 to midnight on Saturdays for the National Barn Dance - and both became long-time staples for radio audiences across a lot of the American Midwest (and beyond). Both shows piled in the top country, bluegrass, Western, Americana, and folk artists of the day - both of this post’s feature artists were regulars on the National Barn Dance; Uncle Dave Macon (again, see previous post) was an early, if irregular, staple of the Grand Ole Opry - and larded those long time slots with skits and comedy. And, yes, Hee-Haw would follow almost the exact same path only for TV audiences (i.e,. it started as a filler for an open summer schedule and public pressure made it permanent).