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| 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…
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…
