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…

One Hit No More, No. 28: The Lemon Pipers & Hiding "Green Tambourine"

"...well, worse for the wear." (WEWS-TV, Cleveland)

The Hit
I was just reminded by a Stereogum article on The Lemon Pipers and their swing in “bubblegum pop” that Billy Bob Thornton played their 1968 hit, “Green Tambourine,” at a party in Season One of Fargo. That’s the TV show, obviously, not the movie. (And, at this point, I can’t tell whether I’m remembering that scene, or just picturing it.)

The song fits a scene like that, with its stumbling beat and those bright, sitar-soaked melodies slurring over it; call it a happy surface but with something out-of-tilt under it. It might have taken over No. 1 for just a week, but it had to claw over some now-classics to get there – e.g., Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools” and The Beatles’ “Hello, Goodbye.” (And, hell yes, that’s who inspired the sitar; more later). It hit big enough to drag five kids out of college and onto the road. The Lemon Pipers played with some massive names – B. B. King and The James Gang (who beat them in an Ohio-state level battle of the bands in 1967) – and rubbed shoulders with Jimi Hendrix, Howlin’ Wolf and Paul McCartney in Manhattan night clubs.

Bassist Steve Walmsley recalled his “rock and roll moment.” Playing “Through With You” at San Francisco's Fillmore West, and on the same bill with Moby Grape, Traffic and Spirit, he looked off-stage to see Moby Grape’s Bob Mosley give him a thumbs up. Cincinnati Magazine’s excellent retrospective contains that anecdote, and many more. In all seriousness, it wouldn’t offend me in the least if you stopped reading this post right now, clicked over to that (link below) and read that instead. You will absolutely learn more. They did solid work.

The Rest of the Story
“Banging out simple block chords, the record producer sang the tunes that Buddah execs had in mind for their newest band. And as he did, the boys looked at one another and silently passed around the same thought: What is this shit?”

The “record producer” in that quote was Paul Leka, the guy Buddah Records assigned to take The Lemon Pipers where Buddah wanted them to go. He partnered with his Brill Building colleague, Shelley Pinz, to write “Green Tambourine.” (Tin Pan Alley never died.) Her conversation with a busker inspired the song – hence the clear busking influence – and, after the band recorded it, Leka whisked them back to Buddah’s Manhattan office, larded on the production (e.g., “soaring strings, Chinese bells, and a reverb echo to Browne’s distinct vibrato tenor”), and set it out into the world.