This transcript of the radio show is an approximation of what I said in the show. The real spoken parts may differ slightly.
And today is my one-hundredth show and for that I tried to find listings that go for a top 100 of Rhythm & Blues Songs. I'll tell you later what I found but one thing's for sure, none of them had anything close to objectivity in them, like for most of them anything before the fifties was a big blind spot and some of them were vocal groups only.
And so I decided to go with the flow and make my own list. But only some 15 songs go in this hour so I made it easy on myself and limited myself to these fifteen. So here is my top list of Rhythm & Blues of songs that I think were important, influential, succesful or otherwise couldn't be left out. In no particular order.
And most obvious is to start with the biggest hit by the most succesful R&B artist of the forties. In 1946 it hit number one for 18 Weeks on Billboard's Race Music popularity chart - an achievement never surpassed since and met only once before. That other longest stay on #1 hit is later today. But here's Louis Jordan with the Choo Choo Ch'Boogie.
01 - Louis Jordan - Choo Choo Ch'Boogie
02 - Joe Turner & Pete Johnson - Roll 'Em Pete
Roll 'Em Pete was a joint effort of Joe Turner and Pete Johnson and in compilations of Rhythm & Blues that shaped Rock 'n Roll this is too often left out, probably simply because for the compilers, the world didn't start before 1948, when a fad hit the Rhythm & Blues scene, of backbeat driven jumping blues that all seemed to sing about rocking and rolling.
This was a full decade earlier and there wasn't yet a sign the dawn of rock 'n roll. Race music - as African American music was named by then - race music were blues, accompanied by acoustical guitar, piano, trumpet or clarinet or a combination of them. That was 90% of, for instance, what Decca brought in its famous 7000 Race series. But Vocalion had this rolling backbeat boogie woogie that would have been just one more if it had been in the late forties. But these were the late thirties and they were ahead of their time ten years. And that's why I think this belongs somewhere high in my Top 15 of pre-Rock 'n Roll Rhythm & Blues.
And so that is 10 years before that song where many music historians start the making of Rock & Roll. Wynonie Harris first rejected the song when Roy Brown presented it to him, and only when Brown's version got some succes, Harris recorded this gospel parody in a version that not only became a big hit, but it spawned a national craze of similar songs that defined Rock 'n Roll and that makes it another high on my top 15. You got it more often, here on the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman, here is Good Rocking Tonight.
03 - Wynonie Harris - Good Rockin' Tonight
04 - Trixie Smith - My Daddy Rocks Me (with one steady roll)
From a 1938 re-recording on Decca you got Trixie Smith with My Man Rocks Me with one steady roll and it describes 12 hours of lovemaking. There was a later follow up that did the other 12 hours of the day and the song didn't just spawn a lot of blues with the 'around the clock' theme, but also inspired the Rock 'n Roll classic Rock Around The Clock.
Smith had recorded it earlier, in 1924 as an acoustical recording with a horrible sound quality. I don't play 'em often, them acoustical recordings, but there's one so important that I don't want to miss it in this anthology of very important Rhythm & Blues. It's the first recording of the blues classic See See Rider of Ma Rainey. It featured a young cat from New Orleans on the trumpet - Louis Armstrong and together with the other musicians they crowded for the recording horn of the Paramount studio. A classic among classics - See See Rider.
05 - Ma Rainey & Louis Armstrong - See See Rider Blues
06 - Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy - Take It And Git
Take it and git - Andy Kirk and his twelve Clouds of Joy and the reason why I play it, is not so much for the song itself, but it marks the start of an institution that stayed until today - the popularity chart for Rhythm & Blues. Take it and git was number one on the very first issue of it - named Harlem Hit Parade - and then we're talking October 24 of 1942, in the heat of the first recording ban of the American Federation of Musicians. Like anything released during that time, it was recorded before the strike struck the recording business on the first of August of that year.
The funny thing is, that during the second recording ban, in 1948, Billboard made history again and that is by inventing the word Rhythm & Blues. It was Jerry Wexler, the soon-to-be executive of Atlantic records, who coined the name and nowadays we easily call all African American music from before Rhythm & Blues but by then no-one had ever heard of that name. It was Race music, and in the thirties also just blues and jazz - the latter was before the swing revolution predominantly black music.
For the next one we go back to 1945 with that other biggest R&B hit of all times. Just like Louis Jordan's Choo-Choo Ch'boogie it peaked 18 weeks on the race music hit parade. Big difference is, that Jordan had powerful Decca behind him and Joe Liggins was on the tiny Exclusive label that had a hard time to cope with the demand for the record - otherwise it might have surpassed Jordan. Here is that cool doublesider that was a six-minute extract of Liggin's 15-minute closer for the night of each gig they did. Here is the Honeydripper.
07 - Joe Liggins & His Honeydrippers - The Honeydripper
08 - Harlem Hamfats - Oh! Red
Oh Red and that was short-lived studio band the Harlem Hamfats. They were very important for the transition towards small-combo Rhythm & Blues but also they were the very first band put together, to record in their own right or to backup blues singers for Decca. The initiative was J. Mayo Williams', and well he was a record producer, he never sung or played a note so I can't include anything of himself in my idea of top R&B music, but he belongs to the key figures of the history of African American music.
I already played Ma Rainey's See See rider that he produced, and next up is another first recording of a classic, the Original Stack-O-Lee blues that he waxed for his Black Patti label. Only one copy is known to have survided and fortunately they made a soundfile of it. Here are Long Cleeve Reed & Little Harvey Hull and their Down Home Boys with the Stack O'Lee Blues.
09 - Long Cleeve Reed & Little Harvey Hull Down Home Boys - Original Stack O'Lee Blues
10 - Lionel Hampton - Hey-Ba-Ba-Re-Bop
Lionel Hampton and his Hey Baba Re bop was another great hit of 1946, it stayed a solid 16 weeks at the top and the scat title stood for the hepcat's scene that emerged after the war.
Today I do my own list of the top R&B music of the time span that this program covers - up to the mid-fifties - here on the one-hundredth episode of the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman, and the reason why I made such a list myself is that I'm not satisfied with the efforts that others done on the web. Most just omit anything before 1948 or even anything before the mid-fifties. I saw a list of top R&B songs of the forties of Music VF.com that was packed with white artists - now you can tell me a lot of things but in the forties Rhythm & Blues was an exclusively black thing and music was highly segregated. They really missed the idea.
Now a lot of the songs that go high on this list - and any other serious attempt to make a top of the best of Rhythm & Blues - have to do with their importance to the transition to Rock 'n Roll. That's inevitable - any nowadays popular music is heavily influenced by African-American music. There have been moments in 20th century music where a wave of black influences invaded popular music. One of them was the start of the swing era, and the most important was the start of Rock 'n Roll.
There's still a lot of people that think that Rock 'n Roll started with Elvis Presley. For them I have the next two songs. One is the blues that saved Elvis first session with Sam Phillips' Sun label, and that hadn't yielded one useful song. There were about to call it quit when Elvis took his guitar and started to play that old 1946 blues. Now Phillips always had said that he was looking after a man who could bring the Rhythm & Blues to the white audience, and with this song, Elvis proved he was that man.
So here is that '46 blues. Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup with That's Alright.
11 - Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup - That's All Right
12 - Big Mama Thornton - Hound Dog
Big Mama Thornton with her groundbreaking original of Hound Dog, penned by two white nineteen-year old boys, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. The story tells how these two, apparently intimidated by that big salty chick that Willie Mae Thornton was, heard her initially crooning the lyrics as if she was imitating Frank Sinatra and when Jerry Leiber objects, he gets a killing look. 'White boy, don't you be tellin' me how to sing the blues.' But still she gets the idea resulting in this smash.
For the next one we go back to 1941 with a classic of women's blues. It tells the story of the man who was rich in the roaring 20s but lost his money to the women he wanted to please - and probably also to the economic crash and with that it's become the most famous of depression blues - despite it was written during the war. It was a re-make Joe McCoy did himself on his Weed Smoker's dream that was a hit for the Harlem Hamfats that he played in. Peggy Lee made it a big hit with Benny Goodman, but here's the original of Lil Green accompanied by Big Bill Broonzy on the guitar.
13 - Lil Green - Why Don't You Do Right
14 - Hank Ballard & The Midnighters - Work With Me Annie
15 - Ray Charles - I got a woman
Rhythm & Blues didn't only do a transition into Rock 'n Roll but also in what was later to be called soul - the new African American music style of the sixties, and for that the influx of gospel elements was important. Hank Ballard was one of the many fifties musicians who brought a more gospelish delivery and his famous Annie song is a good example of it. Many soul fans credit Ray Charles though for the invention of soul with his I Got A Woman - also for bringing the gospel to the blues. Now he wasn't the first one and he wasn't the only one, but one thing's for sure - he was important for the making of soul music.
Well time's up and I hope you liked my top list of Rhythm & Blues. I know you can have a lot of discussion for the choices I made and of course you can e-mail me about that at rockingducthman@rocketmail.com, or visit me on the web, do a google search for the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman and my site will show up first.
This show 100 gone by as fast as all the others did, so meet me next time, here on this radio station for the next episode of the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman.