Anatomy of a Song E-Book

Marc Myers

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Songs that sell the most copies become hits, but some of those hits transcend commercial value, touching a generation of listeners and altering the direction of music. In Anatomy of a Song, writer and music historian Marc Myers tells the stories behind fifty rock, pop, R&B, country and reggae hits through intimate interviews with the artists who wrote and recorded them. Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, the Clash, Smokey Robinson, Grace Slick, Roger Waters, Joni Mitchell, Steven Tyler, Rod Stewart, Elvis Costello and many other leading artists reveal the inspirations, struggles and techniques behind their influential works.

Leseprobe

Anatomy of a Song

Also by Marc MyersWhy Jazz Happened

Anatomy of a Song

The Oral History of 45 Iconic Hits That Changed Rock, R&B and Pop

Marc Myers

Grove Press UK

First published in the United States of America in 2016 by Grove/Atlantic Inc.

This paperback edition published in 2017

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.

Copyright © Marc Myers, 2016

All photos printed throughout the text courtesy of Getty Images, with the following exceptions: p. 8 (Lloyd Price): Courtesy of Lloyd Price. p. 16 (Little Willie Littlefield): Gusto Records. p. 34 (Dion DiMucci): Susan DiMucci. p. 40 (The Dixie Cups): © Alan Betrock / Shake Books, Courtesy of Wayne Betrock. p. 66 (The Four Tops): Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy. p. 92 (Grace Slick): Courtesy of Herb Greene. p. 119 (Loretta Lynn): Loretta Lynn Enterprises Inc. p. 126 (Tammy Wynette): Courtesy of Cathy Sherrill Lale. p. 154 (Elvis Presley): Joseph A. Tunzi / JAT Publishing / Daryl Restly. p. 176 (Mick Jagger), p. 294 (Merle Haggard): Photographs by Norman Seeff. p. 184 (Rod Stewart): John McKenzie, London. p. 201 (Joni Mitchell): Courtesy of Cary Raditz. p. 222 (The Allman Brothers): Photo by Twiggs Lyndon / Courtesy of the Lyndon Family. p. 244 (Stevie Wonder): Courtesy Johnson Publishing Company, LLC. p. 286 (The Neville Brothers): © Christopher R. Harris. p. 308 (Bonnie Raitt): Courtesy Everett Collection.

The moral right of Marc Myers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

A version of each chapter first appeared in The Wall Street Journal as part of the column ‘Anatomy of a Song,’ 2011–2016

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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Paperback ISBN 978 1 61185 525 8

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For Alyse and Olivia My melody and harmony

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1: Lawdy Miss ClawdyLloyd Price

Interviews: Lloyd Price, Dave Bartholomew, Art Rupe

2: K.C. LovingLittle Willie Littlefield

Interviews: Mike Stoller, Billy Davis, Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis

3: ShoutThe Isley Brothers

Interview: Ronald Isley

4: Please Mr. PostmanThe Marvelettes

Interview: Katherine “Kat” Anderson Schaffner

5: Runaround SueDion DiMucci

Interview: Dion DiMucci

6: Chapel of LoveThe Dixie Cups

Interviews: Jeff Barry, Darlene Love, Mike Stoller, Barbara Hawkins, Rosa Hawkins, Artie Butler

7: You Really Got MeThe Kinks

Interviews: Ray Davies, Dave Davies, Shel Talmy

8: You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’The Righteous Brothers

Interviews: Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, Bill Medley

9: My GirlThe Temptations

Interview: Smokey Robinson

10: Reach Out I’ll Be ThereThe Four Tops

Interviews: Lamont Dozier, Abdul “Duke” Fakir, Paul Riser

11: Darling Be Home SoonJohn Sebastian

Interview: John Sebastian

12: Light My FireThe Doors

Interviews: Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger, John Densmore

13: Groovin’The Young Rascals

Interviews: Felix Cavaliere, Chris Huston, Gene Cornish

14: White RabbitJefferson Airplane

Interview: Grace Slick

15: Different DrumThe Stone Poneys

Interviews: Michael Nesmith, Linda Ronstadt, Bobby Kimmel, Don Randi

16: (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the BayOtis Redding

Interviews: Steve Cropper, Booker T. Jones, Wayne Jackson, Ben Cauley

17: Fist CityLoretta Lynn

Interview: Loretta Lynn

18. Street Fighting ManThe Rolling Stones

Interview: Keith Richards

19: Stand By Your ManTammy Wynette

Interviews: Billy Sherrill, Hargus “Pig” Robbins, Jerry Kennedy

20: Magic Carpet RideSteppenwolf

Interviews: John Kay, Michael Monarch

21: Proud MaryCreedence Clearwater Revival

Interviews: John Fogerty, Sonny Charles, Tamiko Jones, Perry Botkin Jr., Brent Maher

22: Oh Happy DayThe Edwin Hawkins Singers

Interviews: Edwin Hawkins, Dorothy Morrison

23: Suspicious MindsElvis Presley

Interviews: Mark James, Chips Moman

24: Whole Lotta LoveLed Zeppelin

Interviews: Jimmy Page, George Chkiantz, Eddie Kramer

25: Mercedes BenzJanis Joplin

Interviews: John Byrne Cooke, Bob Neuwirth, Michael McClure, Clark Pierson, Brad Campbell

26: Moonlight MileThe Rolling Stones

Interview: Mick Jagger

27: Maggie MayRod Stewart

Interview: Rod Stewart

28: CareyJoni Mitchell

Interviews: Joni Mitchell, Cary Raditz

29: Respect YourselfThe Staple Singers

Interviews: Al Bell, Mavis Staples

30: The Harder They ComeJimmy Cliff

Interviews: Jimmy Cliff, Jackie Jackson, Hux Brown

31: Midnight Train to GeorgiaGladys Knight and the Pips

Interviews: Jim Weatherly, Cissy Houston,Tony Camillo, Gladys Knight

32: Ramblin’ ManThe Allman Brothers

Interviews: Dickey Betts, Chuck Leavell, Les Dudek

33: Rock the BoatThe Hues Corporation

Interviews: Wally Holmes, John Florez, Joe Sample, H. Ann Kelley

34: Walk This WayAerosmith

Interviews: Joe Perry, Steven Tyler

35: Love’s in Need of Love TodayStevie Wonder

Interview: Stevie Wonder

36: Deacon BluesSteely Dan

Interviews: Donald Fagen, Walter Becker, Larry Carlton, Tom Scott, Pete Christlieb

37: (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red ShoesElvis Costello

Interview: Elvis Costello

38: Heart of GlassBlondie

Interviews: Chris Stein, Debbie Harry, Michael Chapman

39: Another Brick in the WallPink Floyd

Interview: Roger Waters

40: London CallingThe Clash

Interviews: Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, Topper Headon

41: Brother John/Iko IkoThe Neville Brothers

Interviews: Cyril Neville, Aaron Neville, Art Neville, Charles Neville, Barbara Hawkins, Mac Rebennack

42: Big CityMerle Haggard

Interview: Merle Haggard

43: Time After TimeCyndi Lauper

Interviews: Rob Hyman, Cyndi Lauper

44: Nick of TimeBonnie Raitt

Interview: Bonnie Raitt

45: Losing My ReligionR.E.M.

Interviews: Peter Buck, Mike Mills, Michael Stipe, Bill Berry

Acknowledgments

On Friday, September 23, 2011, I was grabbing a late lunch with my wife on New York’s Upper West Side when Rich Turner, The Wall Street Journal’s music editor at the time, e-mailed an idea for a fast turnaround: “We’re wondering about whether there are stories to be done about individual songs, an Anatomy of a Song, classic songs that resonate today and have backstories behind them, anecdotes surrounding them, huge histories of what happened to them after they came out. They’re like people and we could profile them. To start, how about ‘My Girl’ by Smokey Robinson?”

And so began the newspaper’s “Anatomy of a Song” column and my ongoing odyssey to gather the dramatic stories behind the writing and recording of some of America’s most iconic rock, soul, country, R&B, gospel, reggae, and disco songs. Originally, the mandate was to treat the column as a “write-through”—an article on the song with the songwriter’s quotes spread throughout. But by the third column, on the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” I faced a problem. There were two accessible songwriters­ —Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann—instead of one. That’s when I realized the column would be better served as an oral history, with the stories told through my edit of the songwriters’ and artists’ own words. The new format would be flexible enough to include as many sources as were needed to tell the story, and would also allow me to capture the sound of a subject’s voice.

When I proposed the new format idea to Rich and Eben Shapiro, TheWall Street Journal’s global arts editor at the time, in July 2012, they agreed, and it worked perfectly. In the four years that followed, the three of us routinely batted around artist and song ideas, and the process has been wonderfully collaborative and fruitful. My heartfelt thanks to Eben and Rich for their initial vision and guidance and for giving me the opportunity to preserve music history. A special thanks to the Anatomy of a Song team during this period—Lisa Bannon, Emily Gitter (now editor of the Mansion section), Michael Boone, Brenda Cronin, Catherine Romano, and photo editor Ericka Burchett. I also want to thank Wall Street Journal senior deputy managing editor Michael W. Miller for his critical eye and support for the column.

I am especially grateful for the friendship and sage guidance of Glen Hartley, my literary agent, and Lynn Chu, my literary attorney. I had the good fortune to meet both of them several years ago when author, critic, and playwright Terry Teachout introduced us at his book party for Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington.

I would like to thank legendary editor Morgan Entrekin, CEO and publisher of Grove Atlantic. Morgan’s wisdom, love of music, and passion were huge motivating factors for me. I also was lucky to work with Morgan’s brilliant and devoted team, particularly Allison Malecha, Julia Berner-Tobin, Sal Destro, Tom Cherwin, Charles Rue Woods, Deb Seager, and John Mark Boling.

A big hug for my wife, Alyse, a wonderful memoirist whose love, sharp editing eye, and support never flagged, even during my eight-day weeks. And hugs for my fabulous daughter, Olivia, who shares my adoration of music and respect for musicians.

A big thanks to Dion and Susan DiMucci for use of their photo (I can hear the music drifting across the rooftops); to Cary Raditz for use of his loving photo with Joni Mitchell in Crete; to Cathy Sherrill Lale, who kindly allowed me to use the photo of Tammy Wynette and her father—songwriter and producer Billy Sherrill; to Lloyd Price for use of his image; and to Patsy Lynn Russell for use of the photo of her mom, Loretta Lynn, with her family.

And finally, a big thanks to all of the publicists who understood that preserving musicians’ stories is a noble enterprise and worked hard to make top artists available to me. And most of all, to the artists in this book who opened their hearts and shared their recollections.

Introduction

At its heart, this book is a love story—a five-decade oral history of rhythm & blues, rock, and pop as told to me by the artists who wrote and recorded the forty-five songs in these pages. Through their narratives, we hear the composers’ original motives for writing the songs as well as the emotions that artists poured into their recordings. We also learn about the discipline, poetry, musicianship, studio techniques, and accidents that helped turn these songs into meaningful generational hits that still endure today. Over the decades covered in this book, the sound of R&B, rock, and pop changed repeatedly along with the statements musicians were trying to make in response to their times and the desires and dreams of record-buyers. To put these songs in perspective, I thought I’d provide a sense here of how R&B and rock emerged in the first place, a back story that sets the stage for the book’s opening oral history of “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” (1952).

Unlike popular music of earlier eras, R&B wasn’t written for Broadway musicals, movies, or crooners. Instead, R&B originated as dance music by African-Americans for the ­African-American market in the years just after World War II. During this period, dance music was at an impasse. The tightening post-war economy had forced many large Swing Era dance bands to fold while jazz musicians began playing a new improvised style intended to be heard in club and theater seats rather than on ballroom dance floors. To fill the void, several African-American bandleaders including Lionel Hampton and Louis Jordan merged the blues with boogie-woogie rhythms and dance beats to extend the Swing Era just as jazz was becoming more esoteric and popular music was growing increasingly saccharine and bland.

The merging of blues and dance tempos was largely the result of a sizable demographic shift that took place shortly after America’s entry into World War II in 1941, when round-the-clock defense plants in Southern California, the Midwest, and other parts of the country needed as many workers as they could hire. As word reached the South in early 1942, a mass migration of African-Americans to cities such as Los Angeles, Detroit, and Chicago began. The newly arrived brought with them a passion for music from back home—the blues of the Mississippi Delta. By war’s end in 1945, the demand for blues-flavored dance music in many of these urban African-American neighborhoods gave rise to blues shouters, saxophone honkers, and guitarists backed by foot-tapping arrangements influenced by jazz, boogie-woogie piano, and the rocking rhythms of trains and factory machinery. At first, the new up-tempo genre was called “jump blues.”

Most jump-blues recordings were initially released on major labels such as Decca and the so-called “race record” subsidiaries of Columbia and RCA. These three companies dominated the record industry up until the late 1940s, when a pair of recording bans by the American Federation of Musicians allowed small independent labels such as King, Aladdin, Apollo, Specialty, Imperial, and many others to gain footholds in urban markets, creating opportunities for African-American blues singers and jump-blues musicians. By 1949, beat-driven blues records had become so numerous and varied that Billboard writer Jerry Wexler convinced the magazine to drop the pejorative “Race Records” title from its charts and use “Rhythm & Blues” instead. Wexler, who went on to become a partner at Atlantic Records and one of the most important R&B and soul record producers of the 1950s and ’60s, wrote in the Saturday Review of June 1950 that the new name was appropriate for “more enlightened times.”

The popularity of R&B records among adults in African-­American communities continued to grow in the early 1950s, thanks largely to the proliferation of bar jukeboxes and independent radio stations. But the music also began to inspire younger listeners who discovered R&B stations while cruising radio dials at night. Their growing interest in R&B singles recorded by artists such as Fats Domino, Jackie Brenston, Joe Turner, and Big Mama Thornton led artists to record songs that specifically addressed adolescent aspirations and anxieties. As younger fans gravitated to R&B in the early 1950s, white disc jockeys such as Alan Freed in Cleveland and those in other major urban markets championed R&B records. They referred to the music as “rock ’n’ roll” for dramatic effect and to make the music more acceptable to white households.

Eventually, white artists figured out how to sing and play the music authentically. Chief among them in the early 1950s was Bill Haley & His Comets, whose “Rock Around the Clock” in 1954 was featured during the opening credits of the feature film Blackboard Jungle a year later. The movie helped the song become the first rock ’n’ roll single to hit No. 1 on Billboard’s pop chart, turning the music into a national sensation. The film—a noir morality drama about an urban high school overrun by rock ’n’ roll–crazed juvenile delinquents—added a new defiant dimension to the music. Up until “Rock Around the Clock,” music aimed at young audiences had largely been an audio experience. You clicked on the radio, fed coins into a jukebox or placed a stylus on vinyl, and used your imagination as the music played. The release of the film added dramatic visual imagery and, by doing so, inadvertently glamorized rebellion against teachers and other authority figures. The rudeness and recalcitrance by students in the film against “uncaring” and “disinterested” authority figures remains a mainstay of rock to this day.

The popularity of “Rock Around the Clock” not only excited young imaginations in markets across the country but also paved the way for electrifying performers like guitarists Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, and white rockabilly musicians in the South and Southwest, including Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Buddy Holly, who combined the twang of country and energy of R&B. The result of this fusion was a new, impatient form of rock ’n’ roll with a rural feel that emphasized the electric guitar rather than the saxophone. With the rising sales of portable phonographs and family television sets nationwide in the late 1950s, the popularity of R&B and rock ’n’ roll expanded again, helping the music make up an ever-growing slice of record-company profits. In the decades that followed, R&B and rock proved resilient as the music divided into subgenres. But over time, most songs released did not remain artistically important or even interesting. In fact, only a small percentage of songs recorded have managed to retain their power and transformative significance while the majority have been long forgotten.

This book is concerned with the songs that have endured. Although all of the songs featured in this book appeared originally in the “Anatomy of a Song” column for TheWall Street Journal, the material here is framed a bit differently. The forty-five columns now appear in chronological order by year so they tell a collective story about the music’s evolution and the role each song played. Each song begins with a new introduction to explain its historical significance. In addition, many entries feature new material added from fresh reporting or from my original interview tapes. In some cases, only one interview was conducted with the primary artist who wrote and recorded the song. In other cases, when multiple perspectives were needed, I included sources who could shed light on different phases of the song’s development and recording.

Each song appears as an oral history, which not only lets artists tell you the story behind their songs but also provides a rare opportunity to hear the artist’s voice, thinking, and process. In this regard, each oral history shares the immediacy of an audio podcast, since it enables you, the reader, to feel as if the artist is speaking directly to you. In each case, I carefully edited these oral histories from interviews to ensure a story’s seamless narrative and flow. For example, if an artist talked about a guitar solo and ten minutes later returned to the solo to flesh out a point, that material was united in the same section about the solo. Or if an artist stopped talking about the song to go into lengthy remarks about something unrelated to the song’s history, that material was edited out.

This collection of forty-five songs does not purport to be a list of the best songs ever recorded nor do the songs chosen claim to cover every major event in music history. Together, they simply are a subjective collection of music milestones that I believe provide us with a greater understanding of the songs, the artists, and the music’s history. Some readers might argue that other songs belong on the list. Maybe so. But I don’t believe their inclusion would have dramatically altered the book’s larger story about the music’s development. Ultimately, these forty-five songs are stand-ins for the music’s major turning points, presenting us with a starting point for conversation and debate about other worthy songs.

As for the time span covered, the book begins in 1952 with Lloyd Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” a song critical to the development of both R&B and rock ’n’ roll, and ends in 1991 with the release of R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion”—arguably alternative rock’s biggest hit and the song that primed the pump for grunge rock’s rise. Certainly, there have been songs recorded after 1991 that seem to have all the ingredients of an iconic work. Only time will tell. In my mind, a song is not iconic until it has stood the test of a ­generation—twenty-five years. There’s no question that there are songs recorded as recently as last year that seem destined for iconic status. But the truth is we simply don’t know that to be the case yet. In my role as a historian, I decided that 1991 was as good a cutoff date as any, since it gives us at least twenty-five years to evaluate a song’s merits free from the gravitational pull of fads and music trends that existed when they were released.

Some of the songs in the book may not be as familiar to you as others, but that’s part of the fun. Once you’ve read about the thinking behind a particular song, I urge you to listen to the songs, preferably before and after reading about them. You also may want to listen to them in chronological order, so you can hear the same audio history of R&B and rock that I heard and see how the music’s branches split off into other genres.

After conducting the in-depth interviews for these forty-five songs, I found that fascinating nuggets of information emerged. Some of my favorites include:

• The Doors’ lead vocalist Jim Morrison often listened to Frank Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night album in 1966, while the Latin rhythm that drummer John Densmore used on “Light My Fire” was inspired by the 1964 bossa nova hit “The Girl From Ipanema.”

• The Four Tops’ “Reach Out I’ll Be There” was inspired by Bob Dylan’s “throw-down” style of singing.

• Keith Richards’ “Street Fighting Man” was inspired by the sound of French police-car sirens.

• John Fogerty based the opening of “Proud Mary” on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

• Janis Joplin cowrote the lyrics to “Mercedes Benz” at a bar while the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” was blasting on the jukebox.

• “Midnight Train to Georgia” was originally based on Farrah Fawcett telling the song’s composer that she was catching a midnight flight to Houston.

• Steven Tyler wrote the lyrics to “Walk This Way” on the wall of a New York recording studio.

Throughout the interview and writing process, I viewed myself as a storyteller and the custodian of artists’ recollections, reputations, and legacies. I’ve always felt that interviewing celebrated artists about their work is a sizable responsibility and privilege. Without exception, those who participated in these oral histories expressed gratitude that the stories behind their work were being preserved accurately, sensitively, and with enormous care. Now I’m passing their stories on to you. Please think of this book as an oral-history jukebox.

1: Lawdy Miss Clawdy

Lloyd Price

Released: April 1952

Singer-songwriter Lloyd Price, whose “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” in 1952 featured an early rock ’n’ roll backbeat.

Courtesy of Lloyd Price

Up until the early 1950s, records were marketed primarily to adults who could afford phonographs. Pre-teens and teens had radios and jukeboxes, but much of the music they heard reflected adult tastes. The turning point came in 1949, when RCA introduced the 45—a virtually unbreakable vinyl disc with a large hole in the center. At first, RCA used the 45 to compete against Columbia’s 33 1/3 album, which had been unveiled a year earlier. To take on its rival, RCA sold multiple 45s for each album and manufactured a special phonograph that could drop a stack of 45s individually onto the turntable, each one playing in turn. But by 1951, RCA realized that its efforts on behalf of the 45 were impractical compared with the ease of Columbia’s LP, a format that quickly became the industry’s preferred standard for albums. But the 45 had a bright future. In 1952, the jukebox industry announced it would begin replacing the heavy 78 with the lighter and more durable 45. Since most R&B recordings were heard on jukeboxes, that genre soon rolled over onto the 45.

R&B was also greatly helped by a second innovation—the ­magnetic-tape recorder, which began replacing the clunky “cutting” stylus and wax disc in recording studios in 1948. Tape improved fidelity; lowered the cost of recording, since music could be recorded, erased, and rerecorded on the same reel; and made musicians’ mistakes easier to fix through splicing. As a result, less accomplished musicians were able to record, boosting the number of R&B recording artists in the early 1950s. Tape also enabled executives at small independent labels to travel the country with portable recorders in search of new talent. One of those executives was Art Rupe, owner of Specialty Records, a Los Angeles R&B and gospel label.

In early 1952, Rupe arrived in New Orleans, home of pianist FatsDomino, who had already recorded three R&B hit singles. Rupe traveled to New Orleans hoping to find other musicians with Domino’s magic but instead wound up auditioning a nineteen-year-old singer named Lloyd Price, who was introduced to him by local bandleader and arranger Dave Bartholomew. In March, Rupe recorded Price singing an original song—“Lawdy Miss Clawdy”—with Domino on piano. The song became one of the first R&B recordings to dryly emphasize the second and fourth beats without the more common boogie-woogie jump-blues flourish found in songs such as “Rocket88” (1951). After “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”was released in April 1952,it spent seven weeks at No. 1 onBillboard’s R&B chart, becoming anearly template for teen-directed rock ’n’ roll.

Interviews with Lloyd Price (singer),Dave Bartholomew (producer and arranger),Art Rupe (Specialty Records owner)

Lloyd Price: I grew up in Kenner, Louisiana, a rural suburb of New Orleans. As a child, I took a few trumpet lessons, but taught myself to sing and play piano. By the time I was seventeen, in 1950, I had a band and was singing at local clubs. We covered R&B jukebox hits, like “Blue Moon,” “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” and “Honey Hush.”

My mother was a great cook and owned a popular sandwich shop in Kenner called Beatrice’s Fish ’n’ Fry. I went there to eat and play the beat-up old piano she kept there. I was hoping to write and record a song that she could put in her jukebox. I hoped that fame would be my bus ticket out of town. The bigotry down there was unbelievable then.

One day, I was listening to WBOK and heard a black radio announcer named James “Okey Dokey” Smith, who had his own twenty-minute show. Okey Dokey’s appeal was his funny way of grabbing your ear. He’d say things like, “Lawdy, Miss Clawdy, eat your mother’s homemade pies and drink Maxwell House instant coffee.” Maxwell House was his only sponsor.

I liked that line—“Lawdy Miss Clawdy.” Days later, I was with my band at Morgan’s, a club in Kenner, when I began fooling around on the piano with Okey Dokey’s line. At some point, Okey Dokey came into the club and wandered over to where I was playing. He said, “Hey, you’re doing my thing from the radio.” He gave me a pat on the head and walked off.

Around this time, my girlfriend, Nellie, broke up with me. I was crushed. At my mom’s sandwich shop, I was playing the piano and working on my song, “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” with pitiful sorrow in my voice. Halfway through, I just stopped in frustration. A customer asked what I was playing. I told him without turning around. He told me to play it again and sing all the words. When I finished, I looked up. Dave Bartholomew was standing next to me. I nearly fell off my chair.

Dave was one of the most important musicians in New Orleans back in the late 1940s and early ’50s. He was a trumpeter, composer, arranger, and bandleader. He played all the black proms and big clubs. He also was a huge figure in the recording studios as an R&B producer.

Dave Bartholomew:I had dropped in to get a sandwich when I heard Lloyd playing that piano. The feeling in his voice caught me. It was completely original. Art Rupe, the owner of Specialty Records, a gospel label in Los Angeles, was holding an audition in a few weeks in New Orleans for young singers. I thought Lloyd should come by and sing his song.

Price:When Dave told me I had a shot at recording, I couldn’t believe it. Dave had cowritten, arranged, and played on Fats Domino’s “The Fat Man,” a big R&B hit in 1950. “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” sounded like it, but with a younger feel.

Weeks later, Dave called and told me to come down the next day to Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Recording Studio on New Orleans’ Rampart Street. That was like telling me to get on a plane and fly someplace. I had never been to the French Quarter. Fortunately I knew a bus driver who let me ride for free, and he directed me to the studio. At J&M, seven or eight musicians were there, and Dave was explaining how my song would go. Art was there, too. He loved gospel growing up in Pittsburgh and was trying to bring gospel singing together with an R&B beat.

Art Rupe:I had gone out to Hollywood in the early 1940s with hopes of becoming a writer for radio and film. I started my first R&B record label, Juke Box, in 1944, but changed the name to Specialty in 1946. By 1948, Specialty also was recording gospel, which soon had a big influence on R&B.

I went to New Orleans in ’52 because I liked the Creole sound down there, particularly on Fats Domino’s recordings. I wanted to emulate the sound. Cosimo owned the big R&B studio in town and put me in touch with Dave [Bartholomew]. At the audition, Lloyd was the only one who impressed me, based on the commercial potential of “Lawdy Miss Clawdy.” Lloyd’s voice and the way he sold it had gospel’s intensity. Lloyd was nervous and shy, but he sang with such sincerity and passion that I decided to record him.

Price:When it was time to record “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” Fats Domino arrived and took over the piano. He started playing a ­boogie-woogie, but Dave stopped him. He wanted something different. So instead of playing boogie-woogie, Fats played the introduction like a tinkling piano roll. To this day, nobody has ever played that intro like Fats did that day.

Then drummer Earl Palmer came in and I started singing, with the horns and rhythm section behind me. Earl’s beat was complex. He was hitting the second and fourth beats hard on the snare but also adding a 6/8 figure on the cymbal, picking up on Fats’s piano triplets. The rest of Dave’s band included Ernest McLean on guitar, Frank Fields on bass, Herbert Hardesty on tenor sax, Joe Harris on alto sax, and Jack Willis was on trumpet. There was no sheet music—it was all in their heads. We called it “padding”—the horns playing held notes behind me while I sang.

Bartholomew: Before Lloyd arrived for the audition, the band did a few run-downs to polish and tighten it up. We had a great time recording “Lawdy,” but it was work to get it done just right.

Price:After the first take, Dave decided I needed a second verse, to turn the song into a story. I quickly wrote: “Because I gave you all my money/Girl, but you just won’t treat me right/You like to ball in the mornin’/Don’t come back till late at night.” It wasn’t hard. That’s what my friends and I did all day—we’d make up lyrics. After we recorded this section, it was spliced in on the tape to lengthen the song.

When we finished, Art said, “Sounds great. What’s the B-side?” I didn’t know I needed to write a song for the record’s other side. So I had to come up with something. With Fats playing a boogie-­woogie, I wrote the lyrics for “Mailman Blues,” which was really a jam session with solos. I was expecting my draft notice any day, so the lyrics related to that.

Rupe: I recorded Lloyd’s songs on a two-track Magnecord tape recorder. Dave’s arrangement and the musicians gave Lloyd’s vocal greater urgency. Lloyd’s soulful singing style had authenticity and would connect with teens who listened to the growing number of R&B radio stations.

Price:When we were done, there was no playback of the tape. That was it. The first time I heard myself on the record was four weeks later. I was helping my father and brother install a septic tank in our backyard. The radio was playing, and Okey Dokey announced my song. My brother looked up and said, “Hey, don’t you have a song like that?” At the end, Okey announced my name. I felt like I was flying.

Even more remarkable was what Art did for me. If you wrote a blues or R&B song back then, you were lucky if you got credit for it. If you did, you often shared the credit with others who had nothing to do with it. They were on there just to feed off the royalties.

Art was different. He listed me as the sole writer, which is amazing when I think back on it. He had published the song, so he kept the publishing rights, but everything else on the writing side was mine.

Rupe: It never occurred to me to put my name on Lloyd’s composition or that of any other songwriter. To do so would have been theft. My contribution was my role as record producer, publisher, and manager of the creative process. That’s it.

Price: When the record came out, my mother opened her jukebox, moved all the records down one, and put “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” in the A-1 button spot. After that, every girl in Kenner wanted to ride in my car.

2: K.C. Loving

Little Willie Littlefield

Released: Late 1952

Singer-pianist Little Willie Littlefield (c. early 1950s) was first to record “Kansas City,” known initially as “K.C. Loving.”

Gusto Records

In the summer of 1952, about 40 percent of all R&B records sold in Southern California were being bought by white teens, thanks largely to the region’s growing number of independent radio stations. Teens cared little about the race or ethnicity of artists and more about a song’s beat and feeling. They also were attracted to the energy and endurance of R&B instrumentalists such as saxophonists “Big Jay” McNeely, Red Prysock, Paul Williams, and Joe Houston. As television caught on faster than expected in the early 1950s, the Federal Communications Commission began issuing a greater number of radio licenses to independently owned stations to ensure that radio remained competitive. Many of these new, smaller radio stations played R&B records.

Few songs better illustrate the fickle R&B market in the early 1950s than “K.C. Loving.” As Los Angeles became an R&B recording center, songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller found themselves with plenty of opportunity. R&B recording sessions needed not only songs but also musicians, arrangements, and overall management to ensure efficiency. Late in the summer of ’52, Leiber and Stoller wrote “Kansas City,” a bluesy coming-of-age song. At the last minute, Federal Records decided to change their title to “K.C. Loving,” thinking it would better connect with African-American record buyers than just the name of the city. But when the single by Little Willie Littlefield was released at the end of ’52, it failed to chart and soon faded away.

Seven years later, in 1959, little-known singer-pianist Wilbert Harrison recorded the song as a relaxed stroll with a shuffle beat. Retitled “Kansas City,” the single featured finger-popping vocal phrasing by Harrison and a twangy electric guitar solo. The single shot to No. 1 on Billboard’s pop and R&B charts, and it was followed by several additional cover versions, illustrating how timing and tweaking could turn a forgotten R&B song into a sensation. “Kansas City” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2001 and though it may have been the bigger hit, it’s hard to beat Maxwell Davis’s tenor saxophone solo on “K.C. Loving.”

Interviews with Mike Stoller (cowriter), Billy Davis (guitarist with Hank Ballard and the Midnighters), and Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis (saxophonist and arranger with James Brown)

Mike Stoller: I was still living at home in L.A. with my parents when Jerry [Leiber] and I wrote “K.C. Loving.” We were both nineteen and had been writing together since 1950. Los Angeles back in ’52 was a frenzy of R&B artists. Small record companies like Federal constantly needed songs. The guy who ran Federal was Ralph Bass, and he had us write for artists like Little Esther and Etta James. We’d teach them our songs and then they’d record them. Everything happened fast.

One day, Bass asked us to write a song about Kansas City for Little Willie Littlefield. Kansas City was the home of swing, jazz, and the blues—music that Jerry and I loved. It also was known as a pretty wild place. So Jerry and I set to work at my folks’ house at 1444 South Norton Avenue. Off the living room they had a separate alcove with a sliding door and an upright piano. Jerry would come over and write lyrics while pacing back and forth, and I’d experiment with melodies to go with them.

We asked a bunch of R&B musicians for the names of big streets in Kansas City. When we heard that 12th Street and Vine was a hot part of town, we used it. After Jerry finished the lyrics, I wrote a blues with a melody. Jerry wanted the blues to be more traditional—the kind a blues shouter might sing. I wanted a recognizable melody so if it was recorded as an instrumental, it would still be identified as ours.

We argued about the music until I finally said, “Who’s writing the music, you or me?” Jerry gave in. After we finished, we played “Kansas City” for Bass. He loved the song and told us to teach it to Little Willie Littlefield. We already knew saxophonist-arranger Maxwell Davis, so we all met at his house in South Central L.A. In those days, Max ran recording sessions for Federal, Modern, Aladdin, and lots of other independent R&B labels—before the title “producer” was even invented.

When Jerry and I arrived at his house, Little Willie was already there. I sang and played the song for him. Usually, Jerry showed artists how to phrase the lyrics, but in this case I wanted to make sure Willie heard how we wanted the music to wrap around the words. Then Willie and I sang and played the song at the same time until he had it down.

We cut the single at Radio Recorders with Federal’s engineer Val Valentin. Little Willie was on piano and Max was on tenor sax. Max’s boogie-woogie arrangement had a great groove, like a train heading for Kansas City. He didn’t really need our help in the studio, but Jerry and I went anyway to make sure Little Willie got the melody and lyrics right. Just over a minute into the record, Little Willie shouted, “All right, Max!”—signaling to Max to take his sax solo. It was a great touch.

Jerry and I had originally called the song “Kansas City,” but Federal had the publishing rights. Bass said, “You know what’s hip? ‘K.C.’ is hip. I’m going to change the title.” So Bass renamed it “K.C. Loving.” There wasn’t much we could do. We thought changing the title was dumb since there was no change in the music or lyrics. I also thought the new title was too obscure and probably would keep the song from being recorded by other artists. I was right—for seven years.

By 1959, Jerry and I had relocated to New York to write and produce the Coasters and other artists. One day, tenor saxophonist King Curtis came into the studio to record on a session and said to us, “Hey, y’all got a hit. It’s ‘Kansas City.’” Curtis had been the session leader at Fury Records on Wilbert Harrison’s recording, even though he didn’t play on it. Apparently Harrison had been singing it in clubs for years.

Harrison changed part of Jerry’s lyrics from “They’ve got a crazy way of loving there and I’m gonna get me some” to “They got some crazy little women there and I’m gonna get me one.” Maybe Fury Records’ Bobby Robinson thought our lyrics were too risqué. The new lyrics didn’t rhyme perfectly and Jerry and I liked perfect rhymes. But in the history of the blues, messing around with lyrics was common, so we let it go. But there was another problem.

While we liked that Fury used our original title—“Kansas City”—the initial release didn’t credit us. They apparently didn’t know who had written the song, and didn’t care. We showed them Little Willie’s single, and the songwriting credit was fixed. Within weeks, six new singles of “Kansas City” came out—including versions by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters and Little Richard.

Billy Davis: I was playing rhythm guitar in 1959 for Hank Ballard. We recorded “Kansas City” in Cincinnati for the King label. Hank really wanted Harrison’s boogie-shuffle feel but we couldn’t get it. Jimmy Johnson, King’s studio pianist, was a great player but he was a jazz guy and couldn’t come up with that same R&B feel. A hit is always a result of the musicians and how a song is arranged. It’s impossible to predict what the winning formula is. You can get close but there’s always something special about a hit version that nobody could predict. Little Richard’s version came out after ours.

Stoller: When Jerry and I heard Little Richard’s recording, we were surprised. He was only singing part of our song—as if he had forgotten the words or was pushing them aside. Instead, he added “Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey,” which wound up on the flip side. In 1964, when the Beatles recorded his version, they added Richard as the cowriter. Since Jerry and I thought of Richard as the real king of rock ’n’ roll, we let it slide and shared the royalties on that one. By the late ’60s, hundreds of artists were recording our song.

Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis: James Brown wanted to perform “Kansas City” during a concert at New York’s Apollo Theater in June 1967, so I wrote an extended arrangement. I’ve always been a jazz and big-band fan, and I wanted to get that feel—but with a funky groove. We rehearsed, and James really got into it. The song took us back to R&B at its height—with James slipping between jazz, soul, and funk. He liked operating between the backbeat and the horns to create a dialogue. It’s funny, most versions of “Kansas City” sound so innocent—like the singer is heading to a city he knew about only from others. On ours, James sounded like he invented the place and was going back for more.