Week Five: 1950s: The Big Six

Fats Domino:

By the beginning of 1956, "rock and roll" was not just another euphemism for black mu­sic. It was a genre in its own right, associated with a new matrix of musical sounds, and a new cluster of emblematic cultural values.

Overshadowing this metamorphosis was one song, "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock," and one Mephistophelean figure, Alan Freed. But the substance of the metamorphosis came from other figures singing other songs, none more appealing than Antoine "Fats" Domino and his breakthrough pop hit, "Ain't That a Shame"

A native of New Orleans, born in 1928 in the city's rural ninth ward, Domino (his real name) sang with a warm Creole accent, and hammered out piano triplets—his trademark—with hypnotic preci­sion, producing a flowing, mellifluous brand of sweetly swinging jump blues. He was a squat and baby-faced man, five foot five, two hundred twenty-four pounds, nicknamed "Fats" because he looked cuddly, but also in homage to one of his idols, the great jazz pianist Fats Waller. The product of a musical family, Domino's father was a violinist, and his brother-in-law, Harrison Verrett, was a guitarist who had played with the Kid Ory and Papa Celestin bands. Drawn to the piano, Domino emulated the boogie-woogie style of virtuosos like Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons, and also the rougher, more percussive barrelhouse blues of "Champion" Jack Dupree. (They called it "barrelhouse" because the style had first flourished in the gin mills, or "barrelhouses," that dotted the lumber camps and piney woods of Mississippi, Louisiana, and East Texas.) In 1946, Domino got his first steady gig, working with a band at the Hideaway Club. It was the heyday of jump blues, and Fats Domino made the style his own. He emulated the relaxed delivery of Big Joe Turner, and the good-natured showmanship of Louis Jordan. Starting with his first recording session for the Imperial label, in De­cember 1949, Domino stood out as one of Jordan's most accom­plished heirs, becoming one of the best-selling rhythm and blues recording artists of the early Fifties.

In these years, Domino's recording dates followed a typical pat­tern. The day before the session, Domino's arranger, producer, and A&R man, Dave Bartholomew, met with the pianist and a handful of musicians to work out arrangements for the songs they were plan­ning to record. Though Domino toured with a crack band of his own, Bartholomew sometimes preferred to work with local musi­cians like Herbert Hardesty and Lee Alien on tenor sax, Joe Harris on alto, Ernest McLean on electric guitar, Frank Fields on bass, Earl Palmer on drums, and Bartholomew himself on trumpet. In its day, this studio band was the best of its type, exemplifying the virtues of impromptu riffing and ensemble swing. Since the musicians were at­tuned to each other, it was easy to work out parts by ear before each session. The band played with a loose precision, creating a limber, ir­resistibly kicking pulse that made the written charts used by labels like Atlantic sound stiff in comparison.

Most sessions began at around 10:00 in the morning. When Domino was home, the setting was the J&M Studio, the only one in town, run by an engineer named Cosimo Matassa. It was a small room, and Matassa used just a handful of microphones and a rudi­mentary tape recorder. Since the musicians all played together and es­chewed editing and taped overdubs, the recorded sound was largely determined by where the microphones were placed. To bring out the beat, Matassa put microphones near the bass and drums, letting the pianist pound and the horns blow hard in the background. It would usually take about a half hour to assemble all the musicians, arrange the microphones, and warm up. Once down to business, they worked fast. Most songs required only a few takes.

As a veteran recording team with three million-selling records al­ready to their credit ("The Fat Man" in 1950, "Coin' Home" in 1952, and "Coin' to the River" in 1953), Domino and Bartholomew had a clear idea of what they were aiming for. The music was usually up ­tempo, but never frenzied. The arrangements were simple: the electric guitar and bass doubled up on the same riff, often reinforced by the horns, leaving the drummer free to move around the beat. The accent was on songs that could exploit Domino's relaxed style and mellow Creole patois, which gave his singing a distinctively rural flavor. As Bartholomew explained to blues historian John Broven years later, "we all thought of him as a country-western singer."

On March 15, Domino and Bartholomew were on tour in Los An­geles, where they cut four songs, as usual: "Help Me," "All By My­self," "Oh Ba-a-by," and "Ain't It a Shame." A fruitful session, it produced Domino's thirteenth and fourteenth R&B hits: "Ain't It a Shame" and "All By Myself." Both were strong performances, but it was "Ain't It a Shame," the first to be released, in April 1955, that dramatically changed the singer's status.

Before "Ain't It a Shame," Fats Domino was an anonymous R&B journeyman, not unlike Wynonie Harris. After it, he was a prototypi­cal rock and roll star—and well on his way to becoming an iconic figure of American popular culture, like Fats Waller and Louis Arm­strong before him.

A jaunty lyric jointly credited to Domino and Bartholomew, "Ain't It a Shame" featured a rolling bass line doubled by the electric guitar, and Domino's trademark eighth-note piano triplets, ham­mering home the beat. The main musical novelty was the staccato, stop-time arrangement, which broke up the easy swing of the perfor­mance, giving the song a lurching momentum reminiscent of "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock."

Still, there was remarkably little to distinguish "Ain't It a Shame" from the numerous R&B hits Domino had already produced. Why, then, should this particular song have come to be regarded as a pio­neering piece of early rock and roll?

Part of the answer lies in the larger cultural context. Domino's recording was released three months after he had been a featured performer at Alan Freed's first Rock 'n' Roll Ball in New York City—and just as the popularity of Blackboard Jungle was turning "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock" into a bugle call for juve­nile delinquents. With the phrase "rock and roll" on the lips of disc jockeys, industry executives, and cultural commentators, it was easy enough to categorize Fats Domino as an archetypal rock singer— which, by definition, made his music of potential interest to the young black audience that Freed was now attracting in New York City. Domino's recording of "Ain't It a Shame" entered Billboard's rhythm and blues charts in May, reached number one in June, and stayed on top for nearly three months, becoming one of the year's biggest R&B hits. It was a strong record by a veteran rhythm and blues artist. But in order to explain how Fats Domino's song ac­quired an even larger cultural resonance, it is necessary to tell an­other story, about another singer and another small record label, working out of another studio in another part of the South.

Gallatin, Tennessee, is a small town outside Nashville. In the mid-Fifties, Gallatin was well known to music lovers throughout the Deep South as the home of Randy's Record Mart, a mail-order record store that specialized in rhythm and blues and sponsored a black music program every night on WLAC, a powerful station that reached listeners throughout the region. The owner of the record mart, an auburn-haired Southern gent named Randy Wood, also owned Dot Records, an independent label he had started in 1951. Soft-spoken and genial in manner, Wood cut an odd figure among the buccaneers of the independent record business; still, he was one of the most successful.

Dot's first recordings were of country music. Then, in 1952, Wood produced his first pop hit with a vocal group called the Hilltoppers. Shortly afterward, Wood (like Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler) be­gan to notice that black Southern "cats" were buying a lot of black rhythm and blues records. The fact that he owned Randy's Record Mart gave Wood a rare edge: the store's sales figures offered a good index of the songs the cats wanted to hear.

Like Sam Phillips in Memphis, Randy Wood was an entrepreneur with a vision. He sensed that if only he could find the right black voices to sing the cats' favorite songs, he could make a million dol­lars. In the same months that Phillips was starting to work with El vis Presley, Wood hired a stable of straight black pop singers, all home­spun vocalists like Patti Page, pure of voice, sweet in manner—and willing to take a stab at singing almost anything.

Wood quickly demonstrated a gift for matching singers with songs. He hired the Fontane Sisters, long associated with Perry Como, and had them belt out a pop cover version of the rhythm and blues hit "Hearts of Stone"; it became a number one best-seller early in 1955. He hired Gale Storm, who was the star of My Little Margie on television, and had her sing "I Hear You Knockin'," a rhythm and blues song first recorded in New Orleans by Smiley Lewis and Dave Bartholomew; Storm's version of the song reached number two on the Billboard pop charts, also in 1955.

But Wood's shrewdest gambit of all involved "Ain't It a Shame." Shortly after Domino's recording had been released, Wood handed a copy of the record to a twenty-one-year-old singer named Pat Boone—and helped him turn the song into "a coast-to-coast rock and roll sensation," as the liner notes to Boone's first album put it.

Wood's recipe was simple. Closely following the outlines of Domino's original recording, he had his arranger, saxophonist Billy Vaughn, polish the arrangement, giving the Dot version a big band kick. A chorus scats "bop-a-do-do-wop" during the instrumental break, while Boone croons in his own earnest style, cleanly enunciat­ing the lyrics.

The popularity of Boone's recording (with the song's title changed to "Ain't That a Shame") provoked fresh interest in Fats Domino's quite different version of the song. Boone's record eventually reached number one on the Billboard chart of pop best-sellers, while Domino's "Ain't It a Shame" reached number ten, introducing "The Fat Man" to an entirely new audience—and launching a lucrative new phase in Domino's career. Years later, Boone recalled going to see Domino perform at a club in New Orleans. "When he heard I was in the audience," Boone says, "he called me on stage and he said to the crowd, 'I want you all to know something. You see this ring?' He had a big diamond ring on every one of his fingers, and he pointed to the most prominent of his diamond rings and he said, 'This man bought me this ring with this song,' and the two of us sang 'Ain't That a Shame' together."

Although Boone was a native-born Southerner whose father-in-law, Red Foley, was a hillbilly singer renowned for his mastery of country boogie, Boone himself had colorless diction and a creamy voice that owed more to Bing Crosby than to any hillbilly stylist. Boone had started singing in public when he was ten years old, land­ing his own radio show in Nashville, Tennessee, when he was seven­teen, winning a local talent contest the following year, and eventually earning appearances on both Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour and Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts. At the time, he sang straight pop; he knew nothing about rhythm and blues. Despite his forays onto network television, his declared ambition was to become a high school English teacher. When Randy Wood first played him a rhythm and blues record to cover—it was "Two Hearts" by the Charms, a Negro vocal group that recorded for Syd Nathan—Boone asked Wood if he had the phonograph running at the right speed. Bothered by the bad grammar of "Ain't It a Shame," Boone made a point of introducing the song in concert as "Isn't That a Shame." He wore argyle socks with black buck shoes, was polite and clean-cut, and took pride in attending an Ivy League school, posing on the campus of Columbia University for his first album cover.

Armed with the same song and tagged with the same label, Pat Boone and Fats Domino at a crucial moment offered the public reas­suring images of what rock and roll was all about. Domino was roly-poly, good-humored, and easily pegged as a happy-go-lucky, wide-grinning, loud-laughing, shuffling sort of latter-day minstrel— he was renowned for closing his shows by shoving the piano across the stage while his band blared "When the Saints Go Marching In." Pat Boone was Al Jolson without the burnt cork or emotional inten­sity, a low-key, clean-scrubbed, deeply pious spokesman for cultural uplift, filtering much of the blues and the rhythm out of rhythm and blues, and turning the new music into a winsome form of family en­tertainment.

At the same time, Boone's recordings suggested that the new idiom might be boiled down to one simple musical innovation: the use of piano triplets. There they were on Pat Boone's version of "Ain't That a Shame"; and there they would be, again, on Pat Boone's hugely successful 1957 recording of the 1931 hit ballad, "Love Letters in the Sand." It briefly seemed that triplets sufficed to turn any old song into rock and roll, a feat Domino himself accomplished with his 1956 version of the 1940 Glenn Miller hit, "Blueberry Hill".

It is no wonder that Boone and Domino were, apart from Elvis Presley, the two most popular recording stars of the early rock era. Audibly rooted in songs and sentiments from the past, highly stereo­typed, their music was designed to give pleasure, not offense. Whole­some exemplars, Boone and Domino together helped ease the new music into the mainstream of American popular culture—where it has been ever since.

Fats Domino	Chuck Berry

Chuck Berry:

It was a stomp of a song, with surreal lyrics and a jack-hammer beat, intense, focused, wild, like the car chase the song's lyrics described. Though the music was played by a more or less con­ventional combo featuring guitar, piano, bass, drums, and percus­sion, the band's chaotic attack—and the distorted timbres of the electric guitar—violated almost every ideal of musicality held dear by Fats Domino, never mind Pat Boone. Delivered with nonchalant cheeriness, the song seemed without precedent. Chuck Berry's recording of "Maybellene" nevertheless owed its own kind of debt to the past, a debt doubly disguised: by the form of parody; and by the mass-marketing of the parody as a singular example of Alan Freed's trademark music.

"Maybellene," as Berry would later recall, had its roots in an old country fiddle tune called "Ida Red." It was an up-tempo dance tune, with the accents falling squarely on the beat—no syncopation, no blue notes. The lyrics were impromptu, improvised from singer to singer and version to version, often absurd, always punctuated by the same singsong refrain: "Ida Red, Ida Red, I'm plum fool about Ida Red." Roy Acuff recorded the song in 1939, and so did Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, the country-swing stars. In 1950, Wills re­vived the song again, this time titling it "Ida Red Likes the Boogie."

In the autobiography he published in 1987, Berry recalls hearing "Ida Red" growing up in St. Louis. Born there in 1926, Berry had been raised by hardworking parents who were prosperous enough to own a radio, which filled the house with every imaginable kind of popular music, from Glenn Miller and Fats Waller to Gene Autry and Bob Wills. While still a teenager, Berry began to fool around with an old acoustic guitar, amusing himself by trying to copy the riffs and solos on popular rhythm and blues recordings. In 1951—af­ter serving time for armed robbery and working at a variety of odd jobs—Berry bought his first electric guitar, hoping to pick up some extra cash by performing at private parties. The new instrument changed his life. "I found it was much easier to finger the frets of an electric guitar," he later explained, "plus it could be heard anywhere in the area with an amplifier. It was my first really good-looking in­strument to have and hold. From the inspiration of it, I began really searching at every chance I got for opportunities to play music."

As the first famous electric guitarist to play rock and roll, Berry exemplified the kind of musical brashness that Leo Fender had inad­vertently helped to flourish. As a latecomer to the guitar, relieved that the amplified instrument was "easier to finger," Berry was con­tent to approximate crudely the rounded tones and fluid tempos of his musical models, the jazz virtuoso Charlie Christian, the blues great T-Bone Walker, and Carl Hogan, for many years Louis Jordan's guitarist. In 1958, for example, Berry took Hogan's opening single-note solo on Louis Jordan's 1946 hit, "Ain't That Just Like a Woman," and banged out a raucous but essentially note-for-note copy of the solo, to use as the opening on his classic recording of "Johnny B. Goode"—thus turning Hogan's few notes into perhaps the most famous single riff in rock and roll history. It is telling—and typical of a salient type of difference between rock and rhythm and blues—that Hogan played with fleet finesse. Berry's rendition was, by contrast, rough and jerky—and also, not coincidentally, wonder­fully easy for anyone to copy.

In 1952, at the age of twenty-six, Berry got his first job working as a musician. Before the year was out, he had also discovered the man who would become his longtime musical soulmate, Johnnie Johnson, a barrelhouse pianist who played a stomping style of boogie-woogie. Settling into a regular gig at the Cosmopolitan Club in East St. Louis, where the laws were looser and the music was hotter, Berry and Johnson worked up a repertoire of blues and careening boogies. To fill out the nightly sets, Berry also worked up some pop and swing tunes. And he started to fool around with a few old country tunes, including "Ida Red."

Since "the Cosmo clubgoers didn't know any of the words to those songs," Berry has recalled, he felt free "to improvise and add comical lines to the lyrics." In this way, he elaborated an entirely new version of "Ida Red," which he called "Ida May," exercising an artistic license that his audience otherwise discouraged. The blues are a highly ritual­ized musical form, and Berry's patrons regarded the form with a cer­tain reverence; but the same patrons couldn't have cared less what Berry did to an old fiddle tune. (Elvis Presley, coming from the oppo­site direction, felt similarly free to fool around with the blues.)

In his autobiography, Berry recalled how his hillbilly repertoire changed his fortunes. "Some of the clubgoers started whispering, 'Who is that black hillbilly at the Cosmo?' After they laughed at me a few times, they began requesting the hillbilly stuff and enjoyed try­ing to dance to it. If you ever want to see something that is far out, watch a crowd of colored folk, half high, wholeheartedly doing the hoedown barefooted."

That was just the beginning. As Berry's reputation spread, the composition of his audience changed. "Sometimes nearly forty per­cent of the clients were Caucasian," Berry wrote, adding that the change in his audience produced, in turn, a change in the way he sang: "When I played hillbilly songs, I stressed my diction so that it was harder and blackr. All in all it was my intention to hold both the black and the black clientele by voicing the different kinds of songs"—blues for the blacks, hillbilly for the blacks—"in their cus­tomary tongues."

One weekend in early May 1955, Berry took a trip to Chicago, carrying with him a homemade tape that contained "Wee Wee Hours," a new blues song inspired by Big Joe Turner's majestic and melancholy "Wee Baby Blue," and also a recording of Berry's most requested hillbilly novelty, "Ida May." During a weekend of South Side club-hopping, Berry met one of his musical idols, the Delta blues star Muddy Waters, who suggested that he bring the tapes to his boss, Leonard Chess.

Like Morris Levy, Leonard Chess had entered the music business by running a nightclub, a jazz room called the Macomba. He got into the recording business as a sideline. Shortly after opening a storefront studio in 1946, Chess had his first race hit with McKinley Morganfield, aka Muddy Waters. In the years since, his company had prospered, recording jazz and doo-wop, as well as most of the Windy City's important blues musicians.

Given the history of the label, Berry assumed that Mr. Chess would be most interested in his own blues material. He was wrong. It was "Ida May" that "struck him most as being commercial," Berry has recalled. "He couldn't believe that a country tune (he called it a 'hillbilly song') could be written and sung by a black guy." Chess told him to "give it a bigger beat," and hastily arranged a recording date for May 21, 1955.

When Berry, Johnnie Johnson, and their drummer arrived at the studio that day, they discovered that Chess had invited two other musicians to join them, bassist Willie Dixon (a songwriter who also scouted blues talent for Chess) and maraca player Jerome Green (who normally played with another new Chess artist, Bo Diddley). They also discovered that Leonard Chess wanted to change the song's name—he thought that "Ida May" sounded too corny. Ac­cording to Johnnie Johnson, "there was a mascara box laying on the floor in the corner of the studio and Leonard Chess said, 'Well, hell, let's name the damn thing Maybellene.' " Berry, for his part, recalls that Maybellene was his idea—it was the name of a cow in his third-grade primer.

The song's lyrics are an odd blend of romance and car racing in­spired, Berry claims, by "memories of high school and trying to get girls to ride in my 1934 V-8 Ford." The verse, about the race, and the refrain, about the girl, almost sound like they come from two dif­ferent songs. It is the music's unrelenting beat—and Berry's distinc­tive guitar sound—that holds the song together. On the recording, Berry plays with a twangy "chop, chop, chop," using a staccato style that he would develop into his musical calling card.

Quite apart from the exuberance of Berry's high-spirited perfor­mance, Leonard Chess had good reasons for focusing on "Maybel­lene." Since 1952, he had been a business partner with Alan Freed, who managed Chess' most profitable doo-wop group, the Moon-glows (and took a cut of the group's song publishing). As Chess well knew, more and more black youngsters were attending Freed's "rock n roll" concerts. He guessed that "Maybellene" might be their kind of song. "The kids wanted the big beat, cars, and young love," Chess remarked years later. "It was a trend and we jumped on it."

Chess and Freed cut a deal—not their first, and not their last. Chess assigned Freed one third of the songwriting credits and royal­ties for "Maybellene." In return, Freed pushed Berry's record on his radio show. (It took three decades and several lawsuits, but Berry in 1986 finally won back sole ownership of "Maybellene.")

Freed's radio listeners loved the song—and they were not alone. By August, "Maybellene" had entered the Billboard charts, rivaling Fats Domino's version of "Ain't It a Shame" as the year's biggest rhythm and blues hit. Berry's debut also broke into the pop top ten, peaking at number five.

On September 2, 1955, Chuck Berry and his trio opened a week-long engagement at Brooklyn's Paramount Theater, as part of Alan Freed's First Anniversary Rock 'n' Roll Show. It had been a year since Freed had begun to broadcast from New York City, eight months since Freed's first Rock 'n' Roll Ball had shown that there was an integrated audience for this music. Freed's September concert featured a variety of currently popular doo-wop groups, from the Harptones to the Moonglows. With the exception of singer Tony Bennett, who quickly withdrew from the engagement after angry young fans greeted him with catcalls—he wasn't a real rock and roller!—the musicians, as always, were all black. The audience, on the other hand, as Berry later recalled, "seemed to be solid black."

In his memoir, Chuck Berry movingly recounts his emotions at meeting his new fans. It was "frightening," he admits, this "multicult audience" (as he calls it)—and it forced Berry to jettison old assump­tions. "I was merely playing it by ear and taking in every move made around me," Berry writes, emphasizing the oddity, to him, of the un­restrained black enthusiasm for his music. "I doubt that many Cau­casian persons would come into a situation that would cause them to know the feeling a black person experiences after being reared under old-time southern traditions and then finally being welcomed by an entirely unbiased and friendly audience, applauding without appar­ent regard for racial difference."

At the same time, a thousand miles away, a different kind of racial detente was being staged. In these weeks, Elvis Presley, "the hillbilly cat," had begun to sing the song of "the black hillbilly," adding "Maybellene" to his repertoire. Performing Berry's hit before a solidly black, solidly country audience on The Louisiana Hayride, a live country radio show aired on KWKH in Shreveport, Louisiana, Presley and his band played it cool, calm, and fast.

The evidence is plain: despite their disparate backgrounds, Berry and Presley were speaking the same musical language. Rock and roll was still less than a year old; but the new genre had already pro­duced a telling convergence of vernacular idioms, a blend of country and blues styles, raising the prospect of a new musical fusion—and a collective leap into the unknown, "without apparent regard for racial difference."

Little Richard:

Richard Penniman's leap into the unknown occurred one afternoon m September 1955. The rhythm and blues singer was near-ing the end of a marathon recording session in New Orleans, where he had come to record eight songs for an independent record label called Specialty. For nearly two days and eight hours, Richard and his A&R man, Robert "Bumps" Blackwell, had been rehearsing Richard's jump blues repertoire, trying to find the right groove. De­spite his recording at J&M with the same crack studio band that Fats Domino used, the sessions weren't going well. The musicians viewed the outsider with some .mistrust: at the time, Richard was twenty-two, a journeyman from Atlanta who looked like the queen of the prom, his hair piled high with pomade, his eyes lined with mascara, perfectly pretty.

Richard's singing style was tremulous and intense; he did jump blues and slow blues, all with a trace of churchiness, a hint of the gospel singer's use of shrieks, cries, and melisma. While touring the South with his own band, the Upsetters, "Little Richard," as he billed him­self, had perfected a stage show of legendary flamboyance, performing raucous versions of songs made famous by Fats Domino and Roy Brown, singing a handful of original songs as well, banging away at his piano, jumping around the stage, and rolling his eyes at the audience.

But in Cosimo Matassa's studio, Richard's singing was subdued, his showmanship under wraps. In order to insure a professional sound—Penniman could play the piano in only one key—Bumps Blackwell had hired a local pianist, Huey Smith, to accompany him in the studio. This was a mistake. Deprived of his main musical prop, Richard had plodded through a variety of generic tunes, from a lugubrious slow song called "Lonesome and Blue" to a strangely stiff version of Leiber and Stoller's "Kansas City."

Bumps Blackwell was disappointed. He'd come to the Crescent City hoping to cut some really raunchy, gutbucket blues, something to compete with such current R&B hits as "I Got a Woman" by Ray Charles, a wildly secular version of a gospel hymn that the singer and his band had heard on their car radio. Blackwell was a thirty-seven-year-old veteran of the music busi­ness; in the late 1940s, while he was living in Seattle, he had run a lo­cal big band that had given a start to the teenaged Ray Charles, and also to Quincy Jones (later renowned as an arranger for Count Basic, a composer for Hollywood films, and a producer for Michael Jack­son). Since leaving Seattle, Blackwell had watched with interest as Charles dropped his original cool jazz mannerisms, and developed instead a spiritually charged vocal intensity straight out of the black Baptist church services he had attended every Sunday growing up in Greenville, Florida. Blackwell heard a similar gospel tinge in the tapes that Richard Penniman had sent to the Specialty label earlier in 1955: it was these tapes that had brought him to New Orleans. "People were buying feel," Blackwell later recalled—and "feel" was what he wanted from Little Richard.

In the studio, though, he just couldn't seem to get it. Frustrated, Blackwell adjourned for lunch, and went with Penniman and the other players to the Dew Drop Inn, the place where local musicians met to drink and jam. Spying the club's piano, Richard bounded up to the bandstand. "Awop-bop-a-Loo-Mop a-good Goddam," he shouted, and slammed into a song he'd been using in concert:"Tutti Frutti" good booty/If it don't fit, don't force it/You can grease it, make it easy."

Blackwell was stunned. The feel was right, the music a joy. But the lyrics, with their thinly veiled anal eroticism, had to go.

Time was running out. The musicians and Matassa's studio were booked for only a few more hours. Convinced he could cut a hit song, Blackwell tracked down a young songwriter named Dorothy La Bostrie, had her come down to the Dew Drop Inn, and asked Richard to sing his song so La Bostrie could dash off some new lyrics. At first, Richard refused to cooperate; he was too embarrassed to sing the song again to a woman. La Bostrie, for her part, wasn't sure she wanted to hear the song. Blackwell grew desperate. He asked Richard "if he had a grudge against making money," he later recalled. "I told her that she was twenty-one, had a houseful of kids and needed the money. And finally, I convinced them. Richard turned to face the wall and sang the song two or three times and Dorothy listened."

Richard had composed "Tutti Frutti" in between tours, while washing dishes at the Greyhound bus station in his hometown of Macon, Georgia. "I dreamed I was going to be a star," he later said. "Everybody in my hometown laughed and made fun. They said this cat is never gonna be no star, he's gonna wash dishes. I couldn't talk back to the boss, so instead of saying bad words I'd say 'Wop Bop a Loo Bop a Lop Bam Boom,' so he wouldn't know what I was think­ing."

It's a nice story, but the song's original lyrics suggest another ge­nealogy. As he explains in an authorized biography published in 1984, Richard Penniman had grown up in the segregated South with three strikes against him: he was wild; he was black; and he was gay.

"Richard would holler all the time," one of his brothers later re­called, describing the genesis of the first archetypal voice in rock and roll. "I thought he couldn't sing, anyway, just a noise, and he would get on our nerves hollerin' and beating on tin cans and things of that nature. People around would get angry and upset with him yelling and screaming. They'd shout at him, 'Shut up yo' mouth, boy,' and he would run off laughing all over."

Shunned by his Baptist family and childhood friends, Richard soon enough learned that he could make money by screaming on stage, letting go, and dressing up. In 1947, at the age of fourteen, he left home to join Dr. Hudson's Medicine Show. He stayed on the road, singing with B. Brown and His Orchestra, and performing in drag with Sugar Foot Sam from Alabam, a minstrel show (blacks performing in blackface still being a viable way to make a living in the Deep South).

In Atlanta, Richard met Billy Wright, another gay rhythm and blues singer, then at the height of his popularity. "His makeup was really something," Richard later recalled. "I copied him as far as dressing, the hairdo and the makeup, 'cause he was the only man I ever seen wearing makeup before."

Through Wright, Richard got his first recording date in 1951, which produced a modest local hit, "Every Hour." More recording sessions followed in 1952 and 1953, but Richard earned most of his money on the road, crisscrossing the Deep South, playing in both black clubs and black clubs, refining his live act. By 1954, he had his own band, the Upsetters, and something of a reputation around Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky. "We were making a darned good living," Richard later recalled. "One song that would really tear the house down was 'Tutti Frutti.' "

Not every house, though: Richard discovered that "Tutti Frutti" worked best in the blacks-only clubs. "He only did 'Tutti Frutti' in black clubs," one old friend has recalled, " 'cause you see, blacks were a little more sensitive than blacks." Richard, too, remembers a difference in the crowd's reaction: "black people, it always cracked 'em up, but black people didn't like it that much. They liked the blues."

That is perhaps one reason why Little Richard didn't send a tape of "Tutti Frutti" to Specialty Records when he was looking for a contract. He dreamed of going legit, of becoming a straight blues singer. "Tutti Frutti" was too queer.

It was late in the afternoon when Dorothy La Bostrie finally ar­rived at the J&M Studios with her bowdlerized new lyrics for Richard's song. By then, there was time for only two takes. For the first time in two days, Richard was asked to play piano. The band bore down. The music didn't swing, it exploded.

The record starts with a bark: "WOMP-BOMP-A-LOO-MOMP ALOP-BOMP BOMP." The band socks out a clipped riff while Richard pummels the keyboard, hammering triplets, and periodically yelps "WOOOOO" in a tremulous falsetto, as if in mock ecstasy. The cleaned-up lyrics are both senseless and trite: "I've got a gal, named Daisy ..." The saxophones honk, the drummer drives, the singer keeps barking, shrieking, and yelping. It is over in two and a half minutes.

Blackwell had, finally, gotten what he wanted. On September 17, he wrote a letter to his boss, Art Rupe of Specialty Records, compar­ing "Tutti Frutti" to "Maybellene."

This wasn't rhythm and blues, Blackwell explained, it was rock and roll.

Rupe was nervous. He had been hoping for "a big-band sound ex­pressed in a churchy way"—not a bizarre novelty with a strident beat. Finally he relented, pressing copies of "Tutti Frutti" for distri­bution. "Actually the reason I picked it wasn't solely for the tempo," he later explained, "it was because of the wild intro, it was differ­ent—you know, Be Bop A Lop Bop, all that in front. You didn't hear things like that much on a record"—and that is putting it mildly.

Richard himself was skeptical: "I didn't go to New Orleans to record no 'Tutti Frutti.' ... I never thought it would be a hit, even with the lyrics cleaned up."

But two months later, the news was out. "I was at home in Ma-con," Richard has recalled, "when I heard them play it on Randy's Record Mart, Radio WLAC out of Nashville, Tennessee. The disc jockey Gene Nobles said, 'This is the hottest record in the country. This guy Little Richard is taking the record market by storm.' "

"Tutti Frutti" started to sell in Richard's home territory, moving briskly in Atlanta and Richmond, Nashville and Charlotte. Once again, Randy Wood watched with keen interest as Richard's song went flying out of his Record Mart. Hoping to duplicate his success covering "Ain't It a Shame," Wood rushed Pat Boone into the studio to record a version for his Dot label. Boone had another pop hit. But for Little Richard—who watched his version climb to number two on Billboard's rhythm and blues charts, and number seventeen on the pop charts—"Tutti Frutti" was the start of a whole new career.

Emboldened by the success of his recording, Richard intuitively grasped the issues at play. Being black and being gay, he was an out­sider twice over. But by exaggerating his own freakishness, he could get across: he could evade the question of gender and hurdle the racial divide. "We decided that my image should be crazy and way-out," Richard recalls in his memoir, "so that the adults would think I was harmless. I'd appear in one show dressed as the Queen of Eng­land and in the next as the pope."

As the crowd grew blacker, his live shows grew wilder. To warm up the crowd, he had his band, the Upsetters, blow on a riff; the band was like a chorus line, always moving to the beat. At the right mo­ment (his band never knew exactly when), Richard would burst on stage. He wore capes and blouse shirts and beautiful tailored suits, and his long hair was always piled high above his painted eyes as the show began. While the crowd screamed, Richard improvised. One night he might walk on top of the piano. Another night he might wander into the crowd. He'd prance and preen, then jump and holler, egging the audience on, whipping them up, getting ready to play. Suddenly, he'd hit the piano, hammering out triplets, a picture of frenzy, sweat pouring down his face, his head shaking, his hair falling, the music rocking, and then "WOMP-BOMP-A-LOO-MOMP ALOP-BOMP BOMP."

It was a shriek heard round the world, thanks to Alan Freed and Hollywood. Filmed in performance for Don't Knock the Rock, Freed's sequel to Rock Around the Clock, Little Richard stole the show. Wearing a baggy suit, Richard stood silently after being intro­duced by Freed—and then tore into "Tutti Frutti." As the camera chy. The song finished, he took an ironically exaggerated bow. Then he tore into "Long Tall Sally," his follow-up to "Tutti Frutti." Arms flailing, he leaned back, kicked his leg onto the piano and shimmied while saxophonist Grady Gaines soloed, blowing his horn from the top of Richard's grand piano.

Don't Knock the Rock produced Little Richard's first top ten hit in England. It also bowled over a lot of young viewers around the world. Here was a creature who seemed to live life at a higher pitch than ordinary mortals, convulsed with energy, screaming at the top of his lungs.

The thrill was infectious. Within a matter of weeks, Elvis Presley added "Tutti Frutti" to his repertoire, performing it on two of his first television appearances, and also recording it for his first album. Other singers followed suit: Bill Haley, the Everly Brothers, and Buddy Holly all tried to sing Richard's songs, usually without much success: his mania defied imitation. In Macon, Georgia, a young lo­cal singer named Otis Redding devoted himself to emulating Richard's raspy style, while another local entertainer, James Brown, went his rival one better, by developing a stage show that was tighter—and more histrionic—than anything Richard had yet done.

And half a world away, in Liverpool, England, Paul McCartney— too polite to be wild, but as anxious as any restive adolescent to cut loose and let go—heard Richard yelp "WOOOOO" and found his calling. Like Presley and all the rest, McCartney, too, would study that noise and try to emulate its freedom, by learning how to play and sing rock and roll.

Buddy Holly	Jerry Lee Lewis

Buddy Holly:

Charles Hardin (Buddy) Holly was born September 7, 1936 in Lubbock, Texas the fourth of four children born to Lawrence and Ella Holly. In Texas most everyone had a nickname, and the family always called him "Buddy." The Holly's had a rich musical tradition. Older brothers, Larry and Travis, taught themselves how to play the guitar. Their sister Pat sang duets with her mother in the evening at the living room piano. Every Sunday found the Holly attending services at the Baptist Church, singing hymns of praise and joy to God.

Lubbock "The City of Churches," was conservative and segregated. In his youth, Holly had little direct contact with blacks or their music, but like so many other young musicians, he was attracted to the rhythm and blues heard on distant radio stations.

At age eleven Buddy began taking piano lessons, but soon switched to the steel guitar After 20 lessons he switched to acoustic guitar. Although his formal music education was short, Buddy was familiar with many kinds of music. Thoroughly imbued with the blues and country sounds he heard on the radio at a early age, Buddy won five dollars at age five singing "Down the River of Memories" at age five.

In 1951 Buddy met Bob Montgomery, a fellow seventh-grader at Hutchinson Jr. High, who also played guitar and sang country songs. Montgomery's taste in music ran to country music, especially Hank Williams, and Montgomery would be a major influence over Buddy's choice of music.

Billing themselves as "Buddy and Bob," they played junior high assemblies and local radio shows. Their sets were basically country, beefed up by harmonies and their own guitar accompaniment. Buddy and Bob became Lubbock's leading performers. They soon added Larry Welborn to play bass.

In the early fifties with high school friends he played in a country oriented Western and Bop Band. Between 1950 and 1952, they performed at local clubs and high school talent shows, sometimes adding a bass and, less frequently, drums. Harmony duets still predominated their style, with Bob usually singing lead. When Buddy occasionally would sing lead, you'd hear a more upbeat tempo, a less country sound...and another forecast of things to come.

By the time Buddy and Bob entered high school, they were widening their audience by appearing at youth clubs and centers as far away as Carlsbad, New Mexico and Amarillo, Texas. Lubbock's "Cotton Club" and "Bambaloo Club," the Union Hall in Carlsbad and Amarillo's "Clover Club" all featured "Buddy and Bob" performing music they now dubbed as "Western and Bop." Local radio stations also gave impetus to Buddy and Bob's career. KDAV, the nation's first all-country radio station, held a weekly "Sunday Party," patterned after the highly successful "National Dance Barn" show on Chicago's WLS. Buddy and Bob were frequent guests. In fact, their popularity grew so much they were given their own half-hour program each Sunday. Their repertoire remained basically country with Bob Montgomery still singing lead. But as 1954 progressed, Buddy began to sing more blues and "bop" numbers on the show. Although Montgomery was the principal composer during their partnership, Buddy also began to write. Two of these three songs were "Heartbeat" and "Love's Made a Fool of You," both recorded several years later. But it wasn't a keen-eared record company that brought Buddy his first real break. It was that good old local radio station, KDAV. In addition to airing the "Sunday Party," KDAV also sponsored live country and early rock 'n' roll concerts in Lubbock. The station often chose the "western and bop" duo to open the shows, which headlined stars like Ferlin Husky, Marty Robbins, Porter Wagoner...even Elvis. And Buddy met them all. One of these performances played a crucial role in the advancement of Buddy's career.

That October the group added Jerry Allison on the drums. October 14, 1955, Bill Haley and the Comets starred in a show at the Fair Park Auditorium with Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Snow and "Lubbock's own Buddy, Bob, and Larry." Eddie" Crandall, Marty Robbins' manager, booked the show. The show's promoter Eddie Crandall was impressed by Buddy's performance and told Holly he would attempt to get them a recording contract. In January of 1956, Buddy was offered a contract from Decca Records. The only hitch was that they were interested in just Buddy. Montgomery insisted that Buddy go it alone, Welborn stayed in Lubbock to finish high school.

Holly returned to Lubbock where he played locally with stars that came through the area. On June 3, 1955 Buddy and Bob opened for a young Elvis at Connelly's Pontiac Showroom, in a free show to attract customers. After that gone was the country music, replaced by pure rock and roll.

He signed a contract to record country music on the Decca label in 1956. The first session was in Nashville on January 26, 1956 and held at Owen Bradley's recording studio. Don Guess, another Lubbock boy, played bass and with Sonny Curtis on lead guitar. Drummer Allison, still in high school, sat in for only one session. Holly recorded a number of records that went nowhere. Among them was "That'll Be the Day" that in rock version would be a hit. At this time Holly began writing. One of the songs "Cindy Lou" which was to be one of his biggest hits. It would later be renamed "Peggy Sue" at the suggestion of band member Jerry Allison.

Buddy wasn't allowed to play the guitar as Bradley thought it made the recordings to difficult. Among the four songs that were recorded was "Blue Days, Black Nights" which would be Holly's first single. On the label his name was spelled "Buddy Holly" for the first time. Reviewed favorably in the trade press, the record did not do well in the marketplace. The disc did not succeed partially because Holly and the Decca-selected backup group could not create the tightness inherent in the union of Holly's voice, his guitar and his own group of musicians.

February 25, 1957 Holly and the newly named Crickets recorded the rock version of "That Will Be the Day" at Norman Petty's studio in Clovis, New Mexico. These tapes were sent to Roulette. The company liked Holly's songs but not his group. They felt they didn't need another artist like their current rock 'n' roll stars, Buddy Knox and Jimmy Bowen. They were interested in Knox recording "That'll Be The Day," and Bowen cutting "Lookin' for Someone to Love." But Buddy Holly wanted to record his own songs with his own group, now called the Crickets.

Petty suggested sending the demos to Peer-Southern, a New York publishing house where he'd placed some of his own compositions. Peer-Southern gave the demo to Bob Thiele at Brunswick Records, a subsidiary of Decca. Thiele liked what he heard - so much that Brunswick decided to use it as a master.

Because Decca had the original "That'll Be the Day" it was determined to be unwise to use Holly's name in the credits. Grabbing a dictionary they searched for an appropriate group name and decided to release the song as the Crickets. "That'll Be The Day," recorded by The Crickets, was released in June, 1957. Initially sales were slow but, by August they were increasing and it began to appear on the national charts. A month later "That'll Be The Day" was one of the best selling records in both the rock and roll and R&B markets.

Petty became the groups manager and producer. At Petty's insistence, the Crickets signed with Brunswick as a group, while Holly signed as a solo with with Coral. Petty saw in Holly a potential for superstardom. The strategic attempt at double exposure would pay off later.

In June, 1957 Brunswick released "That'll Be The Day" by the Crickets while Coral released "Words of Love" by Buddy Holly. Only "That'll Be The Day" caught the public's ear. "Words Of Love" was recorded by the Diamonds and beat Holly's version onto the streets by three weeks.

Initial sales of "That'll Be The Day" were slow. Through the summer of 1957, it's popularity moved from the Southwest to the West Coast and back to the Northeast. By early August the record began appearing on the national charts. Four weeks later "That'll Be The Day" was the top selling record on both the pop and R&B charts.

In August, the group began playing the east coast theater circuit, the Howard in Washington, the Royal in Baltimore and the Howard in New York City. For one week at each venue, the Crickets quickly won over the predominantly black audiences with their energetic stage show.

For the next year it seemed like either Holly or the Crickets cut a hit record every other month. At the same time they were touring extensively with Alan Freed shows. They also made their television debut on "The Ed Sullivan Show".

In October Holly split from Petty over a failure to account properly for the groups earning. In November, 1958 the Holly and the Crickets returned to Lubbock. Record sales had fallen off as Buddy changed to from hard driving rock and roll to a lighter style. The other Crickets didn't like the direction that their music was taking. Holly was convinced he was taking the right direction and split with the Crickets when they decided to stay in Lubbock and continue working with Petty. He moved to Greenwich Village, NY where he married Maria Santiago. Back in New York he recorded in January, 1959 "It Doesn't Matter Anymore" on the Coral label.

Buddy's last performance was at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa February 2, 1959. Tired of riding the bus and needing to get his laundry done Holly charter a Beechcraft Bonanza to fly him, J.R Richardson (The Big Bopper) and Ritchie Valens to the next stop Moorhead, Minnesota. On February 3, 1959 the plane took off and crashed minutes later killing all on board.

Jerry Lee Lewis:

Born in Ferriday, Louisiana, Jerry Lee Lewis showed an early, natural talent for the piano. His parents were poor but took out a loan to buy a third-hand upright piano for him. Sharing piano lessons with his cousins Mickey Gilley and Jimmy Lee Swaggart, the ten-year old Lewis is said to have shown remarkable aptitude for the instrument. A visit from piano-playing older cousin Carl McVoy revealed the methods for the boogie-woogie styles he was hearing on the radio and across the tracks at Haney's Big House, which was owned by his uncle, Lee Calhoun, and catered exclusively to blacks. Lewis mixed boogie-woogie with gospel and country and developed his own style. He combined genres in the way he syncopated his rhythms on the piano: his left hand generally played boogie while his right played the high keys with flamboyant elaboration and show. By all family accounts, by the time Lewis was 14, he was "as good as he was ever going to get."

Like Elvis Presley, he was raised singing the Christian gospel music of integrated southern Pentecostal churches. In 1950 he attended Southwestern Bible Institute in Texas but was expelled for misconduct, including playing rock and roll versions of hymns in church.

Leaving religious music behind, he became a part of the burgeoning new rock and roll sound, cutting his first record in 1954. Two years later, at Sun Records studio in Memphis, Tennessee, producer and engineer Jack Clement discovered and recorded Lewis for the Sun label, while owner Sam Phillips was away on a trip to Florida. As a result, Lewis joined Presley, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash as stars who began their recording careers at Sun Studios around this same time.

Lewis' first recording at Sun studios was his own distinct version of the country ballad "Crazy Arms". In 1957, his piano and the pure rock and roll sound of "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" propelled him to international fame. "Great Balls of Fire" soon followed, and would become his biggest hit. Watching and listening to Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis said if he could play the piano like that, he'd quit singing. Lewis' early billing was Jerry Lee Lewis and his Pumping Piano.

Lewis' performances were dynamic. He kicked the piano bench out of the way to play standing (a stunt later adopted by admirer Elton John), raked his hands up and down the keyboard for dramatic accent, and even sat down on it. His frenetic performance style can be seen in films such as "High School Confidential" (he sang the title song from the back of a flatbed truck), and "Jamboree".

Lewis' turbulent personal life was hidden from the public until a 1958 British tour, when reporters learned about the twenty-three year old star's third wife, Myra Gale Brown, who also happened to be his 13-year old second cousin. Lewis didn't consider this odd, as marrying distant cousins was acceptable in the South at the time, and his sister had been married at fourteen. The publicity, however, caused an uproar, and the tour was cancelled after only three concerts.

The scandal followed Lewis home to America, and as a result he almost vanished from the music scene. His only hit during this period was a cover of Ray Charles' "What'd I Say" in 1961. His popularity recovered somewhat in Europe, especially in the UK and Germany during the mid 1960s. A live album, Live at the Star Club, Hamburg (1964), recorded with The Nashville Teens, is widely considered one of the greatest live rock and roll albums ever. A comeback eluded him in the USA, however. In 1968, Lewis began focusing on country and western music, achieving several No. 1 and Top 10 country hits. Although he toured and played many sold-out concerts, he never regained the heights of success he had prior to the 1958 scandal, although he had a major international hit with "Chantilly Lace" in 1972.

Plagued by alcohol and drug problems after Myra divorced him in 1970, tragedy struck when Lewis' 19-year-old son, Jerry Lee Lewis Jr., was killed in a road accident in 1973. During the 1960s, his second son, Steve Allen Lewis, had drowned in a swimming pool accident. Lewis' own erratic behavior during the 1970s led to his being hospitalized after nearly dying from a bleeding ulcer. His fourth wife drowned in a swimming pool under suspicious circumstances. Little more than a year later, his fifth wife was found dead at his home from a methadone overdose. Again addicted to drugs, Lewis checked himself into the Betty Ford Clinic.

While celebrating his 41st birthday in 1976, Lewis playfully pointed a gun at his bass player, Butch Owens, and thinking it was not loaded, pulled the trigger, shooting him in the chest. Owens miraculously survived. A few weeks later (November 23) he was involved in another gun-related arrest at Elvis Presley's Graceland residence. Lewis had been invited by Presley, but security was unaware of the visit. When questioned about why he was at the front gate, Lewis displayed a gun and jokingly told the guard he had come to kill Presley.

In 1989, a major motion picture based on his early life in rock & roll, Great Balls of Fire, brought him back into the public eye. The film was based on the book by Lewis' first ex-wife, and starred Dennis Quaid as Lewis, with Winona Ryder and Alec Baldwin.

The very public downfall of his cousin, television evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, resulted in more adverse publicity to an already troubled family. Swaggart is also a piano player, as is another cousin, country music star Mickey Gilley. Lewis' sister, Linda Gail Lewis, is also a piano player, and has recorded with Van Morrison.

Despite the personal problems, Lewis' musical talent is widely acknowledged. Nicknamed The Killer for his forceful voice and piano production on stage, he was described by fellow artist Roy Orbison as the best raw performer in the history of rock and roll music. In 1986, Lewis was part of the first group inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

That same year, he returned to Sun Studios in Memphis to team up with Orbison, Cash, and Perkins to create the album Class of '55. This was not the first time he had teamed up with Cash and Perkins at Sun. On December 4, 1956, Presley dropped in on Phillips to pay a social visit while Perkins was in the studio cutting new tracks with Lewis backing him on piano. The three started an impromtu jam session, and Phillips left the tapes running. He later telephoned Cash and brought him in to join the others. These recordings, almost half of which were gospel songs, survived, and have been released on CD under the title Million Dollar Quartet. Tracks also include Chuck Berry's "Brown Eyed Handsome Man", Pat Boone's "Don't Forbid Me" and Presley doing an impersonation of Jackie Wilson (who was then with Billy Ward and the Dominoes) singing "Don't Be Cruel."

Lewis has never stopped touring, and fans who have seen him perform say he can still deliver unique concerts that are unpredictable, exciting, and personal. In February of 2005, he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Recording Academy (which also grants the Grammy Awards.) At the presentation, it was announced that a new album would be made with a line-up including Eric Clapton, B. B. King, Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. The album, entitled The Pilgrim, is set for March 2006 [1].

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