If you are able to get to London's Royal Festival Hall there will be two performances of a new musical about R&B/rock'n'roll pioneer Lloyd Price on Saturday 11th October.
Audio of an extensive 2005 interview with Price can be found on Matt the Cat's site here, but for all the undoubted importance of Lawdy Miss Clawdy to the development of rock'n'roll (none of which seems lost on Price himself in that interview) Daniel Wolff's biography of Sam Cooke suggests that the recording was actually part of an ongoing process for Specialty Records owner Art Rupe, and that he'd already been experimenting with accentuating the beat on gospel recordings:
"Actually," Art Rupe has declared, "I dug gospel music even more than rhythm and blues," and the producer often made his own crucial modifications to the songs. In 1952, he seems to hear a new, beat-heavy sound on the horizon. A month after this [February] Stirrers's session, he'll go to New Orleans and cut "Lawdy Miss Clawdy," a run-away #1 r&b hit by Lloyd Price that sells to both white and black fans.
Here [Wolff continues], Rupe approaches from the gospel end, adding drums to the Stirrers's usual mix. At first, it's an awkward fit. Compare the single of "It Won't Be Very Long" to the alternative takes, and you can hear the predictable beat dumbing down the complex rhythms. But towards the end, an odd synthesis starts to happen. The lead voices jump with urgency, and the group seems to open up and let the drums in. Social critics have argued that the concept of the teenager was an invention of the 1950's. If so, here's evidence that it happened not just in the malt shop but across the street, in church.
This seems to be the take which Wolff is talking about:
And here is the original 1952 Specialty version of Lawdy Miss Clawdy, with Fats Domino on piano:
Links:
The information above was extracted from a longer post about Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers entitled Waxing/Waning Crescent Moon, which can be found here.
Matt the Cat's highly recommended Juke in the Back series, which provides excellent musical overviews of R&B artists and record labels, can be found here. I haven't listened to it yet but one programme is devoted to Lloyd Price's Specialty sides and includes excerpts from the interview mentioned earlier.
If the above has whetted your appetite details about booking for the Lloyd Price musical can be found on the South Bank Centre website here.