Lloyd Price musical coming to London

 

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. 

Parrot Records on Matt the Cat's radio show

If you are reading this around the time of its being posted you may be able to catch Matt the Cat's Juke in the Back radio show dedicated to Parrot Records, available for a while as a free-to-download MP3 on the Rock-it radio Archives page here - but hurry, as newer shows will gradually push it off the list. You can find further details about this and other Juke in the Box programmes in the episode guide on Matt's own website here (scroll down to # 44).

Waxing/waning crescent moon (Sam Cooke in the Soul Stirrers)

Daniel Wolff's liner notes for the Sam Cooke Complete Specialty Recordings set, mentioned earlier in connection with his biography of Cooke (above), include details which are particularly relevant to the discussion of Stand By Me and the overlapping of musical forms in the fifties. An extensive interview with Lloyd 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) Wolff suggests that the recording was part of an ongoing process for Specialty owner Art Rupe:

Sad but compelling account of doo wop greats

This is the biography of one of the great doo wop groups who, as Logan Pearsall Smith said of Edmund Waller, floated to immortality on the strength of a phrase - or maybe a few bass notes. Gerald Gregory, the original singer of those notes, died a few years ago, and now lead singer and creative force Pookie Hudson has gone (with, in the UK at least, what appeared to be brief and grudging obituaries).

As one who was turned on to doo wop by the Spaniels I'm writing this review in the hope that someone in the UK apart from Spencer Leigh (who wrote the only halfway decent obit) might read this book, which is not a hagiography but a particularly saddening example of the exploitation of African American performers in the early days of rock'n'roll; even if you're not particularly interested in doo wop, this tells you a great deal about 50s America. (See the biography of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick or Sweet Soul Music by Gerri Hershey for more about exploitation in this period, or seek out the novel The Day the Music Died by Joseph C Smith aka Sonny Knight).

Given all the opportunities missed and all the rightful earnings withheld - especially as Goodnight, Sweetheart, Goodnight has been exploited in film after film, so someone's obviously profiting - it is astonishing that the group persisted over the decades and that Pookie Hudson, even after a battle with cancer, continued to perform while in remission. The fact that there were two distinct groups of Spaniels (with Pookie at the helm in both) is also down to exploitation, as there was pressure on the original members to look after their families by taking regular jobs when it became clear after a couple of years that they weren't getting the rewards from singing. According to the book, the earlier group were more spontaneous, instinctive and the later one more technically able and correct but perhaps less warm (compare the two versions of Baby, It's You).

This book relies almost exclusively on the testimony of the members of the original group and their take on the others in their lives, so it's not a Peter Guralnick job, seeking out a variety of viewpoints, and there's not much analysis of why the Spaniels' records are so good - that's taken as a given - but what gives this account its strength is the sad consistency of the story the individuals have to tell, and the fact that there seems little attempt to whitewash the characters of group members - Gerald Gregory's problems with drink are discussed in detail and everyone seems frank about personal conflicts.

More than thirty years on, the original members came together to be inducted into a Rhythm and Blues Hall of Fame (I don't know whether they were finally honoured by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame) and to perform again; the pressures to support families having eased, this second chance was an unexpected bonus after so much disillusion. It must have been this version of the group I saw around 1992 in London and I recall that they stood out from the other acts in seeming still involved in the material: unlike the glitzy incarnation of a Frankie Lymon-less Teenagers or a Dion-less Belmonts, for example, Pookie, still at the centre, sang as though he was still feeling and exploring the songs. Now I know why: the original memmbers had no idea they were going to get a chance again, and the acapella version of Danny Boy which Pookie announced as having first sung with his friends at High School almost forty years before as a vocal warm-up must have felt as nostalgiac for them as it did for us.

In view of all the missing riches I don't know whether Pookie Hudson died a happy man, but I hope he did: he certainly continued to perform and to find an audience; the book even recounts how he made his peace with Vivian Carter (one of the owners of the 50s R&B label Vee Jay who issued Goodnight Sweetheart Goodnight) on her deathbed. And those Spaniels recordings on Vee Jay - now, ironically, public domain in the UK, so they can be reissued and reissued without the current owners profiting - ensure that James Pookie Hudson's tremulous voice will live on.


More on the Spaniels' London concert in Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 20 plus a link to an interview with Pookie.

The review above was written for work then added to a well-known shopping website. I regret implying that the Spaniels will be remembered solely for Goodnight Sweetheart, Goodnight. There's no denying its ubiquity, but the strange gentleness with which Pookie handled Red Sails in the Sunset on one of those horrible pressings I picked up early on in my doo wop quest meant almost as much to me - to say nothing of the sort of cloudy cushioning provided by the other voices. Interesting to compare it to the impassioned, almost out of control account by Rudy West and the Five Keys - but please don't make me choose. It's not a Crewcuts/Chords situation. Or a Maguire Sisters/Spaniels one, come to that. I felt it as a personal affront when some girls at my former place of work were idly singing Goodnight, Sweetheart Maguire Sisters style. But I didn't say anything.

As mentioned in the Doo Wop Dialog[ue] post, Pookie did say in an interview with Matt the Cat of XM Radio that he had been getting some money, at least, from Goodnight Sweetheart, Goodnight since 1978 but the clear implication was nowhere near what he was due. The fact that he was reduced to asking the public for help with his final medical fees when that song can still be heard everywhere is a disgrace.

Edmund (not Thomas) Waller's carpe diem: Go, Lovely Rose. Does anyone remember or read Logan Pearsall Smith's Trivia collections these days? I loved them as a teenager and even read his autobiography where he talked about religion leaving him like leaves blowing off a tree (or something; apologies to the shade of one who cared so much about precision). I think there were three collections. Project Gutenberg will lead you to two of them (Trivia and More Trivia) but not, it seems, the final collection, which must have been the one which had the Waller piece and the aphorism which ran (forgive me, thou shade) something like:
All our lives we have been putting our goldenest pennies into penny-in-the-slot machines which invariably turn out to be empty.

One entry which I did, however, find in one of the Gutenberg books has a bearing on the Doo Wop Dialog[ue] and the tantalising promise of all those Sweet Dreams of Contentment in so many songs:

Beauty
Among all the ugly mugs of the world we see now and then a face
made after the divine pattern. Then, a wonderful thing happens
to us; the Blue Bird sings, the golden Splendour shines, and for
a queer moment everything seems meaningless save our impulse to
follow those fair forms, to follow them to the clear Paradises
they promise.

Plato assures us that these moments are not (as we are apt to
think them) mere blurs and delusions of the senses, but divine
revelations; that in a lovely face we see imaged, as in a
mirror, the Absolute Beauty--; it is Reality, flashing on us in
the cave where we dwell amid shadows and darkness. Therefore we
should follow these fair forms, and their shining footsteps will
lead us upward to the highest heaven of Wisdom. The Poets, too,
keep chanting this great doctrine of Beauty in grave notes to
their golden strings. Its music floats up through the skies so
sweet, so strange, that the very Angels seem to lean from their
stars to listen.

But, O Plato, O Shelley, O Angels of Heaven, what scrapes you do
get us into!

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 39

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

Clarke,

I read your Gloria piece again while listening to the Cadillacs. It really is a wonderful, precise piece of writing; I found myself listening to that extended "meee" with more pained enjoyment than ever. Again, you're so lucky that this was the soundtrack to your youth, there to enhance each experience rather than something you had to seek out. I went to a rock'n'roll club as a teenager but it was all in the frantic, jitterbugging mode favoured by the Brits, and no doowop ballads. Much the same in London now, sadly.

Anyway, as a sort of appendix to what we've been discussing about Gloria, I've now found the reference to the original song in the book by Gribin and Schiff I referred to. Because of the distinction I made (don't know if you agree yet) between Gloria as the ultimate expression of aching teen sensibility and GT as adult, it’s worth quoting the lyrics in full:

Gloria, it's not Marie, it's Gloria
It's not Cherie, it's Gloria
She's in your every dream

You like to play the game of kiss and runaway
But now you find it's not that way
Somehow you changed it seems

Wasn't Madeleine your first love
It was just hello goodbye
Wasn't Caroline your last love
It's a shame you made her cry

What a fool you are
You gave your heart to Gloria
You're not so smart cause Gloria
Is not in love with you

(Leon Renne, 1946)

The authors say "Whether the borrowing was accidental or purposeful will never be truly known," but the fact that Esther Navarro's name didn't appear on the first pressing of the Cadillacs' version (she was their manager) suggests she did. But the differences - and apparently the melodies are different, too - are fascinating. It's not first person, so you don't get a direct route to his subjective experience of his anguish, and it's hardly first love and all that wonder and innocence we've been talking about - more like poetic justice: as Bob Dylan, that poet (arguably) outside our remit (unquestionably) might put it: "How does it feel?"

That memory of the live performance of Gloria seems more appropriate here, where he gets what he deserves: not malign fate but karma. Gloria Mk.1 reads like a song aimed at adults, and because we're not privy to the guy's inner emotions, we can't feel the sympathy in GT, because we've got no idea how he responds to this blow (unless there's an even more obscure answer song waiting to be unearthed).

But it helps to show what a great piece of work Esther Navarro's conscious or unconscious borrowing of elements led to. As you say, even the title puts the emotions on a par with religious fervour and suggests the purity of that longing: Marie and Cherie are not his cast-offs but girls who did not awaken in him that divine longing.

Put that way, the word sounds camp (as in: "Too too divine, Dahling !") but I mean precisely that: that the wish to make contact, the ability to perceive beauty, maybe where others don't, in another, probably equally flawed, individual is a triumph of that imaginative power we all have that links us to some higher power, whatever you want to call it, or at least brings out our potential to be better than our workaday selves (I'm a long-lapsed Catholic, people, so I'm not particularly selling anything here).

The flip side of the coin, of course, is raging hormones and erector sets and hey, maybe this girl would be incredibly pretty to any pair of teenage male eyes straining at their sockets (“Va va VOOM!" is, I believe, your singularly infelicitous American term) and it's also about the naive belief that someone else will be the quick-fix solution to all your problems as opposed to bringing a whole new set of their own ... but there still seems something noble going on in that longing.

(I'm almost done here but will switch to a new post to avoid having to cut for length. Back after these important messages...)


"... suggests she did" puzzles me as I reread it. Suggests she did what? Know that the borrowing was deliberate? In the Matt the Cat interview cited a few posts ago Earl Carroll, perhaps diplomatically, says that she was "She was a business lady, lovely lady. She was a lady, number one, but she was a business lady and she knew the business." He praises her professionalism in knowing exactly what her artists needed: Cholly Atkins, introduced to them by Navarro, "took us under his wing" - and there is a reference in Nowhere to Run to the young Ben E King's heart thumping as he watched the Cadillacs' dance routines up close.

The relevant bit from my review of a Mills Brothers CD, The Anthology (1931-1968):

Of particular note, if you are interested in their effect on later vocal groups, is the song Gloria, a distant relative of the doo wop standard (associated with the Cadillacs); but without the abject pain and idealisation in the reworking (this early Gloria is cheating on, rather than spurning, the lovelorn adolescent). This is, I believe, the second recording of the song (the original was by Johnny Moore's Three Blazers).

But according to wikipedia there were two other recordings of Goria Mk. 1, one recorded the same year as Johnny Moore's Three Blazers (featuring Charles Brown) by Ray Anthony (above), and one recorded the previous year, 1945, by ex-Ellingtonian Herb Jeffries as part of the Buddy Baker Sextet.

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 33

clarkedavis
(M/Dover, New Jersey)

[...] familiarity of someone you know, and still love, yet she, having moved on to someone else, still has a lingering affection, which she can't hide from you, and communicates freely. A momentary, fleeting, kiss, perhaps the last you and she will ever have, is being made even more significant, by the Passions singing in glorious, fully realized dynamic harmony.

Doesn't matter what her name is. She really is Gloria at that moment. And she's not in love with you.


I deeply regret to say that I have lost the printout I once had of the first page of this piece, a detailed description of the Cadillacs' recording of Gloria. If anyone can help, I'll be most grateful. I've included what remains as the piece is referred to in several subsequent posts.

A reminder that the Matt the Cat interviews referred to earlier include Earl "Speedo" Carroll; he discusses Gloria and you hear part of a new recording of the song.

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 20

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)
Clarke,

I'm also enjoying this and am prompted by your message to add a little more. Thinking about memories and the kind of double exposure you're talking about (40s songs with all those associations heard in the 50s) makes me think of the now multilayered experience of hearing groups today: songs predating their youth, sung in their youth, now sung in the dignity/poignancy/slow decay (select according to today's mood) of late middle age.

I'm thinking of two live experiences, one on record, one I was lucky enough to witness. First is the Dion and Belmonts' 70s reunion album: when Dion sings "some things that happened for the first time... " and you hear the audience's palpable joy at that moment, acknowledging the collision of time zones: it's then AND now, and if Dion's still alive then that part of themselves hasn't wholly died (...and what a great love song that is, incidentally...)

The other experience is seeing the Spaniels in London 1992. I’m of Irish descent and can't remember when I first heard Danny Boy but have always loved the directness of that song. Pookie Hudson introduced it as a song they sang in the locker room at High School in 1952 (or whenever). Great acapella rendition, true both to the Spaniels' style and the song - not all the acts that night sang like it still meant something - and for me something incredibly moving that 40 years on, there they were - or the same nucleus, anyway - and it couldn't be the same, could it? Not 15 any more. But it still felt real and vital and connected: "That which we are we are,' as the aging Ulysses says.

So seeing doowop singers, if you want to get pretentious about it, and I'm in pretty deep already, in their autumn years singing those same songs of idealised love puts us in touch with our own mortality and the needs and desires still in us - almost like Pookie or Dion is the priest in this religious ceremony, bestowing a blessing on us and making us whole, past and present in one ...

I think I'm done. I hope readers other than yourself will be indulgent and realise this comes out of the great love we all share for this timeless music.


As mentioned in Post 10 of this series, that 1992 concert was not well attended. And I was sitting needlessly way, way back in the first half, which didn't help. But my impression was that it was only Bobby Lewis who was warming up the crowd, albeit by relying on Big Joe Turner covers in order to save his big hit till the end. Johnnie Allan either didn't connect with the crowd or wasn't given time.

But the Spaniels were a class act from the git-go, intimidating as Gerald may have looked with the eyepatch. They came on to Baby It's You (of course), which took me back to my Springboard International album, which featured the remake of Baby It's You as well as Golden Teardrops.

From reading the Spaniels' biography, I think that the group then would have been the original members who had been given this late chance to perform again; the book was basically saying that a later set of Spaniels were technically better but the first ones around Pookie had got there by instinct. Must have been odd, however, as the book describes them listening to the old records in order to relearn, or at least be reminded of, what had once come naturally. (As so often, find details of line ups and much else in one of Marv Goldberg's R&B notebooks, based on interviews with Pookie himself.)

Whatever, it worked; and I was aware that, as others have said, Pookie is not a showman as some are, but he does - or, as I must now say, did - the most important thing of all: singing as though he is still feeling and exploring the song right at that moment. Which goes all the way back to that tentative definition I offered in Post 1 of this dialog[ue].

Download former XM deejay Matt the Cat's interview with Pookie Hudson here; you can also find interviews with other doo wop and R&B greats. The interview is well worth a listen; Matt is an intelligent, informed, as well as an enthusiastic, host; Pookie is gracious; callers mostly pay tribute.

I didn't realise that he had been getting at least some payment for Goodnight, Sweetheart, Goodnight since 1978, and that laws had changed at some point so that performers on a recording now get something, no matter how miniscule, each time a recording is aired. Appropriate enough when you think of how much the performance is part of a record's success (apparently Richard Rodgers hated the Marcels' recording of Blue Moon, although I don't know whether he spurned the resulting royalties).

Matt also made the point that small record companies were often up against it in terms of when they would be paid by distributors, so that delayed (or no) monies could be about a little indie struggling for survival - to which, I admit, one obvious riposte might be: "Tell it to Carl Perkins." Anyway, I don't know whether such thoughts were a factor, but the Spaniels' biography does record that Pookie, for his own sake, made it up with Vee Jay's Vivian Carter before she died.

To return to that concert: a Dionless Belmonts also performed, although they seemed to be doing a lot of Dion solo numbers, on the grounds that they had performed them during that reunion gig noted above. They were agreeable enough, although I don't remember the performance in detail, apart from the disturbing fact that one Belmont was now stone bald: suddenly it ain't the fifties no more.

The Spaniels were the best act of the evening but the headliners were the Teenagers with Lewis Lymon in their number. I can't remember whether the female lead was Pearl McKinnon or a later replacement, but I do remember the brightness of delivery becoming a little tiring by the end, and the oddness of the references to the departed Frankie: his mischievousness was mentioned, not his death.

To which the response might reasonably be: Well, what did you expect them to do? And from what I've read of the Teenagers, they deserved to make some money and I hope they did; it was a polished act which delivered what the audience wanted.

But what it comes down to, I suppose, is that a Teenagers without Frankie is like - well, a Spaniels without Pookie.