This week on Jay Bruder’s Home Town Special

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Jay Bruder’s big Washington music retrospective set, “R&B in D.C. 1940-1960” has been released by Bear Family Records and is available from their website.  It’s been reviewed in the Washington Post and Washingtonian magazine.

Sunday October 18

Friends:
Virginian Dick Glasser, says “Well you go out 14 to 29, you turn to the left ‘til you see the sign, the sign says only four more miles to go . . .” to Cattytown. Well, I looked, and I couldn’t find any remaining trace. But you can find “Cattytown” this week on the Home Town Special along with some great rockabilly, rock ‘n’ roll, acoustic country, calypso, blues, and some mainstream pop records thrown in just to set the scene for American music after the Second World War. Joe Clay rounds out the first set with his “Sixteen Chicks” fantasy. The trains star rolling with Johnny “T” Talley, Mac O’Dell, Tarheel Slim, and Papa Lightfoot. The Trinidad calypsonian, The Mighty Sparrow, passed recently in New York City and we will hear three of his earliest recordings done in 1959 on location, in Trinidad by New York recording engineer Emory Cook. Sparrow was versatile and did some r&b sounding numbers which leads us to Big Maybelle, In the wake of Ray Charles’ 1962 LP “Modern Sounds In Country & Western Music” Maybelle revived Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart,” as did rising soul singer Vernon Harrell. Tony Bennett -as promised some weeks ago- completes the set with his definitive pop version from 1951.  If you want to understand the American musical landscape of the 1950s it’s important to listen to all the different musical fields then competing for commercial airtime and jukebox play. So we will continue on to Pop with Chris Connor doing “I Miss You So.” Betty Johnson and her daughters do “In The Garden” and The Liberty Hill Trio do “Saved By The Grace of God.” The latter, from Pete Kuykedall’s collection of obscure bluegrass and acoustic country singles, dates to about 1959. Don Barretto et son Orchestra Cubain tags out hour one with “A Si Paré.”

Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons doubled on pianos for two great boogie woogie pieces to kick off hour two. Chester Burnett did business as The Howlin’ Wolf. We’ll hear some of his early recordings out of Memphis. Then it’s up to Chicago where bluesman, Arbee Stidham, “Signed the Dog” for RCA Victor in 1947. At that time, he had a softer blues sound than the electric blues Muddy Waters and his contemporaries were pioneering. By the mid-1950s Stidham was recording for independent labels ABCO and States where he paired up with the likes of Sonny Boy Williamson No. 2, Walter Horton, and Lefty Bates to deliver the goods. Long-time Washington radio host, Dick Lillard, liked to keep his audience grounded in the 1970s and early 1980s by throwing important pop records into his playlist. “April In Paris” by Count Basie, which peaked at No. 28 in the first three months of 1956 was one of those. Basie’s triple false ending goes a long way to explain the long-enduring cliché of the “One More Time!”. On the R&B charts, releases contemporary with “April In Paris” included “The Great Pretender” by The Platters, “Tutti Fruitti” by Little Richard, and “Sugar Sweet” by Muddy Waters. These give you a sense of just how diverse the music marketplace was in the mid-1950s. The Keystoners and The Bop-Chords spin some romantic vocal group fantasies from the late 1950s before Bill Doggett closes with his follow up to “Honky Tonk.” It was called “Yocky Dock.” I hope you hear something you enjoy.

Thank you for your donations to bluegrasscountry.org
Jay Bruder

Sunday October 11

Friends:
This week on the Home Town Special we remember Ronnie Dove. He was born in Herndon, Virginia in 1935. After a stint with the U.S. Coast Guard, where her worked on the Chesapeake Bay, he settled in Baltimore. He worked the clubs in starting in the late 1950s. His “Lover Boy” and “Saddest Song” were local products, but by 1964 he broke nationally with “Right or Wrong” on Diamond Records of Nashville. It was the second of his 20 charted recordings and climbed to No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The song was produced by “Ray Vernon” (r.n. Vernon Wray) and Phil Khal. Improbably, it sounded like Louisiana swamp pop.  Another Diamond was Ronnie Diamond, a teenage Honolulu rock’n’roller. He worked with D.J. Tom Moffat and in 1958 he had a nice ballad released on Imperial Records of Los Angeles. It sounds like a song crafted by and for a vocal group, but Imperial backed the youngster with a chorus – not quite the same thing. The Jokers were a real vocal group out of Honolulu. Along with The Royal Drifters they released teen-oriented material for the local market. Some tracks, such as “S’Why Hard,” included Hawaiian slang. Hawaii has deep musical traditions as we will hear from Bennie Nawahi and Gabby Pahinui. Both were masters of Hawaiian guitar techniques. They played slide and slack-key respectively. We’ll head back to Jackson, Mississippi for Johnny Vincent’s Ace Records which pumped out hit after hit for the blues and rock’n’roll crowds in the late 1950s. Junior Gordon, Albert Scott, Frankie Lee Sims, and Earl King demonstrate.  It’s back to the Baltimore club scene for Pat Brown’s “Forbidden Fruit.” Marti Brom revived the song in 2010 for Ripsaw Records. In 1957, Anita Ellis released a different song, of the same title, on Epic. It featured all-star New York City session men such as Mickey Baker on guitar, and Sam “The Man” Taylor on sax. John Greer had a strong recording career from the late 1940s into the 1950s on his own with the likes of Lucky Millinder and Annisteen Allen. Time for some religious music. We’ll head up to Charleston, West Virginia where the Moore & Layne Appliance Company issued their own, M&L, line of records including sides by The Blue Ridge Quartet and The Craigsville Songbirds. Frank Hutchison tags out hour one with “The West Virginia Rag.”

We return to the 1946 album of 78rpm discs issued by Rudi Blech on his Circle label called “Climbin’ and Screamin.” The tracks were drawn from Dan Qualey’s 1939 Solo Art sessions with established boogie woogie pianists. We’ll hear the title track by Pete Johnson and “Had A Dream” by Clarence Loftin. Some songs pass through the generations virtually unchanged. But you need to listen carefully to a lot of records to uncover the deliberate mistitling of the commercial releases to disguise their origins. We’ll trace “Hard Times” from Floyd Jones in 1948, to John Brim’s “Tough Times” in 1954, to Hibert “Alabama” Watson’s “Cost Time” in 1965. Baritone saxman and vocalist Willie Restum was known in the entertainment business for his stint at The Dream Lounge in Miami which lasted from the mid-1950s into the 1960s. Before that he made some records for Capitol including a version of “Rock-A-Beatin’ Boogie.” The song originated with The Esquire Boys out of Philadelphia who recorded it in 1953 for Eddie Heller’s Rainbow Records of New York. Their version featured a fabulous guitar break by Danny Cedrone. When Bill Haley assembled his Comets to record their first session for Decca at the Pythian Temple in New York City, he made certain in include Cedrone. That guitar break features prominently on Haley’s iconic “Rock Around The Clock.” Sadly, Cedrone died from a fall shortly after the session. He didn’t live long enough to see the original 1954 commercial release, much less the stunning success the performance achieved after the movie “Blackboard Jungle” pushed it to the top of the charts through the summer of 1955. Jon Strong of Ripsaw Records heard the Charlie Feathers set on HTS a couple of weeks ago. He commented on how straight country Feathers could be. We’ll hear Charlie and his son Bubba back Johnny Seaton on a rockabilly remake of “Get With It” before we hear Feather’s 1956 Sun release “Defrost Your Heart. “Likewise, Wanda Jackson could certainly sell a country song as we will hear on “Half As Good a Girl.” That brings us to Janis Martin from South Boston, Virginia and on to great rocking R&B vocals from Eunice Davis, La Vern Baker, and Ruth Brown. Jack McVea tags us out with “Gaucho Hop.” I hope you hear something you enjoy.

Thank you for your donations to bluegrasscountry.org
Jay Bruder