Anatomy of a Song

The Inside Stories Behind 45 Iconic Hits

Marc Myers

• Éditeur: Grove Press UK
• Année: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781611859591
• Sujet: Médias et arts de la scène
• Sous-sujet: Théorie et appréciation de la musique

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.

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 Fats Domino, 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 “Rocket 88” (1951). After “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” was released in April 1952, it spent seven weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s R&B chart, becoming an early 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....