Episode 40 - A Ghost in Blackface

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This is a real ghost story, but like all real ghost stories, you don't get to see the ghost. Hey, you boy there! What did I just tell you? Please don't attempt to look at him straight on, son. The harder you try, folks, the more he fades, and he's just barely with us as it is now.

You'll have better luck looking away. Pretend you don't see him, and maybe you'll catch a sidelong glimpse from the corner of your eye. Wait quietly and you'll soon feel his presence in unexpected places. His influence, from the unexplained creak on the stair, the glass mysteriously falling from the table, music and voices coming from a empty downstairs room.

[Emmet Miller Mashup]

Is that Lovesick Blues? No, maybe it's Bob Wills. Or maybe I'm totally wrong, and it's really Jimmie Rodgers. It's so faint, so hard to hear. It's like a ghost singing.

This is a story about a ghost who made music, a ghost named Emmett Miller, a forgotten son of a embarrassing and often deliberately forgotten American art form, the blackface minstrel show.

Born in Macon, Georgia on February 2, 1900, Miller's family later said he had wanted to become a minstrel show comedian almost from the time he spoke his first word. And he achieved that goal by the time he and the new century had reached their mid-20s. While the early part of Miller's life is still a mystery between 1919 - when he left home to pursue his dream - and 1924, he had built up his career enough that an August, 1924 issue of Billboard noted that he had played a three-day engagement with the Dan Fitch Minstrels in Poughkeepsie, NY.

Becoming a successful blackface comedian in 1924 must have been a little bit like finally attaining a lifelong dream to become a horse collar maker. While there was still work for both professions if you tried hard enough to find it, your day was done before you had even gotten started.


Any Time and Lovesick Blues

Our ghost would have probably disappeared unknown, unloved, and unmourned except that Emmett Miller also made his first recordings in the late fall of the that year, 1924, for the Okeh label. The recordings included Any Time, his signature song on stage.

[Any Time (1928 version) - Emmett Miller]

By any measurement and in any time, Miller's Any Time is one strange song, beginning with what sounds like a cry of pain after a straightforward jazz introduction and then Miller's blackface partner incongruously noting, "Emmett, you're looking mighty happy today."

But Emmett doesn't sound happy at all, as he begins Any Time with a stereotypical minstrel routine, and then moves into the actual song, which in his hands - or maybe more accurately, his voice - becomes a witches brew of exaggerated blackface vocalization, jazz phrasing, and country yodeling.

Yodeling. But not the yodel-lay-hee Sound of Music Lonely Goatherd style of yodeling. Miller's yodel sounds more as if the lyrics were suddenly disappeared. As if become exhausted, the singer is now without recourse to words, and what bursts out is this awful, inarticulate cry, until Miller seemingly recovers himself and remembers that there is a next line.

Small wonder that Miller became known as the man with the "trick" or "clarinet" voice.

"Without a doubt my father learned Lovesick Blues somehow from Emmett Miller. It was either by record or he heard him perform it in person at a minstrel show." - Hank Williams Jr.

The version we heard of Any Time was cut in the fall of 1928, with Miller backed by a band dubbed the Georgia Crackers and which included both Tommy Dorsey and his brother Jimmy, as well as drummer Gene Krupa. In an earlier session, Miller and the boys also did a remake of his Lovesick Blues, which he had first recorded in 1925, and would eventually become the foundation for Hank Williams' 1949 hit.

As Hank Williams Jr. noted, maybe his father learned Lovesick Blues directly from Miller - at least one person remembers Hank praising Miller's version of the song - or maybe it was from one of the cuts Miller put on record. In either case, when Williams recorded his version, it was obviously influenced by Miller's vocal style.

[Hank Williams - Lovesick Blues]

Lovesick Blues was written by Irving Mills and Cliff Friend in 1922. Incidentally, Friend's best-known song is probably 1937's The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down, which became the signature song for the classic Looney Tunes cartoons. Lovesick Blues had been recorded by several artists before Miller picked it up, but it's his take on the song in 19 and 25 that put it on the musical map and would eventually catch Hank Williams attention.

[Emmet Miller - Lovesick Blues]

The Blue Yodels

We can't let our ghost rest in peace until we take a look at the Emmett Miller/Jimmie Rodgers connection. It's known that during 19 and 25, Rodgers "put on the cork," as the minstrel show saying had it, and was working as a blackface performer. He wasn't alone. As well as Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills, Roy Acuff, and Clarence Ashley all appeared in blackface during the course of their careers. But what's less certain is whether Rodgers ever ran into Emmett Miller and heard Miller's unique yodel.

Miller was in Asheville, North Carolina in the summer of 1925, and while Rodgers didn’t move to Asheville until 1927, the city was one of the premiere stops on the minstrel show circuit. So it's possible Rodgers at least passed through town while Miller was in residence and caught one of his performances. And two years later there's some circumstantial evidence that the two may have even performed together.

Ultimately, like all good ghost stories, it remains a mystery whether Emmett Miller and Jimmie Rodgers ever met, and whether Rodgers Blue Yodels evolved from Miller's yodeling style.

[Jimmie Rodgers - Blue Yodel # 9]

'You Look Familiar'

Oscar Vogel: Hello Jack. Do you know me?

Jack Fate: You look familiar.

OV: I was the star of the show here. One of the biggest stars. I was one of your father's favorite performers once. Everything was going great... just as long as you kept your mouth shut. But he was doing things that were wrong, your father. His desire for retaliation and revenge was too strong.

I was the only one in any position to say anything, everybody else was too scared. I had the show, I had a forum. So, I spoke out. It's not what goes in the mouth. It's what comes out that counts.

OV: They said it was an accident (strums banjo). Some even said it was a suicide. Some people choose to die in all kinds of ways. Some people jump out of buildings and slit their wrists on the way down. Some fall on their own swords. I opened my mouth. You remember? My name is Oscar Vogel.

JF: Oscar Vogel.

OV: (strums banjo)

JF: Well, I gotta get back to the stage.

OV: The stage? Ah yes, the stage. 'The whole world is a stage.' - Masked and Anonymous

By the end of the decade popular interest in minstrel shows had all but faded away although, like an inconvenient ghost, the cork kept re-appearing on stage and in film. Well into the next decade, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland would appear in blackface in 1939's Babes in Arms. Bing Crosby appeared in blackface in 1942's Holiday Inn, the precursor to the better-known White Christmas, released in 1954, and which also included a minstrel show number, but which, happily, was not done in blackface. The Black and White Minstrel Show was a popular British television series with a 20-year run into the `70s that presented traditional American "Deep South" songs - usually performed in blackface.

But even though it kept rolling in the grave well into the 1950s, the minstrel show was certifiably dead by the early `30s, with the popularity of movies putting the final nails in its - and its descendant, vaudeville - coffins. Interestingly, many of the minstrel show performers just put on a new mask - one that didn't require the cork - and moved into "hillbilly" music, masquerading this time as folksy hicks, rather than as rural blacks. In time, many of the pseudo-hillbillies and cowboys like Jimmie Rodgers and Bob Wills would in turn make the move into the more sophisticated country-western genre.

But what of our ghost, Emmett Miller? As far as the record shows, Miller apparently stuck to the cork to the bitter end. During the last part of his recording career, he tried to tame down his vocal style in an attempt to imitate then popular crooners like Rudy Vallee. But it didn't take, possibly because Miller kept including dated blackface routines with his music. His final recording sessions were in 1936.

But he never stopped working until the work dried up, performing when and where he could in minstrel revivals, vaudeville, even appearing with Scatman Crothers in a 1951 movie, Yes Sir, Mr. Bones.

But that was the last gasp for the cork and for Emmet Miller. He'd return to the town where he was born and die in Macon, Georgia in 1962.

Bob Dylan's thoughts on minstrel shows and blackface are unknown. But given the fact that he named an album after a book about the history of minstrel shows, it's pretty obvious that he does have some thoughts on the subject. And then there's Masked and Anonymous, of course. In the movie, Dylan - as the character Jack Fate - receives a visitation from his predecessor, a blackface minstrel.

"Do you know me?" he asks.

"You look familiar," Dylan replies.

The minstrel man later claims his name is "Oscar Vogel." But I'm not so sure. I think he may have worked under more than one name. He was once the star of the show here.

More Reading and Listening: The Wikipedia article on Emmett Miller; The Red Hot Jazz site, which has an excellent collection of Emmett Miller songs in RealAudio format; There's also a good overview of Miller, and his importance to country music, written by an an AnnMarie Harrington in 2003 at the appropriately named "Take Country Back" site.

Much of Harrington's article appears to be sourced from the touchstone of all Emmett Miller arcana, Nick Tosches' 2001 book Where Dead Voices Gather. Alternately fascinating and maddening, the book is no easy read. Tosches' prose can become so dense as to be impenetrable and much of Where Dead Voices Gather seems to have been written as stream-of-consciousness. When Tosches runs out of things to say about Miller, which happens quite often, he falls back on interminable lists of recording dates, forgotten songs, and minstrel show bookings until something new apparently occurs to him. The digressions can range from slang terms for female genitalia to whether Dixie was Abraham Lincoln's favorite song. And we're off and running with Nick again.

Tosches also isn't particularly well-liked in the small but active Emmett Millerphile community, where he's been criticized for sloppy - or no - research. Even I caught him out in a mistake while reading Where Dead Voices Gather. Tosches claims Wanda Jackson recorded the same Right or Wrong as Miller, but just a listen to a few seconds of either piece of music shows that they're completely different songs that happen to share the same title.

Having said all that, I still commend Where Dead Voices Gather to your attention. As frustrating as the book can be, it's still on a par with Greil Marcus' The Old Weird America as a document of Americana music.

Finally, our ghost in blackface is alive and well in the digital age, 107 years after his birth.

***

You've been listening to the Dreamtime podcast – occasional commentary on Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour.

Dreamtime is researched and written by Fred Bals and is a Not Associated With production. As the name says, we're not associated with XM Radio, Bob Dylan, or much of anything else.

Some of the music on Dreamtime is provided via the Podsafe Music Network. Check it out at music.podshow.com. The closing segment's music was an excerpt from Ol' Time Banjo, by David Miles Huber.

Remember that the Dreamtime team loves to get email. You can write us at dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com

The Dreamtime top cats are Curly Lasagna and Shaggy Bear. Our announcers are the notorious honky-tonkin' sisters, Jailbait and Joyride.

Until next time, dream well.

Visit the Dreamtime Store

Welcome to Season 2 of Dreamtime

With Mr. D. readying Season 2 of TTRH next week, I've decided to take Dreamtime into its second season with Episode 40, which will be posted later today... only 10 shows short and about two months over my original goal of 50 shows in one year... but not bad, I think, for an amateur effort.

I want to give my thanks to all who have supported Dreamtime in its first season; either through linking to the blog, publicizing it around the Web, or through your comments and/or emails telling me what you liked, or sometimes what I got wrong.

Also, a big thanks to those of you who have used the Dreamtime store as your launching base into Amazon. Whether you purchase something I recommended or not, when you go to Amazon from a Dreamtime link, I get a small piece of the action from purchases, at no additional cost to you. While my costs to do Dreamtime are minimal, there are some costs, mostly for podcast storage/bandwidth. It's nice to be able to offset even that small expense. So again, thank you, and a reminder to others... just like NPR or PBS, think of using Dreamtime store as your entry point into Amazon.

Off to Season 2!

Theme Time Season 2 Begins September 19th!

via USA Today

On the air: Launching with the topic "Hello," Dylan hosts the second season of XM Radio's Theme Time Radio Hour Sept. 19 (XM 40, Wednesdays, 10 a.m. ET/7 PT). Future shows will center on such motifs as "Young & Old," "California," "Dreams," "Fruit," "Something," "Nothing," "Streets," "Parties" and "Mail," with guests to include Luke Wilson, Amy Sedaris, Jack White and John Cusack. The satellite radio program draws nearly 2 million listeners weekly.

and an update just in from bobdylan.com

Theme Time Radio Hour
On Wednesday, September 19, Bob Dylan's award-winning XM music show, Theme Time Radio Hour, will kick off its much anticipated second season. Along with the show's signature eclectic mix of songs related to a specific theme and entertaining stories about the music and topics of interest, listeners will hear contributions from special guests, including Luke Wilson, Amy Sedaris, Jack White, John Cusack and Richard Lewis. The sultry voice of Ellen Barkin, will continue to herald the start of each "Theme Time" episode this season.

The first episode of season two will be devoted to the theme "Hello," with a typically wide, varied and surprising song list. Fans can expect to hear future episodes this season dedicated to themes such as "Young & Old," "California," the 2nd Annual Countdown Show, "Dreams," "Fruit," "Something," "Nothing," "Streets," "Parties," and "Mail."

New episodes of Theme Time Radio Hour, which airs Wednesdays at 10 a.m. ET on XM's Deep Tracks (XM 40), will also be available all day every Wednesday on XMX (XM 2). In May 2006, Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour debuted to critical-acclaim exclusively on XM; the show has become one of the network's most popular programs, and is heard by nearly two million listeners each week. Among the show's myriad accomplishments of the past year, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum added the show's "Baseball" episode to its archives in June 2006.

and a little bit more from the press release...

The first episode of season two will be devoted to the theme "Hello," with a song list that spans "Hello, Mello Baby" by The Mardi Gras Loungers, "Hello Trouble" by Buck Owens and "Hello in There" by John Prine, among many others. Fans can expect to hear future episodes this season dedicated to themes such as "Young & Old," "California," "Dreams," "Fruit," "Something," "Nothing," "Streets," "Parties," "Mail," and the 2nd Annual Countdown Show.

Dreamtime - the Video Promo

via dylanmessaging.com where you too can create your very own.

Three Miles South of Cash - Bob Wills and Carolina Cotton

We're in full Western Swing mode here at Dreamtime, this time around with a video of Bob Wills and The Texas Playboys from 19 and 51, featuring a semi-duet of Three Miles South of Cash between Wills and Carolina Cotton, who performs her signature yodelin' as Wills tries to keep pace.

This is from a so-called "Snader Telescription," one of television's first music videos. Snaders were 3-4 minute films shot live and produced from around 1950 until late 1953 or early `54, according to this site. The brainchild of Louis D. Snader, a Southern California real estate developer, almost all of the several hundred Snader Telescriptions were written, produced, and directed by a Duke Goldstone, who even helped design many of the sets. Goldstone could shoot as many as 12 Snaders in one day.

A bigger live draw than Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman in his heyday during in the 1940s, Wills career was winding down by 1951, as was Western Swing itself. He'd have one last Top Ten hit with Faded Love in 1950, although he'd continuing performing into the late `60s. The Yodelin' Blonde Bombshell - Carolina Cotton - was a featured songbird in the Spade Cooley, Deuce Spriggins (to whom she was briefly married), Hank Penny, and Bob Wills bands, as well as cutting her own singles.

Cotton appeared in several B Westerns as well as in some of the first "Soundies," an even earlier precursor to music videos (although the audio was taped, rather than performed live). Cotton was also one of the first female deejays, as well as a television pioneer. She turned down the role of Annie Oakley (later played by Gail Davis) to develop her own series, Queen of the Range, although the show was never aired. In the early `60s, Cotton retired from her entertainment career, earned her Masters Degree in Special Education, and taught at several schools in California. She'd occasionally still perform at Western Swing fan conferences and charity events into the late `90s, before passing away in 1997.

Cotton had a fascinating career, and you could learn more about her and her life at carolinacotton.org, a great site maintained by her family.

Hank Penny - Missouri

I need to do a Dreamtime episode on the Western Swing phenomena of the `40s and `50s, which has just a ton of great subject matter and characters to write about, including Carolina Cotton - "the Yodelin' Blonde Bombshell" - who you can see on bass in this clip, and Spade Cooley, the King of Western Swing, whose life played out like a James Ellroy noir novel.

Here we have the Deuce Spriggins Orchestra, featuring Hank Penny, doing Missouri. Spriggins - real name George Braunsdorf - and Cotton (Helen Hagstrom) were secretly married in 1945, and left Spade Cooley's band that same year, taking many of Cooley's musicians with them to form their own band. Spriggins and Cotton would be divorced the following year, with few people knowing that they had been married.

Hank Penny, whose 1950s hit Bloodshot Eyes was featured on Dreamtime 39, was born Herbert Clayton Penny on September 18, 1918, in Birmingham, AL. By the age of 15, he was performing professionally on local radio, and had formed his own band, The Radio Cowboys, before he turned 18.

By the mid-'40s, Penny was in Los Angeles, and had been recruited to front one of the pseudo-Spade Cooley bands that were operating throughout the country. Cooley's popularity was at such a height during the 1940s that the real Spade Cooley Orchestra couldn't fill all its bookings, so Cooley's manager simply formed several more Western Swing bands and sent them on the road under the Spade Cooley brand.

After later stints as band leader, deejay, and club owner, Penny joined Cooley's wildly popular television program in 1948 as a comic backwoods type known as "That Plain Ol' Country Boy." A year later, Penny cut Hillbilly Bebop, an attempt to reclaim the audience Western Swing was losing to the new bop music, and the more successful hit of 1950, Bloodshot Eyes.

Penny later would become a co-owner of the legendary Palomino Club, hosted his own television series, The Hank Penny Show, which was canceled after only a few weeks, and have a much more successful seven-year run at the Golden Nugget Casino in Las Vegas. He'd later moved to Nashville, and audition for the hosting slot of Hee Haw, a job he'd lose to Roy Clark. He passed away in 1992.*

*Note: Hank's widow, Shari, was kind enough to contact me with the correct dates of Hank's birth and death and I've edited the post to reflect those dates  Shari notes that the Hank Penny official web site will be online within the month, and we'll link to it when it goes live.  Thank you, Shari!

Episode 39 - The Lost Theme Time iPod

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Theme Time Music That Never Was, That Might Have Been, And Could Still Be

[Bed music - Perry Mason Theme - Mundell Lowe]

Here's the story. Sometime in 2005, somewhere in Los Angeles, Bob Dylan is in a studio. He does whatever he came there to do, and then makes like a tree... and leaves.

But he forgets his iPod.

Imagine that for a second. There it is, sitting on a sound board right in front of you. Bob Dylan's iPod. Looking just like every other of the million of iPods out there. But it belongs to...

"...the poet laureate of rock 'n' roll. The voice of the promise of the '60s counterculture. The guy who forced folk into bed with rock. Who donned makeup in the '70s and disappeared into a haze of substance abuse. Who emerged to find Jesus. Who was written off as a has-been by the end of the '80s, and who suddenly shifted gears releasing some of the strongest music of his career beginning in the late '90s. Ladies and gentlemen - Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan!"

That's his iPod. Wouldn't you be curious about what Bob Dylan listens to? What would you do? Would you turn it on? Would you skim through the playlists? Would you listen?

Maybe you'd copy the iPod's contents, especially since you have all the equipment to do it right there at hand. And later, so you'd have a clean conscience, you'd call Dylan's people to let them know that their Boss had forgotten it.

That's what somebody supposedly did sometime in early 2005 in the City of Los Angeles. Or at least that's how the story goes. Later that year a playlist appeared on the Web, purportedly listing the contents of the copied iPod... and than the story just kind of faded away into the aether, forgotten by most Dylan fans.

It's not that hard to understand. There's no music by Bob Dylan in that playlist. In fact, you've probably never heard of most of the 171 songs unless you're a hardcore fan of rockabilly, jump music, gospel, bebop, and honky tonk.

In fact, you'd probably need to have the tastes of a certain disk jockey who operates out of the Abernathy Building to know all these songs.

It'd be easy to dismiss the story as the work of an obsessive prankster fan who thought it might be entertaining to come up with a forgery of what you might expect Bob Dylan to listen to. But in 2005 - a year before the first episode of Theme Time Radio Hour ever aired - how many people would have expected Bob Dylan to be a fan of (Every Time I Hear) That Mellow Saxophone by Roy Montrell? Or of Buddy and Ella Johnson? Now, Hank Snow, The Staple Singers, even Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys, sure. But Charlie Mingus and Eat that Chicken?

Here's what I think. I think the story about the iPod is true. And I think that in early 2005, maybe as early as January 2005, XM Radio and Dylan's organization and Eddie Gorodetsky had agreed in principle - as the politicians like to say - that Dylan would be doing a radio show for XM starting in 2006.

Now they had to figure out what that radio show was going to be, and what Mr. D. was going to play. And I think that from Dylan's direction and from a list of his likes and dislikes someone put together a playlist of eight hours worth of music, ripped that music to an iPod, and sent it on down Dylan's way to churn some thought and to spark ideas for the show.

It's not exactly Theme Time Radio Hour, but you can sure hear the roots of the show, and sometimes you'll find music on the playlist that just seems just perfectly perfect Theme Time material: Kip Anderson's R&B number Knife and Fork for the Food episode for example, or maybe this cut from Dr. Humphrey Bate And His Possum Hunters...

[How Many Biscuits Can You Eat? - Dr. Humphrey Bate And His Possum Hunters]

Dr. Humphrey was really a doctor, as well as a graduate of Nashville's Vanderbilt University. His group was originally known as the Augmented Orchestra, but when the group played on the first ever Grand Ole Opry radio broadcast, promoter and host George Hay saddled them with "the Possum Hunters" moniker, figuring it'd be more of a draw with the listening audience.

There's some very strange references on that iPod playlist, too. There's three Hank Williams cuts, all supposedly from an album titled Codfish Pie. Except, as far as I can tell, there never was a Hank Williams collection with that title. The Davis Sisters Everlovin' is supposedly pulled from something called The Sacred Frowns. Except the only Sacred Frowns I could find a reference to is a group that ex-members of NRBQ formed. Weirdly, NRBQ has covered Everlovin', but why the association in the playlist on Dylan's iPod?

[The Davis Sisters - Everlovin']

Everlovin' was recorded in 19 and 55 by Skeeter Davis and Georgie Davis, who were not sisters. Skeeter was born Mary Frances Penick, and took on the more easily remembered name when she teamed up with the original Davis sister, Betty Jack.

The two would record a #1 hit - later covered by Bob Dylan - I Forgot More Than You'll Even Know in 19 and 53. But Betty Jack would die that year in a car accident that would also badly injure Skeeter. Skeeter would later team with Betty Jack's real sister, Georgie, and the two would release several records still using the The Davis Sisters name until Skeeter went solo in 1956.

Here's another cut from an album that doesn't exist as far as I can tell, Fay Simmons singing that nuclear blast from the past, 19 and 54's You Hit Me Baby Like An Atomic Bomb.

[Fay Simmons - You Hit Me Baby Like An Atomic Bomb]

Like Fay Simmons herself, Atomic Bomb is one Big Unknown. Simmons recorded it on August 23, 1954 in Philadelphia with an unknown band. The composer is unknown, and for reasons unknown the song was never picked up by a label.

Not much more is known about Fay Simmons. She appeared on at least 20 singles in a career that spanned about a decade, but she never grabbed more than East Coast airplay, and never had that breakout song. By 1965 she had disappeared from sight.

A fan of old record labels has the best information about Simmons on the Web at the Color Radio and Doo Wop site which includes two other tracks worth a listen: the closest thing Simmons ever had to a hit: And the Angels Sing, and an up-tempo version of the Doris Day classic, Secret Love.

The iPod's playlist has Atomic Bomb coming from something titled One-Offs, which may have been a private compilation put together by Eddie Gorodetsky. The song doesn't appear to have been commercially released until the `90s from the very obscure Flyright label on a CD called Talk to Me Daddy. You can also find it on that comprehensive collection of Cold War madness, Atomic Platters, which came out in '05. If Theme Time ever does a show on the Bomb, I'll guarantee you that more than one song will come from Atomic Platters.

You're listening to the Dreamtime podcast and Theme Time music that never was, might have been, and could still be.

Like Fay Simmons, The Zion Travelers never got the fame that they deserved, but they were one of the best of the gospel quartets of the `40s and `50s. This cut from the iPod playlist stopped me in my tracks when I first heard it, because it's a near-perfect reworking of The Orioles hit from 19 and 53, Crying in the Chapel, with completely different lyrics.

[A Soldier of the Cross - Zion Travelers]

Was someone on the Theme Time team playing with the idea of at least one show dedicated to wildly different versions of songs? Maybe, because as well as A Soldier of the Cross, the iPod playlist includes the original This May Be the Last Time, recorded by the Staple Singers and later a revised hit for The Rolling Stones, and Loretta Lynn doing two completely different takes on I'm a Honky Tonk Girl.

Speaking of honky-tonkin', my own honky-tonk girl, Jailbait Jones, pointed out that the iPod playlist has over a dozen honky-tonk songs, ranging from Joe Maphis and Rose Lee doing Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (And Loud, Loud Music) to Kitty Wells 1952 classic, It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels. Throw in some dee jay chatter, a couple of email readings, and Mr. D. reading the the following poem, and by God you have a a Theme Time episode in the bag...

It's a jazz affair, drum crashes and cornet razzes.

The trombone pony neighs and the tuba jackass snorts.

The banjo tickles and titters too awful.

The chippies talk about the funnies in the papers.

The cartoonists weep in their beer.

Ship riveters talk with their feet

To the feet of floozies under the tables.

A quartet of white hopes mourn with interspersed snickers:

"I got the blues.

I got the blues.

I got the blues."

And . . . as we said earlier:

The cartoonists weep in their beer.

- Carl Sandburg, Windy City poet

We're closing up the honky tonk with a song that would have worked on the Eyes or Drinking episodes, and may still show up on a Theme Time Radio Hour at some point.

A comedian, deejay, singer, club owner, and band leader at various points in career, here's Hank Penny with his hit from 19 and 50, Bloodshot Eyes

[Bloodshot Eyes - Hank Penny]

In the mid-50s, Hank moved his act to Las Vegas where he started a seven-year run at the Golden Nugget casino, fronting a band which at one time included Roy Clark. They'd run into each at least one more time, when Clark beat out Hank for the job hosting Hee Haw.

That's just five of the 171 songs on the iPod's playlist, from Al Urban to the Zion Travelers, from A Cottage for Sale to Your Wild Life's Going to Get You Down. Was it the lost iPod of Theme Time Radio Hour?

We may never know for sure.

You've been listening to the Dreamtime podcast – occasional commentary on Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour.

Dreamtime is researched and written by Fred Bals and is a Not Associated With production. As the name says, we're not associated with XM Radio, Bob Dylan, or much of anything else.

Some of the music on Dreamtime is provided via the Podsafe Music Network. Check it out at music.podshow.com.

Remember that the Dreamtime team loves to get email. You can write us at dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com

The Dreamtime top cats are Curly Lasagna and Shaggy Bear. Our announcers are the notorious honky-tonkin' sisters, Jailbait and Joyride.

Until next time, dream well.

Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen - On the Road

via the Paper Cuts blog at the NY Times

TTRH and Dreamtime favorite Jack Kerouac reading a selection from On the Road, backed by Steve Allen on piano.

More Kerouac and Allen can be heard in Episode 17 - October in the Railroad Earth.

Episode 38 - A Wink or a Nod From Some Unexpected Place

Direct link to mp3.

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"... all it takes is a wink or a nod from some unexpected place to vary the tedium of a baffling existence.

That happened to me when Gorgeous George the great wrestler came to my hometown. In the mid-50s, I was performing in the lobby of the National Guard Armory, the Veterans Memorial Building, the site where all the big shows happened - the livestock shows and hockey games, circuses and boxing shows, traveling preacher revivals, country-and-western jamborees.











Once a year or so, Gorgeous George would bring his whole troupe of performers to town: Goliath, The Vampire, The Twister, The Strangler, The Bone Crusher, The Holy Terror, midget wrestlers, a couple of lady wrestlers, and a whole lot more.

I was playing on a makeshift platform in the lobby of the building with the usual wild activity of people milling about, and no one was paying much attention. Suddenly the doors burst open and in came Gorgeous George himself. He roared in like the storm, didn't go through the backstage area, he came right through the lobby of the building and he seemed like forty men. It was Gorgeous George, in all his magnificent glory with all the lightning and vitality you'd expect. He had valets and was surrounded by women carrying roses, wore a majestic fur-lined gold cape and his long blond curls were flowing. He brushed by the makeshift stage and glanced towards the sound of the music. He didn't break stride, but he looked at me, eyes flashing with moonshine. He winked and seemed to mouth the phrase 'You're making it come alive.'"

- Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One

"I am the Greatest Wrestler in the World!"

During the peak of his career, Gorgeous George's fame was comparable to that of Muhammad Ali's - whose public persona had more than a little of Gorgeous George in it. During the early part of his career, when he was still known as Cassius Clay, Ali was promoting his latest fight on a Las Vegas radio show. Also appearing was Gorgeous George, who was talking up his own fight and who worked himself into a frenzy describing the hurt he planned for opponent,

"If this bum beats me, I’ll crawl down Las Vegas Boulevard on my hands and knees. But it won’t happen. I’ll tear his arm off. For I am the greatest wrestler in the world!"

Like the young Dylan, the young Ali was entranced by George's rhetoric, and became even more enthusiastic when he discovered that George regularly sold out wherever he appeared. Taking up George's invitation, Ali went to see his match and, as he later remembered, "I saw 15,000 people coming to see this man get beat, and his talking did it. I said, 'This is a g-o-o-o-d idea!'"

Gorgeous George's influence can also be seen in Little Richard, James Brown, and Liberace, as well as nearly every other sports or entertainment figure - such as Elton John - who ever adopted a flamboyant, outrageous style.

Gorgeous George was born George Wagner in Seward, Nebraska on March 15, 1915. He began his wrestling career during his teens - often competing at local carnivals, where the prize purse averaged 35 cents. By age 17, George was getting bookings through the area's top promoter. At 5'9' and 215 pounds, Wagner was not all that an imposing a figure, but he developed a reputation as a solid wrestler, and by the late `30s he had legitimately captured two regional titles.

He also met his first wife, Betty Hanson, who George subsequently married in an in-ring ceremony. That turned out to be so popular that the couple incorporated the wedding into their tour and would re-enact it in arenas throughout the U.S. Seeing how show biz elements helped draw crowds may have started George thinking about developing a more memorable shtick than simply straight wrestling. At least one report has it that he got the idea for an effeminate, dandy villain wrestler after reading an article about a now-forgotten contemporary who wrestled under the name Lord Patrick Lansdowne, and who would appear at bouts as a British Lord attended by a valet.

The Human Orchid

Also known as "The Human Orchid," George debuted his new persona in 19 and 41 in Eugene, Oregon, and was instantly slapped with the title "Gorgeous George" by a bemused ring announcer. George rapidly became the villain crowds loved to hate. One of the first wrestlers to use the type of flamboyant entrance now common in pro wrestling matches, George would arrive to the strains of Pomp and Circumstance, escorted down a personal red carpet by his ring valet “Jeffries,” who would carry a silver mirror for George to gaze upon as rose petals were strewn at his feet.

These entrances often took longer than the actual bout, as George still had to exchange taunts with the crowd, have Jeffries spray the ring and unwilling opponent with disinfectant which George claimed was "Chanel #10." The show would culminate in George's refusal to let the referee inspect him for foreign objects unless he was also doused by Jeffries while George shrieked in horror, "Keep your filthy hands off me!"

Eventually the match would begin, and George would brazenly ignore the rules while chanting his motto to the audience: "Win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat!"

It was an outrageous, larger-than-life act, tailor-made for the new medium, television. Gorgeous George would become the biggest drawing card of the wrestling industry, as well as one of its first genuine stars. It's been claimed that Gorgeous George was responsible for selling as many TV sets as Milton Berle, Mr. Television, himself.

By the '50s, Gorgeous George was earning over $100,000 a year, making him that decade's highest paid athlete. His most famous match would take place in 1959 before 14,000 fans and millions of television viewers where he would be defeated by longtime rival "Whipper" Billy Watson and would lose his treasured platinum locks to the Whipper's razor.

Although he would wrestle for three more years, and in fact, knowing a good crowd-pleaser when he saw one, would lose his hair to an opponent's razor twice more in those three years, age and a tough lifestyle eventually caught up with the Gorgeous One. George retired in 1962, bought into a turkey ranch and opened a cocktail lounge in Van Nuys, California, "Gorgeous George's Ringside Restaurant," where he would entertain customers with card tricks. Although filmed before his retirement, you can see a different side of Gorgeous George in this clip from You Asked For It, as he demonstrates some sleight-of-hand for the audience and host Art Baker.

Our Daddy, Gorgeous George

Gorgeous George passed away on December 26, 1963 at age 48. Although he had made millions during his wrestling career and for a time was probably the most recognizable entertainer on the planet, Gorgeous George would die broke. He was buried at Valhalla Memorial Park in North Hollywood, California, the final resting place for several other celebrities including Oliver Hardy; Curly Joe from The Three Stooges; and in a coincidental Dreamtime connection, Cliff ("Ukulele Ike") Edwards, the voice of Jiminy Cricket, who also died penniless.

Gorgeous George's grave can be found in plot 6657, near the northeast side of the fountain. A plaque reads "Love to Our Daddy Gorgeous George."

Audio excerpt from Chronicles: Volume One, read by Sean Penn.

***

You've been listening to the Dreamtime podcast – occasional commentary on Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour.

Dreamtime is researched and written by Fred Bals and is a Not Associated With production. As the name says, we're not associated with XM Radio, Bob Dylan, or much of anything else.

Some of the music on Dreamtime is provided via the Podsafe Music Network. Check it out at music.podshow.com.

Remember that the Dreamtime team loves to get email. You can write us at dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com

The Dreamtime top cats are Curly Lasagna and Shaggy Bear. Our announcers are the notorious honky-tonkin' sisters, Jailbait and Joyride.

Until next time, dream well.

Anita O'Day - Let Me Off Uptown

Ms. Anita O'Day, a three-time favorite of TTRH, she of the "Dance" (Ten Cents a Dance); "Tears" (And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine); and "New York" (Let Me Off Uptown) episodes. Here's Anita with the Gene Krupa Orchestra doing that last song. I add my recommendation to that of Our Host that you pick up her gritty, noirish biography, High Times, Hard Times.

There's also a new documentary out on Anita O'Day - The Life of a Jazz Singer - that is getting good reviews and probably well worth hunting down if you're lucky enough to live somewhere slightly less rural than New Hampshire. The last documentary that played in Dreamtime's home town was Our Friend, the Beaver at the Grange Hall.

Bryant Gumbel: "Your personal experiences include rape, abortion, jail, heroin addiction..."

Anita O'Day: "That's just the way it went down, Bryant."


Here's the trailer for Anita O'Day - The Life of a Jazz Singer

Episode 37 - Chasing The Rising Sun

Left: E. J. Bellocq 1873-1949 Untitled [Prostitute, Storyville, New Orleans] c1911-13

Direct link to mp3.

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I: That girl from Kaintuck

"Georgia, hurry up! He's at Cadle's!"

"Okay, mama," Georgia Turner answers, wiping her hands on a dish cloth. The sixteen-year-old's birthday is today, September 15, 1937. She and her mother walk out of the log house onto the dirt street of Noetown, a poor shanty neighborhood of Middlesboro, Kentucky.

They're going to go sing at Tillman Cadle's house. A man has come down from Washington, D.C. to hear the old music. Mary Gill Turner is known in the neighborhood for her religious songs. The blond-haired Georgia, who always seems to be singing, likes ballads and the blues best.

They pass a muddy Studebaker as they approach the Cadle home. Automobiles are still a rare enough sight in Noetown that Georgia pauses for a moment to look inside. She's never ridden in a car.

The two join the crowd, centered around a young man, not that much older than Georgia. But he's treated with deference, as much for being the master of the bulky piece of machinery he's working over as anything else.

Alan Lomax's Presto disc recorder had been supplied by The Library of Congress for his first solo field recording expedition. The Presto was billed as a portable model, but at 350 lbs, was "portable" only in a copywriter's imagination, handle or not. Lomax traveled with the machine in the back of his Studebaker. In order to record in places where there was no electricity, like Noetown, Lomax used the Studebaker's battery, which he attached to a transformer, which in turn was attached to an amplifier. Lomax was finishing the last connection from amplifier to Presto when Georgia and her mother walked in.

Mary Gill sang a few songs into Lomax's machine, and then it was Georgia's turn. Lomax lifted another of the massive, black, glass platters onto the machine and beckoned Georgia over. She began with an old standard, Married Life Blues. Then she leaned into Lomax's microphone and began another song, first tentatively, then more strongly, as the sadness of the story seemed to take over her voice.

There is a house in New Orleans
they call the Rising Sun.
It's been the ruin of many a poor girl
and me, oh God for one.

II: On to New York and Over the Pond

Georgia Turner's The House of the Rising Sun, which she called Rising Sun Blues, wasn't the first recording of the song; that's probably Clarence Ashley's of 19 and 33, nor the most famous - we'll talk about that one a little later on. But it's the one that inspired most of the later folk renditions of Rising Sun, as well as the Animal's ground-breaking folk-rock version that reportedly caused Bob Dylan to jump out of his car in excitement when he first heard it on the radio.

No one knows where Turner first heard the song. Her home in Noetown didn't have electricity, let alone a radio or phonograph, so it's unlikely that she had heard one of the recorded versions. Ted Anthony, in his recent brilliant book tracking the song, Chasing the Rising Sun, speculates that Georgia may have heard the song direct from Clarence Ashley's lips as he performed it on the medicine show circuit. There's some evidence to back that theory. The song was obviously known in the area and being passed from singer to singer. Three weeks after meeting Georgia Turner, Lomax would be fifty miles north of Noetown and recording a man named Bert Martin, who sang a slightly different version of Rising Sun. Lomax would use Martin's extra lyrics to fill out Georgia Turner's version and credit her with the song in his collection, Our Singing Country, which was published in 1941.

By the late `50s, the song was already a folk standard, having been added to the portfolios of Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Josh White, and Pete Seeger, among many others. In 1957 the music, guitar chords, and lyrics were published in Sing Out!, a folk music `zine with an influence far beyond its raw production values. Sing Out! was one of the primary sources for the booming folkie revival of the late `50s and early `60s. If you couldn't lay your hands on an original of the magazine, you'd likely have a mimeograph copy of the song sheets to learn the music for your next coffee house gig or hootenanny.

With changed chords and a descending bass line, Rising Sun became one of Greenwich Village folk icon Dave Van Ronk's signature pieces during the early `60s, impressing the young Bob Dylan so much that he recorded his own take on the Van Ronk version for his first album, Bob Dylan. Unfortunately Dylan waited until after the fact before asking Van Ronk's permission, and Van Ronk had had plans to record the song himself. And even more unfortunately, Rising Sun became so closely associated with Dylan in the folk community that Van Ronk had to stop singing the song or listen to snide remarks that it was a pretty good cover but much too close to Dylan's version.

"Now that was very, very annoying," Van Ronk noted, with just a trace of irony. But Van Ronk would see Dylan himself forced to stop playing the song after the Animals' 1964 mega-hit became the definitive version - an electric rendition based on Dylan's cover of Van Ronk... or was that Georgia Turner... or Clarence Ashley?

III: Another Shot Fired in the British Invasion

About two years after the Animals' release of Rising Sun, I was in my freshman year at a boarding school. One of my dorm mates had taken up the electric guitar, and the first piece of music he learned was the famous seven-note, A-minor chord arpeggio that begins House of the Rising Sun. For a good part of that year, our adult dorm master was treated nightly to an unlikely chorus of seven 14-year-olds soulfully lamenting their misfortune in visiting that house in New Orleans.

There are various stories about where the idea came from - sources claim the Animals decided to record Rising Sun after hearing either Dylan's, or Josh White's, or Nina Simone's versions - but the band knew it needed a memorable signature song for a spring 1964 tour where they would be on the same bill as Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis. They wanted something that would separate them from the pack and make the audience remember them. Something different, because, as Eric Burdon puts it, "You can't outrock Chuck Berry."

Someone in the band - maybe Eric Burdon, maybe Alan Price, depending on whose story you want to believe - suggested Rising Sun and someone - maybe Alan Price again, if you believe him, maybe the band as a whole - developed the unforgettable electric arrangement.

The Animals joined the Berry-Lewis tour and, in their first night on-stage, closed the first half of the show with their first public performance of The House of the Rising Sun. It was one of those moments that performers dream about but seldom really experience. As the final notes of the song ebbed away and the sole spotlight on Burdon faded into darkness, the audience was silent. Then the applause started, and didn't stop.

The Animals recorded the song on May 18, 1964, under the supervision of an unenthusiastic Columbia label producer, who felt that a four-and-a-half minute single was about a minute-and-a-half too long to have any chance to make it to the charts. He was - of course - dead wrong. House of the Rising Sun would become a trans-Atlantic chart-buster, topping both the U.K. pop singles chart in July of 1964 and the U.S. pop singles chart in September, when it became the first British Invasion #1 hit that wasn't a Beatles tune.

Unfortunately, Rising Sun would generate ill feelings among the Animals that would eventually break up the group and rankle the ex-members to this day. Again, someone - the record is unclear but most fingers point to the group's then-manager - told the band that they couldn't all be credited on the 45 single and suggested they just use organist Alan Price's name alone and sort out the royalty percentages later. It didn't occur to the financially naive musicians until after the fact that they could have used "Trad. Arr: The Animals," but the single was released as "Trad. Arr: Alan Price."

Alan Price's official web site notes, "...Price’s hypnotic arrangement of the band's epic version of The House of the Rising Sun was released in June 1964 and went on to become a worldwide smash..." Eric Burdon acknowledges that Price played a major role in the arrangement's development, but claims that ultimately it was a group effort. Less than a year after Rising Sun hit the charts, Alan Price had left The Animals. Some members of the group suspected he left because he had enough money coming in from Rising Sun to strike out on his own.

The other band members never saw a penny from the publishing royalties. But Rising Sun was never a song to reward its various interpreters very well... at least not with money. Clarence Ashley was probably paid $25 and transportation for his recorded version. Alan Lomax spent a great deal time and effort tracking down Georgia Turner in the early `60s so he could offer her royalties from her 1937 recording. But all in all she probably received less than $1,000.

It's a hard-luck song.

Further Reading/Listening: This article was inspired by Ted Anthony's 2007 book Chasing the Rising Sun, Anthony's journey into the heart of that song, as well as into the heart of America itself. I highly recommend it. I should note that, while based on Anthony's report, my description of the meeting between Alan Lomax and Georgia Turner is a pure product of my imagination, and any errors are mine alone.

Georgia Turner's version of House of the Rising Sun (Rising Sun Blues) can be found on Alan Lomax's Popular Songbook The CD also contains Stagolee, Didn't Leave Nobody But The Baby (later popularized in O Brother, Where Art Thou?), and the original Sloop John B. Popular Songbook is a very good starting point for anyone wanting to explore more of the place I spend much of my time, at least in my imagination, the Old Weird America.

***

You've been listening to the Dreamtime podcast – occasional commentary on Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour.


Dreamtime is researched and written by Fred Bals and is a Not Associated With production. As the name says, we're not associated with XM Radio, Bob Dylan, or much of anything else.

Some of the music on Dreamtime is provided via the Podsafe Music Network. Check it out at music.podshow.com. The background music for the opening segment was Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, performed by Bill Furner.

Remember that the Dreamtime team loves to get email. You can write us at dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com

The Dreamtime top cats are Curly Lasagna and Shaggy Bear. Our announcers are the notorious honky-tonkin' sisters, Jailbait and Joyride.

Until next time, dream well.

South of the Snooty Fox - Produced by Eddie Gorodetsky

via antimusic

(PR) South of the Snooty Fox is the title of the forthcoming album from Sterling Harrison, a veteran soul singer whose approach is the very definition of the term "old school." The album will be released August 21 by HackTone Records, distributed through Rhino/ADA.

South of the Snooty Fox describes an actual geographical location in the inner city as well as serving for a metaphor for the plight of a gifted artist whose professional life was, for the most part, spent out of the spotlight of the mainstream music business. Accordingly, The L.A. Weekly headlined a piece on Harrison "The Best Soul Singer You Never Heard Of."

The album was co-produced by Steve Berlin, long-standing member of Los Lobos and, previously, part of The Blasters line-up. It was co-produced and conceived by Eddie Gorodetsky, the TV writer ("Dharma & Greg," "Two and a Half Men") known for his many forays into music including his role as producer of Bob Dylan's "Theme Time Radio Hour" heard on XM Radio.

Wanda Jackson - I Gotta Know

Another one from the Queen of Rockabilly. The gentleman playing the double-neck Mosrite guitar is Joe Maphis, who backed Rick Nelson and Rose Maddox as well as Jackson and had his own hit with Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (and Loud, Loud Music).

"15, 16, 17... that's Jailbait"

Mr. Andre Williams live. When my partner in crime first heard this on the Jail episode, she immediately took the name. Her sister later decided her name was really Joyride... and thus the Dreamtime announcers were born

Episode 36 - Stagger Lee Shot Billy

Direct link to mp3.
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THEFT OF STETSON HAT CAUSES DEADLY DISPUTE, VICTIM IDENTIFIES SELF AS FAMILY MAN

Liner note for Frank Hutchinson's Stackalee from The Anthology of American Folk Music, edited by
Harry Smith

It's 1895, Christmas night. You're wandering confused down a street you've never seen before, but somehow you know the day, the year.

The city. You're in St. Louis.

How? Are you dreaming? Maybe you are, because you keep on sighting images and scenes that make no sense, that shouldn't be in this world. You see a man by an open grave pulling the rings from a dead woman's fingers. A heavyset speaker on a podium is declaiming his views on tariff laws when an assassin dashes up and shoots him in the belly.

There's a track parallel to the street, and a freight train suddenly appears, moving much too fast, the half-seen engineer pulling down the whistle cord in a long, piercing scream. It disappears back into the night. A few seconds later the street is shrouded in fog, and you glimpse what looks like the prow of an enormous ship passing by, even though there isn't any body of water that could float it within a thousand miles. The fog conceals the ship again before you can see any more than the last few letters of its name -"ANTIC."

You step out of the street, out of the madness, into the welcome lights of a bar, although it has the ominous name of The Bucket of Blood. But by this time you don't care, you just want a drink, company, voices, music.

There's a piano with a player banging out fast ragtime. The room is crowded, loud, filled with smoke. You push your way to the bar, order a beer, and turn as you hear voices raised, chairs pushed away, the crowd scattering to open a space for two men. One is holding a Stetson hat away from another, larger man.

"Give me back my damn hat!" he shouts.

"You son of a bitch, I'm going to make you kill me," the smaller one replies, reaching into his jacket. And the tall man dips into his coat too, bringing out a pistol, and shoots four times.

"I told you to give me my hat," Lee Shelton says to the lifeless body as he reaches down to retrieve his Stetson.

[Stackalee - Frank Hutchinson]

***

Billy DeLyon told Stagolee, "Please don't take my life

I got two little babes and a darling, loving wife"

That bad man, oh cruel Stagolee

"What'd I care about your two little babes and darling, loving wife?

You done stole my Stetson hat, I'm bound to take your life."

That bad man, oh cruel Stagolee - Stagolee by Mississippi John Hurt

Greil Marcus calls it the Old, Weird America. Ted Anthony calls it the Village. I think of it as an interzone, a place where reality and legend collide, a place where a pretty young woman named Polly, the 25th President of the United States, and train engineer John Luther Jones all live out their days and meet their deaths, and the Old 97 and the Unsinkable Ship are the usual mode of transportation.

It's a place where a briar and a rose grow together in a graveyard, and eventually entwine into a lover's knot. It's where a boy and girl - neither much more than children - throw a bundle from a bridge each day. The boy returns later in the night and will follow it into the dark waters.

The interzone. It's where all the songs start.

***

According to the records Lee Shelton, both known as "Stag" and "Stack" Lee, walked into the Bill Curtis Saloon, located in the epicenter of what was then St. Louis's thriving vice district. The saloon was a few blocks away from a notorious bordello called The Bucket of Blood.

Lee Shelton was a pimp, and reportedly something of a loner, either of which may have earned him the "Stag" nickname. But there's some evidence that he called himself "Stack" after the riverboat Stack Lee, part of the Lee Line of riverboats, known as Cecil Brown relates in Stagolee Shot Billy, "...for speed, sumptuous cabins, elaborate cuisine - and prostitution."

At the bar, Shelton asked "Who's treating?" Someone pointed to Billy Lyons. Shelton sat at his table, where, according to several witnesses, they drank companionably until the talk turned to politics. They started throwing blows at each other's hats, Shelton eventually breaking the brim of Lyon's derby.

In turn, Lyons grabbed Shelton's Stetson, saying he wouldn't return it until he was paid for his damaged hat.

Shelton pulled a .44 Smith & Wesson revolver, shot Lyons, took the Stetson from his hand, and walked out of the bar back to his boarding house. He was arrested the next morning.

[Stagolee - Mississippi John Hurt]

***

There are hundreds of different versions of the song, variously called Stagger Lee, Stagolee, Stackerlee, Stack O'Lee, Stack-a-Lee and several other spellings, sung by musicians as far apart in style as W.C. Handy (Stack O'Lee) and The Clash (Wrong `Em Boyo).

Here's a cowboy swing version from 19 and 51, this one with the title of Stack-O-Lee, sung by Mr. Sixteen Tons himself, Tennessee Ernie Ford.

[Stack-O-Lee - Tennessee Ernie Ford]

Tennessee Ernie started off his career as a disc jockey in California in the `40s, and ended up with several chart hits under his belt, including I'll Never Be Free, a duet with Kay Starr, and his signature tune...

[Sixteen Tons excerpt]

Other artists who have recorded Stagger Lee under various titles include Bob Dylan, Taj Mahal, Duke Ellington, Woody Guthrie, Bill Haley & His Comets, Ike and Tina Turner, Fats Domino, Doc Watson, Dr. John, The Isley Brothers, and Huey Lewis And The News. One of the more notable alternate universe versions of the story was written by Robert Hunter for the Grateful Dead, where Billy's wife, Delia, hunts down down Stagger Lee and has her revenge.

[Stagger Lee - Lloyd Price]

In 19 and 59, Stagger Lee became a number one hit for Lloyd Price, selling million of copies and topping both the pop and R&B charts for a full month. At one point the single sold over 200,000 copies in one day.

Lloyd Price recorded his first Stagger Lee on September 11th, 19 and 58 as the B side of what he thought would be a hit single, You Need Love. But You Need Love flopped, while deejays thought Stagger Lee was a gas, especially with its novelty of having white backup singers behind a black lead.

Stagger Lee was on the charts by December 8th 19 and 58, and was heading nowhere but up. But Price had gone back into the studio four days earlier to record another version. Why? The story gets a little fuzzy at this point, but like Stagger Lee's nemesis, Billy, there's always one name associated with Lloyd Price's alternate version of Stagger Lee - Dick Clark.

[American Bandstand theme]

Most stories have it that Clark felt lyrics like the bullet went through Billy and it broke the bartender's glass inappropriate for American Bandstand's teen audience, and that he was the one who requested - or commanded - that Price castrate ol' Stagger Lee if he wanted to appear on the show. But at least one report has it that Price had already sung the original version at least twice earlier on both Bandstand and The Dick Clark Show with no objection from Clark.

It may have been that as the song's popularity and airplay increased, Price and/or his label, and/or Dick Clark (and/or the ABC network) may have become nervous about the complaints - many organized by the then very powerful "League of Decency"- that were pouring into radio stations about Stagger Lee's content, and someone may have decided that Price's next Bandstand appearance was the perfect time to roll out a more kid-friendly version.

What we do know is that Price rewrote and recorded the alternate version on December 4th, 1958, possibly with tongue firmly in cheek. In the new song Stagger Lee and Billy just exchange harsh words rather than gun play, Stagger retires with hurt feelings, and the two later make up. The song also includes the memorable closing lines...

Stagger Lee and Billy never fuss or fight no more
Because he got back his girlfriend and Stagger Lee was no more sore

[Stagger Lee (Bandstand Version) - Lloyd Price]

The reworked track, officially titled Stagger Lee (Bandstand Version), was reportedly intended for use only on the show, as Price gamely lip-synched the changed lyrics without breaking up. However, while never officially released, the revised single did somehow make its way out to radio stations, lending credence to the theory that it had always been intended as an alternative version for airplay. "So, you say you're getting complaints about Stagger Lee? Play this version instead. Hell the kids don't listen to the words anyway... just as long as its got a good beat, and you can dance to it."

[A Word from Our Sponsor]


There are many strange versions of Stagger Lee, but one of the strangest may be one from 19 and 28, recorded by Cliff Edwards, better known then as "Ukulele Ike," and best remembered now as the voice of Jiminy Cricket in Walt Disney's Pinocchio. Whether you realized it or not, you've almost certainly heard Edwards at least once, singing When You Wish Upon a Star.

Here's Ukulele Ike with Stack O'Lee.

[Stack O'Lee - Ukulele Ike (Cliff Edwards)]

A forgotten son of Hannibal Missouri; the man who introduced the song Singing in the Rain on screen in 19 and 29; featured in more than 100 movies; star of his own radio show and frequent guest on The Mickey Mouse Club, Cliff Edwards would die alone and penniless in California in 1971. His unclaimed body was first donated to the UCLA hospital, but - in a semi-happy ending - was later purchased and buried by the Walt Disney Company.

[When You Wish Upon a Star (excerpt) - Cliff Edwards]

The Stagger Lee story is also popular in the black community as a "toast." Not the type the white community is familiar with hearing at weddings - but a ribald, recited story in verse, precursor to rap, and usually performed solely for family and friends at stag parties. The speaker takes on the role of Stagger Lee, boasting about his badness and exploits with women, and always ending with Billy Lyons dead on the floor, victim of the speaker's still-smoking .44. Samuel L. Jackson performs a cross between song and toast in the movie Black Snake Moan, in a version of Staggolee based on R.L. Burnside's original.

[Stack-O-Lee - Samuel L. Jackson]

Recommended Reading:

Stagolee Shot Billy by Cecil Brown; the definitive book on the song and the real people behind the song. Highly recommended to all who love music history.

Stagger Lee written by Derek McCulloch and drawn by Shepherd Hendrix. Largely based on Brown's non-fiction book, McCulloch and Hendrix blend fact and fiction to tell one and more possible stories about Lee Shelton. Also highly recommended, especially for those that still feel graphic novels are just "comic books." Also worth checking out are Derek's blog largehearted boy and the graphic novel's "official" blog, Stagger Lee.

Top image: "John Canoe (with guitar) and friends," July 1935, by Alan Lomax. Public domain via the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Lomax Collection.

***
[Background - Stack O Lee Aloha - Bob Brozman]

You've been listening to the Dreamtime podcast – occasional commentary on Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour.
Dreamtime is researched and written by Fred Bals, and is a Not Associated With production. As the name says, we're not associated with XM Radio, Bob Dylan, or much of anything else.

Some of the music on Dreamtime is provided via the Podsafe Music Network. Check it out at music.podshow.dot com. The background music for the opening segment was eve, performed by Josh Roydhouse.

Remember that the Dreamtime team loves to get email. You can write us at dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com

The Dreamtime top cats are Curly Lasagna and Shaggy Bear. Our announcers are the notorious honky-tonkin' sisters, Jailbait and Joyride.

Until next time, dream well.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe - Didn't It Rain

Way back from TTRH #1, "Weather." Gospel's first national star, Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

Tharpe also makes a an appearance in the "Friends and Neighbors" episode, with Our Host mentioning her attracting 25,000 paying customers to her wedding to her manager Russell Morrison, followed by a performance at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C. in 19 and 51.