chapter six
The “5” Royales: (left to right, clockwise from top) Jimmy Moore, Johnny Tanner, Lowman “Pete” Pauling, Eugene Tanner, and Obediah Carter.
(Michael Ochs Archives/Stringer)
Don Robey did not have a merry Christmas in 1954. Up until Christmas Eve, the year had been very good to him. His Buffalo Booking Agency, administered by the formidable Evelyn Johnson, handled bookings in the area for just about every major black touring act, and acted as an exclusive booking agency for B. B. King, among others. His Bronze Peacock club was also the only conceivable stop for first-class touring acts coming through Houston, and it was one of the swankiest clubs on the circuit, which is why acts vied for week-long engagements there. Robey treated his people well most of the time. His record labels were doing just okay nationally, but locally Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown was racking up local hits, the Songbird label’s gospel records were steady sellers, and Duke, the label he’d bought to acquire Johnny Ace, had proven a great investment; ever since Ace had been with Robey, every single one of his records had been an R&B top-ten seller. His next one, “Pledging My Love,” looked like it was going to go through the roof, so Robey was holding back on releasing it until after Christmas was over. Ace was going to premiere it at the grand Christmas Eve show at Houston City Auditorium, where he’d headline over a bunch of Robey-managed acts, including Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, who was sharing a dressing room with Ace and his band.
Accounts of what actually happened there differ, but not wildly. Anyone would tell you that Johnny Ace loved guns and carried them with him all the time. In part, this was something a lot of performers—not just black ones—who worked the club circuit had to do. Often, threatening the club owner or concert promoter was the only way to get the money legitimately owed you out of them at evening’s end. Robberies in dressing rooms were not unknown. Johnny, though, was a bit too gun-crazy, shooting road signs when on tour and displaying his weapon at inappropriate times. One version of Christmas Eve has him pulling his gun in front of a female admirer who objected, whereupon he told her he knew what he was doing, put the gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger, having forgotten that there was a bullet in the chamber. Other versions having him playing Russian roulette, although just why he’d want to do this is never explained. The caliber of the gun is disputed: some say it was a .22, others a .32. Whatever happened, one thing was clear: in a second, Johnny Ace was dead. The incident would propel “Pledging My Love” to the top of the charts and instigate a weird death cult among black teenage girls, who erected shrines to him in their bedrooms in extreme cases. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. Don Robey, once he got over the shock, knew just what to do; he took all the stuff Ace had recorded and released a ten-inch LP album, the Johnny Ace Memorial Album, one of R&B’s first long players.
Sam Phillips was doing a bit better; “Good Rockin’ Tonight” was selling well, and on January 1, 1955, Elvis had signed a management deal with Bob Neal, a local country music figure who had great connections in both the world of clubs and in Nashville. With Neal in the picture, Scotty Moore could stop booking the band and go back to doing what he did best: playing guitar. And Elvis’s fame was spreading beyond Tennessee; that Texas connection had proven firm, and Elvis, Scotty, and Bill had played a big New Year’s Eve show in Houston. A larger Texas tour was in the offing, and at some point early in the year, they went to Lubbock, way out in west Texas, but a town with a university and a legendary club, the Cotton Club, not named after the place in Harlem, but for one of the area’s main crops. Managed by Western swing fiddler Tommy Hancock, it featured black and white entertainment (on separate evenings, of course), up to and including Duke Ellington and Ernest Tubb. Naturally, Elvis drew a crowd of curious locals, including an up-and-coming country duo and their manager. Charles Hardin “Buddy” Holley and Bob Montgomery played “Western and Bop,” according to their business card, which also gave their management contact as Hi Pockets Duncan, a DJ on local country station KDAV. Buddy and Bob played whatever gigs they could, and studied the competition thoroughly. They also recorded some at the radio station during its downtime. But, like most Lubbock teens, they didn’t actually listen to the station; country music was just a bit square. It was something of a revelation to see this kid their own age tearing it up onstage at the Cotton Club. In between sets, Buddy and Bob went over to talk to the kid, who was sitting alone in a corner drinking a Coke. “You know,” Buddy told Hi Pockets later, “he’s a really nice, friendly fellow.” The next day, there was a show at a Pontiac dealership’s grand opening, and Elvis, Scotty, and Bill played that, as did Buddy and Bob, and they struck up something of a friendship with the guys from Tennessee. And in the next few weeks, Buddy and Bob were getting more and more requests for Elvis Presley tunes, so they learned them. The next time Elvis came, he’d moved up to a bus, which Buddy and Bob intercepted at the city limits. Elvis got out and into their car, and they took him on a tour of Lubbock’s hot spots, such as they were, and then opened for him at the Cotton Club.
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On the West Coast, the arrival of the new wave shook things up. Modern was the first victim: they all but shuttered the Modern label, and concentrated everything on their relatively new RPM label, which had the only consistently selling artist in their roster, B. B. King. They did use Modern to introduce Etta James, whose “The Wallflower” (also known as “Roll with Me, Henry”) was a cleaned-up version of “Work with Me, Annie” where the work was clearly dancing. White singer Georgia Gibbs hopped right on it, and her version of the tune, “Dance with Me, Henry” (alsoknown as “Wallflower”), was a #1 pop hit in March. (Gibbs had already started the year with a cover of LaVern Baker’s “Tweedle Dee,” which cut off Baker’s rise on the pop charts right away. It was her first record, and she and the folks at Atlantic, which had issued the original, weren’t pleased.) At least Hank Ballard had a sense of humor about James’s (and Gibbs’s) appropriation of his tune, and released “Henry’s Got Flat Feet (Can’t Dance No More)” later in the year. But James’s stay with Modern wouldn’t last long.
Over at Specialty, Art Rupe was having trouble with everything but gospel. His relationship with Johnny Vincent was going sour and resulted in Vincent’s striking out on his own with Ace Records (named after a brand of comb) based in Jackson, Mississippi, but with Vincent’s ears still cocked to New Orleans for talent. But Rupe desperately needed someone on the ground in New Orleans. In order to try to modernize his roster of R&B artists, he’d picked up an ambitious young black kid from Seattle (where he’d worked in a jazz band that had Ray Charles as pianist and a young trumpet player, Quincy Jones), Robert “Bumps” Blackwell. Blackwell had a good rapport with musicians, and, although not a top-notch instrumentalist, he had a way with arrangements, and Rupe figured he’d make a good producer. He set him to plowing through the demo tapes that were piling up at the office, and on his second week, he found a tape that had been mailed in a brown paper bag with grease stains on it. When he threaded it onto the machine, a voice said, “Mr. Art Rupe, you are now going to hear Little Richard and his Upsetters.” He listened to a bit, then tossed the tape onto a pile of stuff to be mailed back to the senders. “The reason we listened to it a second time,” Rupe remembered later, “was that Richard kept calling us and bothering us. He was calling us practically every other day.” There was a reason for that; Richard was desperate. His records for Don Robey hadn’t sold—the ones that had finally been issued, that is—and he was working the very lowest level of the chitlin’ circuit when he wasn’t washing dishes in the Macon bus station for a living. Rupe, his patience exhausted, went down to the audition studio and had Blackwell dig out the tape so they could both listen to it. “I made the decision that Richard did not sound like B. B. King, but he had the same feeling, and that, coupled with the gospel sound and a little more energy, was the basis for us being interested and deciding to sign him.” In early March, he sent Richard’s manager, Clint Brantley, a contract and set up a session in Atlanta. Unfortunately, it developed that Richard was still under contract to Robey, so the session was canceled until arrangements were made to buy him out of that contract. It took a while.
The vocal-group thing hadn’t really taken off in California yet, with a couple of exceptions. Capitol had signed the Five Keys, who’d had an immense hit in 1951 with “The Glory of Love” on Aladdin and then disappeared. They started 1955 off with a novelty hit, “Ling Ting Tong,” a racist bit about the title character, who lived in Chinatown and had a song he sung: “Eye a smokum boo-eye-ay, eye a smokum boo.” It’s unlikely many Chinese Americans bought the record, but plenty of other people did; it almost made the top ten on the pop charts. The vocal group record that did make the top-ten pop, though, was one nobody would have predicted: “Earth Angel” by the Penguins. Despite being primitive and seemingly uncopyable, the Crew-Cuts jumped in with their anodyne version, which chased the Penguins up and down the charts. The Penguins, however, did much better on the jukebox charts, which probably reflected better what teenagers really wanted. Realizing this, Mercury Records in Chicago went to the Penguins’ manager, a guy named Buck Ram, who’d kicked around LA doing arrangements for bands, and begged him to let them sign the group. Ram agreed, as long as they’d also take another group he’d been managing, the Platters, who’d flopped on King. Mercury figured it’d be worth the risk; the Penguins clearly had what record buyers wanted, and the Platters didn’t, but if that was what it took, they’d sign the deal. Of course, the Penguins never had anything close to a hit after that, but Ram had added a woman to the Platters, Zola Taylor, and somehow she was the missing element. They were allowed to cut a single in April, lead singer Tony Williams found a voice he’d never used in the studio before, the other Platters closed in around him with harmonies, and “Only You (And You Alone)” became the first of 45 crossover chart records for the group.
In Chicago, the Chess brothers were doing just fine. Muddy Waters, it seemed, could do no wrong, and Howlin’ Wolf was right behind him. Little Walter still hadn’t surpassed “Juke,” but not for want of trying, and the group Allen Freed had brought them, the Moonglows, had hit big with “Sincerely,” so big that their stay on the pop charts was only broken by the McGuire Sisters’ cover, which went to the top. No matter—the group had more where that came from, and “We Belong Together” followed shortly, and didn’t get covered—or pop airplay. The brothers’ open-door policy paid off yet again in February, when Ellas McDaniel and Billy Boy Arnold showed up with a demo they’d cut, “I’m a Man” and “Uncle John.” Asked to return the next day, McDaniel and Arnold found an audience waiting to hear the demo: Muddy Waters, Little Walter, and both Chess brothers. Everyone loved both tunes. “Uncle John” had a pounding, insistent beat over which McDaniel sang what were essentially nursery rhymes, and “I’m a Man” exuded menace over a slow, stop-time backing. A couple of changes had to be made, though; it was bad enough that McDaniel, in real life a retired boxer, looked like an accountant with his black-framed glasses, but the name had to go. Billy Boy remembered the Southern practice of nailing a wire to a barn and attaching the other end to a broom, then twanging it to make sounds: the diddley-bow. His friend became Bo Diddley, and the next day, March 2, they split a session, with a friend of theirs, Jerome Green, playing maracas. Billy Boy’s songs didn’t get issued. Bo Diddley’s did, and “Bo Diddley” and “I’m a Man” was a two-sided hit right out of the box.
If we had to pick a moment when rock & roll was born as a major movement in American popular music (and we don’t), May 1955 would be a good candidate. Bill Haley and the Comets had launched their sanitized version of Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll” in August 1954, but his follow-ups like “Mambo Rock” and “Birth of the Boogie” didn’t do nearly as well. Then, in May, something with a little more attitude and a lot better beat started showing life. “Rock Around the Clock” had been released in 1954 and had just lain there, but someone had made a film about juvenile delinquency in high school, The Blackboard Jungle, and as a way of starting it off with the right atmosphere, had run the song over the film’s opening moments. That was all that was necessary; kids ran to the record stores for a copy of the song, and in May 1955, it topped the charts. Haley was a very unlikely teen idol—chubby, thirty years old, with a ridiculous spit curl on his forehead—and the rest of the Comets were around the same age, but there was something challenging, a line drawn in the sand, around this rather mild-sounding record. Something else happened, too: the film was released in England.
In mid-May, Muddy Waters told the Chess brothers about a guitar-and-piano duo he’d caught in a St. Louis club, the Cosmopolitan. Chuck Berry and Johnny Johnson had decided to see if they could get something going in Chicago and had contacted Muddy when they got into town. Berry said that Chess was his first choice and that he had just presented himself there, but other sources suggest that he’d been tossed out of Mercury first and had maybe gone to Vee-Jay. But the Chess brothers had heard Muddy’s enthusiasm, and then Berry walked in with a demo tape he and Johnson had made. The song Berry was trying to sell was “Wee Wee Hours,” which Johnson accurately referred to as “a regular old blues in G,” but the song that lit up Phil Chess’s ears was Berry’s version of a country song, a fiddle tune with a long and venerable history, “Ida Red.” It had been recorded by Bob Wills (in 1950, as “Ida Red Loves the Boogie”), by Jack Guthrie, and, probably the version Berry emulated because it was fairly current, Cowboy Copas. Berry, an admirer of Louis Jordan’s tricky wordplay, had recast the lyrics, turning them into an exciting car chase as the singer pursues his girlfriend, running away with another guy. Said Phil Chess, it was “different … Like nothing we’d heard before. We figured if we could get that sound down on record we’d have a hit … The song had a new kind of feel about it.” Of course, as “Ida Red,” it couldn’t be copyrighted, being traditional, so they suggested Berry work on another title. Since he’d also trained as a cosmetologist, he came up with “Maybellene,” after the popular line of cosmetics, and then fiddled with the melody of the chorus a tiny bit. On May 21, they (Berry, Johnson, drummer Ebby Hardy, Chess house bassist Willie Dixon, and the omnipresent Jerome Green on maracas) went into the studio and cut it. It took them forever, since Phil and Leonard had no idea what they were looking for, and at one point, they stuck a microphone in the bathroom for Berry to sing into and get some echo. Berry claims it took thirty-five takes to get it right. But oh, did they get it right. So right that they didn’t release it for two months; “Bo Diddley” was still selling well, and Muddy’s version of “I’m a Man,” entitled “Manish [sic] Boy,” was also a big hit. “Maybellene” (with “Wee Wee Hours” on the back) sat in the can for two months until Leonard went to New York for a business meeting with Alan Freed. He left an acetate of the record—no names, no song titles—with him and said, “Play this.” Freed did. “By the time I got back to Chicago, Freed had called a dozen times, saying it was his biggest record ever.” Chess was very conservative about new records, rarely pressing more than two thousand copies on a first run. “Maybellene” got them to press ten thousand just to satisfy the demand coming out of New York (on one show, Freed apparently played the record straight for two hours), and then things went insane. Cover versions (one by country singer Marty Robbins) appeared and were ignored. Answer records (“Come Back Maybellene”) were recorded and ignored. Only the original would do. Teenagers purchasing copies and spinning it on jukeboxes certainly didn’t notice that the first pressing listed Chuck Berry as sole author, and that pressings made after August added Alan Freed and one Russ Fratto, landlord of the building Chess was in. It’s easy enough to see why Chess would cut Freed in for a piece of the pie, and one could speculate several good reasons for the landlord’s presence in the credits, although Leonard Chess’s son Marshall’s speculation that Berry set the deal up with him as a cash advance against royalties seems unlikely; he hadn’t become as sophisticated about the music business as he later became.
Another thing that happened in May was that Lew Chudd finally got the breakthrough he’d been hoping for from Fats Domino. Since “The Fat Man” in 1950, Fats had done well on the R&B charts, but although some pop radio played him, he hadn’t charted. All that changed with “Ain’t That a Shame,” a mid-tempo song with a strolling piano line right up front and Fats’s winsome vocal singing about heartbreak. It was irresistible, and not only topped the R&B charts, but also got to #10 on the pop charts and established him there. Chudd then grabbed another Dave Bartholomew–produced number he had by the guitarist Smiley Lewis, an old New Orleans tune called “I Hear You Knockin’,” with yet another talented local pianist, Huey Smith, doing the honors, and got a hit out of that, too. Chudd seemed to have a lock on New Orleans, although the Chess brothers were trying to get a foothold there. In January, they’d gotten lucky with a vocal group called the Hawkettes, because they’d gotten their record “Mardi Gras Mambo” out in time for citywide saturation during that period, but the group was unstable and vanished, which was a shame; the young kid who’d sung the lead vocal, Aaron Neville, seemed to have something. (In October, via Johnny Vincent, they also put out a record by Bobby Charles, who’d sung “See You Later, Alligator” to one of the brothers over the phone. A couple of months later, they were shocked to discover that his real name was Robert Charles Guidry and that he was a white Cajun.)
As for Elvis, he’d been playing the Louisiana Hayride when he wasn’t touring. A lot of the touring he was doing was on package shows, often headlined by Hank Snow, a diminutive Canadian who’d been cranking out hits since the ’40s and who was managed by a large, rough—some would say crude—man called Colonel Tom Parker. Parker claimed to be an orphan who’d grown up in Florida, and had actually been a dogcatcher in Tampa for a while before getting a job with a traveling carnival. Carnivals were a prime outlet for up-and-coming country stars, and one, a tall, handsome lad with a fine voice, caught Parker’s eye. Eddy Arnold was on his way to stardom, and Parker signed him to a management contract, which meant that when Arnold signed with RCA Records, Parker was exposed to a major record company and its workings. Everyone agreed that negotiating with Parker was essentially a lost cause; if you wanted Eddy Arnold, you dealt with the Colonel (an honorary title he’d gotten from the governor of Louisiana, former country star Jimmie Davis), and although he made the occasional small concession, he won all the big points. The carnival never left his blood; while Arnold was up onstage singing, the Colonel, a cigar jammed in his mouth, was hawking Eddy Arnold songbooks, souvenir programs, and glossy photographs (which the star would sign after the show). Attempts to change Arnold’s fees were doomed; Parker would never budge. In fact, his unwillingness to budge cost him his star. Nobody’s sure exactly what happened, but in 1953, Arnold fired him. Parker continued to book Arnold, but that was it. He had various other things going, especially with a few country artists, but by early 1954, he was working exclusively with Hank Snow, also an RCA artist, whose show also included his young son, Jimmie Rodgers Snow. With Elvis now in possession of a contract with the Louisiana Hayride, he was performing often on bills with both Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow, and Parker was becoming more and more interested in him.
On February 6, Elvis was booked on a show at Ellis Auditorium in Memphis, a good-sized venue where he performed fourth on the bill below Faron Young, Ferlin Husky, and gospel singer Martha Carson. His new manager, Bob Neal, had set up a meeting with Elvis and Scotty, Tom Parker, Sam Phillips, Oscar Davis (Parker’s advance man), and Tom Diskin, who was a partner with the Colonel and Snow in Jamboree Attractions, the firm that handled the Hank Snow tours. Elvis was already booked on one, starting a few days hence, and Neal thought it would be a good idea to get all the people in Elvis’s professional life together in one place, a restaurant around the corner from the Ellis. From all reports, it was pretty tense. Parker started off by insulting Sam, who had already developed a strong dislike for the old carny, by saying that Elvis wouldn’t get far on Sun—certainly not as far as he would on RCA. Neal had to calm things down by introducing the subject of the coming tour, and noting that by working with Parker, he’d be able to get Elvis into territories he hadn’t yet played, thus increase record sales. Neal and Parker were already working together on setting up tours and were looking forward to working together in the future. Elvis and Scotty just sat silently while this drama was going on and eventually left to play the show.
The tour went as planned; all through west Texas, one of Elvis’s best markets, and, in May, down to Florida, where he met a woman named Mae Boren Axton, who was a promoter and had been balancing teaching school, journalism, and songwriting. She interviewed him and worked with Parker on promoting the shows, and noticed his increasing interest in Elvis; he had, she later said, “dollar marks in his eyes.” An RCA promotion man who was down there to help out Jimmie Rodgers Snow was impressed by Elvis, and, seeing Parker’s interest, went to a record store and bought Elvis’s complete catalog—four singles, at that point—and took them back to Nashville to give to Steve Sholes, the head of RCA’s country division. He, too, was impressed. But there was no other movement; Elvis’s agreement with Bob Neal had been renegotiated and now ran through 1956. Country music, though, was changing slightly. Twenty-three-year-old Faron Young was aiming for younger fans when he recorded “Going Steady” in 1953, his first hit, and he almost edged into juvenile delinquent territory with his 1955 hit “Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young (And Leave a Beautiful Memory),” and the charts even welcomed two of Elvis’s Sun records that year: “Baby Let’s Play House” (a cover of R&B artist Arthur Gunter) and “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone,” a song written by a Memphis fan, and “I Forgot to Remember to Forget,” written by a young singer Sam was working with, Charlie Feathers, which had Junior Parker’s “Mystery Train” on the other side. Neither of these dented the pop charts; Elvis was still an eccentric country artist. Still, other country hopefuls took notice. Roy Orbison, who had a band with its own radio show elsewhere in west Texas, thought he was disgusting and dressed badly; Bob Luman vowed to practice guitar more. Buddy and Bob, in Lubbock, went to Nesman Recording Studios in Wichita Falls, as well as a studio in Dallas—a long haul—and the KDAV studios where they now had a show, and recorded a bunch of originals as demos to circulate to any record companies that might come knocking. They were pretty straight country tunes, and the boys had occasional help in the studio from fiddler Sonny Curtis and drummer Jerry Allison.
As inevitably happens, summer passes and it’s back to school again. Alan Freed celebrated this by renting the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre for the week of September 2 to hold his back-to-school show, featuring Tony Bennett, the Harptones, Nappy Brown, the Moonglows, the Red Prysock Band (whose singles in 1955 included “Rock and Roll” and “Zonked”), and, for the first time outside St. Louis and Chicago’s clubs, Chuck Berry, singing his hit “Maybellene,” and, at a climactic part of his short performance (the acts only got to do a couple of songs in order to keep the show moving, and in any event, that’s as many as most of them had in their repertoire), sticking the bottom of the guitar into his stomach, extending the neck straight out, and, picking a repetitive pattern, executing an odd, bent-kneed walk across the stage, head bobbing in rhythm like a duck. The kids went wild. And there were lots of kids; Freed had no problem filling the theater show after show, grossing $154,000 for the week. Even after paying off production costs and cutting in his manager, Morris Levy, and WINS, his station, that was a pretty nice payday.
Freed might not have had a problem, but there was an increasing worry that American society had one. The Blackboard Jungle was an attempt to deal with it, as was, perhaps more sympathetically, Rebel Without a Cause. The former provoked riots in theaters—not all the time, but enough that some chains blocked it—and its story about kids out of control in the nation’s public schools hit home. In its most symbolic scene, a teacher, played by Richard Riley, brings in his jazz records to try to reach the students in his inner-city classroom and they not only make fun of his taste but smash the records. There’s no rock & roll (or, indeed, any music) in Rebel, based on a real-life case study from 1944 by Los Angeles psychologist Robert M. Lindner, but the three teenagers at its center were compelling. James Dean plays the seventeen-year-old Jim, a confused teenager who’s new in town and has been picked up by the police for being drunk in public. Also at the police station are John, a smart but confused young man whose nickname is Plato, played by Sal Mineo, and Judy, played by Natalie Wood. As outsiders at their high school, they bond over their problems with their parents, and engage in some antisocial activity like drag racing, which winds up getting another delinquent youth killed. The subversive message of the film, although it has a fairly happy ending, is that sometimes bad behavior on the part of teenagers is due to a bad upbringing at home, and that parents bear some responsibility for how their kids act out. This was a fairly radical notion for most of the country, and the fact that teenagers flocked to see the film again and again was upsetting. The fact that at least part of the reason they did so was to gaze on James Dean and Natalie Wood (and, perhaps some of them, the gay Sal Mineo) seemed not to matter. And of course there was the unspoken bit: although one rarely saw black people in anything but menial positions in films (although one of the juvenile delinquents in Glenn Ford’s classroom is played by a young Sidney Poitier), rock & roll seemed to be either black people or white trash who were little better, socially speaking.
Ah, but worse was to come: with the recording sessions with Little Richard on hold until he could get his release from Don Robey, it was mid-September before Art Rupe and Richard’s manager could get something together, and this time the most convenient place was New Orleans. Bumps Blackwell was still learning his job, and Rupe cast him into the fire: supervise a recording session with this guy and come back with a hit. On September 13, Bumps, Richard, and a handful of Dave Bartholomew’s musicians convened at Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Studio, site of all of New Orleans’s hits (and still the only recording studio in town) and took stock of one another. Lee Allen and Red Tyler were on saxophones, Earl Palmer was on drums, and Huey Smith was on piano. Smith was later to say, “I played on the session before he became a piano player,” and it’s true that next to New Orleans pianists like Fats Domino or Roy “Professor Longhair” Byrd, Georgia-born Richard wasn’t much of a virtuoso, and Richard felt the resentment in the studio: “They thought I was stupid and crazy and that I didn’t know where I was going.” They managed four songs that day, mostly slow blues, which is what Richard had been cutting for RCA and Peacock, and nobody was happy. These were tame numbers that he used to fill out his stage act. The next day they came back again and did four more tunes, and still nothing was happening. Bumps called a lunch break, and everyone headed down to the Dew Drop Inn, where Richard had played a number of times, as presumably the other musicians had, too. They ordered food and some drinks, and Richard spied the piano up on the bandstand. He jumped up and started playing a number he usually reserved for his shows at gay bars: “A-wop-bopa-lubop-a-good-god-damn! Tutti frutti, good booty!” and giving out with an Alex Bradford / Ray Charles gospel whoop. He was going nuts, beyond the pale of decent behavior with the lyrics, although not nearly as far beyond as some of the stuff that had been performed on the Dew Drop Inn’s stage. He was also doing something that even inexperienced Bumps Blackwell could recognize as something different and new. But … those lyrics! Art Rupe had provided Blackwell with a huge list of resources in New Orleans, and among them was a songwriter named Dorothy Labostrie. He ran to the bar’s phone and called her to come to J&M and help rewrite the song. Richard was horrified; he couldn’t even recite those lyrics to a lady! Bumps and Mrs. Labostrie reassured him that she was married and had had children and was there to help him out, so Richard took her into a corner and whispered the lyrics, line by line, as she scribbled into a notebook. Time was running out, the musicians were getting antsy, and the saxophonists were already breaking down their instruments and putting them into their cases. There was fifteen minutes left on the clock, not enough time for Huey Smith to learn the piano part, which meant Richard re-creating his performance from the Dew Drop Inn. “Wait a minute!” Bumps said to the horn players as Mrs. Labostrie finished up and showed him the lyrics. Richard took to the piano and laid out an arrangement with Bumps’s help, and ten minutes later they had two takes. The musicians still thought it was stupid—“It sounded stupid to me when we did it,” guitarist Justin Adams said later. “It wasn’t sayin’ nothin’. But I still get checks off of it!” The real key to the session, though, was drummer Earl Palmer, whose almost mechanical backbeat propelled the song without a hint of swing. “I just felt that’s what it called for,” he said with characteristic modesty. “I didn’t think much of it at the time, that it was startin’ anything.” Oh, but it did; in the five minutes those two takes took, Earl Palmer had invented rock & roll drumming, setting a rhythmic template that would endure for decades and make him a wealthy, if unknown, musician. Little Richard, too, had invented something; reaching back through years of striving, of living in a shadow world of black Southern gay bars, of hollering his lungs out while washing dishes in bus stations and dives, he had finished inventing Little Richard. Blackwell took the tape back to Los Angeles, telling Mr. Rupe that it was the next “Maybellene,” because, as Rupe explained, “It was up-tempo and had novelty lyrics. Actually, the reason I picked it wasn’t solely for the tempo, it was because of the wild intro … What was interesting was how rapidly that thing caught on. I don’t think we had had a record catch on that fast.” By December, it was working its way up the pop charts—the pop charts!
America was about to enter a state of emergency. Already it was marshalling its defenses; in Nashville, Charles Eugene “Pat” Boone, a clean-cut, well-spoken young man who might have been some mad scientist’s attempt at an anti-Elvis, was toiling away on Randy Woods’s Dot label, releasing anodyne covers of black records: “Ain’t That a Shame,” “At My Front Door (Crazy Little Mama),” and, unbelievably enough, almost simultaneously with the original, “Tutti Frutti.” (That didn’t do too well, but there was more to come.) Studies were launched to see if this music caused juvenile delinquency. At least there was hope in the year’s biggest fad: Walt Disney had a television program, Disneyland, which, like the amusement park, divided its weekly shows into Tomorrowland, Adventureland, Fantasyland, and Frontierland, and the Frontierland parts were serializing the life of Davy Crockett, the Tennessee outdoorsman who’d left the state for Texas (his famous quote, delivered to the Tennessee legislature, where he was serving: “I will go to Texas and you can go to hell”) and died during the Texas revolution defending the Alamo. The episodes’ theme song was a tremendous hit for no fewer than four performers (Bill Hayes, “Tennessee” Ernie Ford, Fess Parker, who played Crockett in Disney’s series, and Walter Schumann) and set off a fad for coonskin caps and BB guns.
But, as 1955 ended and the Drifters’ “White Christmas” started making its annual ascent of the charts, the change was only starting.