PLEDGE WEEK: “If You Wanna Be Happy” by Jimmy Soul

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Rock and roll and roll and roll your

In this week's main episode, we're taking our first trip to Jamaica and having our first look at SCAR music.

But of course, SCAR wasn't the only music to come out of the Caribbean, and Calypso music had already had a great impact on the wider music world.

Today, we're going to look at a major RB hit from 1963 that had its roots in a Calypso song from decades earlier.

We're going to look at the career of the great Trinidadian Calypso Roaring Lion and the tragic story of Jimmy Soule and If You Wanna Be Happy.

Jimmy Soule started his career as a gospel singer, but was signed to SPQR Records with a specific mandate.

Sometimes, Frank Guider, the producer for Gary U.S.

Bonsa's hits, would come up with something that Bons didn't want to record.

When that happened, Soul got to sing them instead.

This meant that Sol would often get saddled with novelty songs, like his first hit, Twist in Matilda, which managed to make number 22 in the charts.

$5,000 friends I lost.

The one money was stored, no housing car.

That was originally a Calypso song from the 1930s, and had been a hit for Harry Belafonte a few years earlier, in a non-twist version.

Soul recorded a follow-up, When Matilda Comes Back, but that had no success.

So they tried to repeat the formula with another 1930s Calypso song that Bond had rejected, this time a remake of a song from 1933, originally written and performed by the great Calypsonian Roaring Lion.

Roaring Lion was one of the most important Calypsonians of the pre-war era, and wrote many classics of the genre, including as paeens to other singers like the Four Mills Brothers.

and seen.

Among the singers on the movie screen, the Negroes are the best ever and seen.

Morton Downey went to a singing school, but the former brother, they're sweet and cool.

And

I

got nobody,

no, and nobody came for me

and Bing Crosby.

Of all the world's famous singers that I have ever seen on the movie screen.

Of all the world's famous singers that I have ever seen, on the movie screen, Lawrence De Bett, and Elson Eddie, Donald Novest, and Morton Downey, Kenny Baker,

and Rudy Valley, but the crooning prodigy has been crossed by

Those of you who know Van Dyke Parks's album of Calypso covers, Discover America, will probably recognise both those songs.

Ugly Woman was another song by Roaring Lion, and it advised men to marry ugly women rather than beautiful ones, because an ugly woman was more likely to stay with her husband.

History does not relate what Mrs.

Lion thought of that advice.

Jimmy Soule's version, retitled If You Wanna Be Happy, credited three writers along with Roaring Lion: Frank Guider, Carmella Guider, and Joseph Royster.

Though the song has very little difference from the original.

As soon as you made us headlines and scars, the things that will break this heart.

But if you make it happily warm by your wife, you'll be happy for the rest of your life.

And all the land wama won't feel contact.

Should always be a few pieces of hack.

If you wanna be happy for the rest of your life, never make a effective baby, one, but your wife's sold for my personal thought of you.

Getting an ugly girl to marry you.

The main difference between Soul's record and the original was a brief dialogue at the end, presumably included to give the other writers some reason for their credit.

That dialogue was largely inspired by Bo Diddley's earlier Sayman.

Hey, man, what's up, boy?

I want to tell you about your girlfriend.

What about my girl?

But you don't look strong enough to dictate your mission.

I'm strong enough.

I might hurt your feelings.

My feelings are already hurt by being here with you.

Well,

I was walking out of dream with your girl on this.

If You Wanna Be Happy made number one on the Billboard charts and made the top 40 in the UK, where it was also covered by an instrumental group, Peter B is Lunars.

That group, with the addition of vocalists Speryl Marsden and Rod Stewart, would later morph into Shotgun Express, before the guitarist and drummer went on to form a blues band.

And we'll be hearing more about Peter Green and Mick Fleetwood in a year or so.

While If You Wanna Be Happy made number one, the follow-up was less successful, and I'm not going to excerpt it here.

I did excerpt Why Noni Harris's Bloodshot Eyes in the main podcast, and had to think long and hard about including a song that trivialised domestic abuse the way that song does.

But Jimmy Soul's next single, Treat'em Tough, goes much further.

It is essentially the same tune as If You Wanna Be Happy, but rather than the dated but arguably humorous misogyny of advocating marrying an ugly woman, which is pretty much par for the course for 1930s humour, it just flat out advocates beating up women to keep them in line.

I won't excerpt that, and I don't suggest you seek it out.

It's a quite vile record.

That only went to number 108, and Soule never had another hit and joined the army.

He became a drug addict and died in prison in 1988, aged 47.

Roaring Lion had a rather happier ending, dying in 1999, aged 91, after 65 successful years in the music business.

In the spell

called the rolling rock and rhythm of the sea.