Episode 50: “Honky Tonk” by Bill Doggett

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs

by Andrew Hickey.

Episode 50

Honky Tonk

by Bill Doggett

Welcome to the 50th episode of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs.

We're now 10% of the way through our story, and also most of the way through 1956.

I'm told that when history podcasts hit a big round number it's customary for them to do a jumping on episode, perhaps a story so far which covers everything that's been discussed up to that point, but in brief so that new listeners can get up to speed.

That's sort of what I'm about to do here.

This week we're going to look at a hit song from 1956, but by someone whose career interacted with almost everyone in the first twenty or so episodes of the podcast.

We're going to look again at some of that old music, not as isolated records by different artists, but as stages in the career of a single individual.

We're going to look at someone who was a jobbing musician, who'd take any job that was on offer, but who by virtue of just being a hard working, competent jobbing player and arranger, managed to have an astonishing influence on the development of music.

While rock and roll was primarily a vocal music, it wasn't a completely clean break with the past.

And for most of the decades, from the 1920s through to the early 50s, if you wanted music for dancing, you would want instrumental groups.

The big bands did employ vocalists, of course, but you can tell who the focus was on from looking at the names of the bands.

The Betty Goodman Orchestra, the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the Duke Ellington Orchestra, the Count Basie Orchestra.

All of the leaders of the big bands were instrumentalists.

They played clarinet, or trombone, or piano.

They didn't sing.

It was only with the musicians' union strikes of the nineteen forties, which we've talked about before, that more through necessity than anything else, the music industry moved from being dominated by instrumental music to being dominated by singers.

But well into the 1960s, we'll still be seeing rock and roll hits that were purely instrumental.

Indeed, we probably wouldn't have rock and roll guitar bands at all without instrumental groups like The Ventures in the US or The Shadows in the UK who had hits with pure instrumental records.

And one of the greatest of the early rock and roll instrumentals was by someone who didn't actually consider himself a rock and roll musician.

It's a record that influenced everyone from James Brown to the Beach Boys, and it's called Honky Tonk.

There is surprisingly little information out there about Bill Doggett for someone who had such an impact on the fields of rock and roll, blues, jazz, and soul.

There are no books about his life, and the only website devoted to him is one designed by his nephew, which

has all the flaws one might expect from a website put together about someone's uncle.

Doggett was born in 1916 in Philadelphia, and he moved to New York in his late teens and formed his own band, for which he was the piano player.

But in 1938, Lucky Melinda was looking for a new band.

The way Millinder worked was that he bought out and took over the leadership of existing bands, which then became the Lucky Millinder Orchestra.

This incarnation of the Lucky Millinda Orchestra, the one that was put together by Duggett before Millinder took the band over, is the one that got a residency at the Savoy.

after Chick Webb's band stopped playing there.

And like Webb's band, this group was managed by Mo Gale Dockett stayed on with Melinda as his pianist and while with the group he appeared with Millinder in the 1938 all-black film Paradise in Harlem playing on this song

Doggetts was, from what I can tell, the de facto musical director for Millinder's band in this period.

Millinder was a front man and occasional singer, but he couldn't play an instrument and was reliant on the musicians in his band to work the arrangements out for him.

Doggett was in the band when Mo Gale suggested that Sister Rosetta Tharpe would work well paired up with Millinda's main singer, Trevor Bacon, in the same way that Louis Jordan and Ella Fitzgerald had worked well together in the Chick Webber band.

Doggett was the pianist during the whole of Tharpe's time with the Millinda band, and he co-composed with Millinda the song that later gave its title to a biography of Tharp, Shout, Sister, Shout.

A reason for it's dimple, but there ain't no reason for a man so simple.

Shout, there's a stout.

Shout, there's tension.

I'm telling you.

Shout,

If you listen to any of Tharp's big band recordings from her time with Millinda, it's Dogit on the piano, and I strongly suspect it was Doggett who came up with the arrangements.

Listen, for example, to his playing on Lonesome Road, another song that the Millinda band performed on film.

The Millinda band were pivotal in the move from swing music to RB, and Doggett was an important part in that move.

While he'd left the band before they took on later singers, like Wainoni Harris and Ruth Brown, he had helped set the band up to be the kind of band that those singers would feel comfortable in.

Doggett was also in the band when they had their biggest hit, a song called When the Lights Go On Again, All Over the World.

When the lights go on again,

all

over the world.

That's most notable now for being one of the the first recordings of a young trumpeter who was just starting out by the name of Dizzy Gillespie.

Gillespie was quickly sacked by Millinder, who had a habit of getting rid of musicians before they reached their full potential.

I've not been able to find out why Doggett left Millinder, whether he was one of those musicians who was sacked, or whether he just wanted to move on to other things.

But whatever the reason, it can't have been been anything that put a stain on his reputation, because Doggett remained with Millander's manager, Mo Gale.

We've mentioned Gale before several times, but he was the manager of almost every important black act based in New York in the late 30s and early 40s, as well as running the Savoy Club, which we talked about in several of the earliest episodes of the podcast.

Gale managed Millander and Rosetta Tharpe, and also managed The Ink Spots, Ella Fitzgevald, Chick Webb, and Louis Jordan.

And so, whenever one of his acts needed a musician, he would tend to find them from his existing pool of talent.

And so, this is how, straight after leaving Lucky Millander's band, Doggett found himself working for another Gale act, The Inkspots.

He joined them as their pianist and arranger, and stayed with them for several years.

What care I

say

I'll get by

as

long

as I

have

you

I'll get by

Oh, yes, honey child

I'll get by

Just as long as I have you.

The Inkspots, if you don't remember, were a vocal quartet who became the most popular black act of the 40s, and who stuck to a unique formula based around Bill Kenney's high tenor and Hoppy Jones's low-spoken bass.

They had hit after hit during the 40s with songs that all sound remarkably similar, and in the mid-40s, those songs were arranged by Bill Doggett.

He was with the group for two years, starting with the classic line-up of the group and staying with them through Charlie Fouquet being drafted and Deke Watson being fired.

While he was a sideman, rather than a full member of the group, he was important enough to them that he now gets counted in lists of proper members put together by historians of the band.

He ended up leaving them less than two weeks before Happy Jones died, and during that time he played on fourteen of their hit singles, almost all of them sticking to the same formula they'd used previously, the top and bottom.

And whenever they croon

our favourite tune, a tear falls with every

rhyme.

Oh, how I miss you

Every night about this time

Every night about this time, honey

That's when I miss you The different acts managed by Mo Gale all sat in with each other when needed so for example Trevor Bacon, the male vocalist with Millander's Band, temporarily joined the Ink Spots when Deke Watson got sick for a few weeks.

And so, during the times when the Inkspots weren't touring, Doggett would also perform with Ella Fitzgerald, who was also managed by Gail.

For heaven knows,

and time will tell

Though

I know so well.

And indeed, during the end of Doggett's time with the Ink Spot, Fitzgerald recorded a number of hit singles with the group, which of course featured Doggett on the piano.

That included this one, which later went on to be the basis of Train Kept a Rolling, which we looked at a few episodes back.

Doggett moved over full time to become Ella's arranger and pianist at some point during the couple of weeks between Deke Watson leaving the Ink Spot and Hoppy Jones dying in early October 1944 and stayed with her for a couple of years.

before moving on to Illinois Jaquette's band, taking the same role again in the band that introduced the honking tenor saxophone into RB and thus into rock and roll.

He also played on one of the most important records in 40s RB, Johnny Otis's Harlem Nocturne, the first hit for the man who would go on to produce most of the great RB artists of the fifties.

And he also led his own band for a while, the Bill Doggett Octet.

They were the ones who recorded Be Babba Liba with Helen Humes on vocals, the song that probably inspired Gene Vincent to write a very similarly named song a few years later.

He then moved on to Louis Jordan's band full-time, and this is where his career really starts.

Jordan was another act in Mo Gale's stable, and indeed, just like the Ink Spots, he'd had hits duetting with Ella Fitzgerald, who he'd first worked with back in the 1930s in Chick Webb's band.

He was also, as you may remember from earlier episodes, the leader of the most popular R and B group in the late 40s and early 50s, the one that inspired everyone from Chuck Berry to Bill Haley.

And as with his tenure with the Inkspots, Doggett was in Jordan's band during its period of peak commercial success.

The timeline for who Doggett played with when, as you can probably tell, is all over the place, because he seemed to be playing with two or three acts at any given time.

And so officially, if you look at the timelines so far as they exist, you see that it's generally claimed that Bill Doggett joined Louis Jordan in 1949.

But I've seen interviews with members of Jordan's organisation that suggest he joined much earlier, but he would alternate with Jordan's other piano player, Wilde Bill Davis.

The way they worked, according to Burl Adams, who was involved in Jordan's management, was that Davis would spend a week on the road as Jordan's piano player, while Doggett would spend the same week writing arrangements for the group, and then they would swap over, and Doggett would go out on the road, while Davis would write arrangements.

Either way, after a while, Doggett became the sole pianist for the group, as Davis struck out on his own, and Doggett once again basically became the musical director for one of the biggest bands in the RB business.

Doggett is often credited as the person who rewrote Saturday Night Fish Fry into one of Jordan's biggest hits from its inauspicious original version, though Jordan is credited on the record.

During his time with Jordan, Doggett continued playing on records for Ella Fitzgerald, Bill Kenny of the Inkspot, and other artists, but he was paying close attention to wild Bill Davis, who he had replaced in Jordan's group.

Davis had discovered the possibilities in a new musical instrument, the Hammond organ, and had formed a trio consisting of himself, a guitarist, and a drummer to exploit these possibilities in jazz music.

Doggett was also fascinated by this instrument, especially when hearing it up close, as when Davis rejoined Jordan's band to record Tamboritzaboogi, which had Doggett on piano and Davis on the Hammond organ.

A bottle of beer is fine, and chugging a lug of wine.

I make sure you blow a very low, and jock at the jute with a nickel or dime.

For Tamboritza Boogie,

Tamboritzaboogie.

Shuffle and wax and pay the tax.

From boogie to the Hogginsacks.

To Tamboritzaboogie.

Luli Ritzaboogie.

When Duggett left Jordan's band, he decided to form an organ trio just like Davis's.

The only problem was that it was just like Davis's.

His group had the same instrumentation, and Doggett and Davis had very similar playing styles.

Still, Henry Glover got him a contract with King Records, and he started recording Hammond organ blues tracks in the Davis style.

Davis and Doggett between them gave the Hammond organ its prominence in the world of jazz, RB, and soul music.

The Hammond organ has an odd image, as most people associate it with the cheesiest sort of light entertainment.

Certainly, for anyone in Britain of the generation older than mine, for example, the name it conjures up is Reggie Dixon, possibly the least funky man ever.

But in that part of music which is the intersection of jazz and RB

the part of music inhabited by Jimmy Smith, Booker T.

Jones, Ray Charles, Georgie Fame, Billy Preston, and others.

The Hammond organ has become an essential instrument, used so differently that one might almost compare it to the violin, where the instrument is referred to as a fiddle when it's played on folk or country songs.

And that comes from Davis and Doggett, and their almost simultaneous invention of a new style of keyboards for the new style of music that was coming up in the late 40s and early 50s.

But after a year or two of playing in an organ trio, Doggett decided that he didn't want to keep making records that sounded so much like the ones Wild Bill Davis was making.

He didn't want to be seen as a copy.

And so, to vary the style, he decided to take on a honking saxophone player.

to be the group's lead instrumentalist, while Doggett would concentrate on providing a rhythmic pad.

This line up of his group would go on to make the record that would make Doggett's name.

Honky Tonk Parts 1 and 2 came about almost by accident.

As Doggett told the story, his biggest hit started out at a dance in Lima, Ohio, on a Sunday night.

The group were playing their normal set, and people were dancing as normal, but then in between songs, Billy Butler, Doggett's guitarist, just started noodling an instrumental line on his bass strings.

This hadn't been planned.

He was just noodling around, as all guitarists will do when given five seconds silence.

But the audience started dancing to it.

And if you're in a bar band and the audience is dancing, you keep doing what you're doing.

As Butler was just playing a simple 12-bar blues pattern, the rest of the group fell in with the riff he was playing and he started soloing over them.

After three choruses of this, Butler nodded to Clifford Scott, the group's saxophone player, to take over, and Scott started playing a honking saxophone version of what Butler had been playing.

After Scott played through it a few times, he looked over to Doggett to see if Doggett wanted to take a solo too.

Doggett shook his head.

The song had already been going about five minutes, and what Butler and Scott had been playing was enough.

The group quickly brought the song to a close, using a standard blues outro.

And that would have been the end of that.

It's the kind of thing that bar bands have jammed a million times.

The sort of thing that, if you're a musician, you think nothing of.

They laughed at the end of the song, happy that they'd pulled off something that spontaneous, and the audience had been okay with it, and carried on with the rest of their planned set.

But then, a couple of songs later, someone in the audience came up and asked them if they could play that hot new song they'd been playing before again, not realising it had just been a spur-of-the-moment jam.

Okay,

you give the audience what they want.

The band members could remember more or less what they'd been playing, so they played it again, and the crowd went wild.

And they played it again, and the crowd went wild again.

By the end of the night, they'd played that new song, the one they'd improvised based on Billy Butler's guitar noodling, ten times.

Doggett immediately phoned Sid Nathan at King Records, his label, and told him that they had a hit on their hands and needed to get it out straight away.

But there was one problem.

The song was over five minutes long, and a Shellac 78 RPM disc, which was still the most popular format for RB music, could only hold three minutes per side.

It would have to be a double-sided record.

Nathan hated putting out records where the song continued onto the other side, because the jukebox operators, who were his main customers, didn't like them.

But he eventually agreed, and Doggett and his band got together in the studio and recorded their new instrumental in a single take.

It was released as Honky Tonk Part 1 and Part 2, and they pressed up 5,000 copies in the first week.

Those sold out straight away, so the next week they pressed up 12,500 copies.

Those also sold straight away, and so for the next few weeks they started pressing up 100,000 copies a week.

The song went to number one on the RB charts and became the biggest selling RB song of 1956, spending 13 weeks in total at number one,

dropping down the charts and then back up again.

It also reached number 2 on the pop charts, an astonishing feat for an RB instrumental.

It became a staple for cover bands, and it was recorded by the obvious instrumental acts like The Ventures and Duane Eddy.

And indeed, Dwayne Eddy's whole style seems to have come from Honky Tonk, but by other people you might not expect, like Buddy Holly.

The Beach Boys

And even James Brown.

Doggett never had another hit quite as big as Honky Tonk, though his next few records, based on the Honky Tonk pattern, also made the top five on the RB chart.

He had ten more RB top thirty hits over the course of the nineteen fifties.

But Doggett was being promoted as a rock and roll act, and playing bills with other rock and roll stars, and he didn't really feel comfortable in the rock and roll world.

When Honky Tonk came out, he was forty years old, by far the oldest of the people who had rock and roll hits in the mid fifties.

And he was a jazz organ player, not a Little Richard type.

He was also stuck repeating the formula.

Over the decade after Honky Tonk Parts 1 and 2, he recorded tracks like Honky Tonk Vocal Version, Hippy Dippy, Blip Blop, Yucky Dock, and Honky Tonk Bossanova.

His career as a charting artist more or less stopped after 1960, when he made the mistake of asking Sid Nathan if he could have a higher royalty rate, given the millions of dollars his recordings had brought in to King Records, and King dropped him.

But it didn't stop his career as a working musician.

In 1962 he teamed up again with Ella Fitzgerald, who wanted to go back to making music with a bit more rhythm than her recent albums of ballads.

The resulting album, Rhythm Is My Business, featured Duggett's arrangements and Hammond organ very prominently.

Let me tell you about a boy I know.

He is my baby and he lives next door.

Every morning before the sun comes up,

he brings my coffee in my favourite cup.

That's why I know, yes, I know.

Hallelujah.

He also teamed up in 1969 with James Brown, who around that time was trying to pay back his dues to others who'd been artists on King Records when Brown had started with them in the 50s.

As well as recording his album, Thinking About Little Willie John and Other Nice Things, Brown had also been producing records for Hank Ballard, and now it was Bill Doggett's turn.

For Doggett, Brown produced and wrote Honky Tonk Popcorn.

Doggett spent most of the rest of his life touring the Old East Circuit, a respected organist who would play hundreds of shows a year until his death in 1996, aged 80.

He played honky-tonk at every show, saying,

I just wouldn't be Bill Dogget if I didn't play Honky Tonk.

That's what the people pay to hear, so that's what they get.

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