Episode 41: “Be-Bop-A-Lula” by Gene Vincent and the Bluecaps

A history of folk music in 500 songs

by Andrew Higgins.

Episode 41

Buckalula

by Gene Vincent.

So sang Ian Dury, one of the great of the rock and roll generation that came up in the seventies, a generation that grew up on listening to Gene Vincent.

In the USA, Vincent was more or less regarded as a one-hit wonder, though that one hit was one of the most memorable of the 1950s.

But in the UK he was to become one of the biggest influences on everyone who sang or played a guitar.

Gene Vincent was born Vincent Eugene Craddock, and he would have been perfectly happy in his original career as a sailor until 1955.

Then something happened that changed his life forever.

He re-enlisted in the Navy and got a $900 bonus, a huge sum of money for a sailor in those days, which he used to buy himself a new Triumph Racing Motorbike.

The bike didn't last long, and nor did Gene's navy career.

There are two stories about the accident.

The one which he told most often, and which was the official story, was that he was not at fault.

A woman driving a Chrysler ran a red light and ran into him, and the only reason he didn't get compensation was that he signed some papers while he was sedated in hospital.

The other story, which he told at least one friend, was that he'd been out drinking and was late getting back to the naval base.

There was a security barrier at the base and he tried to ride under the barrier.

He'd failed and the bike had come down hard on his left leg, crushing it.

Whatever the truth, his left leg was smashed up and looked for a long time like it was going to be amputated, but he refused to allow this.

He had it put into a cast for more than a year, after which it was put into a metal brace instead.

His leg never really properly healed, and it would leave him in pain for the rest of his life.

His leg developed chronic osteomyelitis.

He had a permanent open sore on his shin, his leg muscles withered, and his bones would break regularly.

Then, in September 1955, finally finally discharged from the naval hospital, Jean went to see a country music show.

The headliner was Hank Snow, and the Louvin butlers were also on the bill.

But the act that changed Jean's life was lower down the bill.

A young singer named Elvis Presley.

arrived

16 coaches low

while that long black train

got my baby baby and it's gone

The story seems to be the same for almost every one of the early rockabilly artists But this is the first time we've seen it happen with someone who didn't go on to sign with some.

A young man in the southern US has been playing his guitar for a while, making music that's a little bit country, a little bit blues, and then one day he goes to see a show featuring Elvis Presley and he immediately decides that he wants to do that.

That Elvis is doing something that's like what the young man has already started doing, but he's proved that you can do it on stage for people.

It's as if at every single show Elvis played in 1954 and 1955 there was a future rockabilly star in the audience and by playing those shows Elvis permanently defined what we mean when we say rock and roll star.

The first thing Gene did was to get himself noticed by the radio station that had promoted the show, and in particular by Sheriff Tex Davis, who was actually a DJ from Connecticut, whose birth name was William Duchet, but had changed his name to Sound More Country.

Davis was a DJ and show promoter, and he was the one who had promoted the gig that Elvis had appeared at.

Gene Craddock came into his office a few days after that show and told him that he was a singer.

Davis listened to him sing a couple of songs and thought that he would do a decent job as a regular on his country showtime radio show.

Soon afterwards, Carl Perkins came to town to do a show with Craddock as the opening act.

It would in fact be his last show for a while.

It was right after this show, as he travelled to get to New York for the TV appearance he was booked on, that he got into the car crash that derailed his career.

But Tex Davis asked Carl to watch the opening act and tell him what he thought.

Carl watched, and he said that the boy had potential, especially one particular song, Be Boppaloola, which sounded to Carl quite like some of his own stuff.

That was good enough for Tex Davis, who signed Craddock up to a management contract, and who almost immediately recorded some of his performances to send to Ken Nelson at Capital Records.

Capital, at the time, was the home of crooners like Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole, and other than its small country music division, had little connection to the new forms of music that were starting to dominate the culture.

Capital had been founded in the early 1940s by the songwriter Johnny Mercer, who wrote many standards for Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett, and others, and also recorded his own material like this.

You got to ask

Or pandemonium liable to walk upon the scene.

To illustrate, Mercer was a great songwriter, but you can imagine that a record label headed up by Mercer might not have been one that was most attuned to rock and roll.

However, in 1955, Capital had been bought up by the big conglomerate EMI, and things were changing at the label.

Ken Nelson was the head of country music for Capital Records, and is someone who has a very mixed reputation among lovers of both country music and rockabilly, as someone who had impeccable taste in artists.

He also signed Buck Owens and the Louvin Brothers, among many other classic country artists, but also as someone who would impose a style on those artists that didn't necessarily suit them.

Nelson didn't really understand Rockabilly at all, but he knew that Capital needed its own equivalent of Elvis Presley, so he put out a call for people to recommend him country singers who could sound a bit like Elvis.

On hearing the tape that Tex Davis sent him of Gene Craddock, he decided to call in this kid for a session in Nashville.

By this point, Craddock had formed his own backing band, who became known as the Blue Caps.

This consisted of guitarist Cliff Gallup, the oldest of the group, and a plumber by trade, drummer Dickie Harrell, a teenager who was enthusiastic but good decade younger than Gallup, rhythm guitarist Willie Williams, and bass player Jack Neal.

They took the name Blue Caps from the hats they all wore on stage, which were allegedly inspired by the golf caps that President Eisenhower used to wear while playing golf.

Not the most rebellious of inspirations for the group that would, more than any other rock and roll group of the fifties, inspire juvenile delinquency and youthful rebelliousness.

The session was at a studio run by Owen Bradley, who had just recently recorded some early tracks by a singer from Texas named Buddy Holly.

The song chosen for the first single was a track called Woman Love, which everyone was convinced could be a hit.

They were convinced, that is, until they heard Gene singing it in the studio, at which point they wondered if, perhaps, some of what he was singing was not quite as wholesome as they had initially been led to believe.

He looked up to me and said,

Good dollar of all of a sudden you need a

Ken Nelson asked to look at the lyric sheet, and satisfied that Gene could have been singing Hugging, rather than what Nelson had worried he had been singing, agreed that the song should go out on the A side of Gene's first single, which was to be released under the name Gene Vincent, a name Nelson created from Jean's forenames.

It turned out that the lyric sheet didn't completely convince everyone.

Most radio stations refused to play Woman Love at all, saying that even if the lyrics weren't obscene, and plenty of people were convinced that they were,

the record itself still was.

Or, at least, the A side was.

The B side, a song called Be Bapalula, was a different matter.

She

my baby bit on my baby bed on my baby bit on

she's the girl in the red blue jeans.

There are three stories about how the song came to have the title Be Buffalula.

Donald Graves, a fellow patient in the Naval Hospital, who was widely considered to have co-written the song with Jean, always claimed the song was inspired by the 1920s vaudeville song, Don't Bring Lulu.

You can bring pearls, he's a darn nice girl, but don't bring Lulu.

You can bring rose with a turned-up nose, but don't bring Lulu.

Lulu always wants to do what the folks don't want her food.

When she thrusts herself around, London rich is falling down.

You can bring cake for a quarterhouse steak, but don't bring Lulu.

Lulu gets blue and goes cuckoo like the clock upon the shelf.

She's the kind of smarty breaks up every party.

Hala-balulu, don't bring Lulu, I'll bring her myself.

As Tex Davis told the story, it was inspired by a little Lulu comic book Davis showed Vincent, to which Vincent said, hey, it's Bebopa Lulu.

Davis is credited as co-writer of the song, along with Gene, but it's fairly widely acknowledged that he had no part in the song's writing.

Almost every source now says that Davis paid Donald Graves $25 for his half of the songwriting rights.

Far more likely is that it was inspired by the Helen Hume song, Be Baba Liba.

That song had been re-recorded by Lionel Hampton as Hey Baba Riba, which had been a massive RB hit.

And the song is also generally considered one of the inspirations behind the term bebop being applied to the style of music.

And that's something we should probably at least talk about briefly here, because it shows just how much culture changes and how fast we lose context for things that seemed obvious at the time.

The term bebop, as it was originally used, was used in the same way we use it now, for a type of jazz music that originated in New York in the mid-1940s, which prized harmonic complexity, instrumental virtuosity, and individual self-expression.

The music made by people like Charlie Parker, Oscar Peterson, Dexter Gordon, Dizzy Gillespie, and so on, and which pretty much defined what was thought of as jazz in the post-war era.

But while that was what the term originally meant, and is what the term means now, it wasn't what the term meant in 1956, at least to most of the people who used the term.

Colloquially, bebop meant that noisy music I don't understand that the young people like, and most of the people making it are black.

So it covered bebop itself, but it was also used for rhythm and blues, rock and roll, even rockabilly.

You would often find interviewers talking with Elvis in his early years, referring to his music as hillbilly bop, or a mixture of country music music and bebop.

So even though Bebopalula had about as much to do with Bebop as it did with Stravinsky, the name still fit.

At that initial session, Ken Nelson brought in a few of the top session players in Nashville, but when he heard the Blue Caps play, he was satisfied that they were good enough to play on the records, and sent the session musicians home.

In truth, the Blue Caps were probably best described as a mixed ability group.

Some of them were rudimentary musicians at best, though, as we've seen, Rockabilly, more than most genres, was comfortable with enthusiastic amateurs anyway.

But Cliff Gallup, the lead guitarist, was quite probably the most technically accomplished guitarist in the world of Rockabilly.

Gallup's guitar style, which involved fast-picked triplets and the use of multiple steel finger picks, was an inspiration for almost every rock and roll guitarist of the 1960s, and any group which had him in would sound at least decent.

During the recording of Be Boppalula, the young drummer Dickie Harrell decided to let out a giant scream right in the middle of the song.

He later said that this was so his mother would know he was on the record.

Cliff Gallup was not impressed and wanted to do a second take, but the first take was what was used.

Be Bopalula is, by any standards, a quite astonishing record.

The lyric is, of course, absolute nonsense.

It's a gibberish song with no real lyrical content at all.

But that doesn't matter at all.

What matters is the sound.

What we have here, fundamentally, is the sound of Heartbreak Hotel applied to a much, much less depressive lyric.

It still has that strange morbidity that the Elvis track had, but combined with carefree, gibberish lyrics in the style of Little Richard.

It's the precise midpoint between Heartbreak Hotel and Tooty Fruity, and is probably the record which, more than any other, epitomises 1956.

A lot of people commented on the similarity between Vincent's record and the music of Elvis Presley.

There were various stories that went round at the time, including that Scotty and Bill got annoyed at Elvis for recording it without them, that Elvis's mother had told him she liked that new single of his, Be Boppalula, and even that Elvis himself, on hearing it, had been confused and wondered if he'd forgotten recording it.

In truth, none of these stories seem likely.

The record is, sonically and stylistically, like an Elvis one, but Vincent's voice has none of the same qualities as Elvis's.

While Elvis is fully in control at all times, playful and exuberant, Gene Vincent is tense and twitchy.

Vincent's voice is thinner than Elvis's, and his performance is more mannered than Elvis' singing at that time was.

But none of this stopped Vincent from worrying the one time he did meet Elvis, who came over and asked him if he was the one who'd recorded Be Boppalula.

Vincent was apologetic and explained that he'd not been intending to copy Elvis, the record had just come out like that.

But Elvis reassured him that he understood and that that was just how Jean sang.

What fewer people commented on was the song's similarity to Money Honey.

my front doorbell.

I let him ring for a long, long spell.

I went to the window and peeped through the blind and asked him to tell me what was on.

His mind said,

Mother,

yes,

but honey,

if you wanna stay here with me.

The two songs have near-identical melodies.

The only real difference is that in Be Boppalula, Vincent bookends the song with a slight variation, turning the opening and closing choruses into twelve bar blueses, rather than the eight-bar blues used in the rest of the song and in Money Honey.

Luckily for Vincent, at this time, the culture in RB was relaxed enough about borrowings that Jesse Stone seems not to have even considered suing.

The follow-up to Be Bopalula did much less well.

Race with the Devil, not the same song as the one later made famous by Judas Priest, was one of the all-time great rockabilly records, but the lyrics, about a hot rod race with the actual devil, were, like woman love, considered unbroadcastable, and this time there was no massive hit record hidden away on the B-side to salvage things.

The single after that, Blue Gene Bop, did a little better, reaching the lower reaches of the top 50, rather than the lower reaches of the top 100, as Race with the Devil had, and making the top 20 in the UK.

Don't want you looking

at other

guys

Got to make you give me

one

more chance

I can't keep still so baby let's dance

the pop from me And it's a pop it's dumb done to me You dip your hip, free your knee

But there were three major problems that that were preventing Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps from having the success that it seemed they deserved.

The first was Ken Nelson.

He was in charge of the material that the group were recording, and he would suggest songs like Operazy River, Ain't She Sweet, and Those Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine.

Vincent enjoyed those old standards as much as anyone, but they weren't actually suited to the rockabilly treatment, especially not to the kind of rough and ready performances that the original line-up of the blue caps was suited to.

And that brings us to the second problem.

There was a huge age gap, as well as disparity in ability, in the band, and Cliff Gallup, in particular, felt that he was too old to be touring in a rock and roll band and quit the group.

Gallup was actually offered a regular gig as a session guitarist by Ken Nelson, which would have meant that he didn't have to travel, but he turned it down and got a job as a high school janitor and maintenance man, just playing the occasional extra gig for pin money.

When he was contacted by fans, he would get embarrassed, and he didn't like to talk about his brief time as a rock and roll star.

He never signed a single autograph, and when he died in 1989, his widow made sure the obituaries never mentioned his time with Gene Vincent.

But Gallup was just the first to leave.

In the first two and a half years of the Blue Cap's existence, twenty different people were members of the band.

Vincent could never keep a stable line-up of the band together for more than a few weeks or months at a time.

And the third major problem, that was Vincent himself.

Even before his accident, he had been an impetuous, hot-headed man who didn't think very carefully about the possible consequences of his actions.

Now he was in chronic pain from the accident, he was a rock and roll star, and he was drinking heavily to deal with the pain.

This is not a combination that makes people less inclined to rash behaviour.

So, for example, he'd started breaking contracts.

Vincent and the Blue Caps were booked to play a residency in in Las Vegas, where they were making $3,000 a week, for 1956, a staggering sum of money.

But Tex Davis told Vincent that the owner of the casino wanted him to tone down some aspects of his act, and he didn't like that at all.

It wasn't even enough to convince him when it was pointed out that the man doing the asking was big in the mafia.

Instead, Gene went on stage, sang one song, found Tex Davis in the crowd, caught his eye, flipped him off, and walked off stage, leaving the band to do the rest of the show without him.

Unsurprisingly, the residency didn't last very long.

Equally unsurprisingly, Tex Davis decided he was no longer going to manage Gene Vincent.

Legal problems around the fallout from losing his management caused Vincent to be unable to work for several months.

While both Race with the Devil and Blue Gene Bop were big hits in the UK, the closest they came to having another hit in the USA was a song called Lotta Loving.

So, baby, can't you see that you were meant for

That was written by a songwriter named Bernice Bedwell, who was otherwise unknown.

She wrote a handful of other rockabilly songs, including another song that Vincent would record, but nothing else that was particularly successful, and there seems to be no biographical information about her anywhere.

She sold the publishing rights to the song to a Texas oilman, Tom Flieger, who does seem to have had a fairly colourful life.

He wrote a memoir called Fidel and the Fleegue, which I sadly haven't read, but in which he claims that Fidel Castro tried to frame him for murder in the 1940s after a dispute over a beautiful woman.

Fleger was soon to start his own record label, Jan Records, but for now he thought that this song would be suitable for Gene Vincent and got in touch with him.

Lotta Loving was quickly recorded at Gene's first session at Capital's new studio at the Capitol Tower in Hollywood.

The B-side was a ballad called Wear My Ring by Warren Casoto, the future Bobby Dammin, and Don Kirshner.

Want you

on your finger?

Lotta Loving went to number 13 on the pop chart and number seven on the RB chart, and it looked like it would revitalise Gene's career.

But it was not to be.

Vincent's increasingly erratic behaviour, including pulling a gun on band members on multiple occasions, and Capital and Ken Nelson's lack of understanding of rock and roll music, meant that he quickly became a forgotten figure in the US.

But he had a huge impact on the UK, thanks to a TV producer named Jack Good.

Jack Good was the person who, more than anyone else, had brought rock and roll to British TV.

He'd been the producer of Six Five Special, a BBC TV show that was devoted to rock and roll and skiffle before moving to ITV, producing its first two rock and roll shows, Oh Boy and Boy Meets Girls.

And it was Goode who suggested that Vincent switch from his normal polite-looking stagewear into black leather, and that he accentuate the postural problems his disability caused him.

Vincent's appearances on Boy Meets Girls, dressed in black leather, hunched over, in pain because of his leg, defined for British teenagers of the 1950s what a rock'n'roller was meant to look like.

At a time when few American rock'n'roll stars were visiting the UK, and even fewer were getting any exposure on the very small number of TV shows that were actually broadcast.

This was when there were only two TV channels in the UK, and they broadcast for only a few hours.

Gene Vincent being here and on British TV meant the world.

And on a show like Boy Meets Girls, where the rest of the acts were people like Cliff Richard or Adam Faith, having a mean, moody, leather-clad rock and roller on screen was instantly captivating.

For a generation of British rockers, Gene Vincent epitomised American rock and roll.

Until, in 1960, he was on a tour of the UK that ended in tragedy.

But that's a story for another time.

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