Episode 7: Wynonie Harris and “Good Rockin’ Tonight”

A history of folk music in 500 songs

by Andrew Hickey.

Episode 7.

Good Rocking Tonight

by Wylone Harris.

There's a comic called Fonogram, and in it, there are people called Fonomancers.

These are people who aren't musicians but who can tap into the power of music other people have made and use it to do magic.

I think this concept of the phonomancer is actually a very useful concept for dealing with the real world as well.

There are people in the music industry who don't themselves play an instrument, or sing, or any of the normal musician things,

but who manage to get great records made, records which are their creative work, by molding and shaping the work of others.

Sometimes they're record producers, sometimes their managers, sometimes their DJs or journalists.

But there are a lot of people out there who have shaped music enormously without being musicians in the normal sense.

Brian Eno,

Sam Phillips, Joe Meek, Phil Spector, Malcolm McLaren,

Simon Napier Bell, I am sure you can add more to the list yourself.

People, almost always men to be honest, who have a vision and a flair for self-publicity and an idea of how to get musicians to turn that idea into a reality.

Men who have the power to take some spotty teenager with a guitar and turn him into a god, at least for the course of a three-minute pop song.

And there have always been spaces in the music industry for this sort of person.

And in the thirties and forties

that place was often in front of the band.

Most of the big band leaders we remember now were themselves excellent musicians.

Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, you could put those people up against most others on their instruments.

They might not have been the best, but they could hold their own.

But plenty of other band leaders were mediocre musicians or couldn't play at all.

Glenn Miller was a competent enough trombone player, but no one listens to the Glen Miller band and thinks, wow, one of those four trombone players is fantastic.

And other band leaders were much less involved in the music.

Kay Kaiser, the most successful bandleader of the period, who had eleven number one records and thirty-five in the top ten, never played an instrument, didn't write songs, didn't sing.

He acted as on-stage MC, told jokes, and was the man at the front of the stage.

And there were many other bandleaders like that, people who didn't have any active involvement in the music they were credited with.

Bob Crosby, Bing's brother, for example, was a bandleader and would sing on some tracks, but his band performed plenty of instrumentals without him having anything to do with them.

Most non-playing bandleaders would sing, like Bob Crosby, but even then they often did so rarely, and yet some of them had an immense influence on the music world, because a good bandleader's talent wasn't in playing an instrument or writing songs.

It was having an idea for a sound and getting together the right people who could make that sound, and creating a work environment in which they could make that sound well.

It was a management role or an editorial one, but those roles can be important.

And one of the most important people to do that job was Lucky Millinder, who we've talked about a couple of times already in passing.

Lucky Millinder is a largely forgotten figure now, but he was one of the most important figures in black music in the 1940s.

He was a fascinating figure.

One story about how he got his name is that Al Capone was down $10,000 playing dice.

Millinder offered to rub the dice for Luck, and Capone ended the night $50,000 up and called him Lucky from then on.

I think it's more more likely that Lucky was short for his birth name, Lucius, but I think the story shows the kind of people Millinder was hanging around with.

He didn't play an instrument, or read music, or sing much.

What Millinder could definitely do was recognise talent.

He'd worked with Bill Doggett before Doggett went off to join the Inkspot's backing band, and the trumpet player on his first hit was Dizzy Gillespie, who Millinder had hired after Gillespie had been sacked from Cab Calloway's band after stabbing Calloway in the leg.

He had Rosetta Tharpe as his female singer at the beginning of the 40s, and Ruth Brown, who we'll talk about later, later on.

He'd started out as the leader of the Mills Blue Rhythm Band, the house band in the Cotton Club, before moving on to lead, as his own band, one of the main bands in residence at the Savoy, along with occasionally touring the Chitlin Circuit, the rather derogatory name for the clubs and theatres that were regular tour stops for almost all major black artists at the time.

Slowly, during the 1940s, Millinder transitioned his band from the kind of swing music that had been popular in the 30s to the jump band style that was becoming more popular.

And if you want to point to one band that you can call the first rhythm and blues band, you probably want to look at Millinder's band, who more than any other band of the era were able to combine all the boogie, jump, and jive sounds with a strong blues feeling and get people dancing.

Listen, for example, to Savoy from 1943.

In 1944, after Rosetta Thorpe had left his band, Millinder needed a new second singer to take the occasional lead, as Tharp had, and he found one, one who later became the most successful rhythm and blues artist of the late nineteen forties, Winoni Harris.

Harris was already known as mister Blues when Millinder first saw him playing in Chicago and invited him to join the band.

He was primarily a blues shouter, inspired by people like Big Joe Turner and Jimmy Rushing, but he could also perform in a subtler style, close to the jive singing of a Cab Calloway or Louis Jordan.

Harris joined the Millinder band and started performing with them in their residency at the Savoy.

Shortly after this, the band went into the studio to record Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well.

Who threw the whiskey in the well?

In the well.

Who threw the whiskey in the well?

In the well.

Keep your dippers out of that well, or we all wind up in the well.

Who threw the whiskey in the well?

That's what I'd like to know.

Well, sisters and brothers,

I'm taking my leave of thee.

to the point that that combination was turning up more and more.

That was recorded in May 1944, almost straight after the end of the musicians' union strike, but it wasn't released straight away.

Records at that time were released on discs made out of shellac, which is a resin made from insect secretions.

Unfortunately, the insects in question were native to Vietnam, which was occupied by Japan, and to India, which was going through its own problems at the time.

So shellac was strictly rationed.

There was a new product, vinylite, being made, which seemed promising for making records, but that was also used for life jackets, which were obviously given a higher priority during a war.

So the record wasn't released until nearly a year after it was recorded, and during that time, Wainoni Harris had become a much more important part of Millinder's band, and was starting to believe that maybe he deserved a bit more credit.

Harris, you see, was an absolutely astonishing stage presence.

Lots of people who spoke about Elvis Presley in later years said that his performances, hip thrusts and leg shaking at all, were just a watered-down version of what Wainoni Harris had been doing.

Harris thought of himself as a big star straight away.

This belief was made stronger when Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well was finally released.

It became a massive hit and the only money Harris saw from it was a flat thirty seven dollars fifty session fee.

Millinder, on the other hand, was getting the royalties.

Harris decided that it was his vocal, not anything to do with the rest of the band, that had made the record a success, and that he could make more money on his own.

In case you hadn't realised yet, Wainoni Harris was never known as the most self-effacing of people, and that confidence gave him a huge amount of success on stage, but it didn't win him many friends in his personal life.

Harris went solo, and Lucky Millinder replaced him with a trumpet player and singer called Henry Glover.

Harris started making records for various small labels.

His first record as a solo artist was Around the Clock Blues, one of the most influential records ever made.

The clock struck one.

She said, Come on, Daddy, let's have a little more fun.

Yes, we've been rolling in the room.

Yes, we've been rolling a long time.

She said, I'm so glad glad I'm living earth.

I said, Ooh, we're so glad to marry.

Well, we looked at the clock.

If that sounds familiar,

maybe it's because you've heard this song by Arthur Kudop that Elvis later covered.

My baby, long and tall,

shaved like a cannonball.

Every time she loved me now, Lord, you can hear me squall.

She cried,

I believe I'll change my mind.

She says, I'm so glad I'm living.

I cried, woo, darling, and I'm so glad you mine.

Or maybe you know Real and I'm rocking by Chuck Baby.

Well, I looked at my watch, it was 9:21.

Without a rock and roll, dance, having nothing but fun, and we rolled.

Reeling and a rockin'

we was reeling and a rockin', rolling to the brink of dawn.

Well, I looked at my watch, it was 9:32.

There's nothing I'd rather do than dance with you.

Reeling and a rockin',

we was reeling and a rockin'.

Well,

of course, there was another song with Around the Clock in the title, and we'll get to that pretty soon.

The band on Around the Clock, incidentally, was led by a session drummer called Johnny Otis.

Around the Clock, in fact, is one of the milestones in the development of rock and roll, and yet it's not the most important record Winoni Harris made in the late 1940s.

Harris recorded for many labels over the next couple of years, including King Records, whose AR man Ralph Bass we'll also be hearing more about, and Bullet Records, whose founder Jim Bullet went on to bigger things as well.

And just as a brief diversion, we'll take a listen to one of the singles he made around this time, Dig This Boogie.

Well, if you ever heard the boogie the way it should be played, you'll love the boogie the rest of your days.

Dig this boogie.

I played that just because of the pianist on that record.

Herman Sonny Blount later became rather better known as Son Ra, and while he didn't have enough to do with rock music for me to do an episode on him, I had to include him here when I could.

Winoni Harris became a big star within the world of rhythm and blues, and that was, in large part, because of the extremely sexual performances he put on and the way he aimed them at women, not at the young girls many other singers would target.

As he said himself, the reason he was making $1,500 a week when most famous singers were getting fifty or seventy-five dollars a night was I quote the crooners star on the Great White Way and get swamped with Coca-Cola drinking Bobby Soxes and other jail bait.

I star in Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, and Missouri, and get those who have money to buy stronger stuff and my records to play while they drink it.

I like to sing to women with meat on their bones and that long green stuff in their pocket-book.

And he certainly made enough of that long green stuff.

But he spent it just as fast as he made it.

When he got a ten thousand dollar royalty check, he bought himself two Cadillacs and hired two chauffeurs.

And every night at the end of his show, they'd both arrive at the venue and he'd pick which one he was riding home in that night.

Now, having talked about Winoni Harris for a little bit, let's pause for a moment and talk about one of his fans.

Roy Brown was a big fan of Harris and was a blues singer himself, in something like the same style.

Brown had originally been hired as a black singer who sounds white, which is odd, because he used a lot of melisma in his vocals, which was normally a characteristic of black singing.

But other than that, Browne's main vocal influences when he started were people like Bing Fosby and other crooners, rather than blues music.

However, he soon became very fond of jump blues and started writing songs in the style himself.

In particular, one, called Good Rockin' Tonight, he thought might be popular with other audiences, since it always went down so well in his own shows.

Indeed, he thought it might be suitable for Winoni Harris, and when Harris came to town, Brown suggested the song to him.

And Harris wasn't interested.

But after Brown moved back to New Orleans, from Galveston, Texas, where he'd been performing, there was a girl, and a club owner, and these things happen, and sometimes you have to move.

Brown took his song to Cecil Gant instead.

Gant was another blues singer, and if Harris wasn't up for recording the song, maybe Gant would be.

Cecil Gant was riding high off his biggest hit, I Wonder, which was a ballad, and he might have seemed a strange choice to record Good Rocking Tonight.

But while Gant's A sides were ballads, his B sides were boogie rockers, and very much in the style of Brown's song, like this one, The B-side to I Wonder.

But Gantt wasn't the best person for Brown to ask to record a song.

According to Jim Bullet, who produced Gant's records, everything Gant recorded was improvised in one take, and he could never remember what it was he'd just done and could never repeat a song.

So Gant wasn't really in the market for other people's songs.

But he was so impressed by Brown's singing, as well as his song, that he phoned the head of his record company at 2:30am and got Brown to sing down the phone.

After hearing the song, the record company head asked to hear it a second time, and then he told Gant, Give him fifty dollars and don't let him out of your sight.

And so Roy Brown ended up recording his song on Deluxe Records and having a minor hit with it.

Well, I heard the news, then you'll rock it tonight.

Well, I'm gonna hold my baby tight as I can.

When you listen back to that now,

it doesn't sound all that innovative at all.

In fact, it wears its influences on its sleeve so much that it name-checks Sweet Lorraine, Sue City Sue, Sweet Georgia Brown, and Caldonia.

all of whom were characters who'd appeared in other popular R and B songs around that time.

We talked about Caldonia, in fact, in the episode about Choo Choo Chiboogi and Louis Jordan.

It might also sound odd to anyone who's familiar with later cover versions by Elvis Presley or by Paul McCartney and others who followed the pattern of Elvis' version.

Brown only sings the opening line once, before singing I'm gonna hold my baby as tight as I can.

Those other versions restructure the song into a fairly conventional 16-bar blues form by adding in a repeat of the first line and a chord change along with it.

Roy Brown's original, on the other hand, just holds the first chord and keeps playing the same riff for almost the entire verse and chorus.

The chord changes are closer to passing chords than to anything else, and the song ends up having some of the one chord feel that people like John Lee Hooker had, where the groove is all, and harmonic change is thrown out of the window.

Even though you'd think, from the melody line, that it was a twelve bar blues, it's something altogether different.

This is something that you need to realize.

The more chords something has, in general, the harder it is to dance to.

And there will always,

always be a tension between music that's all about the rhythm and which is there for you to dance to, and music which is all about the melody line and which treats harmonic interest as an excuse to write more interesting melodies.

You can either be Bert Bacharach or you can be Bo Diddley, and the closer you get to one, the further you get from the other.

And on that spectrum, Good Rockin' Tonight is absolutely in the diddly corner.

But at the time, this was an absolutely phenomenal record, and it immediately started to take off in the New Orleans market.

And then Winoni Harris realized that maybe he'd made a mistake.

Maybe he should have recorded that song after all.

And so he did, cutting his own, almost identical, cover version of Brown's song.

There are a few differences between the two of course.

In particular, Harris introduced those hoy hoy vocals we just heard, which weren't part of Roy Brown's original.

That's a line which comes from The Honey Dripper, another massively important R and B record.

Harris also included a different instrumental introduction, playing When the Saints Go Marchin' In at the start,

a song whose melody bears a slight resemblance to Brown's song.

Harris also adds that backbeat again, and it's for that reason that Winoni Harris's version of the song, not Roy Brown's original, is the one that people call the first rock and roll record.

Other than those changes, Harris's version is a carbon copy of Roy Brown's version, except, of course, that Winoni Harris was one of the biggest stars in RB,

while Roy Brown was an unknown who'd just released his first single.

That makes a lot of difference, and Harris had the big hit with the song.

And Good Rockin' Tonight, in Harris's version, became one of those records that was everywhere.

Roy Brown's version of the song made number thirteen on the RB charts, and two years later it would re-enter the charts and go to number eleven.

But Harris's was a world-changing hit, at least in the RB market.

Harris's version, in fact, started off a whole chain of sound alikes and cash-ins, records that were trying to be their own version of Good Rocking Tonight.

Harris himself recorded a sequel, All She She Wants to Do is Rock.

But for the next two years, everyone was recording songs with rock in the title.

There was Roy Brown's own sequel, Rockin' at Midnight.

Well, have you heard the news about Good Rockin' at Midnight?

Well,

I held my baby with all my might.

What a wonderful time we had that night.

Have you heard the news about good rocket at midnight?

There was Cecil Gantz.

We're gonna rock.

We're gonna rock, we're gonna roll,

we're gonna rock,

we're gonna roll,

we're gonna roll,

we're gonna rock,

we're gonna roll, we're gonna rock,

we're gonna roll this morning.

There was Lock the Joint by Jimmy Preston.

From nineteen forty-eight through about nineteen fifty-one, if you listened to rhythm and blues records at all, you couldn't escape this new rock craze.

Record after record with rock in the title, with a boogie woogie bassline, with a backbeat, and with someone singing about how they were going to rock and roll.

This was, in fact,

the real start of the rock and roll music fad.

We're still six years away from it coming to the notice of the white mainstream audience, but all the pieces are there together.

And while we're still three years away, even from the canonical first rock and roll record, Jackie Brenston's Rocket 88,

1948 is when rock and roll first became a cohesive, unified whole, something that was recognizable and popular, a proper movement in music rather than odd individuals making their own separate music.

Of course, it was still missing some of the ingredients that would later be added.

First wave rock and roll is a music that's based on the piano and horn sections, rather than guitars, and it wouldn't be until it merged with Hillbilly Boogie in the early 50s that the electric guitar started to be an important instrument in it.

But

we've talked before, and will talk again, about how there's no real first rock and roll record, but if you insist on looking for one, then Good Rocking Tonight is as good a candidate as any.

Neither of its creators did especially well from the rock and roll craze they initiated, though.

Roy Brown got a reputation for being difficult after he went to the musicians union to try to get some of the money the record company owed him.

In the 1950s, as today,

record companies thought it was unreasonable for musicians and singers to actually want them to pay the money that was written in their contract.

And so, after a period of success, in the late 40s and very early 50s, he spent a couple of decades unable to get a hit.

He eventually started selling encyclopedias door to door, with the unique gimmick that when he was in black neighbourhoods, he could offer the people whose doors he was knocking on an autographed photo of himself.

He sold a lot of encyclopedias that way, apparently.

He continued making the occasional great RB record, but he made more money from sales.

He died in 1981.

Winoni Harris wasn't even that lucky.

He basically stopped having hits by 1953, and he more or less gave up performing by the early 60s.

The new bands couldn't play his kind of boogie, and in his last few performances, by all accounts, he cut a sad and pitiful figure.

He died in 1969 after more or less drinking himself to death.

The music business is never friendly towards originals, especially black originals, but we're now finally into the rock era.

We'll be looking over the next few weeks at a few more first rock and roll songs, as well as some music that still doesn't quite count as rock, but was influential on it.

But if you've ever listened to a rock and roll record and enjoyed it, a tiny part of the pleasure you got you owe to Roy Brown and Winoni Harris.

A history of rock music in 500 songs is written, produced and performed by Andrew Hickey.

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