Category: 1960

First off, I have to note that I do have fun doing the artwork for these episodes.

Where were we? Oh yeah. Somewhere in the late 50s, early 60s. And Hank Ballard has a new song that’s picking up traction in Baltimore thanks to the Buddy Deane Show, when suddenly it gets yoinked out from under him by a newcomer from Philadelphia.

That newcomer is named Chubby Checker, and the song is (surprise!) “The Twist,” which rockets to the top of the charts just a few weeks after Dick Clark features Checker on his Saturday night show. Suddenly the floodgates open up and the nation is awash in Twist records for two years. I’m talking about a couple of dozen songs at least, and those are just the ones that made the charts.

No wonder The Beatles just walked in and took over. I kid! They’d have done that anyway.

This didn’t make it into the show for some reason (though it’s in the transcript), but Ballard wasn’t even mad about Chubby Checker (and Dick Clark) hijacking his record. You see, Ballard’s label didn’t have a lot of confidence in it—hence its placement on a B side—and as one of the writers, Ballard made a pile of money on it anyway. Plus, his version peaked at Number 28 the same week Checker’s version reached Number 1 the first time around. And Dick Clark made it up to Ballard by promoting his other single, “Finger Poppin’ Time,” which was at Number 7 that same week. So, all’s well that ends well.

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And, as promised, here’s the Chubby Checker/Fat Boys video for ye. Man, I thought rap in the 80s was just the most fun.

Click here for a transcript of this episode.

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Holy Cats. I completely forgot that my website host wasn’t working when I did Episode 97, and I didn’t do a post for that one. It was down for maintenance, and I never came back to it. Shame on me.

So for those of you looking for an entry for “Like a Virgin,” sorry. There isn’t one. We’ll just have to let it stand on its own.

In the meantime, I was thinking about doing the Sam Cooke song, but every time I hit the Internet to do some research, I’d bump into the Louis Armstrong song, so I figured, Why not do both in a single show? And so here we are, with a show that talks about both songs and the stories behind them. Especially interesting to me is that both songs picked up a following in Europe that didn’t have a lot to do with their performance in the US.

Click here for a transcript of this week’s show. And, of course, if your podcatcher hasn’t already picked it up, click below to listen/download it.

ADDENDUM: I noted during the show that next week’s episode was a listener request, and that wasn’t a lie. I should note, however, that the listener is another podcaster who calls himself Innkeeper Freddie, and he runs an interview podcast called Guestbook. Freddie runs a bed-and-breakfast or two in the heart of Washington, DC, and he interviews some of the people who stay at his B&B. Consequently he gets in a fascinating array of people, all of whom have some neat perspectives on life in general, plus the discussion is capped off with the “Seven Questions,” which is a fixed set of questions that he asks of all his guests. It’s definitely worth a listen, and you can check him out here. I got to meet Freddie a few weeks ago at the PRX Podcast Garage in DC, and now I’m playing catch-up with his show. He’s a really enthusiastic guy whose show isn’t getting the love it deserves.

Click here for a transcript of this show.

John D. Loudermilk (the D doesn’t stand for anything) was a singer-songwriter who wrote a few hits for a few different artists, and he also fancied himself as a  prankster. So when he was asked by a Las Vegas radio station about his inspiration for writing the song “Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Indian)”, he told a wild tale about meeting a band of Cherokees in a snowstorm. And when Casey Kasem’s crew got wind of the story, they called him to confirm it, and he changed it to sound even more dire. They bought it, Casey aired it, and now that the show is in re-runs, the story gets a national re-airing every now and again. And it’s entirely nonsense. But that also means we don’t really know what led him to write this song, which contains several elements indicating that Loudermilk really knew next to nothing about the Cherokee Nation. 

Does that make the song offensive? That seems to be a mixed bag, based on my research. Some people are pretty specific about the fact that it gets so many things just plain wrong. Some people don’t like the whole cultural appropriation end of things, where white guys (Loudermilk as the writer, Fardon and the Raiders as the performers) are singing about Native Americans in the first person. 

Some people also make a point of saying “I’m xx% Cherokee and it doesn’t offend me at all.” So in this respect, your mileage may vary.I asked my wife, who is part Cherokee, about it and she doesn’t like the song, largely because of the factual inaccuracies. I think she was pleasantly surprised that I knew what they were, though. But I don’t think she’ll be making a point of tuning in to this episode. Then again, I’m pretty sure she only listens when I play it back in my car and she’s there for it. 

At any rate: my apologies for the late delivery, but here’s hoping you enjoy it. As usual, your podcatcher should have it now (or very soon, anyway), or you can listen/download it from here: 

Thanks so much for the reviews I’ve seen, and the good words on Facebook. Next week will be a whole bunch of quick bits on Christmas songs, and then—finally—we’ll finish up the year with Part Two of Shel Silverstein. 

I realize it’s not fashionable to bash the teenagers these days, however in my head this one actually deserves the abuse. Most of you may not agree, but I’m gonna say my piece anyway and be done with it.

Rosalie Mendez Hamlin was just a young teenager when she joined a band and they recorded their only hit record in 1960, in a converted airplane hangar. But by the time the song hit the charts, the band had broken up and Rosie was just starting a decades-long fight to get credit for writing the song, and to get the royalties she deserved. One of the things that broke in her favor as part of the legal actions she needed to take was the fact that she’d mailed a copy of the song to herself. It’s not an iron-clad way of enforcing a simple copyright, but it did turn out to be a shrewd move on her part.

Both “Angel Baby” and its B-Side, a track sung by a friend of the band who happened to be there for the session, are just plain bad recordings. As musicians, The Originals were not what you’d call virtuosos. As Max Bialystock says in The Producers, “I picked the wrong play, the wrong director, the wrong cast. Where did I go right?”

Here’s the B-Side. See if you don’t agree:

But I think that the raw, unpolished sound of “Angel Baby” may be part of its appeal. It was only a couple of years later that genuine garage bands dropped off the landscape, and among bands with that kind of sound, this one stands out as more of a prom theme than a party-all-night tune.

As usual, your podcast catcher should have captured this episode by now (ooh! It’s available at Google Play now!), but if not, feel free to click the player below for listening or downloading.

Next week we look at a different kind of disaster.