Sound Beat

Rocket 88 is one of many songs credited as the first in Rock and Roll history. It’s also one of the first to use guitar distortion…but, not on purpose.

The story goes like this…in 1951, as Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats made their way to the recording studio to record Rocket ’88, the guitar amp’s woofer was damaged. One band member claims it was dropped, while another faults moisture from heavy rain that day. The result: that slightly-fuzzy, just-plain-rock-and-rolly, sound that would be emulated to this day.

The Cats usually went by a different name: Ike Turner’s Rhythm Kings; That’s Ike on piano. The song was named for the fastest car on the road at the time, the Oldsmobile…Rocket 88. The car would dominate the NASCAR circuit in the 50’s.

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Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly, was twice convicted: once for trying to kill a man, and once for following through with it.  After the first, he wrote a song of appeal to the governor of Texas, Pat Neff. Neff, incidentally, had vowed never to grant a pardon as governor.  He did though, in 1925, but he might not have bothered. Less than 5 years later, Ledbetter committed his second crime. And, somewhat unbelievably, received another pardon, this one from Governor O.K. Allen. Here he is with Gallis Pole from 1939.

In the song, a condemned woman pleads for her life, asking family and friends for bribes in order to escape hanging. There are many variations on the same theme…in some she escapes, and in some, the money never comes.

The tune got Led Zeppelin in a bit of hot water, as claims were made that the supergroup plagiarized Ledbetter on their version. While he is listed as the songwriter on some of his releases, it’s more accurately listed on others as “Traditional”. On Led Zeppelin III, this song is credited as “Traditional, arr. Page/Plant”. Page himself acknowledged both Leadbelly and Fred Gerlach as sources of inspiration. What do you think? Get the Led out right here.

You’re on the Sound Beat, listening to Act 2, Scene 4 of Euridice, based on the story of Orpheus and Euridice, from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”. It is one of the first operas. Period. The genre’s origins came about as a result of the Florentine Camerata, an organization of Florence’s finest musicians, thinkers, etc, that met at Count Giovanni de Bardi’s salon. This was the work of Jacopo Peri (Ya-copo Pair- ee). first performed on October 6th 1600 in Florence. Peri himself played the role of Orpheus. Except they would have called it Or-feo. And they wouldn’t have said (English version) Eurydice.

You’re listening to Big Maceo, a pioneer of Chicago Blues, and you’re on the Sound Beat.

Big Maceo, also known as Maceo Merriweather, recorded Worried Life Blues in 1941. It was released by Bluebird Records. He’s accompanied by the legendary Tampa Red on guitar. As is often the case, this traditional song was inspired by an earlier one, Someday Baby Blues, by Sleepy John Estes in 1935. It’s got more of a country blues feel, as opposed to the Chicago Blues that Big Maceo was known for. His moderate-tempo eight-bar blues style helped transform the blues, moving towards that “Chicago urban” style, with a more sophisticated improvisation, using the piano as his main instrument.

This episode was co-written by Syracuse University student Jacqueline Attia as part of the Sound Beat Class Partnership.http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1d/Worried_Life_Blues_single_cover.jpg

You’re on the Sound Beat.

That singer you hear…what’s your mental image?  An elderly woman? A young boy? How about… a 44 year old man?  This recording represents the end of a very weird period in music’s long, weird history.  Alessandro Moreschi  was the last of the castrati, opera singers who had been (ahem) castrated before puberty.  That’s one way around that awkward voice changing stage.

Here’s Moreschi with the Christian hymn “Laudamus Te”.

 So…a castrati’s voice wouldn’t break, but had the force of fully developed lungs behind it.  Castration was outlawed in Italy in 1870, and Moreschi was the only castrati to make solo sound recordings.

Time out for trivia: How many boys were castrated yearly at the height of castrati craze 40, 400, or 4,000?

You probably guessed it…4,000. Eww. Here’s a good site with more than you’d ever want to know on the topic.

This is “Stealin’ Stealin”, recorded by The Memphis Jug Band in 1928. It was one of the first recordings released by the Grateful Dead, on Scorpion records in June 1966.  The band known for jamming, among other things, had their roots in jug band music. In fact, founding members Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir and Ron “Pig Pen” McKernan spent their pre-Dead days in a band called Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions.

They’d move on to The Warlocks, but didn’t want to be accused of…stealin’. Two other bands at the time went by the same name. Ironically, the other two ditched the name as well…you know them by ZZ Top and The Velvet Underground.

So how’d they come up with the name Grateful Dead? From the website “The Straight Dope”:

The official story on the Grateful Dead, as related by Jerry Garcia in the book Playing in the Band, is as follows: “We were standing around in utter desperation at Phil [Lesh]’s house in Palo Alto [trying to think up a name for the band]. There was a huge dictionary, big monolithic thing, and I just opened it up. There in huge black letters was `The Grateful Dead.’ It … just cancelled my mind out.”

I’ll say — how often does the phrase “grateful dead” pop up in the average dictionary? But it turns out Garcia may not have hallucinated the whole thing after all. In the Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, we find a page headed “GRATEFUL DEAD” in big type. Beneath this is an entry to the effect that the “grateful dead” is a motif figuring in many folktales.

Further investigation has turned up a rare volume of folklore entitled The Grateful Dead by G.H. Gerould (1908), lent to me by Straight Dope reader Charles Kroon. In it we find a typical grateful-dead story:

Graf Willekin von Montabour … learned that a beautiful and rich maiden had promised her hand to [whichever] knight should win a tourney she had established. Thereupon he set forth and came to the place announced for the combats. There he found lodging in the house of a man who would only receive him if he paid the debts of a dead man, whose body lay unburied in the dung of a horse-stall. Willekin was moved by this story and paid seventy marks, almost all his money, to ransom the corpse and give it suitable burial. He then had to borrow money from his host in order to indulge in his customary generosity. On the morning of the jousting he obtained from a stranger knight a fine horse on condition of dividing everything he won. He succeeded in [beating] all the other contestants, and so wedded the maiden. On the second night after the marriage the stranger entered his room and demanded a share in the marital rights. After offering instead to give all his possessions, the hero started from the room in tears, when the stranger called him back and explained that he was the ghost of the [presumably grateful] dead, then disappeared.”

Puts a different spin on “Sugar Magnolia,” I’ll tell you that.

In other Dead news, I learn that John Epler, a leading bug authority and loyal Straight Dope reader, has named a newly discovered species of chironomid midge after the Dead, namely Dicrotendipes thanatogratus. (Thanatos is Greek for death, gratus Latin for grateful.) Abrim with boyish enthusiasm, he sent the band a note, but can you believe it, the ingrates (oh, rich irony!) never bothered to reply! Maybe they were turned off by the gauche commingling of Latin and Greek. Or maybe they’re just too jaded. Whatever, when John names his second new bug, you can be sure I won’t forget the thank-you note.

Dear Cecil:

As John Epler may already know, the Dead are no more efficient than they have to be. The mail answerers are rummaging through the backlog in search of the Dicrotendipes thanatogratus note. Your column was the first anyone had heard about it, and it’s a nice flash.

For the record, naming the Dead took place at the house on High Street in Palo Alto on a November afternoon in 1965. The name was found in a regular Funk and Wagnalls dictionary, probably the 1956 edition.

Gerould’s book on the “grateful dead” legends is lovely. Stith Thompson also discusses them. [Typically the hero pays a dead man’s debts so his corpse can be buried. Later a stranger, who turns out to be the grateful dead man, joins the hero and offers his help, on condition that all winnings be equally divided.]

Is the grateful dead man tempting you? Are you making a moral decision? The flat hit you get from the words “grateful dead” can be enhanced by pondering what life situations the g.d. tales represent. When you listen to such tales you’re living on that level of symbolic transaction.

— Bill Legate, San Rafael, California

Two strums…two strums were all it took to make music history.

An electric pulse hits the listeners’ ears twice. Let’s hear it again:  Few people at the time had heard the sound recorded. The year was 1938, and when trombonist and guitarist Eddie Durham recorded his arrangement of “Moten Swing” with the Kansas City Five, it was one of the first jazz recordings made with instrument.

But that wasn’t the end of Durham’s progressive ways.; He also organized one of the first all-female orchestras. And he invented the “non-pressure” technique; a way of playing the trombone without too much pressure on the lips, as to not leave behind a mark after playing.

This episode was written in part by Syracuse University students Seth Kluk-Barany and Meghan Mary Gibbs as part of the Sound Beat Class Partnership. For more on the SBCP, go to soundbeat.org right now.

Sound Beat is produced at the Belfer Audio Archive, Syracuse University Library.

I’m Brett Barry.

The banana may be the perfect food. A low calorie, fat-free natural antacid, it’s high in potassium, which reduces stress, and fiber…which…you know. In 1923, Frank Silver and Irving Cohn wrote Yes! We Have No Bananas reportedly inspired by a Brazilian banana shortage. You’re listening to Brazilian singer Almirante with “Nos Temos Bananas” recorded in 1938.

Others say it was written about a Greek grocer on Long Island, some point to the Windy City for the song’s origins. But the song’s title was used by painter Pavel Jerdanowitch for his critically-acclaimed 1924 painting.  At least, that’s what the art community thought. It was all a hoax, propagated by the real painter to prove that the critics were all full of…uh, fiber.

It’s a great story of critical comeuppance. Read more here.

Ok, so we talk a lot about Cylinders on the show, and for those who have always been curious, but not curious enough to look it up, apparently…Before records were flat, they were cylindrical, and they were played on phonographs. Who can we thank for the invention? Good old Tom Edison, that’s who. And, look, we know it’s very “21st century” to mock the man for the Tesla feud, allegations of ruthless business dealings and, ahem, electrocuting that elephant…still, how’s that lightbulb thing working out for you?

The brown wax cylinder debuted in 1889. This recording, DeWolf Hopper’s “You Can Always Explain Things Away” was made the very next year.

Sound Beat is produced at Belfer Audio Archive, home to one of the largest cylinder collections on the planet. You can choose from over 1400 right now.

Most Atomic-era records seem to achieve, or at least attempt, a bit of humanistic fraternity…a “we’re all in this together” sort-of-vibe. Not so with this decidedly un-P.C. tune. It recounts the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with mention of the “cruel old Japs” and naming the bomb “the answer to our fighting boy’s prayers.”

It was one of the earliest atomic-era records, recorded by Karl and Harty on December 4th, 1945.