After the great ourpouring of grief at the loss of my last attempt, Imma have another try at finishing this. If it fails, I'll give up: as the Great Man said, 'no sense in being a damn fool about it.'
Otis Redding - Shout Bamalama 6.5
This wasn't released in the UK in 1961, at least, not that I noticed. In the wake of Otis Blue, it came out on the Sue label, and while I was all over loads of the R&B releases on the label (Ike & Tina, Bob & Earl, Don & Dewey, and Hank Jacobs, to name but several) I didn't bother with that, partly because I was a bit ticked at Otis's version of My Girl being lauded to the skies by less-cool highschool contemporaries when I knew that the Tempts' original pissed all over it (I was a passionately opinionated teenager - so sue me) and partly because the year before Little Richard had returned from gospel hiatus with Bama Lama Bama Loo, which I saw him play at my third gig ever that year, and I somehow got the idea that it was some kind of riff/rip-off of that, so I never bothered to hear it.
Don't suppose, in fact, that I heard it all last century, because of my 'prejudice saves time' attitude to keeping up with new music, but listening with fresh ears it's undeniably a rousing R&B shouter, with a decent backing band, and all the better for not having the Stax horn section parping all over it. I would probably have been all in for it at the time if I'd been exposed to it.
Ernie K-Doe - A Certain Girl 6.5
That list of previous US number ones I mentioned up there^^ a ways, also included Ern, but the chart-topper in question was not A Certain Girl (which was a Top Ten follow-up), but Mother-in-Law - a hen-pecked semi-novelty whinge of a song, written by Alan Toussaint and featuring a shuffling NOLA production, a tremendous piano solo - presumably by Toussaint himself - and a hi-low vocal arrangement. A Certain Girl was the first I heard from him, as I found a copy in a junk shop fairly early in 1963, but M-I-L had barely scraped the Top Thirty in the UK, and it eluded me in the bargain bins, so in 1964 I paid full price for a London-American EP that featured four NOLA US hits from 1961 (the others were The Showmen – It Will Stand, Jessie Hill – Oooh Poo Pah Doo, and Chris Kenner – I Like It Like That, all of them well worth a listen or two). Here's Ernie, if anyone does not know it.
Anyways, it was the custom at the time to follow up any out-of-left-field hit with something pretty similar, and A Certain Girl has the piano lead, the high-low backing vocals doing a call and response routine and EK-D'S wheedling vocal persona. This time, though, it's a Naomi Neville song with a distinctly different sensibility to the lyrics, and, despite it lacking a Toussaint solo, I think these days I prefer it to the big(ger) hit.
Roy Orbison - Crying 7.5
I already wrote about this single in the recent Big O thread, but would like to add that last night I watched a 90-minute documentary about Orbison which focussed on his songwriting as much as, and perhaps even more, than his performing. It was wonderful, still up on the iPlayer I should imagine, and featured several songwriters saying how weird and out there and ground-breaking some of those early songs were, including this one, breaking down traditional structures.
Timi Yuro - Hurt 7.5
My pick, and as I said at the time of picking it, not my favourite track by one of my favourite vocalists, but all the others would be up against much stiffer opposition in their year. I've already gone on about her at eye-bleeding length here -
preludin.proboards.com/thread/4112/hagiography-timi-yuro - so I'll leave it at that
Del Shannon - Runaway 8.5
One I definitely heard on the radio when it came out. It's difficut for me to overstate how extraordinary the sound of this record was back then, not just the galloping-calliope-from-Mars emanating from whaever the fuck Max Crook was playing at the time, but the echoey bast of the lead vocal, decorated with those sudden leaps into falsetto and a soft growl or two. I think I may have told this story before...when Runaway was released in the UK, the first batch of singles were mispressed. Due to a cock-up over the matrix numbers, the intended track - a ballad called Jody, correctly identified on the label - had been replaced by Max Crook's instrumental (recorded as Maximilian), The Snake
As a result, a few early reviewers concluded, in the absence of any decent press info, that 'Del Shannon' was some kind of boffin experimentalist, rather than a singer.
Dion - Runaround Sue 7.5
Yet another US number one - bit of a theme of this year in the canon - and one that I picked up pretty soon on the Top Rank label (which also released the Flamingos, Shirelles, Wilbert Harrison, B Bumble & the Stingers, U.S. Bonds, and lots of Joe Meek's recordings). By the time I got a copy, Dion had had several more huge hits, including a couple of R&B covers in Drip Drop and Ruby Baby and a sentimental, moralising death ballad written by - gulp - Hank Williams. He really was a contender. He had that suited punk hoodlum look and persona down pat. I also had a couple of Dion and the Belmonts hits on Top Rank, but my favourite track of his from his pomp was another from 1961, a follow-up that refined, rather than diluted, the swaggering formula established on Runaround Sue, The Wanderer.
Patsy Cline - Crazy 7
- I Go to Pieces 6.5
Patsy Cline was just a name in Billboard to me. I probaby didn't notice her until she was killed in 1963, and country in general was anathema to me back then: all I heard on Uk radio was that sweetened Nashville slush. Jim Reeves, Bobby Bare, Wink Martindale, that sort of codswallop. Somehow, somewhen, I acquired copies of both of these singles, on the Brunswick label. Walking After Midnight too. Now I can appreciate them for the songcraft as well as for the extraordinariiy pure, aching tone of PC's voice.
That said, I also get what DF is saying, though how he knows what Sunday afternoons were like in the late 1950s and early 1960s is beyond me.
Bobby Parker - Watch Your Step 7.5
Like Shout Bamalama, this got little or no release/airplay in the UK in 1961, but was released when Guy Stevens rebooted Sue in the UK in the mid-1960s, when I happily picked it up. Its basic selling point - an amphetamine rejig of What'd I Say with a killer guitar riff (played by Parker himsef and later co-opted apparently by the the Bea*les and Led Zeppelin) replacing Ray's piano intro - was catnip to me. It got played a lot in my student years: it's a keeper.
Ray Charles - I Believe to my Soul 6.5
And speaking of Ray Charles...You know, I couldn't recognize this from the intro, and it may be that I haven't heard it before, which surprises me, especially as odd parts of the song seemed very familiar. When I started getting into music Ray had just released Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, and his version of I Can't Stop Loving you was all over the charts for months, it seemed. I didn't hate it, not at all, but the strings and heavenly choirs, the cheese, got in the way of my appreciating his voice. Anyway, of course I knew about What'd I Say (which I picked up in a bargain bin on an EP that had both sides of the single edited together), and I'd read about some of his other Fifties stuff that redefined R&B with added swing, and helped to develop the church-based Soul style, but I never really got into him the way I did with other soul pioneers. Dunno why. But it means I came to this with fresh ears.
I found the tempo dragged for me, although that intro is well moody: the Raelets were in great form as usual, but there was a lot of echo on Ray's voice. That youtube sounds to be natural stereo, but I don't think singles were ever recorded in stereo in 1961, so I went on youtube to find a mono version for comparison, and that I did recognise.
Doctor Ross - Cat Squirrel 6
In my last year of high school, I got friendly with a couple of guys called Clive and Keith. We were all into records in a fairly big way (as well as books and movies) but had our specialities: you all know what I was into, Clive liked the Bea*les, the Yardbirds and Clapton, while Keith also liked clapton and the Yardbirds, but was getting more and more into country blues, as well as the Chicago variety - all three of us liked that. I was especially fond of of what I insisted on caling blues 'harp'. This is how come the first time I ever heard Catsquirrel, it was Cream doing it live (with Clive and Keith, before Fresh Cream was released), and how I first heard the Doc Ross version soon after. I liked the harp, but not really much else. I probably think more of it now than I did then - my appreciation of country blues and pretty much all forms of American roots music has grown the more I've heard of it and read about it - but I still can't nudge it up from the very good to the pretty great. Sorry Adam.
Ok, noted.
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