Not Today

Originally posted August 17, 2009

Sorry, but whatever it is I’m going to do this week, you’ll have to wait for it. I hope to be here tomorrow with some cover versions to add to our discussion of last week.

A Six-Pack of Waiting
“Wait and See” by Fats Domino, Imperial 5467 [1957]
“Waiting” by Santana from Santana [1969]
“Waitin’ For Me At The River” by Potliquor from Louisiana Rock and Roll [1973]
“There’s Always Someone Waiting” by the Average White Band from Average White Band [1974]
“Wait” by Steve Forbert from Jackrabbit Slim [1979]
“Waiting for the Miracle” by Leonard Cohen from The Future [1992]

PG&E, Fats, Stevie Ray & Jimi

Originally posted June 18, 2009

I found an interesting clip of Pacific Gas & Electric performing a long version of “Are You Ready.” It sounds like a live performance – I miss the background singers – but there’s no sign of an audience, not even any audience sounds at the end of the performance. Still, it’s a decent performance from – according to the video poster – 1970.

Here’s a concert performance of “Walking To New Orleans” from Fats Domino. Based on the few visual clues available, I’d put this in the 1990s, maybe a bit earlier. Does anyone know? From what I can tell on later examination, the performance was in 1985.

I found a clip of Stevie Ray Vaughan doing an instrumental version of “Little Wing” in what appears to be a European open-air venue around, maybe, 1985. He moves into a cover of “Third Stone From The Sun” before the clip ends.

Video deleted.

Finally, here’s a YouTube posting with only still pictures. But that’s okay, the audio is Jimi Hendrix’ performance of “Little Wing” (with Noel Redding on bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums) during the second show at San Francisco’s Winterland on October 12, 1968.

Video deleted.

A while back, I posted a single track from the self-titled 1974 album by Isis, which was kind of a female version of Earth, Wind & Fire. I’ve been thinking about posting the full album, but I’ve learned that it’s now available on CD, which is good news. It’s an import, yeah, with the corresponding price, but still, it’s out there.

Slightly revised on archival posting.

Wandering Around

Originally posted June 17, 2009

Wandering the upper levels of the cable offerings last evening, I happened upon a boxing match on one of the premium channels. I’ve never watched a lot of boxing, but when I come across it by accident, I sometimes watch for a few minutes. I did so last evening, and I got to thinking about a time when boxing was on network television on a regular basis.

The program I recall was The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, airing Friday evenings in the late 1950s and early 1960s, or so my memory told me. I didn’t really watch the show, but I sure remembered the theme song. Here’s a long instrumental version of the theme song that’s been used – for some reason – as a background for video of penguins. Here’s the theme – titled “Look Sharp – Be Sharp (Gillette March)” – as recorded in 1954 by the Boston Pops:

So, thinking about The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, I wandered over to Wikipedia, where I read that the show had run on Friday evenings into 1960 on NBC and had then moved to ABC. That made sense: I have vague memories of the show on NBC, but I also remember seeing prime-time boxing on KMSP, which was at the time ABC’s affiliate in the Twin Cities. (Watching shows on KMSP was sometimes an iffy proposition, as the station distinguished itself during the years of roof-top antennas by having the weakest signal of all four commercial stations in the Twin Cities.)

Wandering further into the topic, I checked the 1960-61 prime time TV schedule at Wikipedia and found no listing on ABC for The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports. Digging around a bit, I learned that ABC moved the show to Saturdays and renamed it Fight of the Week. Having resolved that, I spent some time looking at the prime time television schedules for 1959-60 and 1960-61.

And I found that fascinating, a real memory trip: National Velvet, The Red Skelton Show, Sugarfoot, Hong Kong, 77 Sunset Strip, Law of the Plainsman, Hawaiian Eye and on and on. I don’t recall watching them all, but I remember the titles. Of course, I did see some of those shows. One of my favorites was 77 Sunset Strip, a show about two detectives in Los Angeles that starred, among others, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., who went on to star later in the 1960s and 1970s in The F.B.I., and Ed Byrnes, whose hair-combing character, Kookie, inspired the 1959 hit, “Kookie, Kookie (Lend Me Your Comb),” which Byrnes recorded with Connie Stevens. The record went to No. 4. Here are Byrnes and Stevens during an appearance on the Saturday Night Beech-Nut Show from April 4, 1959 (not American Bandstand, as I originally guessed).

We’ve wandered a little afield here. I’m sure I didn’t see that particular performance, nor did I hear the record until many years later. My interest at the time was the drama – such as it was – on 77 Sunset Strip, which ran from 1958 into 1964. Here’s a version of the theme from the show (I think it’s the original, but I’m not at all certain):

“77 Sunset Strip” written by Mack David and Jerry Livingston [1958]

And then, here’s a selection from 1960, which is the year that The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports moved from NBC to ABC:

A Six-Pack from 1960
“New Orleans” by Gary U.S. Bonds, Legrand 1003 [Peak: No. 6]
“Wonderland by Night” by Bert Kaempfert, Decca 31141 [Peak: No. 1 in 1961]
“Walking to New Orleans” by Fats Domino, Imperial 5675 [Peak: No. 6]
“Theme from ‘The Apartment’” by Ferrante & Teicher, United Artists 231 [Peak: No. 10]
“Save the Last Dance For Me” by the Drifters, Atlantic 2071 [Peak: No. 1]
“Last Date” by Floyd Cramer, RCA 7775 [Peak: No. 2]

Bonus Track
“A Fool In Love” by Ike & Tina Turner, Sue 730 [No. 20]

Well, throw in some Everly Brothers, a Johnny Horton tune, a Frankie Avalon tune, some Dion & The Belmonts, then add Elvis, Percy Faith and Connie Francis, and you’d have a pretty good idea of how 1960 sounded.

When I pulled the first six tracks to share today, I didn’t realize that all of them were Top Ten records. That tells me that radio listening might not have been as bad in 1960 as I tend to think it was. (I certainly don’t remember what pop radio sounded like in 1960; I turned seven that year, and I don’t recall listening to much of anything at all. So anything I know about music in 1960 – except for piano exercises by John W. Schaum – comes from learning about it long after the fact.) On the other hand, the year also provided listeners with “Running Bear” by Johnny Preston, “Teen Angel” by Mark Dining and “Mr. Custer” by Larry Verne, all of which went to No. 1. So call it a mixed bag.

Revised slightly on archival posting.

Saturday Single No. 474

Well, I went to see the doctor yesterday about my back. Dr. Julie wasn’t available; I saw another doctor in her group or subset or pod or whatever they call it at the big complex just northwest of St. Cloud. He listened as I told him how it started and how it felt, then he poked my back at various places, pushed and pulled my legs in various directions, and thought for a moment.

Then he told me that it was basically a muscle strain gone wild, and he prescribed a series of pills – a descending quantity of a steroid for a week – and gave me some exercises to do.

I can take pills well, but I’m not all that good at staying with an exercise regimen. I’ll try, though. And it’s nice to pass on the good news that after twenty-four hours of pills and (a little of) the exercises, my back feels much better.

But given yesterday’s visit and other events, as well as the fact that the Texas Gal and I need to run some errands (one of which will no doubt include Chinese food), I have little to offer here. So I thought I’d grab four reference books and see which artist is the first mentioned on Page 474. And from there, we’ll find a single for today.

The New Rolling Stone Album Guide starts its “L” section on Page 474, and the first artist listed is k.d. lang. I have three albums by ms. lang on the digital shelves, so we have something to work with if we go that direction.

In Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles, we find the Isley Brothers in mid-section at the top of Page 474. There’s plenty of Isley stuff on the digital shelves, so we’ll see.

The single ranked at No. 474 in Dave Marsh’s The Heart Of Rock & Soul is the 1956 hit “I’m In Love Again” by Fats Domino. There’s lots of Fats here, too.

And the album listed on Page 474 of the tome 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die is Motorhead’s No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith. That one is, probably unsurprisingly, not on any shelves here, digital or otherwise.

Well, I’ve featured the Isleys a lot over the years, as I have Fats. I’ve not done much with k.d. lang. Still, I’m of the mind that one should listen to Fats Domino whenever one has the chance. So here’s “I’m In Love Again.” It went to No. 3 in 1956, says Whitburn (No. 9 on the R&B chart). And it’s today’s Saturday Single.

What’s At No. 27?

So, with today being February 27 and Odd, Pop and I being short of ideas this morning, we’re going to look at a few Billboard charts released on this date over the years and check out what’s hiding at No. 27. Along the way, we’ll check out the No. 1 records of the times, too. There are four such charts during the span of years that tends to interest us here. We’ll start in 1957.

One of the odd things about the earlier charts in the files I have is that records are often tied for a spot. In the Top 100 for February 27, 1957, two records are tied at No. 26, which means there really was no record at No. 27. So we’ll look at both records at No. 26. The first listed is “Lucky Lips” by Ruth Brown. The record, which went no further on the Top 100 but went to No. 25 on two of the other main charts Billboard issued at the time, is the first listed under Brown’s name in Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles, where the listings start in 1955. Brown was a force long before that, of course; her listings on the magazine’s R&B chart start in 1949. “Lucky Lips” went to No. 6 on that chart.

The other record at No. 26 on this date in 1957 was a pairing of artist and song that seems incongruous from a distance of nearly sixty years: “Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With A Dixie Melody” by Jerry Lewis, whose image in my mind starts at goofy comedian and ends at smarmy telethon host and doesn’t come close to hit singer at all. (The combination evidently seemed so bizarre to the anonymous person who transcribed my collection of Billboard charts that he or she credited the record to Jerry Lee Lewis, which caused me a bit of confusion.) Lewis offers the song over a Vegas-style big band arrangement that serves it well although the whole thing sounds odd to me. Listeners liked it, though; the record peaked at No. 10 on the store sales list. Lewis had one other hit: “It All Depends On You” went to No. 68 on the Top 100 later in 1957.

Sitting at No. 1 on this date in 1957 was “Young Love” by Tab Hunter, by far the most successful single the actor ever had to his credit. (I recall Hunter’s smiling visage on the front of a comic book that told the tale of one of Hunter’s movies. I forget which movie, and a look at Hunter’s credits this morning doesn’t help.)

The next time Billboard released a pop chart on February 27, it was 1961, and the chart was called – as it would be past the turn of the century – the Hot 100. Parked at No. 27 was “What A Price” by Fats Domino. The slow, sad record, which was the forty-fourth of an eventual seventy-seven Domino placed in or near the Hot 100, was on its way down the chart after peaking at No. 22 (No. 7, R&B). Should it have done better? Well, yes, because Fats Domino should always be in the Top Ten.

The No. 1 record as February approached its end in 1961 was Chubby Checker’s “Pony Time.”

It took only another four years before a Billboard Hot 100 touched down on a February 27, and the No. 27 record on this date in 1965 was the first track on one of the first pop LPs I ever owned. My sister gave me Herman’s Hermits On Tour (which was made up of studio recordings, not the live recordings that the album’s title might have implied), and “Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat” led off the album. As a single, “Heartbeat” went to No. 2, the first of nine straight Top Ten hits for Peter Noone and his group. (The Billboard Book of No. 2 Singles tells me that the Hermits’ single was blocked from the top spot by the Supremes’ “Stop! In The Name Of Love.”)

The No. 1 record fifty years ago today was “This Diamond Ring” by Gary Lewis & The Playboys.

And the last of the February 27 Billboard charts that we’re concerned with today came out in 1971. (There were charts on February 27 in 1982, 1988 and beyond, but that gets us into years we are not all that enthusiastic about.) The No. 27 record at the end of the last February of my high school days was “Help Me Make It Through The Night” by Sammi Smith, written by Kris Kristofferson. Smith’s plaintive performance was on its way to No. 8; it would go to No. 1 on the country chart and to No. 3 on the easy listening chart. I’m not sure I had much regard for “Help Me Make It Through The Night” when I was a high school senior, but now I think it’s pretty great stuff.

And to finish this off, the No. 1 single during on this date in 1971 was the Osmonds’ “One Bad Apple.”

Here’s Smith’s single:

Chart Digging, July 25, 1964

Looking into the records in the higher portions of the Billboard Hot 100 from July 25, 1964 – fifty years ago today – is fun but unsurprising, like reading a favorite novel for the fifth time. I’ve been known to do that, read books five times or more, but I also read stuff I’ve never read before, combing the shelves at the local library for authors and titles new to me.

The parallel here is, of course, to go deeper into the Hot 100 from fifty years ago and find tunes that I’ve never heard (or may have heard but have since forgotten). Today’s exploration brings up six records from that long ago chart’s Bubbling Under section.

Parked at the very bottom of the Bubbling Under section, at No. 135, is one of those oddities: A performer’s only listed record sitting in the lowest position possible for one week only. After giving it a listen, I might think that “A Casual Kiss” by Leon Peels, an R&B singer born in Arkansas and raised in California, might have deserved more attention. It’s a pretty record, but it’s offered in a doo-woppish style that likely sounded out-of-date by mid-1964. It would have made for a great slow dance, though. And it’s interesting to note that a few years earlier, Peels was the lead singer of the Blue Jays, who were themselves a one-hit wonder, with “Lover’s Island” going to No. 31 in 1961.

Sitting at No. 129, we find a record I have heard, although I didn’t recall it until this morning. “The Seventh Dawn” by Ferrante & Teicher is one of the movie themes the piano-playing duo frequently recorded, and it’s one of the 175 F&T tracks on my digital shelves. The 7th Dawn was a 1964 film about the Communist insurgency in Malaya after World War II; it starred, among others, William Holden and Susannah York. I don’t know about the movie, but the F&T single is actually kind of blah, and its chart performance reflects that. In four weeks of bubbling, the highest the record got was No. 124, a great distance from the duo’s best charting singles: “Exodus” went to No. 2 and “Tonight” from West Side Story went to No. 8, both in 1961.

With Fats Domino’s unmistakable voice and the R&B sax break, “Mary, Oh Mary” has some of the elements of Domino’s classic New Orleans work from the 1950s. But as good as the single sounds today – and it’s pretty darn good – it wasn’t what the marketplace was looking for in July 1964. “Mary, Oh Mary” was bubbling under at No. 127 fifty years ago; it would stay there one more week and then disappear. It was the 74th single Domino put in or near the pop chart since 1955. He would have three more records reach the Hot 100, but just barely, with two records going to No. 99 later in 1964, and his cover of the Beatles’ “Lady Madonna” reaching No. 100 in 1968.

Jerry Wallace’s name showed up here once before, when I wrote about his 1972 hit (No. 38 pop, No. 2 country, No. 9 AC), “If You Leave Me Tonight I’ll Cry,” which was used as a plot device in a January 1972 episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. This morning, we’re listening to “It’s A Cotton Candy World” from its perch fifty years ago at No. 126. Three weeks later, the record, which is pleasant but no more than that, slipped into the Hot 100 and spent one week at No. 99. It was one of seventeen records the Missouri-born performer placed in or near the Hot 100 between 1958 and 1972. From 1965 into 1978, he placed nineteen records in the country Top 40, starting with “If You Leave Me . . .” and including its follow-up, “Do You Know What It’s Like To Be Lonesome,” which went to No. 2 on the country chart.

Moving up ten slots in that long-ago Bubbling Under section, we find at No. 116 an updated version of a famed American song. “Frankie & Johnnie” was likely a Nineteenth Century folk song but its origins are misty, says Wikipedia. (For those interested in popular music history, the story of the song, as told at Wikipedia, is fascinating.) Either way, the tale of Frankie and her two-timing man showed up in the Hot 100 five times between 1959 and 1966, with the best-performing version being Sam Cooke’s 1963 take, which went to No. 14 (No. 4 R&B). The version we’re interested in this morning is, as the record label says, “The New ‘Frankie and Johnnie’ Song” by the Greenwood County Singers. One of two charting records for the California-based group, which included a young Van Dyke Parks, the record would move into the Hot 100 a week later and eventually climb to No. 75 (No. 15 AC).

You might remember the nursery rhyme:

Bobby Shafto’s gone to sea,
Silver buckles at his knee;
He’ll come back and marry me,
Bonny Bobby Shafto!

Well, fifty years ago this week, Bobby Shafto was Bubbling Under, with “She’s My Girl” sitting at No. 105. The English singer, about whom even Joel Whitburn seems to know little, was, one would think, stage-named after the subject of the nursery rhyme, who was likely, says Wikipedia, “a resident of Hollybrook, County Wicklow, Ireland, who died in 1737.” Or the singing Shafto could have been stage-named for Robert Shafto, an Eighteenth Century member of the British Parliament. Or the singer’s parents might have actually carried the surname Shafto and decided to saddle their son from his birth with that burdensome name. I don’t know, but I lean toward its being the silly brainstorm of the singer’s manager or some promotions person employed by the Rust label. In any case, the record was not bad, but it really went nowhere, spending one week at No. 99 before bubbling back down to where we found it. It was Shafto’s only charting single.

Fats & His Monkey

I love unlikely cover versions, pairings of song and artist that make me go “Huh?” And looking back over the past few weeks of posts here, I realized that I’d mentioned for the second time – without ever posting it – one of the most intriguing and unlikely covers I know about: Fats Domino’s take on the Beatles’ “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey.”

Domino recorded the tune for Reprise in 1968, but a single release didn’t hit the charts. The track was supposed to show up on an album, but I don’t think it did. The liner notes of the sampler titled The 1969 Warner-Reprise Record Show – which is where I found the track – say that “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide . . .” is on the album Fats Is Back, but the 1999 CD release on the Bullseye Blues label omits the track. So I checked a couple of discography sites, and neither the track listing at Discogs nor the listing at Both Sides Now show “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide . . .” as being on Fats Is Back.

It’s possible, I suppose, that both discography sites are relying on the track listing from the Bullseye Blues release, but I kind of doubt it. I think that, despite its being promoted in the Warner-Reprise sampler, the track was omitted from Fats Is Back when it was released in 1968. And that makes me wonder what happened.

Anyway, here’s Fats and Reprise 0843 : “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey.”

The track has since shown up on a CD released last year in Britain: Come Together: Black America Sings Lennon & McCartney. The album includes twenty-three other tracks; at least one of those – Chubby Checker’s take on “Back In The U.S.S.R.” – has been featured in this blog.

Saturday Single No. 286

Earlier this week, my pal jb, proprietor of The Hits Just Keep On Comin’, reminded his readers of a (sometimes sad) truth. Musical memory is ephemeral:

There was a time when Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” was bred into the DNA of music fans. You couldn’t help knowing it. The record was one of several that symbolized what the 1950s sounded like, it was anthologized everywhere, and as a result, people who hadn’t been born when it was a hit could sing along with it, or the first line, in perfect Fats Domino cadence: “I found my thrill . . . .” (In the 70s, on the TV show Happy Days, it was shorthand for gettin’ lucky, or the promise of gettin’ lucky.) 

“Blueberry Hill” is not universally familiar anymore, though. Oldies radio left the 50s behind a long time ago, and 50s music is no longer a staple of that great cultural leveler, the wedding reception playlist. So it’s doubtful that your average person under the age of 30 would know “Blueberry Hill.” For those of us who do know it, the song is so closely identified with Domino that it’s surprising to learn that A) he wasn’t the first to record it and B) he wasn’t the last, either.

From there, jb went on to talk about earlier and later versions of “Blueberry Hill.” As he did and I nodded along, the undercurrent of my mind was recalling a two-LP set that came my way in early 1973 from a fellow student at St. Cloud State. Bruce, who worked in the same office as I did in the learning resources center (better known as the library), said he liked it, but he’d gotten tired of it. So I stopped by his house on the way home from school one day and paid something like two bucks for a package of Fats Domino’s hits, a 1971 United Artists release in its Legendary Masters Series.

Like all the others of our generation that jb mentions in the above paragraphs, I knew “Blueberry Hill,” and yes, I likely still know it well enough to “sing along with it . . . in perfect Fats Domino cadence.” But I didn’t know any of the rest of Domino’s amazingly deep catalog. With its twenty-eight tracks – along with a ten-page insert with photos, an appreciative essay and a discography – the two-LP package introduced me to, among others, “The Fat Man,” “Ain’t That A Shame,” “My Blue Heaven,” “Blue Monday,” “Whole Lotta Loving,” “I Wanna Walk You Home” and so much more.

In the paragraphs above, jb mentioned oldies radio. In 1973, there was no such animal, at least as we know it today. (I stand corrected; see note below from regular reader Yah Shure.) On occasion, if my memory is accurate this fine morning, one might hear a hit from the mid-1950s on KDWB from the Twin Cities or – more rarely – during the hours that WJON across the tracks in St. Cloud played Top 40. (The more advanced radio geeks among my readers are free to correct me in either direction: That it was unlikely to hear a 1950s record on those stations; or that it was far more frequent than I recall.)

Whatever the case, almost all of the music on Fats Domino, as the two-LP set was simply titled, was new to me. Beyond “Blueberry Hill,” I knew only one other tune on the album – “I Hear You Knocking” – and that was only because Welshman Dave Edmunds’ cover of the song had gone to No. 4 early in 1971. (On that cover, Edmunds gleefully name-checks several of his inspirations from the 1950s, among them Domino and Smiley Lewis, who recorded the original version of “I Hear You Knocking” in 1955.) Beyond that, I got a slight glimmering that if I wanted to truly understand pop and rock music, I was going to eventually have to dig into the music of the 1950s and earlier.

That glimmering got lost in a few months as I began to prepare for my academic year in Denmark, and that year, as I’ve related here before, brought me the music of the Allman Brothers Band and the folks at Muscle Shoals, which determined much of my musical digging for a few years. I eventually did get to the rock ’n’ roll of the 1950s and the R&B that preceded it in the 1940s, and I learned at least a little from that era about the music that moves me.

So I won’t say that the tune I’m presenting today was a major tool as I tinkered with the musical machine; if it was, it took a long time to for me to figure out how to use it. But having been reminded of the Fats Domino two-LP set this week, it seemed right to revisit Fats’ version of “I Hear You Knocking.” Recorded in 1958, it was released in late 1961 as the B-Side to Fats’ cover of Hank Williams “Jambalaya (Down On The Bayou.)” The A-Side went to No. 30. “I Hear You Knocking” went to No. 67, and it’s today’s Saturday Single.

‘Blue Monday’ Times Three

Originally posted August 5, 2008

“Blue Monday, I hate blue Monday,” sings Fats Domino. “Got to work like a slave all day.”

“‘Blue Monday,’” wrote Dave Marsh in The Heart of Rock & Soul, “is the foundation of a rock and roll tradition of songs about hatred of the working week and lust for lost weekends. The chain now includes such significant links as the Coasters’ ‘What About Us,’ Gary ‘U.S.’ Bonds’s ‘Seven Day Weekend’ (the first call for the abolition of Mondays, blue or otherwise), the Vogues’ ‘Five O’Clock World,’ ‘Friday on My Mind’ by the Easybeats, ‘Manic Monday,’ the hit Prince wrote for the Bangles, and the Sex Pistols’ ‘Holidays in the Sun’ (in which the vision turns ugly from mass unemployment and begins to die).”

Marsh wrote in 1989, a couple of generations ago as far as music genealogy goes. If I wished, then, I could dig through the last nineteen years of pop and rock and no doubt find other examples of dismay for the fact that we are born to toil, whether that toil be tightening bolts on the assembly line, installing someone else’s new clutch, balancing lunch plates at the diner, making alterations in someone’s new dress, planning lessons and teaching fifth-graders, installing new software, researching legal precedents or writing an account of a ballgame with a deadline fast approaching. I’m sure those songs are out there, but I’m more interested this morning in “Blue Monday,” as Marsh sees it as a signpost.

In “Blue Monday,” Marsh notes, it’s not just hatred of the work week that’s on the table: “Fats,” Marsh writes, “is talking about something much more modern: the demand for leisure. He discards the working week and his loathing of it in the first verse; it’s the weekend that the song dwells upon, and in the end Fats’ feeling for its excesses is clear and profound. ‘Sunday mornin’ my head is bad,’ he sings, ‘But it’s worth it for the times that I’ve had.’”

In other words, Marsh sees “Blue Monday” as possibly the quintessential song for 1950s America, the time and place when leisure became more and more a regular portion of life instead of something possessed by very few and envied by the many. Oh, don’t get me wrong: Not everyone prospered so. But enough did so that having fun for the sake of fun was widespread enough to be the subject of “Blue Monday” and the other songs yet to come in the chain Marsh cites above.

Interestingly, Fats’ version of “Blue Monday” was not the first recorded. Smiley Lewis recorded and released the song – written by New Orleans genius Dave Bartholomew – in 1954, when it was released as Imperial 5268. Modern rock and roll charts starts in 1955, so I don’t know how well Lewis’ version sold. But Bartholomew and Domino recorded Fats’ version in 1956 and released it as Imperial 5417. It entered the charts the second week of January 1957, eventually making its way to No. 5.*

In the fifty years since then, “Blue Monday” has been a popular song to pick up. All-Music Guide lists more than 250 CDs with a version of “Blue Monday.” Even accounting for the repeats of Domino’s version (and for other songs of the same title), there’s an impressive total of covers. Other artists listed as having recorded the song include Bonnie & Francis, the Crickets, Bobby Darin, Dion, Dave Edmunds, Ian Gillan, Wilbert Harrison, Cecil Hill, Huey Lewis & the News, the Kingsnakes, Alexis Korner, Delbert McClinton, Randy Newman, Bob Seger, Cat Stevens, Dave Van Ronk and the Zydeco Boneshakers.

I won’t say that my favorite cover version of “Blue Monday” gets to the song’s center better than any of those versions, as I have – oddly enough – heard none of the versions by the artists listed in the above paragraph. But I really doubt very much that anyone – other than Domino, and maybe Lewis – can deliver the song any better than New Orleans’ own Dr. John, who recorded “Blue Monday” for his 1992 album, Goin’ Back to New Orleans.

Here, then, are Smiley Lewis’ original version, Fats Domino’s hit cover and Dr. John’s take on Dave Bartholomew’s “Blue Monday.”

Smiley Lewis – “Blue Monday” [Imperial 5268, 1954]

Fats Domino – “Blue Monday” [Imperial 5417, 1956]

Dr. John – “Blue Monday” [From Goin’ Back to New Orleans, 1992]

*A quick check of Joel Whitburn’s Billboard Book of Top 40 R&B & Hip-Hop Hits shows no sign of Smiley Lewis’ version of “Blue Monday,” making me think – though I could certainly be wrong – that its sales were not too notable. Fats Domino’s version, on the other hand, was No. 1 for eight weeks on the R&B chart.  Note added July 25, 2011.

One Of Those Days

Originally posted June 30, 2008

I’ve never written in any great detail about my health here (and I don’t plan to; I don’t want this space to turn into a “woe is me” place), but the fact is that there are days – generally Mondays – when my body tells me I’ve done too much in the past few days and it’s time to rest.

Today is one of those, but as I am loathe to leave the space entirely unmelodied, here’s a repost a reader requested, and a link to the original post.

Don Nix – Living by The Days [1971]

And just because, here’s the Fat Man with a song entirely appropriate for the day:

Fats Domino – “Blue Monday” [Imperial 5417, 1957]