A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 13: “Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean” by Ruth Brown

Episode Date: December 31, 2018

Welcome to episode thirteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean” by Ruth Brown. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

A History of rock music in 500 songs By hundred hodry. Episode 13 Mama It reads Your Daughter Me By Ruth Brown While I've often made the point that 50's rhythm and blues is not the same thing as the blues as most people now think of it. There was still an obvious connection,

as you'd expect from the name. name, if nothing else, and sometimes the two would be more connected than you might think. So Ruth Brown, who was almost the epitome of a rhythm and blues singer, had her first hit on the pop charts, with a song that couldn't have been more blues inspired. For the story of Mama he treats your daughter mean, we have to go all the way back to Blind Lemon Jefferson in the 1920s. Jefferson was a country blues picker, who was one of the most remarkable guitarists of his generation. He was a blues man first and foremost, but his guitar playing influenced almost every country player who came later. Unfortunately, he recorded for Paramount

records, notoriously the label, with the worst sound quality in the 20th. and 30s, which, given the general sound quality of those early recordings, is saying something. One of his songs was One Dime Blues, which is a very typical example of his style. I'm broken, I ain't gotta die. I'm broke and I ain't gotta die. I'm broke, ain't gotta die. See what I mean, both about the great guitar playing and about the really lousy sound quality. That song was later picked up by another great blind blues man, blind Willie McTell. MacTell is an example of how white lovers of black music would manage to miss the point of the musicians they loved, and try to turn them into something they're not.

A substantial proportion of MacTell's recordings were made by John and Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress. But if you listen to those recordings, you can hear the Lomax's persuading MacTel to play music that's very different from the songs he normally played. While he was a commercial blues singer, they wanted him to perform tritel. folk songs and to sing political protest material, and basically to be another lead belly,

a singer he did resemble slightly as a musician, largely because they both played the 12-string guitar. He said he didn't know any protest songs, but he did play various folk songs for them, even though they weren't in his normal repertoire. And this is a very important thing to realize about the way the white collectors of black music distorted it, and it's something you should also pay attention to when I talk about this stuff. I am, after all, a white man who loves a lot of black music, but is disconnected from the culture that created it, just like the Lomaxes. There's a reason I call this podcast A History of Rock Music, rather than the history of rock music. The History of Rock Music. The The very last thing I want to do is give the impression that my opinion is the definitive one

and that I should have the final word about these things. But what the Lomaxes were doing when they were collecting their recordings was taking sophisticated entertainers who made their living from playing to rather demanding crowds and getting them to play music that the Lomaxes thought was typical black music. rather than the music that those musicians would normally play and that their audiences would normally listen to. So they got MacTell to perform songs he knew, like The Bowl Weevil and Amazing Grace, because they thought that those songs were what they should be collecting, rather than have him perform his own material.

To put this into a context which may seem a little more obvious to my audience, Imagine you're a singer-songwriter in Britain in the present day. You've been playing the clubs for several years. You've got a repertoire of songs you've written, which the audiences love. You get your big break, with a record company, you go into the studio, and the producer insists on you singing Itsy Bitsy Spider and a hymn you had to sing in school assembly, like All Things Bright and Beautiful.

You probably could perform those, but you'd be wondering why they wouldn't let you sing your own songs, and what the audiences would think of you singing this kind of stuff, and who exactly was going to buy it. But, on the other hand, money is money, and you give the people paying you what they want. This was the experience of a lot of black musicians in the 30s, 40s and 50s, having rich white men pay them to play music that they saw.

as unsophisticated. It's something we'll see particularly in the late 50s as musicians travel from the US to the UK and people like Muddy Waters discovered that their English audiences didn't want to see anyone playing electric guitars and doing solos. They thought of the blues as a kind of folk music, and so wanted to see a poor black sharecropper playing an acoustic guitar, and so that's what he gave those audiences. But MacTell's version of One Dime Blues, retitled Last Dime Blues, wasn't like that. That was the music he played normally, and it was a minor hit. Mama, don't treat your daughter to me. Mama, don't treat you door to me. Mama, I don't treat your daughter me.

You're the meanest woman and man most ever seen. Do you want your friend to be buried like Jesse Jane? Do you want your friend to be buried like Jesse Jane? Do you want your friend to be buried like Jesse James? And that line we just heard, Mama Don't Treat Your Daughter Me, inspired one of the most important in early rock and roll. Ruth Brown had run away from home when she was 17.

She'd wanted to become a singer, and she'd eloped with a trumpet player, Jimmy Brown, who she married and whose name she kept, even though the marriage didn't last long. She quickly joined Lucky Melinda's band, as so many early R&B stars we've discussed did. but that too didn't last long. Melinda's band, at the time,

had two singers already, and the original plan was for Brown to travel with the band for a month and learn how they did things, and then to join them on stage. She did the travelling for a month part, but soon found herself kicked out when she got on stage. She did two songs with the band on her first night, performing live with them and apparently went down well with the audience. But that was all she was

meant to do on that show, so one of the other musicians asked her to go and get the band members' drinks from the bar, as they were still performing. She brought them all sodas onto the stage, and Melinda said, I hired a singer, not a waitress, you're fired, and besides, you don't sing well anyway. She was fired that day, and she had no money. Millinder refused to pay her, arguing that she'd had free room and board from him for a month, so if anything, she owed him money. She had no way to make her way back home from Washington. She was stuck.

But what should have been a terrible situation for her turned out to be the thing that changed her life. She got an audition with Blanche Callaway, Cab's sister, who was running a club at the time. I say Blanche Calloway was Cab's sister, and that's probably how most people today would think of her, if they thought of her at all. But it would really be more appropriate to say Cab Calloway happened to be her brother.

Blanche Calloway had herself had a successful singing career, starting before her brother's career, and she'd recorded songs like this. That was recorded several months before her brother's breakout hit, Minnie the Moutiaultu chorus. Blanche Calloway wasn't the first person to sing that song, Bill Bojangles Robinson recorded it a month before, though in a very different style. But she's clearly the one who gave Cab the idea.

She was a successful bandleader before her brother, and her band, the Joy Boys, featured musicians like Cozy Cole and Ben Webster, who later became some of the most famous names in jazz. She was the first woman to lead an otherwise old. male band, and her band was regularly listed as one of the ten or so most influential bands of the early 30s, and that wasn't her only achievement by any means. In later years, she became prominent in the Democratic Party, and as a civil rights activist. She started Afram, a cosmetic company

that made makeup for black women, and was one of the most popular brand names of the 70s. and she was the first black woman to vote in Florida in 1958. But while her band was popular in the 30s, it eventually broke up. There are two stories about how her band split, and possibly both are true. One story is that the mafia, who controlled live music in the 30s, decided that there wasn't room for two bands led by a Callaway and put their weight behind her brother. leaving her unable to get gigs. The other story is that while on tour in Mississippi,

she used a public toilet that was designated whites only, and while she was in jail for that, one of the band members ran off with all the band's money, and so she couldn't afford to pay them. Either way, Calloway had gone into club management instead, and that was what she was doing when Ruth Brown walked into her club, desperate for her job.

Callaway said that the club didn't really need any new singers at the time, but she was sympathetic enough with Brown's plight, and impressed enough by her talent, that she agreed that Brown could continue to sing at her club until she'd earned her fair home. And it was at that club that Willis Conover came to see her. Conover was a fascinating figure. He presented the jazz-prud.

on Voice of America, the radio station that broadcast propaganda to the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War. But by doing so, he managed to raise the profile of many of the greatest jazz musicians of the time. He was also a major figure in early science fiction fandom. A book of his correspondence with HP Lovecraft is now available. Conover was visiting the nightclub along with his friend, Jew Collington. and he was immediately impressed by Ruth Brown's performance, impressed enough that he ran out to call Armet Ertigan and Herb Abramson and tell them to sign her.

Ertigan and Abramson were the founders of Atlantic Records, a new record label which had started up only a couple of years earlier. We've talked a bit about how the white backroom people in early R&B were usually those who were in some ways on the borderline between American conceptions of race, and this is something that will become even more important as the story goes on. But it was certainly true of Armet Ertagan. Ertigan was considered white by the then prevailing standards in the US, but he was a Turkish Muslim, and so not part of what the white culture considered the default.

He was also, though, extremely well off. His father had been the Turkish ambassador to the United States, and while young Armet had ostensibly been studying medieval philosophy at Georgetown University, in reality he was spending much of his time in Milt Gables' Commodore Music Shock. He and his brother Neshuey had over 15,000 jazz records between them, and would travel to places like New Orleans and Harlem to see musicians. And so Armit decided he was going to set up his own record company, making jazz records. He got funding from his dentist and took on Herb Abramson,

one of the dentist's protégéges, as his partner in the firm. They soon switched from their initial plan of making jazz records to a new one of making blues and R&B, following the market. Atlantic's first few records, while they were good ones, featuring people like Professor Longhair, weren't especially successful.

But then, in 1949, they released Drinking Wine Spodi Odie by Stix McGee. Down in New Orleans where everything is fine, all that cats is drinking that wine, drinking that mess,

they're delight. When he gets a runk, start singing, That's a wine, spoo de drink wine. Mop, ma'rude you to drink a wine. Mop and pop to me. Drinking that mess, dear delight. That record is another of those which people refer to as the first rock and roll record.

And it was pure good luck for Atlantic. McGee had recorded an almost identical version two years earlier for a label called Harlem Records. The song had originally been rather different. Before McGee recorded it for Harlem Records, instead of singing Spodiodi-O-D, he'd sung a four-syllable word, the first two syllables of which were mother,

and the latter two would get this podcast put in the adult-only section on. iTunes. While instead of singing mop mop, he'd sung Godam. Wisely, Harlem Records had got him to tone down the lyrics, but the record had started to take off only after the original label had gone out of business. Ertagan knew McGee's brother, the more famous blues musician, Brownie McGee, and called him up to get in touch with sticks. They got sticks to recut the record, sticking as closely as possible to his original, and rushed it out. The result was a massive success, and had cover versions by Lionel Hampton, Winoni Harris,

and many more musicians we've talked about here. Atlantic Records was on the map, and even though Sticks-Maggie never had another hit, Atlantic now knew that the proto-rock-and-roll style of rhythm and blues was where its fortunes lay. So when Herb Abramson and Armet Ertigan saw Ruth Brown, they knew two things. Firstly, this was a singer who had massive commercial potential, and secondly, that if she was going to record for them, she'd have to change her style, from the torch songs she was singing, to something more Spodi-O-Dy. Ruth Brown very nearly never made it. to her first recording session at all. On her way to New York, with Blanche Callaway, who had become her

manager, she ended up in a car crash and was in hospital for a year, turning 21 in hospital. She thought for a time that her chance had passed, but when she got well enough to use crutches, she was invited along to a recording session. It wasn't meant to be a session for her. It was just a way to ease her back into her career. Atlantic were going to show her what went on in a recording studio, so she would feel comfortable when it came to be time for her to actually make a record. The session was to record a few tracks for Cavalcade of Music, a radio show that profiled American composers. Eddie Condon's band were recording the tracks, and all Brown was meant to do was watch. But then, Armet Ertigan decided that while she was there, they might as well do a test recording of Brown,

just to see whether her voice sounded decent when recorded. Herb Abramson, who would produce most of Brown's early records, listed a handful of songs she might know that they could do, and she said she knew Russ Morgans so long. The band worked out a rough head arrangement of it, and they started recording. After a few bars, though, Sid Catlett, the drummer,

one of the great jazz drummers, who had worked with Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Arlington, and Benny Goodman, among others. Stopped the session, and said, Wait a minute, let's go back and do this right. The kid can sing.

And she certainly could. The record, which had originally been intended just as a test, or at best as a track to stick in the package of tracks they were recording for cavalcade of music was instead released as a single by ruth brown as heard with eddie condon's n b c television orchestra so long became a hit and the follow-up tear-drops from my eyes was a bigger hit reaching number one on the r m b charts and staying there for eleven weeks Teardrops from my eyes was an up-tempo song, and not really the kind of thing Brown liked. She thought of herself primarily as a torch singer, but it can't be denied that she had a skill with that kind of material, even if it wasn't what she'd have been singing by choice. While the song was picked for her by Abramson, who continued to be in charge of Brown's recordings until he was drafted into the Korean War, the strategy behind it was one that Ertigan had always advocated.

To take black musicians who played or sang the more sophisticated. I don't know if you can hear those air quotes, but they're there. the more sophisticated styles, and to get them instead, to record in funkier, more rhythm-oriented styles. It was a strategy Atlantic would use later with many of the artists that would become popular on the label in the 1950s. In the case of teardrops from my eyes, this required a lot of work. Brown spent a week rehearsing the song with Louis Toomes, the song. writer and working out the arrangement. And this was in a time when most hit records were either head arrangements worked out in half an hour in the studio, or songs that had been honed by

months of live performance. Spending a week working out a song for a recording was extremely unusual, but it was part of Atlantic's ethos, making sure the musicians were totally comfortable with the song and with each other before recording. It was the same reason that for the next few decades, vocalists on Atlantic also played instruments on their own recordings, even if they weren't the best instrumentalists. The idea was that the singer should be intimately involved in the rhythm of the record. But it worked even better for Ruth Brown than for most of those artists. Teardrops from my eyes became a million seller, Atlantic's first, or at least it was promoted as having sold a million copies. Herb Abramson would later claim

that all the record labels were vastly exaggerating their sales. But then he had a motive to claim that, just as they had a motive to exaggerate. If the artists believed they sold a million copies, then they'd want a million copies worth of royalties. But Brown's biggest hit was her third number one. Mama, he treats your daughter mean, which was also one of the few records she made to cross over to the pop charts, reaching number 23. This was not a record that Brown thought at the time was particularly one of her best, but 20 years later in interviews she would talk about how she couldn't do a show without playing it, and that when she said her name, people would ask, the Ruth Brown who sings Mama He Treat Your Daughter Mean. The song also made a difference to Brown

because it meant she had to join the musicians union. Vocalists, unlike instrumentalists, didn't have to be union members. But Mama He Treat Your Daughter Mean had a prominent tambourine part, which Brown played live. That made her an instrumentalist, not just a vocalist, and so Brown became a union member. Johnny Wallace and Herbert Lanz, wrote that song after hearing a blues singer playing out on the street in Atlanta. The song the blues singer was playing was almost certainly last-dime blues, and contained a line which they heard as,

Mama, he treats your daughter mean. Brown didn't want to record the song originally. The way the song was originally presented to her was as a much slower blues. But Herb Abramson raised the tempo to something closer to that of teardrops from my eyes, turning it into a clear example of early rock and roll. You can hear the song's influence, for example, in Work With Me Annie by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters from two years later. One always claimed that the reason for the song's greater success than her

the record was down to that tambourine. Or more precisely, because of the way she played the tambourine live, because she used a fluorescent painted tambourine which would shine when she hit it. That apparently got the audiences worked up and made it her most popular live song. Brown continued to have hit records into the 60s, though she never became one of the most well-known artists. In the 70s, she used to talk about adults telling their children she was Arretha Franklin, and this was probably true. Certainly, she was the most successful female rhythm and blues artist of the 50s, and was popular enough that for a while, Atlantic Records became known as the house that Ruth Brown built. But like many of the pioneers of the

rock and roll era, she was largely, though far from completely, erased from the cultural memory in favour of a view that has pre-history start in 1954 with Elvis, and history proper only arrive in 1962 with the Beatles. Partly, this was because in the mid-50s, just as rock and roll was becoming huge, she had children, and scaled down her touring activities to take care of them. But it was also in part because Atlantic Records was expanding. When they only had one or two big stars, it was easy for them to give each of them the attention they needed. But as the label got bigger, their star acts would have the best material divided among themselves, and the hit rate, at least for those who didn't write their own material, got lower. So by the early 60s, Ruth Brown

was something of her has-been, but she got a second wind, from the late 70s onwards, after she appeared in the stage musical Selma, playing the part of Mahalia Jackson. She became a star again, not a pop star, as she had been in her first career,

but a star of the musical stage, and of films and TV, and she used that fame to do something remarkable. She had been unhappy for years with Atlantic Records, not paying her the money she was owed for royalties on her records. Like most independent labels of the 50s, Atlantic had seemed to regard honouring its contracts with its artists and actually giving them money as a sort of optional extra. But unlike those other independent labels, Atlantic had remained successful, and indeed,

by the 80s it was a major label itself. It had been bought in 1967 by Warner Brothers and had become one of the biggest record labels in the world. And Ruth Brown wanted the money to which she was entitled, and began a campaign to get the royalties she was owed. But she didn't just campaign for herself. As part of the agreement she eventually reached with Atlantic, not only did she get her own money back, but dozens of other rhythm and blues artists also got their money,

and the Rhythm and Blues Foundation was founded with money donated by Atlantic as compensation for them. The Rhythm and Blues Foundation now provides grants to up-and-coming black musicians and gives cash awards to older musicians who've fallen on hard times, often because of the way labels like Atlantic have treated them. Now, of course, that's not a lot of course. to say that the Rhythm and Blues Foundation fixed everything. It's very clear that Atlantic continued and continues to underpay the artists on whose work they built a billion-dollar business, and that the foundation is one of those organisations that exists as much to forestall litigation

as anything else. But it's still notable that when she had the opportunity to do something just for herself, Ruth Brown chose instead to also help her friends and colleagues. Maybe her time in the union paid off. Brown spent her last decades as an elder stateswoman of the rhythm and blues field. She died in 2006. A history of rock music and 500 songs is written, produced and performed by Andrew Hickey. Visit 500Songs.com. That's 5000-0-0-mumbers.com to see transcriptions, liner notes and links to other materials, including a mixed cloud stream of all songs excerpted in this episode. A history of rock music and 500 songs is supported by the backers on my Patreon. Visit patreon.com slash Andrew Hickeg to support it. Patreon backers also get early access to my

books and also support my blog and my other podcasts. If you've enjoyed this episode, please by all means subscribe in iTunes or your favourite podcast app and rate it but more importantly please tell just one other person about this podcast word of mouth is the best way to get information out about any creative work so please if you like this tell someone thank you very much