A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 17: “Money Honey” by Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters

Episode Date: January 28, 2019

Welcome to episode seventeen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Money Honey” by the Drifters. 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 Andrew Hake Episode 17 Honey By Clyde MacFatter And the Drifters There's a thought experiment Popular with the Kind of People

For whom philosophical thought experiments are popular Called the Ship of Theseus It asks if you have a ship and you replace every plank of wood in it as each plank rots away, so eventually you have a ship which doesn't share a single plank with the original. Is that still the same ship you had at the start? Or is it a totally new ship? A little while ago, I saw a tweet from a venue I follow on Twitter,

advertising the drifters singing all their great hits. There's only one problem with this, which is that no one currently in the drifters has ever had a hit, and none of them have even ever been in a band with anyone who had a hit as a member of the drifters. Indeed, I believe that none of them have even been in a band with someone who has been in a band, with someone who was in a version of the drifters that had a hit.

This kind of thing is actually quite common these days, as old band members die off. I've seen a version of the foremost, which had no members of the foremost, a version of the searchers with none of the original members. Though it did have the bass player who joined in 1964, and would have had an original member had he not been sick that day. The new A-Men Corner, with no members of the old A-Men Corner,

all on package tours with other more authentic bands. And, of course, we talked back in the episode on The Inkspot about the way that some old bands lose control of their name, and end up being replaced on stage by random people who have no connection with the original act. It's sad, but we expect that kind of thing with bands of a certain age. A band like the Drifters, who started nearly 70 years ago now, should be expected to have had some personnel changes. But what's odd about the Drifters is that this kind of thing has been the case right from the beginning of their career.

The Drifters formed in May 1953. By July 1955, the band that was touring as the Drifters had no original members left. And by June 1958, the band touring as the Drifters had no members of the July 1955 version. An old version of the band's website, before someone realized that it might be counterproductive to show how little connection there was between the people on the stage and the people on their famous records, lists 52 different lineups between 1953 and 2004. In the future, everyone will have been lead singer of the drifters for 15 minutes. We're going to look at the drifters quite a bit over the course of this series.

They had hits in the 50s, 60s and 70s, and some of them were among the most important records of their time. And so the thing to remember when we do that is that whenever we're talking about the drifters, we're not talking about the same band as we had been the time before. Indeed, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, for what this is worth, I value their opinion fairly low, but in this case it's an interesting indicator, actually inducted the Drifters as two separate groups. They're in as the Drifters and as Benny King and the Drifters, because the Hall of Fame didn't consider them as being the same group. Today, we're mostly going to talk about the second line-up of the drifters,

the one that was together from July through October 1953, and which only had one member in common with the May 1953 lineup of the band. That member was Clyde MacFatter, and he was already something of a star before the drifters formed, as the lead singer of Belly Ward and his Dominoes. Great her knee And it is true And the need

So baby Can't you see You must do something For me Billy Ward Was an exceptional man In many ways He was one of the first black people

To graduate from the Juilliard School of Music And he was a hugely talented pianist and arranger. And while he wasn't a particularly strong singer, he was a great vocal coach. And so when he noticed that vocal groups were becoming the new big thing in rhythm and blues, he hit upon a surefire way to make money. He'd form a group featuring his best students and pay them a salary. He and his agent would own the band name, and they could hire and fire people as they wished. And the students would all work for cheap because, well, that's what young people do.

Indeed, it would go further than them working for low pay. If you were a member of Billy Ward and his dominoes, and you messed up, you got fined. And of course, the money went straight into Ward's pocket. The dominoes started out as an integrated group. Their name was because they were black and white, like the spots on a domino. But soon Ward had fired all the white members and put together a group that was entirely made up of black people. The music they were performing was in the style that would later become known as do-wop,

but that wasn't a term that anyone used at the time. Back then, this new vocal group sound was just one of the many things that were lumped together under the Rhythm and Blues label. and as this was still the early stages of the music's development, it was a little different from the music that would later characterise the genre. Dewwop started as a style that was strongly influenced by the ink spots and by acts before them, like the Mills Brothers.

It was music made by impromptu groups on street corners, sung by people who had no instruments to accompany them, and so it relied on the techniques that had been used by the coffee-pot groups, of the 20s and 30s, imitating musical instruments with one's mouth. These days, thanks largely to its late 50s and early 60s iteration, in which it was sung by Italian-American men in sharp suits, there's a slight aura of sophistication and class around do-wop music.

It's associated in a very general sort of way, with the kind of music that the rat pack and their ilk made, though in reality there's little connection other than the ethnicity of some of its more famous performers. But DoWop, in its early years, was the music of the most underprivileged groups. It was music made by people who couldn't afford any other kind of entertainment, who couldn't afford instruments, who had nothing else they could do. It was the music of the streets in a very literal way. People, usually black people but also Latino and Italian Americans, would stand on street corners and sing.

Duwop would later become a very formalised genre and thus of less interest. But early on, some of the music in the genre was genuinely innovative. Precisely because it was made by untutored teenagers, it was often astoundingly inventive in its harmonies and rhythms. and the particular innovation that the Domino's introduced was bringing in far more gospel flavor than had previously been used in vocal group music. The earlier vocal groups, like the Ravens or the Orioles, had had very little in the way of gospel or blues influence. They mostly followed the style set by the ink spots

of singing very clean, straight, melody lines, with no ornamentation. or malismar. The dominoes, on the other hand, were a far more gospel-tinged band, and that was mostly down to Clyde McFatter. Clyde McFatter was the lead singer on most of the band's biggest records, although he was billed as Clyde Ward, with the claim that he was Ward's brother in order to stop him from becoming too much of a star in his own right and possibly deserting the Domino's. McFatter was actually a church singer first and foremost, and had expressed extreme reluctance to move into secular music, but eventually he agreed and became the Domino's star performer.

Their biggest hit, though, didn't have MacFatter singing lead, and was very different from their other records. 60 Minuteman was, for the time, absolutely filthy. 60 minute man Look here girls I'm telling you now they call me love and dad I'll rock'n roll them all night long I'm a 60 minute man If you don't believe I'm all I say Come up and take my hand

When I let you go you cry Oh yes he's a six six six Now, that doesn't sound like anything particularly offensive to our ears, but in the early 1950s, that was absolutely incendiary stuff. And again, along with the fact that radio stations were more restrained in the early 50s than they are these days, there is cultural context that it's easy to miss. For example, the line, they call me loving Dan. Dan was often the name of the backdoor man in blues or R&B songs,

the man who'd be going out of the back door when the husband was coming in the front, and backdoor man itself was a phrase that could be taken to have more meanings than the obvious. The song was popular enough in the R&B field that it inspired other artists to change their songs. Ruth Brown's big hit 5-10-15 hours was originally written to have her asking for 5, 10, 10, 15 minutes of loving until someone pointed out that in the era of 60-minute man

15 minutes of loving didn't seem very much. 60-minute man was remarkable in another way. It crossed over from the rhythm and blues charts to the pop charts, which was something that basically never happened in 1951. I've seen claims that it was the first rock and roll record to do so, and I suppose that depends on what you count as a rock and roll record. Louis Jordan had had several crossover hits over the previous few years, but if you're counting rock and roll musicians as only being

people who started recording around 1948 or later, then it may well be. If it's not the first, it was certainly one of the first, and like all big hits at the time, it inspired a wave of imitators. However, Bill Brown, the lead singer on the song, quit in 1952 to form his own band, The Chequers.

He took with him Charlie White, who had sung lead on an early Domino's track, this duet with Little Esther. With now, sister pigeon, if you really want a true religion, you better do what I say and see the thing on my way. Your eyes are glowing. That's natural, baby. Think I really ought to be a gum.

With both the other main singers having left the band more or less simultaneously, Clyde McFatter was left as the default star of the show. There was no one else who was even slightly challenging. him for the role by this point, and the Domino's records became a showcase for his vocals. Once MacFatter was the star, the band moved away from the more up-tempo rock style to a more ballad-based style, which suited MacFatter's voice better. But they still had a knack for controversial subject matter and novelties as one of their biggest hit shows. Black horses

With eyes of flaming red There are roses Tid ribbons All around my baby's head That kind of Of the top display of emotion Taken well past the point of caricature But soon become one of the hallmarks

of the more interesting black vocalists of the period. You can hear in that song the seeds of Screaming Jay Hawkins, for example. And James Brown would often perform the bells in his early shows, even pushing a pram containing a doll, representing the dead woman in the song across the stage. But what's also obvious from that record is that MacFatter was clearly a remarkable singer. He was the star of the show,

and the reason that people came to see Billy Ward and the Dominoes. And soon he decided that it was unfair that he was making $100 a week minus costs, while Ward was becoming rich. He didn't want to be an interchangeable domino anymore. He was going to make his own career and become a star himself. He stayed in the band for long enough to train his replacement, a new young singer named Jackie Wilson, who had been discovered by Johnny Otis, and then left.

At the same time, a couple of other band members left. One of their replacements was Cliff Givens, who had previously been a temporary ink spot for five months between Hoppy Jones-dine and Herb Kenny replacing him. The Dominoes continued on for quite some time after MacFatter left them, but while they scored a few more hits, the way the band's career progressed can probably be better, summed up by their sequel to 60 Minuteman from 1955.

Jackie Wilson, of course, was a fantastic singer, and if you had to replace Clyde McFatter with anyone, he was as good a choice as you could make, but MacFatter was sorely missed in their shows. Shortly after the line-up change, indeed, some have claimed on the very first day after McFatter left, Armit Ertigan of Atlantic Records, went to see the dominant, live and saw that McFatter wasn't there.

When he discovered that the lead singer of the biggest vocal group in the northeast was no longer with them, he left the venue immediately and went running from bar to bar looking for McFatter. As soon as he found him, he signed him that night to Atlantic Records, and it was agreed that McFatter would put together his own backing group, which became the first lineup of the drifters. That first lineup was made up of people from McFatter's church singing group, one of whom, incidentally, was the brother of the author James Baldwin. That lineup, Clyde McFatter, David Bourne, William Anderson, David Baldwin, and James Johnson, recorded four tracks together, but only one was ever released, Lucille.

staring into space. Oh, Got a word to say. Hearing that, it doesn't sound like there was anything wrong with the band. But clearly Atlantic disagreed. I've heard it claimed by some of the later members of the group that Atlantic thought this first version of the drifters had voices that were too light for backing McFatter.

Either way, there was a new line-up in place by a few weeks later, with only MacFatter of the original band, and that line-up would last a whole four months, and get a hit record out. Their first session included versions of five songs, including the other three that were recorded but never released by the initial lineup, but one of the two new songs was the one that would make the band stars. That song, Money Honey, was written by Jesse Stone, or Charles Calhoun, to give him his pen name.

You'll remember we discussed him in episode two, talking about how he wrote Shake Rattle and Roll, and in episode four, talking about how Louis Jordan ended up taking Stone's entire band and making them into the Timpany Five. Stone was a fascinating man who lived a long, long life that spanned the 20th century almost completely. He was born in 1901 and died in 1999, and his entertainment career lasted almost as long.

He'd started performing professionally in 1905 at the age of four in a trained dog act. he'd sing and the dogs would perform apparently the dogs were so well trained that they could perform the act without him but that's the kind of thing that passed for entertainment in nineteen o five a singing four-year-old and some dogs by nineteen twenty he was the best piano player in kansas city and that was the opinion of count bassy a man who knew a thing or two about piano playing and he was making a living as a professor arranger. He later claimed that he'd written a large number of classical pieces, but no one was interested in playing them, but he could make money off the music that became rock and roll. It's been claimed by some jazz historians that he was the first person ever to write out proper horn charts for a jazz band's horn section, rather than having them play head arrangements.

And while I don't think the timeline works for that, I'm not enough. of an expert in early jazz to be confident he wasn't. If he was, then that makes him responsible for the birth of swing, and specifically for the kind of swing that later ended up becoming rhythm and blues,

the kind with an emphasis on rhythm and groove, with slickly arranged horn parts, which came out of Kansas. Stone worked as an arranger in the 30s and 40s with Chick-Web, Louis Jordan, and others, and also started dabbling in songwriting.

It was a discussion with Cole Porter that he later credited as the impetus for him becoming a serious songwriter. Porter had discovered that Stone was writing some songs and he asked what tools Stone used. Stone didn't even understand the question. He later said, I didn't know what he was talking about.

I had never even heard of a rhyming dictionary I didn't know what a homonym was. I didn't know the difference between assonance and alliteration. Tools? I said. Hell, he said. If you're going to dig a ditch, you use a shovel, don't you? I began to approach songwriting more professionally. And the results paid off. His first big hit was Idaho, recorded by, among others, Guy Lombardo and Benny Goodman. of Idaho where yon and canyons

greet the sun as it smiles above the trees in Idaho to say another night is done warm summer winds

toss the wave and gray calling me back to my home But unlike most of the successful songwriters of the 1940s, he managed to continue his career into the rock and roll era. Stone wrote a huge number of early rock and roll classics, such as shake, rattle and roll, flip, flop and fly, smack dab in the middle,

razzle, and your cash ain't nothing but trash. Many of them recorded by Atlantic Records artists, such as Ray Charles and Big Joe Turner. This was because Stone was one of the founders of Atlantic. He'd worked with Herb Abramson before the formation of Atlantic Records and moved with Abramson to Atlantic when the label started, and he was the only black person on the label's payroll at first. Stone was credited by Armet Ertigan

as having been the arranger who had most to do with the early rock and roll scene. sound, and it certainly seems likely that it was Jesse Stone, more than all the other staff producers and writers at Atlantic, who pushed Atlantic records in a rock and roll direction. According to Stone himself, he took a trip down to the southern states to see why Atlantic's records weren't selling there as well as they were in the coastal states, and he realized that the bands playing in bars were playing with far more emphasis. on rhythm than the bands Atlantic had. At first he wasn't impressed with this music. As he put it later, I considered it backward musically, and I didn't like it until I started to learn that the rhythm

content was the important thing. Then I started to like it and began writing tunes. He adapted the rhythms that those bands were playing, especially the bass line. He later said, I designed a bass pattern, and it sort of became identified with rock and roll. Do da-do-dum, do-da-do-dum, that thing. I am the guilty person that started that. But other than Sheikh Rattle and roll, the most well-known song Stone wrote, under his Calhoun pseudonym,

was Money-Hunny. Ask him to tell me what was on it, money, oh, yes, That song, an arrangement, owes a lot to the work that Lieber and Stoller had been doing with the Robbins, and like those records, the song is very, very funny. And this is something I've not emphasised enough when I've been talking about rhythm and blues records in this series so far, the sense of humour that so many of them had. From Louis Jordan on, the R&B genre wasn't just about rhythm, though it was of course about that,

but it was often uproariously funny, and it was funny in a very particular way. It was funny about the experience of black people living in poverty in cities. Almost all the R&B acts we've discussed so far, especially the ones around Johnny Otis, had a very earthy sense of humour, which was expressed in all their recordings. Songs would be about infidelity, being out of work, being drunk, or, as in this case, being desperate for money to pay the landlord, and having your girlfriend leave you for someone who had more money. This is something that was largely lost in the transition from R&B to rock and roll, as the music became more escapist and more focused on the frustrations and longings of horny adolescents.

But even where rhythm and blues records were about dancing and escapism, they were from a notably more adult and witty perspective than those that followed only a few years later. While Calhoun was the most important figure in the musical side of Atlantic Records, however, he quit by 1956. Atlantic's bosses wouldn't agree to make their first black employee and co-founder of the company an equal partner. In July 1953 though, he was working with the drifters. The line-up on Money Honey was a six-piece group.

McFratter, backing singers Bill Pinckney, Andrew and Gerhard Thrasher, and Willie Furby, and guitarist Walter Adams, who was the third guitarist the group had had. They signed to a management contract with George Treadwell, who was at the time also the manager of another Atlantic record star, Ruth Brown. They also signed to Mo Gail's booking agency, but by the time of their first show,

on October 9, 1953, at the Apollo Theatre supporting Lucky Millinder, there'd already been another line-up change. Furby had been in an accident and could no longer perform and the group decided to carry on with just four voices and by the end of October tragedy had struck again as Walter Adams died of a heart attack

so by the time Money Honey started to get noticed and went to number one on the R&B charts the band was already very different from the one that had recorded the song The new line-up still had Macfatter, though, and quickly followed up their first hit with another, Such a Night, which wasn't as funny as Money Honey, but was raunchy and controversial enough that it got banned from the radio, which made people rush to buy it. That one went to number two on the R&B chart.

Darn, and my heart and her love and the night were gone. But I know I'll never forget her kiss in the whole night. Ooh, such a kiss. Things were going well for the drifters, but then MacFatter got drafted. He could still record with the band. He was stationed in the US, and the band continued to tour without him. They got David Bourne from the original line up to rejoin. He could sound enough like McFatter

that he could sing his parts on stage. And when McFatter's armed services commitment meant that he couldn't make a recording session, they'd record duet with other famous acts, like this one with Ruth Brown. Woke up this morning and I looked around so disappointed.

Oh, what a dream! What a dream! But eventually, the band's management and Atlantic Records decided that they didn't need McFatter to be the lead singer, and it might be more profitable to have the band not be reliant on any particular star. And McFatter, for his part, was quite keen to start a solo career on his discharge. The Drifters and Clyde McFatter were going to part. While McFatter had formed his own group because he didn't want to be an employee and wanted to have the rights over his own work,

he had decided to set things up so that he owned 50% of the band's name, while George Treadwell owned the other 50%. When he left the group, he decided to sell his 50% stake in the band's name to Treadwell, which of course meant that the other drifters were now in precisely the same position, as MacFatter had been with the Dominoes, except that there at least the name's owner had been a band member. Bill Pinckney did later manage to get ownership of the name the original Drifters, and many of the 50s members would tour with him under that name in the 60s, but the band name The Drifters now belonged not to any of the performers, but to their management.

The drifters went through many, many line-up changes, and we'll be picking up their story later, but sadly we won't be picking up McFattas. McFattor's solo career started well with the duet with Ruth Brown. The moon may capture the sunshine and darkness may imprison the day. But love has joined us together, and no one can take you away.

Something certainly had joined them together, as Ruth Brown later revealed that McFatter was the father of her son, Ronald, who now tours as Clyde McFatter's drifters. And for a while, McFatter looked like he would continue being a major star. He had a string of hits between 1955 and 1958, but then the hits started to dry up. He changed labels a few times and would have the occasional one-off hit, but had far more flops than successes. By the early 70s he was an alcoholic, and Marve Goldberg, whose website I have used as a major resource for this episode, describes him telling someone introduced to him as a fan, I have no fans,

and seeing a show with a drunk MacFatter sitting on the edge of the stage and saying, I'm not used to coming on third, I used to be a star. He died in 1972, age 39, completely unaware of how important his music had been to millions. I said near the start of this episode that I don't consider the rock and roll, Hall of Fame important, and that's true. But McFatter was the first person to be inducted into the

Hall of Fame twice, once as a drifter and once as a solo artist. Anyone since him who's been inducted multiple times, people like John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Neil Young and Michael Jackson are referred to as members of the Clyde McFatter Club. A history of rock music and 500 songs is written produced and performed by Andrew Hickey. Visit 500Songs.com That's 50000 the numbers, Songs.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 Hickey 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.