Episode 44: “Train Kept A-Rollin'”, by Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio
00:00A History of Rock Music in 500 songsBy Andrew HickEpisode 44Drain Kept A RollingBy Johnny Benet and the Rock and Roll TrioThere are some recordsthat have had such an effect on the history of rock musicthat the record itself becomes almost divorced from its context.
00:27Who made it and howdoesn't seem to matter as much as that it did existand that it reverberated down the generations.Today, we're going to look at one of those records,and at how a novelty song about cowboys,written for an Aberton Costello film,became a heavy metal anthemperformed by every group that ever played a distorted riff.
00:52There's a tradition in rock and roll musicof brothers who fight constantly,making great music together.and we'll see plenty of them as we go through the next few decades.The Everly brothers, Ray and Dave Davis, the Beach Boys,rock and roll would be very different without sibling rivalry.But few pairs of brothers have fought as violently and as often as Johnny and Dorsey Burnett.The first time Roy Orbison met them,
01:22he was standing in a Memphis radio station chatting with Elvis Presleyand waiting for a lift.When the lift doors opened,inside the lift were the Burnett brothersin the middle of a fist fight.When Dorsey was about eight years oldand Johnny Six,their mother bought them both guitars.
01:43By the end of the day,both guitars had been brokenover each other's heads.And their fights were not just the minor fightsone might expect from young men,but serious business.Both of them were trainedboxers, and in Dorsey Burnett's case, he was a professional who became Golden Gloves champion
02:03of the South in 1950, and had once fought Sunny Liston. A fight between the Burnett Brotherswas a real fight. They'd grown up around Lauderdale Court, the same apartment blockwhere Elvis Presley spent his teenage years, and they used to hang around together and singwith the gang of teenage boys that included Bill Black's brother Johnny. Elvis would, as a teenager,hang around on the outskirts of their little group, singing along with them, but not reallypart of the group. The Burnett brothers were as likely to bully him as they were to encourage himto be part of the gang, and while they became friendly later on, Elvis was always more of a friendof friends than he was an actual friend of theirs, even when he was a colleague of Dorsey's
02:54at Crown Electric. He was a little bit younger than them, and not the most sociable of people,and more importantly, he didn't like their aggression. Elvis would jokingly refer to themas the Dalton's, after the Outlaw gang. Another colleague at Crown Electric was a man namedPaul Berluson, who also boxed, and had been introduced to Dorsey by Lee Denson.who had taught both Dorsey and Elvis their first guitar chords.Berlison also played the guitar,and had played many small bands over the late 40s and early 50s.In particular, one of the bands he was in
03:33had its own regular 15-minute show on a local radio station,and their show was on next to a show presented by the blues singer Howlin Wolf.Berluson's guitar playing would later show many signs of being influencedby Wolf's electric blues, just as much as by the country and western music his early groupswere playing. Some sources even say that Berluson played on some of Wolf's early recordingsat the Sun Studios, though most of the sessionographies I've seen for Wolf say otherwise.The three of them formed a group in 1952, the rhythm rangers, with Berluson on lead guitar,Dorsey Burnett on double bass, and Johnny Burnett on rhythm guitar and lead vocal.
04:18A year later, they changed their name to the rock and roll trio.While they were called the rock and roll trio, they were still basically a country band, andtheir early set lists included songs like Hank Snow's, I'm Moving On.That big eight wheel are rolling down the track means you're to love and daddy ain'tcoming back because I'm moving on.I'll soon be gone.You are flying too high for my little old sky, so I'mThat big loud whistle
04:52As it blue and blue said hello to the SouthlandWe're coming to you and we're moving onOh hear my songYou had the laugh on me so I've set you freeAnd I'm moving onThat one got dropped from their set listAfter an ill-fated trip to NashvilleThey wanted to get on the Grand Ole Opry
05:12And so they drove upFound Snow who was going to be on that night's showand asked him if he could get them onto the show.Snow explained to them that it had taken him 20 years in the businessto work his way up to being on the Grand Ole Opry,and he couldn't just get three random people he'd never met before onto the show.Johnny Burnett replied with two words,the first of which would get this podcast bumped into the adult section in Apple Podcasts,
05:41and the second of which was you.And then they turned round and drove back to Memphis.They never played a Hank Snow song live again.It wasn't long after that, in 1953, that they recorded their first single,You're Undecided, for a tiny label called Von Records in Boonville, Mississippi.You take a heart, you break a heart, you leave a heart,just do you're undecided, now what's going to do?This making up, this breaking up has got to beat your game.
06:15Now someday, someday dear the tide will turn, and.Around this time they also wrote a song called to record, which they didn't get to record until 1957.That's a rockabilly boogie tonightThat has been claimed as the word of the word rockabillyAnd Billy Burnett, Dorsey's son says they coined the wordbased on his name and that of Johnny's son Rocky.Now, it seems much more likely to methat the origin of the word is the obvious one,
07:34that it's a portmanteau of the words rock and hillbillyto describe rocking hillbilly music.But those were the names of their kids,so I suppose it's just about possible.Their 1953 single was not a success,and they spent the next few years playing in honky tongue,They also regularly played the Saturday night jamboree at the Goodwin Institute Auditorium,a regular country music show that was occasionally broadcast on the same station that Berluson's old
08:06bands had performed on, K-W-E-M. Most of the musicians in Memphis, who went on to make importantearly rockabilly records, would play at the jam-boree, but more important than the show itselfwas the backstage area, where musicians would jam, show each other.new riffs they'd come up with and pass ideas back and forth. Those backstage jam sessionswere the making of the rock and roll trio, as they were for many of the other rockabilly actsin the area. Their big break came in early 1956 when they appeared on the Ted Mac Amateur Hourand won three times in a row. The Ted Mac Amateur Hour was a TV series that was in many waysThe Ax Factor or American Idol of the 50s.
08:54The show launched the careers of Pat Boone, Anne Margaret, and Gladys Knight, among others.And when the rock and roll trio won for the third time,at the same time their old neighbour Elvis was on the Ed Sullivan Show, on another channel,they got signed to Coral Records, a subsidiary of Decker Records,one of the biggest major labels in the USA at that time.Their first attempt at recording didn't go particularly well.Their initial session for choral was in New York,and when they got there,
09:28they were surprised to find a 32-piece orchestra waiting for them,none of whom had any more clue about playing rock-and-roll musicthan the rock-and-roll trio had about playing orchestral pieces.They did record one track with the orchestra,shattered dreams,although that song didn't get released until many years later.But after.rest of the session. They'd simply not got the rock and roll sound they wanted when working
10:36with all those musicians. They didn't need them. They didn't have quite enough songs for the sessionand needed another uptempo number and so Dorsey went out into the hallway and quicklywrote a song called Tear It Up, which became the A side of their first choral single, with theB side being a new version of You're Undecided.While Dorsey wrote that song, he decided to split the credit, as they always did,four ways, between the three members of the band and their manager.This kind of credit splitting is normal in a band-as gang,and right then that's what they were.
11:43A gang, all on the same side.That was soon going to change, and credit was going to be one of the main reasons.But that was all to come.For now, the rock and roll trio weren't happy at all about their recordings.They didn't want to make any more records in New Yorkwith a bunch of orchestral musicians who didn't know anything about their music.They wanted to make records in Nashville,and so they were booked into Owen Bradley's studio,
12:14the same one where Jean Vincent made his first records,and where Wanda Jackson recorded when she was in Nashville,rather than L.A.Bradley knew how to get a good rockabilly sound,and they were sure they were going to get the soundthey'd been getting live when they recorded there.In fact, they got something altogether different,and better than that sound,
12:37and it happened entirely by accident.On their way down to Nashville from New York,they played a few shows,and one of the first they played was in Philadelphia.At that show, Paul Berlinson dropped his out.amplifier, loosening one of the vacuum tubes inside.The distorted sound it gave was like nothing he'd ever heard,and while he replaced the tube, he started loosening it,
13:02every time he wanted to get that sound.So when they got to Nashville, they went into Owen Radley's studio,and, for possibly the first time ever, deliberately recorded a distorted guitar.I say possibly because, as so often happens with these things,a lot of people seem to have had the same idea around the same time.But the rock and roll trio's recordings do seem to be the first oneswhere the distortion was deliberately chosen.Obviously, we've already looked at Rocket 88,
13:37which did have a distorted guitar,and again that was caused by an accident.But the difference there was that the accident happened on the day of the recordingwith no time to fix it.This was Berluson choosing to use the result of the accidentat a point where he could easily have had the amplifier in perfect working orderhad he wanted to.At these sessions, the trio were augmented by a few studio musicians
14:04from the Nashville A team, the musicians who made most of the country hits of the time.While Dorsey Burnett played bass live, he preferred playing guitar,so in the studio he was on an additional rhythm,guitar while Bob Moore played the bass. Buddy Harmon was on drums, while session guitaristGrady Martin added another electric guitar to complement Berlusons. The presence of these musicianshas led some to assume that they played everything on the records, and that the rock and rolltrio only added their voices, but that seems to be very far from the case. Certainly Berluson'sguitar style is absolutely distinctive, and the effect he puts on his guitar is absolutely unlike
14:52anything else that you hear from Grady Martin at this point. Martin did, later, introduce thefuzz tone to country music, with his playing on records like Marty Robinsers, don't worry.But that was a good five years after the rock and roll trio sessions, and the most likely explanationis that Martin was inspired to add fuss to his guitar by Paul Burleson,rather than deciding to add it on one session and then not using it again for several years.The single they recorded at that Nashville session was one that would echo down the decades,influencing everyone from the Beatles to Aresmith to screaming Lord Such and the Savages.The A-side, Huddy Hush, was originally written and recorded by Big Joe Turner three years earlier.
16:09It's not one of Turner's best, to be honest, leaning too heavily on the misogyny thatcharacterised too much of his work. But over the years it has been covered by everyone fromChuck Berry to Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello to Jerry Lee Lewis. The rock and roll trio'scover version is probably the best of these, and certainly the most exciting. This is theversion of the song that inspired most of those covers, but the song that really mattered to people wasthe B-side, a track called Train Kept A Rolling. Train Kept a Rollin, like many R&B songs, has a longhistory and is made up of elements that one can trace back to the 1920s, or earlier in some cases.But the biggest inspiration for the track is a song called Cow Cow Boogie, which was originally
18:09recorded by Ella May Morse in 1942, but which was written for Ella Fitzgerald to sing in an AbertonCastello film, but cut from her appearance. Fitzgerald eventually recorded her own hit version of the songin 1943, backed by the Ink Spot, with the pianist Bill Doggett accompanying them.It was a duty, he learned in the city.Come to a-ya-ya-a-a-kma-ta-y-ya-a-h.Get along.Get hip, little doggy.Get along.
19:02Better be on your way.Get along.Get hip, little doggy.And he trucked him on down, that old fairway,singing his cow-cow-cou-buggy in the strangest way.That was in turn adapted by the jump band singer Tiny Bradshaw under the title Train Keptarola.And that in turn was the basis for the rock and real dame she was a hipster and a gone dame she was pretty from New York City and she chucked on down.And that in turn was the basis for the rock and roll trio's version of the song, which they radically rearranged.
20:17to feature an octave doubled guitar riff, apparently invented by Dorsey Burnett,but played simultaneously by Burleson and Martin, with Berluson's guitar fuzzed up and distorted.This version of the song would become a classic.The single wasn't a success, but it's B-side got picked up by the generation of British guitar players.that came after, and from then it became a standard of rock music.It was covered by screaming Lord Such and the Savages.The art birds, shaking Stevens in the sunsets, Aerosmith, motorhead, you get the idea.Get the idea. By adding a distorted guitar riff, the rock and roll trio had performed a kind of
23:44alchemy, which turned a simple novelty cowboy song into something that would make the repertoireof every band that ever wanted to play as loud as possible, and to scream at the top of theirvoices the words, the train kept rolling all night long. Sadly, the rock and roll trio didn'tlast much longer. While they had always performed as the rock and roll trio, choral records decidedto release their recordings as by Johnny Burnett and the rock and roll trio, and the other two memberswere understandably furious. They were a band, not just Johnny Burnett's backing musicians. Dorsey wasthe first to quit. He left the band a few days before they were due to appear in Rock, Rock, Rock,a cheap exploitation film starring Alan Freed.
24:35They got Johnny Black in to replace him for the film shoot,and Dorsey Reed joined shortly afterwards,but the cracks had already appeared.They recorded one further session,but the tracks from that weren't even releasedas by Johnny Burnett and the rock and roll trio,just by Johnny Burnett,and that was the final straw.
24:56The group split up and went their separate ways.Johnny remained signed to choral records as a solo artist, but when he and Dorsey both moved separately to L.A., they ended up working together as songwriters.Dorsey was contracted as a solo artist to Imperial Records, who had a new teen idol star who needed material.Ricky Nelson had had an unexpected hit after singing on his parents' TV show, and as a result, he was suddenly being promoted as a rock and roll star.Dorsey and Johnny wrote a whole string of top 10 hits for Nelson, songs like,Believe What You Say, Waiting in School, It's Late, and Just a Little Too Much.I think I love you. I'm going to scream and shout you.There ain't no doubt about it.
26:08That's why I love you like I do.They also started recording for Imperial as a duo, under the name The Burnett Brothers.But that was soon stopped by Covell, who wanted to continue marketing Johnny as a solo artist,and they both started pursuing separate solo careers.Dorsey eventually had a minor hit of his own.There was a tall oak tree, which made the top 30 in 1960.He made a few more solo records in the early 60s,and after becoming a born-again Christian in the early 60s,
27:07he started a new successful career as a country singer, eventually receiving a most promisingnewcomer award from the Academy of Country Music in 1973, 20 years after his career started.He died in 1979 of a heart attack.Johnny Burnett eventually signed to Liberty Records and had a string of hits that, like Dorsey's,were in a very different style from the rock and roll trio records.His biggest hit, and the one that most people associate with him to this day,was, You're 16, You're Beautiful and Your Mine.You come on like a dream, peaches and cream, lips like a strawberry wine.
27:55You're 16, you're beautiful and you're mine.You're all ribbons and curls.Oh, what a girl.That's twigling shine, you're 16,You're beautiful and you're my.You're my baby, you're my pet.That song is, of course, a perennial hit,that most people still know almost 60 years later.
28:25But none of Johnny's solo recordshad anything like the power and passionof the rock and roll trio recordings.And sadly, we'll never know if he would regain that passion,as in 1964 he died in a boating accident.Paul Berlison, the last member of the trio,gave up music once the trio split upand became an electrician again.
28:49He briefly joined Johnny on one tour in 1963,but otherwise stayed out of the music businessuntil the 1980s.He then got back into performingand started a new lineup of the rock and roll triofeaturing Johnny Black, who had briefly replaced Dorsey in the group,and Tony Ostep, the drummer who had joined with them on many tour datesafter they got a recording contract.
29:16He later joined the Sun Rhythm Section,a band made up of many of the musicians who had played on classic rockabilly records,including Stan Kesler, Jimmy Van Eton, Sonny Burgess and DJ Fontana.Berluson released his only solo album in 1997.That album was called Train Kept A Rollingand featured a remake of that classic songwith Rocky and Billy BurnettJohnny and Dorsey's sums on vocals.
30:18He kept playing Rockabillyuntil he died in 2003, aged 74.A history of rock music and 500 songsis brought to you by The Generosityof my backers on Patreon.Each week,Patreon backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast.This week's is on
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