A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 49: “Love is Strange” by Mickey and Sylvia

Episode Date: September 9, 2019

Welcome to episode forty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “Love is Strange” by Mickey and Sylvia, and how a reluctant bluesman who wrote books on jazz guitar, and a failed child star who would later become the mother of hip-hop, made a classic. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a bonus episode available. This one’s on “Ain’t Nobody’s Business” by Jimmy Witherspoon, and is about blues shouting and the ambition to have a polyester suit. (more…)

A History of Rock Music in 500 songs by Andrew Hockey Episode 49 Love is Strange by Mickey and Sylvia We've talked before, of course, about the great Bo Diddley and his main contributions to rock and roll. But today we're going to talk about a song he co-wrote, which ended up in a roundabout way, contributing to many other genres in ways that we won't properly see until we reach the 1970s,

a song that, for all that it is a classic that almost everyone knows, is still rarely treated as an important song in music history. Yet this is a song that's a nexus of all sorts of music, which connects the birth of hip-hop to the compositions of Janis Xanakis, by way of Doc Pomas, Do Didley, and Ike and Tina Turner. The story of this song starts with Billy Stewart. These days, Billy Stewart is a largely unknown figure, a minor blues man on chess, who was too close to soul music for the Chess Chicago blues fans to take him to heart. Stuart, like many of the musicians were looking at at the moment, started out in the gospel field, but moved over to vocal group R&B. In his case, he did so by occasionally filling in for a group called The Rainbows,

which featured Don Covey, who would later go on to become a very well-known soul singer. There are no recordings of Stuart with the Rainbows, but this recording of the group a few years later should give you some sort of idea what they sounded like. Through his work with the group, Stuart got to know Bo Diddley, whose band he joined as a piano player. Stuart also signed on with chess, and his first record, Billy's Blues, featured both Didley and Didley's guitarist Jodie Williams on guitar.

Teams came up with that guitar part, and that would lead to a lot of trouble in the future. And that trouble would come because of Mickey Baker. Mickey Baker's birth name was McHouston Baker. Baker had a rough, impoverished upbringing. He didn't know the identity of his father, and his mother was in and out of prison. He started out as a serious jazz musician, playing bebop,

up until the point he saw the great blues musician Pewee Creighton. More precisely, when he saw Creighton's Cadillac. Baker was playing difficult, complex music. that required a great amount of skill and precision. What Creighton was doing was technically far, far easier than anything Baker was doing, and he was making far more money. So, as Baker put it, I started bending strings. I was starving to death, and the blues was just a financial thing for me then.

Baker became part of an informal group of people around Atlantic Records, centred around Doc Pommos, a blues songwriter, who we will hear much more about in the future, along with Big Joe Turner and the saxophone player King Curtis. They were playing sophisticated city blues and R&B, and rather looked down on the country bluesmen, who are now much better known as being comparatively unsophisticated musicians. Baker's comments about bending strings come from this attitude,

that real good music involved horns and pianos and rhythmic sophistication, and that what the Delta Blues men were doing was something anyone could do. Baker became one of the most sought-after studio guitarists in the R&B field, and, for example, played the staggering lead guitar on Nidja Love So Bad by Little Willie John. That's some pretty good string bending. He was also on a lot of other songs we've talked. about in previous episodes. That's him on guitar on Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean and Shake Rattle and Roll, Money Honey, and record by Louis Jordan, Laverne Baker, Ray Charles and Moore.

Baker was also a guitar teacher and one of his students was a young woman named Sylvia Vanterpool. Sylvia was at the time a singer who was just starting out in her career. She had recorded several unsuccessful tracks on Savoy and Jubilee Records. A typical example is her version of, I went to your wedding. Sylvia was only 13 when she started. only 13 when she started her career using the name Little Sylvia, inspired by Little Esther, who like her was making records for Savoy Records.

And her early recordings are a strange makes of different styles. For every syrupy ballad like I went to your wedding, there was a hard R&B number, more in the Little Esther style, like Drive Daddy Drive. That was the other side of the same song So if you don't know how to drive Don't drive That was the other side of the same single As I Went to Your Wedding

And you can hear that while she had some vocal talent She was not keeping to a coherent enough distinctive enough sound To make her into a star By the time she was 20 Sylvia was holding down a day job as a typist trying and failing to earn enough money to live on as a singer. But she'd been taking guitar lessons from Mickey Baker

and had got pretty good. But then Sylvia started dating a man named Joe Robinson. Joe Robinson was involved in some way with gangsters. Nobody has written enough detail for me to get an exact sense of what it was he did with the mob, but he had connections, and he decided he was going to become Sylvia's manager. While Sylvia's career was floundering, Joe thought he could beef it up. All that was needed was a gimmick.

Different sources tell different stories about who thought of the idea, but eventually it was decided that Sylvia should join with a guitar teacher and form a duo. Some sources say that the duo was Joe Robinson's idea, and that it was inspired by the success of Jean and Eunice, Shirley and Lee, and the other vocal duos around the time. Other sources, on the other hand, talk about how Mickey Baker, who had started out as a jazz guitarist very much in the Les Paul mode, had wanted to form his own version of Les Paul and Mary Ford. Either way, the gimmick was a solid one, a male-female duo, both of whom could sing and play the guitar, but playing that string-bending music that Mickey was making money from. and the two of them had chemistry, at least on stage and on recordings.

Offstage they soon began to grate on each other. Mickey was a man who had no interest in stardom or financial success. He was a rather studious, private man who just wanted to make music and get better at his instrument, while Sylvia had a razor-sharp business mind, a huge amount of ambition and a desire for stardom. but they worked well as a musical team even if they were never going to be the best of friends. Originally they signed with the label called Rainbow Records, a medium-sized indie label in New York,

where they put out their first single, I'm so glad. It's not an especially good record, and it does seem to have a bit of Jean and Eunice to it, and almost none of the distinctive guitar that would characterize their later work. Just some stabbing point. punctuation on the middle eight and a rather perfunctory solo.

The B-side though, Cede-e-Bum-Rondon, while it's also far from a wonderful song, does have the semi-Calypso rhythm that would later make them famous. Unsurprisingly, it didn't sell. nor did the follow-ups. But the records did get some airplay in New York, if nowhere else, and that brought them to the attention of Bob Rowlots at Groove Records. Groove Records was a subsidiary of RCA, set up in 1953. At that time, the major record labels had a problem, which we've talked about before.

For years, none of them had put out R&B records, and the small labels that did put out R&B, been locked out of the distribution networks that the major labels dominated. The result had been that a whole independent network of shops, usually black-owned businesses selling to black customers, had sprung up that only sold R&B records. Those shops had no interest in selling the records put out by the major labels. Their customers weren't interested in Doris Day or Frank Sinatra.

They wanted Wynoni-Harris and Johnny Otis, so why would the shop want to stock anything by Columbia or Decker or RCA when there was modern and chess and federal and king and sun and RPM out there making the kind of records their customers liked? But of course, the major labels still wanted to sell to those customers. After all, there was money out there, in the pockets of people who weren't shareholders in RCA or Colombia, and in the eyes of those shareholders, that was the greatest injustice in the ones.

world and one that needed to be rectified forthwith. And so those labels set up their own mini-divisions to sell to those shops. They had different labels because the shops wouldn't buy from the majors, but they were wholly owned subsidiaries. Fake indie labels, and Groove was one of them. Groove Records had had a minor hit in 1955 with the piano player Piano Red and his Jumpman Jump. They hadn't had a huge amount of commercial success since, but Rollands thought that Mickey and Sylvia could be the ones to bring him that success. Rollants put them together with the sexophonist and arranger King Curtis, who Mickey already knew from his work with Doc Pommas,

and Curtis put together a team of the best R&B musicians in New York, many of them the same people who would play on most of Atlantic's sessions. Mickey and Sylvia's first single on groove, Walking in the Rain, had the potential to be a big hit in the eyes of the record company. That's night, if I don't find my baby insane, how much I love you. It's a cover version of one of the first records ever released on Sun Records, a few years earlier, originally by a vocal group called The Prisoners. But customers were understandably confused by the presence of two songs with almost identical titles in the market,

and so Mickey and Sylvia's song tanked. They still didn't have that hit they needed. But at that point, fate intervened in the form of Bo Diddley. In May 1956, Diddley had written a movie recorded a song called Love is Strange and not got round to releasing it. Jodie Williams, who was in Didley's band at the time, had played the lead guitar on the session, and he'd reused the licks he had used for Billy's Blues on the song. At the time, Didley was friendly with Mickey Baker, and was using Baker as a session guitarist

on outside recordings he was producing for other artists, including recordings with Billy Stewart and with the Marquis, a vocal group which featured a young singer named Marvin Gay. As a result, Mickey and Sylvia ended up playing a few shows on the same Bill as Deadly, and at one of the shows, Jodie Williams, who was attracted to Sylvia, decided to play Love is Strange for her. Sylvia liked the song, and Mickey and Sylvia decided to record it. Didley claimed that what he told the song's publishers was that Jody Williams wrote the music while he wrote the lyrics, but he asked that the credit for the lyrics

be put in the name of his wife, Ethel Smith. While Smith's name made the credits, Williams' didn't, and Williams blamed Didley for the omission, while Didley just said, with some evidence, that most of the people he signed contracts with were liars and thieves, and that it didn't surprise him

that they'd missed Williams' name off. We'll never know for sure what was actually in Didley's contracts, because, again, according to Didley, just before he and Smith divorced, she burned all his papers, so she could claim that he never gave her any money and he couldn't prove otherwise.

Williams never believed him, and the two didn't speak for decades. Meanwhile, two other people were credited as writers on the song, Mickey and Sylvia themselves. This is presumably for the changes that were made between Didley's demo and the finished song. song, the famous spoken word section of the song in particular.

Sylvia? Yes, Mickey. How you call your lover boy? And if he doesn't answer? Oh, lover boy. And if he still doesn't answer. I simply say, play your... According to Didley, he also later sold his own share in the song to Sylvia,

sometime in the early 60s. This may well be the case, because Sylvia Vantapool went on to become a very, very successful business business. woman, who made a lot of very wise business decisions. Either way, Love is Strange was a big hit. It went to number 11 in the pop charts and number one on the R&B chart. It's one of those records that everyone knows, and it went on to be covered by dozens upon dozens of performers,

including the Maddox Brothers and Rose, the Everly Brothers, and Paul McCartney and Wings. And Jodie Williams. saw a penny from it. But after Groove Records that had this breakthrough big hit, RCA decided to close the label down, and move the acts on the label, and their producer Rollins, to another subsidiary, Vic. Vic Records had, according to Rollins, probably the worst collection of talent in the history of the world, and was severely in debt. All the momentum for their

career was gone. Mickey and Sylvia would release many more records, but they would have diminishing returns. Their next record went top 10 R&B, but only number 47 on the pop charts, and the record after that did even worse, only reaching number 85 in the Hot 100, even though it was another Bow Didley ballad very much in the same vein as Love is Strange. But even though that wasn't a... a big hit record, it was a favourite of Buddy Holly, a singer who at this time was just starting out in his own career. You can tell how much Holly liked Mickey and Sylvia though, just by comparing the way he sings Baby on many of his records to the way Sylvia sings it in Love is Strange,

and he recorded his own home demos of both Love is Strange and Dearest, demos which were released on singles after his death. But Dearest was so obscure that when Holly's single came out, the song was titled O'm O Yeah, and credited to Unknown for many years, because no one at the record label had heard the earlier record. Mickey and Sylvia would have several more records in the Hot 100, but the highest would only reach number 46. But while they had no more hits under their own names, they did have another hit, as Ag Turner. After Mickey and Sylvia were dropped, along with the rest of the Vic artists, they split up temporarily, but then got back together

to start their own company, Willow Records, to release their own material. Ag Turner played on some of their records, and to return the favour, they agreed to produce a record for Ag and Tina Turner. The song chosen was called It's Gonna Work Out Fine. and it was co-written by the great R&B songwriter Rose Marie McCoy, who had written for Elvis, Nat King Cole, Nappy Brown and many others. The other credited co-writer is one Sylvia McKinney, who some sources suggest is the same person as Sylvia Vantapool, who had by this point married Joe Robinson and changed her name to Sylvia Robinson.

Whether she was the other co-writer or not, Mickey and Sylvia had recorded a version of the song for Vic Records, but it hadn't been released, and so they suggested to Ike that the song would work as an Ike and Tina Turner record, and they would produce and arrange it for them. Indeed, they did more than that. They were Agg Turner on the record.

Sylvia played the lead guitar part, while Mickey did the spoken Aig vocals, which Ike would do live. Sylvia also joined the Ikechats on backing vocals, and while Mickey and Sylvia aren't the credited producers, The end result is essentially a Mickey and Sylvia record with guest vocals from Tina Turner. That record sold over a million copies and got a Grammy nomination. However, Mickey and Sylvia's recordings under their own name were still having no success.

And Mickey was also having problems because his then wife was white, and with the particularly virulent form of racism the US was suffering through at the time, he didn't want to be in the country anymore. He was also becoming more and more interested in the academic side of music. He had already, in 1955, written a book, The Complete Course in Jazz Guitar, which is still available today and highly regarded. So he moved to Europe and went back into jazz, performing with people like Coleman Hawkins. But he did more than just jazz.

He studied composition with Janice Zinnakis and started writing fugues and a concerto for guitar and orchestra, the blues suite. Unfortunately, while some of that music was recorded, it only appears to have been released on now out-of-print inexpensive vinyl, which no one has uploaded to the internet, so I can't accept it for you here. What I can excerpt is a project he did in the mid-1970s, an album called Mississippi Delta Dews,

released under his birth name Mac Houston Baker, where he paid tribute to the country blues man he'd looked down on earlier by performing their songs, along with some of his own in a similar style. It's an odd album, in which sometimes he does a straight sound alike, like this version of Robert Johnson's Terraplane Blues. And I feel so lonesome.

Now let me drive your terraply, Mama, And sometimes he uses strings. Sometimes this is just a standard pop-style string section, but sometimes he's using them in ways he learned from Xenakis, like in this version of J.B. Leno's Alabama Blues, rewritten as Alabama March, which ends up sounding like nothing as much as Scott Walker. Baker carried on performing music of all kinds around Europe until his death in 2011.

He died massively respected for his contributions to blues, jazz, R&B, and the technical proficiency of generations of guitarists. Sylvia Robinson made even more of a contribution. After a few years off to have kids after the duo split up, she set up her own record label, all platinum. For all platinum, she wrote and produced a number of photo disco hits for other people in the late 60s and early 70s. Those included Shame, Shame, Shame for Shirley and Company. That's the song that inspired David Bowie, John Lennon, and Carlos Alimar to rework a song Bowie and Alamar had been working on called Foot stomping into fame. Sylvia also had a hit of her own, with a song called Pillow Talk that she'd written for Al Green,

but which he turned down due to its blatant sexuality, conflicting with his newfound religion. But I'm afraid we're going to have to wait more than two years before we find out more about Sylvia's biggest contribution to music, because Sylvia Robinson, who had been little Sylvia and the woman calling her lover boy, became to hip-hop, what Sam Phillips was to rock and roll. and when we get to 1979 we will be looking at how

with financing from a husband's gangster friend Morris Levy someone from the first wave of rock and roll stars was more responsible than anyone for seeing commercial potential in the music that eventually took rock's cultural place A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity

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