A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 50: “Honky Tonk” by Bill Doggett

Episode Date: September 16, 2019

Episode fifty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Honky Tonk” by Bill Doggett, and uses his career to provide a brief summary of the earlier episodes of the podcast as we’re now moving forward into the next stage of the story. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford. (more…)

A History of Rock Music in 500 songs by Andrew Hockey Episode 50 Honky Talk by Bill Doggett Welcome to the 50th episode of A History of Rock Music in 500 songs We're now 10% of the way through our story and also most of the way through 1956

I'm told that when history podcasts hit a big round number, it's customary for them to do a jumping on episode, perhaps a story so far which covers everything that's been discussed up to that point, but in brief, so that new listeners can get up to speed. That's sort of what I'm about to do here. This week, we're going to look at a hit song from 1956, but by someone whose career interacted with almost everyone in the first 20 or so episodes of the podcast. We're going to look again at some of that old music, not as isolated records by different artists,

but as stages in the career of a single individual. We're going to look at someone who was a jobbing musician, who'd take any job that was on offer, but who by virtue of just being a hard, working, competent jobbing player and arranger, managed to have an astonishing influence on the development of music. While rock and roll was primarily a vocal music, it wasn't a completely clean break with the past, and for most of the decades, from the 1920s through to the early 50s, if you wanted music for dancing, you would want instrumental groups. The big bands did employ vocalists, of course, but you can tell who the focus was on from looking at the names of the bands.

The Betty Goodman Orchestra, the Glem Miller Orchestra, the Duke Allington Orchestra, the Count Basie Orchestra. All of the leaders of the big bands were instrumentalists. They played clarinet, or trombone, or piano. They didn't sing. It was only with the musicians' union strikes of the 1940s, which we've talked about before, that more through necessity than anything else, the music industry moved from being dominated by instrumental music to being dominated by singers. But well into the 1960s, we'll still be seeing rock and roll hits that were purely instrumental. Indeed, we probably wouldn't have rock and roll guitar bands at all without instrumental groups like the Ventures in the US or the Shadows in the UK who had hits with pure instrumental

records. And one of the greatest of the early rock and roll instrumentals was by someone who didn't actually consider himself a rock and roll musician. It's a record that influenced everyone from James Brown to the Beach Boys and it's called Honky Tonk. There is surprisingly little information out there about Bill Doggart for someone who had such an impact on the fields of rock and roll, blues, jazz and soul. There are no books about his life and the only website devoted to him is one designed by his nephew, which has all the flaws one might expect from a website put together about someone's uncle. Doggett was born in 1916 in Philadelphia and he moved to New York in his late teens and formed his own band, for which he was the piano player.

But in 1938, Lucky Melinda was looking for a new band. The way Melinda worked was that he bought out and took over the leadership of existing bands, which then became the Lucky Melinda Orchestra. This incarnation of the Lucky Melinda Orchestra, the one that was put together by Douggett before Millinder took the band over, is the one that got a residency at the Savoy, after Chick Webb's band stopped playing there, and like Webb's band, this group was managed by Mo Gale. Doggett stayed on with Melinda as his pianist, and while with the group, he appeared with Milinder in the 1938 All Black Film, Paradise in Harlem, playing on this song. Doggett was, from what I can tell,

the de facto musical director from Millinder's band in this period. Millinder was a frontman and occasional singer, but he couldn't play an instrument and was reliant on the musicians in his band to work the arrangements out for him.

Doggett was in the band when Mo Gale suggested that Sister Rosetta Tharp would work well, paired up with Melinda's main singer, Trevor Bacon. In the same way, that Louis Jordan and Ella Fitzgerald had worked well together in the Chick-Weber band. Doggett was the pianist during the whole of Tharp's time with the Melinda band,

and he co-composed with Melinda, the song that later gave its title to a biography of Tharp, Shout Sister Shout. If you listen to any of Tharp's big band recordings from her time with Melinda, it's Doggett on the piano, and I strongly see that, suspect it was Doggett who came up with the arrangements. Listen, for example, to his playing on Lonesome Road, another song that the Millinder band performed on film. The Millinder band were pivotal in the move from swing music to R&B, and Doggett was an important part in that move. While he'd left the band before they took on later singers, like Wynoni Harris and Ruth Brown, he had helped set the band up to be the kind of band that those singers would feel comfortable in.

Doggett was also in the band when they had their biggest hit, a song called When the Lights Go On Again All Over the World. That's most notable now for being one of the first recordings of a young trumpeter who was just starting out by the name of Dizzy Gillespie. Gillespie was quickly sacked by Melinda, who had a habit of getting rid of musicians before they reached their full potential. I've not been able to find out why Doggett left Melinda, whether he was one of those musicians who was sacked, or whether he just wanted to move on to other things. But whatever the reason, it can't have been anything that put a stain on his reputation, because Doggett remained with Millinder's manager, Mo Gale. We've mentioned Gail before several times, but he was the manager of almost every important black act based in New York in the late 30s and early 40s, as well as running the Savoy Club, which we talked about in several of the earliest episodes of the podcast.

Gail managed Millinder and Rosetta Tharp, and also managed the Ink Spots, Ella Fitzgerald, Chick-Web and Louis Jordan, and so whenever one of his acts, needed a musician, he would tend to find them from his existing pool of talent. And so this is how, straight after leaving Lucky Melinda's band, Doggett found himself working for another gale act, the InkSpot. He joined them as their pianist and the Ranger, and stayed with them for several years. I'll get by. Oh yes, honey child. The ink spots, if you don't remember, were a vocal quartet who became the most popular black act of the 40s, and who stuck to a unique formula based around Bill Kenney's high tenor

and Hoppy Jones's low-spoken bass. They had hit after hit during the 40s with songs that all sound remarkably similar, and in the mid-40s those songs were arranged by Bill Doggett. He was with the group for two years, starting with the classic line-up of the group and staying with them through Charlie Fouquet being drafted and Deke Watson being fired. While he was a sideman, rather than a full member of the group, he was important enough to them that he now gets counted in lists of proper members put together by historians of the band. He ended up leaving them less than two weeks before Hoppy Jones died, and during that time he played on 14 of their hit singles, almost all of them sticking to the same formula they'd used previously, the top and bottom.

every rhyme oh how i miss you every night of all this time ever night about this time honey that's when i miss you the different acts managed by mo gale all sat in with each other when needed so for example trevor bacon the male vocalist with millinder's band temporarily joined the ink spot when Deke Watson got sick for a few weeks. And so during the times, when the ink spots weren't touring, Doggett would also perform with Ella Fitzgerald, who was also managed by Gail. And indeed, during the end of Doggett's, bell.

And indeed, during the end of Doggett's time with the ink spot, Fitzgerald recorded a number of hit singles with the group, which of course featured Dogget on the piano. That included this one, which later went on to be the basis of Train Kept a Roll in, which we looked at a few episodes back. Dogged along, I heard him singing, a most peculiar cowboy song. It was a ditty, he learned in the city, come at a yi-ya, come on a yip-ye. Get along. Get hip-lipped dog, get along. Better be on your way. Dogget moved over full-time to become Ella's arranger and pianist.

At some point during the couple of weeks between Deke Watson leaving the ink spots and Hoppy Jones Daying, in early October 1944, and stayed with her for a couple of years, before moving on to Illinois Jeket's band, taking the same role again in the band that introduced the honking tenor saxophone into R&B and thus into rock and roll. He also played on one of the most important records in 40s are. R&B, Johnny Otis's Harlem Nocturn, the first hit for the man who would go on to produce most of the great R&B artists of the 50s. And he also led his own band for a while, the Bill Doggett Octet.

They were the ones who recorded B. Baba Leba, with Helen Humes on vocals, the song that probably inspired Jean Vincent to write a very similarly named song a few years later. He then moved on to Louis Jordan's band full-time, and this is where his career really starts. Jordan was another act in Mo Gale's stable, and indeed, just like the ink spot, he'd had hits duetting with Ella Fitzgerald, who he'd first worked with back in the 1930s in Chick-Web's band. He was also, as you may remember from earlier episodes, the leader of the most popular R&B group in the late 40s and early 50s, the one that inspired everyone from Chuck Berry to Bill Haley. And as with his tenure with the ink spots, Doggett was in Jordan's band during

its period of peak commercial success. The timeline for who Doggett played with when, as you can probably tell, is all over the place because he seemed to be playing with two or three acts at any given time. And so, Officially, if you look at the timelines so far as they exist, you see that it's generally claimed that Bill Doggett joined Louis Jordan in 1949. But I've seen interviews with members of Jordan's organisation that suggest he joined much earlier, but he would alternate with Jordan's other piano player,

Wild Bill Davis. The way they worked, according to Burle Adams, who was involved in Jordan's manager, was that Davis would spend a week on the road as Jordan's piano player, while Doggett would spend the same week writing arrangements for the group, and then they would swap over, and Doggett would go out on the road while Davis would write arrangements. Either way, after a while,

Doggett became the sole pianist for the group, as Davis struck out on his own, and Doggett once again basically became the musical director for one of the biggest bands in the R&B business. Doggett is often credited as the person who rewrote Saturday Night Fish Fry into one of Jordan's biggest hits from its inauspicious original version, though Jordan is credited on the record. During his time with Jordan,

Doggett continued playing on records for Ella Fitzgerald, Bill Kenny of the Ink Spot and other artists, but he was paying close attention to Wild Bill Davis, who he had replaced in Jordan's group. Davis had discovered the possibilities in a new musical instrument, the Hammond organ, and had formed a trio consisting of himself, a guitarist and the drummer,

to exploit these possibilities in jazz music. Doggett was also fascinated by this instrument, especially when hearing it up close, as when Davis rejoined Jordan's band to record Tamburitsabugi, which had Dogget on piano and Davis on the Hammond organ. A bottle of beer is fine and chugging a lug of wine I makes you blow a barrel low and jockey the chook with a nickel a dime for tamburits a boogie. When Doggett left Jorda Wagon's axe,

To tamper it's the boogie, Loom every to doggie When Doggett left Jordan's band, He decided to form an organ trio Just Like Davises. The only problem was That it was just like Davises. His group had the same instrumentation

And Doggett and Davis had very similar playing styles. Still, Henry Glover got him a contract with King Records, and he started recording Hammondorgan blues tracks in the Davis style. Davis and Doggett between them gave the Hammond organ its prominence in the world of jazz, R&B and soul music. The Hammond organ has an odd image, as most people associate it with the cheesiest sort of light entertainment.

Certainly, for anyone in Britain of the generation older than mine, for example, the name it conjures up is Reggie Dixon, possibly the least funky man ever. But in that part of music which is the intersection of jazz and R&B, the part of music inhabited by Jimmy Smith, Booker T. Jones, Ray Charles, Georgie Fame, Billy Preston and others. The Hammond organ has become an essential instrument, used so differently that one might almost compare it to the violin, where the instrument is referred to as a fiddle when it's played on folk or country songs.

And that comes from Davis and Doggett, and their almost simultaneous invention of a new style of keyboards for the new style of music that was coming up in the late 40s and early 50s. But after a year or two of playing in an organ trio, Doggett decided that he didn't want to keep making records that sounded so much like the ones Wild Bill Davis was making. He didn't want to be seen as a copy. And so, to vary the style, he decided to take on a honking saxophone player to be the group's lead instrumentalist, while Doggett would concentrate on providing a rhythmic pad. This lineup of his group would go on to

make the record that would make Doggett's name. Honky Tonk Parts 1 and 2 came about almost by accident, As Doggett told the story, his biggest hit started out at a dance in Lima, Ohio on a Sunday night. The group were playing their normal set and people were dancing as normal, but then in between songs, Billy Butler, Doggett's guitarist, just started noodling an instrumental line on his bass strings. This hadn't been planned. He was just noodling around, as all guitarists will do when given five seconds. silence. But the audience started dancing to it, and if you're in a bar band and the audience is

dancing, you keep doing what you're doing. As Butler was just playing a simple 12-bar blues pattern, the rest of the group fell in with the riff he was playing, and he started soloing over them. After three choruses of this, Butler nodded to Clifford Scott, the group's saxophone player, to take over, and Scott started playing a honk, a honk, saxophone version of what Butler had been playing. After Scott played through it a few times, he looked over to Doggett to see if Doggett wanted to take a solo too. Doggett shook his head.

The song had already been going about five minutes, and what Butler and Scott had been playing was enough. The group quickly brought the song to a close, using a standard blues outro. And that would have been the end of that. It's the kind of thing. that bar bands have jammed a million times, the sort of thing that,

if you're a musician, you think nothing of. They laughed at the end of the song, happy that they pulled off something that spontaneous, and the audience had been okay with it, and carried on with the rest of their planned set. But then, a couple of songs later, someone in the audience came up and asked them if they could play that hot new song

they'd been playing before again. Not realizing it had just been a spur of the moment jam. Okay, you give the audience what they want. The band members could remember more or less what they'd been playing, so they played it again, and the crowd went wild. And they played it again, and the crowd went wild again. By the end of the night, they'd played that new song, the one they'd improvised based on Billy Butler's guitar noodling,

10 times. Doggett immediately phoned Sid Nathan at King Records, his label, and told him that they had a hit on their hands and needed to get it out straight away. But there was one problem. The song was over five minutes long, and a shellac 78 RPM disc, which was still the most popular format for R&B music, could only hold three minutes per side.

It would have to be a double-stop. sided record. Nathan hated putting out records where the song continued onto the other side, because the jukebox operators, who were his main customers, didn't like them. But he eventually agreed, and Doggett and his band got together in the studio and recorded their new instrumental in a single take. It was released as Honky Tonk Part 1 and Part 2, and they pressed up 5,000 copies in the first week. Those sold out straight away, so the next week they pressed up 12,500 copies. Those also sold straight away, and so for the next few weeks they started pressing up 100,000 copies a week. The song went to number one on the R&B charts and became the biggest selling R&B song of 1956,

spending 13 weeks in total at number one, dropping down the chart and then back up again. It also reached number two on the pop chart, an astonishing feat for an R&B instrumental. It became a staple for cover bands, and it was recorded by the obvious instrumental acts like The Ventures and Dwayne Eddy. And indeed, Dwayne Eddy's whole style

seems to have come from Honky-Tong. But by other people you might not expect, like Buddy Holly, the Beach Boys, and even James Brown. Doggett never had another hit quite as big as Honky Tonk, though his next few records, based on the Honky Tonk pattern, also made the top five on the R&B chart. He had 10 more R&B top 30 hits over the course of the 1950s. But Doggett was being promoted as a rock and roll act, and playing bills with other rock and roll stars, and he didn't really feel comfortable in the rock and roll world. When Honky Tunk came out, he was 40 years old, by far the oldest of the people who had rock and roll hits

in the mid-50s, and he was a jazz organ player, not a little Richard type. He was also stuck repeating the formula. Over the decade after Honky Tonk, Parts 1 and 2, he recorded tracks like Honky Tonk vocal version, Hippi Dippy, Blop, Yucky Doc, and Honky Tonk Bosanova. His career as a charting artist more or less stopped after 1960, when he made the mistake of asking Sid Nathan if he could have a higher royalty rate, given the millions of dollars his recordings had brought in to King Records. King dropped him, but it didn't stop his career as a working musician. In 1962, he teamed up again with Ella Fitzgerald, who wanted to go back to making music with a bit more rhythm than her

recent albums of ballads. The resulting album, Rhythm is My Business, featured Doggett's arrangements and Hammond organ very prominently. He brings my coffee in my favorite cup That's why I know, yes I know Hallelujah I just He also teamed up in 1969 With James Brown Who around that time was trying to pay back his dues

To others who'd been artists on King Records When Brown had started with them in the 50s As well as recording his album Thinking about Little Willie John and other nice things Brown had also been producing records for Hank Ballard, and now it was Bill Doggett's turn. For Doggett, Brown produced and wrote Honky Tonk popcorn. Doggett spent most of the rest of his life touring the Old East Circuit,

a respected organist who would play hundreds of shows a year until his death in 1996 aged 80. He played honky tonk at every show, saying, I just wouldn't be Bill Doggett if I didn't play Honky Tonk. That's what the people pay to hear, so that's what they get. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week, Patreon backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast. This week's is on 16 Tums by Tennessee Ernie Ford.

Visit Patreon.com. slash Andrew Hickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month. This podcast is written, narrated and produced by me, Andrew Hickey. Visit 500Songs.com. That's 5000-0-the-numbers, songs.com, to read transcripts and liner notes, and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here. If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth revealing, Thank you. Please do leave a review on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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