A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 54: “Keep A Knockin'” by Little Richard

Episode Date: October 28, 2019

Episode fifty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Keep A Knockin'” by Little Richard, the long history of the song, and the tension between its performer’s faith and sexuality. 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 “At the Hop” by Danny and the Juniors. (more…)

A History of Rock Music in 500 songs by Andrew Huck. Episode 54 Keep a Knocking By Little Richard When last we looked at Little Richard properly He had just had a hit with Long Tall Sally and was at the peak of his career. Since then, we've seen that he had become big enough

that he was chosen over Fat's Domino to record the theme tune to The Girl Can't Help It and that he was the inspiration for James Brown. But today, we're going to look in more detail at Little Richard's career in the mid-50s

and at how he threw away that career for his beliefs. Richard's immediate follower to Long Tall Sally was another of his most successful records. A double-sided hit with both songs credited to John Mariscalco and Bumps Blackwell. Rip It Up, backed with Ready Teddy.

These both went to number one on the R&B charts, but they possibly didn't have quite the same power as Richard's first two singles. Where the earlier singles have been truly unique artifacts, songs that didn't sound like anything else out there. Rip it up and Ready Teddy, were both much closer to the typical songs of the time. The lyrics were about going out and having a party and rocking and rolling, rather than about sex with men or cross-dressing sex workers.

But this didn't make Richard any less successful, and throughout 1956 and 57, he kept releasing more hits, often releasing singles where both the A and B side became classics. We've discussed the girl can't help it and she's got it in the episode on 20 Flight Rock, but there was also Jenny Jenny, send me some loving, and possibly the greatest of them all, Lucille. But Richard was getting annoyed at the routine of recording. Or, more precisely, he was getting annoyed at the musicians he was having to work with in the studio.

He was convinced that his own. own backing band, the Upsetters, were at least as good as the studio musicians, and he was pushing for specialty to let him use them in the studio. And when they finally let him use the upsetters in the studio, he recorded a song which had roots which go much further back than you might imagine. Keep a knocking had a long, long history. It derives originally from a piece called A Bunch of Blues, written by J. Paul Wyer and Alph Kelly in 1915. Wyer was a violin player with W.C. Handy's band, and Handy recorded the tune in 1917. That itself, though, may derive from another song. My Buckets Got a Hole in it, which is an old jazz standard. There are claims

that it was originally played by the great jazz trumpeter Buddy Bolden. around the turn of the 20th century. No recordings survive of Bolden playing the song, but a group called the Buddy Bolden Legacy Group have put together what, other than the use of modern recording, seems a reasonable facsimile of how Bolden would have played the song.

If Bolden did play that, then the melody dates back to around 1906 at the latest, as from 1907 on, Bolden was in a psychiatric hospital with schizophrenia, but the 1915 date for a bunch of blues is the earliest definite date we have for the melody. My Buckets Got a Hole in it would later be recorded by everyone from Hank Williams to Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant to Willie Nelson and Winter Marsalis. It was particularly popular among country singers.

But the bucket's got a hole in it But the song took another turn in In fact that was recorded by Tamperead's Hocam Jug Band This group featured Tampa Redd's Hocum Jug Band. This group featured Tampa Red, who would later go on to be a blues legend in his own right, and Georgia Tom, who as Thomas Dorsey, would later be best known as the writer of much of the core repertoire of gospel music.

You might remember us talking about Dorsey in the episode on Rosetta Tharp. He's someone who wrote dirty, funny blues songs, until he had a religious experience while on stage, and instead became a writer of religious music. writing songs like, Freshest Lord Take My Hand, and Peace in the Valley. But in 1928, he was still Georgia Tom, and still recording Hocum songs.

We talked about Hocum music right back in the earliest episodes of the podcast, but as a reminder, Hocom music is a form which is now usually lumped into the blues by most of the few people who come across it, but which actually comes from Vodont. and especially from minstrel shows, and was hugely popular in the early decades of the 20th century. It usually involved simple songs with a verse chorus structure and with lyrics that were an extended comedy metaphor, usually some form of innuendo about sex, with titles like meatballs and

banana in your fruit basket. As you can imagine, this kind of music is one that influenced a lot of people who went on to influence Little Richard, and it's in this crossover genre, which had elements of country, blues, and pop, that we find My Buckets Got a Hole in it, turning into the song that would later be known as Keep a Knockin. Tampa Red's version was titled You Can't Come In, and seems to have been the origin,

not only of Keep a Knockin, but also of the Leadbelly song, Midnight Special. You can hear the similarity in the guitar melody. The version by Tampa Red's Hocum Jug Band wasn't the first recording to combine the Keep a Knockin lyrics with the My Bucket's Got a Hole in it melody. The piano player Bert Mayes recorded a version a month earlier, and Mays and his producer Mayo Williams, one of the first black record producers, are usually credited as the songwriters as a result, with Little Richard also being credited on his version.

Mays was, in turn, probably inspired by an earlier recording by James Boolet Wiggins, but Wiggins had a different melody. Mays seems to be the one who first combined the lyrics with the My Buckets Got a Hole in it melody on a recording. But the idea was probably one that had been knocking around for a while in various forms, given the number of different variations of the melody that turn up, and Tampa Red's version inspired all the future recordings. As Hocom music lies at the roots of both blues and country, it's not surprising that

You Can't Come In was picked up by both country and blues musicians. A version of the song, for example, was recorded by, among others, Milton Brown, who had been an early musical partner of Bob Wills and one of the people who helped create Western Swing. but you better let me be. But the version that little Richard recorded by Louis Jordan's version. Jordan was, of course, Richard's single biggest musical inspiration, so we can reasonably

assume that the record by Jordan was the one that pushed him to record. the song. The Jordan record was probably brought to mind in in 1955 when Smiley Lewis had a hit with Dave Bartholomew's take on the idea. I hear you knocking only bears a slight melodic resemblance. to Keep a Knockin, but the lyrics are so obviously inspired by the earlier song that it would have brought it to mind for anyone who had heard any of the earlier versions. That was also recorded by Fat's Domino, one of Little Richard's favourite musicians,

so we can be sure that Richard had heard it. So by the time Little Richard came to record Keep a Knockin, in very early 1957, he had a host of different versions he could draw on for inspiration. But what we ended up with is something that's uniquely little Richard, something that was altogether wilder. In some takes of the song, Richard also sang a verse about drinking gin, which was based on Louis Jordan's version, which had a similar verse. But in the end, what they ended up with was only about 57 seconds worth of usable recording. Listening to the session recording,

it seems that Grady Gaines kept trying different things with his saxophone solo, and not all of them quite worked as well as might be hoped. There are a few infallicities in most of his solos, though not anything

that you wouldn't expect from a good player trying new things. To get it to a usable length, they copied and pasted the whole song, from the start of Richard's vocal, through to the end of the saxophone solo, and almost doubled the length of the song. The third and fourth verses, and the second saxophone solo,

are the same recording as the first and second verses and the first sax solo. If you want to try this yourself, it seems that the woo after the first, Keep a knocking but you can't come in, after the second sax solo, is the point where the copy-pasting ends. But even though the recording ended, up being a bit of a Frankenstein's monster, it remains one of Little Richard's greatest tracks. At the same session, he also recorded another of his very best records. Ooh my soul.

That session also produced a single for Richard's chauffeur, with Richard on the piano, released under the name Fitty Boy. Fittie Boy would later go on to be better known as Don Covey, and would have great success as a soul singer and songwriter. He's now probably best known for writing Chain of Fools for Aretha Franklin. That session was a productive one, but other than one final session in October 1957, in which he knocked out a couple of blues songs as album fillers,

it would be Little Richard's last rock and roll recording session for several years. Richard had always been deeply conflicted about, well, about everything really. He was attracted to men as well as women. He loved rock and roll and rhythm and blues music, loved eating chitlins and pork chops, drinking and taking drugs, and was unsure about his own gender identity. He was also deeply, deeply religious, and a believer in the Seventh-day Adventist Church,

which believed that same sex attraction, trans identities and secular music were the work of the devil, and that one should keep a vegetarian and kosher diet and avoid all drugs, even caffeine. This came to a head in October 1957. Richard was on a tour of Australia, with Jean Vincent, Eddie Cochran and Alice Leslie,

who was another of the many singers billed as the female Elvis Presley. He will come back. To me, he will come back in there. I'll never, never, never, never let him go. Vincent actually had to miss the first couple of shows on the tour, as he and the blue caps got held up. in Honolulu, apparently due to visa issues, and couldn't continue on to Australia with the rest

of the tour until that was sorted out. They were replaced on those early shows by a local group Johnny O'Keefe and the DJs, who performed some of Vincent's songs, as well as their own material, and who managed to win the audiences round, even though they were irritated at Vincent's absence. O'Keefe isn't someone we're going to be able to discuss, in much detail in this series, because he had very little impact outside of Australia. But within Australia, he's something of a legend, as their first homegrown rock and roll star, and he did make one record which people outside of Australia have heard of, his biggest hit from 1958, Wild One, which has since been covered by, amongst others,

Jerry Lee Lewis and Iggy Pop. The flight to guys I'm going to meet all the chicks Shiffor and I shake until I get in my kicks because I'm a wild boy The flight to Australia

was longer and more difficult than any Richard had experienced before and at one point he looked out of the window and saw the engines glowing red He became convinced that the plane was on fire and being held up by angels

He became even more worried a couple of days later, when Russia launched their first satellite, Sputnik, and it passed low over Australia, low enough that he claimed he could see it like a fireball in the sky while he was performing. He decided this was a sign, and he was being told by God he needed to give up his life of sin and devote himself to religion. He told the other people on the tour this, but they didn't believe him, until he threw all his rings into the ocean to prove it. He insisted on cancelling his appearances with ten days of the tour left to go, and travelling back to the US with his band. He has often also claimed that the plane they were originally scheduled

to fly back on, crashed in the Pacific on the flight he would have been on. I've seen no evidence anywhere else of this, and I have looked. When he got back, he cut one final session for specialty, and then went into a seminary to start studying for the ministry. While his religious belief is genuine, there has been some suggestion that this move wasn't solely motivated by his conversion. Rather, John Marascalco has often claimed that Richard's real reason for his conversion was based on more worldly considerations.

Richard's contract with specialty was only paying him half a cent per record sold, which he considered far too low, and the wording of the contract only let him end it on either his own death or an act of God. He was trying, according to Mariscalco, to claim that his religious awakening was an act of God, and so he should be allowed to break his contract and sign with another label. Whatever the truth, specialty had enough of a backlog of Little Richard recordings that they could keep issuing them for the next couple of years.

Some of those, like Good Golly Miss Molly, were as good as anything he had ever recorded, and rightly became big hits. Many others, though, were substandard recordings that they originally had no plans to release. But with Richard effectively on strike, and the demand for his recordings under-mitted, finished, they put out whatever they had. Richard went out on the road as an evangelist, but also went to study to become a priest. He changed his whole lifestyle. He married a woman, although they would later divorce as, among other things, they weren't sexually compatible. He stopped drinking and taking drugs, stopped even drinking coffee, and started eating only

vegetables cooked in vegetable oil. After the lawsuits over him quitting specialty records were finally settled, he started recording again, but only gospel songs. And that was how things stood for several years. The tension between Richard's sexuality and his religion continued to torment him. He dropped out of the seminary after propositioning another male student, and he was arrested in a public toilet. But he continued his evangelism in gospel singing until October 1962, when he went on tour in the UK. Just like the previous tour which had been a turning

point in his life, this one featured Jean Vincent, but was also affected by Vincent's work permit problems. This time, Vincent was allowed in the country, but wasn't allowed to perform on stage, so he appeared only as the compare, at least at the start of the tour. Later on he would sing Be Bopalula from offstage as well. Vincent wasn't the only one to have problems either. Sam Cook, who was the second build star for the show, was delayed and couldn't make the first show, which was a bit of a disaster. Richard was accompanied by a young gospel organ player named Billy Preston,

and he'd agreed to the tour under the impression that he was going to be performing only his gospel music. Don Arden, the promoter, had been promoting it as Richard's first rock and roll tour in five years, and the audience were very far from impressed when Richard came on stage in flowing white robes and started singing Peace in the Valley and other gospel songs. Arden was apopleptic.

If Richard didn't start performing rock and and roll song soon, he would have to cancel the whole tour. An audience that wanted rip it up and Long Tall Sally and Tootty Frutty wasn't going to put up with being preached at. Arden didn't know what to do, and when Sam Cuck and his manager J.W. Alexander turned up to the second show, Arden had a talk with Alexander about it. Alexander told Arden he had nothing to worry about. He knew Little Richard of old, and knew that Richard couldn't stand to be upstaged. He also knew how good Sam Cuck was. Cook was at the height of his success at this point, and he was an astonishing live performer, and so when he went out on stage and closed the

first half, including an incendiary performance of Twisting the Night Away that left the audience applauding through the intermission, Richard knew he had to up his game. While he'd not been performing rock and roll in public, he had been tempted back into the studio to record in his old style, at least once before, when he'd joined his old group to record Fat's Domino's I'm in Love Again for a single that didn't get released until December 1962. The single was released as by The World Famous Upsetters, but the vocalist on the record was very recognisable. So Richard's willpower had been slowly bent. and Sam Cook's performance was the final straw.

Little Richard was going to show everyone what star power really was. When Richard came out on stage, he spent a whole minute in pitch darkness with the band ramping, before a spotlight suddenly picked him out, in an all-white suit, and he launched into Long Tall Sally. The British tour was a massive success, and Richard kept becoming wilder. and more frantic on stage, as five years of pent-up rock and roll burst out of him. Many shows he'd pull off most of his clothes and throw them into the audience, ending up dressed in just a bathrobe on his knees.

He would jump on the piano, and one night he even faked his own death, collapsing off the piano and lying still on the stage in the middle of a song, just to create attention in the audience, for when he suddenly jumped up and started singing Tootie Frutie. The tour was successful enough, and Richard's performances created such a buzz that when the package tour itself finished, Richard was booked for a few extra gigs,

including one at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton, where he headlined a bill of local bands from around Merseyside, including one who had released their first single a few of, weeks earlier. He then went to Hamburg with that group and spent two months hanging out with them and performing in the same kinds of clubs and teaching their bass player how he made his woo sounds when singing. Richard was impressed enough by them that he got in touch with Art Roop, who still had some contractual claim over Richard's own recordings to tell him about them. But Roop said he wasn't interested in some English group. He'd just want a little Richard.

to go back into the studio and make more records for him. Richard headed back to the US, leaving Billy Preston stranded in Hamburg with his new friends The Beatles. At first he still wouldn't record any rock and roll music, other than one song that Sam Cook wrote for him, well all right, but after another UK tour,

he started to see that people who had been inspired by him were having the kind of success he thought he was due himself. He went back into the studio, backed by a group including Don and Dewee, who had been performing with him in the UK, and recorded what was meant to be his comeback single, Bama Lama Bama Lou. Unfortunately, great as it was, that single didn't do anything in the charts, and Richard spent the rest of the 60s making record after record that failed to chart. Some of them were as good as anything he'd done in his 50s heyday, but his five years away from rock and roll music

had killed his career as a recording artist. They hadn't, though, killed him as a live performer, and he would spend the next 50 years touring playing the hits he had recorded during that classic period from 1955 through 1957, with occasional breaks, where he would be overcome by remorse, give up rock and roll music forever, and try to work as an evangelist and gospel singer,

before the lure of material success and audience response brought him back to the world of sex and drugs and rock and roll. He eventually gave up performing live a few years ago, as decades of outrageous stage performances had exacerbated his disabilities. His last public performance was in 2013. in Las Vegas, and he was in a wheelchair. But, because he's little Richard, the wheelchair was made to look like a golden throne. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon.

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