A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 95: “You Better Move On” by Arthur Alexander

Episode Date: August 27, 2020

Episode ninety-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “You Better Move On”, and the sad story of Arthur Alexander. 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 “Mother-In-Law” by Ernie K-Doe. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

A History of Rock Music in 500 songs by Andrew Higg. Episode 95 You Better Move On by Arthur Alexander. Before we start, a warning for those who need it. This is one of the sadder episodes we're going to be doing, and it deals with substance abuse, schizophrenia and miscarriage. One of the things we're going to see a lot of in the next three, few weeks and months, is the growing integration of the studios that produced much of the hit

music to come out of the Southern USA in the 60s. Studios in what the writer Charles L. Hughes calls the country Soul Triangle, Nashville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals. That integration produced some of the greatest music of the era, but it's also the case that with few exceptions, narratives about that have tended to centre the white people involved, at the expense of the black people. The black musicians tend to be regarded as people who allowed the white musicians to cast off their racism and become better people, rather than as colleagues, who in many cases somewhat resented the white musicians. There were jobs that weren't open to black musicians in the segregated south, and now here were a bunch of white people taking some of the smaller number of jobs that were

available to them. This is not to say that those white musicians were individually racist. many were very vocally opposed to racism, but they were still beneficiaries of a racist system. These white musicians who loved black music slowly, over a decade or so, took over the older black styles of music and made them into white music. Up to this point,

when we've looked at R&B, blues or soul recordings, all the musicians involved have been black people, almost without exception. and for most of the 50s, rock and roll was a predominantly black genre, before the influx of the rockabillies made it seem, briefly, like it could lead to a truly post-racial style of music. But over the 1960s, we're going to see white people slowly colonize those mussels, and pushed black musicians to the margins.

And this episode marks a crucial turning point in the story, as we see the establishment of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, as a center of white people making music. inferiorly black genres. But the start of that story comes with a black man making music that most people at the time saw as coded as white. Today we're going to look at someone whose music is often considered the epitome of deep soul, but who worked with many of the musicians who made the Nashville sound what it was, and who was as influenced by Jean Autry as he was by many of the more obvious singers who might influence a soul legend. Today we're going to look at Arthur Alexander,

and that you better move on. Arthur Alexander's is one of the most tragic stories we'll be looking at. He was a huge influence on every musician who came up in the 60s, but he never got the recognition for it. He was largely responsible for the rise of Muscle Shoals Studios, and he wrote songs that were later covered by the Beatles and Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, as well as many, many more. The musician Norbert Putnam told the story of visiting George Harrison in the 70s,

and seeing his copy of Alexander's hit single, You Better Move On. He said to Harrison, Did you know I played bass on that? And Harrison replied, If I phone Paul up now, he'd come over and kick him. your feet. That's how important Arthur Alexander was to the Beatles and to the history of rock music. But he never got to reap the rewards his talents entitled him to. He spent most of his life in poverty, and is now mostly known only to fans of the sub-genre known as Deep Soul. Part of this is because

his music is difficult to categorise. While most listeners would now consider it soul music, It's hard to escape the fact that Alexander's music has an awful lot of elements of country music in it. This is something that Alexander would point out himself. In interviews, he would talk about how he loved singing cowboys in films, people like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, and about how when he was growing up, the radio stations he would listen to, would play a Drifter's record and maybe an Eddie Arnold record, and they didn't make no distinction.

That's the way it was until much later. The first record he truly loved was Eddie Arnold's 1946 country hit. That's How Much I Love You. Now if I had a nickel, I know what I would do, I'd spend it all for candy and give it all to you. I'd spend it all for candy and give it all to you, because that's how much I love you, baby. That's how much I love you. Alexander grew up in Alabama, but in what gets described as a relatively integrated area for the time and place. By his own account, the part of East Florence he grew up in had only one other black family,

and all the other children he played with were white, and he wasn't even aware of segregation until he was eight or nine. Florence is itself part of a Quad City area with three other nearby towns, Muscle Shoals, Sheffield and Tuscumbia. This area as a whole is often known as either the shoals or Muscle Shoals, and when people talk about music, it's almost always the latter. So from this point on, I'll be using Muscle Shoals to refer to all four towns. The consensus among people from the area seems to have been

that while Alabama itself was one of the most horribly racist parts of the country, Muscle Shoals was much better than the rest of Alabama. Some have suggested that this comparative integration was part of the reason for the country influence in Alexander's music. But as we've seen in many previous episodes, there were a lot more black fans of country music than popular myth would suggest, and musicians like Fat Storino, Chuck Berry, and Bo Didley, were very obviously influenced by country singers. Alexander's father was also called Arthur, and so for all his life, the younger Arthur Alexander was known to family and friends as June. for Junior. Arthur Sr. had been a blues guitarist in his youth, and according to his son, was also an excellent singer, but he got very angry the one time June picked up his guitar and tried

to play it. He forbade him from ever playing the guitar, saying that he'd never made a nickel as a player, and didn't want that life for his son. As Arthur was an obedient kid, he did, as his father said. He never in his life learned to play any musical instrument. But that didn't stop him loving music and wanting to sing. He would listen to the radio all the time, listening to crooners like Patty Page and Nat King Cole. And as a teenager, he got himself a job working at a cafe owned by a local gig promoter, which meant he was able to get free entry to the R&B shows the promoter put on at a local Chitlin circuit venue and get to meet the stars who played there. He would talk to people like Clyde McFatter and ask him how he managed to hit the high notes,

though he wasn't satisfied by MacFatter's answer that it's just there, thinking there must be more to it than that. And he became very friendly with the Clovers, once having a baseball game with them, and spending a lot of time with their lead singer, Buddy Bailey, asking him details of how he got particular vocal effect in the song One Mint Julep. He formed a vocal group called The Heartstrings,

who would perform songs like 60 Minuteman, and got a regular spot on a local TV show. But according to his account, after a few weeks, one of the other members decided he didn't need to bother practicing anymore and messed up on live TV. The group split up after that. The only time he got to perform once that group split up

was when he would sit in in a band led by his friend George Brooks, who regularly gigged around muscle shoals. But there seemed no prospect of anything bigger happening. There were no music publishing companies or recording studios in Alabama, and everyone from Alabama who had made an impact in music had moved away to do it. W.C. Handy, Hank Williams, Sam Phillips,

they'd all done truly great things, but they'd done them in Memphis or Nashville, not in Montgomery or Birmingham. There was just not the music industry infrastructure there to do anything. That started to change in 1956, when the first record company to set up in Muscle Shoals got its start. Tune Records was a tiny label run from a bus station, and most of its business was the same kind of stuff that Sam Phillips did before Sun became big, making records of people's weddings and so on. But then the owner of the label, James Joyner, came up with a song that he thought might be commercial if a young singer he knew named Bobby Denton sang it. A fallen star was done as cheaply as humanly possible.

It was recorded at a radio station, cut live, in one take. The engineer on the track was a DJ who was on the air at the time. He put a record on, engineered the track while the record was playing, and made sure the musicians finished before the record he was playing did, so he could get back on the air. That record itself wasn't a hit, and was so unsuccessful that I've not been able to find a copy of it anywhere. But it inspired hit cover versions from Furlin Husky and Jimmy C. Newman.

Off the back of those hit versions, Joyner started his own publishing company to go with his record company. Suddenly, there was a Muscle Shoals music scene, and everything started to change. A lot of country musicians in the area gravitated towards Joyner and started writing songs for his publishing company. At this point, this professional music scene in the area was confined to white people. Joyner later recalled that a young singer named Percy Sledge had auditioned for him, but that Joyner simply didn't understand his type of music. But a circle of songwriters formed that would be important later.

Judd Phillips, Sam's brother, signed Denton to his new label, Jud, and Denton started recording songs by two of these new songwriters, Rick Hall and Billy Sherrill. Denton's recordings were unsuccessful, but they started to. started getting cover versions. Roy Orbison's first single on RCA was a Hall and Cheryl song. Hall and Cheryl then started up their own publishing company, with the help of a loan from Joyner, and with the third partner, Tom Stafford. Stafford is a figure who has been almost written out of music history, and about whom I've been able to find out very little, but who seems in some ways the most intriguing person among these white musicians and entrepreneurs. Friends from the time

describe him as a reality hacking poet, and he seems to have been a beatnik or a proto-hippie, the only one in Muscle Shoals, and maybe the only one in the state of Alabama at the time. He was the focal point of a whole group of white musicians, people like Norbert Putnam, David Briggs, Dan Penn, and Spooner Oldham. These musicians loved black men. music and wanted to play it, thinking of it as more exciting than the pop and country that they also played. But they loved it in a rather appropriative way, and in the same way, they had what they thought was an anti-racist attitude. Even though they were white, they referred to themselves collectively as a word I'm not going to use, the single most offensive slur against black people.

And so when Arthur Alexander turned up and got involved in this otherwise white group of musicians, their attitudes varied widely. Terry Thompson, for example, who Alexander said was one of the best players ever to play guitar, as good as Nashville legends like Roy Clark and Jerry Reed, was also, according to Alexander, the biggest racist there ever was, and made derogatory remarks about black people, though he said that Alexander didn't count. Others, like Dan Penn, have later claimed that they took an I don't even see race attitude,

while still others were excited to be working with an actual black man. Alexander would become close friends with some of them, would remain at arm's length with most, but appreciated the one thing that they all had in common, that they, like him, wanted to perform R&B and country and pop. For Hall, Cheryl and Stafford's fledgling publishing company fame, Alexander and one of his old bandmates from the heartstrings, Henry Lee Bennett, wrote a song called She Won a Rock, which was recorded in Nashville by the rockabilly singer Arnie Dirkson at Owen Bradley's studio with the Nashville A team backing him.

She wanted to rock, rock, rock, rock, rock. A portable radio in her. Rock, rock, rock. And she got a tuned into the big bandstand. That record wasn't a success, and soon after that, the partnership behind fame dissolved. Rick Hull was getting super ambitious and wanted to become a millionaire by the time he was 30. Tom Stafford was content with the minor success they had, and wanted to keep hanging around with his friends, watching films and occasionally helping them make a record.

And Billy Cheryl had a minor epiphany and decided he wanted to make country music rather than rock and role. Rick Hall kept the fame name for a new company he was starting up, and Cheryl headed over to Nashville and got a job with Sam Phillips at Sun's Nashville studio. Cheryl would later move on from Sun and produce and write for almost every major country star of the 60s and 70s. Most notably, he co-wrote Stand By Your Man with Tammy Wynette and produced He Stop Loving Her Today for George Jones, and Stafford kept the studio and the company, which was renamed. spa. Arthur Alexander stuck with Tom Stafford, as did most of the musicians, and while he was working a day job as a bellhop, he would also regularly record demos for other writers at Stafford's

studio. By the start of 1960, 19-year-old June had married another 19-year-old, Anne, and it was around this point that Stafford came to him with a half-completed lyric that needed music. Alexander took Stafford's partial lyric and finished it. He added a standard blues riff, which he had liked in Brooke Benton's record Kiddeo. The resulting song, Sally Sue Brown was a mixture of gut-bucket blues and rockabilly with a soulful vocal, and it was released under the name June Alexander on Judd Records. It's a good record, but it didn't have any kind of success. So Arthur started listening to the radio more, trying to see what the current hits were,

so he could do something more commercial. He particularly liked The Drifters and Benny King, and he decided to write a song that fit their styles. He eventually came up with one that was inspired by real event. His wife, Anne, had an ex who had tried to win her back once he'd found out she was dating Arthur. He took the song, You Better Move On, to Stafford, who knew it would be a massive hit,

but also knew that he couldn't produce the record himself. So they got in touch with Rick Hull, who agreed to produce the track. There were multiple sessions, and after each one, Hull would take the tapes away, study them, and come up with improvements that they could use at the next session. Hall, like Alexander, wanted to get a sound like Benny King. He would later say, it was my conception that it should have a groove similar to stand by me,

which was a big record at the time, but I didn't want to cop it to the point where people would recognize it was a cop, you dig? So we used the baseline and modified it just a little bit, put the acoustic guitar in front of that. For a B-side, they chose a song written by Terry Thompson, a shot of rhythm and blues, which would prove almost as popular as the A-side. Hull shopped the record round every label in Nashville with little success. Eventually, in February 1961, the record was released by Dot Records, the label that Pat Boone was on. It went to number 24 on the pop charts, becoming the first ever hit records be made in Alabama.

Rick Hall made enough money from it that he was able to build a new, much better, studio, and Muscle Shoals was set to become one of the most important recording centres in the US. As Norbert Putnam, who had played bass on you better move on, and who would later go on to become one of the most successful session bass players and record producers in Nashville, later said, if it wasn't for Arthur Alexander, we'd all be at Reynolds, the local aluminium factory. But Arthur Alexander wouldn't record much at Muscle Shoals from that point on. His contracts were bought out. Allegedly, Stafford, a heavy drug user, was bought off with a case of codeine. And instead of working with Rick Hall, the perfectionist producer who would go on to produce a

decade-long string of hits, he was being produced by Noel Ball, a DJ with little production experience, though one who had a lot of faith in Alexander's talent, and who had been the one to get him signed to Dot. His first album was a collection of covers of current hits. The album is widely regarded as a failure, and Alexander's heart wasn't in it. His father had just died, his wife had had a miscarriage, and his marriage was falling apart. But his second single for Dot was almost as great as his first, recorded at Owen Bradley's studio with top Nashville session players, the A-side, Where Have You Been, was written by the Brill-building team of Barry Man and Cynthia Weil, and was very much in the style of You Better Move On, while the B-side, Soldiers of Love.

and yes it was called Soldiers of Love on the original label rather than Soldier was written by Buzz Kaysen and Tony Moon two members of Brenda Lee's backing band The Casuals The single was only a modest hit reaching number 58 but just like his first single

both sides became firm favourites with musicians in Britain even though he wasn't having a huge amount of commercial success music lovers really appreciated his music and bands in Britain, playing long set, would pick up on Arthur's songs. Almost every British guitar group had Arthur Alexander songs in their set lists, even though he was unaware of it at the time.

For his third dot single, Arthur was in trouble. He'd started drinking a lot and taking a lot of speed, and his marriage was falling apart. Meanwhile, Noel Ball was trying to get him to record all sorts of terrible songs. He decided he'd better write one himself. and he'd make it about the deterioration of his marriage to Anne, though in the song he changed the name to Anna, because it scanned better.

Released with the cover version of Gene Ortery's country classic I Hang My Head and Cry as the B-side, that made the top ten on the R&B chart, but it only made number 68 on the pop charts. His next single, Go Home Girl, Another attempt at a you better move on, sound alike, only made number 102. Meanwhile, a song that Alexander had written and recorded, but that Dot didn't want to put out, went to number 42 when it was picked up by the white singer Steve Alimo.

I was a little girl I had planned to marry me. This was my love. I didn't want to share it. I thought that love would make my life bright and sunny. She said she couldn't love me because I didn't have to. He was throwing himself into his work at this point to escape the problems in his personal life. He'd often just go to a local nightclub and sit in with a band featuring a bass player called Billy Cox, and Cox's old army friend, who was just starting to get a reputation as a musician,

a guitarist they all called Marbles, but who would later be better known as Jimmy Hendricks. He was drinking heavily, divorced, and being terribly mismanaged. as well as being ripped off by his record and publishing companies. He was living with a friend, Joe Henderson, who had had a hit a couple of years earlier with Snap Your Fingers. Henderson and Alexander would push each other to greater extremes of drug use, enabling each other's addiction, and one day Arthur came home to find his friend dead in the bathroom.

room of what was officially a heart attack, but which everyone assumes was an overdose. Not only that, but Noel Ball was dying of cancer, and for all that he hadn't been the greatest producer, Arthur cared deeply about him. He tried a fresh start with monument records, and he was now being produced by Fred Foster, who had produced Roy Orbison's classic hits, and his arrangements were being done by Bill Justice, the saxophone player, who had had a hit with Raunchy on a subsidiary of Sun a few years earlier. Some of his Monument records were excellent, like his first single for the label, Baby for You. On the back of that single, he toured the UK and appeared on several big British TV shows and was generally fated by all the major

bands who were fans of his work. But he had no more commercial success at Monument than he had at the end of his time on Dot, and his life was getting worse and worse. He had a breakdown, brought on by his constant use of amphetamins and cannabis, and started hallucinating that people he saw were people from his past life. He stopped the taxi so he could get out and run after a man he was convinced was his dead father, and assaulted an audience member he was convinced was his ex-wife. He was arrested, diagnosed with schizophrenia, and spent several months in a psychiatric hospital. Shortly after he got out, Arthur visited his friend Otis Redding, who was in the studio in Memphis, and was cutting a song that he and Arthur had co-written several years earlier.

Johnny's heartbreak. Otis asked Arthur to join him on a tour he was going to be going on a couple of weeks later. But Fogg grounded Arthur's plane, so he was never able to meet up with Otis in Atlanta, and the tour proceeded without him, and so Arthur was not on the plane that Redding was on on December 10, 1967, which crashed and killed him. Arthur saw this as divine intervention, but he was seeing patterns in everything at this point, and he had several more breakdowns. He ended up getting dropped by Monument in 1970.

He was hospitalised again after a bad LSD trip led to him standing naked in the middle of the road, and he spent several years drifting, unable to have a hit, though he was still making music. He kept having bad luck. For example, he recorded a song by the songwriter Dennis Lind, which was an almost guaranteed hit,

and could have made for a comeback for him. But between him recorded, it and releasing it as a single, Elvis Presley released his version, which went to number two on the chart and killed any chance of Arthur's version being a success. He did, though, have a bit of a comeback

in 1975, when he re-recorded his old song Every Day I Have to Cry, as Every Day I Have to Cry Some, in a version which many people think likely inspired Bruce Springsteen's Hungry Heart a few years later. That made number 45, but unfortunately his follow-up, sharing the night together,

was another song where multiple people released versions of it at the same time without realising, and so it didn't chart. Dr. Hook eventually had a hit with it a year later. Arthur stepped away from music. He managed to get himself more mentally well, and spent the years from 1978 through 1993, working a series of blue-collar jobs in Cleveland, construction worker, bus driver, and jitter.

he rarely opened up to people about ever having been a singer. He suffered through more tragedy too, like the murder of one of his sons, but he remained mentally stable. But then, in March 1993, he made a comeback. The producer Ben Vaughn persuaded him into the studio, and he got a contract with Elektra Records. He made his first album in 22 years, a mixture of new songs and re-workings of his older ones.

He got great reviews, and he was a good reviews, and he was rediscovered by the music press as a sole pioneer. He got a showcase spot at South by Southwest. He was profiled by NPR on fresh air, and he was playing to excited crowds of new young fans. He was in the process of getting his publishing rights back and might finally start to see some money from his hits. And then, three months after that album came out,

in the middle of a meeting with a publisher about the negotiations for his new contract, He had a massive heart attack and died the next day, aged 53. His bad luck had caught up with him again. 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 Mother-in-law by Ernie K. Doe. Visit Patreon.

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