100 Great Rock & Roll Songs Of The 1950s, Part II.

T-Bone Walker “Vida Lee”
(T-Bone Walker)
Imperial, 1953
T-Bone achieved immortality by being the first bluesman to successfully go electric, setting the stage for thousands of axe-shredders and ultimately resulting in that stupid graffitti about a wimpy British wannabe being God. But he never really lived up to the reputation of the blues, being a great all-round entertainer instead of playing a limited role of strict authenticity. This song is even about his wife, which was totally square even back then. But his sense of urban sophistication (which would be upstaged by the more raucous Chicago blues) paved the way for rock & roll balladeers like Johnny Ace, Roy Orbison, and Elvis Costello.


Ruth Brown “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean”
(Herb Lance/Charlie Singleton/John Wallace)
Atlantic, 1953
Every mention of Ruth Brown is contractually obligated to mention that Atlantic Records used to be known as “the house that Ruth built,” which is useful not only as a bit of historical trivia but to point out how enormously popular she was, and how utterly she’s been forgotten even by the music nerds who worship at the shrine of Aretha Franklin. Aretha wouldn’t have existed without Ruth, and not only because they both recorded for the same label (which Ruth helped establish), but because Ruth’s hoarse, sexy voice, different both from blues shouters and jazz phrasers, began the tradition of soul singing which would find its apotheosis in 1967 and “Respect.”


Little Junior’s Blue Flames “Mystery Train”
(Junior Parker/Sam Phillips)
Sun, 1953
Mostly known today from compilations of “Songs Elvis Made Famous,” Junior Parker was one of the first stars of Sam Phillips’ brand-new Sun Records. He was marketed as a blues singer because he was black, but (as this song shows) he wasn’t limited by blues forms or traditions. The railroad metaphor was much more common in traditional country music (Jimmie Rodgers and Johnny Cash both debuted with songs about train travel), and the chugging, late-night sound of the song crossed all kinds of racial boundaries long before Elvis gave it the official (White) Rock ’n’ Roll Stamp of Approval.


Webb Pierce “There Stands The Glass”
(Audrey Greisham/Russ Hull/Mary Jean Shultz)
Decca, 1953
Honky-tonk is rock & roll in a country mode, just like jump blues is rock & roll in a jazz mode, or electric blues is rock & roll in a blues mode. Or, if you prefer, they all contributed to what rock & roll eventually became. Anyway, Webb Pierce is one of the all-time greatest honky-tonk heroes, with a voice as smooth as Scotch and a lyrical focus on the three great themes of honky-tonk music: cheating women, alcoholism, and escaping. “There Stands The Glass” is his signature song, a massive hit that, as much as anything else, announced that great honky-tonk wasn’t going to die along with Hank Williams. It took another ten years and countrypolitan for that.


Otis Blackwell “Daddy Rolling Stone”
(Otis Blackwell)
Jay-Dee, 1953
I know the Who cover is probably the version that most people are familiar with, but I first heard it on a Johnny Thunders solo album with Steve Marriott helping out on vocals, and it’s that hyped-up New York version that stuck in my head, until I heard this. Blackwell was one of the first great rock & roll songwriters (his credits include “Great Balls of Fire,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Return To Sender,” and “Fever”), but he recorded only sporadically. This minor hit, a greasy, slow-burn funk in its original incarnation, was cut before its time; you can’t convince me the Rolling Stones circa Beggars Banquet didn’t know it by heart.


Guitar Slim “The Things That I Used To Do”
(Eddie Jones)
Specialty, 1953
One of the all-conquering blues standards, this recording anticipates B. B. King’s domestication of Chicago blues into supper-club easy-listening music. (Okay, the yuppie appropriation of B. B. King’s domestication of Chicago blues as supper-club easy-listening music. Whatever.) Which you’d think would be a bad thing; but Guitar Slim is a wily enough guitarist and singer that the song never completes the slide into cornball routine, though it dances sentimentally on the brink. Which, at the time, only contributed to the mainstreaming of the blues — and that, of course, is the birth of rock & roll.


Professor Longhair “Tipitina”
(Henry Roeland Byrd)
Atlantic, 1953
Don’t let the year fool you: Fess was the first, the progenitor, the All-Father from whose loins the loose, messy, joyous entirety of New Orleans funk ’n’ soul was spawned. He just got committed to wax later than his descendents, is all. Maybe this song was recognizeable as boogie-woogie in some earlier life, but by this point it’s gotten so easygoing Crescent City dragged out, so mulatto chopped and screwed, that it’s something not only indisputably New Orleanian, but discernably funk. Check those drums: they wouldn’t be out of place on a 1969 Meters track. And then there’s the good Professor’s lyrics: if New Orleans ever secedes from the Union, “Tipitina oola dolla walla shanu-na nigh-yay” should be on the currency.


Big Joe Turner “Shake, Rattle And Roll”
(Charles E. Calhoun)
Atlantic, 1954
When fat, bald, middle-aged Bill Haley covered this song (and made it significantly worse by censoring the “wear those dresses, the sun come shining through” line), rock & roll officially hit pop radio and started scaring the bejeezus out of people who had scared the bejeezus out of their own parents with jazz thirty years earlier. But never mind that old cultural myth: it’s Turner’s original version that’s listenable sixty-odd years after the fact. It’s not particularly more rock & roll than what the Kansas City shouter had been doing for years; maybe the boogie-woogie is stripped down a little more, but it’s just a basic rhythm & blues number. Yeah, and The Godfather is just a basic gangster picture.


The Medallions “The Letter”
(Vernon Green)
Dootone, 1954
Maybe the weirdest doo-wop song ever. The Medallions were led by Vernon Green, a small, sickly man whose fey spoken-word ramblings (after only two half-hearted lines of singing) sound as though his only experience of romance is via pop radio — and then he just slips into nonsense. “Sweet words of pismatology”? “The pompetus of love”? (Oddly, it makes me have more respect for Steve Miller; okay, so he didn’t come up with those brilliant lines, but he’s fully in the blues tradition of borrowing bits to stick in your own songs.) Green really said “puppetuse,” but never mind. The pop misreading is, as usual, better. Greil Marcus knows.


Muddy Waters “(I’m Your) Hoochie Coochie Man”
(Willie Dixon)
Chess, 1954
No hip-hop boasting track has ever out-badassed Muddy Waters. Indisputably the greatest of the Chicago bluesmen, he’d been on top of his game for over a decade and had nothing to prove by the time he waxed this cut. And he still brings it with all the ferocity of a wounded lion, hollering “everybody knows I am” like he was going to hear any backchat. (Incidentally, when I first heard this song as a callow twenty-year old, I thought he was saying “everybody go to hell.” I still like that version.) And anyone who knows anything about anything knows exactly what a Hoochie Coochie Man is — but because he makes up his own words, he tops the charts without even trying, in the century’s most deeply repressed decade.