100 Great Rock & Roll Songs of the 1950s, Part III.

The Chordettes “Mr. Sandman”
(Pat Ballard)
Cadence, 1954
The old Walt Kelly joke (no doubt borrowed from some vaudeville act or other) comes to mind: “You is puttin’ too many bums in the song!” The ancient pedigree of the joke is appropriate, as the Chordettes weren’t exactly cutting-edge: they got their start entering local barbershop quartet competitions. Their harmonies are borrowed from World War II favorites the Andrews Sisters, and namechecking Liberace in the lyrics was never hip, not in any year. But. But for all of that, they were the first of the new wave of girl groups that would achieve pop transcendence in the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las and the Supremes during the mid-60s. Not rock & roll? Check the drum line: slap some echo on there, and it’s straight outa rockabilly.


Elvis Presley “Blue Moon Of Kentucky”
(Bill Monroe)
Sun, 1954
Speaking of which. Nobody can accuse Elvis of ripping off a black artist here: Bill Monroe’s version of bluegrass was notoriously lily-white. (Except that banjos are an African import, and — but never mind.) Of course, his version of the song (like all the rest of the best music of the decade) is hopped up on r&b, Scotty Moore’s guitar solo whining and bleeding like Chet Atkins in a chicken shack. This was famously the flip-side to Elvis’s first single, Big Bill Broonzy’s “That’s Alright Mama,” and encyclopedias have been written about the symbolism of having a blues song on A and a country song on B and making them both sound the same — but Big Bill was already rock & roll. Elvis’s greatest achievement was with the B-side.


The Chords “Sh-Boom”
(James Edwards/Claude Feaster/Carl Feaster/James Keyes/Floyd McRae)
Atlantic, 1954
Doo wop’s infamous nonsense vocal lines have their roots in jazz scatting and the hepcat jive of cats like Cab Calloway and Slim Gaillard, but no vocal group had really integrated them into the lyrical structure of the song until the Chords, a very minor group out of the Bronx, had an unexpected hit with this rave-up B-side to a Patti Page cover. “Doo-wah doo-lang-lang a-dip a-dip a-dip woah-oah” is one of the most joyous sounds in 1950s music, a nonverbal expression of the lovers’ paradise promised in the part of the lyrics that make literal sense.


Tommy Collins “You Better Not Do That”
(Tommy Collins)
Capitol, 1954
So you’ve heard of the Bakersfield sound, right? Uptempo country with electrified instruments, modernizing the sound of western swing for a rock & roll era? Buck Owens? Merle Haggard? Right. Well, Tommy Collins did it first. And he wasn’t rockabilly either; although this novelty-ish hit was clearly aimed at the teen market, the fiddle and his Oklahoma drawl stamp it clearly as mainstream country. But the guitar sounds like Buck Owens’ Buckaroos, and the lyrics are about the triumph of a teenage seductress over the morals and manners of a good ol’ boy from the sticks; the increasing distress in his voice as he begs her not to do that is a sly upending of the usual (male) lasciviousness of early rock & roll.


The Penguins “Earth Angel”
(Jesse Belvin/Gaynel Hodge/Curtis Williams)
Dootone, 1954
Probably the most famous doo-wop ballad, and the song that immediately comes to mind most often when people say doo-wop. Which is funny, because there’s almost no doo-wopping in it: the background vocals mostly ahh and ohh, with one descending doo-doo-doo-doo at the end of every verse. Cleve Duncan’s lead is fragile, tremulous, and oddly voiced by modern standards — it almost sounds like a black parody of white crooners. Which it’s possible to read the entire song as: calling a girl Earth Angel is already over-the-top, and you really have to be a teenager, or have a teenager’s mixture of callowness and earnestness, to find the whole song romantic instead of funny. So: straight classic at the time, camp classic sixty years later.


Joe Williams & The Count Basie Orchestra “Every Day I Have The Blues”
(Peter Chatman)
Verve, 1955
When Count Basie emerged in the 1930s, he brought a revolution with him: his Kansas City swing blew louder and rocked harder than the New Orleans/New York synthesis that jazz had previously followed. Like fellow K.C. denizens Louis Jordan and Big Joe Turner, he’s one of the godfathers of rock & roll — his previous vocalist, Jimmy Rushing, had recorded several classics of 40s rock. But it’s Joe Williams, Basie’s 50s vocalist, and his signature cover of Memphis Slim’s “Every Day I Have The Blues,” that really deserves to be known by rock fans. Williams’ hoarse, precise baritone, swimming upstream against one of Basie’s most searing charts, is the loveliest secret of the decade.


Big Maybelle “One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show”
(Robert Lee McCoy/Charlie Singleton)
Okeh, 1955
Atlanta hip-hop legends Goodie Mob borrowed the title phrase for their first album without Cee-Lo Green, which is both ironic and appropriate: Cee-Lo’s rough, cracked singing voice owes a clear debt to the r&b shouters of the 50s, of which Maybelle led the female contingent. But also — the verses are rapped. Okay, spoken. But her flow, given the laid-back rhythm of the song (only charging into life in the rough, cracked choruses) isn’t half-bad. Her playful seductiveness pulls you in, only to be jolted hard when the growling, hollered chorus takes a proto-feminist stance: fuck you, buddy, I can get any man I want. Bessie Smith and PJ Harvey would be proud.


Sonny Boy Williamson “Don’t Start Me To Talkin’”
(Sonny Boy Williamson)
Chess, 1955
He fit in well at the Chess label alongside such badasses as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Bo Diddley; he’d taken another bluesman’s name (it was the other one who anticipated the Chicago sound with “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl”) and lived to tell the tale. His quavering tenor, though, didn’t sound as badass as the others, and he was never as popular. But this song, his biggest hit, is as fierce as anything cut for Chess: his savage harmonica and Otis Rush’s pounding piano make his threat of gossip (or of snitching) sound positively murderous.


Johnny Cash “Folsom Prison Blues”
(Johnny Cash)
Sun, 1955
It’s not often that a song from the point of view of a cold-blooded psychopath is almost universally recognized as a beloved icon of popular culture. I don’t mean the famous “shot a man in Reno” line either; it’s the ambiguity of “those people keep a-movin’/and that’s what tortures me” that always gets me. Is he tortured by the train moving away, or by the fact that there are still living, breathing people out there? The steady, unhurried boom-chick of the Tennessee Two adds to the creepiness with its minimalism, only the ghost of a smile in Johnny’s voice as he reaches for those low notes at the end of each verse making it clear that this is just gallows humor, folks. The guys actually in Folsom Prison understood.


Clifton Chenier “Ay, ’Tète Fille”
(Clifton Chenier/Roy Byrd)
Specialty, 1955
Zydeco is to cajun music what rockabilly is to country music: the revved-up, rock & roll version of a traditional form. And Clifton Chenier is zydeco’s Elvis: the man who did more than anyone to develop and perfect the form. Or rather, he’s Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins all in one, embodying both the currents of the past and the flashy instrumental prowess of the future. This, his first single cut in the obscure depths of Louisiana regionalism, is a Cajun French translation of Professor Longhair’s “Hey, Little Girl,” though some family resemblance to Little Richard’s “Lucille” might also be noted. Even an accordion can rock & roll.