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

Tony Allen & The Champs “Nite Owl”
(Tony Allen)
Specialty, 1955
Sure, I’ll cop to being a sucker for doo-wop that doesn’t exactly play it straight; first the deeply weird “The Letter” and now this. My point, if I have one, is that doo-wop is bigger, deeper, and stranger than, say, the American Graffitti soundtrack would suggest. Frank Zappa wasn’t a fan for nothing. All of which is to say, doo-wop is rock & roll. This song, with its unconvincing bird imitations and G-rated noir atmosphere (even the title is only a genus away from an Edward Hopper painting), is apparently autobiographical: “night owl” was a nickname Tony Allen’s dad gave him, presumably because of his nocturnal activities. What’d I say? Rock & roll.


Tennessee Ernie Ford “Sixteen Tons”
(Merle Travis)
Capitol, 1955
Yes, Tennessee Ernie recorded a lot of songs that rocked more explicitly (not to mention harder) than this. No, the clarinet that gives the song its most memorable instrumental line isn’t exactly a rock & roll standby. But pay attention beyond the Golden Oldies memory (that is, if you ever even heard this song as a Golden Oldie; these days you never know), and it’s something Woody Guthrie would have recorded if he’d had the pop instincts, not to mention the vocal chops. It’s pinko commie liberal, is what it is — and only gets away with being against capitalism because of country music’s blue-collar ethos. Yeah, country; I don’t hear it either, but where else is a guy with Tennessee in his name gonna get played?


Smiley Lewis “I Hear You Knockin’”
(Dave Bartholomew)
Imperial, 1955
In 1970, Dave Edmunds (British retro-rocker, best known for being pals with Nick Lowe) had his biggest hit with a cover of this song. Fifteen years previously, actress and musical dilettante Gale Storm had her biggest hit with a cover of this song. Smiley Lewis’s original never charted, but it’s the definitive one. A cheerful New Orleans piano thumper, affable even when he’s laying down the sort of dis that gets remembered for years (he got his nickname for a reason), Smiley never broke through to national recognition the way his compatriots Fats, Huey, and Fess did — but his easygoing contribution to the Crescent City’s second-line mythology is incontrovertible.


LaVern Baker & The Gliders “Tweedlee Dee”
(Winfield Scott)
Atlantic, 1955
That descending “hoump-bee-oump-boump-boump” at the end of the chorus is one of those vocal lines that stays with you, and you hear echoes of it everywhere, especially in good-time blues songs of the 60s and 70s. But only LaVern Baker ever growled it as if it meant something — and something dirty, at that. She’s another of the great forgotten female rock & rollers, ignored because she worked the r&b side of the street (ahem) and made music you can dance to. There’s a polyrhythmic Cuban undertone to this song that makes it particularly easy to shimmy to — but it’s LaVern’s sly, full-blooded vocals that make it immortal.


Johnny Ace “Pledging My Love”
(Ferdinand Washington/Don Robey)
Duke, 1955
The first no-two-ways-about-it ballad on the list, with dream-pop signifiers like the celeste tweeing it up scandalously (at least for those who think rock & roll ain’t rock & roll without a snarling guitar), and the Late Great one playing it close to the vest in the vocal department. It was obviously a precursor to Sam Cooke’s early hits (and thus to all of smooth soul), but never mind that. It was also one of the first records where young white audiences definitively preferred the black original to the white cover, forever changing the face of pop music — but never mind that, either. It was the coda to a remarkable career cut even more remarkably short: it’s a man’s epitaph, and that’s what matters.


Nappy Brown “Don’t Be Angry”
(Napoleon Brown/Rose Marie McCoy/Fred Mendelsohn)
Savoy, 1955
The story goes that when a Jewish label executive heard Nappy Brown’s stuttering vocal delivery, he got all excited: “a colored guy singing Yiddish!” Of course, Nappy (incidentally, I refuse to go for the obvious Don Imus joke; his given name was Napoleon, okay?) was just milking a memorable gimmick — one Roger Daltry would pick up on “My Generation” — and if generations of listeners came away from the song believing it was addressed to a woman named Lily, that was fine too. If that label executive had been Italian, or Creole, he might have gotten just as excited — the slow welding of many diverse cultures into the monolith of American music throws off some strange sparks.


The Louvin Brothers “Knoxville Girl”
(Traditional)
Capitol, 1956
In The Old, Weird America, Greil Marcus spends some time examining the uniquely American prediliction for affectlessness. The flat, incurious tone in which horrors are related can be seen in a huge amount of American literature and in nearly all American folk music. The murder ballad from the point of view of the murderer is, of course, nearly as old as civilization; but the Louvin Brothers’ unnervingly straight reading of “Knoxville Girl,” delivered in crisp close harmony, is one of those transcendent moments when it seems that we stare straight into the heart of precivilized humanity. Or if you don’t buy that, just say that Nick Cave would be a very different person without this song.


Clarence “Frogman” Henry “Ain’t Got No Home”
(Clarence Henry)
Chess, 1956
I haven’t actually come across it, but I’m sure someone somewhere is vocal about hating this song. I’m equally sure that in their disparagement, they use the damning word “novelty.” Well, fuck them. Not only are novelty songs part of the glorious rock & roll tradition, they’re only one expression of the most fundamentally American version of entertainment, from vaudeville to Eminem. Anyway. If you haven’t heard the song, it’s a terrific little swamp-shuffle repeated three times in different voices. When the Band covered it, they had to use technology to cheat because even collectively they didn’t have Frogman Henry’s range.


Moon Mullican “Seven Nights To Rock”
(Henry Glover/Louis Innis/Buck Trail)
King, 1956
Reasons to love Moon Mullican: 1) He called himself Moon Mullican. If that’s not a nod towards one of the greatest low-rent comic strips of all time, I don’t know what it is. 2) He aided and abetted the transition from western swing to rockabilly (they call that intervening step “hillbilly boogie” now) as a bandleader, singer, and songwriter. 3) He was never photographed without that ten-gallon hat on his head, like he was a movie cowboy or something, except of course he was just a pudgy middle-aged Texan. 4) This song, one of his last, is like Bill Haley done right. 5) He called himself Moon Mullican. Dude.


Howlin’ Wolf “Smokestack Lightnin’”
(Chester Arthur Burnett)
Chess, 1956
The blues has given the world many unforgettable images, from railroad men that drink up your blood like wine to chopping down a mountain with the edge of one’s hand, but one of the best, most evocative phrases in the music has to be the Wolf’s “smokestack lightning.” He said it was a reference to the sparks that used to fly up out of coal-burning trains, but I can’t be the only person reminded of the Old Testament visions of Ezekiel and Elijah. (“But God was not in the storm.”) His voice is the perfect embodiment of such apocalyptic dread, massive and serrated and tar-black. The loose, unstructured progress of the song adds to its uncanny prophetic atmosphere: this song should be played at the end of the world.