Song of the Week: Wynonie Harris - Who Threw The Whiskey In The Well?

Listen - Wynonie Harris performs Who Threw The Whiskey In The Well

Wynonie Harris is one of those great singers that you've probably never heard of. Along with Roy Brown, Big Joe Turner, Ike Turner and Louis Prima and a handful of others, Wynonie Harris pioneered a jump blues style that would give birth to rock-n-roll.

Wynonie Harris hailed from Omaha, Nebraska and kicked around the uptown blues circuits for years before he got hired by a band leader named Lucky Millinder. Wynonie, with his smooth and powerful voice, good looks and reported stage presence that lured the women closer and closer, quickly became the lead singer of the band.

On May 26, 1944, the same day that 5,500 French civilians were killed as the American Air Force went head to head with Hermann Goring's Luftwaffe over southern France, Wynonie Harris recorded his second song for Lucky Millinder. The song was crowd favorite Who Threw The Whiskey In The Well. Decca didn't get around to releasing it for almost a year, but when they did, it went No. 1 on multiple charts. It stayed No. 1 on the hit parade for 6 impressive weeks. Wynonie would shortly be recognized as the star of the band and, as they all do, went solo. He formed his new band in Los Angeles and, along with T-Bone Walker moved the jump blues sound closer and closer to what would become known as rock-n-roll in 10 years time.

Who Threw The Whiskey In The Well tells the humorous story of fictional character Elder Brown fretting over the spiked punch bowl as the fearful congregation looks to Deacon Jones for spiritual guidance. But the Deacon, like Brother Jones and Mr. Ash, is feeling "mighty fine" and as "high as a Georgia Pine."

With the call and response singing, Wynonie's sermonizing, the storyline of church goers sinning and the undeniable upbeat rhythm, it's not hard to see how this one was a nice cross-over hit.

Enjoy.

Song of the Week: "Strollin' With Bone", T-Bone Walker

Can it get any better? Nope. Today we listen to T-Bone Walker, one of the most influential guitarists of the 20th Century.

Aaron Thibeaux Walker grew up in Dallas, Texas in a very musical family and at a very early age began busking on street corners for change. On the streets Walker worked as T-Bone (a play on words from his middle name) and supported and competed with guitarists like piedmont style guitarist Scrapper Blackwell, the jazzy, inventive and sadly overlooked Lonnie Johnson, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, for whom Walker apprenticed. Walker would often accompany Jefferson on guitar but he would just as often perform as the warm up act, the MC, the dancer and the pass-the-hat guy for Mr. Jefferson. T-Bone Walker began working more and more on his own and even recorded for Columbia Records in Dallas as early as 1929!

Walker's guitar and singing skills had him traveling around the country spreading his skills. After a short stint in the Count Basie band, Walker Settled in as the guitarist for the Los Angeles based Les Hite band where Walker started using an amplified guitar as early as 1939. (Some say this is the first instance of an amplified guitar in recording. Others say it is Walker's Dallas protege, Charlie Christian. I don't know.) Regardless, T-Bone Walker was soon using his amplification to get heard in the band and start taking leads (previously the guitar had been purely a rhythm instrument) and began singing leads as well. The writing was on the wall and T-Bone Walker was now a frontman of his own band and his own blend of big band jazz and blues which was newly christened West Coast Blues. Walker's blues was an upbeat, swinging blues with a strong reference to the nascent jazz movement. A style that Lonnie Johnson had been hinting at years earlier. In 1947, T-Bone Walker hit it big time composing and recording a song that has become a "standard". That song is the ubiquitous Stormy Monday Blues, which you can see Walker performing here. Walker was quite the act to catch. He would play with the guitar behind his head while performing the splits and playing leads with the guitar facing straight up as if it was laying flat on a table.

Our SoTW is one of the most rollicking songs of the pre-Rock-n-Roll era that you will ever here. It's the Walker-penned instrumental, Strollin' with Bone. Not only is the guitar work just stellar, but the entire arrangement is just wonderful. The bouncing piano, the exclamation mark of the multiple horn breaks and the jazzy drums. And dig that guitar digging in with those bends at 2:04 right after the third horn break. Do you think Chuck Berry may have owned this record?

Click here to listen to Strollin' With Bone.

Remembering the "5" Royales

"Life can never be exactly like we want it to be"

So begins the bridge of Dedicated to the One I Love, a song that is familiar to most listeners from two different but equally popular hit recordings, by the Shirelles in 1961, and the Mamas and the Papas in '67. Both versions are likable enough examples of the quality girl group and LA harmony-pop proffered by those groups, but neither ever impressed me as anything beyond a typical example of Sixties pop fare.

A few years ago I read an interview with the great Steve Cropper, Telecaster master of Booker T and the MGs. When the inevitable "Who influenced your guitar playing?" question was asked, the Colonel was eager to say he basically took his whole early style from a guy named Lowman Pauling, who had played with a group called the "5" Royales back in the Fifties. Well, before long I had tracked down an out of print low budget cd release of the "5" Royales 1957 album called "Dedicated to You." This prize was worth the eight bucks it cost me for the cover alone, which featured four of the red tuxedo jacketed quintet falling like dominos away from the front and center figure of Mr. Lowman Pauling, who practically lunged toward the camera proudly cradling his TV-yellow Gibson Les Paul Special. This was his group.

The "5" Royales hailed from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The quotation marks around the "5" in their name have at times been attributed to an early dispute with another similarly named group, but it has also been suggested that there were actually six members of the group for a time, requiring the winking quotation marks. Formed in the early Fifties, their initial gospel-influenced doo-wop style occasionally featured saxophone on instrumental breaks. Lowman Pauling sang bass and quickly emerged as a songwriter. This formula yielded moderate success on the R&B charts. But by the time they made the"Dedicated to You" album for King Records in 1957, Lowman Pauling had brought his guitar to the forefront of the group's sound. As it turned out, this phase of the group peaked on that record, and the centerpiece of the new style was a song penned by Mr. Pauling and Ralph Bass: Dedicated to the One I Love. My familiarity with the hit versions of the song did nothing to prepare me for the first listen to the original. The words and the melody, even the harmonies, were in place, but threaded through the whole song was a raw and determined lead guitar that seemed at once completely at odds with the song as I knew it and quite riveting. So this was what Steve Cropper was talking about. The overdriven, obviously cranked tube amp, the aggressive attack, and best of all, the pause at the beginning of the solo, where you can almost feel Pauling take in a breath and dive in; well this is why I collect music. The album features that guitar sound on most of the tracks, which also include Think another Lowman Pauling original that would later be a hit for James Brown. It's not that Pauling's style was particularly complex, or even original. Echoes of T-Bone Walker and Guitar Slim, among others, are clearly there, but the audacity of the playing in the context of a pop-vocal group (as opposed to a blues setting) goes a long way to explaining why I dig this record so much. Apart from the album itself, the best example of Pauling's fierce guitar style is the single, The Slummer the Slum, (great title, incomprehensible song, beautifully distorted guitar sound), which is found on various collections of the group's work.

For some reason the later sides cut by the "5" Royales tended to tone down Pauling's guitar playing, and by the mid Sixties they had faded in the wake of the new soul styles from Atlantic, Motown and Stax. Legend has it that at some point a down-on-his-luck Lowman Pauling sold his interest in Dedicated to the One I Love for a few hundred dollars. At any rate, by the early Seventies he was basically forgotten and worked as a custodian in a Brooklyn synagogue. It was there that he suffered a fatal seizure on the day after Christmas, 1973. He was 47.