I’ve known Buddy Holly’s big hits since back when I started buying “oldies” rock ‘n’ roll sets in my early teens, and can still sing “That’ll Be the Day,” “Peggy Sue,” and “Oh, Boy!” I think I even performed them occasionally when I was busking the cafe terraces in Antwerp, though I tended more to old swing numbers. But I just sang them because they were fun and upbeat and never worked up interesting versions.

I started playing “Everyday” in Antwerp, as well. I don’t remember why or how it came up, but I have a vague memory of walking down a cobbled street, trying to figure out the chords to the bridge. Nor do I remember where I’d heard it, or how I came to know the lyrics and melody. It wasn’t a hit, and I’m pretty sure I never owned a Buddy Holly LP. Frankly, he always seemed kind of lightweight and perky to me — it was only after hearing Joe Ely‘s version of “Midnight Shift” that I went back to Holly’s original and got a better sense of what he could do.

“Everyday” first attracted me because of the Latin rhythmic feel. I was working on Congolese guitar and getting more interested in playing those kinds of rhythms, and it popped into my head, and then I got fascinated by the chords to the bridge, which are unusual and smart. I was working from memory and won’t swear I got them right, but I think I did, and they’re a neat use of the circle of fifths: If you’re playing the song in E, the regular sections are a basic “La Bamba” progression of E-A-B7, repeated over and over, but the bridge goes to A, then D, G, and C, then drops a half-step to B7, leading back into the regular pattern.

The lyric is standard Buddy Holly, which is to say it’s not Chuck Berry or Leiber and Stoller, but well put-together and distinctive enough to stick in my brain. In Antwerp, I just strummed the rhythm, but now I’m experimenting more with playing those rhythms fingerstyle, so came up with this arrangement, and I’m enjoying it, and that’s about all I can say about this one.

Except… I should add that Holly was a major influence and touchstone for a bunch of my favorite artists, so if I never totally fell for him, I still owe him a major debt. He seems to have been totally devoted to the music, starting with blues and country, then adding different flavors, and coming up with interesting ideas like the bridge to this one. Oh, and… of all the rockabillies, he is the only one I can think of who got multiple top 10 hits on the pop and R&B charts but never even dented the country charts. Maybe that’s a Texas thing, but anyway, he was an interesting figure.

(P.S. I’m sticking with the title from the records, but… it really should be “Every Day,” not “Everyday.”)

He said it himself, the first time I saw him live: “I am the beautiful Little Richard! The originator! The emancipator! The architect of rock ‘n’ roll! History alive! Are you glad to see me? Oooo… I feel so real! I AM  real! Shut up! I’m not conceited–I’m convinced!”

What can I add? I’m a huge fan and for a while was thinking of doing a book about him. But I’ve tended not to perform his songs, because… well, come on: what can one do with a Little Richard song after hearing Little Richard do it?

He wasn’t like Chuck Berry, who wrote brilliant lyrics; he wrote pretty simple lyrics — perfect, maybe, but simple. What mattered was the performance, the voice, the piano, the whole thing. I saw him three times, all in the space of two weeks, and am forever glad, because seeing those shows in that space of time, I got to see how much variation he brought to every show. For example, he did “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” at every show, but the first show he called over his guitarist to sit with him on the piano bench and just sang to the guitar, the next time he did it solo at the piano, and the third time he did it with the full band. He performed “I Saw Her Standing There” at all three shows, but at the second show he never went to the bridge.

I was reviewing him for the Boston Globe, so got to talk to his bandleader, the trumpet player, who told me they never knew which song was coming next or how he’d do it. They just had to pay attention and follow him. It was quite a band, as well: eight pieces, including two bass players, one keeping time and the other, in high platform shoes, popping, slapping, and looking like Bootsy Collins.

No other pioneering rock ‘n’ roll star kept their show that fresh, but Richard was always more than just a rock ‘n’ roll star. He began as a gospel-tinged female impersonator on the southern club circuit, was recording good blues records by 1951, hit nationally with “Tutti Frutti” in 1955, inspiring a wave of imitators that included Otis Redding and James Brown, and when they led a new wave of soul music in the 1960s, he recorded some beautiful soul sides, including the magnificent “I Don’t Know What You’ve Got But It’s Got Me,” written by Don Covay, who also sang second vocal, and featuring Billy Preston on organ and Jimi Hendrix on guitar.

I know a bunch of Richard’s classic hits from the 1950s, not because I learned them, but because they are part of my cultural DNA. But, again, I’ve never tended to play them, except occasionally for my own pleasure, and I doubt I’ll ever post a version of “Tutti Frutti” or “Lucille…” but, then again, I would have said the same thing about “Long Tall Sally…” and then I came up with a version of “Kansas City” that used some older blues guitar licks, and somehow this fell together and I’ve been really enjoying playing it.

Richard used to explain that he wrote this after Pat Boone’s “Tutti Frutti” was a bigger hit than his original, the idea being that Boone could never match the speed and perfection of his enunciation of phrases like “Saw Aunt Mary coming and he ducked back in the alley.” Which, of course, was true. I’ve posted his full version of that story and some others on youtube, and recommend it; he always told his story better than anyone else could.

So anyway, this is my tribute to the originator, the emancipator, the architect, the true King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

I always appreciated Bruce Springsteen, but never saw him live or owned any of his records. My aunt Marie saw him many, many times, because she was best friends with Jon Landau’s mother; lots of my friends were devoted fans; and the music felt like something I should like more… but when I actually listened, it didn’t click with me. I’m sure if I’d seen him back when my friends first saw him, I’d have been hooked and that would have carried over to the records, but I didn’t and it didn’t.

As a result, this is the only Springsteen song I know, and I only know it because it was a staple of my friend Peter Keane’s sets, back when he was a college student in Cambridge, performing at the Nameless Coffeehouse. I’ve written about Peter before, and the audiences of young women who would scream and sigh at his Nameless sets — not at all the norm for that room, which was a free folk coffeehouse in a Unitarian church and tended to draw an older crowd and be more sedate.

This was one of Peter’s killer songs, and I still picture him singing it, squinting into the stage lights, tense and blond and sexy — like the screaming women, that description will embarrass him, but it was his choice to do the song and what the hell else is “I’m On Fire” about?

I heard Springsteen’s version after hearing Peter do it, not on a record but on MTV. As I recall, Springsteen had resisted MTV, insisting on them using live videos of his previous hits rather than lip-syncing to his studio recordings, but for this one he took a different tack: he still didn’t lip-sync, but appeared in a little movie, acting the part of a garage mechanic pining after a rich woman who leaves her car for him to fix.

I’ve had a bunch of arguments about Springsteen over the years with Jack Landron, who had an earlier career as Jackie Washington, Cambridge’s Black Latino folksinging star. Jack is endlessly irritated by Springsteen wearing jeans and a t-shirt onstage. “He always looks to me like he came to fix the car,” Jack says. And yes, he does, and it works fine for me and his fans, but I understand why Jack is irritated. Clarence Clemons never dressed like a car mechanic, because he would not have enjoyed being mistaken for a car mechanic.

Those arguments made me think about Springsteen’s relationship to Black music and musicians, and when I read his autobiography, he gets into that and his background in a way that pulled me in more directly than his records had. Around the same time, I was asked to contribute a piece to a Springsteen anthology, so I went back and listened to his early records and bootlegs of live shows, and wrote a piece called “American Skin: Springsteen and Blackness.” I hoped it would spark some conversations, but never met anyone who had read it, so now I’ve posted it, and if anyone wants to have a conversation about it, positively or negatively, you can find me on social media or my email is on the first page of my website.

Finally… this song worked great for Peter, back when he was in his early twenties, and obviously worked fine for Springsteen. But frankly, if you’re not entranced by the singer, the lyric is pretty creepy: “Hey little girl, is your daddy home? Did he go away and leave you all alone? Oh, I’ve got a bad desire…” So I’m posting it, because I know it and it reminds me of good times and Peter’s performances, and I do appreciate Springsteen… but otherwise I’ll let it alone.

“Kansas City” was one of the first songs to be recorded from the dynamite rock ‘n’ roll songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. They met in Los Angeles while Jerry was still in high school and Mike just out, and started by writing blues. Their first hit was “Hard Times,” recorded by Charles Brown; their second was “Hound Dog,” recorded by Big Mama Thornton. In between, they had this one, which didn’t make much noise when Little Willie Littlefield recorded it in 1952, but became a huge hit and a standard when Wilbert Harrison recorded it in 1959.

Leiber and Stoller are among my all-time favorite singers and record producers, and I can recall most of the brilliant “playlets” they created for the Coasters word for word and note for note, but doubt I’ll ever post them, because there’s no way I could do them justice. We’ll see… I may come up with work-arounds for a couple, but so far the only samples of their repertoire I’ve posted have been variants of basic 12-bar blues: “Riot in Cell Block #9” and “Framed,” which are based on Muddy Waters’s “Hoochie Coochie Man” riff, and the sprightlier “Run Red Run.”

This is an even more basic blues. Stoller later explained that his idea was to write something like “Going to Chicago,” which had been a defining hit for Jimmy Rushing with the Count Basie Orchestra, but  where most blues songs are defined by the lyric and singers rework the phrasing and melody from verse to verse, he wanted to write a “melodic blues,” which would be recognizable even if it were just played as an instrumental.

The result feels like a standard blues, but it’s internally cohesive in a way that sets it apart. The melody is simple but instantly recognizable, and almost everyone sings the four verses Leiber wrote to fit Stoller’s melody, no more, no less. (Little Richard was an exception, recording it as a straightforward blues shout, as were the Beatles, because they covered Richard’s version.)

As with a lot of classic rock ‘n’ roll songs, I don’t remember consciously learning this, but my version is faithful to Leiber and Stoller’s original. Though I first learned it from the Wilbert Harrison record, which had the tag line, “They’ve got some crazy little women there and I’m gonna get me one,” I switched over as soon as I heard the original, “They’ve got a crazy way of loving there and I’m gonna get me some.” It’s clearly better that way.

Though I’ve known this forever, I never performed it because I just played it as a blues shuffle and since it had been done by hundreds (thousands?) of other people, I had nothing to add and avoided it in favor of less familiar  shuffles. But when I began fooling around with it for this project, I found it felt most comfortable to sing in the key of A and  gravitated to the Gary Davis/Blind Boy Fuller diminished-chord-pull-off lick, and that got me to the D9 shape, which I think of as a Scrapper Blackwell thing (though I probably got it via Josh White), and to someone from the East Coast, Indianapolis (where Blackwell was from) is just down the road from Kansas City, so it all made sense.

(I’ve spent enough time driving around that part of the country to know how far apart those cities are, but it’s all so flat… a friend of mine told a story about one of her bandmates failing to make a gig in Winnipeg because she started driving from a previous gig in Iowa and, “I kept driving and driving, but I wasn’t getting anywhere, so I stopped.”)

Stoller later said his favorite recording of this was by Joe Williams, who did a really nice version with a Basie-style big band, and I just heard another big band version that Leiber and Stoller produced on a terrific two-LP set by T-Bone Walker. Both are excellent, and in other news, I picked up a later LP by Wilbert Harrison, where he does a one-man band thing. Not what I expected and not earthshaking, but solid blues. There’s a lot of good stuff out there… and I’m gonna get me some.

Still on a rock ‘n’ roll kick, celebrating my new Rock ‘n’ Roll: A Very Short Introduction, this is another favorite from the brilliant Mr. Berry, my nominee for the greatest rock ‘n’ roll songwriter of all time. I’ve said all this before, but he had an incredible gift for fitting words together in ways that sounded completely natural while scanning and rhyming so easily that a lot of people don’t realize how incredibly difficult that is. I’ve given that rap in my post about “Nadine,” and it goes for pretty much all of his classic work.

I’ve already posted a bunch of Berry’s songs: “Nadine,” of course, and “Maybellene,” “Memphis,” “No Money Down,” “Too Much Monkey Business,” “Promised Land…” I know a few others, and will eventually get around to those as well. Like I say, I think he was the greatest, and one mark of great songwriting is that his compositions stick in my head — there are songs of his that I never learned, never sang, but if I think about them, I realize that I remember every word.

I think this is one of those. I’m not sure; maybe I sat down and learned it at some point, but I rarely sang it, even for my own amusement — and amusement is definitely the point.

It’s in the general category of Berry’s car songs, following “Maybelline” and “No Money Down,” but written in the 1960s, while he was in prison on a Mann Act conviction. Though he tends to be associated with the previous decade, Berry was at the top of his game in that period and the best of those songs — “Nadine,” “Promised Land,” “You Never Can Tell,” “It Wasn’t Me,” and this one — have an imaginative flair and verbal intricacy that went beyond his earlier hits.

In his autobiography — a display of Berry’s inimitably quirky prose, which he wrote during another prison term — he describes himself at that point as “thirty-five years old, really set back, out of contact, feeling more black but still intact, and determined to make the best of it.” He kept busy taking college classes, wrote a bunch of new songs, and despite the ugliness of his situation, the writing had a brilliant lightness and humor.

He got out in 1963 and was shortly releasing new records, first “Nadine,” which announced his return and did pretty well, then this one, which cracked the Top 10. It’s a funny, self-deprecating story with a classic Berry beat, and I’m thinking I should perform it more often.

I could have posted about this one in the first few weeks of this project, because Woody Guthrie was pretty much where I started — him and Pete Seeger and Cisco Houston, and the Almanac Singers and Union Boys 78 albums, which included him, and Bound for Glory, which changed my life. After reading that book, all I wanted to do was hit the road as a rambling hobo folksinger. My folks presumably thought I’d grow out of that, but I just waited till I turned eighteen, then took off and spent most of the next dozen years hitchhiking, occasionally hopping freight trains, playing guitar for tips or barter, taking a few odd jobs, and generally living that dream.

I was following Woody’s admonition “to sort of vaccinate yourself right into the big streams and blood of the people.” Everything I’ve done since has been informed by those years on the road, riding with strangers (I used that as the title of a book about hitchhiking), hoboing with hobos, sleeping on people’s couches, or under bridges, or under the sky. It was a very sociable existence; not a lot of close relationships, but lots of short ones with the intimacy and honesty that comes from knowing you’ll soon go your separate ways and never see each other again. It was like what Mark Twain wrote in Life on the Mississippi: “When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before — met him on the river.” Same with hitchhiking and throwing yourself on the mercy of the world.

I was inspired by Woody and Twain and lots of other stories of young guys going off to seek their fortune — and that’s “fortune” in the sense of luck or fate or future, not money. It was a romantic dream and a great education. Which is to say, it was very different from the reasons that put most people on the road.

Most people don’t choose to leave home and live hand to mouth. When I started hopping freight trains in the Pacific Northwest, all the real hoboes were baffled that I wanted to do that. They were old drunks, on the trains because they had no choice, but I was a clean young guy with a driver’s license, and they kept advising me to go to the welfare office, get a check, and buy a bus ticket.

It was fun and exciting for me, but I wonder if it would have been fun and exciting if I’d had no choice. I met some young folks on the road, women as well as men, who were out there having a wild youth and enjoying it, despite not having the safety nets I had — parents with a house I could go back to anytime and an easy stepping stone to a comfortable middle class life. But I also met a lot of folks who were out there because they had no choice, escaping bad situations or trying to find ways to support themselves, their parents, their families. And that was back in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was a lot easier…

I’m not nostalgic for that period. There were plenty of problems, plenty of places with ghastly governments, plenty of people suffering for all sorts of reasons. But, if someone really wanted to get out and change their situation, the opportunities were much more available. Economies were in better shape; immigrants were not being demonized the way they are today; there were still a lot of jobs that you could pick up for a few weeks or months, or stay in for decades, and that paid enough to support a family. It was hard for a lot of folks, but homeless encampments were still something you were more likely to associate with the Great Depression than to run across in the middle of a modern American city.

There’s plenty more to be said about all of that, and about the increasingly garish theater of cruelty that is replacing any sense of civic decency or basic humanity… but Woody’s songs are reminders that none of this is new and, along with the people grinding other people down, there are people trying to help other people and make the world a better place. Good songs won’t fix things, but they can give us some energy and bring us together. Woody had a gift for keeping things simple and saying what needed to be said, and his songs have aged well… better than I sometimes wish they had, given the situation then and now.

I always liked the Everly Brothers, though I tended to go for their more upbeat stuff, like “Wake Up, Little Susie” (which I’ve already posted) and “Bye Bye Love” (which I should get around to), as well as the relatively obscure (and frankly dreadful) “Poor Jenny.” I’m not sure how I ended up knowing “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” except that it was a huge hit and kind of unavoidable, and pretty, and was probably one of the songs my sister and I used to sing with friends at night on the beach.

Like most of their early classics, it was composed by the husband and wife team of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, and I just learned that the back-up on their record was Chet Atkins on guitar. Speaking of which…

…I was kind of stymied about what to do with this song, because although I’ve always known it, its charm is in the Everlys’ gorgeous harmony singing, which I couldn’t replicate even if I had a brother. So I put it off till now, when I’m past 400 songs and getting around to things I don’t normally play, and on a dive into 1950s pop hits because I’ve just published a short history of rock ‘n’ roll, which of course includes the Everlys.

Since I don’t normally sing this, I had to find a key and arrangement, and I started out in C, because that’s where I always start out for the basic rock ‘n’ roll ballad chord pattern: C-Am-F-G. As it turned out, that was clearly too low for me to sing, so I tried D… and warning: technical guitar stuff ahead.

My main guitar teacher was Dave Van Ronk, who loved dropped D tuning (like standard tuning, but with the bass string dropped from E to D). Joseph Spence, the Bahamian guitar genius, was even more devoted to that tuning, and between them I got a thorough schooling in it.  So I gave that a shot, and was entranced by the way the chord shapes fell together. Reverend Gary Davis, another hero of mine, was a master at conserving energy by  playing chords that used nearly the same fingering with minimal changes, and in dropped D that basic r’n’r ballad sequence is elegantly simple: start with a barre on the second fret that covers three strings for the D, four strings for the A, and five strings for the Bm, with another finger or three thrown in to finish the chord…

…except, it kept sounding clunky when I went from the D to the Bm in the opening phrase, because I had to lift the barre, and I wanted to let a note ring longer. And then (eureka!) I thought of fingering the Bm Gary Davis style, with the thumb reaching over to the 5th string. I only recently discovered that chord shape — which is weird, because I’d been using the major equivalent for fifty years — and it makes me inexplicably cheerful.

Not that anyone cares, including lots of guitarists, but that made the arrangement sound better and someone may want to pick up on the shape. Or not. I know a lot of folks don’t like those thumb-on-the-fifth-string chords. But for those of us who grew up on Davis, Van Ronk, and Jim Kweskin, they are absolutely basic, and very handy when you need them.

Otherwise, this is just a pretty song. “Only trouble is… (gee whiz)… I’m dreaming my life away.”

“Save the Last Dance for Me” is yet another Latin-flavored classic of vocal group rock ‘n’ roll, an apt follow-up to last week’s “Little Darlin’.” It was  a number one R&B and pop hit for the Drifters in 1960, and their all-time best-selling record.

I’ve written about the Drifters before, in my posts for “Money Honey,” from the original group with Clyde McPhatter, and “Under the Boardwalk,” which was similarly Latin-flavored and would be their final major hit before the Beatles and Motown changed the world.

“Save the Last Dance” is a lovely piece of writing with a wrenching back story. Doc Pomus, one of the all-time great rock ‘n’ roll songwriters, was crippled by polio as a child, and he came up with the idea on his wedding night. As his wife tells the story in a wonderful documentary (which is online for free and highly recommended), the reception was full of show-business people, with a great band, and everyone was dancing. Pomus could get around on crutches, though he mostly used a wheelchair, but there was no way he could get out on the dance floor. She was going to stay with him, but he urged her to go out and dance with his father, his brother, his friends. So she did, and later found the initial notes for this song written on the back of one of their leftover wedding invitations.

That was in 1957, which was his breakout year as a songwriter. He’d started out in the mid-1940s as a crippled Jewish blues shouter working Black clubs around New York and New Jersey. He made a bunch of records, wrote his own material, and eventually some publishers caught on to the quality of the songs. He became a regular writer for the new Atlantic Records label and got his first major hit in 1956, when Ray Charles’s record of “Lonely Avenue” made the R&B top ten. The next year, the Coasters took “Young Blood” to the pop top 10, and for the next few years he made a nice living, bought a house on long island, had two children, and things were good.

Rock ‘n’ roll had become the music of teenage America, and Pomus teamed up with a young songwriter named Mort Shuman to get a more youthful touch. I’ve posted about “Teenager In Love,” their breakthrough hit for Dion and the Belmonts, and they went on to write hits for lots of other artists, including a bunch for the Drifters and some of the best later Elvis records (“Little Sister,” “Suspicion,” “Viva Las Vegas,” and lots more).

By the mid-1960s, times were changing. The hits dried up, Shuman moved to Europe, Pomus got divorced. He was living in a cluttered apartment, running a poker game in his living room, trying to make ends meet and take care of his kids. There were some bleak years, but eventually he got a second act (or third, or fourth — it was quite a life). His classic songs started getting major play as oldies, turning up in movies, getting covered by new artists, and he also began writing with some new partners, including a long association with Dr. John, and mentoring young artists, including Bette Midler. (He played a major role in her early career, but things ended badly and the documentary doesn’t mention her.)

There’s plenty more; the documentary is an excellent place to start, and there’s also a good biography, aptly titled Lonely Avenue. He was a fascinating character, and I can’t sing “Save the Last Dance” without thinking about him sitting on the sidelines, watching all the happy dancers.

One of the less-explored byways of rock ‘n’ roll history is the influence of “Latin” or Caribbean rhythms, styles, and instrumentation. I have a section on this in my new book, Rock ‘n’ Roll: A Very Short Introduction, including such relatively familiar touchstones as “La Bamba” (which I will post about at more length one of these days); “Louie Louie,” which took its trademark riff from “El Loco Cha Cha,” by the Cuban bandleader René Touzet; and the use of the Brazilian baião beat on “Stand By Me,” “Spanish Harlem,” and a bunch of hits by the Drifters.

There are plenty of other examples, like the mambo-inflected bassline of Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog,” played on the original by the Puerto Rican bass player Mario Delagarde and mimicked on the Elvis version. But the most explicitly Latin percussion on a rock ‘n’ roll hit is rarely mentioned: the Gladiolas’ “Little Darlin’,” composed by the group’s lead singer, Maurice Williams (who went on to have a huge hit with “Stay” a few years later, with another group, the Zodiacs) and recorded in Nashville in 1956. It’s a classic doo-wop record, and opens with some kind of shaker, then claves, then some kind of conga drum — all kind of makeshift. (I asked my friend Wayne Marshall, who has better ears for this stuff than I have, to identify the shaker, he couldn’t, and then pointed out that the conga wasn’t really a conga, and the claves probably aren’t really claves.) Who knows what instruments were handy in a Nashville studio in 1956? Whatever they were using, they provide creditable Latin percussion and a straight-ahead mambo beat.

I didn’t know any of that when I first heard the song, which is another I’ve known forever. Typically for my age, race, and place, I first heard it done by Sha Na Na, who were my entry to the world of doo-wop, then picked up an oldies set that had what I thought of as the original version, by the Diamonds, and only years later heard the real original. Sha Na Na were also imitating the Diamonds, a white Canadian doo-wop group, and, listening back, I realize my version of the spoken monologue in the middle of the song is still theirs, rather than the Gladiolas’.

To be fair, the Diamond’s treatment of the monologue is sillier, which in this case may be a plus — but I see from Wikipedia that some modern critics think the Diamonds’ version is better overall, and no. Just no. I’ll grant that their pitch may be a bit more solid, but the Gladiolas’ record is clearly superior. To my eternal shame, as a 13-year-old I similarly preferred the Crew-Cuts’ version of “Sh-Boom” to the Chords’ original. (That’s another case of clean-cut white Canadians covering a hit composed and performed by Black teenagers and outselling the original in a racist pop market. I write about all of this in my book.) But I grew up. Maurice Williams and his crew, all the way.

I sang this occasionally for fun when I got together with other folks who knew doo-wop — that used to happen fairly often. I particularly remember a very early morning in Vancouver, BC, when a bunch of us who had drunk our way through the night on Jameson’s Irish Whiskey wandered to the back porch of someone’s third-floor apartment and sang a bunch of this stuff, and at dawn a neighboring couple came out on their porch to sit and listen to us.

Since I don’t have a doo-wop group at the moment, I had to come up with an alternative and did what I always do for this kind of rhythm, which is fall back on what I learned from Jean-Bosco Mwenda and Edouard Masengo in the  Congo and Herbert Misango in Nairobi, reworked in various ways. It’s all pretty absurd, but fun.

I’ve got a new book out, a history of rock ‘n’ roll in Oxford’s “Very Short Introduction” series, and it prompted me to revive a bunch of songsI’ve known since my early teens but rarely perform, since I rarely have a rock ‘n’ roll band or vocal group handy.

This one is a bit of an exception. I’ve performed “Great Balls of Fire” in various venues and situations over the years, when I did have the chance to work with a band, or just when someone asked me to play some rock ‘n’ roll. I’m not sure why, but it has always felt right for me in a way that all the various Little Richard and Elvis songs didn’t,  much as I may have liked them.

And Jerry Lee Lewis… he seems to have been a difficult, mercurial, and potentially dangerous character, but a hell of a singer. I put him up with Ray Charles for his ability to take on material in all kinds of styles and genres — country, pop, rock, soul — and put them across with a depth, skill, and personal touch that made them uniquely his own. (Aretha Franklin is another one, but different, because whatever she sang was transformed from its original genre into hers; Lewis and Charles were stylists rather than virtuosos, and although their singing was wildly distinctive and instantly recognizable, their rock songs sounded like rock, their country like country, their pop like pop.)

I’ve written a bit about Jerry Lee’s country stuff in my post for “Crazy Arms,” and that still may be my favorite period of his work, but of course I first heard him singing rock ‘n’ roll, either “Great Balls of Fire” or “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” To me, he has always been in a class by himself among the white rock ‘n’ rollers of that period. I like Elvis fine, especially in the early movies, but he was doing an act, while Lewis was a genuine rock ‘n’ roll wild man. For better or worse–if you don’t know the biography or all the other stories, I’m not going to recap them here but they’re easy to find.

What matters here, at least to me, is how much I’ve always loved to play and sing this one. Again, I’m not sure why it felt so right, but it always did. Ridiculous, maybe, but right. I particularly remember playing it one afternoon in a hall of the Odéon stop on the Paris Metro.

I normally worked on the trains, where there was a captive audience and we made a lot more money, and at that period was in a trio with Vince McCann and a bass player named Doug (covered in my post for “Truck Driving Man“). Vince wasn’t around that afternoon and Doug and I tried playing as a duo in the hall. I was doing a lot of rock ‘n’ roll songs, especially this one, and we weren’t making any money, and at some point another musician came by, and said, “The thing about that music is you have to have the energy.” To which Doug responded, “Oh, that’s not his problem; he has the energy.”

Which could have been a compliment, but also might have suggested that energy was pretty much all I was bringing to the table. Be that as it may… there’s something about this song that still energizes me like nothing else I play. It’s just so much fun.