“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.