{"id":953,"date":"2016-04-21T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-04-21T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=953"},"modified":"2017-03-15T17:32:32","modified_gmt":"2017-03-15T21:32:32","slug":"walk-right-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/walk-right-in\/","title":{"rendered":"Walk Right In (Rooftop Singers\/Jose Feliciano)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Walk Right In\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/H9KH_7jtpA0?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I mostly missed the hottest groups of the pop-folk craze. I was born in 1959 rather than 1950; I started out with my grandparents&#8217; 78s, listening to the Almanac Singers and Josh White; my half-brother Dave introduced me to <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-956\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/greatest-folksingers-of-the-sixties-300x293.jpg?resize=300%2C293\" alt=\"greatest folksingers of the sixties\" width=\"300\" height=\"293\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/greatest-folksingers-of-the-sixties.jpg?resize=300%2C293&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/greatest-folksingers-of-the-sixties.jpg?w=330&amp;ssl=1 330w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/>old-time country blues recordings; and I guess I was already something of a loner and a contrarian by age five, more attuned to Woody Guthrie than to the perky collegiate approach. In any case, I missed the Kingston Trio, the Chad Mitchell Trio, the Brothers Four, and only heard Peter, Paul and Mary because my little sister liked them, but never listened to them voluntarily.<\/p>\n<p>However, somewhere along the line I picked up Vanguard&#8217;s <em>Greatest Folksingers of the &#8216;Sixties<\/em>, and along with Cisco and Kweskin and Ramblin&#8217; Jack Elliott it included the first tracks I ever heard by Ian and Sylvia, and by Richard and Mimi Fari\u00f1a, and &#8220;Walk Right In,&#8221; by the Rooftop Singers. Those were not really my kind of music &#8212; the Fari\u00f1as a bit more than the others, and I did pick up their &#8220;best of&#8221; double LP, but didn&#8217;t listen to it very often &#8212; but it was hard to resist the rhythmic drive of &#8220;Walk Right In,&#8221; propelled by Eric Darling&#8217;s 12-string guitar. (Incidentally, Ian and Sylvia&#8217;s &#8220;You Were on My Mind,&#8221; also on that album, has a very similar 12-string arrangement, which I&#8217;d guess was not coincidental.)<\/p>\n<p>The Rooftop Singers, as it happened, were formed by Darling specifically to record &#8220;Walk Right In,&#8221; which he&#8217;d presumably heard on Sam Charters&#8217;s <em>The Country<\/em> Blues reissue LP. I preferred the Cannon version, of course, but didn&#8217;t learn it because the song was already so overdone, due to the Rooftop version, which was a number one pop hit in 1963&#8230; the rub being that I could not avoid knowing the Rooftop version, more or less, because it was unforgettably catchy,<img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-959 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/feliciano-jose-300x298.jpg?resize=300%2C298\" alt=\"feliciano-jose\" width=\"300\" height=\"298\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/feliciano-jose.jpg?w=300&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/feliciano-jose.jpg?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/> and fooling around with my own variation of the bass part, because it was fun. And then there was Jos\u00e9 Feliciano&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>He was on <em>Greatest Folksingers of the &#8216;Sixties <\/em>as well, blowing away the Newport Folk Festival audience with his flamenco-ized version of &#8220;La Bamba,&#8221; and sometime later I managed to acquire a copy of his first LP, which is a truly weird and wonderful record, recorded when he was seventeen years old and including his versions of &#8220;Flight of the Bumblebee,&#8221; &#8220;High Heeled Sneakers,&#8221; and &#8220;Walk Right In,&#8221; which he sings in English, Spanish, and Yiddish.<\/p>\n<p>Whatever my reasons for not learning the Cannon or Rooftop versions, my reason for not learning Feliciano&#8217;s is simple: there was no possible way I could even dream of playing like him&#8230; and yet, the bassline in my head is more Feliciano than Darling, and I&#8217;ve got that Spanish verse (I don&#8217;t speak Yiddish, which didn&#8217;t stop Jos\u00e9, but I&#8217;m not seventeen, or a genius). So, here it is, for what it is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A number one hit from the pop-folk craze, owing more to the Rooftop Singers than to Cannon&#8217;s Jug Stompers, with a tip of the hat to Jos\u00e9 Feliciano.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Walk Right In (Rooftop Singers\/Jose Feliciano) - 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He performed it in the movie I Walked with a Zombie (1943), then recorded it with Gerald Clark's Caribbean Serenaders on Keynote Records, the leftist New York label known for\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/Zombie-SirLancelot.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3279,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/gritenme-piedras\/","url_meta":{"origin":953,"position":1},"title":"Gritenme Piedras del Campo","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"December 23, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Hitching along the Gulf Coast from Louisiana, I planned to spend a couple of weeks in Texas, but I got hassled by the cops in Galveston and it was freezing in Corpus Christi, so I scampered down to Mexico. They wouldn't let me across the border without a bus ticket\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/Flaco-Jimenez-LP.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3682,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/africa-to-appalachia\/","url_meta":{"origin":953,"position":2},"title":"Africa to Appalachia","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"April 28, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"I compiled this instrumental either while traveling through Africa or shortly afterwards, using \"Wanjiru Wanjiru\" by the Kenyan guitarist Francis Macharia as the unifying theme. I was struck by how much the guitar on that track felt like the kind of fingerpicking played in the Appalachians, so I combined\u00a0 it\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/The-Nairobi-Sound-297x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":112,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/talking-union\/","url_meta":{"origin":953,"position":3},"title":"Talking Union (The Almanac Singers)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"February 1, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"\"Talking Union\" was the title song of the Almanac Singers' most popular album (back in the days when \"album\" meant literally that: a bound album of 78 records). As I mentioned in the last couple of posts, my first records included a bunch of left-wing 78 albums, including Talking Union,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/talking-union.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3915,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/row-of-dominoes\/","url_meta":{"origin":953,"position":4},"title":"Row of Dominoes (Butch Hancock)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"August 4, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Yet another I learned from Joe Ely. Among the many debts I owe to Joe is that he introduced me to Butch Hancock's songwriting. Joe and Butch had teamed up way before I heard of either of them, in a band called the Flatlanders, which also included Jimmie Dale Gilmore\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/butch-hancock2.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1478,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/georgia-on-my-mind\/","url_meta":{"origin":953,"position":5},"title":"Georgia on My Mind (Hoagy Carmichael)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"June 25, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"The musical education I got from Dave Van Ronk was by no means limited to guitar lessons, or to his own work. By the third or fourth week, he shifted my lesson to the end of the day, and when it finished he would cook dinner, then we\u2019d break out\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"hoagy2","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/hoagy2.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=953"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/953\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2681,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/953\/revisions\/2681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}