Steve Cropper and the Memphis Sound

Duck Dunn, Booker T. Jones, Steve Cropper, Al Jackson, Jr.

I've never written about the soul music offshoot of R&B on these blogs, but the recent death of guitarist-songwriter-producer Steve Cropper is a good, if sad opportunity to do so.

Cropper was one of the leading lights of the "Memphis sound" - the recordings on the Stax and Volt label in the 1960s that defined the soulful, groove-oriented music that generated a great number of hits.

I'm far from an expert on the music, but I am a fan, so from my collection I can provide a short playlist of hits featuring Cropper that span 1961-68.

A later French picture sleeve - Cropper is in the shadows at right

The first success was by the Mar-Keys with "Last Night," which originally came out on the Satellite label. With its blasting horn motto and simple structure, it provided fodder for a whole generation of garage bands. It's been said that Cropper doesn't play on the tune - there is no guitar part - but he insists he was there: "Jerry Lee 'Smoochy' Smith came up with the piano riff that was played on organ. Since [producer Chips] Moman didn't want a guitar on it for whatever reason, I wound up playing the hold-down on the organ on the root note." The only solo on the record is by a tenor saxophonist. I think it is Packy Axton doing his best Boots Randolph imitation.

Cropper soon got together with three other musicians to form Booker T. and the MGs - Booker T. Jones on keyboards, Lewie Steinberg and later Duck Dunn on bass, Cropper on guitar and the minimalist and rock-steady drummer Al Jackson, Jr.

This formidable quartet almost immediately had a giant R&B and pop hit with 1962's "Green Onions," which set a pattern - extraordinarily catchy music that was seemingly simple, and yet intricate and precise. It also provided an early example of Cropper's ability to fire off memorable guitar stings and riffs, one after the other. All this from a tune that used the same progression as "Last Night."

The second example from Booker T. and crew is 1967's "Hip Hug-Her," a title that was a play on a women's trouser style that was then fashionable. The organist carries the melody, Cropper's guitar interjects terse (and highly influential) comments.

The MGs often backed up Stax-Volt's star vocalists. In 1967, Stax paired soul superstar Otis Redding with Carla Thomas, Rufus Thomas' daughter, who already had enjoyed a few hits. They had a huge R&B success with "Tramp," covering a Lowell Fulson song. It is a highly amusing diss contest with Carla (then in graduate school) dismissing Otis as being "from the Georgia woods" (which he was), for wearing overalls and needing a haircut, among other sins. His response - "I'm a lover! Oooo, I'm a lover!" Cropper contributes one memorable (and frequently imitated) riff after another. Also heard on this side are the Memphis Horns - trumpeter Wayne Jackson and saxophonist Andrew Love.

It's another (almost) perfect record - the only flaw being that Otis & Carla (as they were billed) were much too low in the mix. I've raised their level substantially, but Otis in particular is often off-mike.

Sam & Dave

The MGs and the Memphis Horns also supported the popular duo Sam & Dave (Sam Moore and Dave Prater), who are superb in "Soul Man" by David Porter and Isaac Hayes, who would become a soul superstar. This song had an afterlife when adopted by the Blues Brothers in the late 70s - who also were backed by Cropper.

Otis Redding

We complete this mini-festival of Stax-Volt hits with Otis Redding's valedictory song, "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay," released in 1968, a few months after the great singer died in a plane crash. The record was (and is) massively popular, deservedly so. Redding wrote the song with Cropper - listen to how the guitarist's usual stinging attack is transformed into sensitive support for Booker T. Jones on piano, the Memphis Horns and the touching vocal.

A brilliant record and a fine remembrance of the hugely talented co-authors.

LINK

Lambert Conducts Warlock and Bliss

Peter Warlock

Here are additional English compositions conducted by the supreme talent Constant Lambert - songs by Peter Warlock and a neglected march by Arthur Bliss.

Warlock - The Curlew and Two Songs

The playful fellow you see at right is the 20th century English composer Peter Warlock. While he did have a jolly side - heard in some of his songs - a dark side was expressed both in his art and very likely in his death.

Here is what I wrote about him years ago: "Peter Warlock, a pseudonym for Philip Heseltine, mainly wrote songs during his short life, which ended in what is most likely suicide at age 36. He is lightly regarded as a composer - possibly because he was a miniaturist, but his songs are of a very high standard. The Curlew cycle is his masterpiece, his music fitting extraordinary well to Yeats' bleak poetry. ('No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind; the boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.') 

"But the composer responds just as strongly to joyful verse such as the Shakespeare setting 'Pretty Ring Time.' This dual aspect of Heseltine's work is sometimes thought to express the dual Heseltine/Warlock identity."

Composer-conductor Constant Lambert was a close friend of Warlock during the 1920s. He led this performance of The Curlew in March 1931, a few months after Warlock's death. The performers included the International String Quartet, the baritone John Armstrong, and Terence McDonagh, who was to begin a long career with English ensembles by joining the new BBC Symphony at age 22. He takes the important English horn part in this work.

John Armstrong has a prominent, rapid vibrato that can be distracting, but is otherwise good as the vocal soloist.

The Curlew set was issued by the National Gramophonic Society, a subscription company that would soon close shop after making first recordings of many works, including this one, I believe. Thanks to my friend Nick Morgan for information on this release. You can find his research on this pioneering organization here. This transfer may well have originated with Nick, although I did find it on Internet Archive, and clean it up for presentation at this time.

You can find the second recording of The Curlew, with Alexander Young and the Sebastian String Quartet, here.

The National Gramophonic Society set also includes two other songs by Warlock - "Sleep," with words by Beaumont and Fletcher, and "Chop Cherry," from a work by George Peele.

 Bliss - March - The Phoenix (Homage to France)

Arthur Bliss and Constant Lambert preparing the ballet
Miracle in the Gorbals in 1944

Lambert also was friends with another important composer, Arthur Bliss. In 1944 he began preparing the Sadler's Wells Ballet production of Bliss's contemporary work, Miracle in the Gorbals. (Lambert's 1946 recording of the score can be found here.)

Also in 1944, Bliss was working on one of his stirring marches, The Phoenix (Homage to France). Lambert conducted the first recording, also in 1946, with the Philharmonia Orchestra. This piece is reminiscent of the composer's march theme from the film Things to Come, and looked forward to his superb Welcome the Queen of 1954.

LINK

Sylvia Syms' 1956 Decca Singles

Cash Box April 28, 1956

The vocalist Sylvia Syms was, until 1956, a niche attraction. She had issued LPs on Atlantic and the obscure Version label, and the year before had come out with an album on Decca, the subject of a new post on the main blog.

Decca also decided to take advantage of her versatility by issuing a string of singles containing songs that did not appear on her albums. For this post, we feature all he songs Sylvia recorded in 1956 - seven numbers.

As it happened, Syms' first Decca single was to take her to new heights of popularity. It was her enthusiastic rendition of Lerner and Loewe's "I Could Have Danced All Night," which of course came from My Fair Lady, one of the most successful musicals of all time.

Ironically, this single was backed by a song from one of the big Broadway failures of the day, a musical called Shangri-La that was based on James Hilton's novel Lost Horizon. Far from being enchanted, Shangri-La the show lasted only two weeks. That was enough time for Syms to come out with "Walk Sweet," an inoffensive song from the score by Harry Warren, Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee. (Actually, Sylvia recorded the song in March, three months before the show opened.)

(The story of Lost Horizon had no luck in the musical realm. Bacharach and David turned it into a movie musical in 1973 - another fiasco. There had been a successful non-musical film in 1937, however.)

Sylvia's follow-up to "I Could Have Danced All Night" enjoyed some popularity as well - although it was in a much different style. "English Muffins and Irish Stew" turned out to be a calypso, of all things, by those fine Trinidadians Moose Charlap and Bob Hilliard. Syms, an excellent actor, adopted a convincing accent (to me, anyway) are sailed confidently through this amusing number.

Ballads, calypso, R&B - Syms did it all

The discmate for "English Muffins" provided another contrast. It was the title song from the Audie Murphy boxing saga The World in My Corner, with music by Henry Mancini and words by Roy Carroll. This is a very good song, if downcast, and Sylvia makes the most of it.

"Dancing Chandelier" returned to the giddy world of "I Could Have Danced All Night." It's a Bob Hilliard-Phil Springer tale of  party-going dancers upstairs making the ceiling shake - with a happy ending. Syms is ebullient.

Sylvia again showed her range on the flip side, with a lively R&B number called "Each Day" from producers Bob Kornegay and Paul Winley. She's entirely persuasive.

Jack Pleis

Finally, we have another Phil Springer song, with lyrics by the gifted Carolyn Leigh - "The Nature of Things." This is a pleasing ballad with excellent contributions by the conductor and arranger Jack Pleis, who is just as much a stylistic chameleon as Syms. He is at the helm for all these numbers, which are generally admirable.

Decca might have had its doubts about "The Nature of Things" - the label did not issue it until late 1958, on the flip side of Gigi's "The Night They Invented Champagne" (which is not in this package).

LINK

Goossens Conducts Grieg

Eugene Goossens

The talented English conductor Eugene Goossens has not appeared on these blogs for more than 15 years, and so perhaps it's time he reappeared. Today he does so with a composer whose music he often recorded - Edvard Grieg. Most of the program is taken up by the two suites from Grieg's incidental music for Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt. The makeweight is the composer's Two Elegiac Melodies.

Grieg's most popular work on the concert platform is likely the Piano Concerto. But for popularity, the Peer Gynt suites would not be far behind.

It's ironic that Grieg's suites these days are usually consigned to the summer season or to pops concerts. They come from a play that was considered radical for its day. According to the Norwegian Ibsen Company, "Ibsen wrote Peer Gynt in deliberate disregard of the limitations that the conventional stagecraft of the 19th century imposed on drama. Its 40 scenes move uninhibitedly in time and space and between consciousness and the unconscious, blending folkloric fantasy and unsentimental realism."

Edvard Grieg, Henrik Ibsen

Ibsen himself chose Grieg to write the music for this tale, and the composer responded with some of his most memorable - and popular - themes. The story's ambulatory plot of a journey from Norway to Africa and back provided Grieg with ample opportunities for colorful music, most famously with "In the Hall of the Mountain King."

Goossens recorded the music on four occasions: The Suite No. 1 in 1927, 1937 and 1945, and the Suite No. 2 in 1928. For this program we have the 1937 Suite No. 1 and the 1928 Suite No. 2. (I wanted to include the 1947 recording as well, but one of the sides was unplayable.)

1937 label; 1928 label

Goossens conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra for the first suite, and the New Light Symphony Orchestra (perhaps a recording aggregation) for the second. The sound for all these pieces is quite good for the period, and the performances are affectionate.

The Two Elegiac Melodies - "The Wounded Heart (Hjertesár)" and "The Last Spring (Váren)" also were recorded in 1937 with the LPO and are just as sympathetically done.

LINK to Grieg recordings

More from Eugene Goossens

Although Goossens is little remembered these days, he was a skilled conductor (and composer) who made many excellent recordings. Here are two that have appeared on the main blog, which are now newly refurbished in ambient stereo. The links in the subheads below lead to the original posts.

Vaughan Williams - A London Symphony. The composer's second symphony elicited a detailed and idiomatic reading from Goossens conducting the Cincinnati Symphony, which he led from 1931-46. This recording comes from 1941, and is unusual in that it is of the 1920 version of the symphony, which Vaughan Williams later revised.

The cover at left ascribes the performance to the "Cromwell Symphony Orchestra." It came out during the early 1950s, when Victor's budget label Camden used pseudonyms on its classical reissues, for whatever reason.

Britten - A Simple Symphony. Here's what I wrote about this piece 16 years ago: "It's amazing (and perhaps a little daunting) to read that Britten composed some of this material when he was as young as nine, and assembled it into this delightful and memorable string symphony when he was 20."

The composer must have liked what he heard from Goossens and the recording orchestra in 1953 - he wrote the liner notes for this 10-inch LP. 

Ray Anthony Plugs His New Record

The year is 1957, and bandleader Ray Anthony is looking for a hit. His band is still popular, he was appearing in films - that year, This Could Be the Night - he is making albums and is on TV. But chart hits were hard to come by.

It wouldn't be too long before his version of Henry Mancini's Peter Gunn theme would make the best-seller lists, but in the meantime, he was issuing novelties like today's pairing - "Cello-Phane," written by Anthony himself (supposedly), and "The Lonely Trumpet" by Hugo Strasser and Claus Ritter.

Capitol was behind this new release all the way. There was the full-page ad in Billboard seen at right, a promotional tour by the bandleader, and a promo record, shipped with the fond hope that deejays would play Ray's quick introductions to the two songs.

In brief, he remarks in the intros that "Cello-Phane" is interesting because it utilizes a cello, and "The Lonely Trumpet" notable because it features a Hammond organ.

"Cello-Phane" turns out to be "In the Mood" played on a cello with wordless vocal accompaniment - and a trumpet break, of course. Ray did not write "In the Mood"; in fact, it's hard to figure out who did. The hit Glenn Miller record said the author was Joe Garland, but Wingy Manone claimed the riff was based on his "Tar Paper Stomp" of 1930.

"The Lonely Trumpet" was by the then-young German bandleader Hugo Strasser. It also is attributed to Claus Ritter, but he was a lyricist and this version does not use the words. Here, the lonely trumpeter is of course Ray himself. Not sure who the lonely organist - or cellist - are.

As far as I can tell, the disc did not make the charts, so the promotion effort was in vain.

Wonderfully, I believe Ray is still with us, at age 103.

By the way, the This Could Be the Night soundtrack I mentioned above is newly remastered in ambient stereo, with new graphics and complete scans. It features the chanteuse Julie Wilson along with Ray's band.

LINK to Cello-Phane and The Lonely Trumpet

Lonely Ray Anthony with then-wife Mamie Van Doren

Jane Morgan's First Record

Jane Morgan

I was saddened to see that the singer Jane Morgan died yesterday, just a day after she was featured in a post on movie songs from 1957. She was 101. I stumbled across news of her death while researching an article about her early recordings. 

I knew that Morgan had been a vocalist for Art Mooney's band in the mid-1940s, when she was in her early 20s. Searching on the holdings of Internet Archive led me to what is probably her first appearance on record, and it's an interesting one, less so for the performance, more so for the disc.

Mooney was one of the first signings to the new Vogue label, a Detroit start-up that had a different slant on the record as product. As you can see at left, Vogue issued colorful picture discs. The artwork was pasted onto a aluminum core, which was coated with clear vinyl and then stamped with the record's grooves.

In this example - issued in 1946 but probably recorded in late 1945 - Mooney and vocalist "Janie" Morgan performed "Seems Like Old Times," a popular end-of-war song written by Carmen Lombardo and John Jacob Loeb, although based on an earlier song by Sam Stept and Charles Tobias.

The hit versions were by Guy Lombardo and several others, not including Mooney. The reason is not hard to figure out - the Mooney version cost more than double the Lombardo disc and all other versions . Vogues were not only priced much higher than conventional 78s, their distribution was haphazard. So if you wanted to hear Mooney and Morgan, you had to pay for the privilege - if you could actually find the record.

Billboard December 22, 1945

So the Vogue label didn't last long - barely more than a year and 60-80 releases. Then to bankruptcy court they went. Morgan - and Mooney - did much better. Art transformed his troupe from the standard-issue big band heard on this record to an old-timey brigade that had hits with "I'm Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover" and "Baby Face" in 1948.

Morgan eventually became one of the most popular singers of the 1950s and 60s, with the Kapp label seemingly issuing a new LP with every change of the season.

This early effort shows her to be a competent, if stiff singer even at an early age. Vogues have a reputation for good quality, but this recording is anything but that. The sound was dead with no bass and Morgan's voice buried in the mix, all of which I have attempted to address in this mastering.

If you are interested in Vogue recordings, I've included two old issues of Record Research that tell the story of the label and provide a discography. The records are still highly collectible.

LINK

Five Big Movie Songs from 1957

Here's another one of those EPs that collate the current hits into one hopefully irresistible package. This one comes from the Columbia folks, who in 1957 had strong (or at least reasonably successful) songs from four notable films.

But wait - the headline above says five movie songs, not four. That's because the hit from the film Love in the Afternoon wasn't the theme but an ancient waltz called "Fascination" that was used on the soundtrack. So I've added that tune to the package - in three version, two from the hit record and one from the soundtrack EP.

But back to the Columbia EP. Their set starts off with the label's big hope from August of 1957 - the title song from An Affair to Remember. It was entrusted to the golden pipes of Vic Damone, who the year before had celebrated his new contract with the label by turning My Fair Lady's "On the Street Where You Live" into a big chart hit.

Cash Box ad

"An Affair to Remember" has the soaring quality that Vic (and Percy Faith) did so well, and the record is a winner, although not as memorable as his famed rendition of the My Fair Lady anthem. The Affair music is by the veteran Harry Warren with lyrics by Harold Adamson and Leo McCarey, the film's director. In the film, Vic's singing is heard over the opening credits.

We move from Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr's affair to the Old West - Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas and the Gunfight at O.K. Corral. This legendary tale brought forth a typically robust ballad from the master Dimitri Tiomkin (see the celebration of his music here), working with the great lyricist Ned Washington.

Who else but Frankie Laine could supply the vocal? He is fantastic, but as I wrote a while back, "Laine's inimitable singing was a popular success, although the record did not become as iconic as High Noon."

Cash Box ad

The next song is a decided contrast - for A Face in the Crowd, director Elia Kazan used folk singer Tom Glazer to provide the music, with lyrics from screenwriter Budd Schulberg. I don't believe the Hi-Lo's single of the title song was a hit, but it is nonetheless a good record.

The group had just moved to Columbia and was enjoying increasing success with its records. The vocal arrangements of Gene Puerling became highly influential, and the penetrating tenor voice of Clark Burroughs was a distinguishing feature of their sound.

The EP's fourth song is sung by the young Jerry Vale, who already had been at Columbia for several years by the time he was tasked with Love in the Afternoon's title song. The film features 56-year-old Gary Cooper romancing 28-year-old Audrey Hepburn. This had to take place in the afternoon so it wouldn't interfere with Coop's early bedtime.

The film had a title song by Matty Malneck, with Johnny Mercer lyrics, which Vale handled well on the single release. The biggest hit from the film, however, was written in 1904. More about that below.

LINK to the Columbia EP

Music from Love in the Afternoon

In Love in the Afternoon, Coop is followed everywhere by a band of gypsies (not the Hendrix band, although that would have been interesting). This troupe provides the soundtrack.

Perhaps realizing that it would have limited appeal, the Verve label put the music out on an EP, and a short one at that. Its three songs are "Love in the Afternoon," "Hot Paprika" and "Fascination." The latter was the hit from the score, written way back when by Fermo Dante Marchetti. ("Hot Paprika," like the title music, is by Malneck.)

"Fascination" caught the public's fancy, and the biggest hit was by vocalist Jane Morgan, singing new lyrics by Dick Manning.

The gypsies perhaps being otherwise occupied, Morgan's record company, Kapp, brought in a group called the Troubadors as backing. The resulting single has Jane's vocal on one side and the Troubadors whistling on the other.

Kapp presented this to the public complete with the picture sleeve below showing Coop in ascot and Hepburn in pigtails - "old chic and young chick," as I remarked when I first posted this nearly 17 years ago. 

All recordings are remastered in ambient stereo.

LINK to Love in the Afternoon EP and Fascination single