Welcome to episode ten of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Double Crossin' Blues" by Johnny Otis, Little Esther, and the Robins. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.



Resources

Like last week, this episode talks about a musician losing the use of some fingers. If you want to help others like Johnny Otis, you might want to check out a charity called the One-Handed Musical Instrument Trust, which invents and provides instruments for one-handed musicians.

As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.

There are a lot of cheap compilations of Johnny Otis' material -- this one seems to be the best value for money, and contains two other songs I already have podcasts written about, and two more that I'm almost certainly going to cover.

This CD covers Little Esther's first couple of years, including all her recordings for Savoy along with some of those from Federal.

And this double-CD set contains almost everything the Robins recorded, though for some unknown reason it doesn't contain their three most well-known songs.

Much of the biographical information about Johnny Otis comes from Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story by George Lipsitz.

Both Otis and Ralph Bass are interviewed in Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues.

Patreon

This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?

Transcript

We talked last week about playing an instrument with missing or damaged fingers. Today, we're going to talk about how a great musician losing the use of a couple of fingers led directly to several of the biggest careers in rhythm and blues.

When we think of the blues now, we mostly think of guitar-based music – people like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters – rather than piano-based musicians and the more vaudeville style of what's called “classic blues”, people like Ma Rainey or Bessie Smith. And that tends to give a rather ahistorical perspective on the development of rock and roll.

Rock and roll when it started -- the music of the mid fifties -- is not really a guitar-based music. It's dominated by the piano and the saxophone, and that domination it takes from jump band rhythm and blues. We've already heard how blues shouters in jump bands were massively influential for the style, but of course the blues, along with the jump bands, fed into what was just becoming known as "rhythm and blues", and that in turn fed into rock and roll.

There were two real links in the chain between the blues and rock and roll. And we'll definitely talk about the Chess label soon. But to the extent that there was any influence at all from what we now think of as the blues, it was mostly down to one man, Johnny Otis. It's probably safe to say that if Johnny Otis had never lived, the whole of 1950s music would be totally different.

We're going to be talking about Johnny Otis *a hell of a lot* in this podcast, because to put it as simply as possible, Johnny Otis was responsible for basically every good record that came from the West Coast of the US between about 1947 and 1956. I have three more Johnny Otis-related records lined up between now and the middle of February, and no doubt there'll be several more after that.

Johnny Otis had his first hit in 1945, with "Harlem Nocturne", which featured his friend Bill Doggett on piano:

[excerpt of "Harlem Nocturne"]

After “Harlem Nocturne” became a hit, and partly through the connection with Doggett, he got the opportunity to tour backing the Ink Spots, which exposed him to a wider audience. He was on his way to being a big star.

At that time, he was a drummer and vibraphone player. And he was one of the great drummers of the period -- he played, for example, on Ilinois Jacquet's version of "Flying Ho