Welcome to episode twenty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Earth Angel" by the Penguins. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.



Resources

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

Much of the information here comes from various articles on Marv Goldberg's site, which is an essential resource for 50s vocal group information.

The quotes from Dootsie Williams are from Upside Your Head!: Rhythm and Blues on Central Ave by Johnny Otis.

And this CD contains all the Penguins' releases up to the point that they became just a name for Cleve Duncan.

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Transcript

When you're dealing with music whose power lies in its simplicity, as early rock and roll's does, you end up with music that relies on a variety of formulae, and whose novelty relies on using those formulae in ever-so-slightly different ways.

This is not to say that such music can't be original -- but that its originality relies on using the formulae in original ways, rather than in doing something completely unexpected.

And one of the ways in which early rock and roll was formulaic was in the choice of chord sequence. When writing a fifties rock and roll song, you basically had four choices for chord sequence, and those four choices would cover more than ninety percent of all records in the genre. There was the twelve-bar blues -- songs like "Hound Dog" or "Roll Over Beethoven" or "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" are all based around the twelve-bar blues. There's the variant eight-bar blues, which most of the R&B we've talked about uses -- that's not actually one chord sequence but a bunch of related ones.

Then there's the three-chord trick, which is similar to the twelve bar blues but just cycles through the chords I IV V IV I IV V IV -- this is the chord sequence for "La Bamba" and "Louie Louie" and "Twist and Shout" and "Hang On Sloopy". And finally, there's the doo-wop chord sequence.

This is actually two very slightly different chord sequences -- I , minor sixth, minor second, fifth:

[demonstrates on guitar]

and I, minor sixth, fourth, fifth:

[demonstrates on guitar]

But those two sequences are so similar that we'll just lump them both in under the single heading of "the doo-wop chord sequence" from now on. When I talk about that in future episodes, that's the chord sequence I mean.

And that may be the most important chord sequence ever, just in terms of the number of songs which use it. It's the progression that lies behind thirties songs like "Blue Moon", and the version of "Heart and Soul" most people can play on the piano (the original song is slightly different), but it's also in "Oliver's Army" by Elvis Costello, "Enola Gay" by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, "Million Reasons" by Lady Gaga, "I'm the One" by DJ Khaled... whatever genre of music you like, you almost certainly know and love dozens of songs based on that progression. (And you almost certainly hate dozens more. It's also been used in a *lot* of big ballads that get overplayed to death, and if you're not the kind of person who likes those records, you might end up massively sick of them.)

[Excerpt: "Blue Moon", Elvis Presley, going into "I Will Always Love You" by Dolly Parton, going into "I'm the One" by DJ Khaled]

But while it has been used in almost every genre of music, the reason why we call this progression the doo-wop progression is that it's behind almost every doo-wop song of the fifties and early sixties. "Duke of Earl", "Why Do Fools Fall In Love", "In The Still of the Night", "Sh'boom" -- it forms the basis of more hit records in that genre than I could name even if I spent the whole of this podcast naming them.

And today we're going to talk about a song that cemented that sequence as the doo-wop standard, im