Episode fifty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Honky Tonk" by Bill Doggett, and uses his career to provide a brief summary of the earlier episodes of the podcast as we're now moving forward into the next stage of the story. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Sixteen Tons" by Tennessee Ernie Ford.



Resources

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

There are many best-of collections of Doggett's work available. This one seems to have the best sound quality and is a decent overview of his work.

Information for this one comes from all over the place, including Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe by Gayle F Wald, Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, and Inkspots.ca 

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Transcript

Welcome to the fiftieth episode of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. We're now ten percent of the way through our story, and also most of the way through 1956.

I'm told that when history podcasts hit a big round number, it's customary for them to do a jumping-on episode, perhaps a "story so far" which covers everything that's been discussed up to that point, but in brief, so that new listeners can get up to speed.

That's sort of what I'm about to do here. This week, we're going to look at a hit song from 1956, but by someone whose career interacted with almost everyone in the first twenty or so episodes of the podcast.

We're going to look again at some of that old music, not as isolated records by different artists, but as stages in the career of a single individual. We're going to look at someone who was a jobbing musician, who'd take any job that was on offer, but who by virtue of just being a hard-working competent jobbing player and arranger managed to have an astonishing influence on the development of music.

While rock and roll was primarily a vocal music, it wasn't a completely clean break with the past, and for most of the decades from the 1920s through to the early 50s, if you wanted music for dancing you would want instrumental groups. The big bands did employ vocalists, of course, but you can tell who the focus was on from looking at the names of the bands -- the Benny Goodman Orchestra, the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the Duke Ellington Orchestra, the Count Basie orchestra -- all of the leaders of the big bands were instrumentalists. They played clarinet or trombone or piano, they didn't sing.

It was only with the musicians union strikes of the 1940s, which we've talked about before, that more through necessity than anything else the music industry moved from being dominated by instrumental music to being dominated by singers. But well into the 1960s we'll still be seeing rock and roll hits that were purely instrumental. Indeed, we probably wouldn't have rock and roll guitar bands at all without instrumental groups like the Ventures in the US or the Shadows in the UK who had hits with pure instrumental records.

And one of the greatest of the early rock and roll instrumentals was by someone who didn't actually consider himself a rock and roll musician. It's a record that influenced everyone from James Brown to the Beach Boys, and it's called "Honky Tonk":

[Excerpt: Bill Doggett, "Honky Tonk"]

There is surprisingly little information out there about Bill Doggett, for someone who had such an impact on the fields of rock and roll, blues, jazz, and soul. There are no books about his life, and the only website devoted to him is one designed by his nephew, which... has all the flaws one might expect from a website put together about someone's uncle.

Doggett was born in 1916 in Philadelphia, and he moved to New York