The Heart of Rock and Soul by Dave Marsh

13 SHAKE, RATTLE AND ROLL, Big Joe Turner Produced by Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler; written by Charles Calhoun [Jesse Stone] Atlantic 1026 1954 Did not make pop charts WHOLE LOTTA SHAKIN' GOIN' ON, Jerry Lee Lewis Produced by Sam Phillips; written by Dave Williams and Sunny David [Roy Hall] Sun 267 1957 Billboard: #3

Winner and first runner-up in the Lewd and Lascivious category, "Shake, Rattle and Roll" and "Whole Lotta Shakin' " are the two strongest arguments for the idea that prudes really did have something to fear from rock and roll. Both Big Joe and Jerry Lee leer and drool with an indelicacy that would be comic if it weren't so intense. If there's a way to impute more pure, dripping lust into the word "shake," no one has ever found it, even though Lewis and Turner doubtless inspired many a search. Aside from that. the records are opposites. Turner's never made the pop charts, although its wonderful, witty lyric was bowdlerized and turned into a multimillion seller by Bill Haley later the same year; Lewis got a Number One R&B hit to go with his pop success, even though R&B shouter Big Maybelle (perhaps the closest thing to a distaff equivalent of Turner) had flopped with the same song in 1955. There's a kind of double whammy here because "Whole Lotta Shakin' " began its life as a collaboration between a black man, Williams, and a white one, Hall. (Jerry Lee apparently worked from Hall's country version, even more obscure than Big Maybelle's.) The contrast is greatest when it comes to the piano playing. Forty-three-year-old Turner, who'd been making records since the late thirties when he came East from Kansas City as part of the boogie-woogie boom, got his most famous hit with an arrangement driven by lovely triplets that wouldn't have been out of place on his first sides. Lewis, like the twenty-two-year-old hothead he was, simply guns it from the first notes, playing a cross between honky-tonk and blues shuffle at an impossible tempo, which he has the audacity to speed up after the first verse. Turner is commanding because he remains dignified even while exorcising his lust. Lewis is in charge because he's tough and arrogant enough to back up every claim his romp over the keyboards makes. In a way, this only restates the obvious: Big Joe Turner was a blues shouter who had rhythm and blues hits in the rock and roll era. Jerry Lee Lewis was a rock and roller. Still, their finest records live on, side by side.

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