Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} I Hear You Knockin The Sound of New Orleans Rhythm and Blues by Jeff Hannusch Ya Ya. I don't know why, but I always suspected that this was somehow related to "Jah/Yah", as in the Tetragrammaton. Then again, I never read the book. Jun 10, 2002 #3 2002-06-10T13:23. Jun 10, 2002 #4 2002-06-10T13:41. Dunno where "Ya-Ya Sisterhood" comes from [perhaps merely a phrase of affirmation, like "right on!" or "rah-rah!"?] -- but the history of the song "Ya Ya" is --ummm-- somewhat less than sisterly. The man who recorded it, New Orleans' Lee Dorsey, had this to say [quoted in I HEAR YOU KNOCKIN': THE SOUND OF NEW ORLEANS RHYTHM AND BLUES, by Jeff Hannusch]: "I was living next to a grocery store, and the kid used to play the dozens out in front. They were singing, 'Sittin' on the slop-jar, waitin' for my bowels to move!" It was catchy the way they were singing it. So that night I just jotted it down, "Sittin' on my La-La, waitin' for my Ya-Ya. " He goes on to explain that producer Alan Toussaint sanitized it further, changing "Sittin' on my La-La" to "Sittin' here, La-La. " Rhythm & Blues Music. Rhythm & blues – also known as R&B – is an African-American commercial music genre with distinct roots in traditional blues and gospel music. While significantly influenced by such sources, R&B also differs in that those songs are written with the deliberate goal of crafting a hit. Blues and gospel artists also seek success, but many traditional blues and gospel songs draw on a vast body of folk-rooted lyrics, known as collectively floating verses, which appear in many songs – different combinations that are sometimes random and thus can be thematically vague. The aggressive market-driven orientation of R&B manifests in its penchant for lyrics that tell succinct stories and the prominent inclusion of brief, catchy and instantly identifiable passages – vocal, instrumental or both – that are known in the record business as “hooks.” The presence of memorable hooks – in songs of any commercial genre – dramatically increases the chances for that song’s commercial success. Ernie K-Doe’s R&B hit, “Mother-In-Law” offers a prime example of a song that combined a strong hook – its title phrase – with a pithy narrative to reach number-one on the national pop and R&B charts. R&B evolved in the 1940s as a convergent hybrid of several genres. Traditional blues contributed such bedrock African-American musical traits as call and response, melisma, syncopation, improvisation, and the prominent use of blue notes – the flatted third, fifth, and seventh in any given scale. R&B diverged from traditional blues songs by expanding beyond the typical blues song-structure – twelve bars, an A-A-B verse pattern, and a one-four-five chord progression – to use widely varying chord progressions and often, distinct and unique melodies. Similarly drawing on tradition, while straddling the secular/sacred boundary, R&B utilized gospel music’s sophisticated tradition of quartet singing, which maximized the dramatic contrast between the four alternating vocal leads. Early R&B also reflected the influence of various jazz styles – the classic New Orleans sound of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Morton, and Sidney Bechet; the humorous, virtuosic records of the great pianist, singer and composer Fats Waller; big-band swing a la Count Basie; the boogie-woogie craze of the ‘30s and ‘40s, and a style known as jump-blues that combined elements of all of the above. One of the most popular exponents of this latter sound was Louis Jordan and the Tympani Five – a band that is sometimes regarded as a proto-R&B group, thus underscoring the arbitrary and at times confusing nature of precise musical categorization. In south Louisiana, R&B additionally absorbed the Afro-Cuban three-count tresillo rhythms that reflect the region’s strong connections with Caribbean culture, as well as the second-line street beats of the traditional-jazz brass bands. While rhythm & blues was a national trend, many of its most important developments occurred in south Louisiana – most notably in New Orleans, but also typified by the “swamp blues” sound of Baton Rouge, exemplified by Slim Harpo, and the Cajun-zydeco infused “swamp pop” of Lafayette/Opelousas/Lake Charles, exemplified by Bobby Charles, Phil Phillips and Carol Fran. The common thread in all three south Louisiana styles was an infectious, rowdy exuberance on up-tempo numbers, and soul-baring poignancy on the slow songs. Roy Brown’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” which climbed the R&B charts in 1948, was the first hit in this genre to be recorded in New Orleans. Its national success was followed by such hits as Fats Domino’s “The Fat Man” in 1950, Lloyd Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” in 1952, and Guitar Slim’s “The Things I Used To Do” in 1954. The success of these artists and others prompted record companies based around the nation to send their A-list artists to New Orleans to work with the city’s stellar studio musicians and its best audio engineer, Cosimo Matassa. Record labels including Atlantic, Imperial, Specialty and Chess could easily have worked at less expense in the major cities where they were based, but they opted for New Orleans, where Matassa and his cadre of session players were thought to possess that certain intangible feel which guaranteed commercial success. These record executives’ collective hunch proved right on hits such as Big Joe Turner’s “Honey, Hush” and Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” and “Long Tall Sally.” A vast surge of creativity and commercial success energized the Crescent City from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, an era later dubbed the Golden Age of New Orleans rhythm and blues. A cursory list of its other luminaries includes Professor Longhair, Shirley and Lee, Smiley Lewis, Irma Thomas, James Booker, Lee Dorsey, Art Neville, Aaron Neville, Huey “Piano” Smith, Frankie Ford, Clarence “Frogman” Henry. The Meters and Dr. John, who emerged in the late 1960s, and the Neville Brothers (with siblings Aaron, Art, Charles, and Cyril), who formed a decade later, also stand in that illustrious number. So do the musicians who accompanied these artists on many of their records: saxophonists Lee Allen and Nat Perrilliat, drummers Earl Palmer and Smokey Johnson, bassists Frank Fields and Lloyd Lambert, and guitarists Roy Montrell, Justin Adams and “Deacon” John Moore, to name but a few. While The Golden Age eventually gave way to the British Invasion and other trends that followed, New Orleans R&B remains vibrant and popular. At this writing, such seminal artists as Aaron Neville, Allen Toussaint and Irma Thomas continue to enjoy active careers in undiminished peak form, while comparatively younger musicians including Davell Crawford carry the Crescent City torch. Baton Rouge artists Chris Thomas King and Larry Garner expertly honor that city’s blues-drenched R&B legacy, while swamp pop flourishes thanks to such thriving originators as Warren Storm, T. K. Hulin, Carol Fran and Tommy McLain, the multi-generational Lil’ Band ‘o’ Gold, and the second-generation Creole String Beans. Ben Sandmel is a New Orleans-based journalist, folklorist, drummer, and producer. Sandmel is the author of Ernie K-Doe: The R&B Emperor of New Orleans and Zydeco!, a collaborative book with photographer Rick Olivier. Sandmel has produced and played on albums including the Grammy-nominated “Deep Water” by the Cajun/country band The Hackberry Ramblers. Suggested Reading: Bernard, Shane K., Swamp Pop: Cajun and Creole Rhythm and Blues. Jackson, MS. The University Press of Mississippi. 1996. Berry, Jason, Foose, Jonathan, and Jones, Tad. Up From the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music Since World War II. Lafayette, LA. The University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press. 2009. Broven, John. South To Louisiana: The Music of the Cajun Bayous. Gretna, Louisiana. Pelican Publishing, 1983. Broven, John. Rhythm & Blues In New Orleans. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1988. Coleman, Rick. Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2006. Dr. John (Mac Rebennack), with Rummel, Jack, Under A Hoodoo Moon: The Life of the Nite Tripper. New York, Saint Martin’s Press, 2004. Hannusch, Jeff. I Hear You Knockin’: The Sound of New Orleans Rhythm & Blue. Ville Platte, LA: Swallow Publications, Inc., 1985. Hannusch, Jeff. The Soul of New Orleans. A Legacy of Rhythm and Blues. Ville Platte, LA, 2001. Swallow Publications, 2001. Sandmel, Ben. Ernie K-Doe: The R&B Emperor of New Orleans. New Orleans, the Historic New Orleans Collection. 2012. Tricentennial Reading List With Jason Berry (Part 1) Susan Larson, host of The Reading Life, talks with local authors and readers about their favorite books from three hundred years of New Orleans literature. “Up from the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music Since World War II,”by Jason Berry, Jonathan Foose and Tad Jones “I Hear You Knockin’: The Sound of New Orleans Rhythm and Blues,” by Jeff Hannusch “New Orleans Rhythm and Blues,” by John Broven. Susan Larson: Let's go back to “Up from the Cradle of Jazz” you know this was the first book I ever read about New Orleans music and I feel like it set me on the right path. You covered so much material in this book, it's amazing. Jason Berry: Well, we worked more than five years on it, it began in the late 1979,1980 in a break; production lull, you might say, from the documentary of the same title that Jon Foose and I were producing; and we realized we had so many outtakes from all of these interviews we were doing with the Neville and Lastie family members; sadly, a number of them are no longer here. Charles Neville died just recently. We conceived the book as a sort of large tableau to explain the inner woven nature of the neighborhoods and the tradition of musical families. Susan Larson: That's one of the things you brought home to me that was so fascinating the way music is a family affair in New Orleans in almost every kind of music almost. Jason Berry: It is and frankly I think if one were to do a book like this today dealing with those two themes neighborhoods and musical families it would be an enormous undertaking because so many of the younger musicians who come up, one example alone, Trombone Shorty, whose brother, James Andrews, was a major figure in his life, a mentor of sorts. Their grandfather was Jessie Hill, [with the song] ,“Ooh Poo Pah Doo” the R&B singer and Glen David Andrews who is one of their cousins, comes out of a family that's almost like a dynasty out of Gabriel Garcia Marquez ,where you have eight cousins named Glen Andrews, several of whom have played in the same band. It takes a great deal of digging, in a scholarly sense research sense, but I think the richness of the musical culture here is fed by this dense network of kin alliance and kinships and people who are cousins and brothers and mothers and sons. It is rather elaborate. Susan Larson: It's amazing, now some of the other general histories that I think have educated people along the way, I think, I Hear You Knockin, the Sound of New Orleans Rhythm and Blues. Jason Berry: It's a great book by Jeff Hannusch and both of us I would say, well both books, Jeff's book and the book that I did with Jonathan and Tad [Jones] who sadly is deceased now, we really in a very real sense built on the work that John Broven did with his book, well it's now called “New Orleans Rhythm and Blues”, the early 1970 paperback edition. Susan Larson: And it's massive. Jason Berry: It keeps growing every time John updates it and reissues it but it was originally called “Walking to New Orleans” and I remember when I read that, I suppose I was about 25 or so and I had never read a book that dealt with Fats Domino and Professor Longhair and the Nevilles, who at that time did not have a family band and as much as I admired the industry of his research, I felt that there was a much more intimate story to be told about who these musicians were as individuals. Look, when you grow up as I did, seeing Deacon John and Irma Thomas playing at proms and CYO dances and then you get a little bit older and you realize they're not only still around but they're making new records, it rather plants the idea that the music is a garden of ever-spreading delights. Cosimo Matassa, Whose Studio Created a Rock ’n’ Roll Sound, Dies at 88. Cosimo Matassa, whose used-record business in New Orleans led him to sell new records, which led him to open a tiny studio that helped jump- start rock ’n’ roll by recording early hits by the likes of Fats Domino and Little Richard, died on Thursday in New Orleans. He was 88. His granddaughter Mia Matassa confirmed the death. Mr. Matassa was given a lifetime achievement award at the 2007 Grammys and inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012 for the vaunted output of his J & M Recording Studio. (The initials were those of both his father, John, and his father’s business partner, Joe Mancuso.) The hall designated the original studio, the first of four ever-bigger iterations, a “rock and roll landmark” in 2010. (It was later named Cosimo’s Recording Studio.) Recording engineers like Mr. Matassa seldom receive recognition. Part of his accomplishment, musicians said, was an ability to get the most out of primitive equipment. More important, his studio was for years the principal commercial recording studio in a city famed for its jazz, soul, R&B and rock ’n’ roll musicians. Jerry Lee Lewis made his first demonstration record there. “Virtually every R&B record made in New Orleans between the late ’40s and the early ’70s was engineered by Cosimo Matassa, and recorded in one of his four studios,” Jeff Hannusch wrote in “I Hear You Knockin’: The Sound of New Orleans Rhythm and Blues” (1985). More than 250 nationally charting singles and 21 gold records were recorded at the studio, most of them distinguished by what came to be known as the Cosimo sound: strong drums, heavy bass, light piano, heavy guitar and light horns. It is sometimes also called simply the New Orleans sound. The studio became a sought-after resource for the independent labels that emerged or grew in importance after World War II. Chess, Aladdin, De Luxe, Atlantic, Savoy and Specialty, among others, used the studio, originally for just $15 an hour. The hits born there included Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” and “Good Golly Miss Molly”; Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll”; Professor Longhair’s “Mardi Gras in New Orleans”; Smiley Lewis’s “I Hear You Knockin’ ”; Frankie Ford’s “Sea Cruise”; and Chris Kenner’s “Land of 1,000 Dances.” Some music historians say that rock ’n’ roll began in 1947 when Roy Brown recorded “Good Rockin’ Tonight” at J & M. Others say a signal moment came on Dec. 10, 1949, when Fats Domino cut eight songs there, including his first commercially released single, “The Fat Man.” Cosimo (pronounced Cosmo) Vincent Matassa was born in New Orleans on Aug. 13, 1926. He studied chemistry at Tulane University but dropped out after five semesters when he realized that he did not want to be a chemist. He and a partner bought an old grocery store with the idea of turning it into an appliance store. As a sideline, Mr. Matassa sold records discarded by his father, a grocer who also owned a jukebox business. The records sold so well that Mr. Matassa expanded the business to include new records. He then gave up on the appliances and sold only records. Soon he realized that there was no place to record music in New Orleans. He felt the skills he had learned at a technical school might be useful. In 1946, he bought equipment that let him record directly onto a disc. That meant he could not stop and splice in changes, as later recording techniques would make possible. Each two-to-three-minute record, therefore, amounted to an exact replica of the recording session — or it wasn’t released. Mr. Matassa urged musicians to pretend they were performing for live audiences. “Those guys played with a lot of excitement,” he said in a 2012 interview in conjunction with his Hall of Fame induction, “and I felt if I couldn’t put it in a groove, people weren’t going to move.” In his book “Rhythm & Blues in New Orleans” (1988), John Broven quoted Mr. Matassa as saying that this approach often worked wonderfully. The reason, Mr. Matassa said, was that “they were really performances as opposed to the synthesized record you make today.” But impromptu remarks by performers could still mess things up. Mr. Domino, Mr. Matassa told Mr. Broven, was particularly difficult because he would stop in the middle of a take and ask, “How do I sound?” “Pretty bad, especially if it’s the first good take of the thing you had,” Mr. Matassa told Mr. Broven, though perhaps not Mr. Domino. Mr. Matassa’s wife of 65 years, the former Jennie Maggio, died in 2009. He is survived by three sons, John, Louis and Michael; seven grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren. In the 1960s, Mr. Matassa started his own record company, Dover Records, but it did not last long. He estimated that he lost $200,000 in his years in the music business. Until his health began to fail, Mr. Matassa liked to hang out in the grocery store in the French Quarter that his family has owned for three generations and chat with people. He played down his own significance. “People expect me to have some sense of history, as though I’d hear a record and know this was going to be something we’d be talking about 30 years later,” he said in a 2007 interview with WWL-TV in New Orleans. “We were all busy making a living,” he continued. “We had a hell of a good time and it was a great way to make a living, but no, there was no sense of history. Certainly not with me.” Rhythm and Blues Music. T he rhythm and blues (R&B) heritage in Louisiana includes a wide variety of styles of national significance, beginning in the 1940s and continuing until today. From 1947 to 1971, more than 260 Louisiana-based or Louisiana-related rhythm and blues recordings appeared on Billboard magazine’s Top 100 sales charts. From 1957 to 1961, in particular, a period when R&B exercised its greatest influence on mainstream rock ‘n’ roll, Louisiana R&B singles accounted for 125 Billboard Top 100 hits—an average of roughly 25 hits per year. The greatest number of those were recorded by New Orleans R&B singer and pianist Antoine “Fats” Domino, an icon of post-World War II American popular music. While New Orleans was easily the state’s most prominent source for R&B activity, other regions also made uniquely local contributions. The southwestern parishes saw local music influenced by the R&B sound gradually evolve into two distinct genres: swamp pop, a version of what came to be called “blue-eyed” soul, and zydeco, created from a distinct blend of Cajun, Creole, and R&B elements. In addition, Louisiana-based musicians and producers influenced national R&B artists. The New Orleans musical environment, in particular, could also be powerfully transformative. Ray Charles frequented the city for two years in the early 1950s, arriving as an easygoing blues crooner and leaving as the innovator of a new style of gospel-influenced, powerfully emotional R&B that would later be called soul music. In the mid-1950s, a Georgia native named Richard Penniman recorded in New Orleans, scoring a string of hits as the high-spirited and wildly exuberant vocalist Little Richard. And another central R&B figure, Sam Cooke, recorded briefly in New Orleans and relied on New Orleans-trained musicians for some of his best-known national hits. Pioneering Sounds. New Orleans produced a substantially large, if often overlooked, proportion of the musicians responsible for forging the early sounds of R&B and rock-and-roll. In 1947, for example, Annie Laurie, singing with the Paul Gayten Orchestra, made a hit with “Since I Fell for You,” later a frequently recorded R&B ballad. In 1948, Roy Brown had a national dance hit with “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” often cited as one of the earliest rock ‘n’ roll songs. Vocalist Lloyd Price, whose string of 1950s rock ‘n’ roll hits would include “Stagger Lee” and “Personality,” first achieved national notice with “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” in 1952. The city’s greatest musical strength, however, was its piano players—especially those schooled in a rhythmic, blues-derived style called boogie-woogie. Within just a six-month period during the early 1950s, three New Orleans piano players released nationally successful records: Fats Domino (“The Fat Man”), Leon T. Gross, known as Archibald, (“Stack-A-Lee”), and Henry Roeland Byrd, later known as Professor Longhair (“Bald Head”). Saxophonist and bandleader Louis Jordan, widely considered an essential figure in the transition from jazz to R&B, implicitly acknowledged New Orleans’s central role in helping create an atmosphere ripe for the development of rock ‘n’ roll in his 1949 hit “Saturday Night Fish Fry.” Remaining number one on R&B sales charts for twelve weeks, the song is set on Rampart Street in New Orleans, with two musicians attending a raucous occasion where the participants were “scufflin’ and shufflin’ ‘til the break of dawn.” Indeed, New Orleans has a long history of both social events and of music that reflects those events. But New Orleans’s musical influence in the transition from R&B to rock ‘n’ roll depended more heavily on two other factors. These were the preponderance of talented musicians living in the city—the result of a musical heritage dating back at least to the earliest days of jazz—and the 1947 establishment of J&M Recording, a studio founded by producer Cosimo Matassa. Working closely with songwriter and arranger Dave Bartholomew, Matassa created an atmosphere in which talented local musicians felt free to collaborate in the recording process. The resulting hit records made in New Orleans, especially those by Fats Domino, attracted independent record companies with more direct access to national markets, including Atlantic Records (New York City), Imperial Records and Specialty Records (Los Angeles), and Chess Records (Chicago). Spreading the Louisiana Influence. In retrospect, the partnership of Matassa and Bartholomew, combined with a steady supply of talented local musicians, created a template for future regional record labels. According to one account, “Along with Sam Philips’s Sun Studio in Memphis, J&M was to become one of the two most productive studios in early rock and roll.” Sun Records is where artists like Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Roy Orbison first achieved national prominence during the mid-1950s. In fact, J&M Studios preceded Sun Records by several years and drew on a rich supply of talent in all phases of the recording process. In that regard, J&M Studios can also be seen as a precursor to influential labels like Stax Records in Memphis and Motown Records in Detroit, Michigan, as well independent labels in the world of hip hop. Another measure of New Orleans’s influence is the large number of songs recorded originally by New Orleans musicians that became national hits for more prominent artists, including “Ain’t That a Shame” (Pat Boone), “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” (The Beatles), “Time Is on My Side” (The Rolling Stones), “Let the Good Times Roll” (Jimi Hendrix), and “Southern Nights” (Glen Campbell), among many others. The “British Invasion” of the early 1960s sidelined many R&B and rock ‘n’ roll musicians. One of the most telling stories in this regard is that of New Orleans vocalist Irma Thomas, poised on the edge of national stardom during her early twenties. Soon after The Rolling Stones recorded her regional hit “Time Is on My Side”—complete with her distinctive, spoken interlude—the mother of four found herself working behind a dry-goods chain store sales counter. Although Louisiana in general and New Orleans in particular never regained the widespread popular influence it enjoyed during the 1950s and early 1960s, the state’s R&B traditions remained very much alive. Revivals, Brass Bands, and Hip Hop. In the state’s southwestern region, “swamp pop” music by white musicians immersed in R&B traditions like The Boogie Kings, remains locally popular. Pioneered in the 1950s by Clifton Chenier, zydeco remains vital today. In New Orleans, pianist and songwriter Allen Toussaint emerged in the mid-1970s as a much sought-after producer. His core group of studio musicians, The Meters, helped to advance the rhythmically muscular descendent of R&B known as funk. They became precursors to The Neville Brothers. Beginning with their 1976 landmark album, Wild Tchoupitoulas , the four Neville brothers achieved international success by joining forces and celebrating the legacy of New Orleans R&B for audiences all around the world. Also in the 1970s, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, an annual celebration of Gulf Coast cultures, began to receive national attention, setting the stage for a revival of veteran New Orleans R&B figures, including Professor Longhair, Irma Thomas, and many more. Concurrently, the city generated a new wave of small, neighborhood brass bands, beginning with The Dirty Dozen Brass Band and the aptly named Rebirth Brass Band, mixing traditional and modern jazz with elements of R&B and funk. Author. Suggested Reading. Aswell, Tom. Louisiana Rocks!: The True Genesis of Rock’n’Roll. New Orleans, LA: Pelican Publishing, 2009. Bernard, Shane K. Swamp Pop: Cajun and Creole Rhythm and Blues. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1996. Berry, Jason. Up from the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music Since World War II. Lafayette: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2009. Broven, John. Rhythm and Blues in New Orleans. New Orleans, LA: Pelican Publishing, 1983. Coleman, Rick. Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock’n’Roll. New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 2006. Gillett, Charlie. The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll. New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 1996. Koster, Rick. Louisiana Music. New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 2002. Hannusch, Jeff. I Hear You Knockin’: The Sound of New Orleans Rhythm and Blues. Ville Platte, LA: Swallow Publications, 1985. Hannusch, Jeff. The Soul of New Orleans: A Legacy of Rhythm and Blues. Ville Platte, LA: Swallow Publications, 2001. Lichtenstein, Grace and Laura Danker. “Rebirth—The First Wave of R&B,” “The Second Wave of R&B.” In Musical Gumbo: The Music of New Orleans, 72–136, 137–94. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co, 1993. Neville, Art, Aaron Neville, Charles Neville, Cyril Neville, and David Ritz. The Brothers Neville. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 2000. Rebennack, Mac, and Jack Rummel. Under a Hoodoo Moon: The Life of Dr. John the Night Tripper. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Scherman, Tony. Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999. Vincent, Rickey. Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of One. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.