This was written by Vincent Rose, Al Lewis and Larry Stock for the 1940 Western The Singing Hill before they decided it was good enough to be released commercially. The song was used in the movie, where it was heard for the first time performed by Gene Autry.

Larry Stock, who wrote the lyrics, recalled that

One important publisher turned down ‘Blueberry Hill’ because he claimed blueberries don’t grow on hills. I assured him I had picked them on hills as a boy, but nothing doing. So Chappell And Company bought the song and another hit was born.

Fats Domino, who knew the song through Louis Armstrong’s 1949 version, recorded this at Master Recorders in Los Angeles at a session in which he ran out of material to tape.

Domino insisted on recording the song over the vehement objections of producer-arranger Dave Bartholomew, who felt the song been done too many times already. Domino came up with the definitive version though, featuring his famous piano triplets and sly Cajun accent. The band couldn’t get a full take of this song they were happy with, so the engineer, Bunny Robyn pieced together the final version from many fragmentary takes.

Many artists recorded this before Domino, mostly orchestras. In 1940, it was a #2 US hit for Glenn Miller.

That same year, Russ Morgan, Gene Krupa and Kay Kyser all recorded it with their orchestras. Louis Armstrong did the song with Gordon Jenkins and his orchestra in 1949; this version was re-released in 1956, going to #29 in America. Other artists to cover the song include Elvis Presley (on his 1957 album Loving You), The Beach Boys, Andy Williams, Kiki, Cliff Richard, Bruce Cockburn.

An international hit in 1956 for Fats Domino and has become a rock and roll standard. It reached #2 for three weeks on the Billboard Top 40 charts, becoming his biggest pop hit, and spent eight non-consecutive weeks at #1 on the R&B Best Sellers chart. The version by Fats Domino was also ranked #82 in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The song was Domino’s greatest hit and remains the song most associated with him.

Hits: 63

“Shake, Rattle and Roll” is a twelve bar blues-form song, written in 1954 by Jesse Stone under his assumed songwriting name, Charles E. Calhoun. It was originally recorded by Big Joe Turner.

It was most successfully released by Bill Haley & His Comets. The song as sung by Big Joe Turner is ranked #127 on the Rolling Stone magazine’s list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Stone played around with various phrases before coming up with “shake, rattle and roll”. However, the phrase had been used in earlier songs. In 1919, Al Bernard recorded a song about gambling with dice with the same title, clearly evoking the action of shooting dice from a cup. The phrase is also heard in “Roll The Bones” by the Excelsior Quartette in 1922.

The song, in its original incarnation, is highly sexual. Haley reworked the most overtly sexual lyrics in the song for the sake of airplay, replacing “You wear those dresses, the sun comes shining through. I can’t believe my eyes all that mess belongs to you” with “You wearin’ those dresses, your hair done up so nice. You look so warm but your heart is as cold as ice.”

Perhaps its most salacious lyric, which was absent from the later Bill Haley rendition, is “I’ve been holdin’ it in, way down underneath / You make me roll my eyes, baby, make me grit my teeth”. [It may actually be “Over the hill, way down underneath.] On the recording, Turner slurred the lyric “holdin’ it in”, since this line may have been considered too risqué for publication.

The chorus used “shake, rattle and roll” to refer to boisterous intercourse, in the same way that the words “rock and roll” were first used by numerous rhythm and blues singers, starting with Trixie Smith’s “My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll) in 1922, and continuing on prominently through the 1940s and 1950s.

Stone stated that the line about “a one-eyed cat peepin’ in a seafood store” was suggested to him by Atlantic session drummer Sam “Baby” Lovett, which is also a sly sexual reference, the “one-eyed cat” being the male organ and the more traditional “seafood” reference being the female organ. Haley’s producer, Milt Gabler, has explained that he would “clean up” lyrics because, “I didn’t want any censor with the radio station to bar the record from being played on the air. With NBC a lot of race records wouldn’t get played because of the lyrics. So I had to watch that closely”.

Comparing the two versions illustrates the differences between blues and rock ‘n’ roll. A simple, stark instrumental backing is heard on the Turner version. Where Turner’s version uses a walking bass line, the Comets version features an energetic slap bass. A subdued horn arrangement in the Turner recording can be contrasted with a honking sax riff that answers each line of verse in Haley’s version, and the entire band shouts “Go!” as part of the vocal backing.

Although musical revisionists and American media tried to paint Turner as a victim of the music industry due to Haley’s covering of the song, in fact Haley’s success helped Turner immensely although Turner was a well-established performer long before “Shake, Rattle and Roll”. Listeners who heard Haley’s version sought out Turner’s. The two men became close friends, and performed on tour together in Australia in 1957. In 1966, at a time when Turner’s career was at a low ebb, Haley arranged for his Comets to back the elder musician for a series of recordings in Mexico, although apparently Haley and Turner did not record a duet version of “Shake, Rattle and Roll”.

Hits: 58