“Good Golly, Miss Molly” was  recorded in 1956 by Little Richard and released in January 1958. The song, a jump blues, was written by John Marascalco and producer Robert “Bumps” Blackwell.  Although it was first recorded by Little Richard, Blackwell produced another version by The Valiants, who imitated the fast first version recorded by Little Richard, not released at this time. Although the Valiants’ version was released first in 1957, Little Richard had the hit, reaching #4.

The song by Little Richard is ranked #94 on the Rolling Stone magazine’s list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Like all his early hits, it quickly became a rock ‘n’ roll standard and has subsequently been covered by hundreds of artists.

Little Richard first heard the phrase “Good golly, Miss Molly” from a Southern DJ named Jimmy Pennick. He modified the lyrics into the more suggestive. “Good golly, Miss Molly/You sure like to ball.”

Little Richard himself later claimed that he took the music from Ike Turner’s piano intro to Jackie Brenston’s influential 1951 rock and roll song “Rocket 88”, and used it for “Good Golly, Miss Molly”.

“I always liked that record,” Richard recalled, “and I used to use the riff in my act, so when we were looking for a lead-in to ‘Good Golly, Miss Molly’, I did that and it fit.”

Little Richard’s publisher sued Creedence Clearwater Revival over their song “Travelin’ Band,” which they claimed lifted from “Molly.”  Instead of the result of the gift of a diamond ring being “When she hugs me, her kissin’ make me ting-a-ling-a-ling,” John Fogerty sang, “Would you pardon me a kissin’ and a ting-a-ling-a-ling?” A settlement was reached with Creedence giving up some of their royalties.

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“Mr. Tambourine Man” was written, composed, and performed by Bob Dylan, who released his original version of it on his 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home.

The Byrds’ version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” was listed as the number 79 song on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and Dylan’s version was ranked number 106. In a 2005 reader’s poll reported in Mojo, Dylan’s version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” was listed as the number 4 all-time greatest Bob Dylan song, and a similar poll of artists ranked the song number 14. In 2002, Uncut listed it as the number 15 all-time Dylan song.

The song has a bright, expansive melody and has become famous in particular for its surrealistic imagery, influenced by artists as diverse as French poet Arthur Rimbaud and Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini.

The lyrics call on the title character to play a song and the narrator will follow. Interpretations of the lyrics have included a paean to drugs such as LSD, a call to the singer’s muse, a reflection of the audience’s demands on the singer, and religious interpretations.

Dylan’s song has four verses, of which The Byrds only used the second for their recording. Dylan’s and The Byrds’ versions have appeared on various lists ranking the greatest songs of all time, including an appearance by both on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 best songs ever. Both versions also received Grammy Hall of Fame Awards.

Dylan began writing and composing “Mr. Tambourine Man” in February 1964, after attending Mardi Gras in New Orleans during a cross-country road trip with several friends, and completed it sometime between the middle of March and late April of that year after he had returned to New York.

Nigel Williamson has suggested in The Rough Guide to Bob Dylan that the influence of Mardi Gras can be heard in the swirling and fanciful imagery of the song’s lyrics. Journalist Al Aronowitz has claimed that Dylan completed the song at his home, but folk singer Judy Collins, who later recorded the song, has stated that Dylan completed the song at her home.

While there has been speculation that the song is about drugs such as LSD or marijuana, particularly with lines such as “take me on a trip upon your magic swirling ship” and “the smoke rings of my mind”, Dylan has always denied the song is about drugs. Though he was using marijuana at the time the song was written, Dylan was not introduced to LSD until a few months later.

Other commentators have interpreted the song as a call to the singer’s spirit or muse, or the singer’s search for transcendence. In particular, biographer John Hinchey has suggested in his book Like a Complete Unknown that the singer is praying to his muse for inspiration; Hinchey notes that ironically the song itself is evidence the muse has already provided the sought-after inspiration.

Mr. Tambourine Man has also been interpreted as a symbol for Jesus Christ and for the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The song may also reference gospel music, with Mr. Tambourine Man being the bringer of religious salvation.

Dylan has cited the influence of Federico Fellini’s movie La Strada on the song, while other commentators have found echoes of the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud. Author Howard Sounes has identified the lyrics “in the jingle jangle morning I’ll come following you” as having been taken from a Lord Buckley recording.

Bruce Langhorne, who performs guitar on the track, has been cited by Dylan as the inspiration for the tambourine man image in the song. Langhorne used to play a giant, four-inch-deep “tambourine” (actually a Turkish frame drum), and had brought the instrument to a previous Dylan recording session.

Here is his first live performance of the song, in 1964, at the Newport Folk Festival, from before his studio recording of the song:

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Wayne Carson wrote “The Letter”, built on an opening line suggested by his father: “Give me a ticket for an aeroplane”. Carson included the song on a demo tape he gave to Chips Moman, owner of American Sound Studio in Memphis, Tennessee. When studio associate Dan Penn was looking for an opportunity to produce more songs, Moman suggested a local group, the DeVilles, who had a new lead singer, sixteen year-old Alex Chilton. Penn gave the group Carson’s demo tape for some songs to work up. With little or no rehearsal, the group arrived at American Sound to record “The Letter”.

Chilton recalled:

“We set up and started running the tune down … [Dan] adjusted a few things on the organ sound, told the drummer not to do anything at all except the basic rhythm that was called for. No rolls, no nothin’. The bass player was playing pretty hot stuff, so he didn’t mess with what the bass player was doing.”

Penn added:

“The guitar player had the lick right—we copied Wayne’s demo. Then I asked the keyboard player to play an ‘I’m a Believer’ type of thing”. Chilton sang the vocal live while the group was performing; Penn noted: “I coached him [Chilton] a little … told him to say ‘aer-o-plane,’ told him to get a little gruff, and I didn’t have to say anything else to him, he was hookin ’em, a natural singer.”

He later explained,

“[Chilton] picked it up exactly as I had in mind, maybe even better. I hadn’t even paid any attention to how good he sang because I was busy trying to put the band together … I had a bunch of greenhorns who’d never cut a record, including me”.

About thirty takes were required for the basic track. Then Penn had Mike Leach prepare a string and horn arrangement for the song to give it a fuller sound.

Leach recalled:

“My very first string arrangement was ‘The Letter’, and the only reason I did that was because I knew how to write music notation … Nobody else in the group did or I’m sure someone else would have gotten the call.”

Penn also overdubbed the sound of an airplane taking off to the track from a special effects record that had been checked out from the local library. He explained:

“That was a big part of the record … When I finished it up, I played it for Chips [Moman], and he said, “That’s a pretty good little rock & roll record, but you’ve got to take that airplane off it.” I said, “If the record’s going out, it’s going out with the airplane on it”. He said, “Okay, it’s your record.”

The DeVilles were renamed the Box Tops and “The Letter” lasts only 1 minute, 58 seconds.

Hits: 68

“The Loco-Motion” is a 1962 pop song written by American songwriters Gerry Goffin and Carole King. The song is a popular and enduring example of the dance-song genre: much of the lyrics are devoted to a description of the dance itself, usually done as a type of line dance. However, the song came before the dance.

King and Goffin wrote “The Loco-Motion” in hopes to have it recorded by Dee Dee Sharp who had a smash hit with “Mashed Potato Time”. Sharp passed on the song leaving the opportunity open for Eva Boyd who had recorded the demo. Her version was released and her name was changed to Little Eva.

“The Loco-Motion” was the first release by the new Dimension Records company, whose releases were mostly penned and produced by Goffin and King. There are two common versions of the song in circulation; one includes handclaps during the verses, the other has no handclaps. King performed the backup vocals in the recording.

The widely believed story of how the song “The Loco-Motion” came to be is that Carole King was playing music at home and Eva Boyd was doing some chores and started dancing to it; the dance The Loco-Motion was born. However, this is not true. Boyd was actually Carole King’s babysitter, having been introduced to King and husband Gerry Goffin by The Cookies, a local girl group who would also record for the songwriters and they realized she had a good singing voice, so they had her record “The Loco-Motion”. Carole King stated this during an interview on National Public Radio (NPR) shortly after Little Eva died.

As the song came before the dance, there was no dance when the song was originally written. When the song became a smash hit, Eva Boyd ended up having to create a dance to go along with the song. Carole King stated this in her “One to One” concert video. In live performances of the song, Little Eva can be seen doing her version of the dance.

Another bit of the conventional lore is that she had received only $50 for “The Loco-Motion”. However, although she never owned the rights to her recordings, it seems $50 was actually her weekly salary during the years she was making records (an increase of $15 from what Goffin and King had been paying her as nanny). In 1971, she moved to South Carolina and lived in obscurity on menial jobs and welfare, until being rediscovered in 1987. She died of cervical cancer in 2003.

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The song originates in a domestic event that took place while Graham Nash was living with Joni Mitchell (and her two cats) in her house on Laurel Canyon (Los Angeles), after they had gone out for breakfast and had bought an inexpensive vase on Ventura Boulevard. Nash wrote the song in an hour, on Mitchell’s piano.

In October 2013, Nash elaborated:

“Well, it’s an ordinary moment. What happened is that Joni [Mitchell] and I – I don’t know whether you know anything about Los Angeles, but on Ventura Boulevard in the Valley, there’s a very famous deli called Art’s Deli. And we’d been to breakfast there.

We’re going to get into Joan’s car, and we pass an antique store. And we’re looking in the window, and she saw a very beautiful vase that she wanted to buy… I persuaded her to buy this vase. It wasn’t very expensive, and we took it home.

It was a very grey, kind of sleety, drizzly L.A. morning. And we got to the house in Laurel Canyon, and I said – got through the front door and I said, you know what? I’ll light a fire. Why don’t you put some flowers in that vase that you just bought?

Well, she was in the garden getting flowers. That meant she was not at her piano, but I was… And an hour later ‘Our House’ was born, out of an incredibly ordinary moment that many, many people have experienced”.

In the same interview, Nash was asked about the harmonies in the song:

“It’s me and David [Crosby] and Stephen [Stills] doing our best. That’s all we ever do. You know, we’re lucky enough to be able to do, you know, anything that we want to do, musically. And, you know, these two guys are incredible musicians.

Crosby is one of the most unique musicians I know, and Stephen Stills has got this blues-based, South American kind of feeling to his music. And I’m this, you know, Henry VIII guy from England… You know, it’s not supposed to work, but it does, somehow”

Hits: 44

Paul Williams wrote this with Roger Nichols. Instrumental backing was by L.A. session musicians from the famous Wrecking Crew.

Sometimes song lyrics are written on the fly, and that was the case with a line in this song. Says Williams:

“On ‘Rainy Days And Mondays’ Chuck Kay, who was head of publishing at A&M, said, ‘That’s a perfect song for The 5th Dimension, let’s play it for them.’ They passed on it. I said, ‘Well, there are a couple of lines that aren’t done yet.’ He said, ‘You’ll finish it in the car.’

So in the car going over there, I came up with a fill line, which was ‘What I’ve got they used to call the blues.’ I didn’t have that line done yet, so I wrote it as just a quick fill line, because I wanted to mention the blues, but it was such a hackneyed expression, ‘I’ve got the blues.’ So I just wrote, ‘What I’ve got they used to call the blues.’ And it actually became my favorite line in the song. I think it’s the best line in the song.

I met Johnny Mercer once at A&M Records, and he sat down and I introduced myself, ‘Paul Williams,’ and he shook my hand. And he walked back into the studio where he was mixing, then he stuck his head back out into the hall and he went, ‘Paul Williams, ‘what I’ve got they used to call the blues,’ that Paul Williams?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’

It was funny. It was one of the great moments of my life, to meet Johnny Mercer, who I think was the lyricist’s lyricist.”

Hits: 75

Roy Orbison was writing with his songwriting partner Bill Dees at his house when he told Dees to get started writing by playing anything that came to mind. Orbison’s wife Claudette came in and said she was going to go into town to buy something. Orbison asked if she needed any money, and Dees cracked, “Pretty woman never needs any money.” Inspired, Orbison started singing, “Pretty woman walking down the street.”

Bill Dees recalls:

“He sang it while I was banging my hand down on the table and by the time she returned we had the song. I love the song. From the moment that the rhythm started, I could hear the heels clicking on the pavement, click, click, the pretty woman walking down the street, in a yellow skirt and red shoes.

We wrote Oh Pretty Woman on a Friday, the next Friday we recorded it, and the next Friday it was out. It was the fastest thing I ever saw. Actually, the yeah, yeah, yeah in Oh Pretty Woman probably came from The Beatles.”

In the same book Bill Dees recounts how the distinctive growling cry of “Mercy” came about: “I can’t do that growl like Roy, but the “Mercy” is mine. I used to say that all the time when I saw a pretty woman or had some good food. Still do.”

Orbison and his wife Claudette had recently reconciled after some tough times, but as this song was climbing the charts, Roy found out she had been cheating on him and filed for divorce. In 1966, they remarried, but two months later Claudette was killed when the motorcycle she was riding was hit by a truck. Orbison faced tragedy again when his two oldest sons died in a fire at his home in 1968. He was on tour at the time.

Orbison posthumously won the 1991 Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for his live recording of “Pretty Woman” on his HBO television special Roy Orbison and Friends, A Black and White Night. In 1999, the song was honored with a Grammy Hall of Fame Award and was named one of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked it #224 on their list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” On May 14, 2008, The Library of Congress selected the song for preservation in the National Recording Registry.

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In 2011, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Dylan’s version of the song at #232 in their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

In the album notes of his 1985 compilation, Biograph, Dylan claimed that he wrote the lyrics of this song in Kansas City on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1965, while on tour. However, after listening to the recording session tapes of Dylan at work on this song in the Nashville studio, historian Sean Wilentz has written that Dylan improvised the lyrics in the studio, by singing “disconnected lines and semi-gibberish”.

Dylan was initially unsure what the person described in the song does that is just like a woman, rejecting “shakes”, “wakes”, and “makes mistakes”. The improvisational spirit extends to the band attempting, in their fourth take, a “weird, double-time version”, somewhere between Jamaican ska and Bo Diddley.

Clinton Heylin has analysed successive drafts of the song from the so-called Blonde On Blonde papers, papers that Heylin believes were either left behind by Dylan or stolen from his Nashville hotel room. The first draft has a complete first verse, a single couplet from the second verse, and another couplet from the third verse. There is no trace of the chorus of the song. In successive drafts, Dylan added sporadic lines to these verses, without ever writing out the chorus.

This leads Heylin to speculate that Dylan was writing the words while Al Kooper played the tune over and over on the piano in the hotel room, and the chorus was a “last-minute formulation in the studio”. Kooper has explained that he would play piano for Dylan in his hotel room, to aid the song-writing process, and then would teach the tunes to the studio musicians at the recording sessions.

The song features a lilting melody, backed by delicately picked nylon-string guitar and piano instrumentation, resulting in arguably the most commercial track on the album.

The musicians backing Dylan on the track include Charlie McCoy, Joseph A. Souter Jr., and Wayne Moss on guitar, Henry Strzelecki on bass, Hargus “Pig” Robbins on piano, Al Kooper on organ and Kenny Buttrey on drums. Although Dylan’s regular guitar sideman, Robbie Robertson, was present at the recording session, he did not play on the song.

This exploration of female wiles and feminine vulnerability was widely rumored—”not least by her acquaintances among Andy Warhol’s Factory retinue”—to be about Edie Sedgwick. The reference to Baby’s penchant for “fog, amphetamine and pearls” suggests Sedgwick or some similar debutante, according to Heylin. “

Just Like a Woman” has also been rumored to have been written about Dylan’s relationship with fellow folk singer Joan Baez. In particular, it has been suggested that the lines “Please don’t let on that you knew me when/I was hungry and it was your world” may refer to the early days of their relationship, when Baez was more famous than Dylan.

Discussing whether the biographical basis of this song is important, literary critic Christopher Ricks has argued, “Everyone can understand the feelings and the relationship described in the song, so why does it matter if Dylan wrote it with one woman in mind?”

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“Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)” was written by Bob Dylan and first recorded during The Basement Tapes sessions in 1967.

The song was recorded in December 1967 and first released in January 1968 as the “Mighty Quinn” by Manfred Mann. There are a lot of folk legends about where the inspiration came from:

It is possible that Dylan came up with the idea for this after seeing the 1959 Nicholas Ray movie called The Savage Innocents. In that movie, Anthony Quinn played an Eskimo named Inuk.

The Grateful Dead occasionally played this at their shows. Here’s one story that circulated about the song: The Grateful Dead years ago had a wild LSD party in a New York City hotel during a tour visit. Allegedly, one of the party guests was Bob Dylan. One of the other guests at the hotel didn’t appreciate the noise and voiced several complaints.

It was actor Anthony Quinn who’d played an Eskimo in The Savage Innocents. That could have inspired a partying Dylan to write a strange and funny song like this.

One theory is that “The Mighty Quinn” is Sheriff Larry Quinlan, who raided the Castillia Foundation land in Millbrook, New York and arrested Dr. Timothy Leary and his group of hippies. Quinlan confiscated all the LSD and other drugs at the scene. In this scenario, the “pigeons” are informers.

Mike D’Abo of Manfred Mann:

“We met in a publisher’s house as Bob Dylan was making some new material available to other artists. We heard about 10 songs and I thought ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’ would be the one to do, but Manfred liked The Mighty Quinn, which was called ‘Quinn The Eskimo’ then.

It was sung in a rambling monotone but Manfred had recognized its potential. He sold me on the idea of doing this song, but I had to make up some of the words as I couldn’t make out everything he was saying. It was like learning a song phonetically in a foreign language. I have never had the first idea what the song is about except that it seems to be ‘Hey, gang, gather round, something exciting is going to happen ’cause the big man’s coming.’ As to who the big man is and why he is an Eskimo, I don’t know.”

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