James Taylor is not singing about himself in this song, but about the child who was named in his honor. Taylor wrote the song in 1969, when he drove on his way to Richmond, Virginia to see his older brother, the late Alex Taylor. James had recently returned to America after recording his first album in England, and he was shocked to learn that Alex had become a father for the first time in his absence.

Alex and his wife, Brent Taylor, had given birth to their first child, a baby son, which Brent wanted to name Richmond, after the city in which he was born. However, Alex wanted to name the child James, after his younger brother. So after a few arguments, the couple named the boy James Richmond Taylor. James was elated to discover that he had a new baby nephew, also named James. So the title can be a little confusing, since both the singer and his nephew are named James. The singer is James Vernon Taylor, while his nephew is James Richmond Taylor.

There are some ways this song associates with its writer. As a young child, James Taylor, along with his siblings, often sang each other to sleep at night. The story goes that James couldn’t stand it when his mother sang, because she only sang opera. And because James’ mother was a lyric soprano, she never sang lullabies. James’ father never sang lullabies either, because he didn’t exactly have the knack for music. So when he was a little boy, the young James Taylor was often put in the position of having to sing himself to sleep each night, hence the line, “Singin’ works just fine for me.”

Speaking with Rolling Stone in 2015, Taylor said this was his best song. “It starts as a lullaby, then the second half of the song – ‘the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston’ – talks about what music means to me. It gets pretty spiritual by the end.”

Taylor spent considerable effort on the lyrics, whose verses he later said used the most intricate rhyming pattern of his career. One of the most famous parts of the lyric is:

Now the First of December was covered with snow
And so was the Turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston
Lord, the Berkshires seemed dream-like on account of that frostin’ With ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go

Hits: 78

“Born Under a Bad Sign” was recorded by American blues singer and guitarist Albert King in 1967. Called “a timeless staple of the blues”, the song also had strong crossover appeal to the rock audience with its bass and guitar harmony line and topical astrology reference. “Born Under a Bad Sign” became an R&B chart hit for King and numerous blues and other musicians have made it perhaps the most recorded Albert King song.

When Albert King signed with Stax Records in Memphis, Booker T. Jones, who was a member of the Stax house band Booker T. & The MGs, was assigned his producer. In an interview Jones explained: “At that time, my writing partner was William Bell. He came over to my house the night before the session. William wrote the words and I wrote the music in my den that night. That was one of my greatest moments in the studio as far as being thrilled with a piece of music. The feeling of it, it’s the real blues done by the real people. It was Albert King from East St. Louis, the left-handed guitar player who was just one of a kind and so electric and so intense and so serious about his music. He just lost himself in the music. He’s such a one of a kind character. I was there in the middle of it and it was exhilarating.”

Bell recalled, “We needed a blues song for Albert King … I had this idea in the back of my mind that I was gonna do myself. Astrology and all that stuff was pretty big then. I got this idea that [it] might work.” The lyrics describe “hard luck and trouble” tempered by “wine and women”, with wordplay in the chorus in the turnaround:

Born under a bad sign, been down since I began to crawl
If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all

Similar lyrics are found in Lightnin’ Slim’s 1954 swamp blues song “Bad Luck Blues”:

Lord if it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all
You know bad luck has been followin’ poor Lightnin’, ever since I began to crawl
Now folks I was born in the last month of the year

Albert King was a huge influence on so many artists over the years, including Stevie Ray Vaughan. In late 1983, Albert and SRV played and taped a television special called “In Session” and “Born Under A Bad Sign” was one these two legends graced us with on an extended version.

In 1988, Albert King’s “Born Under a Bad Sign” was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame and he himself was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in May 2013. Writing for the Blues Foundation, Jim O’Neal called it “one of the signature hits of Albert King that started to win the left-handed string-bender a crossover following in 1967, as he began to break out of the chittlin circuit to invade rock venues like the Fillmore”. King’s song is also included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s list of the “500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll”. In 2011, he was ranked number 13 on Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.

King’s health problems led him to consider retirement in the 1980s, but he continued regular tours and appearances at blues festivals, using a customized Greyhound tour bus with “I’ll Play The Blues For You” painted on the side. King died of a heart attack on December 21, 1992, in his Memphis home. His final concert had been in Los Angeles two days earlier. He was given a funeral procession with the Memphis Horns playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” and was buried in Paradise Gardens Cemetery in Edmondson, Arkansas, near his childhood home. B.B. King delivered a eulogy, stating, “Albert wasn’t my brother in blood, but he was my brother in blues.”

Cream recorded “Born Under a Bad Sign” for their third album, Wheels of Fire. The group’s record company, which also distributed Stax records, requested that they record it, according to guitarist Eric Clapton. Cream’s rendition follows Albert King’s, except for bassist and singer Jack Bruce combining two verses into “I’ve been down ever since I was ten” and an extended guitar solo by Clapton. Clapton idolized American Blues artists and often performed their songs. It marked a change of guitar style for Clapton, who adopted a harder, attacking style on this song in place of the sweeter, sustaining notes he called “woman tone,” which were more apparent on Cream’s first two albums.
Cream played this when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on January 12, 1993 in tribute to Albert King, who died the previous year.

Hits: 165

“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