While on tour with the Bar-Kays in August 1967, Redding wrote the first verse of the song, under the abbreviated title “Dock of the Bay,” on rock impresario Bill Graham’s houseboat at Waldo Point in Sausalito, California. He had completed his famed performance at the Monterey Pop Festival just weeks earlier. While touring he continued to scribble lines of the song on napkins and hotel paper. In November of that year, he joined Steve Cropper, producer  and guitarist for Booker T. & the M.G.’s (Stax’s house band), at the Stax recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee, to record the song.

In a September 1990 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, Cropper explained the origins of the song:

Otis was one of those the kind of guy who had 100 ideas. […] He had been in San Francisco doing The Fillmore. And the story that I got he was renting boathouse or stayed at a boathouse or something and that’s where he got the idea of the ships coming in the bay there. And that’s about all he had: “I watch the ships come in and I watch them roll away again.” I just took that… and I finished the lyrics. If you listen to the songs I collaborated with Otis, most of the lyrics are about him. […] Otis didn’t really write about himself but I did. “Dock of the Bay” was exactly that: “I left my home in Georgia, headed for the Frisco Bay” was all about him going out to San Francisco to perform.

When Redding first sang Steve Cropper the lines “Watching the ships roll in/And then I watch ’em roll away again,” Cropper says he “always envisioned a ship going under the Golden Gate Bridge.”

“Me being a purist kind of guy I said, ‘Otis, did you ever think that if a ship rolls it’s going to take on water and sink,’” Cropper recalls, “and he said about the lyric, ‘Hell, Crop, that’s what I want,’ and Otis always got his way.”

Actually, the Golden Gate Bridge isn’t even visible from where Redding was, but Cropper never saw that spot until years later when he was on tour with Robert Cray; he got a bite to eat overlooking the water and saw ferries going back and forth and realized that “when a ferry goes to park it pushes up a big wake and comes in sideways and looks like it is rolling in. So a ferry was a ship in his mind.”

Together, they completed the music and melancholy lyrics of “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.” From those sessions emerged Redding’s final recorded work, including “Dock of the Bay”. Redding’s restrained yet emotive delivery is backed by Cropper’s memorably succinct guitar playing. The song is somewhat different in style from most of Redding’s other recordings.

While discussing the song with his wife, Redding stated that he had wanted to “be a little different” with “The Dock of the Bay” and “change his style”. There were concerns that “The Dock of the Bay” had too much of a pop feel for an Otis Redding record, and contracting the Stax gospel act the Staple Singers to record backing vocals was discussed but never carried out.

Redding had considered the song to be unfinished and planned to record what he considered a final version, but never got the chance. On December 10, his charter plane crashed into Lake Monona, outside Madison, Wisconsin. Redding and six others were killed.

The song features a whistled tune heard before the song’s fade. It was originally performed by Redding, who (according to Cropper) had “this little fadeout rap he was gonna do, an ad-lib. He forgot what it was so he started whistling.

Later, a rumor began swirling that Redding’s whistling wasn’t good enough and that Cropper used musician Sam “Bluzman” Taylor to dub in a stronger take. Cropper vehemently denies that. “I don’t even know where that story came from,” he says.

The whistling has been the subject of much debate. Cropper says that he always left space at the end of a song for Redding to add extra vocals, frequently ad-libbed on the spot. On this day, Cropper says, Redding simply forgot what he wanted to sing and whistled instead, merely as a placeholder to be fixed at a later date. “That was no placeholder,” says producer Al Bell. “That was Otis – the very essence coming out of him.”

At the end of the first take, Redding started whistling, poorly enough that engineer Ron Capone joked that he wasn’t “going to make it as a whistler.” Redding nailed it on the third take. “If he had come back that Monday, it would definitely have been different,” Cropper says.

While Redding and Cropper planned more work on the song, the fact that Redding whistled on all three takes gave many the impression that this was an intentional touch that perfectly suited the song’s mood.

After Redding’s death, Cropper mixed “Dock of the Bay” at Stax Studios. He added the sound of seagulls and waves crashing to the background, as Redding had requested, recalling the sounds he heard when he was staying on the houseboat. Cropper says he hadn’t yet even conceived of adding the sound of birds and waves that now feel so intrinsic to the song. Instead, he says, he and Redding felt the track was missing some special something and had a plan to give “Dock of the Bay” a more traditional soul feel. Cropper suggested background vocals and told Redding that the Staple Singers were coming in shortly, adding that “I know if I asked them they’d be more than happy to sing on the song. Otis said it was a great idea. He planned on being there.” There was no time for background vocals but Cropper knew the song “really needed something.”

“One of the hardest things I ever had to do was mix that song”. “I got to thinking about Otis clowning around on some of the outtakes. He was trying to make seagull sounds but he sounded like a dying crow.”

As homage to his friend and partner, Cropper went to a local jingle company and recorded an extended loop of seagulls and ocean waves on separate tracks. He then used trial-and-error to figure out where to bring the sounds up in the song.

“I stayed up 24 hours mixing the song. The next morning I went out to the airport, went out on the tarmac and a stewardess came down to the bottom of the steps and I handed her that master,” Cropper recalls. The tape was flown to New York and disc jockeys had preview copies in their hands by Christmas.

In 1999, BMI named the song as the sixth-most performed song of the twentieth century, with about six million performances.  “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” was ranked twenty-eighth on Rolling Stone‘s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, the second-highest of four Redding songs on the list.

Hits: 70

I distinctly remember one Saturday watching American Bandstand when Dick Clark introduced the new hit “Magic Carpet Ride” by Steppenwolf with “a short movie to go along with it”. It was one of the first “music videos” broadcast on national TV. Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild” tour was the second concert I went to, January 31, 1969. Ticket price was $4.50. I can still remember Goldie McJohn with his huge afro rockin’ his Lowery organ. Here is an interview from American Bandstand:

The group wrote this based on the bass line their bass player, Rushton Moreve, came up with. The only words he had written for it were, “I like my job, I like my baby.” Lead singer John Kay wrote the rest of the lyrics.

Months earlier, as royalties from the success of our first album started to come in, Jutta [his girlfriend] and I replaced our lousy stereo with a top-notch system from a high-end audio store in Beverly Hills. As soon as I put in the cassette and heard the electronic sound effects in the opening, the song’s lyrics popped into my head: “I like to dream/ Yes-yes, right between my sound machine/ On a cloud of sound, I drift in the night/ Any place it goes is right.”

In an interview, Kay disputed a common rumor about the song:

I didn’t drop acid before writing the lyrics, as many people later assumed. And the lyrics weren’t about an acid trip. I may have smoked a joint that night, but that was it. Since birth, I’ve had achromatopsia—complete color blindness. If I had dropped acid, I would have been hallucinating in vivid black and white. I doubt that would have helped me or the song much.

The single version differs noticeably from the album version with a different vocal take by Kay used for the first verse of the song and differing instrumental balances, most notably the introduction feedback. The single version is also much shorter than the album version, with a running time of 2 minutes and 55 seconds. (The album version is 4 minutes and 25 seconds long.)

In the interview, Kay and guitarist Michael Monarch discussed the making of the song:

Kay: One day, Jerry’s brother Dennis, who had changed his name to Mars Bonfire, came in to show us a new song he had written. At some point, Rushton started playing this bouncy riff on his bass that he had played during sound checks on our first tour. Mars liked the riff and started playing chords against it on his Fender Jazzmaster guitar.

The guys in the booth went nuts. They came on the speaker and said, “Hey, keep doing that. That’s really good.” So we kept at it. But all we had was this cool riff. Mars suggested we add an instrumental interlude. He played these chords that led into the jam, for which I later wrote the lyrics, “Close your eyes girl/ Look inside girl/ Let the sound take you away.”

Michael, our lead guitarist, loved thick distorted guitar notes and had a Fuzz Face guitar-effects pedal. I said to Michael, “Let’s go into the studio—you do your feedback routine, the really nasty, growly animal, monster sounds. Whenever I hear something approaching a note, I’ll contrast that with a high-pitched single note slide on my guitar.”

Michael Monarch: I cranked my Fender Concert amp full open. Then I took my Fender Esquire and leaned into the amp, to overload it and create midrange-to-bottom feedback. I was being real physical with the instrument, bending notes and hitting the strings hard with the bottom of my fist so the strings would touch the pickup underneath.

Normally, they never touch, so when they did, it made a chugging sound, like a space ship landing. I gave the guys in the booth about 30 seconds of that. Then they asked me to do it all again. I did, but it came out different, of course. What you hear on the record’s opening are the two takes I recorded overlapping.

The first part is my distortion and bending the guitar strings while playing. The second part is me hitting the strings rapidly against the pickup to get that chugging sound before John’s vocal comes in and the song starts.

The full interview can be read here.

John Kay (born Joachim Fritz Krauledat) was born 12 April 1944 in Tilsit, East Prussia, Germany, now Sovetsk, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia. His father Fritz was killed a month before he was born. When Kay was a baby in early 1945, his mother fled with him from the advancing Soviet troops during the Evacuation of East Prussia in harsh winter conditions. What a way to start a life.

In 1948, when I was 4, my mother and I escaped from East Germany. We eventually made our way to Toronto in 1958, where I listened to rock ’n’ roll on the radio and began playing guitar. When I was 20, I moved to Los Angeles, and from 1964 to ’65 played folk-blues guitar at coffee houses. I played my way back to Toronto in 1965 and joined a rock group called the Sparrows.

Hits: 48

“Hush” was written by American composer and musician Joe South, for recording artist Billy Joe Royal.

The chorus begins “Hush, hush, I thought I heard her calling my name”, which is a takeoff from the traditional gospel song lyrics “Hush, hush, somebody’s calling my name”. Session musician Barry Bailey, who later became the lead guitarist for the Atlanta Rhythm Section, plays guitar on the track.

The song was subsequently recorded by Deep Purple for their 1968 debut album “Shades of Deep Purple”.

Originally named “The Roundabout” (a “supergroup” where the band members would get on and off, like a musical roundabout), the start of the group who would later rename to Deep Purple, from Ritchie Blackmore suggesting a new name: “Deep Purple”, named after his grandmother’s favourite song (written by pianist Peter DeRose in 1933 as a piano composition.) The Deep Purple version was included on their first album and recorded with the band’s original lineup – Ian Paice, Jon Lord, Ritchie Blackmore, Nick Simper, Rod Evans.  Shortly after the successful release of this song, Deep Purple was booked to support Cream on their Goodbye tour.

In December 2015, the band were announced as 2016 inductees into the Hall of Fame, with the Hall stating: “Deep Purple’s non-inclusion in the Hall is a gaping hole which must now be filled”, adding that along with fellow inductees Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, the band make up “the Holy Trinity of hard rock and metal bands.” The band was officially inducted on 8 April 2016.

Hits: 90

Written and produced by The Miracles members Smokey Robinson and Ronald White, the song became the Temptations’ first U.S. number-one single, and is today their signature song. Robinson’s inspiration for writing this song was his wife, Miracles member Claudette Rogers Robinson (they were wed from 1957-1986), but Smokey said that the song is not about a specific girl, but “written with all the women in the world in mind”. It was also a response to Mary Wells song, which he wrote and produced, “My Guy”.

This was written in the Apollo Theater when The Temptations were playing as part of a package tour with The Miracles. According to Robinson, he was working out the song on a piano at the theater when his bandmate Ronald White joined him and they hashed out the song. When The Temptations heard it, they convinced Robinson to let them record it instead of The Miracles. Robinson, who was Berry Gordy’s right-hand man at Motown agreed, and rehearsed the song with The Temptations over the next week. When they returned to Detroit, Robinson and White produced the session on December 21, 1964 when they recorded this song.

In a 2006 NPR interview, Robinson explained that he wrote this with David Ruffin’s voice in mind. It was the first Temptations single to feature Ruffin on lead vocals (Eddie Kendricks and Paul Williams sang lead on previous Temptations singles), and it led to a greater role for Ruffin, as he became their primary lead singer. Ruffin had joined the group as a replacement for former Temptation Elbridge Bryant. While on tour as part of the Motortown Revue, a collective tour for most of the Motown roster, Smokey Robinson caught the Temptations’ part of the show. The group had included a medley of soul standards in the show, one of which, the Drifters’ “Under the Boardwalk”, was a solo spot for Ruffin.

Impressed, Robinson decided to produce a single with Ruffin singing lead. Robinson saw Ruffin as a “sleeping giant” in the group with a unique voice that was “mellow” yet “gruff”. Robinson thought that if he could write just the perfect song for Ruffin’s voice, then he could have a smash hit. The song was to be something that Ruffin could “belt out” yet something that was also “melodic and sweet”.

Robinson went on to write many more hits for The Temptations, who were considered the most talented vocal group at Motown. Members of the Motown house band The Funk Brothers played on the track. The song has a very simple but effective arrangement, which was charted by Paul Riser. It opens with James Jamerson’s bassline, then goes into the ascending guitar figure played by the song’s writer/producer Ronald White. Finger snaps come in, then drums played by Benny Benjamin and strings provided by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

The arrangement accentuates the vocals, making the words very easy to understand. This served as a template for future Temptations recordings and helped make them stars, as attention was always focused on stage on the singers.

Hits: 33

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

This is REQUIRED listening for any father, particularly new fathers.

The song’s lyrics began as a poem written by Harry’s wife, Sandra “Sandy” Gaston; the poem itself was inspired by the awkward relationship between her first husband, James Cashmore, and his father, John, a politician who served as Brooklyn Borough President. She was also inspired by a country music song she had heard on the radio:

Whenever I was on a long drive I would listen to country music, because words would keep me awake more than just music. And I heard a song… I can remember the story, but I don’t remember who sang it or what the title was, but an old couple were sitting at their breakfast table and looking out the window, and they saw the rusted swing and the sandbox, and they were reminiscing about the good old days when all the children were around and then the grandchildren, and how it passed, and now it’s all gone.

The other part of the idea – this is always a problem, because Harry introduced the song at all his concerts and said, ‘This is a song my wife wrote to zap me because I wasn’t home when our son Josh was born.’ I was always kind of amused by that because of the fact that we learn life’s lessons too late. We don’t learn lessons before the fact. We don’t have a child born and then have all this wisdom. So I always thought it was interesting the way he told the story. But I learned the story because my [first] husband was going to New York to be a lawyer, and I had a teaching job in New York. While we were apartment hunting, we were living with his parents in Brooklyn. His father was the borough president of Brooklyn at the time, which I think was a much more important job than it is today. But every day when he got home from work, he would start talking to his son about, ‘It’d be great if you’d go down to the club on Tuesday night, I’d like to introduce you to some of the people I know,’ and so forth. And he started trying to engineer a career for him which leads to politics. They did not have any relationship or communication because they had been so busy until his son went off to college and was gone. I don’t remember exactly how, but he started talking to me. My father-in-law would say me, even though we were all in the same room, ‘Tell Jimmy I would like to see him down at the clubhouse on Tuesday.’ It was really very strange.

So this is the way the evenings went. The conversation was going through me. So I realized what had happened. You know, relationships and characters and personalities and all those things are formed by two, so I realized that that hadn’t happened. And it was very jerky at that stage. So I observed something that gave me the idea for the song.”

It took the birth of his son for Harry Chapin to decide to turn the poem his wife wrote into a song. Sandy Chapin explained in an interview: “Harry and I would exchange writing of all kinds. We were always working on each other’s writing. Some of my writing at a certain period were 20-page papers for a doctoral program at Columbia. So it wasn’t always that poetic. But we both looked at each other’s stuff. And then one time he came home and he said, ‘What have you been doing?’ I showed him ‘Cat’s In The Cradle,’ and he said, ‘Well, that’s interesting.’ You know, sometimes he’d pick up something and put music to it. And that didn’t really grab him at all. And then after Josh was born, it did. He picked it up and he wrote music to it.”

Harry also said the song was about his own relationship with his son, Josh, admitting, “Frankly, this song scares me to death.”

Hits: 56

“In My Room” is a song written by Brian Wilson and Gary Usher. “In My Room” was ranked number 212 on Rolling Stone’s list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

Gary Usher explained that

‘In My Room’ found us taking our craft a little more seriously. Brian and I came back to the house one night after playing ‘over-the-line’ (a baseball game). I played bass and Brian was on organ. The song was written in an hour… Brian’s melody all the way. The sensitivity… the concept meant a lot to him. When we finished, it was late, after our midnight curfew. In fact, Murry [the Wilson brothers’ father] came in a couple of times and wanted me to leave. Anyway, we got Audree [the Wilson brothers’ mother], who was putting her hair up before bed, and we played it for her. She said, ‘That’s the most beautiful song you’ve ever written.’ Murry said, ‘Not bad, Usher, not bad,’ which was the nicest thing he ever said to me.”

Gary Usher (who co-wrote the lyrics with Brian Wilson) further describes that “Brian was always saying that his room was his whole world.” Brian seconds this opinion:

I had a room, and I thought of it as my kingdom. And I wrote that song, very definitely, that you’re not afraid when you’re in your room. It’s absolutely true.” In 1990, Brian wrote, “I also enjoyed producing ‘In My Room’. There is a story behind this song. When Dennis, Carl and I lived in Hawthorne as kids, we all slept in the same room. One night I sang the song ‘Ivory Tower’ to them and they liked it. Then a couple of weeks later, I proceeded to teach them both how to sing the harmony parts to it. It took them a little while, but they finally learned it. We then sang this song night after night. It brought peace to us. When we recorded ‘In My Room’, there was just Dennis, Carl and me on the first verse…and we sounded just like we did in our bedroom all those nights. This story has more meaning than ever since Dennis’ death.”

Hits: 81

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