Chart position: #1 R&B
Category: R&B, jump blues
Writer: Roy Brown
Label and number: King 4210, Cincinnati
Flipside: "Good Morning Mr. Blues"
When and where recorded: December 28, 1947, in Cincinnati
When released: February 1948
Why Important: It started a trend of records concerned with "rockin :"
Influenced by: Tommy Dorsey's "(Ah Yes) There's Good Blues Tonight" (#23
Pop, 1946) and Roy Brown's original version of "Good Rockin' Tonight" (#13 R&B,
1948)
Influenced: A spate of "rockin' "hit songs, including Harris's own "All
She Wants
to Do Is Rock" and Etta James's "Good Rockin' Daddy," as well as several records
that used the call "Hoy boy boy" to generate excitement
Important remakes: Wynonie Harris's "Good Mambo Tonight" (1954), Elvis
Presley (his second release on Sun Records in 1954), the Treniers (1956), Pat
Boone (#49 Pop, 1959), James Brown (1967), Robert Plant and the Honeydrippers'
"Good Rockin' at Midnight" (1984)
The story behind the record: "Well, I heard the news, there's good
rockin' tonight!" The war's over, postwar prosperity is here, so I'm rockin'
and having a good time. Everybody's there with me, from Sweet Lorraine and Sioux
City Sue to Sweet Georgia Brown and Caldonia too-the ladies of popular song.
The man who wrote this celebration of nightlife was Roy Brown, a New Orleans blues shouter (born September 10, 1925) who waxed his original version for DeLuxe Records before Wynonie Harris covered it, but Brown's record didn't chart (number thirteen R&B) until a month or so after Harris's cover became a sensation. "I tried to get Wynonie to record it, but he turned me down the first time," Brown said shortly before his death in 1981. "When I needed him to record `Good Rockin' Tonight,' he wouldn't do it. When I didn't need him to record it, he did!"
"Good evening, America, there's good news tonight!"
That's how Gabriel Heatter, broadcasting each night from his home on Long Island, began his coast-to-coast radio program of happy tidings during World War II, when the country looked to newscasters for a few rays of optimism amidst the grim reports from Europe and the South Pacific. It was a familiar salutation, much like Walter Winchell's "Hello, America, and all the ships at sea." In 1946 Sy Oliver, a black trumpeter and singer, was recording with the white Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. That year he wrote and recorded "(Ah Yes) There's Good Blues Tonight," which sold respectably in pop markets. The song, inspired by Heatter's salutation, begins with the call, "Hear ye, hear ye, I've got good news tonight," then announces that "Oh yes, there's good blues tonight, there's groovy blues tonight," and warns that "No gate that's late will rate the latest lick." The song's melody and overall message sound remarkably similar to what Roy Brown would write the following year. When Lucky Millinder covered "There's Good Blues Tonight" for Decca Records, his band laid down a steady handclapping to drive the rhythm, much like the All Stars would later do behind Millinder's former vocalist, Wynonie Harris, on his version of "Good Rockin' Tonight."
But the melody didn't begin with "There's Good Blues Tonight." Sy Oliver had simply lifted it from his own gospel-flavored hit song he'd recorded with Tommy Dorsey in 1941, called "Yes Indeed," and the Lord only knows where Oliver picked that song up. (Ray Charles recorded "Yes Indeed" in 1958.)
Wynonie Harris had three things going for him as he went head-to-head with Roy Brown on "Good Rockin' Tonight." First of all, there was his reputation as a lusty, fun-loving rake. "I deal in sex," he told a reporter for a black magazine in the early '50s. "The straight blues I sing are about men and women, love and hate." Secondly, he had a superb band: backing him were Oran "Hot Lips" Page's sassy trumpet, Hal Singer's raging tenor sax, Joe Knight's rolling piano, Carl "Flat Top" Wilson's thumping bass and an insistent, contagious hand-clapping that kept the song rockin', whereas Brown had to contend with a slower tempo and a band, led by trumpeter Tony Moret, that swung more than it jumped. Thirdly, Wynonie Harris recorded for King Records, one of the most efficient independent companies in the R&B field.
Syd Nathan, who owned King Records, contained the entire process of recording and marketing music in one big warehouse operation on Brewster Street in Cincinnati. He owned the artists and their songs. He owned the studio where they recorded. He manufactured everything from record sleeves and jackets to shipping cartons. He owned his own pressing plant, where he recycled old scrap shellac and vinyl into new records. And he owned his own distribution company. "He didn't want anybody [else] to make a profit on anything he did," said songwriter Jerry Leiber.
Wynonie Harris was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on August 24,1915. A handsome charmer who relied on his instincts, he dropped out of Creighton University to follow his dream of the spotlight. At first he emceed at nightclubs and tap-danced, but soon he began to sing the blues in his distinctive sandpaper rasp. Bandleader Lucius "Lucky" Millinder introduced him on a couple of sides released on Decca Records, including "Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well?" The song sold well enough to prompt Syd Nathan to sign Harris for King Records in late 1947.
Harris idolized Big Joe Turner and considered Turner the only singer better than he was. "Wynonie thought blues was the only music in the world," said alto saxist Preston Love, who played behind him in Millinder's orchestra. Since Big Joe was known as the Boss of the Blues, Harris looked around for another sobriquet. A hit record, "Mr. Blues Is Back in Town," soon gave him one.
Mr. Blues took time off from a steady round of touring and recorded nearly twenty songs during a series of sessions in December 1947 that anticipated a musicians' strike set to begin on the first day of 1948. One of them was "Good Rockin' Tonight." Harris didn't realize that he was about to change musical history. The song originally held no fascination for him.
"That was one of the first songs I ever wrote," said Roy Brown. "At this time I knew nothing about copyrights, records, royalties, etc. I was broke and I wanted eating money. I wrote `Good Rockin' Tonight' on a piece of brown paper bag . . . and I took it to Wynonie Harris at the Dew Drop Inn [in New Orleans]." Harris didn't want to sing it, but during his intermission the band let Roy sit in with them and perform the song. One of the musicians suggested that Brown take the song down the street to another club where pianist Cecil Gant was playing.
Instead of taking the song himself, Gant generously put Brown in touch with Jules Braun, the owner of DeLuxe Records, in Linden, New Jersey. "Cecil called collect and got Mr. Braun out of bed," Brown said. "I took the phone and began to sing." Braun flew to New Orleans that same week and hustled Brown into a local studio. Only when DeLuxe released "Good Rockin' Tonight" and New Orleans disk jockey Poppa Stoppa turned it into a local hit did Wynonie Harris see fit to record the song . . . as a cover.
"Good Rockin' Tonight" kicked off Harris's final December session. Two other songs recorded that day were "Lollipop Mama" and "I Believe I'll Fall in Love." Harris, who had a reputation for drinking and wild fun, probably came to the session with a little lubrication. At times he mumbled Roy Brown's words, twisted them up, sometimes even forgot them.
"Weeeeellll"-Roy bellows the word, holds it for a moment-"I heard the news, there's good rockin' tonight. Well, I'm gonna hold my baby as tight as I can, tonight she'll know I'm a mighty, mighty man, I heard the news, there's good rockin' tonight." The lyrics were straight ahead, and when Harris covered the song he didn't change them much. It isn't until he gets to Brown's "Well, meet me in a hurry behind the barn" that Harris adds a little grit: "Well, meet me in the alley behind the barn!" Later in the song, where Brown sings, "The Deacon Jones and Elder Brown, two of the sleekest cats in town, they'll be there just wait and see, stompin' and a-jumpin' at the jamboree," Harris clearly loses his way for a moment: "Elder Brown . · . [brief confusion] . . . Deacon Jones, they've even left their happy homes . . . "As the song progresses Harris apparently forgets the ending. Vaguely remembering that Roy Brown had sung "Hoy sister, hoy sister, ain't you glad," he simply shouts "Hoy boy boy" over and over to wind up the song. The producer probably thought the performance's raw excitement was more important than anything else-or perhaps he realized he wouldn't get anything better out of Harris that day-so he declared it a "keeper." As it turned out, Harris's dithering with the lyrics didn't matter, because his version rocked much harder than Brown's original. He wasn't just singing about good rockin', he was doing something about it. "I got the news!" he shouts, and means it.
Like everything else about "Good Rockin' Tonight," the "hoy boy hoy" shout spawned its own minor school of music. The word had already been around in black music. "Down, Down, Down," a 1930s song by black composer Don Redman, features the line, "Just send yourself, holler hey! If not, you better say hoy." And in early 1947, several months before "Good Rockin' Tonight," Stick McGhee used a single "hoy" a couple of times to fill a beat in his first version of "Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee." But not until Harris boisterously shouted "Hoy boy hoy" did it become a cry of uninhibited freedom.
In summer 1948, Los Angeles bandleader Roy Milton recorded "Hop, Skip and jump," best remembered for its choruses of "hoy boy hop"; Little Johnny Jones rerecorded it in 1954 as "Hoy Hoy," and in the late '50s a young rockabilly act called the Collins Kids had a small hit with it under that title. When Stick McGhee recorded his top-selling second version of "Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee" in 1949 [see #13], his simple "hoy" from his original became a raucous "hoy hoy hoy!" About that same time, Texas bluesman Goree Carter recorded "Hoy-Hoy." (The word hoy, incidentally, goes back to Middle English, when it was used to call attention or to drive animals. As a nautical term it evolved into ahoy. In recent years boy's cousin, hey, has replaced it in the American vocabulary.)
The popularity of "Good Rockin' Tonight" inspired not just hard-rockin' records but also records about hard rockin': Wild Bill Moore's "Rock and Roll" (based on his earlier "We're Gonna Rock, We're Gonna Roll"), Connie Jordan's "I'm Gonna Rock," "Rock and Roll" by Bill Mathews and the Balladeers, "Rock and Roll Blues" by Erline Harris, and Wynonie Harris's own "All She Wants to Do Is Rock" all followed in "Good Rockin' Tonight" 's wake. Lil Son Jackson, John Lee Hooker and others continued with "Rock and Roll"-with variations on the "and." The ultimate title was "Rock Around the Clock" by saxophonist Hal Singer (1950), which was not the same song recorded in 1953 by Sonny Dae and the Knights. Dae's version, later recorded by Bill Haley, took rockin' to its greatest heights.
Though Roy Brown's original recording came up a distant second to the Wynonie Harris hit, he got a lot of play out of "Good Rockin' Tonight." The following year, when he reworked a couple of words and released almost the same song, retitled "Rockin' at Midnight," it shot to number two on the R&B charts, stirring enough action that when his record company reissued "Good Rockin' Tonight" at the same time, it crept up to number eleven. From then on Roy Brown knew where his bread was buttered. He recorded a slew of songs with "midnight" and "rockin' " in the titles. More than thirty-five years later, ex-Led Zeppelin vocalist Robert Plant recorded a pop hit version of Brown's "Rockin' at Midnight" called "Good Rockin' at Midnight."
Harris couldn't quite give it up, either. During the mambo craze of 1954, he rerecorded "Good Rockin' Tonight" as "Good Mambo Tonight," changing only a couple of words.
Wynonie Harris retired from music in the late '50s to open a cafe in Brooklyn. He died of cancer in Los
Angeles on June 14, 1969. Roy Brown suffered a fatal heart attack in May 1981 in the midst of a comeback.
In 1954 "Good Rockin' Tonight" was Elvis Presley's second release on Sun Records. He followed Roy Brown's version, not Wynonie Harris's, and in many ways Elvis, guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black improved upon the song, updating it. Whereas Brown and Harris emphasized that they had heard the news, Elvis put the word out to his generation: "Have you heard the news, there's good rockin' tonight! Have you heard the news, everybody's rockin' tonight . . . " It was a call to arms. He threw away the song's black, dated references to Elder Brown, Deacon Jones, Caldonia, Sioux City Sue, Sweet Georgia Brown and Sweet Lorraine-all the people rockin' at the jamboree-and replaced them with Wild Bill Moore's simple vamp: "We're gonna rock, rock, rock, yeah, rock!"
Thirty-five years later, ABC-TV featured a prime-time series about Elvis's early days in the Memphis music business. The original title of the show was "Good Rockin' Tonight."