Chart position: #1 R&B (for 7 weeks)
Category: R&B
Writer: Lloyd Price
Label and number: Specialty 428, Los Angeles
Flipside: "Mailman Blues"
When and where recorded: March 13,1952, in New Orleans
When released: Mid-April 1952
Why important: It was the earliest New Orleans hit to be adopted into
rock 'n' roll.
Influenced by: Champion Jack Dupree's "Junket Blues" (1941), Andy Kirk's
"Hey Lawdy Mama" (#4 R&B, 1943)
Influenced: Internal rhyme-titled songs such as "Money Honey" by the
Drifters (#1 R&B, 1953), "Mercy, Mr. Percy" by Varetta Dillard (#6 R&B,
1953), "Lovey Dovey" by the Clovers (#2 R&B,1954), "Promise, Mr. Thomas"
by Varetta Dillard (1955), "Dizzie Miss Lizzie" by Larry Williams (1958) and
"Good Golly, Miss Molly" by Little Richard (#10 Pop, 1958)
Important remakes: Elvis Presley (Elvis Presley #1 Pop, 1956), Gary Stites
(#47 Pop, 1960), the Buckinghams (#41 Pop, 1967), Mickey Gilley (#3 C&W,
1976)
The story behind the record: When the West Coast blues began to dry up
in the early 1950s, Specialty Records president Art Rupe flew from Los Angeles
to New Orleans to "find another Fats Domino" for his company. After a local
black disk jockey announced that Rupe was auditioning talent at J&M Studio
on North Rampart Street, a parade of R&B musicians and singers showed up,
but to Rupe "they all sounded very amateurish and quite poor." It looked like
he would have to return to Los Angeles empty-handed.
The last one to audition, a seventeen-year-old singer named Lloyd Price, seemed as bad as or worse than the others. "He was rehearsing and rehearsing and chewing up the clock," Rupe told musicologist Ian Whitcomb, "and I finally said to him, 'Look, kid, if you don't get yourself together I'm splitting.' The kid literally began to cry and so I said, 'Okay, I'll listen to it,' and he sang 'Lawdy Miss Clawdy.' And the kid got to me the way he did it, it was very emotional, and I canceled my plane trip [back to L.A.]."
Since Price didn't have his own musicians, Rupe hired Dave Bartholomew's band, which included pianist Fats Domino, to arrange and straighten up Price's rambling eight-bar blues and accompany him on the session. So, in the end, Rupe got not only another Fats Domino, but Fats's band (which gave the song its New Orleans quasi-shuffle) and Fats himself. For good measure, he even got a new variation on the melody of the New Orleans standard, "Junket Blues," which had given Fats Domino his own first hit, "The Fat Man," two years earlier.
Lloyd Price remembers a slightly different set of events, without the tears. "Dave Bartholomew . . . happened to be at my mother's place," he told writer Seamus McGarvey, "and he heard me play this thing. He said, 'Listen, do you have any more lyrics, is that a song you're singing?' I says, `Sure.' So he says, 'If you can get that thing together I would like for somebody to hear it.' " Art Aupe liked "Lawdy Miss Clawdy," Price said, but he flew on to New York without recording it. "I forgot all about it. Two months later they called me again, 'Art Rupe's back in town and he wants to record you.' "
On the final recording of "Lawdy Miss Clawdy," as drummer Earl Palmer lays down a heavy backbeat, Fats kicks things off with a few bars of his trademark rolling piano triplets, introducing Price's gravelly vocals: "Oh now lawdy lawdy lawdy, Miss Clawdy, girl you sho' looks good to me, you d- . . . -please don't excite me, baby, no it can't be me. Because I give you all of my money, girl, but you just won't treat me right, you like to ball in the morning and don't come back till late at night."
What was that screw-up at the beginning of the third line? Don't try to figure it out. You'll have to listen to an alternate take of "Lawdy Miss Clawdy," taped just before the released version. On that one, Price begins the song, "Oh now lawdy lawdy 1 awdy, Miss Clawdy, girl, who can your lover be? Well please don't excite me, baby, no it can't be me." Apparently Price momentarily got confused on the next take of "Lawdy Miss Clawdy," but in those days feeling took precedent over lyrical smoothness. Specialty released the take with the flubbed line, and nobody seemed to notice.
Price was working at the airport after school when his brother called to tell him he'd just heard him on the radio. "What was I singing?" Lloyd asked. He quickly found out for himself that he was singing "Lawdy Miss Clawdy." "It didn't sound like me, 'cause I didn't know what I sounded like. But then the Dew Drop Inn [a major black club in New Orleans] called. They wanted to hire me for $50 a night"-which was twice as much as his weekly salary at the airport.
"Lawdy Miss Clawdy" became the biggest R&B hit of the year (it was on the charts for six months), earned Price the Cash Box award for Best New R&B Singer of 1952 and sold almost a million copies by crossing over into the white record-buying market to become a repertoire staple of local country bands. "The record had no barriers," Price said. "Everybody bought it." For a time, every new R&B song coming out of New Orleans sounded suspiciously like "Lawdy Miss Clawdy."
Lloyd Price was born March 9,1935, in the New Orleans suburb of Kenner. As a boy he trained on the trumpet and piano. In high school he formed a combo called the Blueboys who guested regularly on the city's most popular R&B radio show, hosted by disk jockey James "Okie Dokie" Smith. Smith had a phrase he used all the time-"Lawdy Miss Clawdy"-to show his pleasure for a hot new record. He also used it during commercials, which in those days were mostly delivered by the deejays themselves. "Lawdy Miss Clawdy, drink Maxwell House coffee and eat Mother's homemade pies," he'd say, plugging two clients at the same time. Lawdy, of course, was a Southern pronunciation of the expletive "Lordy!" "I sorta liked that saying, Lawdy Miss Clawdy," Price told writer Dave Booth. "And during our generation we just sorta used that when we were talking about girls."
Lawdy had been around on wax for years. Back in 1929 Blind Teddy Darby recorded "Lawdy Lawdy Blues." The expression popped up in a hit song in 1943, when Andy Kirk and his band recorded "Hey Lawdy Mama." Roy Milton cut the song a year later. Even Clawdy, most likely a diminutive of Claudine or Claudia, had a past-Jimmy Witherspoon recorded "Miss Clawdy B." in 1950.
Lloyd Price's follow-up record, "Oooh Oooh Oooh," recorded at the same March session, also became a hit, though a much smaller one (number four R&B) that probably rode "Clawdy" 's coat tails. But none of his subsequent recordings matched the power of the debut, and to make matters worse, the army drafted Price in 1953 and shipped him off to the Far East, giving new meaning to his "Clawdy" flipside, "Mailman Blues," which had originally been called "Korea Boogie"-"Oh mailman, tell me what you got for me. He said, 'A long letter, brother, we need you across the sea.' " By the time Price returned to Specialty in 1955, he'd been replaced by a new hitmaker named Little Richard, whom Price himself had directed to Art Rupe many months earlier. Little Richard was even recording his hits with the same New Orleans band that Price used. When Lloyd Price's last Specialty single, "Forgive Me, Clawdy," got no mercy from record buyers, he looked like just another has-been.
But Lloyd Price was an enterprising man. He started his own label and recorded a new batch of songs. One
of them, "Just Because"-which Price wrote to the melody of an aria, "Caro Nome," from Giuseppe Verdi's
1851 opera Rigoletto-prompted ABC Paramount to pick up both the record and the singer.
Several major pop hits followed, including a reworking of the old blues standard "Stack-O-Lee" ("Stagger
Lee") and an elaboration on a line in the gospel classic "Wade on the Water" ("Personality"). Now a real showbiz cat with his own jazzy sobriquet-Mr. Personality-Price became a New York entrepreneur, investing in
small record labels and nightclubs.
For a time during his Specialty tenure, Price's keyboard player and valet was Larry Williams, who in some ways took Lloyd Price's place after he left the label. Williams not only covered Price's "Just Because," he even recorded a new version of "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" for an album. But mostly Williams followed Price's example of intemally rhymed titles and came up with several hit songs, including "Dizzie Miss Lizzie" (later recorded by the Beatles) and "Bonie Maronie."
One of Price's boyhood buddies, popular New Orleans singer Tommy Ridgley, said he almost recorded "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" instead of Lloyd. "I'd been singing, I had been making records in those days . . . Lloyd was doing auditions for all these record companies . . . and they all turned him down. Well, he said, 'Man, I'm gonna give you that tune, let you record it.' " But before Ridgley could get a session lined up, Rupe decided to record Lloyd Price. "I was going to do it exactly like he did," said Ridgley about the one that got away. He had to settle for recording "Oh, Lawdy, My Baby" a year later. It put a little change in his pocket.
The world at large discovered "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" in 1956, but without Lloyd Price. The song hitched a ride on the first Elvis Presley album, which stayed at the top of the album charts for ten weeks.
Because Price, on his 1958-59 ABC Paramount hits, was backed up by a call-and-response female chorus, Specialty tried to fool the public by overdubbing his original recording of "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" with female singers and reissuing it both as a single and as the title track on a 1959 album, Lawdy Miss Clawdy. This "remake" did not sell, and time has only made it an embarrassment.