Chart position: #1 R&B, #22 Pop
Category: R&B
Writer: Charles Calhoun (a.k.a. Jesse Stone)
Label and number: Atlantic Records 1026, New York
Flipside: "You Know I Love You"
When recorded: February 15, 1954, in New York City
When released: April 1954
Why Important: The record established Big Joe, whose career stretched
back several decades, as a teen favorite. Its sales also allowed Atlantic Records
to take an active role in shaping rock'n'roll of the'50s and'60s.
Influenced by: Boogie-woogie music, as well as by Turner's own "Honey
Hush"
(#23 Pop, 1953)
Influenced: "Flip, Flop, and Fly" by Big Joe Turner (#2 R&B, 1955),
"Jumps, Giggles, and Shouts" by Gene Vincent (1956), "Hop, Skip and Jump" by
the Collins Kids (1957), dozens of other anthem-style rock 'n' roll tunes
Important cover version: Bill Haley and His Comets (#7 Pop)
Important remakes: Elvis Presley (Elvis Presley, #1 Pop, 1956), Arthur
Conley (#31 Pop, 1967)
The story behind the record: More than any other successful rock 'n'
roll performer, Big Joe Turner covered a huge expanse of black musical history.
He performed at the Spirituals to Swing concert at New York City's Carnegie
Hall in December 1938, an event that introduced boogie-woogie and blues music
to a mass white audience. And his Kansas City blues shouting style set the standard
for later singers such as Jimmy Witherspoon, Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, Roy Brown
and Wynonie Harris, who in turn influenced Elvis Presley, James Brown, Otis
Redding and so many other singers.
Born in Kansas City on May 18,1911, Big Joe was a middle-aged, overweight six-footer when he unexpectedly became a '50s R&B star. Self-taught, he had trained as a singing bartender, using his barrel chest and large head to amplify his voice. In 1938 he and famed boogie pianist Pete Johnson signed with Decca's Vocalion label and made a series of popular recordings, such as "Roll 'Em, Pete." Early on, his record company tagged him Boss of the Blues. He had his first major hit, "My Gal's a jockey," in 1946. But when he joined Atlantic's roster five years later, Joe was considered to be over the hill.
However, an infusion of new blood brought him back to health. Bebop was waning and folks were looking for good-time music they could dance to again. His first release, "Chains of Love," was not only one of 1951's top R&B hits, it also crossed over and climbed to number thirty on the pop charts at a time when few black stars had the privilege and luxury of a mass hit. His first real break through, though, was 1953's "Honey Hush" [see #33], recorded with New Orleans musicians. "Honey Hush" would echo a year later in Big Joe Turner's next number one R&B single, "Shake, Rattle, and Roll."
The song is credited to Charles Calhoun, a pseudonym of Atlantic's prolific songwriter and arranger, Jesse Stone, who used the alias because he wanted to belong to both broadcast performing societies, ASCAP and BMI. But there's some indication that Big Joe had been singing a primitive incarnation of "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" during World War II. British writer Cliff White reported that during Big Joe's early tenure at Cafe Society in New York, a newspaper critic listed "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" as one of the songs he performed one night in 1943. Unfortunately, Big Joe never recorded the song at the time.
These two versions of the song's genesis don't especially conflict, because Jesse Stone and Joe Turner were old friends from their Kansas City days. Stone was certainly aware that, while Turner could sit down and ad lib new blues songs all night, those songs would tend to repeat themselves or, at best, sound familiar. Indeed, a challenge for any album compiler of Big Joe's material has always been to come up with a sequence of recordings that doesn't tire the listener. It's very possible that Stone heard Joe singing an early, impromptu version of "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" and later threw it back at him as something new. In any event, Stone himself claimed that he heard the expression "shake, rattle, and roll" at a poker game-some card player's wisecrack equating dealing the cards with a craps shooter throwing the dice-and used the expression simply as a device to tie together all of the song's disjointed verses.
What Stone certainly contributed to Big Joe's 1954 recording was the big beat, not to mention the rolling piano that provides the song with its main drive. Jesse Stone was one of those seminal figures too often forgotten, primarily because he was unknown outside of the industry in the first place. Born in Atchison, Kansas, in 1901, he worked as a pianist and arranger in Big Joe's hometown during the '20s and recorded a disk, "Starvation Blues," for Columbia's Okeh subsidiary as early as 1927. In the early'40s he wrote Jimmy Dorsey's hit, "Sorgham Switch," and in 1947 he was involved in the founding of Atlantic Records. As the only black man on staff at Atlantic, he became its A&R man, and wrote one of its major early hits, "Money Honey," for the Drifters. Atlantic president Ahmet Ertegun later told British writer Charlie Gillett that "Jesse Stone did more to develop the basic rock 'n' roll sound than anybody else."
Stone recognized that white kids would listen to R&B as long as it had a rhythm they could dance to. "So I designed a bass-pattern," he told writer Nick Tosches, "and it sort of became identified with rock 'n' roll-doo, da-doo, dum; doo, da-doo, dum-that thing!" Stone parlayed "that thing" into dozens of hits for the Drifters, Ruth Brown, the Clovers and, of course, Joe Turner. Stone said: "In January or February 1954, [producer] Herb Abramson said to me, 'We got Joe Turner comin' in to record and we need an up-tempo blues for a change.' I threw a bunch of phonetic phrases together-shake, rattle, and roll, flip, flop and fly-and came up with thirty or forty verses. Then I picked over them. I got the line about 'a one-eyed cat peepin' in a seafood store' from my drummer, Baby Lovett. He was always comin' out with lines like that."
Big Joe Turner, who had a way of embellishing and changing his recollections nearly every time he rehashed them, recounted the story of "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" this way: "[Stone] came in there in the middle of the recording [session] and he said he had a couple of new songs. I told him we'd hold up the recording and go back in the back and listen to them." When Stone played "Shake, Rattle, and Roll," "I said, 'You sing it over a couple of times, let me listen.' So he done it a couple of times, and I said, 'Okay, I'll try it. If I mess up, let me know.' So we go back and take out one of my other numbers and put [Stone's] in. He said he's going to give me part of the song, but he never got around to that. We didn't have no singers to back me up so we had the cats in the studio, [Atlantic owners] Ahmet Ertegun, Jerry Wexler and them, they was backing me up, singing . . I sung it just like [Stone] wrote it."
According to the session sheet, "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" was the first of five songs recorded that day, so Big Joe's recollection of Stone coming in during the middle of the session is most likely not entirely true. You can also forget his comment that he sang the song as Stone wrote it. As with anything that Big Joe tackled, he added his own lyrics, double entendre refrains such as "over the hill, way down underneath," to enhance Stone's already leering lines, "Wearin' low dresses, sun comes shining through, girl I can't believe all that mess belongs to you."
Propelled by Stone's distinctive piano triplets, the sinewy riff of the three-man horn section, the drummer playing on the offbeat and a steady, multiple handclapping brought up high in the balance-with Heywood Henry's baritone sax solo in the middle-"Shake, Rattle, and Roll" entered the R&B charts in May 1954, stayed at number one for three weeks, and didn't drop away until early 1955. It also crested the pop charts at number twenty-two, the highest that Big Joe would ever rise in the mainstream. As was usually the case, a white cover version, in this instance by Bill Haley on Decca Records, took most of the action, topping out at number seven. But both versions sold over a million copies, making "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" the first giant rock 'n' roll hit. Jesse Stone's other song from the session, "Well All Right," was also an R&B hit at the end of 1954.
Comparing Haley's version with the original provides insight into what public morality would allow in 1954. Turner's line "Wearin' low dresses . . . " became "Wearin' those dresses, your hair done up so nice . . . " Where Turner sang "I believe to my soul you're the devil in nylon hose," Haley sang, "I believe you're doin' me wrong and now I know."
Elvis Presley recorded the song for his first, multimillion-selling RCA album in 1956, reciting Bill Haley's cleaned-up lyrics about the hair done up so nice, but he kept in the line about the nylon hose. Interestingly, he mixed the two earlier versions together, using Turner's nylon hose line at the beginning of the song and Bill Haley's replacement lyric-"I believe you're doin' me wrong and now I know"-near the end, suggesting that he was singing "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" off the top of his head. The executives at Decca and RCA apparently didn't catch any lascivious meaning behind the song's best line: "I'm like a one-eyed cat peepin' in a seafood store." It not only survived both white recordings, but also Elvis's performance of "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" during his first national TV appearance, on the Dorsey Brothers' "Stage Show" on January 28, 1956. In case anyone hep to the jive missed that Elvis was paying homage to the blues shouter on the program, he segued into "Flip, Flop, and Fly," Big Joe's follow-up record.
The three recordings-all hits in their way-relied on different emphases in their instrumentation, an indication of the different directions that rock'n'roll was coming from. Jesse Stone's piano and Al Sears's tenor saxophone propelled Turner's original; Haley relied on two saxes and his slap-bass player; and on Elvis's version Scorry Moore's guitar and D. J. Fontana's drums dominated the mix. All three were exciting, but had little in common with one another.
In 1956 Big Joe Turner appeared in American International Pictures' Shake, Rattle, and Roll, in which he took second billing to Fats Domino. Joe sang two songs in the film, neither of which was "Shake, Rattle, and Roll." In fact, nobody sang the title song.
Soul singer Arthur Conley briefly returned the song to the Top 40 in 1967. As for Big Joe Turner, he continued to sing, despite serious health problems, right up to his fatal heart attack in Los Angeles, on November 24, 1985.
Film buffs can still catch Big Joe singing "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" on video, from a mid-'50s short film taken from the "Showtime at the Apollo" series, originally shown in black theaters before the featured attractions.
"Rock 'n' roll wasn't but a different name for the same music I been singin' all my life."-Big Joe Turner
"As far as I'm concerned, the first rock 'n 'roll record that meant anything was Shake, Rattle, and Roll.'"-Freddy Cannon
"I'll tell you a fellow who had a tremendous infuence on my career . . . and that's Big Joe Turner, the boss of the blues."-Bill Haley