More Nugetre's Nuggets: Whatcha' Gonna Do?

The tribute concert to commemorate the life of Ahmet Ertegun has been postponed until December 10th. The announcement that Led Zeppelin would reform to headline the show sent rock fans into a frenzy for a furious ticket lottery earlier this year, perhaps to the detriment of the memory of Mr Ertegun himself, who sometimes was barely mentioned in the news reports.

So here for your enjoyment are some more nuggets of Nugetre ("Ertegun" backwards), r&b authored by Ahmet himself, continuing the series I ran last November. Well, this selection has a few twists and turns, which took it past Ahmet along the way...

Whatcha Gonna Do by The Drifters was recorded on 2nd April 1954 and was released in February 1955 and featured Clyde McPhatter on lead vocals, and was to become the last single featuring him, as several other recorded tracks were then canned and kept for rainy days and b-sides. It reached No.2 on the R&B chart. It marked the end of Clyde's tenure with the group, as it had been intended to promote it as a commencement of his solo career. Then in July 1955 he was drafted.

This was the third time that the Drifters had recorded the song, the first time having been with the short-lived Mount Lebanon Singers line-up, the next time when Bill Pinkney and the Jerusalem Stars had come in to replace the Mount Lebanon Singers on 9th August 1953. So in a way the song had a history that spanned the entire period of the classic Drifters line-up. It also had a gospel past.

Whatcha Gonna Do was originally recorded by The Radio Four, and written by their lead singer Reverend Dr Morgan Babb. Ahmet had heard the gospel tune perhaps on the legendary radio show Ernie's Record Parade, John Richbourg's show on WLAC on a 50,00 watt signal out of Nashville, as Dr Babb also acted as a gospel A&R man for Ernie Young, founder of Nashboro and Excello Records, who was the show's sponsor.

This 45 was recorded at 535 Fourth Avenue South in Nashville and released in April 1953 on Tennessee Records subsidiary label Republic. The new subsidiary had been set up in summer 1952 on the back of the success of Christine Kittrell's single Sitting And Drinking. The five brothers in the group, of whom Dr Babb was the youngest, had been performing in various line-ups since the late 1930s. The Radio Four had an enviable reputation in the gospel circuit, regularly sharing billing with R.H. Harris' Soul Stirrers, and by chance happened to be double-heading the bill for Sam Cooke's first outing with the Stirrers. They recorded a kind of country gospel style, which related very much to the older brothers' former days in a popular jug band before their conversion to religion (appparently due to a bolt of lightning that nearly killed their father.) When Dr Babb joined his older brothers in 1950, he brought a emotive, soulful style of singing, which set them apart from the emphasis on technical singing found in the jubilee singing groups of the era.

This particular track also bore the name of Madame Edna Gallmon, a bone of contention for The Radio Four. Morgan Babb had helped her to get a chance singing with them at Tennessee, and coached her in technique to develop an up close and personal style of performance. The first recordings were released released as just by The Radio Four, as Tennessee were unsure whether to even sign her to a contract. When she was finally signed, not for the first time Tennessee wanted to use them as a backing group for the new 'star', and so The Radio Four stated that they would not be backing her in the future. Despite this, tracks like this one were later released and promoted with both Gallmon and The Radio Four's names. To add further salt to the wound, Dr Babb was never paid any royalties for the songs , like this one, that he wrote for Republic.

Listen to a rollicking, boogie-woogie number:

Clyde McPhatter & The Drifters - Whatcha Gonna Do (Atlantic 1055) 1955

And here is the gospel original:

Mdm Edna Gallmon Cook & The Radio Four - Whatcha' Gonna Do? (Republic Records 7067) 1953

OK, I can understand Led Zeppelin being on the bill. But Paolo Nutini?

I really enjoyed researching this little post, as I discovered so many connections between this and other artists I had researched in the past year. Information and images about The Drifters from Marv Goldberg's R&B Notebooks, a site I cannot stop reading! Information about The Radio Four comes from the liner notes of CD The Radio Four 1952-1954, written by Opal Louis Nations, which is also where I took the featured track from. The great gospel site Recordconnexion, written by Robert Termorshuisen, who got details from ''Gospel Music 1943-1969' by Cedric Hayes and Robert Laughton, is also a great resource. I also read about Dr Morgan Babb on the WLAC Fan Site. The Radio Four label scan and images come from Big Joe Louis and Robert Termorshuisen. The development of gospel in Tennessee is well documented by PBS in the article From Jug Band To Gospel by David Evans & Richard M Raichelson Also, visit this post at Red Kelly's gospel blog, Holy Ghost, to read a bit more about Nashboro Records.

99 1/2 Just Won't Do: Brown Eyed Has Got To 100!

I have let another milestone pass me by... my post about The Chants was in fact my 100th published post.! With all of the half-started posts strewn in my blogger dashboard, I never realised...

To help me celebrate it, here is the late, the great, the wicked Wilson Pickett, to sing that ode to perfection, 99 1/2 Won't Do. I just hope 102 is enough! Accompanying him, The Alabama Christian Movement For Human Rights Choir sing the hymn and freedom song from which Pickett, Eddie Floyd and Steve Cropper took their inspiration.

In the summer of 1963, in the midst of the gruelling Birmingham, Alabama protests co-ordinated by Rev Fred Shuttlesworth of the ACMHR and Rev Martin Luther King of the SCLC, the Alabama Christian Movement Choir perfomed nightly at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in support of the protests. According to historian Wilson Fallin Jr: "In two organizations within the ACMHR, women made up the majority of the members. The ACMHR choir, formed in 1960, was intended to enhance the spirituality of the Monday night meetings. Twenty-three members formed the group. Most were Baptist women who sang in their church choirs and were accustomed to singing songs similar to those sung by the movement choir, including spirituals and gospel hymns. They sang "God Will Make a Way Some How," Walk with me Lord," and "Ninety-Nine and a Half Won't Do." One member of the choir remarked that "the choir sang with faith in God knowing that his power worked through their songs to give courage." In the mass meetings, female singers allowed their emotions to take over, and on many occasions, they had to be restrained by the ushers."

Choir conductor Carlton Reese adapted the lyrics to add new civil-rights phrases to a popular gospel song sung by Mother Katie Bell Nubin (mother of even more famous Sister Rosetta Tharpe). Reese is leading the singing, backed by a powerful thumping Hammond organ. This version was recorded by folk singer Guy Carawan. The recording served a dual purpose, giving nightly hope and strength to those taking part in the protest, but also as a conscious element of Project C, a strategy to confront the racialist system of segregation in the city head-on in a high-visibility strategy that would engage the entire nation. The singers themselves faced intimidation and arrest. Cleopatra Kennedy was 20 years old in 1963 when she sang solos for the choir. She recalls what it was like the first time she was sent to jail: "That first time, she was in jail for 14 days, but the group sang songs and stomped their feet on the iron beds to make their music. "Singing songs was our way of keeping our self-esteem up, of washing away fear," she says. The day after she was released, she went back on the picket line." When Martin Luther King was arrested and jailed in April of that year, local liberal white church leaders wrote to him urging him to tone down the movement's activities, calling them "unwise and untimely". His response was the famous Letter From A Birmingham Jail, with his powerful riposte: "For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant 'Never." The situation would become even more ense later in that year, with the use of dogs and fire hoses against student and youth protestors, and the bombing of the 16th Street Church during a Sunday school session, with the tragic death of four children. It was in trying times like these that freedom songs could give hope and inspiration.

Jump forward in time two years, to May 1965. Wilson Pickett arrived in Memphis courtesy of Jerry Wexler, who was sure that The Little Label That Could had the spark he needed to secure Pickett, former member of The Falcons, an elusive r&b hit. Pickett sat down with Steve Cropper, and within a matter of half-an-hour, they had come up with In The Midnight Hour and Don't Fight It, both taking the behind-the-beat Stax sound in a new direction by incorporating a behind-the-beat 'Jerk' rhythm. Not a bad night's work! So pleased was he with the sessions, that he sent each of the MGs a $100 thank-you gift.

Wexler and Pickett were eager to return in October and again in December 1965. Eddie Floyd, Wilson's old partner from The Falcons, Steve Cropper, keen to earn some more songwriting money, and Donald Dunn, impressed with Pickett's vocal ability, were all pleased to see him again. Jim Stewart was less keen, perhaps fearful that Atlantic Records were borrowing too much of the Stax sound. The MGs were joined this time by Isaac Hayes, brought in to play piano while Booker T Jones was at college. The new sessions were more difficult, as the group felt the pressure to reproduce what they had achieved in May. Nervous about the prospect, Steve Cropper turned to the experienced Eddie Floyd for advice about songwriting. Cropper said in an interview with Gerry Hershey: "He had been on the stage, and he knew what was going on... He was real helpful to me. Eddie knew the pulse on the street, he knew the pulse of the ghettos of Chicago and Detroit, and I didn't know jack shit about that..."

Eddie Floyd and Cropper had been working on a new song for a whole week, 634-5789, before Wilson arrived back in Memphis on 19th December. After hearing a tape, a clearly tense and nervous Pickett let fly: "This is it? This is my hit tune? It's a piece of shit!" Eddie Floyd had to be prised off his old buddy! But apparently, it had been no different in the old days with The Falcons...

Later on that day, Wilson had calmed down, and so had Eddie, so they went over to Pickett's hotel to write something else. Eddie and Steve noticed a Coca-Cola billboard, with the slogan 'Ninety-Nine And A Half Won't Do.' Recalling the gospel tune and the freedom song, and with Eddie suggesting they add that stop-start behind-the-beat jerk feel, soon Pickett had another classic in the can, so to speak!

The songwriting and recording relationship was sometimes explosive but always professional, and could have produced even more hits, had not Jim Stewart become uncomfortable with the amount of studio time devoted to an Atlantic artist. Citing Pickett's 'drunkenness' (an assertion that Cropper and others hotly dispute, citing Pickett's sober dedication to every session), Stewart packed Pickett and Jerry Wexler back to New York. It was time for them to try to find similar magic at FAME Studios...

The Alabama Christian Movement Choir - 99 1/2 Won't Do

Wilson Pickett - Ninety-Nine And A Half (Won't Do)

Read A Letter From A Birmingham Jail here...

Information from Soulsville: USA by Rob Bowman, Nowhere To Run by Gerry Hershey, and liner notes of Voices Of The Civil Rights Movement: Black American Freedom Songs 1960-1966 by Bernice Johnson Reagon and Phyllis May. Wilson Fallin's article about the ACMHR and the role of women in the organisation can be found here. Visit the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute to read more and to study eye-witness accounts of events from 1956-1963. Quote from Cleopatra Kennedy from an interview for Baylor University magazine.

The Original Drifters Come To Rest: Bill Pinkney 1925-2007

RIP Bill Pinkney, 15th August 1925 - July 4th 2007

Yesterday, Bill Pinkney, the last original member of The Drifters, passed away in Daytona, Florida. He had continued his career as a Drifter unbroken from 1953 to the present day, and had been due to perform for a 4th July event.

As well as contributing his distinctive bass to the early hits of the Drifters, Bill stood as a testament to musical integrity, defiantly fighting to use the name of Original Drifters after he and the other founder members were summarily sacked by their management in 1958, and campaigning for a law which requires a band to include at least one original member if it wishes to claim to be the genuine article.

Bill's life up until 1953 was equally remarkable. Born in Dalzell, South Carolina, Bill Pinkney used to listen to his mother, a choirleader in a church in Woodrow, South Carolina, and started to perform gospel himself at the age of 12 with a group called the Wandering Four. Bill Pinkney joined the US Army to fight in France, and took part as one of 1,500 black troops in the initial assault to secure the Omaha and Utah beaches on D-Day, helping to set up and maintain barrage balloons over the beachhead, delivering ammunition and supplies constantly throughout the assault, dealing with the wounded, and in the following days liberating several villages. Pinkney was assigned as a technician in a combat support unit attached to the 3rd Armoured Division. For his part in outstanding acts of courage supporting the 101st Airborne and fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with them at Bastogne, Bill was the proud recipient of the Distinguished Unit Citation (now known as the Presidential Unit Citation) with Four Bronze Stars, denoting service in Normandy, The Battle of Saint Lo, Bastogne, and crossing the Rhine. That Saint Lo action tells you that Bill had a role as a technician in the transport route known as the Red Ball Express, which trucked supplies from Saint Lo to the front line, which is how Bill became trapped in Bastogne with the 101st Airborne whom he was bringing supplies to. After the war, Bill moved to New York and tried for sporting fame, as a pitcher from 1949 to 1951 in a Negro Baseball League with the New York Blue Sox. He also began singing with gospel groups the Jerusalem Stars and The Southern Knights. However, by 1953, Bill had decided he needed a more regular job, and he was running a car dealership.

Watch an interview with Bill Pinkney from 2005 about his career...


It was in 1953 that Bill Pinkney was contacted by his old Southern Knights colleague Gearhart Thrasher. Clyde McPhatter, another old aquaintance on the gospel circuit, had an r&b contract with Atlantic Records, but was in need of a new group to back him, after the first group, the Mount Lebanon Gospel Singers, were rejected by Ahmet Ertegun. Billy met up with Gearhart and his brother Andrew 'Bubba' Thrasher and local labourer Willie Ferbie. The group were among those strongly influenced by the harmonising gospel quartet style of The Orioles, and Bill's deep bass helped to complement Clyde McPatter's soaring melodic lead tenor. It was a sensation in r&b music. The group secured a contract, and Clyde revealed the name Drifters at the end of the sessions after a worried Gearhart Thrasher asked him what they were going to call themselves!


Thus began a series of r&b hits, amongst which Bill sang lead parts on White Christmas, their biggest hit of all time, Steamboat, I Should Have Done Right, Bip Bam, and Soldier Of Fortune. Bill's presence in the group was soon resented by their manager George Treadwell, as Bill, acting as road manager, frequently argued that the group were not getting their fair share of the ticket receipts for their shows.

"I was a singing road manager, well there was a fellow name of Charlie Carpenter, he was the manager of a show for Mr Fell, every week he would pay everybody. With the Drifters money, I had to pay Gearhart, a man by the name of David, and a guitar player by the name of Jimmy Oliver... I had to take this money back to New York in a suitcase, cash, and I was making $200 for the week, and the others would get £180, $175, and I would get a few more dollars under the table. Anyhow, I'd dump that suitcase of money, .. then I'd go on back, and get another tour started .. til I finally got hip! I said, you know what, this man is sitting down in his office in New York, we've doing all the work! Atlantic Records paying Jesse Stone, we went in and did the recording, and [George] Treadwell was climbing fat as a manager! He should have only won a percentage of what the Drifters made, not all of the money. So we talked it over with the rest of the Drifters and they said, Yeah you talk to George, we want raise in pay..."

A pay rise was not forthcoming, and he was summarily fired. After that, Bill went off and recorded some rock and roll themed tracks with a band called The Turks (or The Perks according to itunes!) The rest of the Drifters, chastened by Mr Treadwell, carried on, but were all finally fired from their own band in 1958, after a dispute at the Apollo Theater, and George replaced the entire line-up!

Bill persuaded the original group to stick together, and kept them going on a lucrative touring schedule, gaining a solid following in the Southeast. At first they went under the name of The Harmony Grits, and recorded some singles in 1959 with David "Little David" Baughn, who had been one of the singers Clyde had originally picked for his group. Later, Johnny Moore, who had also left the Drifters to go solo, got Bill's group to back him on several songs he recorded under the name Johnny Darrow, thus renuniting the 1957 Drifters line-up. But it occured to Bill and the others that they had every right to stake a claim to the Drifters name themselves, and so The Original Drifters were born. In 1964, they recorded Don't Call Me and I'll Do The Jerk, on Fontana Records, with temporary lead singer Jimmy Lewis. In 1966, they recorded another, for Veep Records, I Found Some Lovin' backed with the slow classic The Masquerade Is Over. I love this song, especially Nancy Wilson's version, but I would love to hear this rendition by the Drifters some day.

As the line-up of the Atlantic Records' Drifters continued to change, it seemed more and more Drifters were competing and claiming the same authenticity! Both Johnny Moore and Charlie Thomas would continue their own Drifters on the groups departure from Atlantic. This Bill's Original Drifters could accept, seeing as there was some connection to the classic group. Indeed, in 1976 Johnny Moore's Drifters paid the complement of covering (More Than A Number) In My Little Red Book, which the Originals had written and recorded back in 1967.

As the 70s arrived, however, the Drifters name became further clouded by bands that had little claim to the name. One group that Bill had hired and rehearsed to go on a tour after the other Originals had decided to retire, The Tears, dumped him and toured for many years as The Drifters. In the 80s and 90s, other groups, like the Nu Drifters, worked almost like Drifters 'franchises'. Bill Pinkney became involved in campaigning for the rights of artists who were being denied control over the identity that was their livelihood. And right up to the present, Bill had kept faith with authenticy by including the son of the founder of the Drifters, Ron McPhatter, Clyde's son, in the Originals, alongside Richard Knight Dunbar, of duo The Knight Brothers fame. The group also ventured into gospel in recent times, recording as The Gospel Drifters.

Bill was awarded the key to the state of South Carolina, which proclaimed May 14 as Bill Pinkney Day. Not least amongst his other honours must stand his 2001 honorary doctorate for services to South Carolina's state dance, the Shag!

The Drifters - Bip Bam (B side of Atlantic 1043) 1954
The Drifters - Steamboat (B Side of Atlantic 1078) 1955
The Drifters - I Should Have Done Right 1956


Information found at BBC News, www.originaldrifters.com , Soulfulkindamusic, wikipedia (!), the South Carolina African American History Calendar, and most especially from the amazing research of Marv Goldberg's R&B Notebooks, (also his Original Drifters Notebook ). Vince Welsh has recorded an interview with Bill Pinkney which you can watch. Also of interest is the regimental history page of the 761st Tank Battalion. Info concerning black soldiers on D-Day can be found in an article by Marian Douglas at Afrigeneas. Gregory Kane writes an interesting article about the contribution of black soldiers fighting at Bastogne in the Battle of The Bulge.

Darling, You Send Me, Honest You Do

Some say that To Love Is Our Soul Purpose. It's February 14th, and so I thought I should help everyone to get into the spirit of things. Who better to help than Aretha Franklin, singing one of Sam Cooke's simplest yet most sublime love songs, his first secular hit, You Send Me. It's just a single verse and then an endless repetition of how they make you feel...

Aretha Franklin - You Send Me (Atlantic 584186B) 1968

P.S. For all you free spirits, a warning - this song does mention the phrase 'marry me'. On the single, guys, you would have of course just sat through the tirade of Think on the a-side, with a finger-wagging Aretha telling you exactly what's what. Weakened, you then hear this, apologise for everything you did and for the things you didn't (and a few things you didn't know you did or didn't do), make up, and succumb.