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 Alex
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Monday, June 20, 2005
SO LONG
Little Miss Cornshucks
Sunbeam 104 : 1947
The Chronological Little Miss Cornshucks 1947-1951
[Buy It]
SO LONG
Little Miss Cornshucks
Coral 65077 : 1951
The Chronological Little Miss Cornshucks 1947-1951
[Buy It]
SO LONG
Big Maybelle
Savoy 1527 : 1957
Savoy Blues Legends: Candy!
[Buy It]
THIS BOY
The Beatles
Capitol : 1964
Meet The Beatles
[Buy It For $1,700]
In February, 1950, jazz critic and Metronome columnist Leonard Feather played Billie Holiday a series of cuts by Sarah Vaughan, Wynonie Harris, Count Basie, and nine other artists. "This is Ruth Brown, and you don't have to play it," Holiday said upon hearing the fifth track. "I know all about that. I can't stand copycats, and this girl copies Miss Cornshucks note for note. She looks a little better but she hasn't got a damn thing; I just don't like her. I'd like to get 'em both together with a good piano player and have 'em both sing; if Cornshucks' So Long isn't twice as good, I'll eat my hat. When Cornshucks sings this style, she means it. Sure, I copied Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong - but not note for note; they inspired me.... I don't care if she hates me for saying this, it's my opinion!"
As it happens, Ahmet Ertegun, who built the Atlantic Records empire on the back of Ruth Brown's earliest successes - including her 1949 recording of "So Long" - had recorded Little Miss Cornshucks in 1943, whilst his father was serving as Turkey's wartime ambassador to Roosevelt's White House: "When I was 19 or so, I went to a nighclub in the northeast black section of Washington and heard a singer whose name was Little Miss Cornshucks," Ertegun recalled. "I thought, 'My God!!!' She was better than anything I'd ever heard. She would come out like a country girl with a bandana around her head, a basket in her hand, and so forth, which she'd set aside fairly on in the show. She could sing the blues better than anybody I've ever heard to this day. I asked her that night if she would mind if I made a record for myself. We cut 'Kansas City' along with some other blues and she also sang a song called 'So Long.' She had such a woneful sound and I remember just thinking, 'My God! My God!' And I didn't have a record company, I just made those records for myself."
Cornshucks, who was born Mildred Cummings in Ohio in 1923, was remarkably influential in her day (e.g., another Atlantic artist, LaVern Baker, started her career as an imitator named "Little Miss Sharecropper"); by the time of her death, in 1989, she was entirely forgotten. So for those of you who who haven't heard her - as I hadn't, until Ertegun mentioned her in the course of an interview for my book - I'm including her take on "Try A Little Tenderness," which Otis Redding remade, brilliantly, some years later (see below). But instead of including Ruth Brown's version of "So Long" - the one Holiday eviscerated in Metronome - I'm posting a version LMC herself cut in the wake of Brown's success. Beneath it, you'll find yet another version, by Big Maybelle (who recorded the original "Hound Dog"). Released by Savoy in 1957, the song seems to have made its way to Liverpool, where Lennon/McCartney liked it enough to include the chord progression, the arrangement, even echoes of the lyric (or, at least, the subject matter), in their own "This Boy." It's the only time I've been able to catch the Beatles stealing so brazenly, and I can only imagine what Billie might have said.
TRY A LITTLE TENDERNESS
Little Miss Cornshucks
Coral 65090 : 1951
The Chronological Little Miss Cornshucks 1947-1951
[Buy It]Labels: alex, rhythm and blues
posted by Alex
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