Honey Hush

"Honey Hush"
Single by Big Joe Turner
B-side "Tomorrow Night"
Released August 1953 (1953-08)
Format 10-inch 78 rpm & 7-inch 45 rpm
Genre Blues, rhythm and blues
Length 2:25
Label Atlantic
Songwriter(s) Lou Willie Turner

"Honey Hush", is a blues song, written by Big Joe Turner (although he assigned the copyright to his wife, Lou Willie Turner), recorded in May 1953 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and released that August by Atlantic Records. It was a number-one song on Billboard's Rhythm and Blues chart for eight weeks.[1]

Recording

Turner, a big Kansas City blues shouter, had been spending all of his time out on the road, while Atlantic's Ahmet Ertegun was getting nervous that his backlog of Turner recordings was running low. When Turner was near New Orleans, Ertegun insisted he make some recording. Atlantic's New Orleans recording studio was fully booked, so Turner recorded some sides in the studio of local radio station WDSU. He did not have his own band but was able to round up the trombonist Pluma Davis and his band, the Rockers, as well as the boogie rhythm pianist, James Tolliver.[1] Other musicians on the recording were Dimes Dupont on alto saxophone and Warren Hebrew on tenor saxophone.[2]

Lyrics

Like the session, the song is largely adlibbed traditional blues verses with various incongruous lines thrown in, to a standard 12-bar blues. It opens with the bold statement, "Aw let 'em roll like a big wheel in a Georgia cotton field, Honey hush!" The title in this song Turner revealed his typical attitude toward a woman who will not do what he tells her to do, while the tailgate trombone gives the woman's raucous answers back. Although his songs talk about relationships as misery, his emotion in the song is upbeat. To quote Arnold Shaw in his book Honkers and Shouters[3]

"Love ain't nothin' but a lot of misery," he would declare, exhibiting no emotion in his characterization of the female as demanding, unprediciable, and untrustworthy. But unlike his predecessors in the blues, he did not cry or get uptight over it.

The spirit of the song is the good-natured optimism that characterized his work.[4] His lyrics are sexually suggestive and aimed at an adult audience and his vocal style is that of an urban blues shouter – intimate and relaxed.[5]

Come in this house, stop all that yakkety yak (2×)
Come fix my supper, don't want no talkin' back
Well you keep on jabberin', talk about this and that (2×)
I got news for you, baby, you ain't nothin' but an alley cat
Well you keep on jabberin', talk about this and that ( 2×)
Don't make me nervous, 'cause I'm holding a baseball bat
Hi-yo, hi-yo, Silver

The final lyric is a reference to the "Hi-Yo Silver!" trope popularised by the Lone Ranger television series, that aired on the ABC Television network from 1949 to 1957.

Legacy

The advent of rock and roll narrowed the content of songs to adolescent preoccupations and made simple the complicated rhythms of rhythm and blues. The explicitly sexual content was too adult, as was the singer's strong voice tone as well as his raw assumptions about life. A year later, in 1954, a Turner song very similar to this one, "Shake, Rattle and Roll," with its boogie-woogie rhythm and squawking saxophone was cleaned up by Bill Haley to become a hit as rock and roll changed the face of music. Turner turned to recording songs by rock and roll writers, but his blues shouter voice betrayed him and his career faded.[4]

However, not long after the rock and roll craze hit, a new audience of intellectuals, college students, and eventually beatniks, and then another with European blues fans joining in, gave singers in partial retirement or obscurity new opportunities although they had to clean up some to fit the new role of authenticity, fueled by the writings of Samuel Charters, demanded by these new audiences. For urban blues singers, having grown up in cities, it was convenient to be labelled as country singers to fit the criteria of purity.[5]

In 1959, Turner re-recorded "a much tamer, lamer, teenage rock'n'roll version"[1] of "Honey Hush" for Atlantic which was a mild hit and his last one. Turner returned to performing with jazz combos as the rock and roll founders settled in to please the suddenly important teenage market.[6]

Covers

Early covers include the 1956 version by Johnny Burnette's The Rock and Roll Trio as well as Chuck Berry in 1965 for Chess Records. The song has since been covered by - among many others - Jerry Lee Lewis, Screaming Lord Sutch, Foghat, Paul McCartney, Coco Montoya, Fleetwood Mac, George Jones, Elvis Costello, NRBQ, and John Lindberg Trio.

In 2008 the song was covered by Jools Holland on his album The Informer.[7]

References

  1. 1 2 3 Dawson, Jim; Propes, Steve (1992). What Was the First Rock'n'Roll Record. London: Faber and Faber. pp. 118–120. ISBN 0-571-12939-0.
  2. ↑ "Honey Hush - Big Joe Turner - Song Info". AllMusic. Retrieved 10 October 2017.
  3. ↑ Shaw, Arnold (1978). Honkers and Shouters. New York: Macmillan Publishers. pp. 45–49. ISBN 0-02-061740-2.
  4. 1 2 Gillett, Charlie (1996). The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll (2nd. ed.). New York City: Da Capo Press. pp. 128–129, 165. ISBN 0-306-80683-5.
  5. 1 2 Keil, Charles (2014). Urban Blues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 61–64, 100–101. ISBN 0-226-42960-1.
  6. ↑ DeCurtis, Anthony; Henke, James (1980). The RollingStone: The Definitive History of the Most Important Artists and Their Music (3rd. ed.). New York City: Random House. p. 48. ISBN 0-679-73728-6.
  7. ↑ "The Informer/Consider The Source - Record Collector Magazine". Recordcollectormag.com. Retrieved 10 October 2017.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.