“Broken Hearted Melody”, Sarah Vaughan, 1959, Hal David and Sherman Edwards.
A Hal David sighting! Bet it won’t be our last. The song does kind of have that Brill Building sound to it, a little, now that I think about it.
Most songs, the thing that makes them go is the chorus. Not this one. This one, it’s the way Vaughan comes up on the title phrase in the first line of each stanza, slinky and catchy and irresistible. How do you do that. That’s the question, isn’t it? How do you do that?
“Drugstore Rock and Roll”, Janis Martin, 1956, Janis Martin.
Martin was only fifteen when she recorded this, but she puts it over with more authority than you’d expect from a fifteen-year-old. I mind me of a thing I read in one of Bill James’s baseball books, where he lists a number of indicators for how mature a sports league is, as in, how well-developed is it as an institution, and one of the indicators is, are a lot of the players particularly old or young?
Because I think we can agree that the world of rock’n’roll was not particularly mature in 1956, and Janis Martin’s age is consistent with that. But maybe it’s not so simple, because it’s not like super-young performers are going to be phased out as the industry matures. Look at how old Billie Eilish was when she hit it big, and also, brace yourself for when this countdown gets into the 2020s, because I’m going to be listing some songs by some old-ass people. Maybe James’s idea isn’t much use to us here.
So that’s all right. We listened to a song, had a thought, evaluated it, and discarded it. Good day’s work.
“Walkin’ After Midnight”, Patsy Cline, 1957, Alan Block and Don Hecht. #2 Country, #16 Billboard Hot 100.
I had to refresh my memory about this one. Just listened to it now. Singer takes long walks after midnight, missing her guy, old-school country, very good… And then she elevated her voice a bit to sing about the weeping willow and I was like, oh, right, that’s this one! That’s what makes it work right there. And then toward the end she puts some growl into her voice, just for a second? Stop selling when you get to “yes”, Patsy.
“Shake, Rattle and Roll”, Big Joe Turner, 1954, Charles Calhoun (Jesse Stone). #1 US R&B. Marsh’s Heart of Rock & Soul #13.
Shake, rattle and roll? In this economy?
The second stanza here, where Turner is singing about the sun shining through the woman’s dress? You know what that reminds me of? I’ll just pause for a second while you can marshal your thoughts.
(Pause.)
It’s the Billy Crystal comedy movie City Slickers, of course. What else could I be talking about? There’s a scene in City Slickers where Crystal’s character is talking to Jack Palance’s old cowboy character, Curly, about Life And Stuff, and Palance relates how when he was young he saw a beautiful woman, also backlit by the sun, “showing the shape that God had give her”.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. But now that I think of it, the fourth Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, has a scene where the main characters are walking through Hyde Park and some nutcase is giving a speech where he says, “The purpose of the sun going down in the afternoon, especially in parks, is to make women’s breasts bounce up and down more visibly to the eye.”
I think the odds are pretty low that City Slickers or So Long and Thanks for All the Fish were specifically influenced by “Shake, Rattle and Roll”. So is this just a thing three separate people happened to comment on? Or is it an actual trope? But I do know one thing: none of Big Joe Turner, Curly, or the weirdo in the park were capable of being normal about a woman’s body. Turner calls the woman in the song “the devil”. Curly runs away and builds a philosophy about it. And the weirdo in the park, uh, makes a weird speech in a park. Maybe everybody calm down a bit. Women are around. Sometimes it’s sunny.
“Farther Up the Road”, Bobby “Blue” Bland, 1957, Don Robey and Joe Medwick Veasey. #1 US R&B, #43 Billboard Hot 100. Dave Marsh’s Heart of Rock & Soul #333.
Thing I was curious about, is Bland’s nickname. “Blue”. What I wonder about is, just how was it his nickname? Was it as simple as, his friends would call him “Blue”? Hey, Blue, I heard your new record yesterday, great stuff. That would be straightforward. But as far as I can tell, his records didn’t get sold as either Blue Bland records or Bobby Blue records. They were either Bobby Bland records or Bobby “Blue” Bland records. So, not the same kind of deal where Gary “U.S.” Bonds’ singles were sold sometimes as just by “U.S. Bonds”. Was “Blue” a nickname that he used at all, or just one that he sort of generally had? It’s not important. But I wasn’t there, so I don’t know.
“Raunchy”, Bill Justis, 1957, Bill Justis and Sidney Manker. #2 on the Billboard Hot 100, #1 US R&B, #1 on Toronto’s CHUM charts.
Our first instrumental! Always a good time. I wonder what’s supposed to be so raunchy about it? Really it sounds to me like more of a car song in its cadence.
“Tallahassee Lassie”, Freddy Cannon, 1959, Bruce Moore, Bob Crewe, Frank Slay, and Frederick Picariello (Freddy Cannon’s real name). #6 on the Billboard Hot 100 and Toronto’s CHUM charts.
This has got to be a fun song to sing for a professional. Big flashy rhymes, deep ah-ooos, what’s not to like. I wonder if people who live in Tallahassee are sick of it.
“Cry Me a River”, Julie London, 1955, Arthur Hamilton. Gold record.
I always like this jazzy loungey kind of stuff. (Unless I don’t.*) We’ll get to rock’n’roll pretty soon, I promise.
—
*Let me spoil one thing about this countdown right now. There’s no Frank Sinatra in it. Frank Sinatra gives me the pip. I’m not fond of his style and I don’t like his persona at all. Could I make an exception? For the sake of a better countdown, theoretically? Of course. But here’s the thing.
I am consciously trying to include women and people of colour in this countdown. I don’t have quotas in mind; I’m just paying attention. Because I promise you if I didn’t pay attention I would produce a very white male list, and I don’t want it to be that way. (The ’50s part of the countdown is going to be pretty male anyway. Too much so. I can’t help it.) So, while I might stretch a point to get somebody into this countdown, I’m not going to do it for a Sinatra or a Crosby.
“Unchained Melody”, Roy Hamilton, 1955, Alex North and Hy Zaret. #1 on the R&B Best Sellers chart.
This is a song that lots and lots of people have covered, and R&B singer Roy Hamilton was one such person, and he had a big hit with it, and it is the first song in our countdown. You may not know his version, but you probably know a version.
Anyway, if you’re only casually familiar with the song, by anybody, you may not know about the title. You might think that the songwriters considered their new composition and said, “What we’ve got here is a song that derives its grandeur from the possibility of love overcoming great distance and time, and that may inspire in its listeners a sense of freedom. We could just pick out one of the lyrics and call the song that, like, ‘My Love, My Darling,’ or similar. That would work. But I have an idea: for the title, we could dispense with the lyrics altogether and just refer to the song in terms of the emotional and musical liberation we’re trying to evoke. We can call it ‘Unchained Melody’.”
You might think that. That would be a better story. But no. It’s called that because it’s from a prison movie called Unchained. It’s not “Unchained Melody” so much as it’s ‘the Unchained melody’.
Oh well.
Choosin’ Texas – Ella Langley (2025). #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Longest-running #1 song in the history of the Hot 100. Song of the summer for 2026 (citation needed). #1 in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and the U.K. Certified platinum in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K., and the U.S. The English-speaking world, give or take!
This is a pleasant little country song that somehow captured people’s attention this year and thereby achieved unprecedented success. It’s pretty good. I don’t love it; Langley leans on too many of the words and drags them out too long, and it slows down the whole enterprise. That’s not a criticism of her; she’s doing what the song needs her to do. It’s a song with a lot of drags in it. There’s no help for it. But it’s still a pretty good song.
I promise you the next paragraph is not about current politics.
Like all right-thinking people I have no time for all the mythology around Texas, like, everything’s bigger and better there, and the people are tougher, or whatever it is. And there are so many songs that lean into that. I mean, I’m sure it is a beautiful place, and I’m sure that a lot of the people of Texas are super great. I agree that it’s special! Just like every other place on the big blue marble! Anyway, I was worried that this was going to be one of those kinds of songs, like a Texas-chauvinistic anthem, and it’s not. That’s not what it’s doing at all. So that’s fine.
The lyrics are clever. “I wasn’t a match for that kind of spark”? That’s pretty good is what that is. There are allusions to other singers and songs, which I always like. Langley has a nice voice. It’s a solid effort all around.
But the discussion at the moment on the soshs is about whether it’s reasonable to expect people to have heard “Choosin’ Texas” or not. A lot of people haven’t. I hadn’t, until a couple of days ago. I had heard of it, and figured I might do well to check it out. But here’s the thing: all the people who are saying they haven’t heard it? They have heard of it. You can tell they have, because they’re involved in a conversation about it. Which means that the system is working.
Even today, with curated playlists and the continued withering of mass media and shared culture, you can’t hide from the blockbuster country hit. A song this successful should be well-known outside the boundaries of its genre, and it is! So there’s no problem!
