1950s and 1960s Miscellany

Album reviews of 1950s and 1960s artists who don’t qualify for their own page.

Johnny Cash

At Folsom Prison

1968, 6/10
Johnny Cash always had a bulletproof reputation, as a respected elder statesman of country music and anti-authoritarian hero. His baritone is authoritative, imbuing his music with gravitas, and it’s perfect for these dark tales of crime and punishment that he’s singing to an appreciative prison audience. Cash performs with the backing band The Tennessee Three, and it was recorded at a time when he’d cleaned up his personal life.

Cash has the captive audience lapping up these songs, and it’s a compelling performance – songs like the execution countdown of ’25 Minutes To Go’ are riveting. But with Cash’s limited vocal style and these simple country songs, At Folsom Prison is an event more than a record that stands up to repeated listening. There are highlights like Cash’s sensitive vocal performance on ‘Long Black Veil’ and June Carter’s harmony vocals on the lively ‘Jackson’.

At Folsom Prison is a terrific document of a masterful live performer, and it’s something that every music fan should hear. But it’s not an album I need to have in my collection.

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Arlo Guthrie

Alice’s Restaurant

1967, 6.5/10
Arlo Guthrie came to folk music with an incredible pedigree. He’s the son of folk legend Woody Guthrie, and he met and jammed with other famous musicians such as Pete Seeger and Leadbelly as they visited his home. He rose to prominence at the 1967 Newport Folk Festival at the age of 20 where the lengthy talking song ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ was first performed at a topical songs workshop.

While the song continues the acoustic simplicity of early 1960s protest folk, it’s also laced with a humour that makes its subversive litany on littering and the draft go down surprisingly easily. In fact, the song is much more notable for Guthrie’s comic timing and laconic delivery than it is for its musical content – the almost incessant guitar riff only adds to the humour – he’s as much a stand-up comedian as a musician over the eighteen minutes as he details his adventures trying to dispose of a half-tonne of garbage, in court and with the army psychiatrist, and the catchy chorus is only introduced towards the end of the song. The song’s following was strong enough to spawn a full-length feature movie in 1970, starring Guthrie.

The second side of Alice’s Restaurant isn’t as memorable; with pleasant but generic folk like ‘Chilling of the Evening’ and ‘I’m Going Home’ and assorted silliness like ‘The Motorcycle Song’ (“I don’t want a pickle/I just want to ride my motor-sickle”) and ‘Ring-Around-A-Rosy Rag’, which uses a riff that’s too close to the infinite loop of the title track.

Alice’s Restaurant is an album that has been treated precisely right by posterity – it never makes top-album-of-all-time lists, and it doesn’t deserve to, but it’s still easily available. The title track enjoys a cult following and still holds up as a transcendent piece of work that’s as interesting as a piece of social history as a song.

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Buddy Holly

20 Golden Greats

1978, 9.5/10
There’s debate about when the first rock and roll single was released. Contenders include Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s ‘Strange Things Happening Every Day’ from 1944 and Arthur Crudup’s ‘That’s All Right’ from 1946. 1955 was a watershed year, with Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’ topping the charts, Bo Diddley’s ‘Bo Diddley’, and Chuck Berry’s first single ‘Maybellene’.

If we accept 1955 as the birth of rock and roll, it was centred around singles in its early years. The album as the creative pinnacle of rock and roll didn’t emerge until the mid-1960s with records like The Beatles’ Rubber Soul and The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Running an album review site, it’s easy to overlook the impact of artists from these early days, and I’ve barely discussed artists like Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and Buddy Holly.

Buddy Holly was born in Texas during the Depression. He grew up with country music, switching to rock and roll after hearing Presley. Holly was 20 years old when he had his first hit, ‘That’ll Be the Day’; 21 months later he was dead, killed in the same plane crash that claimed Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper. Holly released three albums during his lifetime, but his legacy is the string of singles he released in the late 1950s and posthumously in the 1960s. It makes him a natural fit for a compilation, and 1978’s 20 Golden Greats (also known as Buddy Holly Lives) does a great job of rolling through twenty hits in 45 minutes.

More than any of his rock and roll contemporaries, Holly would have adapted easily to the 1960s. He was a major influence on The Beatles, whose name was a homage to Holly’s band The Crickets. The four-piece lineup of drums, bass, rhythm guitar, and lead guitar became the standard band lineup in the 1960s, and Holly was the first rock musician to play a Fender Stratocaster. He would have enjoyed playing alongside acts like The Byrds, The Kinks, and The Beatles in the mid-1960s, although he was so sweet and genuine that he may have seemed passe as rock music turned edgier later in the decade.

One development in rock music that occurred after Holly’s career is the self-contained act. It might be surprising that Holly didn’t write all of these songs. He penned ‘Words of Love’, ‘That’ll Be The Day’, and ‘It’s So Easy’, but others like ‘Rave On’ and ‘It Doesn’t Matter Anymore’ were covers. Confusingly, songs like ‘Not Fade Away’ are credited to Holly’s pen name Charles Hardin, while manager Norman Petty is a frequent co-writer. Holly also covered recent songs by his contemporaries, something that’s rare in more recent popular music, taking on ‘Bo Diddley’ and (although it’s not featured here) Chuck Berry’s ‘Brown Eyed Handsome Man’.

The music here is taken from a range of settings – ‘Peggy Sue Got Married’ is a demo that was posthumously pimped out in the studio, while the four songs that Holly recorded in his last studio session with an orchestra perhaps step too close to saccharine. But there’s a wealth of material from an all-too-brief career. Highlights include ‘Not Fade Away’, with its Bo Diddley beat, ‘Rave On’, a simple three-chord rocker that Holly carries with his hiccoughing vocal performance, and breakthrough hit ‘That’ll Be The Day’ with its countrified rock and roll.

Recording 20 worthy hits in a two-year career is a great achievement, and 20 Golden Greats is a great snapshot of an all-too-brief career.

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Dusty Springfield

Dusty in Memphis

1969, 9.5/10
Dusty Springfield began her career in a folk-pop trio The Springfields with her brother Tom. When The Springfields broke up, she went on to solo success in the early 1960s with ‘I Only Wanna Be With You’ and ‘I Don’t Know What To Do With Myself’, showcasing her sensual voice. But by the late 1960s her star was fading, and she signed with Atlantic Records to reignite her career. Recording in Memphis, the production team of Jerry Wexler, Tom Dowd, and Arif Mardin gave her more direct, stripped down sound than she was accustomed to.

The standard from Dusty in Memphis is ‘Son of a Preacher Man’ – it was originally written for Aretha Franklin, who passed it over but recorded it after Springfield’s version became successful. Randy Newman contributes ‘Just One Smile’, previously a hit for Gene Pitney, and ‘I Don’t Want To Hear About It Anymore’. The ethereal ‘The Land of Make Believe’ is from Burt Bacharach, while the Carole King and Gerry Goffin team contribute four of the songs. Dusty in Memphis boasts a fabulous opening trio, where each song lifts the ante from its predecessor – the mid-tempo, memorable ‘Just A Little Lovin” leads into the cool drama of ‘So Much Loving’, before delivering the tour de force of ‘Son of a Preacher Man’.

Dusty in Memphis is a classic, Springfield reinventing herself as a soul singer.

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