Larry Williams was another of those high energy Rock artists who helped fill the gap Little Richard left.
Larry Williams
After the success of Little Richard the Specialty label was looking around for someone who could emulate that style. They discovered the immaculate Larry Williams. With Little Richard out of the way on his religious pilgrimage Larry’s way was clear to reproduce the same piano based, raw vocalised Rock songs. He came up with a whole string of them many of which have gone on to become classics. They included Boney Moronie, Short Fat Fannie, Bad Boy, Dizzy Miss Lizzy, Slow Down and She Said Yeah. It was quite an impressive list and one that proved popular with later Rock acts including the Beatles, Animals and Stones.
When his Rock and Roll career petered out he formed an association with Johnny Guitar Watson in the seventies to produce a successful Funk act.
Larry himself was always a bit of a gangster with associations in the underworld with violence and drugs. He was found shot in the head at the age of forty four. It was put down as suicide but there was a lot of talk.
Little Richard was my first Rock idol back when I was ten. Along with Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley I spent a lot of time playing Little Richard. When he ducked out there was a void in that high energy, explosive sound – Don and Dewey went some way to fill the gap.
Don & Dewey
When Little Richard dropped out of the scene to have a sojourn bothering deities Specialty were in a fix. He was their biggest selling artist and they were eager to plug the gap. They tried out Esquerita and Larry Williams and they both came up trumps but there was still a short-fall. Don and Dewey were called in.
Forget Batman and Robin this was the duo with all the energy. They produced a double edged vocal attack that has only been equalled by Sam and Dave. On stage they were acrobatic and produced a dynamite performance as well as belting those songs out. Sadly, despite the quality of their performance and strength of their material, they never had hits. That doesn’t detract from the fact that they produced some of the best Rocking numbers of their day – ‘Justine’, ‘Farmer John’, ‘Koko Joe’, ‘Little Sally Walker’, ‘Jungle Hop’, ‘Bim Bam’ and ‘Leaving it all up to you’ are testament to that.
Cyril Davies should be much better known. He was a pioneer.
Cyril Davies
How many Grandfathers can one genre have? As many as you want!
Cyril Davies was there at the beginning. He was instrumental in getting the whole British Blues Scene off the ground. Without Cyril’s flair, drive and harp playing skills there probably would not have been a Blues Incorporated. I doubt that Alexis Korner would have got it going on his own. Without Blues Incorporated the next generation of British Blues might never have happened. We might not have had The Rolling Stones, Animals, Yardbirds, Cream, Free, Fleetwood Mac, Aynsley Dunbar, Chicken Shack and the rest.
It all happened way back in the misty past in the dour days of the 1950s when Trad Jazz was the drug of choice for rebellious British youth, when CND was big and Aldermaston Marches were all the rage. Trad Jazz was the British equivalent of the American Beat Poets – we did things differently here. Nobody, outside of a small group of musicians, had heard of the Blues. Black music of that nature was considered primitive. New Orleans Jazz, with its bastardised son – Skiffle, were the only acceptable brands, and they were treated with grave suspicion by the BBC. Of the few who showed interest Chris Barber was the leading light. He brought authentic Blues singers, like Muddy Waters, Big Bill Broonzy and Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, over to England and gave them a platform. He also set up Skiffle with Lonnie Donnegan and took Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies into his fold. That was the application of the flame to the fuse. It took a long while to burn and quietly smouldered in the background for many years, training up a generation of musicians, until it reached the TNT and detonated. Unfortunately for Cyril that explosion was many years too late to benefit from.
Cyril Davies was an unlikely Blues hero in many ways, being a balding panel beater who was well out of his first bloom of youth. Yet he was a brilliant blues harp player and also played guitar. He came out of the fifties Skiffle boom, having formed a Skiffle band with Alexis Korner, before going into Blues. The other equally important aspect of Cyril’s was that he not only played the music but when faced with a lack of places to play solved the problem by opening his own venues. He did that with Britain’s first Rhythm ‘n’ Blues club – ‘The London Blues and Barrelhouse Club’ and then later the ‘Ealing Club’. These became the focus of not only the small rabid group of Blues enthusiasts but also the wannabe musicians who would soon form the core of the British Beat scene like Jagger and Brian Jones.
Cyril joined up with Alexis, following a Chris Barber Blues project in 1961, to form the seminal Blues Incorporated. That was the springboard for the sixties Beat boom.
Cyril didn’t stay long. He wanted to produce a more authentic electric Chicago Blues sound and left to form his ‘All-Star’ band.
He became ill in 1963 just as it was all about to happen and died in January 1964 just short of his thirty second birthday. The cause of his death was put down as inflammation of the heart although leukaemia was the probable reason.
If you like Rock Music, in the widest sense, you’ll find my book of tributes quite interesting. This is my bit on Chris Barber.
Chris Barber
Chris Barber is the unsung Grandfather of British Blues and Rock. He is still regarded as a Trad Jazz performer, and did stay true to that style of music throughout, but he was so much more important than that. Single-handedly he did three incredible things that transformed the music scene in Britain.
Firstly he encouraged and facilitated the introduction of a scaled-down unit in his act that focussed on simple versions of American Folk-Blues. The sub-group was led by Lonnie Donnegan and they went from having a short set in the interval at the middle of Chris Barber’s act to becoming an over-night sensation and starting the whole Skiffle Boom of the fifties. The Beatles and every other Beat group in the country started off in a band because of that. Just think if Chris had not given them a place in the performance and had not gone on to record them in one of his sessions all that might not have happened. Without ‘Rock Island Line’ there might not have been any Beatles.
Secondly he provided a platform for Black American Blues artists to visit, play and record. By doing that he exposed future British musicians to the real thing and got a sizeable group of the British public interested in Blues so that the British bands had an audience when they got going. The Blues guys were bemused by the enthusiastic responses they got from White British audiences. They did not receive that reception in their native America.
Thirdly he brought Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies back together to work on a Blues album he was recording in 1961. Out of that came Blues Incorporated, the first, seminal R&B band in Britain.
I reckon those three things are sufficient to give him legendary status in anybody’s book. In my eyes he was responsible for the Beatles, Stones and the whole British Rock Scene. Without Chris Barber we’d still be on a par musically with Sweden and I can’t stand Abba.
