Til The Cows Come Home: Rock 'n' Roll Nebraska
By Bart Becker, 1985
2 Floyd Smith to "Louie Louie"
Two Omahans had a more direct influence on the roots of rock 'n' roll. In 1937, Floyd Smith met a guitarist named Eddie Durham. Smith played banjo and ukulele but was enthralled by Durham's sound on guitar. Remembered Durham in a Guitar Player magazine interview, "He wanted to sound like me, but he said he didn't have a d guitar and his mama wouldn't buy him one. I was always being written up in the paper and he came to me and asked me to say to his mother, "Mrs. Smith, this boy could be a genius on guitar if you'd just buy him one. After I did that he got his first guitar. Before I left town, I made sure he tuned it up right."
Only two years later, on March 16, 1939, Smith recorded "Floyd's Guitar Blues" with the Andy Kirk Band. Wrote critic Leonard Feather in The Book of Jazz, "A minor sensation. It was a trigger for the whole fusillade of new guitar styles to be issued only months later by Charlie Christina's arrival in New York."
In 1949 Wynonie "Mr. Blues" Harris crashed the rhythm and blues charts with a rocking debut, "Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee." He followed it up three months later with a No. 1 hit, "All She Wants to do Is Rock." The rhythm and blues charts were jumping and Harris's native Omaha stomping grounds were fertile, with such non-native innovators as Johnny Otis and Jimmy Witherspoon working local clubs and jamming at the Blue Room.
Harris was giving the fledgling rock 'n' roll movement a boost in the right direction although it would be another five years or so before everybody else started to catch on.
As early as 1951 the perimeter of Lincoln, the state capital, was dotted with spots promoting dancing and drinking (the town itself was dry). A reporter for a local paper found the most crowded places "seem to appeal mainly to the younger set. Equipped with large dance floors and boasting 'live' music rather than the canned variety, they give customers their money's work at $1 a head cover charge." In other places "a jukebox provides music." At the time, that jukebox would have been playing mostly easy, post-swing-era pop music.
On the day I was born, for instance, Nov. 17, 1950, the national No. 1 popular single was "Harbor Lights" by Sammy Kaye. Other big-selling stars of the day were Patti Page, Guy Lombardo, Kay Starr and Doris Day. The rhythm and blues charts, though, were jumping. That November, Percy Mayfield, Lowell Fulson, Ruth Brown, Louis Jordan, Roy Brown, Johnny Otis, Little Esther and Amos Milburn were all riding the Top 10.
To make it short, that's about the way things stayed for a while: the R and B charts being torn up by some great records while the pop charts continued to waste away. It was still the same at the end of 1954. The r and b charts carried Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, Joe Turner, Guitar Slim and Fats Domino, while the top two popular albums were Music For Lovers Only and Music To Make You Misty, both by Jackie Gleason.
In July, 1954 a cover version of the Chords r and b hit "Sh-boom" by a white teen group, the Crew Cuts, appeared on the pop charts and stayed awhile among its adult company. Before "Sh-boom" dropped off the charts in November, another rhythm and blues song, "Shake Rattle and Roll" a hit for Joe Turner, entered the pop charts in a version by Bill Haley and His Comets. Except for Haley's "Rock Around the Clock," the summer of '55 wasn't so great, but change was clearly in the wind. In early 1956 Kay Starr hit the top of the charts with a reactionary tune called "Rock 'n' Roll Waltz" but the days of Nelson Riddle, Perry Como and the rest were numbered.
Big Mama Thornton had scored a hit a couple of years earlier with her wear-and-tear blues voice. It was called "Hound Dog" and you know the rest of the story. Elvis Presley picked up on it, with a good rendition, the world picked up on him, and then rock 'n' roll, and hasn't put it down since. To show his gratitude for introducing him to the song, Presley neither pestered Thornton to star in "Blue Hawaii" with him, nor forced any of his excess Cadillacs on her.
The rock 'n' roll era had arrived and the next six years saw such Top 10 hits as Presley's "Don't Be Cruel" (October '56), "Party Doll" by Buddy Knox and the Rhythm Orchids (March '57), "You Send Me" by Sam Cooke (January '58), "Rebel Rouser" by Duane Eddy (July '58), "The Chipmunk Song by David Seville and the Chipmunks (December '58), "A Teenager in Love" by Dion and the Belmonts (May 59), "Teen Angel" by Mark Dinning (February 60), "Travellin Man" by Ricky Nelson (May '61), "Slow Twistin" by Chubby Checker (April '62), "Monster Mash" by Bobby Boris Pickett and the Crypt Kickers (October 62), "Walk Like a Man" by the Four Seasons (March '63), "It's My Party" by Lesley Gore (June '63) and "Fingertips (Pt. II)" by Little Stevie Wonder (August '63).
In Nebraska, such musicians as the Rebels, Sparkle Moore and Carl Cherry cut rockabilly records. By the early '60s Little Joe and the Ramrods, the Bygones and the earliest version of the Rumbles were plugging in their guitars. An Omaha native, Gene McDaniels (known as Booker McDaniels in his hometown) had one of 1961's biggest hits, "A Hundred Pounds of Clay." It was the No. 26 rock 'n' roll single of the year and the LP One Hundred Pounds of Clay was a top rhythm and blues seller, although no charts were kept at the time. McDaniels "Tower of Strength" also edged into the top 10 in December, 1961. Near the end of 1963 the Kingsmen rode high on both the national popular and R and B charts with their classic unintelligible version of "Louie Louie." The Beach Boys' "Surfin' USA" was the No. 1 record of the year and well-scrubbed folk music was popular. In January, 1964 Bobby Vinton's "There! I've Said It Again" leapfrogged over "Louie Louie" into the No. 1 spot. It was a lull before the storm.