Cagey
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Post by Cagey on Aug 31, 2022 10:52:18 GMT -5
How many of you recall this major hit of the 1970's on classic rock radio stations across America?
One thing most of us probably did not know is that this major hit had actually been recorded once before and released but it did not score, so it was redone, rerecorded and re-released as Black Betty on Ram Jam's debut album and instantly scored a major radio hit as well as creating controversy over racism and an attempted boycott which clearly failed back then.
Here is the version of this song we all got to know from years of being played on radio:
The following video is 100% made by the band pretending to play along with the album. A bad sync'd version from the days of poor technology and let's say less creative production efforts.
The above "official" video version is a shortened version to only 2:25 in length, while the album version is 3:59:
And here is that first version by his StarStruck band. It sounds quite familiar for a lot of it, but if you listen to the end you will hear lots of differences.
History Early days
Bill Bartlett went on from the Lemon Pipers to form a group called Starstruck. Starstruck originally included Steve Walmsley (bass) and Bob Nave (organ) from the Lemon Pipers. Walmsley left the band and was replaced by David Goldflies (who later played for years with Dickey Betts and Great Southern, and the Allman Brothers). While in Starstruck, Bartlett took Lead Belly's 59 second long "Black Betty" and arranged, recorded and released it on the group's own TruckStar label. "Black Betty" became a regional hit, then was picked up by producers in New York who formed a group around Bartlett called Ram Jam. They re-released the song, and it became a hit nationally.
The Ram Jam "recording" was actually the same one originally recorded by Starstruck (albeit significantly edited to rearrange the song structure), the band at that time composed of Bartlett (lead guitar and vocals), Tom Kurtz (rhythm guitar and vocals), David Goldflies (bass), and David Fleeman (drums). The rest of the tracks on the first studio album containing "Black Betty" were played by the Ram Jam lineup. Even though the song was credited to Huddie Ledbetter, the NAACP and Congress of Racial Equality called for a boycott due to the lyrics.
The boycott failed, however, and "Black Betty" reached number 18 on the singles chart in 1977 in the U.S., top ten in the UK Singles Chart and Australia, and number 46 in Canada, while the Ram Jam album reached the U.S. top 40. It was also a hit in the Netherlands, reaching number 4. In Canada, the album reached number 33.
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Cagey
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Post by Cagey on Aug 31, 2022 10:56:58 GMT -5
But guess what? These Ram Jam white guys from up north stole the song from chain gang Southern blacks! Well maybe, and maybe not depending on perspective, but clearly here is the source of their version, but history records that this use of Black Betty goes back much further... Maybe what we should do is frame it as the white guys simply turned this old version into a more modern hit song with their cover version of it. They borrowed and immortalized the following original source: James "Iron Head" Baker, recorded in the field by US musicologists John and Alan Lomax in December 1933, performed a cappella by the convict James "Iron Head" Baker and a group at Central State Farm, Sugar Land, Texas (a State prison farm).[12] Baker was 63 years old at the time of the recording. The Lomaxes were recording for the Library of Congress and later field recordings in 1934, 1936, and 1939 also include versions of "Black Betty". A notated version was published in 1934 in the Lomaxes book American Ballads and Folk Songs. It was recorded commercially in New York in April 1939 for the Musicraft Records label by Lead Belly, as part of a medley with two other work songs. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Betty
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Cagey
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Post by Cagey on Aug 31, 2022 11:05:32 GMT -5
And according to this, the song went from the Texas prison version to Lead Belly who recorded a version of it which is from where the white guys up north in Ram Jam learned it. Lead Belly!
You can start to hear what Ram Jam heard and picked up on starting after the 1:00 mark in following Lead Belly version:
Black Betty
This article needs additional citations for verification. (July 2017)
"Black Betty" (Roud 11668) is a 20th-century African-American work song often credited to Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter as the author, though the earliest recordings are not by him. Some sources claim it is one of Lead Belly's many adaptations of earlier folk material.[1] "Black Betty" Lead Belly Negro Sinful Songs album cover 1939.jpg Song by Lead Belly from the album Negro Sinful Songs
There are numerous recorded versions, including a cappella and folk. The song was eventually, with modified lyrics, remade as a rock song by the American band Ram Jam in 1977. Subsequent recordings, including hits by Tom Jones and Spiderbait, retain the structure of this version. Contents
Meaning and originEdit
The origin and meaning of the lyrics are subject to debate. Historically, the "Black Betty" of the title may refer to the nickname given to a number of objects: a bottle of whiskey, a whip, or a penitentiary transfer wagon.
David Hackett Fischer, in his book Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford University Press, 1989), states that "Black Betty" was a common term for a bottle of whisky in the borderlands between northern England and southern Scotland; it later became a euphemism in the backcountry areas of the eastern United States. In January 1736, Benjamin Franklin published The Drinker's Dictionary in the Pennsylvania Gazette offering 228 round-about phrases for being drunk. One of those phrases is "He's kiss'd black Betty."[2][3] Other sources give the meaning of "Black Betty" in the United States (from at least 1827) as a liquor bottle.[4][5]
In Caldwells's Illustrated Combination Centennial Atlas of Washington Co. Pennsylvania of 1876, a short section describes wedding ceremonies and marriage customs, including a wedding tradition where two young men from the bridegroom procession were challenged to run for a bottle of whiskey. This challenge was usually given when the bridegroom party was about a mile from the destination-home where the ceremony was to be had. Upon securing the prize, referred to as "Black Betty", the winner of the race would bring the bottle back to the bridegroom and his party. The whiskey was offered to the bridegroom first and then successively to each of the groom's friends.[6]
John A. and Alan Lomax's 1934 book, American Ballads and Folk Songs describes the origins of "Black Betty":
"Black Betty is not another Frankie, nor yet a two-timing woman that a man can moan his blues about. She is the whip that was and is used in some Southern prisons. A convict on the Darrington State Farm in Texas, where, by the way, whipping has been practically discontinued, laughed at Black Betty and mimicked her conversation in the following song." (In the text, the music notation and lyrics follow.) — Lomax, John A. and Alan Lomax, American Ballads and Folk Songs. (1934; reprint, New York: Dover, 1994), 60-1
John Lomax also interviewed blues musician James Baker (better known as "Iron Head") in 1934, almost one year after Iron Head performed the first known recorded performance of the song.[7] In the resulting article for Musical Quarterly, titled "'Sinful Songs' of the Southern Negro", Lomax again mentions the nickname of the bullwhip is "Black Betty".[8] Steven Cornelius in his book, Music of the Civil War Era, states in a section concerning folk music following the war's end that "prisoners sang of 'Black Betty', the driver's whip."[9]
In an interview[10] conducted by Alan Lomax with former Texas penal farm prisoner Doc "Big Head" Reese, Reese stated that the term "Black Betty" was used by prisoners to refer to the "Black Maria" — the penitentiary transfer wagon.
Robert Vells, in Life Flows On in Endless Song: Folk Songs and American History, writes:
As late as the 1960s, the vehicle that carried men to prison was known as "Black Betty," though the same name may have also been used for the whip that so often was laid on the prisoners' backs, "bam-ba-lam." — Wells, Robert V., Life Flows On in Endless Song: Folk Songs and American History. (Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, 2009) 156.
In later versions, "Black Betty" was depicted as various vehicles, including a motorcycle and a hot rod. Early recordings (1933–1939)Edit
The song was first recorded in the field by US musicologists John and Alan Lomax in December 1933, performed a cappella by the convict James "Iron Head" Baker and a group at Central State Farm, Sugar Land, Texas (a State prison farm).[11] Baker was 63 years old at the time of the recording.
The Lomaxes were recording for the Library of Congress and later field recordings in 1934, 1936, and 1939 also include versions of "Black Betty". A notated version was published in 1934 in the Lomaxes book American Ballads and Folk Songs. It was recorded commercially in New York in April 1939 for the Musicraft Records label by Lead Belly, as part of a medley with two other work songs: "Looky Looky Yonder" and "Yellow Woman's Doorbells". Musicraft issued the recording in 1939 as part of a 78-rpm five-disc album entitled Negro Sinful Songs sung by Lead Belly.[12] Lead Belly had a long association with the Lomaxes, and had himself served time in State prison farms. Lead Belly was first recorded by the Lomaxes in 1933 when he was approximately 44 years old. John Lomax helped Lead Belly get the recording contract with Musicraft in 1939. Post-1939Edit
While Lead Belly's 1939 recording was also performed a cappella (with hand claps in place of hammer blows), most subsequent versions added guitar accompaniment. These include folk-style recordings in 1964 by Odetta (as a medley with "Looky Yonder", with staccato guitar strums in place of hand claps), and Alan Lomax himself.[13]
Singer Dave Ray of the folk-blues trio Koerner, Ray and Glover also recorded the song unaccompanied on their 1964 album Lots More Blues, Rags and Hollers.
In 1968, Manfred Mann released a version of the song, arranged for a band, on their LP Mighty Garvey!, with the title and lyrics changed to "Big Betty". In 1972, Manfred Mann's Earth Band performed "Black Betty" live for John Peel's In Concert on the BBC,[14] this version was released in 2019 on the double CD / triple LP Radio Days Volume 4, which also contains an earlier rendition from 1971 under the title "Big Betty". The same musical arrangement but with a new lyric and altered vocal melody appeared on the Earth Band's second album Glorified Magnified as "Look Around", credited solely to drummer Chris Slade. A studio version of "Big Betty" was recorded at the same sessions but remained unreleased until the 40th Anniversary box set in 2011.
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ttaylor
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Post by ttaylor on Aug 31, 2022 17:14:09 GMT -5
Funny thing about this song was I’ve heard on more than a few occasions that Skynyrd was who actually released it. Obviously people who didn’t know what they were talking about, but I remember hearing an unusual number of times.
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Post by JerseyGirl on Aug 31, 2022 20:49:39 GMT -5
I listened to three of the versions of "Black Betty". The version Ram Jam rearranged and released is the one I like the best. I never knew Ram Jam guitarist Bill Bartlett was in the Lemon Pipers. "Green Tambourine" was the Lemon Pipers' biggest hit.
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Post by fstbck2000 on Dec 2, 2022 17:34:32 GMT -5
I’ve been in a lot of arguments over Skynyrd singing it. The reason people think that is because the first version on YouTube was listed as Skynyrd. It pissed me off cause I always hated that song.
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ttaylor
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Post by ttaylor on Dec 3, 2022 2:51:05 GMT -5
I’ve been in a lot of arguments over Skynyrd singing it. The reason people think that is because the first version on YouTube was listed as Skynyrd. It pissed me off cause I always hated that song. Interesting, but I can remember hearing that Skynyrd sang this long before You Tube existed
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