I'm just a lonely guy

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I'm just a lonely guy
Cover
Little Richard And His Band
publication November 1, 1955
length 2:38
Genre (s) Rhythm and Blues
Author (s) Dorothy La Bostrie ,
Bumps Blackwell
Publisher (s) Venice Music
Label Specialty Records
album The Fabulous Little Richard

I'm Just a Lonely Guy , also with the addition of brackets I'm Just a Lonely Guy (All Alone) (German for example: I am just a lonely boy (All alone) ), is a rhythm written by Dorothy La Bostrie for Little Richard and-Blues - Song from 1955. Bumps Blackwell arranged the song and produced the recording in Cosimo Matassa's J&M studio in New Orleans with his studio band . I'm Just a Lonely Guy thematizes the desperation of an abandoned lover and is a free eight-bar 12/8 blues in G major. The piece appeared atSpecialty Records under number 561 on the B-side of Little Richard's successful debut single, the rock 'n' roll hit Tutti Frutti , but remained without a chart listing and is only used in the literature in connection with the genre-defining A- Side mentioned.

Emergence

After Little Richard had made some less successful blues and rhythm and blues recordings for RCA Records and Peacock Records in the first half of the 1950s, he tried to advance his musical career at the beginning of 1955. Lloyd Price had recommended him the Californian independent label Specialty Records, to whose owner Art Rupe he sent a demo tape with the two numbers He's My Star and Wonderin ' . Art Rupe was looking for a singer comparable to BB King , but at the same time able to process gospel influences following the example of Ray Charles . After several months and many telephone inquiries from the self-confident singer, Rupe sent his producer Bumps Blackwell to New Orleans to arrange a recording session with Little Richard in Cosimo Matassa's J&M studio. Little Richard received the invitation while touring with his live band The Upsetters in Fayetteville , Tennessee. He left the current engagement with his musicians Lee Diamond , Charles Connor and road manager Henry Nash and drove to New Orleans overnight to complete his first recording session for Specialty Records there on the morning of September 13, 1955.

Blackwell had already addressed a call to songwriters via a local radio station on September 3rd to submit material for a session with Little Richard. Dorothy La Bostrie heard the offer and, in conversation with Jeff Hannusch, remembers: “I was listening to the radio when an appeal was broadcast that caught my attention. It was said that Bumps Blackwell was looking for a songwriter. As soon as it was announced that I could meet him, I decided to be a songwriter. ”Over the next few days, she persistently suggested various compositions to Bumps Blackwell, from which the producer chose I'm Just a Lonely Guy and for the second day of the two-day session.

The studio operator and sound engineer Matassa had booked his routine studio tape for the two days of recording , as Little Richard had mentioned to Blackwell that he liked their accompaniment on Fats Domino's successful records. Earl Palmer was on drums, Frank Fields played bass, Lee Allen and Red Tyler played saxophones. Justin Adams took over the electric guitar, Melvin Dowden and Huey Smith took turns on the piano . Palmer noted of his first encounter with the extroverted singer: “I don't remember exactly what I said, something like, 'What the hell is this?' Not 'who?' But 'what?' 'Dude,' I said to Tyler, 'what the hell is that?' "On September 14th, eight tracks were scheduled in six hours of studio time. La Bostrie had come to the studio in person to find out about the progress of I'm Just a Lonely Guy recording . The first attempts at He's My Star , Wonderin ' , I'm Just a Lonely Guy and The Most I Can Offer didn't convince Blackwell, which is why he decided to take a break, which the musicians used for a snack in the nearby bar Dew Drop Inn .

In the pub, Little Richard spontaneously intoned his self-written live number Tutti Frutti on the piano there , in which Blackwell immediately suspected hit potential if the suggestive text were defused. Therefore, he commissioned Dorothy La Bostrie with a revision of the text, which it completed up to 15 minutes before the end of the session. In the meantime the musicians had recorded Directly from My Heart to You and again I'm Just a Lonely Guy . In the remaining quarter of an hour, Tutti Frutti was recorded in three takes . Of I'm Just a Lonely Guy next to the published version only one take has been handed down, which did not meet the requirements because of a false start. Blackwell took the recordings to the Specialty Records office on his return to Los Angeles, where Art Rupe made the master tapes . The copyright for I'm Just a Lonely Guy was registered on October 22, 1955 by the specialty music publisher Venice Music to the songwriter La Bostrie as lyricist and producer and arranger Blackwell as composer at the Library of Congress .

Musical structure and content

I'm Just a Lonely Guy is based on an 8-bar blues scheme in 12/8 time in G major. The first four bars each make up a stanza , the second four bars the refrain . While the stanza changes from the root G to the subdominant C and then C minor, the chorus leads the tonic G back to G via an EAD cadence before oscillating between subdominant, tonic and dominant D in blues fashion. The refrain of the first 8-bar figure reduces the cadence to AD and leads through the dominant D to the second stanza. The song has a total of five 8-bars, the fourth recording a guitar solo and the fifth repeating the third.

The singer regrets his loneliness after breaking up with his great love. Should he not find his way back to her, he wants to put an end to his life by throwing himself out of a boat into the river. For this he uses the widespread in American popular music expression "I'm going to the river" (German: I go to the river ), a form of suicide to announce that acts as a farewell particularly desperate and emotionally to the audience. The emotionality of the message is underlined by gospel-like melisms , which particularly emphasize the verses about loneliness "I'm all alone" and "I'm just a lonely guy", repeated several times and thus make the hooklines and the title of the song. The narrative situation also supports the feeling of loneliness to be conveyed, since the speaker in the first person perspective does not address the words in the form of a monologue to his absent love, but to himself or to an unaddressed, mute audience.

Publications

On November 1st, 1955 I'm Just a Lonely Guy appeared on the American market together with Tutti Frutti as Specialty 561. Although Specialty Records did not include A and B sides on their singles, the marketing and success of Tutti Frutti left no doubt that I'm Just a Lonely Guy was intended as the back of the potential hit. The single was released as a 78er shellac record as well as a 45er vinyl single and was published several times under this number, each with stickers in the current design. Only Little Richard's second specialty single Long Tall Sally was marketed internationally, while the debut hit Tutti Frutti did not come onto the European market until 1957 through the British distributor London Records . On the back, I'm Just a Lonely Guy was replaced by Long Tall Sally , which was released in Europe in 1956 , so that the title appeared on single only on the American home market.

A series of six EPs that Specialty Records released with material from Little Richard had room for 24 tracks. I'm Just a Lonely Guy was n't one of them. However, from 1957 in Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, South Africa and Sweden the EP Little Richard and his Band was released , on which the title can be heard alongside She's Got It , Heeby-Jeebies and Slippin 'and' Slidin is.

Specialty Records also took its time for the first edition on LP : When Little Richard's third album The Fabulous Little Richard was put together at the beginning of 1959, the rock 'n' roll numbers that were successful on single were already largely on the two previous albums Here's Little Richard and Little Richard second published. Little Richard had withdrawn from the rock 'n' roll business in October 1957 in favor of theological training and recording of gospel music, so Art Rupe searched the archives for the numbers from the September 1955 recording session, which had previously been perceived as less strong. In an overdub session in February 1959 at the Master Recorders in Los Angeles, he and the sound engineer Abe Robyn had the girl group The Steward Sisters sing a background and put the new audio tracks over the existing blues master tapes. A revised version of I'm Just a Lonely Guy was released in March 1959 on Speciatly LP 2104 and in Great Britain, Australia, France, Italy, Japan and the Netherlands on records from the respective license partners.

The alternative track was officially released in 1989 on the 6-CD box The Specialty Sessions from Ace Records .

Importance, Criticism, and Success

I'm Just a Lonely Guy is closely related to Little Richard's debut hit Tutti Frutti in several ways and is almost exclusively associated and discussed with this song in the music literature. On the one hand, there are constants between the two songs, especially in terms of personnel, as not only the musicians and studio staff are identical, but both tracks are the only contributions by Dorothy La Bostrie to Little Richard's repertoire. On the other hand, the recordings that follow one another during the session show a stylistic development that ends Little Richard's early rhythm and blues phase, influenced by jump blues and gospel , and his rock 'n' roll phase and thus the climax heralds his career. With Specialty 561, this development is documented on two sides of a single. Through their sale, I'm Just a Lonely Guy indirectly became a million seller behind Tutti Frutti , even if this success did not affect the B-side in the form of chart positions.

Dorothy La Bostrie's contribution as a songwriter is assessed differently: While the Canadian television presenter and critic Richard Crouse attests to the "beginner" at least "a good text, but a not particularly remarkable melody", the American literature professor David Kirby judges more harshly: I'm Just a Lonely Guy is "more soporific than bluesy", it is "immediately recognizable as a number that can be heard from bands at concerts to relax between two wild rascals". After all, the two tracks Directly from My Heart to You and I'm Just a Lonely Guy , which were recorded after the break at the Dew Drop Inn, already made a difference to the previous day's work, as if the “pure energy of the musical had Insertion in the pub gave the subsequent recordings a new, raw force ”. Little Richard's voice was "present, scratchy and loud, but the text itself was lame: (...) nothing about these words indicated that [La Bostrie] was worth recalling." The choice of La Bostrie to revise Tutti Frutti was therefore only owed to the desperation and time pressure of the producer Blackwell.

The American musicologist Albin Zak judged more benevolently that although the song was a “slow blues”, of all the tracks of the recording session it was “ closest to the fervor of Tutti Frutti ”. Even Bumps Blackwell could have got along with the two numbers recorded between the break and the last track “with hanging and gagging”, but his opinion of La Bostrie's songwriting talent was ambivalent: All of her songs “sounded like Dinah Washington's blowtop blues . They were all composed with the same melody. But when I looked at the words, I recognized her as a prolific copywriter. She just didn't understand anything about melodies. "

Unlike the rock 'n' roll songs Little Richards, which are counted among the standards of the genre due to their chart successes and the frequent new recordings by other artists, there are hardly any commercially published cover versions for I'm Just a Lonely Guy . The Canadian blues musician King Biscuit Boy recorded his version in 1970 with the band Crowbar for the joint album Official Music . In 2015 Charley Cochran presented a version of the piece in F major as a “little tribute for Little Richard” with a guitar solo by Johnny Gale and an additional bridge on the video platform Youtube.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Charles White: The Life and Times of Little Richard. The Authorized Biography. Omnibus Press, London et al. 2003 (1984), pp. 40-42.
  2. ↑ a b Jeff Hannusch: I Hear You Knockin '. 5th edition. Swallow Publications Inc., Ville Platte 2005 (1985), Dorothy Labostrie. New Orleans Songstress, pp. 219-224.
  3. ^ A b c d Charles White: The Life and Times of Little Richard. The Authorized Biography. Omnibus Press, London et al. 2003 (1984), pp. 49-51.
  4. ↑ Tony Sherman: Backbeat. Earl Palmer's Story. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, London 1999, p. 90.
  5. ^ Public Catalog. In: Library of Congress , accessed March 13, 2015.
  6. ^ Steven Carl Tracy: Langston Hughes & the Blues. University of Illinois Press, Champaign 2001, p. 202.
  7. ↑ Zora del Buono: Going into the water. ( Memento of April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) In: Mare Online , accessed on March 13, 2015.
  8. ↑ a b c John Garodkin: Little Richard Special. 2nd Edition. Mjoelner Edition, Praestoe 1984, Specialty Records, pp. 23-66.
  9. ↑ Valeri Orlov: Little Richard. All rock 'n' roll and blues rock studio recordings. In: Little Richard. The Quasar of Rock , accessed March 13, 2015.
  10. ↑ Larry Birnbaum: Little Richard: The Georgia Peach. In: Stereophile.com. 2011 Records To Die For. P. 2, accessed on March 13, 2015 (English).
  11. ^ Grace Lichtenstein, Laura Dankner: Musical Gumbo. The Music of New Orleans. WW Norton Company, New York, London 1993, p. 99.
  12. ^ Joel Whitburn: Hot R&B Songs. Billboard 1942-2010. 6th edition. Record Research Inc., Menomonee Falls 2010, p. 401.
  13. ↑ Richard Crouse: Who Wrote the Book of Love? Doubleday, Canada, Tutti Frutti. Little Richard (e-book).
  14. ↑ a b David Kirby: Little Richard. The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll. Continuum, New York 2009, Keep A-Knockin ', 111.
  15. ↑ David Kirby: Little Richard. The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll. Continuum, New York 2009, Keep A-Knockin ', pp. 113-114.
  16. ↑ a b David Kirby: Little Richard. The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll. Continuum, New York 2009, I've Got It, p. 126.
  17. ^ Albin Zak: I Don't Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America. University of Michigan Press, Minnesota 2010, p. 184.
  18. ^ Keith Pettipas: Original Music. In: Allmusic , accessed on April 24, 2015.
  19. ↑ Charley Cochran: "I'm Just a Lonely Guy" - Little Richard Cover. In: Youtube. February 11, 2015, accessed March 13, 2015.
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on June 20, 2015 .