Groovy Little Suzie
| Groovy Little Suzie | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Bo-Pete | |
| publication | August 1964 |
| length | 2:17 |
| Genre (s) | Rock and roll |
| Author (s) |
John Marascalco Harry Nilsson |
| Publisher (s) | Robin Hood Music |
| Label | Try records |
| Cover versions | |
| 1964 | Little Richard |
| 1968 | The Seven Souldiers |
| 1972 | The Air Mail |
Groovy Little Suzie , also Groovy Little Susie , Groovy Little Suzy or Groovy Little Suzi written is a rock 'n' roll - song by the American songwriter John Marascalco together with the young Harry Nilsson wrote. Nilsson's demo recording was released in 1964 as his fourth single under his pseudonym "Bo-Pete". The piece was quickly picked up by Little Richard and later published many times. The song, based on a 12-measure blues song, which is dedicated to the rock 'n' roll themes of fun and sex, was commercially unsuccessful, but is one of the first compositions in Harry Nilsson's songwriting career and due to his collaboration with the Rock 'n' roll star Little Richard is of musical historical importance. Cover versions of the Seven Souldiers and the formation The Air Mail are available.
Emergence
John Marascalco had been successful in the Los Angeles music business since his rock 'n' roll compositions interpreted by Little Richard in 1956 and 1957 . Through his colleague Scott Turner , he met the young Harry Nilsson, who in 1962 recorded some Marascalco / Turner compositions in a demo session for Turner. In 1963, Marascalco and Nilsson first worked on songs together, including Baa Baa Blacksheep , Do You Wanna (Have Some Fun) and Groovy Little Suzie , for which Nilsson made demo recordings at the end of the year. The sessions took place in a small studio in Los Angeles under the direction of Marascalco and in the presence of a studio employee named "Bo Pete". Do You Wanna (Have Some Fun) and Groovy Little Suzie were created first, and Baa Baa Blacksheep was recorded the following week . There are no reports on the identity of the instrumentalists. Baa Baa Blacksheep Part 1 & 2 was first pressed for Marascalco's own label Lola Records in December 1963 and finally released on Crusader Records in early 1964 . For Crusader 103, Nilsson chose the name of the studio employee “Bo-Pete” as a pseudonym. The other two pieces remained unpublished for the next few months.
Marascalco and Nilsson promptly presented the song to Little Richard, who arrived in August 1964 for his second recording session at his new record label Vee-Jay Records in Los Angeles. Little Richard had only recently made his rock 'n' roll comeback after a break of several years, which he had used for religious studies and gospel recordings. He produced the session himself, assisted by Motown arranger Jerry Long Jr. During the session, Groovy Little Suzie made new recordings of the classics Only You (And You Alone) , Memories Are Made of This and Short Fat Fanny . It probably played Richard's tour band The Upsetters , possibly reinforced by Johnny Guitar Watson on guitar and Maxwell Davis on baritone saxophone. The Nilsson biographer Alyn Shipton suspects Buddy Collette , Clyde Johnson and Bill Green , who were working for Vee-Jay Records at the time, to be the wood section . The appearance of Groovy Little Suzie in the tracklists of some of Jimi Hendrix's compilations suggests that the guitarist was involved in the recording. Although he played in Little Richard's Band for a few months in 1964 and 1965, he cannot be heard on the previously created Groovy Little Suzie .
Musical structure
Harry Nilsson's demo version of Groovy Little Suzie is a pure 12-bar blues with a change to the dominant on the last bar. At the beginning there is an intro played by the piano over four bars of tonic :
- || I | I | I | I ||
- || I | I | I | I | IV | IV | I | I | V | IV | I | V ||
The stanzas are lined up without inserting a refrain . On the tonic of the third and fourth as well as the seventh and eighth bars of a scheme, the organ responds to the vocal phrases of the singer in the principle of call and response . The third verse plays repeatedly with the fragmented title “A-Suzie, Suzie, a-groovy, groovy, groovy, my girl”, which lyrically comes closest to a chorus function. After the third stanza, an organ solo is performed over the full blues scheme. After the subsequent fourth stanza, the title charade of the third stanza is repeated and the song fades out . Accompanied by a piano, the eighth note pattern is reminiscent of many earlier Little Richard recordings.
Little Richard's version varies Nilsson's original in a number of ways. The intro was taken over by the guitar and a vocal group replaced the organ answering the singer with the interjections "Aa-ha, oh yeah", the solo of which was taken over by Little Richard at the piano and extended by a further 12 bars of a modified blues scheme. In addition to the swap of organ and piano, the most noticeable change in the instrumentation compared to Nilsson's recording was the addition of saxophone riffs. In addition, except for the solo, the change to the dominant in the last bar of the blues scheme was omitted in favor of another bar on the tonic. Rhythmically, the recording is more ambitious than the rock beat of Nilsson's demo and thus corresponds to the further development of Little Richard's sound along the current mainstream of Afro-American pop music.
content
The song title Groovy Little Suzie is part of several traditions with which Little Richard attracted attention in the American charts in the 1950s: On the one hand, it is a rhyming play on words analogous to Tutti Frutti , Ready Teddy or Heeby-Jeebies , on the other hand includes the title as Long Tall Sally and Good Golly, Miss Molly a woman's name: the "small Suzie" is the attribute "groovy" (German approximately: cool, strong ) a current in the 1960 mode word assigned to which Marascalco and Nilsson 1965 dedicate their own title to another joint work for the band The Travelers in the form of the instrumental Groovy . The song content is first an invitation to dance, which then expands on further rapprochement up to the sexual act. Here call the songwriter, the Italian-American Marascalco and Sweden-born Nilsson, in sometimes metaphorical way to fun and sex as two of the main themes of African American influenced pop music, the 'n' in the 1950s, rock and roll as mainstream established would have.
Publications
Crusader 103 with Baa Baa Blacksheep sold so well that the label thought about the release of the other two tracks from the Bo Pete repertoire and secured the financing for August 1964. Marascalco had previously registered the sole copyright for his publishing house Robin Hood Music in the notation Groovy Little Susie on August 3, 1964 . Nilsson's demo version appeared on the small label Try Records distributed by Crusader Records as the B-side behind Do You Wanna (Have Some Fun) with the record number 501. The label of the record again mentions "Bo-Pete" as the artist. In May 2009, Ace Records included Bo-Pete's Groovy Little Suzie in the You Heard Them Here First: First Recordings by Famous or Influential Artists compilation , conceptually designed to be “the first recorded version of pop, rock and soul classics which became hits through the recording of other artists ”.
Little Richard's version was released, shortened by 13 seconds by Vee-Jay, shortly after Nilsson's single on the album Vee-Jay LP-1107 entitled Little Richard is Back (And There's a Whole Lotta Shakin 'Goin' On) . The song was released as a single together with a new recording of the classic Baby Face on the Vee Jay subsidiary label Oldies under the number 194. The master tape found its way to Modern Records under unexplained circumstances , where Richard was under contract for a few months from late 1965 to spring 1966. Modern used the unabridged recording in December 1967 for the album The Wild and Frantic Little Richard . In addition, the piece appeared on a large number of compilations on budget labels utilizing the well-known artist's Vee-Jay and Modern repertoire.
Cover versions
After the two early versions of Nilsson and Little Richard, only a few cover versions are known. The band The Seven Souldiers released the track in 1968 on the album Traditional Soul . The album was released on the German label Fass under the number 1486. A re-release took place in 2008 for Black Hole Recordings on the album Go Tell It on the Mountain . The Hamburg record company Europa had international hits re-enacted for a number of compilations from 1968 and founded the formation The Air Mail with John Lawton as singer. In 1972 the album Top Hits International 1 was released as Europa E474 , on which the song is represented under the title Little Susy . The composition “A. Gilbert ”attributed.
The Seven Souldiers 
The Air Mail
Importance, Criticism, and Success
Groovy Little Suzie is one of the first compositions by Harry Nilsson, who achieved great success as a songwriter and performer in later years. The song is of the opinion BBC -Moderators Brian Matthew is a prime example of what Nilsson was able to before he became famous. The piece, rooted in rock 'n' roll of the 1950s, strongly reminded Nilsson of Little Richard's Good Golly Miss Molly from 1956, which was also composed by Marascalco. Alyn Shipton even described the title as a "shameless rework" of the earlier hit. Furthermore, Shipton stated that the rough and direct mood suggested a single recording attempt, which was only intended as a demo tape for sale to Little Richard. Little Richard praised Nilsson's voice as he performed the song for him with the words: “Man, you sing well for a white boy!” Little Richard's version put his own piano playing in the foreground and was faster and more confident in the presentation than Nilsson's demo Admission.
After the two releases Baa Baa Blacksheep and (Do You Wanna) Have Some Fun with Groovy Little Suzie under the pseudonym "Bo-Pete" and the two singles Donna I Understand and Stand Up and Holler under different artist names, Nilsson found the first with Tower Records Contract partner for his subsequent world career, which produced "bigger and better things" than Groovy Little Suzie . None of his early singles were of commercial importance. Little Richard stated that despite the frequent reprints of Groovy Little Suzie in all possible spellings like Suzie , Suzy and Suzi on budget labels, he had not received any noteworthy royalties.
Individual evidence
- ^ A b c Peter Doggett: Session '62. Harry Nilsson. The Debut Sessions . Retro Records, Sheffiels 1995 (CD booklet from Retro Records retro 804).
- ↑ Harry Nilsson: Baa Baa Blacksheep . Lola Records, Los Angeles 1963 (vinyl single with a datable number from the Monarch Records press shop).
- ↑ a b c d John Garodkin: Little Richard Special . 2nd Edition. Mjoelner Edition, Praestoe 1984, ISBN 87-87721-14-7 , Vee-Jay Records, pp. 83-104 .
- ↑ a b c d e Alyn Shipton : Nilsson. The life of a singer-songwriter . 1st edition. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2013, ISBN 978-0-19-975657-5 , Good Old Desk, pp. 33 (American English).
- ↑ Gary Geldeart, Steve Rodham: Jimi Hendrix - from the Benjamin Franklin Studios . Part 1: The Complete Guide to the Recorded Work of Jimi Hendrix. 3. Edition. Jimpress, 2008, ISBN 0-9527686-5-8 , pp. 281 .
- ↑ Bob Leszczak: Who Did It First ?: Great rhythm and blues cover songs and Their original artists . Scarecrow Press, Lanham 2013, ISBN 978-0-8108-8866-1 , Ready Teddy, pp. 175 (American English).
- ^ Richard Aquila: That Old-Time Rock & Roll. A Chronicle of an Era, 1954-1963 . University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Chicago 2000, ISBN 0-252-06919-6 , pp. 84 ff .
- ↑ Geraldine Gonzales: About. In: The Travelers. Retrieved November 10, 2014 (B-side of the single Turn On , Lola # 003).
- ↑ a b Dawn Eden: One Last Touch of Nilsson . In: Goldmine Magazine . tape 20, 9 , no. 359 . Krause Publications Group, Inc, April 20, 1994 ( online ).
- ^ Public Catalog. Retrieved July 15, 2012 (title search).
- ↑ Stephen Thomas Erlewine: Various Artists. You Heard Them Here First: Rock's Icons before They Were Famous. In: Allmusic. Retrieved November 3, 2014 .
- ^ Charles White: The Life And Times Of Little Richard. The Authorized Biography . Omnibus Press, London, New York, Paris, Sydney, Copenhagen, Berlin, Madrid, Tokyo 2003, ISBN 0-7119-9761-6 , Discography / Filmography, pp. 263-276 (English, first edition: 1984).
- ↑ John Garodkin: Little Richard Special . 2nd Edition. Mjoelner Edition, Praestoe 1984, ISBN 87-87721-14-7 , Modern Records, pp. 106-113 .
- ↑ Fass 1486 at Discogs, accessed October 30, 2014
- ↑ Discography by John Lawton, accessed on October 31, 2014 ( Memento of the original from February 5, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ A b Brian Matthew: Brian's Weekly Sleevenotes - 02 August 14. In: Sound of the Sixties. Accessed November 1, 2014 .
- ↑ Stuart Colman: The Killer Quillers. John Marascalco . In: Trevor Cajiao (Ed.): Now Dig This . No. 362. Bensham, Gateshead, Tyne & Wear May 2013, pp. 13-16.
