Joannie Sommers, Charlie Feathers, Wanda Jackson - Strange, creepy, and politically incorrect rock 'n' roll lyrics

When listening to old records - as I often do - the past occasionally does feel like a foreign country. An outstanding example of changing attitudes  is Joannie Sommers’s 1962 hit, “Johnny Get Angry” (see above), in which the singer tries to goad her wimpy boyfriend into behaving like a complete “Right Man” bastard: 

Oh, Johnny get angry, Johnny get mad
Give me the biggest lecture I ever had
I want a brave man, I want a cave man
Johnny, show me that you care, really care for me

Blimey! I mean, does she really want to end up in A&E? I’ve been asked for some strange things by women over the years - but never a lecture!

The lyrics that open Wanda Jackson’s blistering 1957 rocker, “Fujiyama Mama”, probably win the award for the least sensitive choice of a metaphor in popular music:

I’ve been to Nagasaki
Been to Hiroshima too
What I did to them babe
I could do to you

Charming! 

I know the war with Japan had only been over for a dozen years when this was recorded – but surely someone must have realised that you didn’t need to be Japanese, or even a damn Yankee liberal, to find the lyrics offensive.

Mind you, the following verse from Carl Perkins’s Sun-era celebration of his home state, “Tennessee”, comes a close second:

They make bombs they say, that can blow up our world, dear
Well a country boy like me, I will agree
But if all you folks out there can remember
They made the first atomic bomb in Tennessee

Er…okay, Carl. I suppose.

I stopped sniggering at deliberate sexual double entendre lyrics when I was about 14, and I’ve never understood why filthy blues songs – with lyrics along the lines of “Bang my box till your engine runs out of oil” – have given people such a thrill over the years. But I’ve always found country singer Roy Hall’s 1950 release, “Dirty Boogie” - which is borderline single entendre - disquietingly near the knuckle:

There was an old man out trying to truck
When he was young he boogie-woogied too much
He can’t do the dirty boogie – too old to boogie woogie...
Momma’s in the poor house, Daddy’s in the jail
Sister’s on the street shouting “Boogie for sale!”
Cos she does the dirty boogie...

Yes, okay, Roy – we get it! For goodness sake - did this actually get airplay on Country & Western radio stations? In 1950?

Sun boss Sam Phillips turned down the chance to record rockabilly original Charlie Feathers’s “Tongue-Tied Jill” on the grounds that it would offend listeners with speech defects. Charlie evidently didn’t cotton to that sort of politically correct interference, because he compounded the felony by later recording a song called “Stuttering Cindy”, a sort of companion piece to Buck Griffin’s “Stutterin’ Papa”.  It’s all very affectionate, but still...

I don’t have any records making fun of physical deformity, but there are plenty along the same lines as Larry Williams’s “Short Fat Fanny”, Eddie Cochran’s “Skinny Jim” and Warren Smith’s “Miss Froggie” :“I got a gal, shaped just like a frog… I found her drinkin’ muddy water, sleepin’ in a hollow log”. Shaped like a frog? Back-country inbreeding, I suppose.

Twenty-five years before rap music appeared on the scene to brighten our lives and enrich our culture, rock ‘n’ roll wasn’t above testosterone-fuelled threats of violence - but they were almost invariably directed at fellows muscling in on the singer’s gal, rather than at women, homosexuals or policemen.

1956’s “Cruisin’” finds Gene Vincent out hunting for his girl-friend and the chap she’s two-timing him with – “I’m cruisin’ for the bruising that man with her is gonna get”. When Carl Perkins finds himself in a similar predicament in “That’s Right” he tells his errant girlfriend: “When I’ve found the cat that’s getting my sugar/It’s gonna be rough when I catches that booger”. But the strangest example of 1950s violence has to be Chet Atkins’s “Blackjack” in which we hear a criminal having a confession beaten out of him, while repeatedly growling “I won’t talk!”

There’s very little of an obviously racist nature when it comes to blacks in my collection. The only vaguely offensive line I can find is “We were rippin’ along like white folks might” in Arkie Shibley’s 1949 “Hot Rod Race”.

But Native Americans are another matter: I have a whole CD devoted to obscure country, rockabilly and rock ‘n’ roll songs about Redskins. Possibly the oddest is Ray Scott’s “Boppin’ Wigwam Willie”, which is a thinly-veiled account of a brave who suffers from erectile dysfunction:

Hey, Wigwam Willie had one desire
He really wanted to set the world on fire
But the more he tried, the worse he got
'Cause Wig Wam Willie just could not bop

Fortunately, our hero manages to get his tomahawk working:

Hey-eeh, Wigwam Willie now got his squaw
To show him how to do that rock 'n' roll
Now Willie is as happy as he can be
Because he rocks all night in his old tepee

I’ll end with a few intriguing oddities, none of which are in the least bit offensive - but they are distinctly odd. In “Long John’s Flagpole Rock”, Long John Roller describes his attempts to set a new world record for sitting on top of a flagpole, in order to win a new Ford – I presume it must have been based on a real competition. It offers  a glimpse into a mysterious, long-lost world.

Equally bizarre is Jimmy Wolford’s “Teeney Weeney Man”, in which the audience is urged to feel sympathy for a spaceman attempting to make contact with our leaders.

Finally, I’ve long been intrigued by The Lone Drifter’s “Eager Boy” in which a young, would-be populist Southern politician (he wants to “help the weary ones to see the light”) objects to his backers treating him “like a toy/Just cos I’m an eager boy”. All very charming, but what a strange choice of subject for a song!