In 1969, with the help of James Brown and his band, veteran organist and bandleader Bill Doggett returned to the fertile soil of “Honky Tonk,” the song that remains his greatest achievement in both commercial and aesthetic terms. The King Records’ single “Honky Tonk Popcorn” b/w “Honky Tonk” wasn’t a hit however, and its current rep is too often absorbed as part of Brown’s long string of musical triumphs. But in relation to Doggett, it does provide a valuable lesson; never count an artist out. And nearly forty-five years later, the single continues to sound fantastic.
Even though his career spanned a large portion of the 20th century, Bill Doggett’s name will always be associated with his biggest hit. And that hit was indeed a huge one. “Honky Tonk (Part 1)” was simply a monstrous object; not only the most successful R&B single of 1956 (chalking up thirteen weeks at the top spot), the 45 additionally attained the stature of true crossover smash, making it all the way to number two on the pop chart.
Subsequently, that killer and its fabulous flipside “Honky Tonk (Part 2)” have become part of the lore of the early rock ‘n’ roll era, even though Doggett was far from any kind of rocker. Born in 1916 and considered a child prodigy on the piano at age 13, William Ballard Doggett began his career shortly thereafter, and by the ‘30s he was leading his own orchestra.
Tough times led him to sell his band to Lucky Millander. Doggett continued to work with the group, making his recording debut with that outfit in 1939. In 1942 he became the pianist and arranger for The Ink Spots. Employment with Count Basie, Wynonie Harris, Lionel Hampton, Coleman Hawkins, and Ella Fitzgerald followed, and by 1947 he’d stepped into the piano role for Louis Jordan’s Tympany Five. It was with Jordan that Doggett first played the Hammond organ, the instrument that came to be his calling card.
And stories persist that Doggett wrote “Saturday Night Fish Fry,” a big hit for Jordan and one the bandleader claimed as his own. If true, this usurping of credit likely played a role in Doggett’s decision to again form his own, this time smaller, band. In the early ‘50s, his trio began making records for the King label, Syd Nathan’s now legendary imprint based in Cincinnati, Ohio, but it took a few years and changes in personnel before the jackpot was struck.
While surely famous by name, “Honky Tonk” is also quickly recognizable to scores of ears that hold no knowledge of the song’s specifics. Redolent of a time when the casual assurance of uncut Rhythm and Blues was making a big dent in the consciousness of the culture at large, “Honky Tonk” has managed to avoid obscurity and endures as an essential component in the soundtrack to the Eisenhower years. And anybody that’s watched David Lynch’s Blue Velvet has probably found the tune lodged into their memory banks for instantaneous, troubling recall. I wonder if Doggett ever watched it. I sure hope so.
A stupendously suave instrumental featuring the talents of guitarist Billy Butler and saxophonist Clifford Scott, “Honky Tonk” helped to launch a magnificent era of R&B, and it bookends exceptionally well with Booker T & the M.G.s’ ’62 vocal-less doozy “Green Onions,” which exploded onto the charts as this era of Rhythm & Blues motion began winding down (as Soul continued to shape up, vocalists became even more dominant). But due to Doggett’s resistance to jumping onto the rock ‘n’ roll bandwagon, his name lacks the celebrated status that’s awarded to his fellow jazz/R&B-bred R&R trailblazer Big Joe Turner.
Turner never bailed on the music that shaped him, but he did indulge in the kicking out of often risqué jump-derived R&B singles for as long as the exercise proved profitable. Doggett resisted straying from the path he followed prior to “Honky Tonk” however, and his subsequent recordings largely travel non rock-inflected R&B and jazz avenues.
This resulted in scores of albums, singles, and EPs that generally alternated between earthier strokes and environments that are frankly much more polite and mainstream. If prolific, Doggett’s career can be accurately assessed as uneven, a factor that’s definitely limited his posthumous reputation (he passed back in 1996.) It’s also difficult to get a grip on his discography, which really is pretty formidable.
His pre-“Honky Tonk” recordings for King have their moments, including “Bird Dog,” a cool two-part single from ’52 and “High Heels,” a tidy ditty from ’54. But there’s also a bunch of less interesting material; one moment you’re riding a rather swell groove, the next it seems you’ve been transported to a soporific ice skating rink, a recurring problem with early organ-led junk. There’s also too many cuts where the music serves as backing for unremarkable vocalists, entries mainly proving that not every ‘50s-era R&B recording is imbued with the aura of greatness.
Throw in a half-dozen tracks from ’54 that distressingly feature a Yuletide theme, and it becomes clear that Doggett’s (and surely King’s head guy Nathan’s) vision was considerably directed toward the realms of hopeful commercial success. Doggett’s sides from this era have been collected onto a couple of CDs by the French Classics (aka Chronological Classics) label, but for anyone not totally obsessed with ‘50s R&B, I’d say they’re pretty inessential.
Doggett’s post-“Honky Tonk” output for King has been served up on a slew of comps, though at this late date, retrieving vinyl copies will require some digging. Back in ’85 the Charly imprint put together a very swank collection titled Gon’ Doggett that opened with both ends of that ’56 dilly and then tapped into a fine stream of instrumental guff that never faltered.
And it’s notable that Doggett was no one hit wonder. Landing in the R&B Top 20 five more times after “Honky Tonk,” the sounds he made in the late-‘50s are good, starchy gravy. A few well-crafted CD compilations add more tracks to this equation, but as LP’s go, Gon’ Doggett is hard to beat in essaying the best of the man’s first run for King. So if you’re intrigued, happy hunting.
Leaving Nathan’s enterprise in 1960, Doggett went on to record for Warner Brothers, Columbia, and the Sue label, and fans of soul-jazz organ-combos should look into his ’65 LP for ABC-Paramount titled Wow! While it doesn’t reach the greasy hard-bop heights offered up by Jimmy Smith, Brother Jack McDuff, Big John Patton etc, it’s a far better record than some observers have rated it, and it shows that Doggett was far from mired in a ‘50s frame of mind.
But the best example of Doggett’s sustained vitality is a single that he made after returning to the King fold in 1969, a slab intrinsically linked to the whopping, wailing presence of the late James Brown. While Soul music’s reigning Godfather had a fairly tumultuous relationship with King, in the late ‘60s he reengaged with the company (under the heading King-Starday) to record a few tribute-themed LPs focused on artists that just happened to share label space with Brown in the late ‘50s.
The first was Thinking About Little Willie John and a Few Nice Things, a tip of the hat to the cat that brought us, along with much more, the sublime “Fever” in 1956. Up next was a team-up with crucial R&B figure Hank Ballard (he of the saucy “Annie” series, “Finger Poppin’ Time,” and the original version of “The Twist”) on the LP You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down. But the best is the 45 he made with Doggett.
The a-side “Honky Tonk Popcorn” finds Brown’s personality dominating the proceedings. His popularity circa ’69 was jammed-up jelly tight in the gyrations of a dance known as the Popcorn, with Brown hitting the charts with “The Popcorn” (# 11 R&B, #30 Pop), “Mother Popcorn (You Got to Have a Mother for Me)” (# 1 R&B, #11 Pop), “Lowdown Popcorn” (#16 R&B, #41 Pop) and the most superbly-titled of the lot, the simultaneously issued two-parter “Let a Man Come in and Do the Popcorn” (#2 R&B, #21 Pop, # 6 R&B, # 40 Pop), so it’s not a bit surprising that he adapted Doggett’s tune into a similar mode.
Largely instrumental, the cut is an exemplary slice of the drum-tight deep-funk science that Brown presided over and continued to develop well into the 1970s. Historically, the song is notable for the first appearance on a Brown affiliated record by Philippé Wynne, Robert McCullough, Frankie “Kash” Waddy, Clayton Runnels, Darryl Jamison, and Bootsy & Catfish Collins. Then called the Pacesetters, quickly recruited after Brown huffily fired his band for desiring an increase in pay, they quickly morphed into the J.B.’s, one of the greatest bands of the ‘70s (or any time, come to think of it.)
“Honky Tonk Popcorn” is virtually unrecognizable next to Doggett’s original, but ol’ Bill hangs in without a hitch, his mode in direct keeping with the approach he established on the ’56 take. That one spotlighted the talents of Butler and Scott, with Doggett leading from the rhythmic position. Here he gets a bundle of choice licks in as Brown and company outline the boiling intensity that was soon to set stages and turntables aflame.
As stated, the piece is not entirely instrumental. Not only does the group shout out the title at the beginning, but Brown hangs close to a microphone to throw down some vigorous throat gymnastics, sounding like a jacked-up maestro in the clutches of soulful ecstasy. At one crucial point the whole band just stops and lets James do his thing.
And a good thing he does too, squealing wildly and weirdly, his emoting detailing a man riding atop the apex of his creative game as he begins shifting into high funk gear. It’s a hunk of supreme massiveness from a truly deluxe dude, but if this was the only track to arise from the collab with Doggett, the organist would’ve been substantially and disappointingly relegated to the sidelines.
Thankfully the flipside “Honky Tonk” lets Doggett shine like a set of freshly polished silverware. A healthy dollop of sturdily grooving funk with much stronger ties to the oomph of classique R&B than the groundbreaking efforts Brown was dishing out at the time, this legit update of “Honky Tonk” can perhaps be compared to a wickedly zesty M.G.’s knocking out a beautiful nugget of feet, hips, and ass seduction from the bandstand of a marvelously swaggering discothèque.
A song that’ll make even the most unlikely to dance amongst us wanna step right out and move some serious muscles, it achieves this through the same recipe that made prime R&B/soul/funk so flat-out brilliant; it’s committed players wielding real instruments as they commence to getting deep down and dirty, with no time for any messing around. And if that seems a relatively simple idea (in obvious retrospect), it was (and remains) far from easy to pull off. Chemistry, vision, dedication, and pure ability were needed, and sometimes even that wasn’t enough to conjure up music for the ages.
That Doggett was able to belt out a fresh version of “Honky Tonk” that not only got within spitting distance of the original’s grandeur, but ultimately nuzzled up right next to it like a lover randy with notions of canoodling (and more) on its mind, speaks volumes about not only talent but also staying power. A whole LP with Bill and this band made under the stern, watchful eyes of Brown should’ve been quickly waxed (as the spirit of the then recently deceased Syd Nathan grumbled in their midst), but sadly it wasn’t.
Instead, King assembled an album titled Honky Tonk Popcorn that does include these two tracks, but even though the production of the whole record is credited to Brown, the other ten selections actually lack his and the soon to be J.B.s’ involvement. As Honky Tonk Popcorn unwinds it’s revealed as a very good disc, holding a nifty take of Edwin Starr’s “Twenty Five Miles” and a run-through of Otis’ “Mr. Pitiful” that’ll gas any fan of the M.G.s’ roughly contemporaneous instrumental transformations of vocal hits, but the difference in energy between the 7-inch and the rest of the album is readily apparent.
With that said, Honky Tonk Popcorn does get recommended to folks heavily invested in hearing as much of this type of long-gone sweetness as possible (it’s also notable for appearances by Funkadelic members Eddie Hazel and Billy Nelson), but sticklers will be most impressed by the tunes from the single. This is partly due to Brown’s involvement of course, but a huge part of what makes “Honky Tonk Popcorn” b/w “Honky Tonk” such an outright slayer is how Doggett confidently steals the show on the b-side, grooving like a man with pure-funk plasma running through his veins.
Both the LP (later given a pressing by Polydor) and the 45 are terribly hard to find, so parties interested in the vinyl should snatch it up in either format, for these two songs belong in any serious collection devoted to the top-notch strains of funked-out R&B. And while digging, don’t confuse it with the two-part “Honky Tonk” that Brown bombarded the charts with in 1972 (that one finds the J.B.s under the moniker of The James Brown Soul Train.)
Bluntly, a new press of this single is more than warranted. Hopefully, one of our many worthy current reissue labels will step up and remedy this need for contemporary consumers everywhere. It’ll not only assist in extending Doggett’s solid reputation, but it’s also sure to go down like a hurricane in any room where deep cuts are spun.
(RE)GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
