CLASSIC ROCK

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1966

Black sounds came from even more unlikely places.Slim Harpo--a sly,laconic swamp bluesman who had played harmonica with the legendary Lighting Slim before going solo and getting his King Bee covered by the Rolling Stones--embraced rock-n-roll when most blues singers were disdaining it.

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1966

Billy Stewart's Baby,Scratch My Back written one afternoon in the back room of a south Louisiana record store,was one of his several pop hits. Billy,a 300 pound man from from Washington D.C. was know as both "Fat Boy' and "Motormouth".He got the latter nickname for the histrionic vocal style he applied to records such as his version of Summertime, which took the Porgy and Bess standard places Gershwin had never dreamed of. Stewart's career had been launched nearly a decade earlier when he sang Summertime in a D.C. talent contest.

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Lee Dorsey had come here from New Orleans in 1961 with classic Crescent City doggerel such as Ya Ya and Do- Re-Mi,and then saw his career go into eclipse.In 1965.he teamed up with songwritter-producer Allen Toussaint,who liked the country twang in the voice of the auto mechanic and former boxer.Toussaint tailored material to Dorsey's voice,such as Holy Cow, a sad song that sounded happy.

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Love Makes The World Go Around................Deon Jackson

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Percy Sledge's Warm and Tender Love suffered from the fact it was the former hospital orderly's follow-up to When a Man Loves a Woman, which had been improvised on the spot months earlier and had become the standard against which all other soul ballads were judged.The 25-year-old Sledge took success stylishly enough: according to friends,after he finished his tour he pleaded "nervous exhaustion" and checked into the Colbert County,Alabama,hospital where he once emptied bedpans. His former bosses pampered him back to good health.

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1966

One of seven kids born to blind parents in Nashville, Bobby Hebb was invited at the age of 12 by Roy Acuff to appear on the Grand ole Opry,which was not in the habit of spotlighting black singers
Hebb had studied guitar under country vituoso Chet Atkins and played spoons for rock'n' roller Bo Diddly before he wrote Sunny in memory of his brother
Hal,a member of the Marigolds who died in a 1963 mugging.Hebb claims he was also thinking of President Kennedy,who was assassinated just a few days before he finished the song.Unable to sell Sunny for more than two years,he recorded the song at the end of one of his own sessions and watched it become his only major chart success.

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The Mindbenders and Them were two U.K. bands dipping into black American music with very different results.The Mindbenders cut A Groovy Kind of Love, written by Carole Bayer and Toni Wine for Patti LaBelle and the Blue Belles,as their first release after confounder and leader Wayne Fontana quit to pursue a solo career on the nostalgia circuit.When the song became the groups American breakthrough,the band promptly wrote Fontana as "our former tambourine player." Ireland's Them,named after the giant mutant ants created by atomic experiments in a 1950s science fiction movie,absorbed black influences in a more soulful way.Leader Van morrison's Gloria, one of the raunches records ever made,was actually a bigger U.S. hit for the Shadows of Knight,a Chicago garage band.

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The Kinks showed almost no black influence.They had begun as a power-chord rock band but by 1966 leader Ray Davies was more interested in satire and upper-class British anomie.Most of his songs had something of a music hall flavor to them. Sunny Afternoon was the last in a two-year run of eight Kinks hits that did not resume until 1970 when an American musician's union blacklisting of the group was lifted.

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Elusive Butterfly---------------------Bob Lind

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Oh How Happy......Shades of Blue

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In America,the Byrds ruled with folk-rock.One outcome was the Cyrkle,from Easton. Pa.managed by the Beatle's manager,Brian Epstein.The group even toured with the Fab Four before disappearing shortly after Turn Down Day left the charts

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SWEET DREAMS - RAINBOW

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love makes the world go around

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A folk-group, the Turtles--were almost the Tyrtles- a former Southern California surf band remolded into a folk style by White Whale,the label that signed them and had them record Dylan's It Ain't Me Babe in 1965.After that, they specialized in material by P.F. Sloan (the poor man's Bob Dylan from Los Angeles) such as You Baby.

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The Beach Boys even got into folk.In 1966,at the height of Brian Wilson's increasingly complicated studio experimentation they cut Sloop John B., a West Indies folk song originally published by poet Carl Sandburg as The John B. Sails and later adapted by Lee Hays for the Weavers as I Wanna Go Home.

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But its alright

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you baby

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1966

The years big comeback belonged to Lugee Sacco,known to pop fans as Lou Christe.In 1962 the suburban Pittsburgh teenager,who'd been singing locally for five years,began working with Twyla Herbert, a gypsy,psychic and former concert pianist who was 20 years his senior. Their The Gypsy Cried charted in 1963,and they continued to co-write nearly all of Christie's material (the clairvoyant Herbert claimed she knew in advance which would be hits).

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Elusive butterfly

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1966

In 1964,Lou Christie joined the Army Reserves,which involved a six-month hitch at Fort Knox.Upon his release he signed a management deal with Bob Marcucci,the man behind Fabian and Frankie Avalon.Christie's Lightin Strikes went to #1 in 1966,and his follow-up Rhapsody in the Rain, might well have done the same,except that it was banned by many radio stations.The song's lyrics were deemed too suffestive,as were the rhythmic windshield-wiper sound effects.