Welcome to episode twenty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at LaVern Baker and "Tweedle Dee". Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.



Resources

As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.

The Patreon-only episode on Johnnie Ray I mention is here.

There are no full biographies of LaVern Baker that I know of, but Blue Rhythms: Six Lives in Rhythm and Blues by Chip Deffaa devotes forty-three pages to her, and also has similar-length essays on five more important R&B pioneers.

There are many compilations of Baker's early work available. This set contains her first four albums in full, and is probably your best bet.

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Transcript

We talked a while back about how the copyright law in the 1950s didn't protect arrangements, and how that disproportionately affected black artists. But that doesn't mean that the black artists didn't fight back. Today we're going to talk about LaVern Baker, who led the fight for black artists' rights in the 1950s, But she was also one of the most successful female R&B artists of the fifties, and would deserve recognition even had she never been a campaigner.

LaVern Baker was born Delores Evans, but she took her father's surname, Baker, as a stage name -- although she took on many different names in the early stages of her career.

Music ran in her family. Her aunt, for example, was Merline Johnson, the "Yas Yas Girl", who had been a mildly successful blues singer in the thirties and forties, and had performed with musicians such as Big Bill Broonzy and Blind John Davis:

[excerpt: "Sold it to the Devil", Merline Johnson]

Young Delores idolised her aunt, as well as her more distant relative, the blues singer Memphis Minnie, and by the time she was twelve she was recording with Lester Melrose, the producer at RCA who also worked with Baker's relatives. However, those early recordings only produced one single, under another name, which sold so poorly that when she was interviewed in the 1990s Baker would say that she only knew of one person who owned a copy, and that person wouldn't even make a cassette copy for Baker.

When Baker became a full time singer in her late teens, she wasn't performing as LaVern Baker, but as "Little Miss Sharecropper". She was, in fact, basically a tribute act to "Little Miss Cornshucks", a novelty blues singer whose act had her dressed as an innocent, unsophisticated, farm-girl:

[excerpt: Little Miss Cornshucks "Waiting In Vain"]

Little Miss Cornshucks seems to have had personal problems that limited her success -- she was an alcoholic and married to a drug dealer -- but she was hugely influential on a lot of the rhythm and blues artists who recorded for Atlantic in the early 1950s, as she was a favourite of the label's owner, Ahmet Ertegun. In particular, Ruth Brown's first hit single on Atlantic, "So Long", was a cover version of Cornshucks' local hit version of the song from the forties.

Little Miss Cornshucks never did particularly well on the national scene, but she was popular enough in Chicago that the club owners wanted to put on an act who could capitalise on that popularity. And so, like Little Miss Cornshucks, Little Miss Sharecropper would go on stage carrying a straw basket, barefoot, in ragged clothes and a straw hat. She was not exactly happy about this act, but she still gave her all in her performances, and quickly established a reputation as an excellent blues singer around the midwest -- first in Chicago and later in Detroit. She also recorded at least a few singles as Little Miss Sharecropper, including this early attempt at jumping on the rock bandwagon:

[Excerpt: Little Miss Sharecropper, "I Want To Rock"]

While in Detroit, she also played a big part in teaching a young singer na