Blues Brothers

[Ron Phillipchuk]

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1= everybody-needs-somebody
2=Flip Flop & Fly
3= Gimme Some Lovin
4= Medley
5= Sweet Home Chicago



The Blues Brothers are an American blues and soul revivalist band founded in 1978 by comedians Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi as part of a musical sketch on Saturday Night Live. Belushi and Aykroyd, respectively in character as lead vocalist "Joliet" Jake Blues and harmonica player/vocalist Elwood Blues, fronted the band, which was composed of well-known and respected musicians. The band made its debut as the musical guest on the April 22, 1978, episode of Saturday Night Live, performing "Hey Bartender."

The band began to take on a life beyond the confines of the television screen, releasing an album, Briefcase Full of Blues, in 1978, and then having a Hollywood film, The Blues Brothers, created around its characters in 1980.

After the death of Belushi in 1982, the Blues Brothers have continued to perform with a rotation of guest singers and other band members. The band reformed in 1988 for a world tour and again in 1998 for a sequel to the film, Blues Brothers 2000. They make regular appearances at musical festivals worldwide.

[montage]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAG8iD-XS44


"Everybody Needs Somebody to Love" is a song written by Bert Berns, Solomon Burke and Jerry Wexler, and originally recorded by Solomon Burke under the production of Bert Berns at Atlantic Records in 1964. Burke's version charted in 1964, but missed the US top 40, peaking at #58.

Wilson Pickett covered the song in 1966, and his version (which explicitly mentions Solomon Burke in the opening section) made it to #29 pop, and #19 R&B in early 1967. Other notable versions of "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love" were recorded by The Rolling Stones and The Blues Brothers.
The song is ranked #429 on the Rolling Stone magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

[montage]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgzdgLR6tl4


"Flip, Flop and Fly" is a jump blues-style song recorded by Big Joe Turner in 1955.  Called a "prototypical rocker,"  the song was a hit reaching #2 in Billboard magazine's R&B chart.  "Flip, Flop and Fly" has been recorded by a variety of artists, including early rock and roll performers such as Elvis Presley.

"Flip, Flop and Fly" has an arrangement similar to Big Joe Turner's 1954 #1 R&B hit "Shake, Rattle and Roll" and it has been suggested that "leftover verses [from the 'Shake, Rattle and Roll' recording session] were then recycled into Turner's follow-up hit, 'Flip, Flop and Fly.'"  Both are up-tempo twelve-bar blues with a strong backbeat. Accompanying Turner (vocals) are the song's writer Jesse Stone (piano), Al Sears (tenor sax), Connie Kay (drums), and unidentified trumpet, alto sax, baritone sax, guitar, and bass. Turner subsequently recorded several live versions of the song.

Elvis Presley performed "Flip, Flop and Fly" during his first television appearance on January 28, 1956. It was included with a medley of "Shake, Rattle and Roll" and "I Got a Woman" and released on his posthumous compilation album A Golden Celebration. A live version from 1974 was included on Elvis: As Recorded Live on Stage in Memphis.

Several artists have recorded their versions of "Flip, Flop and Fly," including Johnnie Ray (1955), Bill Haley and His Comets from the album Rock Around the Clock (1956), Downchild Blues Band (1973), The New York Dolls during live performances (1976), The Blues Brothers from Briefcase Full of Blues (1978), Jerry Lee Lewis (1999) and Ellis Hall (2000), his version being used exclusively in the soundtrack of the animated DreamWorks Pictures movie, Chicken Run and also in the movie, itself.

[montage]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_r37wVxrbA


Gimme Some Lovin'" is a song written by Steve Winwood, Spencer Davis and Muff Winwood, although solely credited to "Steve Winwood" on the UK single label, and performed by The Spencer Davis Group. The basic riff of the song was borrowed from the Homer Banks song "(Ain't That) A Lot of Love", written by Banks and Willie Dean "Deanie" Parker.

As recalled by bassist Muff Winwood, the song was conceived, arranged, rehearsed in just half an hour. At the time, the group were under pressure to come up with another hit, following the relatively poor showing of their previous single, "When I Come Home", written by Jamaican-born musician Jackie Edwards, who had also penned their earlier #1 hits, "Keep On Running" and "Somebody Help Me". The band auditioned and rejected other songs Edwards offered them, and they let the matter slide until, with a recording session looming, manager Chris Blackwell took them to London, put them in a rehearsal room at the Marquee Club, and ordered them to come up with a new song.

"We started to mess about with riffs, and it must have been eleven o'clock in the morning. We hadn't been there half an hour, and this idea just came. We thought, bloody hell, this sounds really good. We fitted it all together and by about twelve o'clock, we had the whole song. Steve had been singing 'Gimme, gimme some loving' - you know, just yelling anything, so we decided to call it that. We worked out the middle eight and then went to a cafe that's still on the corner down the road. Blackwell came to see how we were going on, to find our equipment set up and us not there, and he storms into the cafe, absolutely screaming, 'How can you do this?' he screams. Don't worry, we said. We were all really confident. We took him back, and said, how's this for half an hour's work, and we knocked off 'Gimme Some Lovin' and he couldn't believe it. We cut it the following day and everything about it worked. That very night we played a North London club and tried it out on the public. It went down a storm. We knew we had another No. 1."

"Gimme Some Lovin'" was a UK No. 2 in the Autumn of 1966 and a US No. 7.  The song is ranked No. 247 on the Rolling Stone magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

The original UK version, which is the 'master' take of the song, differs in several respects from the version subsequently released in the US on the United Artists label, being slower, lacking the 'response' backing vocals in the chorus, some percussion, and the "live-sounding" ambience of the US single. These additional overdubs (which were performed by some of the future members of Traffic), and the 'tweaking' of the recording's speed to create a brighter sound, were the work of producer Jimmy Miller, who remixed the song for its US release. (The US version has more often been used on reissue CDs, even those coming from Europe.) The single features the sound of the Hammond B-3 organ.

[montage]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4E6j4tBfa0


(Everybody Needs Somebody)
Everybody
needs somebody
everybody
needs somebody to love

Someone to love
sweetheart to miss
sugar to kiss
I need you, you, you
I need you, you, you

I need you, you, you
in the mornin'
when my soul's on fire

Sometimes I feel
I feel a little sad inside

When my baby mistreats me
I never, never, never
have a place to hide
I need you


Sometimes I feel
I feel a little sad inside
when my baby mistreats me
I never, never, never
have a place to hide

I need you, you, you
I need you, you, you
I need you, you, you
I need you, you, you

(Gimme Some Lovin')
Hey!

Well, my temperature's risin'
and my feet on the floor
twenty people rockin'
and they wanna go more

Let me in, baby
I don't know what you got
but you'd better take it easy
this place is hot

So glad we made it
so glad we made it

You gotta
Gimme some lovin'
gimme some lovin'
gimme some lovin'
everyday

(Shake Your Tailfeather)
Well, I heard about the
fella you been dancin' with
all over the neighbourhood

So, why didn't
you ask me, baby
or didn't you think I could

Well, I know that
the boogaloo is out of sight
but the shing-a-ling's
the thing tonight

But if that was
you and me a-now, baby
I would have shown you
how to do it right

Do it right
do it right
do it right...

Aah...
twistin', shake it, shake it
shake it, shake it, baby
hey we gonna loop de loop
shake it out, baby

Hey we gonna loop de la
bend over let me see
ya shake your tailfeather
bend over let me see
ya shake your tailfeather

Come on, let me see
ya shake your tailfeather
come on, let me see
ya shake your tailfeather

Aah...
twistin', shake it, shake it
shake it, shake it, baby
hey we gonna loop de loop
shake it up, baby

Hey we gonna loop de la
bend over let me see
ya shake your tailfeather
bend over let me see
ya shake your tailfeather

Come on, let me see
ya shake your tailfeather
come on, let me see
ya shake your tailfeather
aah...

Back to the top

[montage]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79vCiXg3njY


Sweet Home Chicago" is a blues standard first recorded by Robert Johnson in 1936. Although he is often credited as the songwriter, several songs have been identified as precedents.  The song has become a popular anthem for the city of Chicago despite ambiguity in Johnson's original lyrics. Numerous artists have interpreted the song in a variety of styles.

On November 23, 1936, in Room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, Texas, Robert Johnson recorded "Sweet Home Chicago".  He changed the character of the song to one of aspirational migration, replacing "back to Kokomo" with "to Chicago", and replacing "that eleven light city" with another migrational goal "that land of California".

"But I'm cryin' hey baby, Honey don't you want to go
Back to the land of California, to my sweet home Chicago"
Johnson sang this as the first verse and used it as the refrain. Otherwise, his verses retained the structure of Arnold's recording, with similar counting verses. Johnson succeeded in evoking an exotic modern place, far from the South, which is an amalgam of famous migration goals for African Americans leaving the South. To later singers this contradictory location held more appeal than obscure Kokomo. Tommy McClennan's "Baby Don't You Want To Go" (1939)[13] and Walter Davis's "Don't You Want To Go" (1941)  were both based on Johnson's chorus. Later singers used Johnson's chorus and dropped the mathematical verses.

Johnson uses a driving guitar rhythm and a high, near-falsetto vocal for the song. His guitar accompaniment does not use Kokomo Arnold's bottleneck guitar style. Instead, he adapted the boogie piano accompaniments of Roosevelt Sykes to "Honey Dripper" and by Walter Roland to "Red Cross" to guitar.  Leroy Carr's "Baby Don't You Love Me No More" (with Leroy Carr on piano and Scrapper Blackwell on guitar) shares the rhythmic approach and the feel of Johnson's initial two verses.

The lyrics only obliquely refer to Chicago itself, in the song's refrain, where the song narrator pleads for a woman to go with him back to "that land of California/ my sweet home Chicago". Indeed, California is mentioned in the song more than Chicago, both during this refrain and in one of the stanzas ("I'm goin' to California/ from there to Des Moines, Iowa"). These perplexing lyrics have been a source of controversy for many years. In the 1960s and 1970s, some commentators speculated this was a geographical mistake on Johnson's part. However, Johnson was a sophisticated songwriter and used geographical references in a number of his songs.

One interpretation is that Johnson intended the song to be a metaphorical description of an imagined paradise combining elements of the American north and west, far from the racism and poverty inherent to the Mississippi Delta of 1936. Like Chicago, California was a common such destination in many Great Depression-era songs, books, and movies. Music writer Max Haymes argues that Johnson's intention was "the land of California or that sweet home Chicago".  Another suggests it is a reference to Chicago's California Avenue. It is a thoroughfare which runs from the far south to the far north side of Chicago and predates Johnson's recording.

A more sophisticated and humorous interpretation (and one more consistent with all of the lyrics) has the narrator pressuring a woman to leave town with him for Chicago, but his blatant geographic ignorance reveals his attempt at deceit. Another explanation is that Johnson was conveying a trip across the country, as mentioned in the line, "I'm going to California/from there to Des Moines, Iowa", and that the end destination was Chicago, Illinois, a state sharing borders with Iowa. Writer Alan Greenberg mentions that Johnson had a remote relative who lived in Port Chicago, California, which could add ambiguity as to which Chicago the lyrics are actually referring. Finally, using the same tune, Sam Montgomery sang of a land "where the sweet old oranges grow" in a song by that name.  It is unclear whether the reference to oranges (a California cash crop) was corrective of Johnson's geographical confusion or reflective of an earlier song that Johnson changed.

As the song grew to be a homage to Chicago, the original lyrics that refer to California were altered in most subsequent renditions. The line "back to the land of California" is changed to "back to the same old place", and the line "I'm going to California" becomes "I'm going back to Chicago". This altered version dates to pianist Roosevelt Sykes.