One of 1955’s guaranteed hitmakers, Nudie-suited showman Webb Pierce found fame with the Louisiana Hayride before helping to launch the career of musicians such as Jimmy Day and Floyd Cramer – but did a famous glam rocker borrow his boogie?
As Marc Bolan’s latest single I Love To Boogie began spinning on record turntables in the summer of 1976, there were rumblings of unrest over the number’s similarity to Webb Pierce’s rockabilly-flavoured Teenage Boogie, a hit on the American country charts in 1956. The same week that Record Mirror ran a cover feature on Bolan in which he explained he’d written the song in 10 studio minutes, New Musical Express was reporting that rock’n’roll fans were in a state of outrage. While there was much about glam that borrowed from the template of old-fashioned rock’n’roll, the neglect of first-generation rock by mainstream broadcasters was a sensitive issue among afficionados at that time. There was a justified feeling that it wasn’t getting a fair rap from a new generation of long-haired, prog-obsessed presenters.
DJ Geoff Barker was fresh from the previous month’s march of the diehards on the BBC’s London HQ, at which a petition, signed by over 50,000 fans, was handed in, requesting Radio 1 play more old school rock. Under the headline, “Former Pixie In Plagiarism Drama,” Barker let rip about I Love To Boogie in the NME ‘Thrills’ column, telling reporter Steve Clarke, “The records are so alike it can’t be coincidence. He’s kept the basic melody, and simply changed the chorus lyrics from ‘Teenage boogie on Saturday night’ to ‘We love to boogie, Saturday night.’ Even the guitar solo is a ripoff.” Clarke also related that “oldies purists” were about to meet at a favourite London Teds haunt, The Castle on the Old Kent Road, where a ceremonial burning of the offending single would be staged.
Teenage Boogie On Saturday Night
The uproar had a certain irony, given that in his heyday the sharp-nosed Pierce rarely missed the chance to get himself a co-credit whenever a new writer approached his publishing company with a likely new song, thus ensuring himself an ongoing source of future royalties. Although common practice at the time, Pierce was notorious for it. But a week later, Bolan was back on the Thrills page, claiming he’d never heard of Pierce or Teenage Boogie, and that he’d been attempting to rework Carl Perkins’ Honey Don’t. He added that he’d had the record checked out for copyright infringement and that it had been confirmed that “it wasn’t anything like Teenage Boogie and that the middle of the song was exactly like Glenn Miller’s In The Mood.”
What is certainly true is that Teenage Boogie itself was no fresh-minted original. The single was a rocked-up revision of an earlier Pierce song Hayride Boogie. Furthermore, if we want to get really picky, have a listen to Red Foley’s venerable country boogie Tennessee Saturday Night, recorded in 1947. This was the apparent model for the Pierce song, with a similar guitar solo albeit at a lazier tempo. Little wonder that, after a flurry of correspondence between representatives of Pierce and Bolan, the matter was taken no further. As Tony Visconti put it to Mark Paytress, the author of Marc Bolan, The Rise And Fall Of A Twentieth Century Superstar, “Marc never stole; he was always influenced by.”
The interesting thing is how Bolan, if we assume he did source Teenage Boogie, came by the song. He’d grown up in the 1950s listening to early American rockers like Bill Haley and Little Richard, with Eddie Cochran a particular favourite. But Pierce had no substantial profile in Britain at that time. In any case, he was not a rockabilly singer, although he did work himself a co-credit with Mel Tillis on Ronnie Self’s classic raver Bop-A-Lena, had some success with a version of the Everly Brothers’ Bye Bye Love, and sung uptempo numbers like Tupelo County Jail and I Ain’t Never with terrific attitude. Pierce was a prolifically successful hardcore country vocalist, but Teenage Boogie was cut in an attempt to stay relevant at a time when rock’n’roll was threatening to sweep artists like him off the airwaves. The song was a better-than-average attempt to get down with the kids, and the 35-year-old Pierce’s delivery remained true to his characteristically astringent nasal style.
Southern Sounds
While Teenage Boogie is one of the lesser songs in Pierce’s 1950s songbook, what gave it an afterlife was its inclusion on the first of four volumes in MCA’s Rare Rockabilly album series, launched in 1975. Together with similar collections issued in the same period, such as Imperial Rockabillies, Mercury Rockabillies and Chess Rockabillies, these revered compilations introduced a new generation of rockabilly fans to obscure cuts from the 1950s. The Pierce number took its place alongside the output of kosher rockers by the likes of Johnny Carroll, Peanuts Wilson and Jackie Lee Cochran.
Around this time Bolan was listening to rockabilly in an attempt to return to his roots. He told Record Mirror he’d just bought nine rockabilly albums and had been threading them together in his head prior to the I Love To Boogie session. It’s reasonable conjecture that one of those nine LPs was Rare Rockabilly and that this is where he first heard Teenage Boogie. There was a frustration on the underground rockabilly scene that some glam artists were trading in watery rock pastiche. To add salt to the wounds, Bolan also admitted that he’d “nicked” Ride A White Swan from a lick by Ricky Nelson’s guitarist James Burton. But though the scene might have sneered at him, at a moment when the pub rock movement was also pursuing a simpler approach, perhaps Bolan was more in sympathy than was realised. All that differed was the hippie lingo or, to paraphrase Mark Paytress, the song’s “star spangled salesman.” At least neo-rockabillies The Polecats were on the Bolan wavelength, scoring a minor hit revival of his Jeepster in 1981.
Pierce’s slightly off-key, unmistakably country voice would have been a constant on the radios of future southern American rockers before the arrival of Elvis, but by the 1970s he was a former country great whose style was out of date. In the 1980s Willie Nelson, at the height of his commercial glory, had an endearing habit of cutting duet albums with country singers whose better days were behind them.
Honky Tonk Hero
The first, San Antonio Rose made with Ray Price in 1980, was especially successful, and in 1982 he tried to repeat the formula with Pierce. Despite the quality of the old Pierce classics they chose to revisit, it didn’t quite work. Entitled In The Jailhouse Now, in recognition of Pierce’s 1955 revival of the Jimmie Rodgers song, which had remained at No.1 in the country charts for a remarkable 21 weeks, the stylistic differences of the two singers was too big. Nelson’s understated, jazzy, off-the-beat phrasing, clashed with Pierce’s up front, always on the beat rigidity and minimal modulation. Pierce’s singing was heartfelt, but it was delivered as a man who’d learnt his craft not in the studio but in tough honky tonks, where you had to sing loud to get heard over the noise. The album makes fascinating listening, but it did not pave the way for a Pierce comeback.
Yet at his peak, he’d been an eye-catching, bankable star. After success with Wondering, the reworking of an old Cajun song that supplied his first hit in 1951, the next 19 singles also made the country charts. According to Joel Whitburn’s Top Country Singles he was the top country artist of the 1950s, with 13 country No.1s. Billboard, in July 1955, stated that only two contemporary singers were guaranteed hit makers, citing Pierce alongside the mellow pop maestro Nat King Cole.
To begin with, Pierce, along with Hank Williams and the master stylist Lefty Frizzell, was one of the young guns whose franker honky tonk songs about women, betrayal and drinking made more traditional Grand Ole Opry favourites like Roy Acuff seem passé. Born in West Monroe, Louisiana in 1921, his career took off when he started performing around the turn of the 1950s on the Louisiana Hayride, broadcast live each Saturday night on KWKH radio from Shreveport’s Municipal Auditorium. The show became known as the Cradle Of The Stars, the nearest rival to Nashville’s Opry. Williams, Slim Whitman, Johnny Horton and Elvis received some of their widest early exposure via their performances on the Hayride.
Star Quality
Pierce became something of an unofficial talent scout for the show, taking future country star Faron Young under his wing, perhaps seeing something of himself in his edgy persona, and encouraging him to make full use of his extrovert, likeable stage persona to offset insecurity about his lack of stature. When Young first went to him to audition a few songs he’d written, Pierce told him, “Well, son, I’ve got a little information for you. You sing a hell of a lot better than you write.” Sadly Young, who achieved a major UK hit with the country weeper Four In The Morning in 1972, died aged 64 of a gunshot wound, self-inflicted when his own career was on the slide, in 1996.
Beyond Young, Pierce’s band gave early starts to creative country innovators like steel guitarist Jimmy Day, and Floyd Cramer, populariser of the “slip-note” piano style that became a key component of the later Nashville Sound. Pierce’s 1953 recording of Slowly, which he’d twice previously recorded without achieving a satisfactory version, is credited as one of the first songs to prominently feature as a pedal (as opposed to a laptop) steel guitar. The grim Back Street Affair was country at its most austere, and There Stands The Glass one of the greatest songs about alcoholic despair, banned by some radio stations. I’m Walking The Dog was another fine honky tonk song. In 1954, he was voted number one by readers in the Country Music Roundup Hillbilly Popularity Poll.
Pierce always had something of the star about him.
Nudie Tunes
Frank Page, the long time Hayride announcer, quoted in Diane Diekman’s Live Fast, Love Hard, The Faron Young Story, spoke of the way Pierce schooled Young on stagecraft. “Webb would do things the audience liked,” Page said, remembering how he’d “stand on his toes and let the veins in his throat stand out as he tried to hit those high notes.”
Even in the 1960s, by which time subtler country interpreters like George Jones, Jim Reeves and Marty Robbins had gone past him, he was still a big draw. According to Whitburn’s Top Country Singles he was still the seventh most successful artist of the decade, notching up movie credits in an uproariously hokey western alongside Marty Robbins, Buffalo Gun (1961), and in the musical entertainment pot-pourri Tennessee Jamboree (1964).
Always cutting a striking figure in his Nudie suits, clips of him performing on YouTube testify to his ongoing star appeal. A shrewd businessman, eventually he allowed organised tours of his Nashville mansion. Fans were bought in on buses so they could admire his guitar-shaped swimming pool and his Pontiac Bonneville, with its customised door handles, modelled on Wild West six-shooters, and steer horns on the engine hood. Drawing 3,000 visitors a week, the initiative so infuriated the neighbours, among them Ray Stevens (The Streak, Misty), they took him to court to put a stop to it. Unbowed, he had another built, as a purely commercial enterprise, on Nashville’s Music Row.
Twanging Troubadour
Pierce lacked the softer qualities that might have enabled him to cross over to the pop charts in the way Jim Reeves did, and his former country chart dominance faded, his last Top 40 hit being Tell Him That You Love Him in 1971. He died in 1991, never having recaptured his former stature. But as pure honky tonk singer, there were none finer.
As for I Love To Boogie, it only made No.13, way below the glory days though at least better than Bolan’s two previous singles. It was the last T. Rex single to make the UK Top 30 in his lifetime. It later emerged that, as related by his then partner Gloria Jones to John and Shan Bramley for their Marc Bolan: The Legendary Years, he’d written it for his son Rolan.
According to the Paytress biography, once the plagiarism threat had been seen off, Bolan “went home and celebrated in the most mischievous way he could,” spinning the Pierce song and, with a cassette player running simultaneously, launched into his own song, accompanying himself on guitar, “capturing the obvious similarity between the two songs for posterity.”
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