A1 	Good Rockin' Tonight 	2:45
A2 	I Feel That Old Age Coming On 	2:45
A3 	Bloodshot Eyes 	2:40
A4 	Rot Gut 	2:32
A5 	Mr. Dollar 	2:10
A6 	Grandma Plays The Numbers 	2:35
B1 	Good Morning Judge 	2:39
B2 	Adam, Come Get Your Rib 	2:20
B3 	All She Wants To Do Is Rock 	2:32
B4 	Quiet Whiskey 	2:26
B5 	Lovin' Machine 	2:25
B6 	Tremblin' 	2:28

Wynonie Harris - Guitar, Vocals	

“Well I heard the news: There’s good rockin’ tonight! I’m gonna hold my baby as tight as I can, tonight she’ll know I’m a mighty, mighty man! Meet me in a hurry behind the barn, don’t you be afraid, I’ll do you no harm. We’re gonna rock! We’re gonna rock! Let’s rock! C’mon! Rock all our blues away!” Roy Brown wrote those words in 1947 and pitched the song to Wynonie Harris, who, at first, turned it down. Good thing Harris changed his mind, because his superior version, which came out after Brown’s original and Cecil Gant’s cover, changed his life and was a precursor for rock and roll itself.

The song — recorded for Syd Nathan’s King Records out of Cincinnati — burst out of jukeboxes across the country in 1948 with its hand claps, propulsive back beat, honking saxophone by Hal “Cornbread” Singer and sexually suggestive vocal, an intimidating leer. It topped the charts for six months.

This hard-core blues shouter enjoyed the kind of lifestyle that mirrored the rough and tumble ribald tunes Harris belted out both live and on record. Harris was a lean, mean, love machine; a hard drinker, carousing womanizer and good-looking Dapper Dan who had been dancing, singing and playing guitar and drums since the mid-1930s.

Wynonie “Mr. Blues” Harris was born Aug. 24, 1915, in Omaha, Neb., to his unmarried, 15-year-old mother. It is believed his father was a Native American named Blue Jay. A high school dropout, Harris fathered two children to two different women before he was 18. A third child was born to him when he was 20; he married the baby’s teenage mother. By then, he had taught himself to play the drums and had formed a dance team with Velda Shannon in the bustling 1930s Omaha music scene. He’d often travel to Kansas City, Kan., where he thrilled audiences.

After moving to Los Angeles in 1940, Harris honed his vocal chops to the point where he toured the country. In Chicago, Lucky Millender recruited Harris to sing in a big band; in New York City, Harris performed at the prestigious Apollo Theater. His vocals graced the 1945 Decca recording of “Who Threw The Whiskey Down The Well.” In 1946, Harris’ sang on legendary saxophonist Illinois Jacquet’s “Wynonie’s Blues.”

Harris did all right for himself between 1944 and 1948, but it was nothing like what happened to him at the height of his notoriety from 1948 to 1952: rockin’ after midnight every night in a different club, shoutin’ and wailin’ his way into the kind of success that made him feel invincible, and, at the same time, laying the groundwork for something called rock and roll. Harris had a Cadillac, a chauffeur and a fancy home. He couldn’t have known that his hits and his career would dry up before the ’50s were over.

Enter Elvis Presley. When Presley got a hold of “Good Rockin’ Tonight” in 1954 for his second single out of Sun Records in Memphis, Tenn., all hell broke loose. Pastors started preaching against rock and roll. The music itself was demonized. As Elvis ascended, Harris clung to the hopes he could rekindle his once hotter-than-hot fortunes, but by the early 1960s, Harris couldn’t buy a hit. Still he hung on, recording decent enough material for Atco, Roulette and Chess (which never even released his masters). Those lucky enough to witness Harris’ still-rockin’ live shows in small bars in the mid-to-late ’60s saw the glimmer of greatness. But cancer got the best of Harris; he died in Los Angeles on June 14, 1969, at the age of 53. --- Mike Greenblatt, goldminemag.com

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01 Who Threw The Whiskey In The Well
02 Hurry, Hurry
03 Around The Clock Blues Pt. 1
04 Around The Clock Blues Pt. 2
05 Wynonie's Blues
06 Here Comes The Blues
07 She's Gone With The Wind
08 Everybody's Boogie
09 I Gotta Lyin' Woman
10 Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop Pt. 1
11 Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop Pt. 2
12 In The Evenin' Blues
13 Drinkin' By Myself
14 Lightnin' Struck The Poor House
15 Mr Blues Jumped The Rabbit
16 Rugged Road
17 Come Back, Baby
18 Whiskey And Jelly-Roll Blues

Wynonie “Mr. Blues” Harris (August 24, 1915-June 14, 1969) was an American blues shouter and rhythm and blues singer.

He was born in Omaha, Nebraska. Harris traveled as a singer and dancer with the Lucky Millinder Big Band in his youth. His first big solo hit was in 1944 with his record “Who Threw The Whiskey In The Well”. He was a dynamic live performer who brought a lot of attention to the emerging styles of rhythm and blues.

Harris made a major contribution to the birth of rock and roll when he covered “Good Rocking Tonight”, written and originally recorded by Roy Brown. Brown’s version was a jump blues with a jazz rhythm section. Harris’s cover version was much more frantic and played with a much stronger back beat. In effect, Harris, a black artist, had done what many white artists were to do later. He had turned blues into rock and roll and made one of the first rock and roll records. The song was later covered by Elvis Presley.

Harris recorded for many labels and in 1947, had a hit on Aladdin Records with “Wynonie’s Blues”, featuring Illinois Jacquet on tenor sax. His greatest success came at King Records where he was the leading male solo artist. “All She Wants to Do Is Rock” went to Number One on the R&B charts. Many of his songs were novelty numbers, like “(Don’t Roll Those) Bloodshot Eyes (at Me)”, “Good Morning, Judge”, and “I Love my Baby’s Pudding”, and his last hit, “Loving Machine”.

Harris’ severe alcoholism resulted in his career going into a tailspin in the mid-1950s. While other blues shouters of his generation such as Big Joe Turner were able to maintain their popularity despite changing styles, and Presley’s cover versions brought his songs to a whole new audience, Harris fell into obscurity. He recorded little after 1956 and nothing after 1960. Harris’ last public appearance was as a guest performer at a Motortown Revue concert at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in Santa Monica, California in 1966, which was universally considered to be a disaster (according to author Nick Tosches’ article on Harris in Creem magazine, collected in Tosches’ Unsung Heroes of Rock and Roll). Harris died of throat cancer on June 14, 1969. ---last.fm

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01. Around the Clock Parts I & II 
02. Cock-A-Doodle-Doo 
03. Yonder Goes My Baby 
04. Time to Change Your Town 
05. Hard Ridin' Mama 
06. You Got to Get Yourself a Job, Girl 
07. My Baby's Barrel House 
08. Oh Babe! 					play
09. Luscious Woman 
10. Bad News Baby There'll Be No Rockin' Tonight 
11. Stormy Night Blues 			play
12. Down Boy Down 
13. Git To Gittin' Baby 
14. Don't Take My Whiskey Away From Me 
15. I Get a Thrill 

Personnel includes: 
Wynonie Harris, Joe Turner (vocals); 
Mary Osborne (guitar); 
Vincent Bair-Bey, Frank Culley (alto saxophone); 
Allen Eager, Joe Allston, Dave Brooks, Wesley Brooks (tenor saxophone); William McLemore (baritone saxophone); 
Hot Lips Page, Cat Anderson, Willie Wells, Frank Galbraith (trumpet); 
Joe Britton, Alfred Cobbs (trombone); 
Joe Knight, "Birdie" Wallace (piano); 
Carl "Flat Top" Wilson, Jimmy Butts, Gene Ramey (bass); 
Clarence "Bobby" Donaldson, Connie Kay, Kelly Martin, Solomon Hall, 
James Crawford (drums).

No blues shouter embodied the rollicking good times that he sang of quite like raucous shouter Wynonie Harris. "Mr. Blues," as he was not-so-humbly known, joyously related risque tales of sex, booze, and endless parties in his trademark raspy voice over some of the jumpingest horn-powered combos of the postwar era.

Those wanton ways eventually caught up with Harris, but not before he scored a raft of R&B smashes from 1946 to 1952. He was already a seasoned dancer, drummer, and singer when he left Omaha for L.A. in 1940 (his main influences being Big Joe Turner and Jimmy Rushing). He found plenty of work singing and appearing as an emcee on Central Avenue, the bustling nightlife strip of the Black community there. Wynonie Harris' reputation was spreading fast -- he was appearing in Chicago at the Rhumboogie Club in 1944 when bandleader Lucky Millinder hired him as his band's new singer. With Millinder's orchestra in brassy support, Harris made his debut on shellac by boisterously delivering "Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well" that same year for Decca. By the time it hit in mid-1945, Harris was long gone from Millinder's organization and back in L.A.

The shouter debuted on wax under his own name in July of 1945 at an L.A. date for Philo with backing from drummer Johnny Otis, saxist Teddy Edwards, and trumpeter Howard McGhee. A month later, he signed on with Apollo Records, an association that provided him with two huge hits in 1946: "Wynonie's Blues" (with saxist Illinois Jacquet's combo) and "Playful Baby." Harris' own waxings were squarely in the emerging jump blues style then sweeping the West Coast. After scattered dates for Hamp-Tone, Bullet, and Aladdin (where he dueled it out with his idol Big Joe on a two-sided "Battle of the Blues"), Harris joined the star-studded roster of Cincinnati's King Records in 1947. There his sales really soared.

Few records made a stronger seismic impact than Harris' 1948 chart-topper "Good Rockin' Tonight." Ironically, Harris shooed away its composer, Roy Brown, when he first tried to hand it to the singer; only when Brown's original version took off did Wynonie cover the romping number. With Hal "Cornbread" Singer on wailing tenor sax and a rocking, socking backbeat, the record provided an easily followed blueprint for the imminent rise of rock & roll a few years later (and gave Elvis Presley something to place on the A-side of his second Sun single).

After that, Harris was rarely absent from the R&B charts for the next four years, his offerings growing more boldly suggestive all the time. "Grandma Plays the Numbers," "All She Wants to Do Is Rock," "I Want My Fanny Brown," "Sittin' on It All the Time," "I Like My Baby's Pudding," "Good Morning Judge," "Bloodshot Eyes" (a country tune that was first released on "King" by Hank Penny), and "Lovin' Machine" were only a portion of the ribald hits Harris scored into 1952 (13 in all) -- and then his personal hit parade stopped dead. It certainly wasn't Harris' fault -- his King output rocked as hard as ever under Henry Glover's supervision -- but changing tastes among fickle consumers accelerated Wynonie Harris' sobering fall from favor.

Sides for Atco in 1956, King in 1957, and Roulette in 1960 only hinted at the raunchy glory of a short few years earlier. The touring slowed accordingly. In 1963, his chaffeur-driven Cadillacs and lavish New York home a distant memory, Harris moved back to L.A., scraping up low-paying local gigs whenever he could. Chess gave him a three-song session in 1964, but sat on the promising results. Throat cancer silenced him for good in 1969, ending the life of a bigger-than-life R&B pioneer whose ego matched his tremendous talent. ~ Bill Dahl, Rovi

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