“Flip Flop & Fly” by BIG JOE TURNER

The Best Song Ever (This Week): a quick dive into a song and what makes it special.

“She’s so small she can mambo in a pay phone booth.”

Big Joe Turner was indeed big, six feet tall and a full 400 pounds when, in his mid-40s, he became a rock star. Rock ‘n’ roll was new then, but he had been around since the 1920s, singing Kansas City blues, boogie woogie, big band jazz, and jump blues until, as songwriter Doc Pomus put it, “Rock ‘n’ roll would have never happened without him." Big Joe did much of it without a microphone. 

Turner was a blues shouter even as a child. He busked on street corners to help support his widowed mother, and then, with a mustache drawn over his 12 year-old lip, started singing in Kansas City’s rough-and-tumble barrooms. In the early 1930s, the kid who came to be known as The Singing Barman found an able partner in pianist Pete Johnson. Turner’s voice was already as big as his frame, booming unamplified over rooms filled for dancing and drinking. Johnson, unlike fellow boogie woogie greats Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis, let his singer hold the spotlight. The pair played to mixed crowds at big Kansas City joints like The Sunset, where regular police raids meant that the club manager kept a bondsman on retainer to bail out his performers in time for a second show. (Turner and Johnson honored that manager by giving his name to their “Piney Brown Blues.”)

“Flip, Flop and Fly” was released in 1955, a year after Turner’s better-known Oxford-comma-defying hit, “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” and a year before Elvis would sing a medley of the two songs in his first televised performance. By then, Turner had already played Carnegie Hall and Wrigley Field, recorded with the great jazz pianist Art Tatum, appeared in a Duke Ellington review, and sung with the Count Basie Orchestra, where he briefly replaced the also famously rotund Jimmy Rushing (a k a Mr. Five x Five). It was after one of those Basie performances that Turner was signed by Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun to their new label, Atlantic Records, where he was paired with in-house songwriter Jesse Stone. It was Stone who gave Turner what all those other big names hadn’t -- hits. 

“Flip, Flop and Fly” comes out swinging -- in both senses of the word. Bill Haley & His Comets had released their peppy, bowdlerized version of “Shake, Rattle and Roll” just a few months after Turner’s. This follow-up, constructed out of entirely similar, perhaps even leftover materials, goes harder. Connie Kay’s snare nails the backbeat like a rivet gun. Brawny horns honk the shoulder-bouncing riff. Underneath rumbles the dancefloor-filling bass pattern that makes Stone part of the rock DNA sequencing. (“It sort of became identified with rock 'n' roll -- doo, da-DOO, DUM; doo, da-DOO, DUM -- that thing. I'm the guilty person that started that,” Stone says to Nick Tosches in Unsung Heroes of Rock ‘n’ Roll.) The song rollicks like a house party. 

It’s a party, but it’s also a flex. This track, too, would surely be covered by guys fresh from cutting country records. (Johnny Ray indeed released a version later in ‘55; Bill Haley took his predictable spit-curl stab at it in ‘56. Let’s also take a moment to note that singing Turner’s lyrics straight, with the sweaty earnestness of early rock ‘n’ roll, makes them less playfully risqué than just creepy. On his swing-less cover of “Honey Hush,” Pat Boone sounds like someone who wants to lock up women in his basement.) Listening to this band cook, there’s little doubt anyone following Big Joe Turner and His Blues Kings would know they’re competing for second place.  

Turner, for his part, responds to this freight train of rhythm with cocked-eyebrow insouciance. Real power is not having to show it, and he basks in the band’s incandescent heat. He’ll break a sweat -- this is a 400lb man -- but he’s not working. You can easily imagine his one outward palm turning broad, easy circles -- his singular on-stage move -- as he flows through the lyrics’ grab bag of recycled and off-the-cuff blues verses like an Ed Sullivan comic dishing one liners.

I’m like a Mississippi Bullfrog sittin’ on a hollow stump

 I’m like a Mississippi Bullfrog sittin’ on a hollow stump

I got so many women, I don’t know which way to jump

Each verse is a pair of these 2 x 1 rhymes, and much of the fun is in hearing what he does with the phrasing of the repeated line -- the way he wrings something unexpected out of the melody or how his bassy trill adds a wink to sell the lyrics’ bawdy nonsense. It’s the same through the choruses: Both halves of the “Flip, flop and fly /  Don’t care if I die” hook are sung differently each time; he varies the tone a dozen ways. He’s not just singing the melody; he’s soloing, just like the jazz cats trading fours across town. 

By the early ‘60s, Big Joe Turner was singing jazz with small combos, much as he did after hours, bail ticket in his pocket, in the Kansas City club days. He kept at it until he died in 1985. Two years later, he was inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, which lauds him as The Boss of the Blues. That honorific was lazily lifted from the title of his 1956 album with Pete Johnson, in which the pair reunited to record new versions of their early blues and boogie-woogie sides just as this rock ‘n’ roll thing was really taking off. But the Hall gets this much right in their museum introduction to Joseph Vernon Turner, Jr.: ”Big Joe Turner is bigger than any one genre, era or song.”

10 Song Playlist

Songs referenced in, or in the neighborhood of, this post

New Thing

Joan As Policewoman + Tony Allen (Fela: “Without Tony Allen, there would be no Afrobeat.” Brian Eno: "perhaps the greatest drummer who has ever lived") + The Invisible’s Dave Okumu. Wowowowowow.

Joan As Policewoman is Joan Wasser and about the coolest thing going. She was the violinist in the Damnbuilders and Antony and the Johnsons and did session work for Elton John and Rufus Wainwright + a bunch more. Her CV is just to get your attention, however: Her own music is so smart and adventurous, and her warm, supple voice will occupy your heart and mind. Just listen to her incredible Prince cover. Good Lord.

Just Because

There’s always room for Slim Gaillard

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Thanks again,

Scott

July 15, 2021

Brooklyn, NY

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