Lawdy Miss Clawdy

Nineteen-year-old Lloyd Price was nursing a broken heart when he wrote this influential R&B wailer on an old piano in his mother's popular New Orleans sandwich shop, Beatrice's Fish 'n' Fry. Borrowing the title phrase from James "Okey Dokey" Smith, a disc jockey for the local R&B station WBOK, Price bids a painful farewell to the good-looking gold-digger who uses and abuses him. With a rolling piano intro courtesy of Fats Domino, blaring saxes, and a signature backbeat from prolific rock n' roll drummer Earl Palmer, the song is hailed as a seminal rock n' roll tune.

As luck would have it, a prominent patron overheard Price's playing and introduced him to Art Rupe, a Los Angeles record executive who was in town looking for new talent, particularly young singers who would attract the growing market of teens tuning into R&B radio. The patron was Dave Bartholomew, a hot R&B producer who wrote co-wrote and arranged "The Fat Man" for Fats Domino two years earlier. "I had dropped in to get a sandwich when I heard Lloyd playing that piano," he told Marc Myers, author of Anatomy of a Song. "The feeling in his voice caught me. It was completely original." Rupe agreed and had Price record the tune with Bartholomew as producer.

Price told Myers about the recording session, which took place at Cosimo Matassa's J&M Studios in New Orleans. "When it was time to record 'Lawdy Miss Clawdy,' Fats Domino arrived and took over the piano. He started playing a boogie-woogie, but Dave stopped him. He wanted something different. So instead of playing boogie-woogie, Fats played the introduction like a tinkling piano roll. To this day, nobody has ever played that intro like Fats did that day." He continued: "The drummer Earl Palmer came in and I started singing, with the horns and the rhythm section behind me. Earl's beat was complex. He was hitting the second and fourth beats hard on the snare but also adding a 6/8 figure on the cymbal, picking up on Fats's piano triplets. The rest of Dave's band included Ernest McLean on guitar, Frank Fields on bass, Herbert Hardesty on tenor sax, Joe Harris on alto sax, and Jack Willis was on trumpet. There was no sheet music – it was all in their heads. We called it 'padding' – the horns playing held notes behind me while I sang."