Word: lotta
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...Come on over, baby, we got a chicken in the barn/ Whose barn? What barn? My barn! Come on over, baby, really got the bull by the horn We ain't fakin', whole lotta shakin' goin' on. -recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis, February...
...summer of '57 belonged to Jerry Lee Lewis and "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On." Sun had issued his rendition of the song (written by Dave Williams and Roy Hall, a.k.a Sonny David) in the spring, but it started soaring after Lewis's July 28th appearance on Steve Allen's Sunday night show. I remember watching that performance with the same startled excitement that seized me when I saw Elvis's debut on the Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey "Stage Show" 18 months earlier. A sharp intake of breath, a gnarl of the stomach and an irresistibly bopping head could mean only...
...figure on the piano starts rumbling and, two beats later, J.M. Van Eaton's cymbals join in. After the four-bar intro (which he first used in his own composition "End of the Road," recorded November 14, 1956), Jerry Lee makes the vocal invocation: "Come on over, baby, whole lotta shakin' goin' on!" It's a firm but liquid tenor, at times quavering with the infusion of the Spirit (perhaps holy, perhaps profane) that Jerry Lee heard and sang in the Assembly of God meetings of his youth. Which is of course at the sundered heart of his music...
...Anyway, I was once more transfixed by the music. I still believe that "Whole Lotta Shakin' " and "Great Balls of Fire" constitute the most potent one-two punch any pop performer ever launched and landed. And of these, "Balls" is certainly the greater. The first song was standard 12-bar boogie: C, C, F, C, G-F, C. "Great Balls," written by ace '50s rock composer Otis Blackwell (of "Don't Be Cruel" and "Fever" fame) and Jack Hammer, is a declaration of lust so impatient it needs only eight bars, dropping the second and fourth C lines. It gets...
...whole lotta Texas, a pinch of preppiness...