Wanda Jackson on the TeeVee!

Backed by the early 70s line-up of the Buckaroos on Hee-Haw, performing "Big Iron Skillet."

Greased Griddles & Poodle Dogs: The Raunchy Rock 'n' Roll of Johnny Buckett, Roy "The Hound" Hall, and Others

“I’m a Griddle Greasing Daddy”... “Let Me Play With Your Poodle,”... “I call her my Eager Beaver Baby,”... Yessir, sometimes singers said a lot more back when they couldn’t come right out and say it all. Sandwiched between the pre-war era of explicitly nasty blues & hillbilly lyrics and the suggestive 70s country music of Tanya Tucker, et al, lies a body of raunchy RnR double entendre. A comprehensive survey of these dirty ditties could, of course, fill an entire book, and to dwell the subject for very long is to expand it beyond what fits neatly into a blog post. So today the GS brings you a quick sampling.


Now, Poodle-owners out there, ask yourselves, would you let Johnny Buckett and his Cumberland River Boys “Play With Your Poodle” “...I mean your little poodle dog”? While considering Buckett's offer, you might recall that it's a sort of two-for-one deal, because when you flip the record, he also promotes further services in “Griddle Greasing Daddy.” Originally released as a single for the Renown label, both cuts reappeared on Fortune EP 1330. Note how Buckett cops song-writing credit for himself, despite the fact that Hank Penny had already cut "Poodle Dog" for the King label back in 1947.



The moniker “Roy the Hound” was but a mask for the boogie pianist Roy Hall, who wrote “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”, and whose Coahutta Mountain boys had been doin’ the “Dirty Boogie” since the late 40s. Out there ahead of me somewhere is a more fully fleshed-out post on my main-man Roy Hall--like he says himself in “Bedspring Motel” ...“Boy I sure dig that Roy Hall on the piana”. In 1960 he cut one of the dirtiest numbers you’re likely to find anywhere in the Rockabilly ouvre “Flood of Love”. Personally, I like to think the listener’s shock is anticipated and embodied by the Big-Bopper sounding back-up singer’s shouts of “Now what you say?! A Flood of LOVE?!” Hall’s occasional employer Webb Pierce owned the short-lived label that released this slab o’ salaciousness.

While Johnny Burnette employs the double entendre in “Eager Beaver Baby,” ostensibly a tale of unrequited love interest with obvious connotations, Jerry Lee Lewis dispenses with this device nearly altogether in “Big Legged Woman”. Aside from its clever biscuit dough metaphor, the latter is a raw, unabashed poon-hound anthem. George “Thumper” Jones, on the other hand, sounds like an unwitting accomplice to kink in “Slave Lover,” putting away his paper and pipe with a sigh to go “uptown and downtown” at his master’s bidding.


In RnR, just as in blues, male performers didn’t hold a monopoly on the raunch. Wanda Jackson’s “Cool Love” comes on panting in red lipstick, so don’t’cha be no square. The Miller Sisters offer their ode to variety, in dance partners and lovers, in “Ten Cats Down,” while Barbara Pittman growls for it outright in “I Need a Man,” and Charline Arthur--really more of a western swinger than a rocker--expresses a certain self-sufficiency in “I’m Having a Party All By Myself.”

Joe Maphis: Fiery Strings and Strange Embraces

Joe Maphis, early chicken-picker extraordinaire, might never have heard of Rimbaud, or heard him proclaim that "unknown inventions demand new forms," but he definitely plied his craft with a pretty strange, previously unknown invention, the double-neck Mosrite Joe Maphis model guitar, pictured above.

With that double-necked beast, custom built by Semie Moseley, founder of the Mosrite guitar company, and his own “Firey Fingers,” Maphis established himself as the West Coast’s top dog guitar virtuoso, band leader, and session man throughout much of the 1950s & early 60s. For years his Town Hall Band backed pretty much every act to appear on LA area hillbilly music show Town Hall Party, and Maphis can be heard playing on records by Wanda Jackson, Ricky Nelson, Merle Travis, Terry Fell, Skeets McDonald, Larry Collins, and more.


During his early musical development, Maphis didn’t even play guitar. Growing up in Cumberland, MD, in the 1920s & 30s, he started out on piano and fiddle, and his subsequent guitar style, noted for its meticulous precision, fluidity, and speed, is said to have developed from transposing fiddle licks to what would later become his signature instrument. However it developed, Maphis soon became a crack multi-instrumentalist, and began to appear on radio & television shows like Boone County Jamboree (from Cincinatti), the Wheeling Jamboree, and the Old Dominion Barn Dance (from Richmond, VA). In Richmond he met his wife-to-be, Rose Lee, and by 1951, they moved to LA, eventually settling in at the Town Hall Dance Party and doing session work on the side.

Maphis plays on Wanda Jackson's debut Capitol LP Rockin’ with Wanda!, most of which was also released as singles. A pretty complete Ace reissue (compiled from her 1st two LPs) can be found here. Below is a clip of Joe & Wanda doing up “Cool Love” on Tex Ritter’s Western Dance Party, 1958.



He cut a long list of sides with Johnny Bond, of which I own but a few, namely “Sick Sober & Sorry,” and Bond’s version of Charlie Ryan’s “Hot Rod Lincoln,” a tune more tailor-made for Maphis’s brand of chicken-pickin’ you’d be hard-pressed to find. Too bad Maphis’ playing is so subdued there. But then, Bond’s monologue is the song’s main focus, after all. Despite all the restraint, you can hear Maphis doing some pretty crazy tricks on the volume knobs throughout. In a seeming gesture of mutual admiration, Ryan would later cut his own version of the Maphis standard "Hot Rod Guitar" for the 4-Star label.

Fellow Compton hillbilly Terry Fell⎯that’s right, infamous Compton was once LA’s Okie Town⎯employed Maphis on the Christmas classic, “(We Wanna See) Santa do the Mambo.” Maphis’ fiddle can also be heard on Fell’s “Get Aboard My Wagon” and “He’s In Love With You”⎯good honky tonk weepers, those last two, but nowhere near Fell’s wildest stuff like “Caaveman” and “Don’t Drop It.”

Maphis played on a slew of Collins Kids recordings, such as their version of Ernest Tubb’s “Walking the Floor Over You,” plus “Hop, Skip, and Jump,” “Missouri Waltz,” and others. Little Larry Collins, with his own custom double neck guitar and slick technique, was most definitely a Joe Maphis protegé. Together they cut the songs “Hurricane,” “Bye Bye,” “Moonshot,” and “Flying Fingers,”, which originally appeared on the Columbia EP Swinging Strings, and they regularly performed flashy expositions of guitar wizardry on Town Hall Party. Watch the clip below and see how Maphis’ full-growed height versus Collins’ pre-adolescent sprout-hood, and the positions imposed by those crazy guitars, sometimes placed them in a rather strange embrace.



But what about those “new forms” demanded by those “unknown inventions”? About the closest Maphis came to finding them was on his solo Fire on the Strings LP, on Columbia, from 1957. While songs like “Flying Fingers” and “Guitar Rock and Roll,” do reach new heights of stratospheric boogie, all those “chops” sometimes threaten to drain any semblance of rock'n'roll from record. Fortunately for Maphis, tho, most of his recordings avoid falling into guitar wanking, thanks in part to his hillbilly roots, and probably also to the restraints imposed on him as a side-man. Let’s end with one of Joe Maphis’ best instrumentals, from his post-Columbia days, the “Water Baby Boogie” single, recorded in Ecco-Fonic Sound for the Republic label.