Song titles come to songwriters in mysterious and unanticipated ways. Sometimes composers spot a road sign, a marquee, or a license plate, and—kapow!—a song title. And from titles come verses, choruses, and songs. 

Likewise, band names have been inspired from unusual places. 

Read on for some examples. 
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A cinema across the street from Black Sabbath’s rehearsal room was showing the 1963 horror film Black Sabbath starring Boris Karloff. While watching people line up to see the film, bassist and lyricist Geezer Butler noted that it was strange that people spend so much money to see scary movies.

​Hence, the band’s name, the first recorded song’s name, and the first album’s name.[1]

One afternoon in 1974, Bill Danoff and his friend Margot Chapman visited restaurant bar Clyde’s in Georgetown, DC, where he sometimes sang as a folk duo with his wife, Taffy Nivert. It was after lunch, and from three o'clock to six, each table had a small menu that read, “Afternoon Delights.” 

What a neat title for a song, he thought. After a year or so of rewrites, it became the song “Afternoon Delight” and a record by the pop-folk Starland Vocal Band, Bill, his wife Taffy, friend Margot, and husband Jon Carroll.

​And a hit record at that, reaching the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the summer of 1977, helped along by its suggestive tent sign title and lyrics “skyrockets in flight.”[2]

Tom Johnston of the Doobie Brothers came up with “China Grove” after seeing a sign for the city outside San Antonio. Indeed, the lyrics referenced a sleepy little town near “San Antone” where the people living there were a little strange.

No harm, it was all made up. The song ran to number 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was included on The Captain and Me album released in 1973.[3]

The last track on the Hall & Oates 1974 album War Babies was called “Johnny Gore and the C. Eaters” because on a midnight drive through Georgia, Oates noticed a small town marquee that read what became the song’s name.

A few days later, on the way back through that town, Oates saw the other side of the marquee: “Johnny Gore and the Cheaters.”

​Duh! The “H” was missing on the other side.

Fortunately, the faux pas didn’t mess up the lyrics, which revolved around the tough time the band was having constantly touring from one small town to another.[4]

In 1972 Bob Seger took notice of a Leonard Cohen book of poetry called Beautiful Losers and thought that would make a good title for a song.

It took a while and a series of rewrites before Seger released “Beautiful Loser” in 1975 on you guessed it, an album named Beautiful Loser.[5]

“Kitty’s Back” was inspired by a sign Bruce Springsteen saw while driving—the new marquee of a strip club trumpeting the return of one of their dancers.

The song was released in 1973 on The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, the album prior to the boss’s breakout Born to Run album.[6]

Guitarist Stephen Stills and Richard Furay miraculously and successfully reconnoitered with singer-songwriter Neil Young and bass guitarist Bruce Palmer, both Canadians, on traffic-jammed Sunset Boulevard in LA.

In no time, they decided to form a band, picking up experienced drummer Dewey Martin, and became Buffalo Springfield, courtesy of a nameplate sign on a steamroller resurfacing Hollywood streets.

It was a good sign. The new band promptly booked top music venues and signed with Atlantic Records, which released their first mega-hit single “For What It’s Worth.” 

​Moreover, and to their credit, the Buffalo Springfield Roller Company, a New York–based maker of heavy machinery, actually supported the Springfield’s use of their mark.[7]

Guitarists Sylvan Sylvain and Billy Marcia worked at a New York hippie boutique where friend Johnny Thunders would occasionally visit. Across the street was a toy repair shop called New York Dolls Hospital.

Sylvan used to kid Billy and Johnny, “Man, wouldn’t that be a great name for a band someday?”

They’d reply, “What, New York Dolls Hospital?”

Sylvan “No, just the New York Dolls!”

The trio became—wait for it—the proto-punk band the New York Dolls.[8]

Dewey Bunnell, singer and guitarist for America, recalled: “I just remember seeing the sign Ventura as we were driving down the coast [of California], and we got a flat tire . . . I always liked the word ’Ventura’ for some reason. A lot of times, a word or phrase can be enough to inspire a song—or at least the title of a song.”

​You bet, “Ventura Highway” was a hit song from America’s second album, Homecoming.[9]

One night, a newly formed Memphis rock group fronted by singer Alex Chilton, while taking a break from working on songs, decided they needed a name. There were two buildings across the road from the studio, one an ice-cream joint called Sweden Kream, the other a branch of the local grocery Big Star.

They liked “Big Star.” It was a joke nobody outside the South would get and was an ironic commentary on their ambitions, as was the title of the album that came out of their sessions: #1 Record.[10]

Walter Egan recalled: “I was driving home [from the studio after recording my first album] around four in the morning from Van Nuys in Pomona, I get on the 101 Freeway in LA, and the car in front of me was this lowered—what they call ‘pimped-out’—Continental, with a diamond window and lights underneath it, and all these accoutrements on it. And the license plate said, ‘Not Shy.’ To me, it was somebody hitting me in the head, going, ‘There it is. Go for it.’ ”

He did. Want to guess the name of his first album?[11]

Tommy James and his songwriting partner Ritchie Cordell had laid down everything for a new song, but they needed a two-syllable girl’s name to finish it off.

​Around midnight, the pair sauntered out onto their high-rise terrace, leaned on the railing, and looked out at the Manhattan skyline. All of a sudden, Tommy’s eyes fell on a building across the street. It was the Mutual New York Insurance Company building. A large sign kept flashing “MONY.”

​“Is that God winking at us, or what?” It was, and he blessed the two with “MONY, MONY,” another hit record for Tommy James.[12]

1. “Ozzy Osbourne: The Godfather of Metal,” NYRock.com, June 2002. Archived from the original on October 31, 2013. 
2. J. Freedom du Lac, “Starland Vocal Band’s ‘Afternoon Delight’ Still Being Served after 35 Years,” The Washington Post, July 8, 2011.
3. Andrew Grant Jackson, 1973: Rock at the Crossroads (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2019), 105.
4. Paul Meyers, A Wizard a True Star: Todd Rundgren In the Studio (London, Jawbone Press, 2010), 119.
5. Andrew Grant Jackson, 1973, 232–33.
6. Ibid., 256–58. 
7. Rik Forgo, Eagles Before the Band (Time Passages, 2019), 84.
8. Paul Meyers, A Wizard a True Star: Todd Rundgren in the Studio, 83. 
9. Greg Prato, The Yacht Rock Book: The Oral History of the Soft, Smooth Sounds of the 70s and 80s (London: Jawbone Press, 2018), 111–12.
10. Ed Ward, The History of Rock and Roll Volume II 1964–1967: The Beatles, the Stones, and the Rise of Classic Rock (New York: Flatirons Books, 2019), 259.
11. Greg Prato, The Yacht Rock Book, 133.
12. Edward Allan Faine, Serendipity Doo-Dah, Book Two: True Stories of Happy Musical Accidents (Takoma Park, MD: IM Press, 2020), 66.

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At various times people, have declared both “God Bless America” and “This Land Is Your Land” as alternatives to the “Star Spangled Banner.” Whether one would be a better choice over the other is not the focus here, but rather, what the songs have in common:

1. Once written, both songs were shelved—20 years in the case of “America” and four years for “This Land.”
2. After they were resurrected, their original lyrics were tweaked for the better.

“God Bless America” (Irving Berlin)
​

The US Army drafted Broadway composer Irving Berlin in 1918 and assigned him to Camp Upton (then known as Yaphank) on Long Island.

Aware that he would never be able to adapt to army life, the resourceful songwriter convinced the base commander to let him organize a show (produce, write the songs, everything) that would include talented draftees (many from the Big Apple entertainment industry) to entertain the troops, raise morale, and maybe do a little off-base recruiting. ​

Berlin “drafted” Harry Ruby from his Manhattan office to be his musical assistant, take down his songs, harmonize them, and pass them on to the arranger to do orchestrations for his big production Yip, Yip, Yaphank. 

WWI was raging furiously and literally dozens of patriotic songs were coming out. Irving had even written several such numbers himself for Yip, Yip, Yaphank. When the composer brought “America” to his assistant for scoring, Ruby said, “Geez, another one?” Irving took him seriously and filed it away. 

Twenty years later, when many Americans were fearing another war in Europe, Berlin thought the time might be right for a patriotic song, maybe the one he had stashed away two decades prior. But times had changed, and some lyrics needed to be modified.

First, in the original lines “Stand beside her and guide her / To the right, with a light from above,” he replaced “To the right” with “Through the night.”

The second change was more dramatic. “Make victorious on land and foam” became “From the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam,” requiring a change to the melody, but all would agree, much more poetic, and oh so right. Over the years since, the lyrics have held up rather well with very little controversy.

Irving Berlin, parent of both the melody and the lyrics, and as copyright holder, willed all royalties from “God Bless America” to the Boy and Girl Scouts of America in perpetuity, specifically to programs in impoverished and disadvantaged areas, the allocation determined by the trustees of the establishing fund. As of the end of 2011, more than $10 million had been distributed to scouting organizations.[1]

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​“This Land Is Your Land” (Woody Guthrie)

While Irving Berlin was a composer of Broadway musicals that spawned numerous hit songs (“Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Always,” “How Deep Is the Ocean,” “Blue Skies, “Easter Parade”), Woody Guthrie was a storytelling commoner, a cornpone philosopher who rode the rails, and walked the hot roads from coast to coast singing a grab bag of folk ballads, country songs, and hymns.

​The self-described one-cylinder guitar picker sang at campfire gatherings and worker meetings, as well as over the radio. A few of his compositions took hold with a narrow slice of the public (”So Long, It’s Good to Know You,” “Do Re Mi,” “Ain’t Got No Home”).[2]

Riding the freights up to New York during the winter of 1940, Guthrie had been plagued by Irving Berlin’s ubiquitous “God Bless America,” which seemed to be everywhere during the winter of 1940. No piece of music had bothered him so much. It was just another of those songs that told people not to worry, that God was in the driver’s seat.

A string of words began to take shape.[3]

Once in New York, he checked into a ratty hotel near Times Square and dashed off six verses set to a tune loosely modeled on the Carter’s Family “Little Darling, Pal of Mine,” which had been based on the Southern gospel hymn “Oh, My Loving Brother.”

For the first line of the first verse, now known to millions, Woody wrote “This land is your land, this land is my land,” and at the end of each verse, “God blessed America for me,” and titled the piece “God Blessed America.” He thought no more about it for four years. 

Guthrie continued his traveling ways, crisscrossing America several times, before reconnecting with protégé Pete Seeger and the Almanac folk singers in New York. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Almanac singers switched from performing union/peace songs to pro-war songs. Seeger entered the army, and Woody joined the merchant marines.

When the merchantman returned to New York on shore leave in March 1944, he hooked up with folk-loving entrepreneur Moe Asch, who arranged recording sessions for Woody accompanied by a coterie of folk talent, including Lead Belly and Sonny Terry. Guthrie laid down hundreds of songs, some traditional, some his.[4]

One of the last songs recorded by Asch in late April was Woody’s Irving Berlin parody, or as the irascible folksinger initially intended, a Marxist response to “God Bless America” he had called “God Blessed America.” But now, he had changes, a new tag line at the end of each verse “This land was made for you and me,” and a new title “This Land Is Your Land.”[5]

All would agree, much better.

But not everyone agreed with two of the six verses, the so-called private property and welfare line verses considered an anathema to conservative folks. In the former, Woody wrote of a “No Trespassing” sign with nothing on the other side, the side for you and me. In the latter, he told of hungry people at the relief office and wondered if this land is for everyone.

With the passage of time, the “offensive” verses got left behind (except at gatherings of liberal-leaning folks), and the remaining four verses became the sheet music and schoolbook standard for a grateful nation to sing.[6]

It is this version that was often touted as a replacement for the “Star-Spangled Banner” as the national anthem. “This Land” was used as an advertising jingle by United Airlines and the Ford Motor Company, and as the theme song for George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign.[7]

Woody is the copyright holder for the lyrics, the royalties designated to the Guthrie family. The copyright and royalties for the melody part is less clear.

Despite what the Berlin/Guthrie songs do—and do not—have in common, and the fact that one was borne in protest of the other, both songs are worthy anthemic tributes to the country they share.

1. Edward Allan Faine, Serendipity Doo-Dah, Book One: True Stories of Happy Musical Accidents (Takoma Park, MD: IM Press, 2017), 30–31.
2. Dorian Lynskey, 33 Revolutions per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day (New York: Ecco, 2011), 14–25.
3. Joe Klein, Woody Guthrie: A Life (New York: Delta, 1999), 140–41.
4. Dorian Lynsky, 33 Revolutions, 27–28.
5. Joe Klein, Woody Guthrie, 287.
6. Dorian Lynsky, 33 Revolutions, 30.
7. Joe Klein, Woody Guthrie, 454.

As long as there are kitchen utensils and leftover glassware in the recording studio, who would ever need to hire a band?

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​THE DIXIE CUPS

The Brill Building songwriting team of Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich brought the singing Dixie Cups, a New Orleans girl group, into the studio to touch up a song they were working on with songwriting producer Mike Stoller.

The principals gathered in the booth when by chance the engineer opened the mics to the studio. Just for fun, the Dixie Cups were singing an old Mardi Gras song called “Iko Iko.” It knocked everybody out.

​The decision was made to record it, but there was no band on hand. No problem.Jeff and Ellie picked up a Coke bottle, a plastic bowl, and a few can openers.
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​That became the percussion.

Mike commandeered a West Indies kalimba—similar to an African thumb piano—someone had left behind, and backed by the Brill Building makeshift band, the Dixie Cups sang as if down in old New Orleans.

Stoller and partner Jerry Lieber released “Iko Iko” on their Red Bird label in March of 1965, peaking at number 20 on both the R&B and Billboard Hot 100 charts.

And that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Here are a few more.

NEVILLE BROTHERS

At the Neville Brothers session for Yellow Moon (1989), producer Noah Howard used whatever was available in the studio for percussion.

For the “Yellow Moon” and “Voodoo” songs, they used little green glass Perrier bottles, found the best eight bars on the tape, and then looped it. The band played on top of the loop while the brothers sang live.

During a visit to Aaron Neville’s house, producer Howard noticed aluminum wind chimes hanging on his porch and got his permission to bring them back to the studio.

He used them on “With God on Our Side,” recording them at double speed. When they were played back at normal speed, they sounded like low-chiming church bells.[1]

TOM WAITS ​

Some 15 years later, Mark Howard hooked up with singer-songwriter Tom Waits to record his new album Real Gone at an old, unused schoolhouse. Mark arranged Waits, a guitarist, and a bass player in a classroom and set a SONY Blaster recorder along with drummer Bryan Mantia (aka “Brain”) in the boy’s bathroom—the liveliest-sounding room.

​On the day they recorded “Shake It,” Brain was in the bathroom taping up his snare drum with gaffer tape—like duct tape but with fabric instead of plastic—while Mark, Tom, and the other musicians were in the classroom. Tom wanted the sound of the ripping tape on the record.

As Mark wrote:

A tape-ripping, door-slamming rhythm section! As far as anyone knows, Real Gone did not set a new percussive trend, but the album rated four out of five stars by Rolling Stone magazine and topped the Billboard Independent Album chart.

And there’s more than one way to use musical tape, as producer/musician Jim Dickinson did on the 1986 Paris Texas film soundtrack recording:

MICHAEL JACKSON

​While we’re on the subject, best to mention our most obsessive pursuer of ear pleasure, the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, who constantly urged his aides to record different sounds that could be used as percussion: sweeping floors, breaking glass, and hitting trash cans.

​​On “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” (1979), his first single as a solo artist, he featured glass soda bottles (presumably struck by spoons), along with shakers in the rhythm mix.
​
On “Smooth” from his BAD album (1982), he recorded firework poppers—the ones you throw on the ground—inserting the poppety-pop-pop at the end of each hook in the song.

“She Dives Me Wild” from Dangerous (1991) featured a foundation of everyday sounds: honking horns, screeching brakes, and slamming doors.

On “Jam” from the same album, more subtle sounds—scanners and sleigh bells—persist throughout the number.

And on the “Will You Be There” track from Dangerous, the King of Pop wanted the rhythm to be dry and “in your face”—meaning, no reverb, just raw. They achieved the desired effect by banging a piece of wood against a piano bench. It created an organic wood-to-wood texture.[4]

THE SUPREMES

Not be topped by King Pop, Lamont Dozier of the Motown songwriting-producing team Holland Dozier Holland (HDH) used car chains from somebody’s trunk as a percussive instrument on Martha and the Vandellas “Nowhere to Run.”  In his memoir, Dozier added:

“Those distinctive sounds you hear on some of those [Motown] hit records were made by slamming a tire iron on a concrete floor or stomping on a piece of wood.”

He also revealed that what everyone thought were handclaps on the Supremes first number one hit “Where Did Our Love Go” was actually a teenager stomping on a piece of plywood.[5]

1. Mark Howard with Chris Howard, Listen UP!: Recording Music With Bob Dylan, Neil Young, U2, R.E.M, The Tragically Hip, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tom Waits . . . (Toronto, Canada: ECW Press, 2019), 9–10.
2. Ibid., 159–60.
3. Robert Gordon, Memphis Rent Party: The Blues, Rock & Soul in Music’s Hometown (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018), 23.
4.  Joseph Vogel, Man in The Music: The Creative Life and Work of Michael Jackson (New York: Vintage, 2019), 60–61; 155; 197; 223–34; 240; 246; 260.
5. Lamont Dozier with Scott B. Bomar, How Sweet It Is: A Songwriter’s Reflections on Music, Motown, and the Mystery of the Muse (BMG, 2019), 103; 125.

​In Serendipity Doo-Dah: True Stories of Happy Musical Accidents, Book Two, we learned of songwriters who, in the dead heat of a California summer, wrote about the opposite: winter in the distant north.

These were no fly-by-night tunesmiths either: Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne (“Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!”), Bob Wells and Mel Tormé (“Christmas Song”), Irving Berlin (“White Christmas”), and Jay Livingston and Ray Evans (“Silver Bells”).

Ted Gioia referred to this songwriter peculiarity as “geographical incongruity.”[1]

​Well, here’s another.

​In 1970, Joni Mitchell wrote “River” with its memorable first line, “It’s comin’ on Christmas.” Ensconced in her Laurel Canyon home in the Los Angeles hills, this girl from the Canadian prairies found herself in a place without snow or ice, wishing for a river to skate away on.

Like many of Joni’s songs, it’s a heartbreaker, a sad song of mourning—not decking the halls and making merry.

Because of this, its popularity suffered for a long time, but no more. It has since been covered by more than 500 musicians and taken its place on numerous holiday playlists.[2]
​
​Most importantly, it is now included on the prestigious Geographical Incongruity Song List.

1. Edward Allan Faine, Serendipity Doo-Dah, Book Two: True Stories of Happy Musical Accidents (Takoma Park, MD: IM Press, 2018), 17–18;  Ted Gioia, The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 138–39.
2.  Davis Yaffe, Reckless Daughter (New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2017), 136–37.

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​​In May 1988, President Ronald Reagan traveled to Moscow to meet with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to begin the fourth nuclear disarmament summit held in the previous three years.

​Accompanying him, at the request of First Lady Nancy Reagan, was the Dave Brubeck Quartet (Bill Smith, clarinet; Randy Jones, drums; Chris Brubeck, electric bass; and guest bassist Eugene Wright from the 1960s classic quartet). The group was brought along to entertain the Soviets at Spasso House (the American Embassy) according to diplomatic protocol.

The big day came. The quartet gathered in the Spasso Ballroom along with Soviets and Americans all mixed together at the tables.

As Brubeck’s manager, Russell Gloyd, later recounted:

For the time, there could not have been a better American song than “‘A’ Train” to open a jazz set in what Reagan called the “evil empire.” Duke Ellington and his signature tune were a known quantity in the Soviet Republic.

​The maestro and his orchestra had toured the Soviet Union in November 1970. Even more significant, countless Soviets surreptitiously listened to Willis Conover’s daily jazz show on the Voice of America with its “‘A’ Train” opening theme.

As for Brubeck’s well-known tune, his manager later detailed, “When Dave started playing ‘Take Five’ . . . Gorbachev’s translator . . . was poking Gorbachev and saying, ‘See, I told you they’d play it!’ And Gorbachev was mimicking the drum solo with both hands.”[2]

Wrongly or rightly, Ronald Reagan has since been credited with ending the Cold War—with the assist credited to Dave Brubeck and Duke Ellington.

1. Fred M. Hall, It’s About Time: The Dave Brubeck Story (Fayetteville, AR: The University of Arkansas Press, 1996), 52–53.
2. Ibid., 53.

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​NPR All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen once asked modern classical composer Philip Glass to name the song that dramatically changed his life. 

Glass said the William Tell Overture (1829) by Italian composer Gioachino Rossini. [1]
​

​No surprise there, most would think. After all, Glass had written 10 symphonies, hundreds of sonatas, and 12 operas.

But—and here’s the rub—he wasn’t referring to the version rendered by the New York Philharmonic or the Italian La Scala Orchestra, but rather the Spike Jones comedy version.

For those who don’t know Jones, he led a 1930s-era ’50s band called Spike Jones and the City Slickers specializing in satirical arrangements of popular songs and classical selections.

​Ballads receiving the City Slickers treatment were punctuated with gunshots, whistles, cowbells, and outlandish vocals.

Jones’s played the zany version of the William Tell Overture on pots and pans over chirping birds, galloping trumpets, crowd noises, gargling, and featured announcer Doodles Weaver narrating a silly horse race, with puns at every turn: “it’s cabbage by a head, banana coming up in the bunch, girdle in the stretch, and the winner is . . . Feetlebaum.”
           
Perhaps the distance between classical Glass and comical Jones is closer than you might think. Boilen and I, at least, are in agreement. Both musicians were mavericks, eccentric free spirits testing the boundaries of possibility.[2]
​
​Wheeee! Clank, sput, bang, chink tunk, buzz, hup hup, rattle, popzing, tick wheeee!

1. Edward Allan Faine, Serendipity Doo-Dah: True Stories of Happy Musical Accidents, Book One (Takoma Park, MD: IM Press, 2017), 120–22.​
2. Bob Boilen, Your Song Changed My Life: From Timmy Pace to St. Vincent, Smokey Robinson to Hozier, Thirty-Five Beloved Artists on Their Journey and the Music That Inspired It (New York: William Morrow, 2017), 125–32.

As we learned in Serendipity Doo-Dah, Book Two, record industry officials are more often wrong than right when it comes to picking a hit single off an album.

Here’s another instance: a Doobie Brothers single, somewhat early on, from their fourth album, What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits. The songs include “Another Park, Another Sunday” and “Black Water.”[1]

Highly qualified and very experienced producer Ted Templeman put “Another Park” on the A-side of the single figuring it would do well—gangbusters, actually—and placed “Black Water” on the B-side just to get Doobie brother Pat Simmons some songwriting royalties off the A-side action, which Templeman believed would be immense.

Brother Tom Johnson, author of “Another Park,” had, after all, been the brothers’ more prolific and successful songwriter.

But not this time. The hoped-for “Another Park” action did not happen.

Sales tanked.

But then—surprise, surprise—something started to happen with flip-side “Black Water.” There was a little radio station in Roanoke, Virginia, and not too far away was an actual river called Black Water River.

The station started playing the B-side over and over, and the local folks loved it. Soon, other stations followed suit and slowly build, build, build. Eventually stations all over the country joined in, and “Black Water” caught fire, as they say.

Did it matter? You bet.

​“Black Water” was the first number one hit the Doobie Brothers ever had!

With all due respect to Mr. Templeman and his company, Warner Brothers, when you have a song title that is a person’s name, a place name, a monument name, or something similar, you’ve got a winner.

One example: Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer changed their “Blue River” to “Moon River,” and we all know how that turned out.

1. ​Tom Johnston and Pat Simmons with Chris Epting, Long Train Runnin’: Our Story of the Doobie Brothers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2022), 163–66.

​

​Is it possible that singer Ella Fitzgerald’s career was the result of a happy musical accident? You bet. Read on.
           
It was 1934, and 16-year-old Fitzgerald found herself backstage at the Harlem Opera House, nervously shifting from one foot to the other as she waited to take part in an amateur contest as a dancer.

She hoped to dance professionally one day, and this was her first opportunity to strut her stuff. Behind the curtain, Ella peeked at the audience. She noticed with alarm that another dance act  was onstage.

Uh-oh.
           
By then it was too late for Ella to bow out. The emcee was calling her name, telling the seated crowd that she was going to tap dance for them. 

As the band started playing, her limbs felt like rubber, and she was too petrified to move. The emcee whispered, “Do something.”

Ella’s mind raced. What could she do other than dance? She thought about the music she heard on the radio and the records her mother had around the house. The Boswell Sisters just might work. She began to sing one of their tunes: “Judy.” The band knew the song and began to accompany her.

Her voice grew stronger and more confidant.

When the song ended, the theater erupted into cheers.

​Ella offered another Boswell song, and after she finished singing, the audience applauded wildly. The emcee announced she had won a $25 prize.
           
Soon after, Ella decided to become a professional singer. Her six-decade career traversed the big band swing era, the subsequent bebop era, and beyond.[1]
           
But ask yourself, had the act ahead of Fitzgerald been anything other than dance—a comic, a ventriloquist, a gymnast, a singer even—would Ella have become, as Peggy Lee said at the Kennedy Center Honors, “the greatest jazz singer of our time," or as Bing Crosby said, “Man, woman, or child, Ella is the greatest singer of them all.”[2]

​Serendipity Doo-Dah!

1. ​Bud Kliment, Ella Fitzgerald: Singer (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1969), 16–19.
2. Kliment, Ella Fitzgerald, 12, 14.

In the fall of 2019, I profiled my jazz LP collection (see October / November blogs) and in the summer of 2022, my jazz CD collection (see May / June / July blogs).

​Hence, it is only logical and reasonable that I do the same for my music book collection: 709 books strong, with 441 jazz books and 268 non-jazz books (pop, rock, Broadway, other).

Here I present the jazz books, the first of which I purchased in 1965, and the bulk of them I acquired during the 1970–2000 time frame. My acquisition strategy, I hasten to add, was not based on any predetermined notion that focused on, for example, a specific jazz artist or style. Nope, if it was a jazz book, I bought it, pure and simple.

To convey a sense of my overall jazz collection, I list books below in several categories. For the most part, these books center on the life and music of the titular artist, as opposed to a period in jazz (like the ’30s) or a specific sub genre (like hard bop) or a region in jazz (like Kansas City).

What three artists topped the most-books list?

Duke Ellington     15
Miles Davis           13
Louis Armstrong  11

​Not much of a surprise there. But how about those artists who played the instrument most symbolic of jazz—the saxophone?

​​In 1964 a novice, kinkily-named British rock and roll band called the Kinks, formed by brothers Ray and David Davies, struggled mightily for recognition, a task made all the more difficult when teenage attention was hyper-focused on already established bands like the Dave Clark Five, the Turtles, the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles. Tough competition indeed.

The four-man Kinks made some headway when they scored a three-record deal with Pye Records.

Their first record managed to reach number 42 on the charts, enough to get the band a place on a rock-and-roll package tour of England and mention in the music trades.

The second single also flopped.

​Pressure mounted. The third single on the Pye contract just had to be a winner.[1] A rock-and-roll band without a number one hit record was like a skiffle band without a tea chest bass. A miracle of some sort was needed, an intervention by the gods, but what?

As the group’s rhythm guitarist Ray Davies told Geoff Edgers of the Washington Post,

​As expected, a number one record was what the group needed to propel them to the top of the rock-and-roll celebrity mountain. 

Released in August 1964, the band's third single, “You Really Got Me,” went to number one on the UK singles chart and later in the year to number seven in the US charts. 

All it took was a fit of rage, a slashed speaker cone, and a distorted sound from Davies’s little green amp.

Whether the guitarist or his girlfriend should receive the most credit for this happy musical accident is moot. Guitar distortion of this sort was old hat, invented (or discovered, if you will) more than a decade before in 1951.

That time, the speaker cone, rather than being slashed, was busted when someone accidentally dropped the amplifier on the ground.
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​On their way from Mississippi to Sun Studios in Memphis, Tennessee, to record their first record, Ike Turner’s band crammed themselves and two saxes, a guitar, and a drum set into a car when the inevitable flat tire happened. In their hurry to dig out the spare, they dropped the guitar amp on the pavement. Uh-oh.

Once they were at Sun Studios and meeting owner Sam Phillips—yes, that Sam Phillips, the one who nursed Elvis to worldwide acclaim—the guitarist plugged in his amp, and it sounded terrible, the speaker cone blown.

Sam pricked up his ears. It would sound different, he told the band, like another saxophone, and he went to the restaurant next door to score brown paper and wadded it inside the speaker.

​Problem solved.

The rubbing sound between the saxophone and the distorted guitar in recording “Rocket 88” was instantaneous, the fuzztone taking the bass part, the horns riffing in unison, and Ike’s storming piano cutting through the churning mix.

No wonder “Rocket 88” became one of the most influential early R&B hits ever, as much for its exuberant drive as for its accidental fuzztone guitar that was copied by Chicago bluesmen who tampered with their speaker cones.

Later on, California guitarist Billy Strange used a fuzztone on his guitar. He did so on “I Just Don’t Understand” for Ann Margaret (1961) and on “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” for Phil Spector (1962). And he did it the old-fashioned way by pulling one of the four 6L6GC vacuum tubes out of the back of his Fender Twin Reverb Amp.

Were the Davies brothers and the other Kinks totally unaware of this? The Beatles and the Rolling Stones were certainly aware. Paul McCartney used a fuzzbox—an early manufactured device called the tone bender—on his bass guitar on “Think for Yourself” on Rubber Soul (November 1965). Keith Richards used the early marketed Gibson Maestro Fuzztone on “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” (May 12, 1965). 
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What to make of all of this?

While the Kinks lagged behind introducing guitar distortion into their rock-and-roll mix, when they did, courtesy of an accident, it led to that coveted number one song followed by five top 10 singles in the US Billboard chart with nine of their albums charting in the top 40.

​Today the Kinks are regarded as one of the most influential rock acts of the ’60s and early ’70s, and are ranked 65th on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.
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For fans of that breakthrough song, Ray Davies later wrote a poignant origin story that he turned into a song “Little Green Amp” (2013).
 
CODA 
Another lucky break, albeit a small one, came about with a change to the lyrics that helped the initial hit song’s appeal:
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1. ​Carey Fleiner, The Kinks: A Thoroughly English Phenomenon (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 53–55.
2. Geoff Edgers, “Q&A with Dave Davies,” The Washington Post, January 31, 2021.
3. Fleiner, The Kinks, 54.