JOHNNIE RAY - “Such A Night”
(30th April 1954)
“Such A Night” stands out because it gets its content over via beat and flow rather than melody. The backing singers kick the song off on a do-be-do-be pattern with a drum kick at the end and this hardly varies through the whole track. Ray creates the interest by the way he moves his vocal around the beat, sometimes riding it for emphasis (”Now she’s gone! Gone! Gone!”), sometimes wandering off into morning-after reverie (lots of knowing “ooh”s and “oh”s, and a marvellously taken “I - I reminisce..”). It’s charming, fruity, sophisticated pop - probably the track that’s grown on me the most of everything I’ve heard so far. 7
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wichita lineman on June 16th, 2008
If Chuck Jones’ leering wolf was a song, this would be it.
Such A Night was first cut by Clyde McPhatter & The Drifters and later by Elvis on his first post-army album Elvis Is Back, a beautiful false dawn and, I reckon, his best LP.
Johnnie Ray had hits on the ‘race’ - or rhythm & blues - chart, which made him more of a groundbreaker in retrospect than Bill Haley, whatever Rock Around The Clock’s contemporary cinema-trashing claims.
Maybe it was because McPhatter had given these two mischief makers such a lipsmacking start, but both Johnnie and Elvis play fast and loose with Such A Night, adding their own oohs, mmms, and slow intakes of breath to up the ante. “When we kissed… I had to fall in love” is such a deliciously leading line!
I love the fact this went all the way to number one in the UK (it only made 19 in the US) between the spectacularly chaste pairing of Doris Day and David Whitfield; that alone goes some way to explaining Ray’s pre-rock impact. I wouldn’t call it sophisticated, and I don’t think anyone would have described it that way in 1954.
Unsurprisingly, the BBC banned it.
DJ Punctum on June 17th, 2008
As indeed they also banned another controversial top ten hit from the same year - Jo Stafford’s “Make Love To Me!” (exclamation mark as writ-TEN on the la-BEL ten points Uncle Ted). What was she thinking? Eh? Eh?
rosie on July 23rd, 2008
As I’m going through an exercise in playing all of them from the beginning, in order, one after the other, it screams at me that this is the first manifestation in the charts so far of what is to come. The pop I grew up with, in an embryonic form.