JOHNNIE RAY – “Yes Tonight Josephine”
Snappy nudge-wink tune bizarrely and gratifyingly enlivened by the backing vocalists, who repeat – ahem – “Yip Yip we ‘pon the boom-ditty boom-ditty!” at every opportunity (and they have several). It would undermine a more serious song, but from its title down “Yes Tonight” is no such thing. My wife suggests that Josephine should have nothing to do with this chancer, but that seems a little harsh. After all, Ray gets inside the song with aplomb and plays the comedy horndog role to the hilt, his lips smacking and tongue flapping like a Tex Avery cartoon wolf. Yip yip!
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Tom in Popular • 1,136 views • Share/Save
Monumentally silly and catchy as hell. I love this, it condenses the corn and melodic joy of Guy Mitchell’s hits and throws them into a nascent rock arrangement. Quite audibly, you can hear the camp and sass that Elvis drew from Johnnie.
I know Tom’s take is how the music stands up in the 21st century, without contemporary context. But I’ve often wondered how audiences – allegedly the first teen screamers – reacted to Ray’s stage act, so I bought, for research purposes, his 1954 Live At The London Palladium album. The answer? They ooh and aah and gasp as if they were watching a saucy circus act, sex presumably being rather new in Britain seeing as it wasn’t officially invented until 1963.
And, finally, they scream for Such A Night, which he reprises, and reprises again, like James Brown throwing off the cape. And he does this until you can hear girls shout “Johnnie!!” At which point, modern Pop begins.
I must say I’ve become rather taken with Johnnie Ray, having never heard anything by him in my life before yesterday.
Johnnie Ray is a strange transitional and hard to categorise character between Sinatra of the mid 1940s bobby-soxer era and Presley of the mid 1950s. He’s not really a crooner and he’s not rock’n'roll, but at his peak he could drive an audience to hysteria just like the other two, crying and breaking down on stage – so that he was known as the “Prince of Wails” and the “Nabob of Sob”. It’s nice to see that he has 3 number one songs in these charts with largely favourable comments from contributors. He also had major hits in 1951 before these charts began with “Cry” and “The Little White Cloud that Cried” (Johnnie was always crying).
It’s quite odd how many chirpy hits he had considering his reputation for blubbing.
The fact he was originally signed to R&B label Okeh is also a clue that he was a major break from the past. I think J Ray and Roy Hamilton were important crossover figures – one white, one black – before Elvis blew it wide open.
Has anyone ever used the word Nabob, apart from as Johnnie Ray’s nickname?
Are there many original nicknames in rock/pop? Off the top of my head I can only think of lazy, obvious ones like the King of.., the Godfather of.., the Queen of.., the Princess of.., the First Lady of.., the Boss and Macca. They should be reasonably widely-known nicknames, as the Nabob of Sob was in its day.
Is Sting a nickname?
I like Perry Como’s – the Barber of Civility.
I like that. Perry Como inevitably leads to Dean Martin. His best-known “nickname” Dino was of course his real name, but according to the usually unreliable internet sources he was also called King Leer – which is at least an original take on the stale King of..etc categories, although I don’t think it suits the amiable Dino persona. He was a boxer in his younger days and at that time had the nickname Kid Crochet, based on his real surname Crocetti.
Gene Chandler credited himself as the Duke of Earl after his biggest US hit. Sadly he had stopped using this nonsensical (to us forelock-tuggers) nickname by the time of his one UK Top 20 hit, Get Down, in 1979.
Kid Crochet! Sounds like a parallel universe King Creole, starring Pat Boone instead of Elvis.
Is Flip, Flop and Fly the only song recorded by both Johnnie Ray and Pat Boone? Given the penchant for cover versions in the 1950s, there’s got to be more.