Rocks

For those who aren't feeling sufficiently limbered up to drop a hundred bucks for Bear Family's 122-track The Doctor Is In!, the best way to get acquainted with and possibly permanently dazzled by Speckled Red's little brother Piano Red is probably Bear Family's 33-track condensed edition, Piano Red Rocks, which appeared in 2009. Like the mothership four-CD set, this potent retrospective covers a timeline from 1950 to 1966, opening with a veritable fusillade of boogie and barrelhouse-based R&B briquettes, and combining his toughest RCA Victor titles with examples of his hell-raising brand of piano-driven rock & roll recorded for Checker, Jax, and Okeh in the late '50s and early '60s with his backing units the Meter-Tones and the Interns. A handful of previously unreleased material from the '60s makes this the ideal mini-history of Willie Perryman, aka Piano Red, aka Doctor Feelgood. Note the obvious parallels with Professor Longhair and Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown ("Bald Headed Lena," "She Walks Right In"); echoes of Perry Bradford, Clara Smith, and Sonny Boy Williamson ("I Ain't Fattenin' Frogs for Snakes"), and visitations from Big Joe Turner and Leroy Carr ("I Ain't Gonna Be a Lowdown Dog No More"), as well as "Right String But the Wrong Yo Yo," a monster hit borrowed from his big brother but composed by cornetist Douglas Finnell and recorded with his Dallas-based Royal Stompers (including pianist Sammy Price) back in November 1929. Doctor Feelgood didn't write "Yo Yo," but he popularized the hell out of it in 1962, and has since been erroneously credited as the tune's composer on hundreds of websites worldwide. ~ arwulf arwulf|