JOHNNIE RAY – "Such A Night"

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.

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.

Light Entertainment Watch: Johnnie Ray rarely appeared on British television. This show didn’t survive;

SUNDAY NIGHT AT THE LONDON PALLADIUM (VAL PARNELL’S …..): with Bruce Forsyth, Johnnie Ray (1957)

These episodes exist in the archives;

VAL PARNELL’S SPECTACULAR: The Johnnie Ray Show (1957)

VAL PARNELL’S SPECTACULAR: The Johnnie Ray Show (1960)

Johnnie Ray really deserves to be rediscovered – he’s another relic like Guy Mitchell or Frankie Laine these days, but his vocal style was really quite pioneering.

Forget Elvis and Heartbreak Hotel, *this* must have sounded quite groundbreaking at the time, although I guess Ray’s earlier records had helped accustom British listeners to his style (he was heavily influenced by Bessie Smith, Billie Holliday et al). It was also quite subsersive for the time – a straightforward exclamation of sex on record must have been quite something in 1954. A fantastic record.

Re 8: This seems to be one of those tongue-in-cheek performances required for TV in the mid 1950s from the more outrageous male singers – the kids musn’t get too sexually charged. In this category, well-known examples are Elvis on TV singing Hound Dog …to a dog, or only being filmed from the waist up. I would think that Johnnie Ray’s stage performances away from the TV were something to behold. I don’t think he was helped much by the orchestra in this clip, who seem to come from a different planet.

I’m a big fan of The Drifters (although I’m much too young to have heard them in their hey day, given I was born in 1981, I’ve listened to my fathers Greatest Hits tape as far back as I can remember), so this doesn’t have a chance displacing the version I know in my saturated Drifters brain. Good tune, though.

Also interestingly that this is the first track so far I haven’t been able to find on Spotify. I’m not sure if that’s because Johnny Ray (not sure of the right spelling, he pops up as Johnny Ray on the YouTube version I found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI0wLT73nuY ) is obscure, or just licensing.

EDIT: Scratch that, my WiFi was being stupid. Ray’s version is on there after all. In fact, two versions by him are on there. 😉

I wasn’t aware of The Drifters’ version, and while Elvis’s take is wonderful (the drumming!) Johnnie Ray’s is definitive. 9/10. I’d name this as one of the best fifties #1s, and the very best of the pre-rock era… In fact, it is rock ‘n’ roll in everything but sound. Steamy, raunchy, sweat-drenched – I certainly agree with the poster who said Ray sings like a dog on heat – and modern (compare and contrast this with David Whitfield…) Plus, JR was gay, as came out later and was perhaps ‘known’ at the time, and so he’s presumably singing about gay sex! On record! In 1954! Ok, the song uses female pronouns, but still… One thing I’m unsure about, as this was banned by the BBC, and presumably pirate radio wasn’t around at this time, how did people know about it? Did they have to go out and buy it before they’d heard it? Was Ray a big enough star to get to number one on name alone?