JIMMY JONES – "Good Timin'"

….which is to say that it actually does.

Have I never mentioned that this is the last one for some considerable time that I didn’t know before I discovered Popular? I must have done, on Haloscan if not in the comments regime that prevailed before then.

Anyway, I think this is quite remarkable and if I’d known it then (aged not-quite 6), I’m sure I would have loved it. I like it a lot even now – worth a 7 at least in my book.

The same chart that they did 2 years ago – I’m all for going earlier than the mid-sixties in theory, but 1960 vs 1985 made for a dull afternoon!

At least he didn’t play ‘What A Mouth’ this time around, though…

SteveIson has hit the nail on the head there, I think. POPULAR music was devised to appeal to the masses. The songs were short, sweet and for all the disposability of it these ‘operettas for the teenagers’ were for the most part rather well made and had ‘soul’ (not the music style, that is). The heartless, sex obsessed schlock served up by the very serious recording artists (I mean you Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Beyonce Knowles et al) who jostle for space on the strict radio playlists nowadays doesn’t hold a candle to a lot of what came out in the late 50’s and early 60’s. At least most of them could actually sing in the actual sense of the word.

Sorry Billy, but for the record it looks like you’re confusing Jimmy Jones the black Alabama-born singer with Jimmy Jones the (very) white English comic. Wiki says Jimmy Jones the comic once toured with the Equals, which he likes to mention when accused of racism. Hmmm.

“‘kin’ell!” – That was his catchphrase, IIRC.

Post Adam F, Newley etc, lurking at its peak position of no.3 was the verrrry cockernee pop of Tommy Bruce’s Ain’t Misbehavin’. Chas & Dave meets Stepney’s Johnny Cash.

Teenagers who felt Jimmy Jones was anodyne (which I’d like to think I wouldn’t have done, I do find this pretty exciting) would generally have been into trad jazz (Chris Barber, Kenny Ball) in the UK and folk (Kingston Trio, Brothers Four) in the US, though not necessarily as deeply or seriously as the Kerouac readers. Margo Guryan, a music school classmate of Ornette Coleman, said she was almost entirely unaware of pop/r&r and only ever heard jazz in her everyday world until she chanced across God Only Knows on the radio in 1966 and it changed her life.

Otherwise, there were a LOT of music loving teens in the 50s who still dug Frank Sinatra and (especially) Perry Como. I guess that didn’t change overnight. Or, it simply wasn’t a big deal for them; in 1960 pop wasn’t anywhere near a part of most peoples lives – compared to 1970, let alone 2010.

I was a teenager around the same time as #17’s Dad. It was indeed a fallow period for chart music between early r’n’r and the Beatles etc, although there was some good music around by artists who don’t appear in these no. 1 charts and are associated primarily with that period- for example Dion (DiMucci not Celine)who released a few classics (Runaround Sue, The Wanderer) and Chubby Checker – the Twist liberated millions of people who previously couldn’t handle the Jive, and is probably the progenitor of all subsequent non-contact dance. Roy Orbison appeared on the scene, and Elvis was back with a short-term mini-renaissance. In the UK, Billy Fury wasn’t at all bad. Johnny Kidd and the Pirates have been much praised elsewhere in these pages. I saw them in ’61 or ’62 as the “interval act” at a student dance starring, I believe, Kenny Ball (trad jazz) in Portsmouth.

Re #16, along with many other teenagers I had a visceral hatred of trad jazz at that time and still don’t like it. I associated it with stuffy, middle class English people who looked down on rock’n’roll. I think that Kerouac readers/ beatniks would have been more into “modern” jazz (Miles Davis etc) which I now love, but didn’t at that time.

Regarding the comment about pop not being part of most people’s lives, I think that teens and people in their early 20s were just as interested in pop then and, in particular, dancing to it – this was the period not just of the twist but also those many strange dances that were a craze for about five minutes each – Mashed Potato, Hully Gully, Madison etc. These dances generated some pretty good music (or was it the other way round?) -e.g. Little Eva with the Locomotion, and many others.

Saw Jimmy on his first tour of England in 1960. Very good.

Yep, Jimmy had timin’… And now he doesn’t.

Critic watch:

1001 Songs You Must Hear Before You Die, and 10,001 You Must Download (2010)
Bruce Pollock (USA) – The 7,500 Most Important Songs of 1944-2000 (2005)
Colin Larkin (UK) – The All-Time Top 100 Singles (2000) 74
Giannis Petridis (Greece) – 2004 of the Best Songs of the Century (2003)

One of those songs that almost feels as if it’s trying to make me hate it (those tocka tockas are super shrill), but I still like it.