Post by a more piratey game on Dec 29, 2015 17:41:19 GMT
all this time I never knew where it came from
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/12071596/Bonnie-Lou-rockabilly-singer-obituary.html
Bonnie Lou, who has died aged 91, was a winsome rockabilly singer from the American Midwest whose 1954 novelty hit Tennessee Wig Walk was transformed later by anonymous bards into one of the great English football anthems.
One play on Jimmy Savile’s Sunday lunchtime Old Record Club in 1971 gave the tune a new lease of life. Its catchy rhythm and pause before the final two notes caught fans’ imagination, and within a few weeks it reverberated with new sets of lyrics – some of them repeatable – round every ground in the country.
The original song, by Larry Coleman and Norman Gimbel, opened:
I’m a bow-legged chicken, I’m a knock kneed hen
Never been so happy since I don’t know when
I walk with a wiggle and a giggle and a squawk
Doing the Tennessee – wig walk.
Bonnie Lou’s recording, which reached No 4 in the British charts despite the refusal of her employers (a Cincinnati radio station) to release her to promote it, was a model of coyness, delivered at a measured pace. Speeded-up and bellowed in unison by male voices, it became something else.
Initially the wording underwent few changes. The second line became “Ain’t had a w--- since I don’t know when”, and the final line “We are the Chelsea – boot boys!” or “We are the Stretford – Enders”. By that autumn, when Sheffield United briefly topped the League, it had morphed into
Here’s what we said to Bill Shankly:
Have you heard of the North Bank, Highbury?
He said, 'No, I don’t think so
But I’ve heard of the SU – FC.’
Over the years, as wordsmiths on the terraces became less inventive, the lyrics settled down to “We hate Cockneys and we hate Cockneys…” But variants kept coming, including a ribald attack on Manchester City when United fans feared they might sign Robin van Persie. The tune remains one of the most often heard of the 8,307 football anthems listed on one specialist website.
Bonnie Lou was born Mary Joan Kath at Towanda, Illinois, on October 27 1924, the daughter of a farmer. She learnt how to yodel from her Swiss grandmother, started violin lessons at five, was given her first guitar at 11, and first broadcast at 16.
Leaving school in 1942, she sent an audition record to a Kansas City radio station, who signed her to a five-year contract as “Sally Carson” on a live barn-dance show broadcast nationally by CBS. She brought the house down with her first appearance, a local reporter enthusing: “You can close your eyes, and her voice bubbles over with vim, vigour and vitality. Open up – and just look at them golden tresses!”
In 1945 she married and moved to WLW in Cincinnati, who changed her stage name to Bonnie Lou. She appeared sporadically at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, but it was 1953 before she signed a recording contract, with King Records. Tennessee Wig Walk was one of her first releases.
Bonnie Lou moved on from country music, recording a song by Murry Wilson, father of the Beach Boys, before having a hit with her first rock’n’roll record, Daddy-O! This made her a star, but when her contract expired in 1958 she turned down an offer from a major label that would have meant moving to New York. She stayed in Cincinnati, co-hosting a television show until 1974.
She then moved out of the city with her second husband, making commercials for his furniture shop and hosting a radio show.
In 2008 Cincinnati honoured her with the key to the city.
She married, first, Glenn Ewins in 1945. He died in 1964 and in 1966 she married, secondly, Milton Okum. He survives her with a daughter from the first marriage.
Bonnie Lou, born October 27 1924, died December 8 2015
