Saturday Night Fish Fry

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Here's Jackie Wilson, singing lead for Billy Ward and His Dominoes.



I really like this performance and arrangement, but it certainly is a noodle-scratcher.

First, consider the most prominent facet of this track: Wilson belting out the lyrics with depression and mania, bundled under tension tighter than a gnat's ass. But he sounds like nothing so much as a freshly minted graduate of the Dudley Do-Right School of Voice.

Then there is the chart, which definitely has the upbeat "fish-fry" feel as a frame for some pretty "prayer-meeting" lyrics. I'd started to post this several times in past months but couldn't figure out which rubric it belonged under. But since it's in a tempo suitable for shagging at a Carolina beach music club with sand on the floor (it's a dance, perv!), here it is on a dog-day Saturday night.

And, as a production artifact---but not one engineered into the original---there's this cheesy post-production reverb hovering conspicuously over the recording like a cloud of corn aphids wanting to get into your ear canals.

Frankie Sinatra recorded this tune the same year as the Dominoes---1955. The lyrics sound like a natural for Sinatra, and with a Nelson Riddle arrangement one might expect his version to be the definitive one. I'm sure most people familiar with it agree with that sentiment, but not me. The way I hear it, Riddle's chart doesn't surpass "OK" and neither does the orchestra performance. And Frank's fiddling with the melody at the margins, which is a key to his interpretive genius, falls flat on this one and actually weakens the line considerably. If you want to compare it with Wilson's interpretation, go look for it on YouTube---Sinatra's version doesn't rise to the level of interest that I need in order to be bothered to embed it and track down the catalog data for you.

But Wilson's peculiar version of this composition totally kicks ass. Not sure why it didn't hit in 1955, but they didn't even try because it was the B side of another Dominoes tune few people have heard of---"May I Never Love Again." I'd guess the studio chumped it as a throwaway track because the lyrics were too mature of a take on getting the bum's rush from a lady to have broken through on the emerging rock charts of the day. That is, it did not reflect the standard teenager-style sentiments about such matters.

Learnin' The Blues, Jackie Wilson with Billy Ward and His Dominoes (1955, King Records 1492), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.