{"id":3223,"date":"2010-04-09T09:49:36","date_gmt":"2010-04-09T14:49:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/?p=3223"},"modified":"2015-01-07T13:52:31","modified_gmt":"2015-01-07T17:52:31","slug":"hello-stranger-my-old-friend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/?p=3223","title":{"rendered":"Hello Stranger, My Old Friend"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple weeks ago, as I was driving cross-country with my brother, we tuned into a show somewhere in Tennessee which was devoted to playing 50s and (early) 60s jams from the current week, however many years ago they may have hit. This was quite a treat, especially in comparison to insane-but-boring talk radio and endless middle-of-the-road schlock, as it offered up a lot of great songs from beyond the typical “oldies” cannon. One of the songs caught my ear at a certain point with its seemingly unremarkable riff “shoo bop shoo bop, my baby” which, as I sang it over in my head, started to recall a classic reggae riff. <\/p>\n

Because my iPhone was running low on batteries and I needed it for navigation, I couldn’t Shazam<\/a> the track then and there, so instead I scrawled “shoo bop shoo bop, my baby” on a scrap of paper and filed it away for later. I was a little afraid that a Google query for “shoo bop shoo bop, my baby”<\/a> might be a total mess, but as it happens, when I finally tried it yesterday, it turned up the song right away. It’s this —<\/p>\n

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Listening back to it, especially the section from 1:40 onwards, I was struck once again by how much it appears to mirror (and hence probably informed\/inspired) the well-worn horn riff in Alton Ellis’s “Still in Love,” originally recorded in 1967 for Studio One — thus four years after Barbara Lewis’s R&B hit, with which Ellis and Coxsone Dodd and the Studio One band were likely familiar, being such R&B heads — a riff which has reared its head again and again on songs that take flight from Ellis’s rocksteady hit (including, most recently and notably, Sean Paul’s hit version<\/a> from 2002’s Dutty Rock<\/em>). Here’s the original Ellis \/ Studio One version; sound like a connection\/derivation to you?<\/p>\n

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I was curious to know whether I was imagining this relationship myself, so I asked Twitter<\/a> to lend me an ear. I can’t say that the response was overwhelming, but I was thrilled that DJ Dabbler<\/a> decided to do some digital sleuthing with me. Among other things, we discovered that not only had Alton Ellis re-recorded the song in 1977, but that ’77 also happens (tellingly? which came first?) to be the same year that another American R&B singer, Hawaiian crooner Yvonne Elliman, scored her own hit with “Hello Stranger”! Check em out below (btw, I wish that someone would video the Elliman record playing like these others — such a nice witness to material culture\/history):<\/p>\n

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Although, as with the 60s examples, this still only suggests without confirming — and we can’t ask Ellis anymore, unfortunately — that some amount of borrowing\/inspiration is happening here, Dabbler turned up another version that certainly offers evidence of some players in the reggae scene explicitly connecting these dots. Check out this version of “Hello Stranger” by UK-lovers group Brown Sugar<\/a> (which features a young Caron Wheeler<\/a>, who would go on to perform with Soul II Soul): <\/p>\n

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It’s pretty obvious that Brown Sugar here employs the horn riff from “Still In Love” to animate (and make more meaningful) their cover of “Hello Stranger.” This is all par for the course for reggae’s riddim method<\/a>, of course, but still, a really wonderful example of how a little riff can do so much. I wonder where Barbara Lewis & co. might have heard it themselves. Seems like the sort of thing that might have been bubbling through R&B and doo-wop for a while. If you have any other leads or connections to offer, no matter how seemingly far-flung, I’m all ears!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple weeks ago, as I was driving cross-country with my brother, we tuned into a show somewhere in Tennessee which was devoted to playing 50s and (early) 60s jams from the current week, however many years ago they may have hit. This was quite a treat, especially in comparison to insane-but-boring talk radio and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[402,158,72,408,75,407],"class_list":["post-3223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-jamaica","tag-rb","tag-radio","tag-reggae","tag-uk","tag-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3223"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8290,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3223\/revisions\/8290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}