INC NEWS - John D. Loudermilk to perform (June 17 at 7:30)

[John Schelp]

You're invited...

John D. Loudermilk will perform on Saturday, June 17
at 7:30. He's promised to sing one of his most famous
songs, "Tobacco Road."

Born on a kitchen table in West Durham, John D.
Loudermilk is a Grammy-winning, Country & Western Hall
of Fame composer who wrote 1500 songs including...

* "Tobacco Road" (performed  by Lou Rawls, Jefferson
Airplane, Edgar Winter, and others), 

* "Rose and a Baby Ruth" (#1 song in late 1950s), 

* "Turn Me On" (Nora Jones). 

The performance will be filmed by Dr. Steven Channing
and his production company Video Dialog Inc. of
Durham.  Steve is producing a television documentary
on the history of the Bull City and will be
interviewing John D. about his memories of growing up
near the Erwin textile mills on 9th Street.

Along with singer George Hamilton IV, John D is in
town in conjunction with gifting his papers and
archive to the Southern Folklife Collection at UNC.

Where: University Baptist Church 
Downtown Chapel Hill (corner of Franklin & Columbia)
100 S. Columbia Street 
7:30 PM

More information about Loudermilk can be found at the
bottom of this page... http://www.owdna.org/snaps9.htm

Please spread the word.

~John Schelp
Old West Durham

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Although his music isn't exactly weird, John D.
Loudermilk is one of the weirdest figures of early
rock & roll. Much more famous as a songwriter than a
performer (although he made plenty of records), his
material was incredibly erratic. He could range from
the most mindless, sappy pop to a hard-bitten, bluesy
tune that rang with as much authentic grit as a
Mississippi Delta blues classic. That tune was
"Tobacco Road," and if he'd written nothing else,
Loudermilk would have been worth a footnote in any
history of popular music. 

Loudermilk wrote plenty of other songs, though, in a
lengthy career that saw him straddling the fields of
rock, pop, and country. Originally striving to be a
performer in a very mild pop/rockabilly style, he
found his first success as a songwriter, when George
Hamilton IV took "A Rose and a Baby Ruth" into the Top
Ten in 1956. Recording as Johnny Dee, Loudermilk made
a few singles for the small Colonial label in North
Carolina. The best and most successful of these was
"Sittin' in the Balcony," which made the Top 40 in
1957. Eddie Cochran's cover, based closely on
Loudermilk's version (though performed with more force
and style), stole most of Johnny Dee's thunder when it
outsold the original by a wide margin, making the Top
20. 

Johnny Dee changed his name back to John Loudermilk
when he signed with Columbia in 1958, and also decided
to concentrate on songwriting when he relocated to
Nashville, eventually working for Chet Atkins at RCA.
Although Loudermilk had a pleasantly passable voice,
his early records aren't worth much, often purveying
material that was mindlessly lightweight or, worse,
idiotically humorous ("Asiatic Flu"). 

"Tobacco Road" was a different story -- a stark,
stomping tale of hard-bitten Southern poverty, it had
a strong blues flavor that was virtually absent from
most of his material. It took a one-shot British
Invasion group, the Nashville Teens, to fully realize
the song's menace in their magnificent, hard rocking
1964 cover, which made the U.S. Top 20. The song was
also covered by Lou Rawls, the Jefferson Airplane,
Edgar Winter, and others. 

"Tobacco Road" was far from Loudermilk's only success.
In the late '50s and early '60s, he supplied material
for country stars, teen idols, and pop/rock singers,
including "Waterloo" (Stonewall Jackson), "Angela
Jones" (Johnny Ferguson), "Ebony Eyes" (the Everly
Brothers), "Norman" (Sue Thompson), and "Abilene"
(George Hamilton IV). In the mid-'60s, he was briefly
in vogue in Britain: the Nashville Teens did both
"Tobacco Road" and "Google Eyes" (the latter of which
was a hit in the U.K., though a flop stateside), and
Marianne Faithfull had a British hit with the moody
"This Little Bird." 

Loudermilk continued to record on his own, though more
as an afterthought than a specialty, reserving most of
his focus for writing songs for other performers. Much
of his material followed a faint-hearted, goofy
pop/novelty thread, which made his somber efforts seem
all the more incongruous. His last big songwriting
success was another of his serious-minded tunes,
"Indian Reservation," which topped the charts for Paul
Revere & the Raiders in 1971 (it had previously been a
hit for British singer Don Fardon). He withdrew from
professional activities to spend most of the '80s and
'90s studying ethnomusicology. 

~ Richie Unterberger, All Music Guide

****