Continuing my post of Billboard Top 100 songs from 1964.
Discovering the information about this 1964 song is educational and enlightening.
When I started playing music in 1967 at the age of 16/17, I was familiar with this song.
I’d heard it played by bands at teenage clubs and youth centers. White kids with guitars and drums.
I never heard this record on my local Central Florida radio station in 1964.
Looking deeper into this, as an American culture, I believe the reason I never heard this record was because: it was raw, rhythm and blues. I’m sure this record got the majority of its airplay in major markets, big cities.
Then again, those kids in bands heard it somewhere, maybe it completely slipped under my radar.
When I got my first drumset and started playing in adult night clubs, juke joints, honky tonks, I played this tune hundreds of times. I liked the beat!
I’d call it a quarter note, 2 and 4 backbeat. There were a couple tunes with this kind of groove when I started playing music. Chuck Berry wrote the song Memphis in 1959. Johnny Rivers had a hit with it in 1964. They have similar grooves.
Hi-Heel Sneakers was written and recorded by Tommy Tucker. (1933-1982) It’s a 12 bar blues typical to traditional forms like Big Boss Man, by Jimmy Reed.
This version by Tommy Tucker starts with the guitar riff, then joined by the other musicians. The tempo it starts at is not the tempo it ends with. Click tracks were not available, music was real and played with human emotion. In other words, it really speeds up, which I’m ok with, it’s part of the creative process.
Today, a song that varied by a few bpm would be thrown into the pro tools delete trash file.
Hearing this original recording for the first time in 2024, I’m slightly surprised it became a hit, it’s so primitive. Research would probably uncover Billboards history of inclusion and exclusion with a song like this. Was this mainly on the R&B, Rhythm and Blues category, that snuck into the mainstream Top 40 arena?
I was born in the same city as Tommy Tucker, Springfield, Ohio.