When Willie Mae Thornton left home to tour the Southern States of the USA as a singer in the Hot Harlem Revue in 1941 she was just 14. Just like Big Joe Turner, who’d started his career only a couple of years before (ABON 0138), she could shout the Blues louder than most of her rivals, who were twice her age. And also like Big Joe Turner, even as a teenager, she had the physique to gain access to the bars, clubs and theatres of the South years before she should legally have been allowed to. 

By the beginning of the 1950s, although she was still only 24, she had already been on the stage for 10 years and plain Willie Mae had blossomed into Big Mama Thornton. At 20 stone and with a voice that had become even more ferocious over the years, she was an imposing and slightly intimidating figure. 

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Richard Thompson was born in London in 1949. But his father was Scottish and, as a teenager growing up in the 50s and early 60s, Richard was not only exposed to Rock’n'Roll, and then Rock, but also to his father’s apparently extensive collection of traditional Scottish music and Jazz.

Which helps to explain why, although Richard is often described as a Rock guitarist, his songs actually don’t sound very ‘Rock’ at all when you listen closely.

His love for unusual non-Blues-based tunings has a Jazz feel to it. The drone-like hums in his guitar-playing, and even in his songs’ vocals, sound like they were ’inspired’ by years of Scottish bag-pipe indoctrination. And his distinctly non-Rock melodies and subject matter often seem to have more in common with traditional Scottish or Gaelic singing than Elvis.

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It would make perfect sense – and be absolutely logical – if the key influences on Rock’n'Rollers Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard were the pioneering Blues shouters of the of the 30s and 40s such as Big Joe Turner (see ABON 0139) and the R’n'B stars of the late 40s such as Wynonie Harris who were the first to move towards a R’n'R-tinged music.

So it might be a bit of a surprise to most people when they realise that this is wrong. The single artist who seems to have influenced all three future stars most, by their own admission, is actually Sister Rosetta Tharpe. And Sister Rosetta didn’t even sing the Blues.

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Back to the post modern black art of the remix again. Possibly the most game-changing development of the last 20 or so years, the cutting up, re-using, re-mixing and general mashing up of samples or even whole tracks is everywhere.  

So evolved is the art these days that we’ve reached a stage where the different remix artists have developed styles and sounds that are as recognisably distinctive as say the individual styles and sounds of different singers or guitarists in the ’70′s or ’80′s. And recognisably distinctive whatever the original source material.

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For me there are two Elvis Presleys that count. And they come with two very different beats.

There’s the Elvis of ’54, ’55 and ’56. Nailing the Rock’n'Roll beat as solidly as anyone ever did. But he didn’t stop there. Elvis was so in control, so at home in the Big Beat that he had the time to jump in, jump out, skip out in front and then slip ever so slightly behind. Seamlessly. Without ever breaking sweat. Whilst most of his rivals needed all their wits about them simply to keep up with the monster beat, Elvis was playing with it.

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