1956 Johnnie Ray: Just Walking In The Rain

And from Frankie Laine's square peg in a round hole to a man definitely comfortable with what he's singing - songs of self flagellation and broken hearts were manna for Johnnie Ray and this tale of 'my gal's gone' misery in the wet is one of the defining songs in his catalogue. So why is something so full of sadness and self pity so popular? Well it helps that Ray manages to sound both heartbroken but also amused at himself for being such a loser simultaneously. To remove all doubt, there's a chirpy whistling motif that punctuates the song with good indication that Ray isn't on his way to buy a packet of razor blades just yet.

And that's just what the song needs, because with lyrics that overload on literal heavy handedness ("Just walking in the rain, getting soaking wet"), any reading with a moribund, furrowed brow could have produced the unintentional comic effect of a tacky Victorian stage melodrama. Ray's 'Gee what the heck' tone adds sigh of relief enough to raise it from suck lowliness into something more enjoyable, though I'd have enjoyed this all the more if Johnnie wasn't followed on his walk by a groaning barbershop quartet chorus, a device that's ruined many a fifties song for me.

1956 Frankie Laine: A Woman In Love

I've been reading back over some of the kickings I've dished out to Mr Laine so far this decade and I have to confess that they've left me feeling a trifle vexed. You see I am in fact a big fan of the man and I know he deserves better, but the problem seems to be that the things I like him for - the steely glint of drama from a voice that sweats bullets - is woefully inappropriate for the songs that the general public seem to have taken to. Because while Frankie does brooding menace and cowboy drama where love is never allowed to get in the way of a man's work incredibly well (think 'Cool Water', High Noon', 'Rawhide' etc), big ballads and showtunes sit uneasy on those broad shoulders.

'A Woman In Love' is as good an example as any of the mis-match; Laine goes for gold on this 'Guys And Dolls' number ("Those EYYYEEESSS are the EYYYEEESSS of a WO-MANNNNNNN in LOOOVVVEEEEE"), but he's in competition with a bold and brassy backing that tries it's damndest to outpunch him at his own game. It tries but ultimately 'A Woman In Love' ends up as an awkward and uncomfortable clinch in the middle of the ring, largely because Laine emotes it through gritted teeth with all the sincerity of a disinterested checkout girl bidding you a nice day. For all his lungbusting, you can't help but think that he'd rather be singing something else. Which is precisely what I'd rather be listening to. Sorry Frankie.

1956 Anne Shelton: Lay Down Your Arms

Every so often the media will pick up on a jokey story of a letter or postcard being delivered thirty or forty years after it was actually posted, usually with a Royal Mail spokesman taking some perverse pride in the fact it turned up at all. I kind of regard 'Lay Down Your Arms' as part of the same phenomena, a song that slipped through some wormhole in time from pre-Blitz to 1956. Set to a strident military march, 'Lay Down Your Arms' is pure gangshow material, a rousing blast to the troops 'over there'. Or perhaps not all that rousing - Shelton articulates the lyrics with the prissy aggression of a frigid Brown Owl barking out instructions to a troupe of unruly Brownies; 'Lay down your arms and surrender to mine' - the poor sod at the end of that doesn't sound like he has much say in the matter and her domination makes Vera Lynn sound like Shakira. I have no doubt that Shelton and her songs kept the home fires burning through Britain's darkest hour, but shoehorned into 1956 it looks as anachronistic as a new build house with an outside toilet.

1956 Doris Day: Que Sera Sera

Back in the 1980's, Birds Eye ran a TV ad campaign in the UK for their Steakhouse Grills, To whit, a gang of builders on their way home in a van ponder what their wives had waiting for their dinners. "Will it be chips or jacket spuds? Will it be salad or frozen peas? Will it be mushrooms? Fried onion rings? You'll have to wait and see!", though to a man they make it clear they hoped it was the chips. It's an advert I've never forgotten due to its immense irritation factor; instead of running the risk of being served up with something they weren't fussed on, why the @*!$ didn't they just let their wives know they wanted chips before they went to work? To my young mind, leaving something so simple and basic to luck seemed like a ludicrous proposition - what was the matter with these people?

What have chips got to do with Doris Day? Two things really, the first being that the builder's were musing to the tune of 'Que Sera Sera' and their own fatalistic predicament mirrors the lyric of the song; Doris asks her mother if she would grow up to be pretty or rich and her mother responds with an unhelpful "Whatever will be, will be. The future's not ours to see". OK, so growing up to be pretty or rich is an end less easily attainable than telling your wife you fancy chips, but message is the same, a lazy shoulder shrug that life is something that happens to you rather than to be lived. Things work out well enough for Doris in the song, but I've always found the sheer inertia and free will denial of that lyric frustrating to the point of hatred.

Which is perhaps odd because I don't hate 'Que Sera Sera'. And this brings me to the second 'thing' that the song has to do with those builders - the tune. It's undeniable that the melody of the song is instantly recognisable and, along with the pithy philosophy of the title, sticks in the mind like flies on glue. In fact, it's versatility is evident by its ubiquity; I'm guessing that it's so ingrained that a great many people made the link with the lyrics and those builders without a second thought. Much covered across the genres, the basic tune has been adopted as football chants, used to sell life insurance and it's always something that gets wheeled out in films or on TV wherever a happy piece of good fortune needs a soundtrack.

And that itself is kind of ironic given the context in which the song originally appears in Hitchcock's 'The Man Who Knew Too Much' (I won't spoil it, watch it yourself), though for her own part Day gives the song the right amount of breeze to make all my criticisms above largely redundant and further defuse any ticking bombs of resentment. But really, the song's the star here and in the final analysis it's perhaps the most telling illustration of its quality is that such a freewheeling nursery rhyme jingle can disguise it's own chin stroking depths with a wink and a smile that lets you know that everything will be alright. As I say, I don't buy into that but for three minutes at least Day manages to make it sound plausible enough.

1956 Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers: Why Do Fools Fall In Love?

'Why Do Fools Fall In Love'? Now there's a question, though it's one usually asked whenever you've fallen out of love rather than in. Or I suppose to be more accurate, when you've been kicked out of it unexpectedly. This is not something I had a great deal of experience of when I was thirteen. At that age my biggest loves were AC/DC and my bike; girls and romance were an uncharted territory that just didn't blip on my radar.

Frankie Lymon was thirteen when he recorded this song and, based on its evidence, he knew a thing or two about love. Lymon invests his vocal with a rasp of heartache that manages to convince it was born out of bitter experience far beyond his years.* Wild, untrained, rubbed raw and on the verge of breaking maybe, but never childish, childlike or rooted in teen angst. For the sake of contrast, Michael Jackson was two years younger when he sang 'I Want You Back', but he sounded it too and his cheery shout combined with the Jackson 5's funky stomp created a top drawer pop song buffed to a high sheen, something that 'Why Do Fools Fall In Love'? could never be accused of being.

A 'boyband' they may have been, but 'Why Do Fools Fall In Love'? offers up precious few smooth edge, and as familiar as I am with the song itself actually listening Lymon again for the first time in years catches me out with it's primal raggedness which, on reflection, makes 'Why Do Fools' sound like 'I Want You Back' dragged through the mud and left out in the rain. In 1956, the song stood at a neat intersection where street doo wop, stinging r&b licks and a solid rock and roll backbeat collide, yet what could have been a car crash of disconnected sound instead transforms effortlessly into a rule breaking abrasive chunk of angst driven ever forward by Lymon's wide eyed vocal that pulls off the trick of sounding both heartbroken but also glad of the opportunity and experience - Frankie knows it's better to have loved and lost and he constantly boots the song and the listener up the arse with his yelling so that we don't feel sorry for him. Not here anyway, but there's a great deal of pity to be derived from the fact that he would die a penniless heroin addict at the age of just twenty five. A fact that always takes the edge off the upbeat of this for me, but it remains a glorious milestone in the history of popular music that showed the possibilities of cross genre pollination to excite and innovate.

* I think my closest point of reference would be the just turned seventeen Alex Chilton growling through 'The Letter' with The Box Tops while sounding like he'd just turned into a fifty year old black man.

1956 Pat Boone: I'll Be Home

Usually the first and last word in clean cut, Boone generated his own mini industry in the mid fifties through recording sanitised versions of early r&b/rock & roll songs to re-sell back to a white, middle class audience left unnerved by the primal wildness and (let's be honest) racial origins of the originals. As a case in point, 'I'll Be Home' was originally recorded the previous year by black doo wop band The Flamingos. Exactly what they're coming home from is never made clear; "so long until I'll be home to start serving you" suggests something military but it shouldn't really matter - the sentiment is what's important and The Flamingos present it with an inappropriately jokey, frat boy aura that makes it sound akin to a novelty song.

For one man to take on a four piece harmony is no small task but Boone shows his intent by taking it at a much slower, lower pace that strangles any feelgood at birth. And by taking it in the opposite direction, Boone invests the song with an ill advised seriousness to the point that 'I'll Be Home' starts sounding more like a threat than a promise. And whilst it's true that Boone is an open goal for barbs that riff on a 'white bread soulless' criticism, I don't care much for the song no matter who is on performing duties. Boone's version is no less likeable to my ears than the original; songs with spoken word passages rarely do it for me and the ambiguity of 'I'll Be Home' means it does less than most. A lot less in fact.

1956 Ronnie Hilton: No Other Love

Now largely forgotten by modern ears, Ronnie Hilton was quite the star in the fifties though he picked the wrong time to start forging a career as a crooning balladeer. His preferred style was rapidly running out of time and on 'No Other Love' there's a temptation to picture some Tomcat Murr practical joker transposing the lyrics to a different score of music before passing them to Ronnie and then giving the orchestra something different again from the realm of the Avant Garde to play. How else to explain Hilton's wild phrasing and sudden shifts of key and tone while the backing music breaks into rolling crashes of sound for no apparent reason?

For what's meant to be a loving ballad, 'No Other Love' is about as tender and soothing listening to a hailstorm from inside a tin shed; Hilton's voice is solid enough, but it's bland enough too and if there was some japery afoot behind the scenes (which, alas, I very much doubt), then he proves himself a top class straight man by rolling with everything that's thrown at him without missing a beat. And that's my main problem with this - his poker faced delivery is bone dry and it makes 'No Other Love' a turgid affair on every level. "Hurry home, come home to me, set me free, free from doubt and free from longing" - leave it out Ron.

1956 Winifred Atwell: The Poor People Of Paris

Another (then) popular song given the Atwell treatment of fuel injection on the high keys. It's a jolly enough romp, but being just a single tune it lacks the jumpy variety of the previous 'Let's Have Another Party' medley and it has me looking at my watch after about a minute. But just when you think you've heard all it has to offer, producer Joe Meek chips in with a bizarre drone that sounds like a theremin but is apparently someone playing a wobbly saw blade. Its effect is to add alloy wheels and a spoiler to a ramshackle Model T, and while this isn't all that aesthetically pleasing its unexpectedness does make you stop and stare in a 'what the....???' kind of way. Which I suppose is better than in a rubbernecking at a car crash kind of way.

1956 Kay Starr: Rock And Roll Waltz

Neither rock & roll nor a waltz, Starr's song is a wry comment on the ever growing generation gap that was starting to yawn between parents and their teenage offspring. Bold as brass Starr has been out late on a date and on coming home she finds her parents trying to dance to one of her 'jump' records: "And while they danced, only one thing was wrong. They were trying to waltz to a rock and roll song". An unlikely scenario maybe, but no less prescient than seeing the endless parade of fortysomethings at my local 'nightclub' trying to dress twentysomething years younger. Starr herself was 34 when she recorded this and so perhaps seeing herself as square as the oldies she was lampooning, she's nothing less than enthusiastic with her last roll of the dice vocal pitched somewhere in the hinterland between big band and Broadway.

Though age has long since diluted any humour to a trace, 'Rock And Roll Waltz' is not a bad song as novelty songs go. It's verve and gusto remain intact, but as we've been spoiled by some of the number ones just recently I'm less disposed to give an unqualified thumbs up to something that jumps on the brakes and tries to put the machine into reverse by pandering to the very audience it was having a dig at.

1956 The Dreamweavers: It's Almost Tomorrow

Being a precocious child (or pretentious, take your pick), I read Hardy's 'Tess Of The D'Urbervilles' at a fairly young age. One evocative scene that always stayed with me comes toward the end after the unwilling murderess Tess and her Angel Clare have absconded and made it as far as Stonehenge where Tess falls asleep before the police catch up with them. Clare goes on the offensive 'Springing to his feet, he looked around for a weapon, loose stone, means of escape, anything. By this time the nearest man was upon him. 'It is no use sir,' he said. 'There are sixteen of us on the Plain, and the whole country is reared.' 'Let her finish her sleep!' he implored in a whisper of the men as they gathered round. When they saw where she lay, which they had not done till then, they showed no objection, and stood watching her as the pillars round'.

And so the doomed Tess slept on in peace, oblivious to the fact that waking meant arrest and ultimately execution. I've always found something quite evocative and unsettling in that scenario - to be at ignorant peace with yourself when the reality is anything but. 'It's Almost Tomorrow' presents a similar situation, albeit reversed; the vocalist is in bed with his lover, but the relationship is on the rocks and he realises this is probably the last time he is going to lie with her. His own love is true ("I'll love you forever, 'til stars cease to shine"), but:

"Your heart was so warm dear, it now has turned cold
You no longer love me, for your memories grow old
It's almost tomorrow, for here comes the sun
But still I am hoping that tomorrow won't come"

It's the mirror image of Tess - sleep is preserving his own peace of mind in that it's the only thing keeping the relationship together. The coming of the sun, normally symbolic of hope or rebirth, is here a harbinger of the opposite, a neat reversal of the norm that ensures there's something acutely disturbing in the desperation of 'It's Almost Tomorrow' and also something voyeuristically morbid in us for looking on.

Compared to the Dean's and Bill's company it's keeping 'It's Almost Tomorrow' by The Dreamweavers lies in dust covered hush and shroud, virtually undisturbed for the past fifty years. It's quite the bleakest song to reach number one to date and in truth it will rarely be bested in its misery by anything to come. And though its been much covered since, no other version has come close to conveying the same levels of sheer desperation that The Dreamweavers manage. If it sounds slightly rough, then it's because The Dreamweavers wrote, recorded and produced the song themselves in the face of record company indifference. No matter, the sense of a song barely holding itself together adds to the fractured vulnerability of the singer and the lyric, though it's somewhat ironic that the band were in competition with no less that five other versions by artists not so blinkered as to not know a hit when they heard one.

1956 Dean Martin: Memories Are Made Of This

'Golden Oldie' is a somewhat pejorative term that's come to describe anything older than about six months. Perhaps I exaggerate, but I find it irksome to hear acts like Phil Collins being described thus, partly because there was never anything 'golden' about the man or his music but mainly because I don't much care to have my teenage years labelled as 'nostalgia'. I don't like that at all.

For my own money, 'Memories Are Made Of This' is the epitome of what I regard as constituting a 'golden oldie'. From the moment it starts up, it's clearly an artefact from times past (the 'oldie' requirement) yet does not sound dated or anachronistic the way something like 'Outside Of Heaven' does (the 'golden' requirement). It's a song I well remember as being staple fodder of the family favourites radio shows when I was growing up and the sort of thing my mother would always be singing along to. This was a state of affairs that, in my eyes, immediately applied a 'THIS IS NOT COOL' branding iron to its hide which would have been at odds to my mother's own generation for whom Dean Martin and the Rat Pack must have stood as the very epitome of cool. I have no doubt they resented their past being repackaged as nostalgia too.

So what of the song then? Well, early prognosis is not good; "Don't forget a small moonbeam, fold in lightly with a dream" - the lyrics could have been lifted directly from the cheapest, tackiest greetings card and, if overdosed with sincerity (as some interpreters have been wont to do), then 'Memories Are Made Of This' oozes a patronising naivety that sticks in the craw. Happiness is all about getting married and producing three kids apparently. But before we all start booking the church, Dino's vocal arrives to puncture this little bubble of joy by carrying it with an amused air that both suggests he's got much better memories than any of this (which I'm sure he did) but that he's also happy enough to purvey this homespun philosophy ("One girl, one boy. Some grief, some joy") to us more easily pleased mere mortals, even if he had no intentions of taking it seriously himself.

Maybe this is being unfair to both the song and the singer, but in truth Martin was a consummate professional who didn't just know hokum when he saw it, he also how to make it palatable. And palatable it certainly is - the nagging vocal harmonies that glide beneath the lead and egg it on are infectious to the extreme and whilst I ultimately find this inessential, it's undeniably enjoyable. Enjoyable enough with a good time verve that gets me singing along whenever I hear it being played anyway, the way my mother did before me. Whether that makes me cool or it's opposite I care not a jot but I guess it proves that every wheel will turn full circle if you manage to live long enough.

1956 Tennessee Ernie Ford: Sixteen Tons

The worksong has been a common staple in both blues and country since the days of African slaves accompanying their labours with call and response field hollers. And not just slaves - singing while you toil is a tradition found in all cultures and communities where life is hard and the roots of worksongs spread widely from prison songs, sea shanties to Welsh miners singing hymns on their way to work. Which brings us neatly to 'Sixteen Tons', a fingersnapping take on a miner's woes and hardship.

Ford's song was in competition with a strong version by Frankie Laine (which got to number ten the same month), and whilst it's a song that Laine was born to sing, Ford bests him by virtue of his tone of helpless resignation that's coupled with a 'don't fuck with me' indignation and a percussive beat of what sounds like a fist smacking into an open palm. There's a vulnerability about Ford's recognition of himself as little more than "a mind that's weak and a back that's strong" and he rides on top of the haunting, thick yet sparse bass twang shuffle of the music with a humility that's missing from Laine's jazzy, proud man swagger.

The end result is something that will resonate with everyman; you don't need to be a miner to recognise that the futility of labour can also be misrepresented as dignity and such social commentary made 'Sixteen Tons' a very different proposition from anything that went before. Pop music was finally growing up and 'Sixteen Tons' still sounds as 'modern' and relevant now as it did then. A copper bottomed classic in fact.