Get Involved blog

Little Willie John - Leave My Kitten Alone

Killer Little Wille John track from 1959. Gotta love the “meow” backing vocals! Leave My Kitten Alone was famously covered by The Beatles who recorded a cover of it in August 1964 during their studio sessions for the Beatles For Sale album. It never made it on to the LP and wasn’t released until the Anthology collection came out in 1995.

Rueben Bell, less famously, covered the track in 1973 on Deluxe - but that’s not up on YouTube!

Jerry Wexler, who as a reporter for Billboard magazine in the late 1940s christened black popular music “rhythm and blues”, and who as a record producer helped lead the genre to mainstream popularity, propelling the careers of Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin and other performers, died yesterday, Friday 15 August, at his home in Sarasota, Fla. He was 91.

The New York Times has written a comprehensive and fitting obituary, a tribute to one of Soul music’s founding fathers. Read it here.

Tonight’s session of Gerry’s Joint at The Boogaloo will be dedicated to the late, great Wexler.

Rest in peace.

Yup, we’ve got a blog and this is the very first post on it. The idea is that the I’ll post up a weekly slab of old gold here and also drop nuggets of news about interesting exhibitions and other stuff as-and-when the time is right.

Massive thanks goes to www.indexhibit.org code-king, Vaska, for all his help, time and patience getting the blog up and running in the site. Muchos gracias senor!