Wee Willie Harris – Grab You – The Brits Are Rocking Vol. 9
Bear Family Records BCD17732
Let’s Have A Party – Rosie Lee – I Go Ape – Grab You – Love Bug Crawl – Little Bitty Girl – Rockin’ At The 2 I’s – Get Happy – Back To School Again – Wild One – Blueberry Hill – Smack Dab In The Middle – Mean Woman Blues – Riot In Cell Block #9 – Bloodshot Eyes – No Chemise Please – Buona Sera – Got A Match? – I Don’t Know Why (But I Do) – Say Mama (Live) – Trouble In Mind – Row Row Row – I Go Ape (‘ll Mondo Di Notte’ Movie Version) – Have A Drink On Me – Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On – Medley: Shufflin’ Along/Baby Face/Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With A Dixie Melody/Toot Toot Tootsie
It would be too simplistic, and above all reductive, to summarize Wee Willie Harris by his colorful hair and outlandish bow ties. This new volume of the essential and always impeccable The Brits Are Rocking series demonstrates just how much more subtle and varied his music was than his eccentricity might suggest. Eddie Cochran’s vocal influence on “Let’s Have a Party” and “Rockin’ At The 2 I’s” is evident. This influence is perceptible, modulated by varying degrees of British accent, on most of the recordings. “Rosie Lee” successfully blends early rock and roll with big band elements. In a similar vein, “Get Happy” manages to combine rock and roll with Dixieland. These are not isolated cases; jazz influences regularly appear in Wee Willie Harris’s music, whether in the saxophone solo of the bluesy “Back To School” or in this excellent version of “Bloodshot Eyes,” a wild rock and roll track enriched by superb arrangements. And even if the idea of recording with a Big Band displeased Wee Willie Harris, this mix of genres is often what gives his music a very special personality.
I Go Ape is surely one of the singer’s best-known tracks, and rightly so, as Harris lets his wild side shine through. Paradoxically, Wild One, despite its title, is anything but wild; it’s a catchy, rather generic twist. While not bad, Love Bug Crawl (which Marty Wilde would also cover) and Blueberry Hill remain fairly conventional, as does Mean Woman Blues, although the latter boasts an excellent guitar solo. No Chemise Please is completely ruined by the omnipresent (and irritating) backing vocals.
Among the oddities, we find Got A Match, an instrumental with Harris on piano that seems to have been written as a television interlude, and, much more interestingly, Grab You, a disturbing and spooky track that Screamin’ Lord Sutch wouldn’t have disowned. This latter track once again benefits from excellent arrangements and backing by Tony Crombie (by the way, when will there be a Crombie volume in this series?).
I Don’t Know Why (But I Do) proves that Harris was a versatile singer and capable of crooning with subtlety. As is typical of the label, the booklet is very detailed, both in terms of illustrations (color photos, posters, press clippings, etc.) and text. Roland Heinrich Rumtreiber doesn’t simply recount Wee Willie Harris’s life, but places it in its context, and he expands his analysis by discussing the singer’s influence.
Buy your copy at Bear Family
Fred “Virgil” Turgis
