Earlier entries of this series can be found here: http://www.acclaimedmusic.net/forums/vi ... ive#p45337
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“I’ll make love to you, to you/ I’ll make love to you”
86. Buddy Knox – Party Doll
The facts:
Year: 1956.
Genre: Rockabilly.
Country: United States of America.
Album: Buddy Knox.
Acclaimed Music ranking: #4477.
Song ranking on Acclaimed Music in the artist’s discography: 1st, the only one.
Ranks higher than Happy Birthday by Altered Images, but lower than Getting Better by The Beatles.
Place in the Acclaimed Music Song Poll 2015: Unranked.
The people:
Written by Buddy Knox & Jimmy Bowen.
Produced by Norman Petty.
Vocals by Buddy Knox.
Backing vocals by Verdi Ann Knox, Ireana Potts of Amarillo and a neighbour.
Guitar by Buddy Knox & Don Lanier.
Bass by this other guy hanging around the studio.*
Drums by Dave Alldred.
Cymbals by a girl from the Clovis High School.
* Jimmy Bowen, part of Knox’ backing band The Rhythm Orchids, is credited as the bass player, but he isn’t actually on the record. Norman Petty thought he was terrible and according to Knox they resorted to using “this other guy hanging around the studio” to play the bass. Who was this? No clue.
The opinion:
There is a moment during many parties when someone decides to start a song that is particularly silly. Sometimes the song is meant to be funny, sometimes it is unintentionally so, other times it is a youth sin of many people gathered there and every now and then it is a current hit that nobody likes (or dares to admit they do). The effect is usually the most enthusiastic response of the whole party. Nothing gets people singing aloud so hard than a song that they know to be ridiculous. Perhaps because if the recording artist himself doesn’t seem ashamed to sing it, why should we? Most of the time, this one song is followed by several others.
Party Doll is too old for me to ever come across it at a party, but it feels like a song that is tailor made for such occasions. Apparently people genuinely liked it (it was a big number 1 hit in the US at its time), but surely it never could have been taken seriously? It is a party song with the most simple of rhythms, ridiculously stupid lyrics and upbeat yet restrained singing. It’s not much of a song, but it is supremely silly.
No, I don’t like Party Doll. I can’t think about voluntarily listing to this outside one of those party moments as mentioned above. It came out late in 1956, a year that opened with the big hit Blue Suede Shoes by Carl Perkins. That song put rockabilly on the map and it is clear that this is the sound that Buddy Knox and his band the Rhythm Orchids were trying to emulate. They don’t have the strong sense of rhythm of Perkins’ group though and Knox doesn’t even come close to matching Perkins’ own deliciously joyous, country-inflected vocals. There is a guitar solo in there, but like everything else it doesn’t stand out much among the rock-‘n-roll classics of its day.
But Party Doll is catchy, annoyingly so. The reason that it is so catchy is because Knox basically repeats the extremely simple and still very stupid lyrics without much variation and the backing rhythm is equally repetitive. Make no mistake, even in such a simple genre as rockabilly these guys didn’t strain themselves. It should be said that they weren’t particularly experienced.
I don’t know if anything other than a whim made them decide to head to a recording studio, but it was only there that they found out that the bass player, Jimmy Bowen couldn’t actually play the bass. Do the credits above partly look like a joke to you? A girl from the Clovis High School played the cymbal? Ireana Potts of Amarillo and someone only known as her neighbour on backing vocals? All this evokes the suspicion that this was indeed a whim and these guys were winging it.
The only thing that hints that there was some passion behind this is that Knox apparently wrote the lyrics to this song already in 1948, behind a haystack on his parents’ farm. That’s a good spot for it. Now Knox was 15 years old in 1948 and I think that’s a little old to be still writing lyrics like those of Party Doll. It doesn’t quite explain why Jimmy Bowen also has a writing credit. Was he there too behind the haystack? Where the original lyrics even worse and did it need a rewrite? Also, why did it take 8 years to turn this into a song? Part of me thinks that Knox needed 8 year to think up this simplest of melody. Yes, that is a very nasty suggestion, but I haven’t been able to find any hint of natural creativity in this guy so there you have it. Whatever the case, that Knox in 1956 still felt that these lyrics needed to be used shows some firm believe in them.
Everything here seems a joke, even the life of Knox beforehand. His real name is indeed Buddy and he was born in a Texas village actually named Happy. Before he went into music he was a high school cheerleader and then a rodeo clown. His first music experience was as part of a group named The Serenaders. This wasn’t a concert band or anything like that. No, it was a trio of guys who serenaded under girls windows at dorms. I kid you not.
This looney tale continues after Party Girl hit the charts. Just take a look at many of the titles of the songs Knox recorded after Party Doll: Hula Love, Ling Ting Tong, Bip Bop Boom, Ooby Dooby, Lovey Dovey, Chi-Hua-hua, Teasable, Pleasable You, I Ain’t Sharin’ Sharon and Swingin’ Daddy. Of those, only Chi-Hua-Hua seems to be meant as a joke and is therefore the only tolerable one. Hula Love might have the most mind-blowingly stupid lyrics in music history (sample: “And he sang Hulu Hawai hula/ Smile on your zing gang a zula”), but Knox sings them in a straight-faced, honest way. It was a hit, of course. Another hit was Rock Your Little Baby to Sleep. A boringly normal title perhaps, but as a compensation the performance is especially terrible.
To give this completely insane discography another touch Knox also recorded a song under a totally different kind of title: I Think I’m Gonna Kill Myself. Don’t worry, it still sounds like an upbeat party song despite the dark lyrics. Radio stations refused to play the song, because of the title. That’s the closest Knox came to ever being seen as one of the more dangerous exponents of rock. By the way, Knox didn’t end up killing himself, but he did die eventually. He is buried in Canyon, Texas on Dreamland Cemetery. Fittingly, because Knox always seemed to inhabit a dreamland, completely devoid of common sense.
To be a little fair to Knox, he became better eventually. Were the records during his prime were really the most non-assuming rock songs of the era, he later put a lot more passion and power in the songs. In the end, he could rival Carl Perkins and Buddy Holly in that sense. There is a catch to this story: Knox achieved this high-level performance in the sixties, when this type of music had fallen completely out of favour. It took him roughly 6 to 7 years to be able to do what Perkins already did before him. In the late sixties Knox turned towards country and became a specialty star there, outside of the mainstream.
This is sheer madness. I guess it’s huge success in its time (along with its revival on the hugely popular soundtrack to the film American Graffiti) was the reason for four lists to include Party Doll, which made sure that it now ranks at #4477 on the Acclaimed Music list. Who knows. Every era has its own new music styles and after the pioneers have shown how it is done there inevitably follows a group of followers that deliver a watered-down version of said styles. Even though the pioneers might have hits and earned respect, it’s always somewhat dispiriting to see the clones getting a lot of attention and even higher levels of success. To me Buddy Knox and his Party Doll belong firmly to the latter group. I didn’t mince words in this article yet and I won’t do so now: Buddy Knox was a true hack.
3/10
Other versions:
There are a lot of covers to Party Doll, as is usual with classics of this era. I found the experience of listening to all of these kind of tiresome. The original is already very repetitive for a two minute song. These follow-ups hardly expand the sound, so ninety minutes of listening to the same part repeating every 30 seconds or so, becomes a grating experience. There are some variations in instrumentations and tempo, but it all quickly bled into one whole, making it hard to remember which is which. It doesn’t matter too much: there is no good song as a basis here and nobody could change that. The best covers are the one with the fastest tempo, like the punk take by the X-Possibles. But really, I don’t care for any of them.
The playlist:
