BoumanBlog
"How vain is it to sit down and write when you have not stood up to live…" – Thoreau

Nice video. Academy Award performance from the guy with all the good lines. Nice riff about the name and the tenses.

Rockin’ Robin was, of course, the quintessential 50s radio hit from the side of R&R that tried to make it all nicey, as opposed to all that down and dirty stuff influenced by R&B, invented by Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry .

Pat Boone, the honky crooner, was the exemplar of the white bucks and wholesomeness crowd that ripped off the tunes of Fats Domino and and made them into insipid junk. As the 60s approached the same bunch gave his songs the lavish, string-drenched treatment that was typical of the “Nashville sound” . They were working on killing it, but got run over by the British invasion.

But, even Rockin’ Robin, with it’s image of a little bird in the neighborhood, catching the beat from that shake-your-ass music, kept getting back to the theme that make our parents jittery.

Hey, rockin’ robin
Oh, we’re really gonna rock tonight.