1955 Top Ten Songs: I Want You to Be My Baby (#10)

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All month long I’ve talked about how 1955 (well, the 50s in general) was filled with multiple versions of the same song. We kick off the top ten portion of the look back 70 years with yet another example of one song turning into a hit a lot of times. #10: I Want You to Be My Baby - Lillian Briggs This started with Louis Jordan in 1953. Lillian Briggs, who began her music career singing and playing trombone in a big band orchestra, did the first cover of it. That set her career on fire, even after Georgia Gibbs’ version (recorded almost immediately after Briggs’ version was released) took over on the strength of Gibbs’ status. (I’ve mentioned Gibbs a lot..and she will show up in the 1960 countdown. ) If you can’t tell, this is some pretty rollicking stuff for (a) a woman (b) trombone player (c) in 1955. By 1956 they were calling her “the Queen of Rock and Roll,” to match Elvis’s regal sobriquet (to steal a line from Warren Zevon). Briggs was tearing down some walls, BIG TIME. She toured overseas not only as a rock and roll singer, but as a white rock and roll singer with Nat “King” Cole (remember, audiences were still segregated in many places in the U.S. in the 50s [Cole himself usually did two shows in a city: one for white audiences and one for black audiences]). While her name has generally been forgotten in music, she did play a very important part in politics, albeit unintentionally: she owned a yacht appropriately named Monkey Business, and it was aboard that yacht that Gary Hart was photographed with Donna Rice (for you kids, there actually were scandals that would END a presidential campaign instead of enhance them). Get up and enjoy some jumpin’ blues! I Want You to Be My Baby Written by Jon Hendricks Recorded by Lillian Briggs Released as a single, 1955 Listen to your mama: