Wang Dang Doodle

Inspired by the CD to which I'm listening, I remembered this old Usenet post of mine:

I was fifteen years old, spending the summer with my parents in a trailer in Kwajelein between sessions of boarding school in Hawaii. My parents were away at some party or other, and I was sitting up late at night, reading and listening to the local AFRS radio station.

It was after midnight, and the DJ decided to be cute with the songs he played. The first one was, of course, "After Midnight", followed by others in the same vein.

And then this song came on, about something bad and bloody about to go down, involving people toting knives and razors. The singer was bragging about it, looking forward to it. "All night long!" went the refrain. "All night long!"

Scary.

Years later, I learned me to play the guitar and got a serious jones for the blues, and bought a bunch of CDs, including collections and retrospectives. And on one of them, The Great Tomato Blues Package (Tomato, R2 70386) had Koko Taylor singing "Wang Dang Doodle", written by Willie Dixon. (He wrote everything, don't you know.) The same song I remembered from twenty-five years before.

That's Dixon singing harmony in the chorus, giving Taylor's performance that extra degree of spooky menace.

Scary.