When Sex Was Dirty and the Air Was Clean, They Sanatized "Work With Me Annie" to Make "Dance With Me Henry."

“When ‘Work With Me, Annie (12169)’ appeared in 1954, it created a sensation and a furor. For that period, the lyrics were extremely sexually explicit-- ‘Annie, please don't cheat. Give me all my meat.’ And although it was anathematized by many men of the cloth and banned from many a disk jockey's play list, it still sold by the thousands. The rollicking ‘Annie’ came to symbolize what the white establishment feared the most? the stereotypical latent sexuality of the Negro running amok. ‘Hank Ballard & the Midnighters were the 2 Live Crew of the early 50s, burning up the airwaves and Black jukeboxes,’ asserts Cub Koda in his review of the 1993 retrospective, Sexy Ways, a ‘best of’ package on Rhino records, which specializes in reissues.Former mentor, Johnny Otis, seized upon this opportunity to ‘appropriate’ the melody and offer a less blatantly sexual version of the number to the public when he had the then fourteen-year-old Etta James (Jamesetta Hawkins) record ‘Roll With Me Henry’ for the Bihari brothers' indie Modern (947) at 686 N. Robertson in Los Angeles, featuring Richard Berry, the originator of rock classic, ‘Louie Louie (Flip 321).’ But Otis, too, had to compromise, changing the title to the more innocuous ‘The Wallflower.’ Such a practice, basically stealing a song, was rampant in this decade before such copyright laws were strictly enforced. In fact, Etta James soon sang a response to the macho ‘I'm A Man (Checker 814)’ by Bo Diddley, retorting with ‘W-O-M-A-N (972).’ Another egregious example of this custom was Johnny Guitar Watson's ‘cover’ on RPM (436) of Earl King's ‘Those Lonely, Lonely Nights (Ace 509)’ in 1955. Other such illustrations of the ‘Annie’ rip-off phenomenon included the vocal group El Dorados (‘At My Front Door’), who countered with ‘Annie's Answer (Vee-Jay 118),’ the West Coast Midnights (notice the name similarity), who replied with ‘Annie Pulled A Hum-Bug (Music City 746),’ the Champions, who responded with ‘Annie Met Henry (Chart 602),’ and label mates, the Platters, who answered with ‘Maggie Doesn't Work Here Anymore (12204),’ credited to the writers Taylor and Lynch. In all fairness, Otis did share the royalties between himself, James, and Ballard. But, for the most part, R& B artists of the 50s are still trying to recover what unscrupulous publishers of that era owe them.

But not only were other R&B artists jumping on the ‘Annie’ bandwagon. Pop chanteuse, Georgia Gibbs, further sanitized both the title, ‘Dance With Me Henry,’ and lyrics, resulting in a monster hit on Mercury (70572) in 1955?a song that was now so fit for public consumption that it sold over a million copies.” From Bluesworld.com Hank Ballard (1936-2003) by Larry Benicewicz, B.B.S. Thanks to Dick for the tip.