Rudy Ray Moore’s Dolemite Shuffle, by Michael H. Price

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2 Responses

  1. mike weber says:

    Moore is hardly the first to have tried such a route, but he is patently the first to have made a career of committing explicitly bawdy material to commercially issued phonograph records.How does his beginning that sort of thing track with the career of Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts?

  2. Michael H. Price says:

    A good question. Thanks. Clark and Moore are contemporaries, of course, and Moore was still working as a general-purpose R&B/rock vocalist when Clark began delivering his blush-inducing party-record albums.The bawdier material in general dates from the 1920s and '30s, but most of it (as late as Doug Clark & the Hot Nuts, during the 1960s) deals more extensively in aggressive double-entendres or bait-and-switch rhymes — incidental to a more generalized interest in playing the blues. (The Clark band's signature song dates from the Depression years.)And quite a few famous comedians were known during the 1950s for their dirty-talk recordings — privately circulated, unofficially issued items by, for example, Jonathan Winters and Martin & Lewis. Moore crossed that line decisively and never looked back. But he still packs a fine blues-and-ballads voice.