The Seventh Son

While I was standing in the checkout line at my beloved Happy Foods (as I’ve mentioned before, I’m a daily shopper), their in-store music system which pays a rather unusual selection of material began playing Poor Side of Town. I said to the checkout clerk, a young woman in her early twenties, “I bet that you don’t know who that is.” No one in the vicinity knew. “It’s Johnny Rivers.”

Johnny Rivers, originally John Ramistella, was born in New York in 1942 and grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He started recording in the 1950s. In the 1960s he had a string of hits including Poor Side of Town, Seventh Son, and Secret Agent Man. He did a lot of covers. A number of his hits were covers of Chuck Barry songs including Maybellene and Memphis. Rivers’s rendition of Memphis hit #2, outselling Barry’s original version by far (it had stalled at #84). His last hit was in 1977.

For my money Rivers is one of the greatest of all rock performers and one of the finest of all rock guitarists, right up there with Chuck Barry, Jimi Hendrix, and Eric Clapton. Few people today seem to know his name. That’s ironic because so many of them are familiar with his music. Frequently, when they think of a Chuck Barry tune, they’re actually thinking of Johnny Rivers’s rendition of it.

Although he was chronologically considerably younger than Elvis or Buddy Holly, musically he was very much their contemporary. And he’s one of the very few performers from that era who’s still performing.