Work with Me Annie
Hank Ballard and the Midnighters (1954). Excerpt from "The 50 Songs that Gave Birth to Rock and Roll"
Hank Ballard was born in Detroit in 1927, but bounced between the Motor City and the Deep South of Alabama during his formative years. His exposure to two vibrant but utterly different musical cultures would imbue the young singer with a unique pedigree. He put this background to use in the early 1950s as a purveyor of some of the era’s most risqué R&B tunes.
First as the leader of a doo-wop combo called the Royals, and thereafter as frontman for the more R&B-leaning Midnighters, Ballard carved out a small niche as a singer with a particular flair for overtly sexual storytelling. Their first hit, 1954’s “Work with Me Annie,” encouraged the song’s addressee to “get it while the gettin’ is good, so good, so good, so good, so good.”
Ballard’s on-the-nose lyrics and suggestive yelping earned the song a ban from the airwaves by the Federal Communications Commission. But this didn’t stop the bawdy tune from selling enough copies to reach all the way up to #1 on the R&B Billboard charts and #22 on the Pop charts.
Its simple but scintillating electric guitar solo and shuffling harmony are also prototypical of the fare that would soon emanate from radio stations across the U.S. In the wake of this first success, Ballard followed up with the self-explanatory “Annie Had a Baby” and “Annie’s Aunt Fanny”—which were also banned by the FCC.
“Work with Me Annie” inspired countless answer songs, most notably Etta James’s “Roll with Me, Henry (The Wallflower).”
In addition to producing a song which is rightfully seen as among the most necessary immediate precursors to rock and roll, Hank Ballard would return in 1959 with “The Twist.”
His original composition only reached #87 on the Pop charts, but the following year, Chubby Checker’s untouchable cover topped the chart, and in 1962, became the only song in history to ever do so a second time.
Though he last recorded in 1969, Hank Ballard had intermittently emerged from his private life to perform live prior to his death in 2003 at age 75.
See the full list of 50 Songs that Gave Birth to Rock and Roll
Ballard turned the heat up even further with his "Annie" follow-up, "Sexy Ways" ("Shake baby, shake, shake, shake/'Til the meat rolls off your bones..."). Another hit in spite of airplay bans, it must have been one of the first times the adjective "sexy" was used in a popular hit record.
His last recordings were cut under the auspices of James Brown, who had been strongly influenced by the Midnighters' sound. Unfortunately, as with many of Brown's recording ventures, he basically turned Ballard into one of his many mini-mes....