'Baby, Let's Play House'

Born in Nashville in 1926, Gunter had started out singing in a gospel quartet – one of Elvis’s great, unfulfilled ambitions – and got his big break after Ernie Young, the owner of the Nashville record store he liked to hang around in, launched the Excello label in 1952. After singing with various blues bands, Gunter wrote the song Baby Let’s Play House and took it to Young. Released in 1954, it was picked up by Leonard Chess and became Excello’s biggest hit on Billboard’s R&B charts.

"House" was a popular euphemism for romantic numbers in the early 1950s. The same year Arnold struck gold, Rosemary Clooney topped the Billboard hot 100 with 'Come On-a My House', a song she thoroughly detested.

To be clear, Gunter didn’t copy Arnold or Cohen either. His 'Baby Let’s Play House' is earthy, direct and infused with an emotional charge missing from the sunny 'I Want To Play House With You'.

Played back today, Gunter’s original sounds like a prophetic blend of delta blues, rock and roll and rockabilly. He is, in a relatively laid back fashion, urging his errant lover to come back but he’s not commanding her – he mostly sounds as if he’s pleading with her to come to her senses although, at other moments, he doesn’t sound that bothered if she comes back or not.

Elvis’s version is much more emphatic, playful, exuberant, tougher and scornful – just listen to the way he makes “school” sound like “skewl”. And whether you prefer his interpretation or Gunter’s, it’s impossible to argue that the King copied the original or watered it down in the way that, for instance, Pat Boone covered Fats Domino’s 'Ain’t That A Shame'. As rock critic Robert Hillburn wrote of Elvis’s Sun recordings: “Far from being timid, Presley – working with producer Sam Phillips – redesigned them. He not only frequently changed the tempos, but often revised the words, sometimes throwing out whole verses to give the songs more compactness and punch.”

From the very first, subsequently much imitated, stuttering hiccup on Baby Let’s Play House, Presley takes command. The pace is frenetic – his version lasts two minutes and 23 seconds, 26 seconds faster than Gunter’s. The interplay between Bill Black’s thunderous bass-slapping, Elvis’s audacious, experimental vocal – he makes use of every trick in his rapidly expanding vocal repertoire – and Scotty Moore’s snarling rhythm guitar creates something that transcends such labels as country and blues and, 60 years after it was recorded, still sounds fresh and original. As Bill Dahl notes on allmusic.com, the performance’s decadent danger and incendiary energy defines rockabilly in the 1950s.

It’s hard to know what to read into Elvis’s improvised warning about a pink Cadillac. It was, as Greil Marcus wrote, “at the heart of the contradiction that powered Elvis’s early music; a perfect symbol of the glamour of his ambition and the resentments that drove it on.”

Was the future King reflecting on the paradoxes of fame? Or ironically chiding himself? (Quite possibly – he was funnier about his career and legend than he is usually given credit for.) Or was he merely substituting an image that better captured his own frustrations as a truck driver, electrician and singer who had, when he cut this record, become his family’s principal wage earner? Given his devout faith as a member of the First Assembly of God, he may not have felt comfortable with a line that seemed to specifically demean religion.

The performance paved the way for Gene Vincent to hiccup his way through his trademark smash Be Bop A Lula, sounding so like Elvis that Gladys Presley thought her son had made the record, and mesmerised John Lennon who tried, with his band The Quarrymen, to recapture the feel on their cover version.

In 1965, Lennon used the line “I’d rather see you dead little girl than to be with another man” to open the Beatles song Run For Your Life on their album Rubber Soul. Although Lennon later said he regretted writing the number, it was one of George Harrison’s favourites and was covered by Elvis’s friend and one-time co-star Nancy Sinatra.

Decades later both the Beatles song – and Elvis’s Baby Let’s Play House – were banned by Ottawa radio station CFRA because they were deemed misogynistic. The ban seems a little perverse because, as monstrously possessive as Elvis sounds on that crucial line, he backs away from the menace with a kind of comically syncopated interpretation of the lyrics that implies none of it is to be taken too literally. And the contempt, as his vocal makes clear, was not for the girl but for, in Marcus’s words, “a world that had always excluded him”, a world where too many people felt it was their social duty to show the Presley family exactly who they were.

A class divide is implied here: the pink Cadillac and the college-education may symbolise that the singer is a few rungs below his girl on the social ladder and resents having to look up.

Buddy Holly covered Baby Let’s Play House a few months after Elvis – very much in the King’s style while, as Dahl notes, the Johnny Burnette Trio’s “romping Oh Baby Babe”, recorded in 1956, is so similar it should be counted as another cover. Elvis’s ad-libbed lyric provided the catalyst for the Bruce Springsteen song Pink Cadillac, released in 1984 as the B-side to the single 'Dancing In The Dark', and later covered by Natalie Cole, daughter of the great Nat, a singer the King paid tribute to by singing 'Mona Lisa' while he was in the US Army.

Moore’s playing was almost as influential as Presley’s vocal, inspiring Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page to take up guitar. To this day, Keith Richards is still desperate to understand how Scotty created that feel – and how he might be able to duplicate it.

Presley’s Baby Let’s Play House reached number five on Billboard’s country charts in 1955, his first single to chart nationally. Fifteen years later, he revisited the song in rehearsals for his Las Vegas concerts. The footage of him singing “Come back baby come” – his feet pounding out the rhythm – is one of the most evocative scenes from those rehearsals. Half jokey, half sincere, his run through has the kind of authenticity that makes you wish he had recorded such material on a bluesy counterpart to the album Elvis Country.

Gunter may not have realised it in 1955 but Presley’s cover was the best thing that happened to his career. His own records never generated any great sales – the 1995 compilation Baby Let’s Play House (Uni/Excello) collects all his best work if you’re interested – and by 1966, when he moved to Michigan, he was only performing occasionally. He died in 1976, at the age of 49, a year before Presley. Gunter’s great regret, he said once, was that “Elvis got that number and made it famous but I never got the chance to shake his hand.”

Spotlight written by Paul Simpson (images by Piers Beagley)
-Copyright EIN December 2015

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Paul Simpson investigates Elvis’ inspired 1955 version of the Arthur Gunter original.

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