‘Skip ’Cross The Ocean Like A Stone . . .’

 by whiteray

A while back, I wrote about Dion, noting that in my mind, he’s “always been an inhabitant of a mythical 1960. He’s on the corner and under the streetlight, standing hipshot and snapping his fingers, singing doo-wop to the night . . .” 

And I wrote about the career he took from doo-wop and R&B through folk and into blues in this century, stopping off at his interpretation of one of Bruce Springsteen’s prettiest songs, “If I Should Fall Behind.” Along the way, I mentioned his self-titled album of 1968, the album that included the hit  “Abraham, Martin and John,” and concluded that the album “was, if not a masterpiece, at least a fascinating and sometimes very good exploration of folk rock.” 

One track on that album, however, didn’t quite fit: “Daddy Rollin’ (In Your Arms)” showed up as the B-side to “Abraham, Martin and John” as well as on the album. And it wasn’t folk, wasn’t folk-rock. It was . . . well, in his 1989 book The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1,000 Greatest Singles Ever Made, critic Dave Marsh ranked the B-side at No. 452, and said: 

Haunted electric guitars clang and clash against one another, drums pound in from another room, uniting in a wad of noise symbolizing nothing but spelling out pain and fear . . . It was the scariest music Dion ever made . . . a surging, churning, angry, anguished version of Robert Johnson’s country blues. 

I got my copy of “Abraham, Martin and John” in 1968 from Leo Rau, the jukebox jobber who lived across the alley from us. I was fourteen. And when I flipped the record over, the B-side freaked me out, and I didn’t play it for years. And now, fifty-four years later, “Daddy Rollin’ (In Your Arms)” can still kind of freak me out.