This OPENING VOCAL is SO KILLER…I Have to HEAR It 10 Times EVERY TIME I Play It! | Professor of Rock

The year we are traveling back to today was a year of seismic pop culture shifts—Jimmy Carter was in the Oval Office, Star Wars took over theaters, and Saturday Night Fever lit up the dance floor. New York City went dark in a massive blackout, but the music scene was burning bright. One of the biggest rock songs of the year by Ram Jam came from the 1800s. Another by Heart came when a sleazy radio promoter’s dirty innuendo pissed off Ann Wilson, causing her to write one of the greatest rock songs in mere minutes… another song by Paul McCartney was released on an album 7 years earlier but a live version of the song hit the top of the charts and another one by Fleetwood Mac came from one of the greatest soap opera’s in music history. It made today’s year a revelation… see if you can guess the year in today’s top 10 countdown coming up next!

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Hey music junkies, Professor of Rock, always here to celebrate the greatest artists and the greatest songs of all time. If you remember watching Halley’s Comet back in 1986, you’ll dig this channel of deep musical nostalgia. Make sure to subscribe below right now. I promise that you are going to love this channel. Also, make sure to become an exclusive member of our website.

There’s a lot of great memories and powerful performances on our countdown of the Top 10 Songs of 1977. We begin with the track that was reimagined from a sing-along that was more than a hundred years old by the time it became a worldwide sensation. At

#10….it’s that SLAMMIN’ one-hit wonder… “Black Betty” by Ram Jam!“ Black Betty” is historically linked to blues singer Leadbelly, born Huddle William Ledbetter. At 63 years old when his version was recorded, he couldn’t lay claim to writing Black Betty.

That song had likely echoed under the blistering sun for generations, a raw and rhythmic work song passed down since the first enslaved people arrived on American soil. The Song is over 200 years old… But whether “Betty" referred to a bottle of whiskey, a treacherous woman, a police car, or the dreaded bullwhip that tore into the backs of laborers, one thing was certain—he understood its meaning in his bones. A man who called himself “the roughest to ever walk the streets of Dallas,” Baker didn’t just sing Black Betty—he unleashed it. His voice carried the weight of lived experience, an eerie, haunted moan that even Lead Belly, with his legendary 1939 recording for Musicraft Records, struggled to match.

In 1934, nearly a year after James “Iron Head” Baker delivered the first known recorded performance of Black Betty, journalist John Lomax sat down with him for an interview. The conversation found its way into an article for Musical Quarterly where Lomax noted that Black Betty was a common nickname for the bullwhip—a symbol of suffering etched into the song’s very core. “Black Betty” goes back even further than Iron Head Baker. Its roots go back to the 1800s, when it was a ‘work song’ sung by inmates in the chain gangs of the south. But when it came to popularizing “Black Betty” in modern times, it was guitarist/ singer Bill Bartlett who had the vision and the execution to make it happen.

Bill Bartlett had already made his mark with the Lemon Pipers before branching out to form his own band, Starstruck. It was with Starstruck that he took Lead Belly’s brief, 59-second rendition of Black Betty and transformed it into something new...