A Round-About Journey To ‘Kansas City’

by whiteray

For a time around 1969-70, the evening deejay at WJON, the radio station just down the street and across the railroad tracks from our house in St. Cloud, Minnesota, was a fellow who used the name Ron P. Michaels (his initials were then RPM, you see). And one evening during the summer of 1970, he put on a special show. 

From seven o’clock to (I think) midnight one weekday evening, Michaels played nothing but the Beatles. From the hits like “Hey Jude,” “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “I Want To Hold Your Hand” to tracks from deep in the group’s catalog, WJON was all-Beatles for one five-hour stretch that summer night. 

I was a fledgling Beatles fan, just beginning to learn about the Fab Four’s music. I had – and knew well – the Let It Be and Abbey Road albums. I owned – with my sister – Beatles ’65, one of the albums of bits and pieces that Capitol had created in the early days of the group’s American success. Later that summer, I would buy Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Hey Jude, a package of hits and B-sides (also known as The Beatles Again). 

There was still plenty I did not know about the Beatles’ music. I was determined to learn, however. So, I stationed myself in my bedroom with my Panasonic cassette recorder and carefully stopped and started the tape to edit out commercial breaks. My recording technique was brutal: I placed the radio on the bed with the microphone set down nearby, and I knelt on the floor as I pushed buttons, listened and took notes. The sound quality wasn’t great, but it was good enough for the time being. 

I ended up with three-and-a-half hours of music, which was nothing near the group’s entire output on Capitol/Apple – in their British configuration, the Beatles’ original thirteen albums plus non-album singles and B-sides run about eleven hours in toto – but it was certainly a place to start learning about the deeper places in the group’s catalog. 

I recall that some of the songs I heard for the first time that evening weren’t, to be honest, high points in the Beatles’ career: “Devil In Her Heart,” “Yes It Is,” “Act Naturally” and “Blue Jay Way” come to mind. On the other hand, that was the evening I was introduced to “In My Life,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Back In The U.S.S.R.,” the last of which remains one of my favorite recordings by anyone, ever. 

Another song that I heard for the first time that evening was titled at the time “Kansas City.” It started, “I’m goin’ to Kansas City, bringing my baby back home.” 

Released on Beatles For Sale in 1964, the song was the Beatles’ cover version of the tune written in the early 1950s by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, as recorded by Little Richard.

Little Richard’s indelible contribution to the song – beyond his lethal performance of “Kansas City” itself – was the “Hey, hey, hey hey” coda, which was his own creation. From what I’ve read, the Beatles were unaware of Penniman’s addition; they called the song simply “Kansas City” and listed only Leiber and Stoller as the writers. (Eventually, the title of the Beatles’ recording was changed; it’s now called a medley of “Kansas City” and “Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey” with Little Richard given a writing credit [as Richard Penniman].) 

Looking a little bit deeper, there was no way the Beatles really could have known. After all, when Little Richard’s recording was released on the Specialty label after it was recorded in 1955, its title was simply “Kansas City,” with only Leiber and Stoller listed as writers. As was the case with the Beatles’ omission, that error has since been corrected. The 1991 CD The Georgia Peach, a Little Richard hits package, lists the song as “Kansas City/Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey” and lists Penniman as a writer along with the team of Leiber and Stoller. 

Anyway, that night was the first time I’d heard “Kansas City” with or without the Penniman addition. I thought it was a pretty good song, but I didn’t bother in those days to dig too deeply into the history of the music I was listening to. I was having a difficult enough time keeping track of current groups and their catalogs. So I didn’t know for years that “Kansas City” – sometimes listed as “K.C. Lovin’” – had been around since before I was born. 

As noted above, the song came from the duo of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, a duo credited with writing hit after hit during the Fifties and early Sixties, including “Hound Dog,” “Young Blood,” “Yakety Yak,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Stand By Me” (with Ben E. King), “Ruby Baby” and many more, including the very odd No. 11 hit for Peggy Lee in1969, “Is That All There Is?” 

Originally recorded by Little Willie Littlefield as “K.C. Lovin’” in 1952, “Kansas City” is without doubt one of the most-covered R&B songs of all time. The website Second Hand Songs lists more than 200 versions of the song, including instrumentals and foreign language covers. The most famous cover of “Kansas City” is most likely Wilbert Harrison’s 1959 version on the Fury label, which was No. 1 for two weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 and for seven weeks on the magazine’s R&B chart. (As good as Little Richard’s version on Specialty was, it went to only No. 95 on the pop chart and did not reach the R&B chart.)

Other covers of the song that I have in my collection are from Joe Williams, Muddy Waters, Paul McCartney (on his 1988 album Снова в СССР, originally released only in the Soviet Union), David “Honey Boy” Edwards, Jan & Dean, and Albert King. It’s not a song in which I’ve invested a lot of time. 

But there is one fascinating version I do have. In 1977, Libby Titus – who I think is generally forgotten today – recorded a version of the song that she titled “Kansas City (K.C. Lovin’)” and released it on her self-titled album. The album is pretty good, but is, I think, of additional interest because Titus was the ex-wife of Levon Helm of The Band, and a couple of Helm’s former bandmate showed up to help out: Garth Hudson shows up on one track, and Robbie Robertson plays on one track and produced two of the tracks. (Producing the remaining tracks were, in various combinations, the intriguing trio of Paul Simon, Carly Simon and Phil Ramone.) 

Among the other highlights of the are Titus’ work on the classic song “Love Has No Pride,” which she co-wrote with Eric Kaz, and the slightly odd “The Night You Took Me to Barbados in My Dreams.” But “Kansas City (K.C. Lovin’),” with its own odd moment in the introduction, is likely the best thing on the album and one of the slinkier covers of the song I’ve ever heard.