Interpret: Ben Hewitt
Art: LP
Label: Hydra
Artikel Nr.: BLK 7704
A
1 Rock´n Roll Fever
2 That Night In Jamaica
3 Bop A Lena
4 Together Together
5 I´m Gonna Get To You Yet
6 Tore Up
B
1 Can´t Cha Feel It
2 You really Got A Lot Of Style
3 The Right Place In My Heart
4 To An Old friend With Love
5 Shattered
6 Flip Flop and Fly
Ben "Smokey" Hewitt (* September 11, 1935 in Tuscarora; † December 8, 1996 in Maryland) was an American rockabilly musician.
Hewitt was born in 1935 in a wooden cabin on an Indian reservation in Niagara County, New York State. He belonged to the Tuscarora tribe, one of the Iroquois-speaking Indian peoples of North America. At the age of twelve he was given a ukulele as a gift and one year later he got his first guitar.
In addition to country music, rhythm & blues music, which was becoming increasingly fashionable at the time, began to influence the young Hewitt in the early 1950s. Later he also listened to the records of the Sun Records label and Elvis Presley. He and his combo were frequent guests at DeFazios, a small bar in Niagara Falls. It was there that songwriter Julian Langford became aware of them and tried to persuade them to demo his songs. Since the songs written by Langford were in Hewitt's opinion very similar to each other, he started to rewrite them. The only song Hewitt left in the original was the song Whirlwind Blues. There were also some numbers written by Hewitt, such as Queen in the Kingdom of My Heart and Bundle of Love, but these were later credited as Julian Langford songs. Langford paid for the studio and drinks and they recorded a demo with the band. In 1958, a record deal was signed with Mercury Records and a management contract with Langford. Producer was Clyde Otis, who also worked with artists like Brook Benton, Roy Hamilton and The Five Satins. Otis contributed his own song, I Ain't Givin' Up Nothin' (If I Can't Have Something from You), which he had written together with Brook Benton. Most of the recording sessions took place at Bell Tone Studio, where Hewitt later recorded several demos for Elvis Presley under the direction of Clyde Otis.
In 1961 Hewitt separated from Mercury Records and lost interest in further recordings and record contracts. Later he recorded a live album and the country single Border City Call Girl in 1975.
Even though Ben Hewitt's recordings did not reach any charts, he never turned his back on his music. He continued to perform at DeFazios for decades and was known under his nickname "Smokey".
When the Rockabilly revival in Europe began in the late 1970s, concerts at major European Rock'n'Roll and Rockabilly festivals followed, at which he was booked as headliner, celebrated as one of the pioneers of the genre.
In 1985, between his European concert dates, Hewitt recorded another LP entitled Ben Hewitt - Tore Up! in a studio in Munich. The accompanying band was the Munich group The Catlegs, and the album was released on the German label Hydra Records. His old recordings and some new ones were also released by bear Family. Ben Hewitt died in Maryland on December 8, 1996 at the age of 61.
