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Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop

"Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop"
Ba ba re bop.jpg
Single by Lionel Hampton and his Orchestra
B-side "Slide, Hamp, Slide"
Released January 1946 (1946-01)
Format 10" 78 rpm records
Recorded Late 1945
Genre Swing, jump blues
Length 2:57
Label Decca (18754)
Writer(s) Lionel Hampton, Curley Hamner
Lionel Hampton and his Orchestra singles chronology
"Beulah's Boogie"
(1945)
"Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop"
(1946)
"Hamp's Salty Blues"
(1946)

"Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop" is a 1946 song by Lionel Hampton and His Orchestra. The song's lead vocals were performed by Lionel Hampton himself and the recording featured Herbie Fields on alto sax. The song went to number one on the R&B Juke Box chart for sixteen non-consecutive weeks and reached number nine on the national pop charts.

Although the writing of "Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop" was credited to Hampton and his drummer Curley Hamner, it was essentially a partial rewriting of Helen Humes' 1945 R&B hit "Be-Baba-Leba", which in turn was closely related to "Ee-Bobaliba" by Jim Wynn.

The song "Be-Baba-Leba" was recorded by Helen Humes with the Bill Doggett Octet in August 1945, in Los Angeles, and rose to number 3 on the Billboard R&B chart at the end of the year. The writing of the song was credited to Humes, who wrote the lyrics, such as: "He thrills me in the morning, thrills me in the night, the way he loves me makes me scream with delight, oooh oooh oooh baba-leba....". The vocal choruses are interspersed with saxophone breaks by Wild Bill Moore, who was brought in by Doggett for the session.

Pianist Jelly Roll Morton said that "Be-Baba-Leba"'s riff was "so old it's got whiskers", and it is close to the one on "Boogie Woogie" recorded by Jimmy Rushing with Count Basie in 1937. However, the scat wording apparently derives from "Ee-Bobaliba", a song performed by saxophonist and bandleader Jim Wynn in the early 1940s with his band, the Bobalibans. By that time, the term "bebop" or similar terms like "ba-re-bop" were becoming popular among musicians to describe the new forms of jazz being performed by such musicians as Dizzy Gillespie. Wynn recorded his song, with vocalist Claude Trenier, after Humes recorded "Be-Baba-Leba", and it did not make the chart.


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