Song of the Day 3/28: Dave Edmunds, “I Hear You Knocking”

As much as I hate everything involved in the Trump maladministration, this is just sad. In a lame attempt to distract from its national security ineptitude, they tried to send Usha Vance to Greenland, apparently on the theory that a non-white person might get a better reception. They reportedly went on a door-to-door quest to find someone they could use for a photo op. No dice.

American officials have been looking for locals in the Greenland capital of Nuuk who would be willing to receive Vice President JD Vance’s wife but couldn’t find any takers, according to a Wednesday report from Danish television station TV2.

Yeah, I’ve got a song for that. It was written by New Orleans R&B bandleader and composed Dave Bartholomew, who produced most of Fats Domino’s hits, and first recorded in 1955 by Smiley Lewis. Fats didn’t record it until years later.

Boomers probably identify the song with British rocker Dave Edmunds, who had his biggest hit with it in 1970. His version spent six weeks atop the UK singles charts and reached No. 4 in the U.S.

The song’s roots go back to a 1928 recording, “Keep Knockin’ An You Can’t Get In,” by James “Boodle It” Wiggins. His biographical information is extremely sketchy. He was discovered by a Paramount Records scout in Dallas, but nobody was sure where he was born – Big Bill Broonzy said he came from Louisiana – or how old he was when he died, sometime around 1930. That was the year after he survived a mob that shot him four times and tried to lynch him for failing to step off the sidewalk for a white woman in Bogalusa, La. Sources aren’t even clear about his nickname. It referred to either a dance or something sexual, or maybe both.