I Want to Know — Sugar Pie DeSanto (1960)

Why this song

The same man found both singers. In 1952 Johnny Otis produced Big Mama Thornton singing Hound Dog, and played the drums on it himself. Three years later he found a young singer in San Francisco and gave her a stage name: Sugar Pie.

One of those two records is in your textbook. This one is not, even though it reached number four on the American rhythm and blues chart in 1960.

The song is built on the twelve bars you already know. What changed is the speed, and who it was made for.

Historical context

Her name was Peylia Marsema Balinton. She was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1935. Her mother was African American and a concert pianist; her father was Filipino. The family moved to San Francisco when she was four, and that is where she grew up. As a girl she was friends with another singer from the neighbourhood, Etta James. Thirty years later they would record together.

Foto: Barbara Weinberg Barefield, CC BY-SA 3.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

Johnny Otis found her in 1955. He was a bandleader, a talent scout and a producer, and he is the one who gave her the name Sugar Pie. She toured with his revue, and in 1959 and 1960 she toured with James Brown's as well.

"I Want to Know" came out in 1960 on Veltone, a small label, catalogue number 103, with "Baby It Ain't Right" on the other side. The label does not carry her name alone: it says she is backed by the Pee Wee Kingsley Band, and Pee Wee Kingsley was her husband. The record reached number four.

Two years later she moved to Chicago and signed to Chess — the label at 2120 South Michigan Avenue, the home of electric blues — as a singer and as a writer.

She died in Oakland in December 2024, aged eighty-nine. She was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame that same year. Sixty-four years after the record.

Musical characteristics

Press play and count until the song starts over. It comes back quickly: the music goes round once and returns to where it began. That lap lasts twelve bars, and only three chords appear inside it — G, C and D.

The lap has a name: the twelve-bar blues. It works like a lap of a running track. You always know where you are, because you always pass the same places in the same order. You leave home (G), go out to the second chord (C), come home, and near the end the third one (D) turns up and pushes you back to the start.

G, C and D are not three chords picked at random. They are the first, the fourth and the fifth of the G scale. That is why they get written as roman numerals — I, IV and V — and why the same lap works in any key: change the three chords and the shape stays the same.

So far there is nothing here that Hound Dog does not have. The frame is identical. What changed is the speed and the purpose. Hound Dog takes its time; it is a blues for listening to somebody complain. This one runs at 130 beats per minute and waits for nobody; it is a blues for dancing.

That shift — same skeleton, different energy, and a record industry that wanted to sell to young people — is what ended up being called rhythm and blues.

In class the two songs also land in the same key: this one is in G to begin with, and Hound Dog is transposed to G on its chart. Same three chords, same shapes. You can play them one after the other without moving your left hand.

The form is simple too: two verses, a bridge, two verses, another bridge and a final verse. The bridge is the section that steps out of the routine for a moment, so that the verse lands harder when it comes back.

Hard facts: G major, 4/4, 130 BPM, 3:01. The chart counts seven sections. Do the arithmetic: twelve bars at 130 BPM last about twenty-two seconds, and seven times twenty-two falls short of three minutes and one second. There is time left unaccounted for. Where does it come from? Stopwatch in hand.

Trivia and curiosities

• Johnny Otis, the man who found her, also found Big Mama Thornton and Etta James. On the 1952 Hound Dog session he did more than produce: he sat down at the drums, and signed under a false name because he was under contract elsewhere. The names printed on a label are not always the ones who were in the room.

• She was 1.50 m tall and did standing back flips on stage. When she toured Europe with the American Folk Blues Festival in 1964, that is what audiences remembered. In the R&B of those years you did not defend a hit with a music video: you defended it every night, live, with your body.

• At Chess she was not only a singer. She was a writer too, and she signed her songs under a different name, Peylia Parham. That is the name on "Do I Make Myself Clear", which she recorded as a duet with her childhood friend Etta James.

• She entered the Blues Hall of Fame in 2024, the year she died. Recognition arriving sixty-four years late says nothing about how good the record is. It says who was deciding, and when, what got told.

Foto: Sumori, CC BY-SA 4.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

Classroom activities

• Play: the twelve-bar lap in G. Ukuleles on G, C and D; bass on the roots of those three chords; electric guitar keeping the pulse; drums holding 130 without speeding up. The exact bar-by-bar layout is on the JamZone chart.

• Measure: time one complete lap. You should get around twenty-two seconds. Then count how many laps there are in the whole record and see whether the total reaches 3:01 or leaves time over. If it does, where is that time?

• Compare: play Hound Dog and this one back to back — in class they use the same three chords — and time one twelve-bar lap in each. The form is the same; the number is not. Write one sentence about what that number does to the song.

• Search: take the index of a music history book and look for five of the names in this article. Write down which ones are there and which are not. That is not your opinion: it is a figure you can count.

Key vocabulary

• Twelve-bar blues — blues de doce compases
• Degrees I, IV and V — grados I, IV y V (los acordes numerados por su lugar en la escala)
• Rhythm and blues — rhythm and blues (el blues acelerado y hecho para bailar)
• Bridge — puente
• Tempo — tempo: la velocidad del pulso, en pulsaciones por minuto

Resources

In Year 3 — this song is used in the units ¿Cómo sabes por dónde vas en una música que oyes por primera vez? and ¿Cómo se guarda algo que solo existe mientras suena?, from the theory and history book.

The 1960 record

Live, 1964 — "Rock Me Baby", from the Reelin' In The Years archive. Not this song, but the only way to watch her sing and move in those years.

Ukulele tutorial — MrTolandMusic. Fifty seconds: the whole lap in G, with G, C and D7.

Guitar tutorial — David Calabrés, in Spanish. He explains the twelve-bar structure and, above all, how to count it without getting lost.

Bass tutorial — TrueFire, with Brad Carlton. Long, but it teaches the twelve-bar blues bass line in G, which is the key of this song.

Drum tutorial — Love To Learn Drums. Three and a half minutes on how to hold the twelve bars without losing count.

Backing track — TrueFire, twelve-bar blues in G.