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Hughie Scott and the Meteors
I Will / Be Bop A Lula - 7"
Tamarac - 1964
Michael Panontin
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For years Hughie Scott was the king of the Ottawa Valley country music scene. In fact Scott, who grew up in the nearby hamlet of Riceville, rarely ventured outside the capital region. He started playing the fiddle at age five, and by his mid-teens the young singer was already a fixture on the local circuit, first as a member of Smokey Rand and the Drifters and then fronting his own band, the Meteors.
Scott's Elvis routine and his heady mix of country and early rock 'n' roll was immensely popular. His residency at The Chamberlain Hotel in Aylmer, Quebec lasted well over a decade, and might have gone on even longer had the place not burned down to the ground. From there, he signed a lucrative contract to play the 1300-seat Rose Room at The Chaudiere Club, a storied venue on Upper Aylmer Road that in its lifetime saw many performers grace its stage, from the silk-throated Mel Torme and early rockers Bill Haley and the Comets all the way to Iggy Pop and Motorhead.
Though Scott spent most of his lifetime close to home and thus made his living as a live performer, he did manage to make a number of records for a variety of labels including Melbourne, Rodeo, Tamarac, London, Snocan and his own Lise Records. Many of his records charted, starting with his 1967 single on Melbourne, 'You're the Least of My Worries', which was a top-10 hit on RPM's Canadian country chart. And his sophomore album, 1968's Town & Country's Happy Boy, sported a hand-written letter from Waylon Jennings on the back cover. Jennings, it appears, had caught Scott's show while he was in Aylmer and was so impressed that he tried - unsuccessfully, it turned out - to entice him to come back to the USA and join his national touring band.
Few, however, remember Scott's first record, a revved-up rendition of Gene Vincent's 'Be-Bop-A-Lula' that was issued on Stan Klees' fledgling Tamarac imprint in the summer of 1964. Scott takes all the subtlety of Vincent's original and tosses it right out the window. His spoken intro ("Now there's this cute little chick who lives down the street...") and that frenetic drum beat signal right from the get-go that this is going to be one hell of a wild rock 'n' roll ride.
Though there are a few videos of 'Be Bop A Lula' out there on YouTube, and the song was comped in 2012 on a Dutch CD called Rock & Roll Covers: Hot Steamy Lovers - Volume Three, it was originally issued as the b-side to 'I Will'. Klees actually took out at least two sizeable ads in RPM to promote 'I Will', one in the 1 Sept '64 issue and another a couple of months later on Nov. 2nd.
Scott rarely toured, and so his name is barely a footnote in country music circles. But he did manage to get on a few nationally televised programs, including Carl Smith's Country Music Hall, The Tommy Hunter Show and Family Brown Country. And of course closer to home he was inducted into the Ottawa Valley Country Music Hall Of Fame in 1987.
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