5
“They have a new expression along old Harlem way,” proclaims Fats Waller in the opening line of his hit “The Joint Is Jumpin’,” recorded with his sextet on October 7, 1937. “To say that things are jumpin’ leaves not a single doubt,” Waller continues, “that everything is in full swing when you hear someone shout.”
Exactly three months earlier, Count Basie and his big band had cut their first hit, “One O’Clock Jump,” which became Basie’s theme song and was also recorded by Benny Goodman, Harry James, and Duke Ellington. The piece is essentially a pastiche of riffs, the most distinctive of which is taken from the introduction to “Six or Seven Times,” a Fats Waller composition first recorded in 1929 by members of McKinney’s Cotton Pickers—including Don Redman, Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins, Rex Stewart, and Waller himself—under the name the Chocolate Dandies.
The term “jump,” used as a synonym for “swing,” was indeed a new expression. Under the headline “‘Jitter-Bugs’ Thrill at N.Y. Jam-Session,” an anonymous Down Beat reviewer uses the words “ride,” “sock,” “jive,” and “truckin’”—but not “jump”—to describe the music at a May 1936 show billed as the first swing concert.[1] In October 1938, Jimmy Mitchelle, a saxophonist in Erskine Hawkins’s big band, sang on Hawkins’s hit “Do You Wanna Jump, Children?” using “jump” interchangeably with “swing,” “stomp,” and “jive.” Before the year was out, that song (whose writers include the white bandleader Al Donahue, the black bandleader Willie Bryant, and the white composer Jimmy Van Heusen) had been covered by the bands of Cab Calloway, Charlie Barnet, Count Basie, and Gene Krupa. But although both white and black artists were involved with jump music at the outset, the word “jump” was mainly used in an African American context and eventually became associated with the blues.
Beginning in 1938, there was a profusion of jazz tunes—mostly straight-ahead swing numbers—with “jump” in the title, among them Hot Lips Page’s “Jumpin’,” Mildred Bailey’s “Jump Jump’s Here,” the Savoy Sultans’ “Jump Steady,” Slim and Slam’s “Jump Session,” Count Basie’s “Jumpin’ at the Woodside,” and Andy Kirk’s “Jump Jack Jump,” not to mention Ollie Shepard’s “This Place Is Leaping.” A headline in the October 15, 1938, issue of the New York Amsterdam News ran, “Jump Band Will Record,” heralding the studio debut of Louis Jordan’s combo, whose blend of swing, blues, and boogie-woogie—with an occasional Caribbean tinge—would redefine jump music and set the parameters for rhythm-and-blues.[2]
Swing only came into vogue after August 1935, when Benny Goodman’s hot arrangements caused a sensation at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, but the music itself had germinated a decade earlier. Jump music, loosely considered as the bluesier aspect of jazz, had an even longer gestation. The success of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” in late 1920 sparked a demand not just for black female blues singers but for instrumental blues played by jazz bands in an ostensibly black style. Until then, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band had recorded mostly material by its own, white members, including a few blues. But in 1921, beginning with an instrumental version of “Crazy Blues,” the group cut nothing but blues, the majority by black songwriters such as W. C. Handy, Clarence Williams, and Tom Delaney (although one, “Home Again Blues,” was cowritten by Irving Berlin). Other white jazz bands made bluesy records under black-sounding pseudonyms, assuming different aliases for different labels: the New York–based Joseph Samuels Jazz Band recorded as the Tampa Blue Jazz Band and the Six Black Diamonds, while the Original Memphis Five, also from New York, recorded as Ladd’s Black Aces, Jazz-Bo’s Carolina Serenaders, and the Cotton Pickers.[3]
Naturally, the post–“Crazy Blues” blues craze—lasting roughly until 1924, when the Charleston craze set in—also drew black musicians into the studios. Fletcher Henderson, the most prolific black recording artist of the period, cut his first sessions as an accompanist to blues singers such as Alberta Hunter and Ethel Waters, beginning in 1921, and his instrumental records as a bandleader in 1923 and 1924 include many blues tunes, even though Henderson had a middle-class background and recorded for various labels’ “general” series rather than the race series to which other black musicians were confined.[4]
The blues was a component of jazz from the beginning, and some of the earliest African American jazz recordings were of blues—or at least bluesy—tunes, going back as far as Ford Dabney’s “The Jass—‘Lazy Blues’” in 1917. The first jazz record by a black group from New Orleans, made by Kid Ory’s Original Creole Jazz Band in June or July of 1922, featured “Society Blues” as the B-side of “Ory’s Creole Trombone.” Fats Waller’s first record, from October 1922, coupled “Muscle Shoals Blues,” written by George W. Thomas, with “Birmingham Blues,” cowritten by Artie Matthews. The pioneering New Orleans jazz musicians Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Freddie Keppard, King Oliver, and Louis Armstrong, as well as Bennie Moten’s seminal Kansas City Orchestra, all made their first recordings in 1923, and each of their earliest sessions contained blues material.
Moten’s group, along with other southwestern “territory” bands—Troy Floyd’s Shadowland Orchestra from San Antonio, Walter Page’s Blue Devils from Oklahoma City, Jesse Stone’s Blues Serenaders from Kansas City, Alphonso Trent’s Orchestra and Terrence Holder’s Dark Clouds of Joy from Dallas—forged a bluesy, rhythmic, riff-driven style that ultimately became the dominant school of swing, as exemplified by Count Basie’s “One O’Clock Jump.” These ensembles also incubated many musicians who helped blaze the trail for rhythm-and-blues, including saxophonists Herschel Evans and Buddy Tate, trumpeter Hot Lips Page, pianist Lloyd Glenn, guitarist Eddie Durham, singer Jimmy Rushing, and bandleaders Count Basie and Andy Kirk. Kirk took over Holder’s group in 1929, shortening its name to the Clouds of Joy and moving it to Kansas City. Jesse Stone went on to write R&B hits, notably Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” as a composer-arranger for Atlantic Records in the 1950s.
A pair of 1920s recordings is sufficient to secure the Moten band’s place in rock ’n’ roll prehistory. On “Tulsa Blues,” cut for OKeh in November 1924, ragged horns wail tragicomically over Moten’s crude boogie piano vamp and drummer Willie Hall’s backbeat, played on what sounds like a wood block. On “The New Tulsa Blues,” cut for Victor in June 1927, the horns sound cleaner, drummer Willie McWashington’s backbeat is more emphatic, and the melody of the final two choruses—not heard on the original “Tulsa Blues”—bears a remarkable resemblance to the tune of Fats Domino’s rocking 1956 hit “I’m in Love Again.”
Three more early examples of blues with a backbeat can be found on a Paramount session recorded in Chicago around June 1928 by the Dixie Four, consisting of pianists Buddy Burton and Jimmy Blythe, bassist Bill Johnson, and drummer Clifford “Snags” Jones. Jones, originally from New Orleans, puts a backbeat behind all four selections the group recorded; of the three blues tunes, the most extraordinary is “Kentucky Stomp” (titled after Burton’s native state), where the backbeat combines with Johnson’s boogie-woogie bass line to create a rock-like rhythm that’s years ahead of its time. It would seem that the combination of a backbeat and a boogie bass line automatically produces the feel of early rock ’n’ roll.
But backbeats are not widely found in either traditional or swing-era jazz, the usual swing rhythm consisting of four unaccented beats to the bar. A backbeat, strummed by banjo player Charlie Dixon, can be heard behind Louis Armstrong’s solo on the Fletcher Henderson band’s October 1924 recording of “Go ’Long Mule,” from Armstrong’s first session with Henderson. According to Henderson’s biographer Jeffrey Magee, “We can hear that kind of accompaniment behind a few solos in the band’s pre-Armstrong period, but once Armstrong came on board, it was reserved almost exclusively for him.”[5] In his autobiography, cornetist Rex Stewart, who played in Henderson’s and Duke Ellington’s bands, writes that in New York around 1923, the clarinetist and saxophonist Happy Caldwell “started teaching me the Western ‘get-off’ style of playing, which had a heavy accented back beat on the second and fourth bars.” Stewart claims that Caldwell, trombonist Jimmy Harrison, and trumpeter June Clark—all of whom had spent time in the Midwest—“were the only musicians in town playing ‘Western’ style” at that time.[6]
The white swing trumpeter Harry James strikingly foreshadowed rhythm-and-blues and rock ’n’ roll with his “Back Beat Boogie” in 1939. The backbeat found its way into R&B as early as May 1944, when Lucky Millinder’s band recorded “Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well” with singer Wynonie Harris, adding handclapped accents on the second and fourth beat of each measure on the choruses. Because the song parodies a church service, it might seem that the backbeat is borrowed from gospel music. But Millinder uses similar handclapped backbeats on such nonspiritual songs as “There’s Good Blues Tonight” and “Shorty’s Got to Go,” both from February 1946. Harris’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” recorded at the end of 1947, also features a handclapped backbeat, although Roy Brown’s original July 1947 version does not.
But though backbeats are a fixture of gospel music today, they are not generally heard on early gospel recordings. The handclapped rhythms on recordings from the Georgia Sea Islands, thought to represent older African American traditions, are more complex and varied than the simple backbeats of modern gospel music. And gospel music since the 1920s has been strongly influenced by jazz, blues, and R&B. The exact derivation of the backbeat—the basic rhythm of rock ’n’ roll (and of rhythm-and-blues, from its post–World War II inception through the hip-hop era)—remains unclear.
The derivation of the basic rock ’n’ roll dance—the jitterbug—is better known, due in part to the contemporary revival of swing dancing. The jitterbug remained the most popular dance among young people for some three decades, a remarkable span. The term “jitter bug” was introduced in Cab Calloway’s January 1934 recording by that title, referring to an alcoholic. In the 1939 edition of Cab Calloway’s Cat-ologue: A Hepster’s Dictionary, a “jitter bug” is defined as “a swing fan; formerly a person addicted to ‘jitter sauce’ (liquor).”[7] Over time, the word “jitterbug” was attached to the most popular swing-era dance, previously called the Lindy hop.
The Lindy hop had been named after Charles Lindbergh, who began his famous transatlantic flight on May 20, 1927. George “Shorty” Snowden claimed he came up with the tag while competing in a dance marathon in New York around the end of June 1928. When a newsreel reporter asked what he was doing with his feet, Snowden replied, “the Lindy.”[8] But a “Lindbergh Hop” had already been recorded on May 25, 1927, by a group of musicians associated with banjo player Elmer Snowden and led for the occasion by trombonist Te Roy Williams. It’s a semi-arranged jazz romp in the typical 2/4 rhythm of the period, better suited to the Charleston than to the Lindy hop as seen in later film clips. By comparison, Calloway’s “Jitter Bug” is an up-tempo swing number in 4/4 time—exactly the kind of tune normally associated with the Lindy or jitterbug dance.
The Lindy hop had earlier antecedents, most importantly the Texas Tommy, an African American dance that had been introduced to white society in San Francisco around 1910 and brought to New York in the groundbreaking 1913 review The Darktown Follies. Described as similar to the Lindy hop, the Texas Tommy contained a step called the breakaway, where the dance partners pulled apart from each other and danced independently, in African style, instead of remaining together in the “closed” position of European ballroom tradition.[9] As a defining element of the Lindy/jitterbug, the breakaway became the principal basis for American popular dancing from the 1930s until the 1960s, when the twist and its successors separated the dancers completely. According to one observer, the Lindy hop “seemed to gobble up and incorporate every novelty that followed it.”[10]
In September 1928, the Memphis Jug Band recorded its own “Lindberg [sic] Hop,” with a Charleston-esque melody and such verses as, “Now, Mama, how can it be? / You went way across the sea, / [To] keep from doin’ that Lindyberg with me.” Led by guitarist Will Shade, the group was the most popular and prolific of the jug bands that that enjoyed a brief heyday in the late 1920s, and it established Memphis as the jug-band capital, although Shade was inspired by the jug bands of Louisville, Kentucky, where the genre likely originated.[11]
The jug-band style was revived during the folk-music boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s; the Rooftop Singers had a No. 1 pop hit in 1963 when they resurrected “Walk Right In,” originally recorded by Cannon’s Jug Stompers in 1929. Some of the revivalists went on to play in rock bands such as the Grateful Dead, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Country Joe and the Fish, and the 13th Floor Elevators, popularizing such jug classics as “On the Road Again” and “Stealin’.” But though some later rockers mirrored their mischievous spirit and ragged disposition, the jug bands made little direct contribution to early rock ’n’ roll except through their predilection for hokum.
Southern skiffle bands using washboards, kazoos, and harmonicas, together with conventional instruments, are said to date back at least to the 1890s. In 1898, by one account, an itinerant black banjo player from Louisville named B. D. Tite encountered an elderly man in southwestern Virginia who played tuba-like bass lines by blowing over the mouth of a jug; adopting the instrument for himself, Tite became the first professional jug player.[12] It’s better established that several jug bands were active in Louisville around the time of World War I, but none was recorded until a white skiffle trio from St. Louis, the Mound City Blue Blowers, had a big hit with “Arkansaw Blues.”
Recorded in February 1924, “Arkansaw Blues” is a winningly clever interpretation of Spencer Williams’s composition “Arkansas Blues,” a hit for Lucille Hegamin in 1921. Historians David Jasen and Gene Jones describe the tune, with its walking bass line, as “a blues that wants to boogie,” but the Blue Blowers, with Jack Bland on banjo, Dick Slevin on kazoo, and Red McKenzie humming through a paper-covered comb, reduce the rhythm to a steady strum.[13] Imitators soon tried to capitalize on the Blue Blowers’ success, among them a white trio calling themselves Fred Ozark’s Jug Blowers, who recorded a pair of sides in May 1924. That group comprised singer Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards, banjo and kazoo player Vernon Dalhart, and kazoo player Dick Smalle, but had no jug player. (Later that year, Dalhart, a classically trained tenor who had recorded all sorts of material under dozens of pseudonyms, had a huge hit with “Wreck of the Old 97,” backed with “The Prisoner’s Song,” establishing a mass market for country music.)
The first actual jug band to record consisted of musicians from two Louisville groups, the Louisville Jug Band and the Clifford Hayes Orchestra, who cut ten sides as Sara Martin’s Jug Band in September 1924—eight in accompaniment to the classic blues singer Sara Martin, a Louisville native, and two on their own. Days later, Whistler’s Jug Band, another Louisville group, recorded four titles, including “Jail House Blues,” a song better known as “He’s in the Jailhouse Now.” Jug player Earl McDonald and violinist Clifford Hayes, the two bandleaders who’d backed Sara Martin, continued to collaborate on records through 1927 as the Old Southern Jug Band, Clifford’s Louisville Jug Band, and the Dixieland Jug Blowers. On their December 11, 1926, session for the Victor label, the Dixieland Jug Blowers were joined by the great New Orleans clarinetist Johnny Dodds, a veteran of Kid Ory’s, King Oliver’s, and Louis Armstrong’s jazz bands and of several washboard bands led by Jimmy Blythe.
Jug bands are usually classified with blues groups, but though a few prominent blues artists, such as Sleepy John Estes and Memphis Minnie, performed in jug bands, jug-band music owes as much to ragtime and jazz as to blues. Beginning with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s snorts and whinnies on “Livery Stable Blues,” early jazz musicians recorded antic instrumental sounds similar to the ones that jug-band players produced on their kazoos and stovepipes. Essentially string ensembles at first, jug bands later added the occasional cornet or saxophone; drawing on Tin Pan Alley and medicine-show songs as well as blues, jazz, and old-time country music, they blurred the distinctions between genres. The Five Harmaniacs, one of the first white bands to record with a jug, wear cowboy costumes in publicity photographs, but one of their mid-1920s releases, “Carolina Bound,” was listed in the Brunswick and Vocalion labels’ otherwise all-black race catalogs.[14]
The rowdy, comical jug-band sound lent itself naturally to hokum material. Jug bands recorded variations on Georgia Tom and Tampa Red’s “It’s Tight Like That,” and Georgia Tom and Tampa Red—the original Hokum Boys—worked with jug bands. In June 1928, four months before cutting “It’s Tight Like That,” Georgia Tom Dorsey joined the Tub Jug Washboard Band on several of their own records and in accompaniment to Ma Rainey. At the end of October, just days after “It’s Tight Like That” was recorded, the Vocalion producer J. Mayo Williams had Dorsey and Tampa Red cut a couple of sides with members of the Tub Jug band, plus vocalist Frankie “Half-Pint” Jaxon, under the name Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band.
The same group recorded three more numbers in early November, including a jug-band version of “It’s Tight Like That.” The flip side was a comic take on Leroy Carr’s smash hit “How Long, How Long Blues,” with Jaxon doing his female-impersonation routine. “How Long, How Long Blues”—Carr’s first record, made for Vocalion in June 1928—is based on “How Long Daddy,” which Ida Cox had recorded with Papa Charlie Jackson in 1925. But Carr’s relaxed, introspective singing, accompanied by his own spare piano playing and by Scrapper Blackwell’s piquant single-string guitar runs, give the bluesy eight-bar song a singular feel—earthy yet sophisticated. “How Long, How Long Blues” was covered by Count Basie, Big Joe Turner, Big Bill Broonzy, Ella Fitzgerald, and Ray Charles, among many others. Although his music deeply influenced country bluesmen such as Robert Johnson, Carr, who was born in Nashville and spent most of his short life in Indianapolis, is considered to be the forefather of the urban blues style.
The third song recorded by Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band in November 1928 was “You Can’t Come In,” which singer-pianist Bert Mays had cut for Vocalion a month earlier and which evolved into Little Richard’s 1957 rock ’n’ roll classic “Keep A Knockin’.” Singer and kazoo player James “Boodle It” Wiggins had recorded essentially the same song with pianist Bob Call for Paramount in February under the title “Keep a Knockin’ an You Can’t Get In,” but with a somewhat different melody. Clarence Williams recorded a similar but slower song, “I’m Busy and You Can’t Come In,” twice in September 1928, first with Eva Taylor singing and then as an instrumental. Sylvester Weaver had recorded a solo guitar piece titled “I’m Busy and You Can’t Come In” in 1924, but it bears little resemblance to the tune Williams played.
Bert Mays’s record seems to have been the first to marry the melody of “Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” to the lyrics of “You Can’t Come In” (the same melody is also used for “Midnight Special”). “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” was initially recorded as such in June 1927 by a white Minneapolis band led by saxophonist Tom Gates, but a black New Orleans band led by cornetist Louis Dumaine had recorded a jazzier version of the same tune in March of that year under the title “To-Wa-Bac-A-Wa.”[15] A similar melody is heard on “She’s Crying for Me,” recorded twice in early 1925 by the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. J. Paul Wyer and H. Alf Kelley first published the “Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” melody as part of their 1914 composition “The Long Lost Blues.” But “Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” has been attributed to Buddy Bolden, which if true would date it to before 1906.[16]
Accompanying himself on slide guitar, Kokomo Arnold recorded his adaptation of Wiggins’s “Keep a Knockin’ an You Can’t Get In” in April 1935, calling it “Busy Bootin’.” Lil Johnson recorded “Keep On Knocking” to the approximate tune of “Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” in July 1935, with Black Bob Hudson on piano and Big Bill Broonzy on guitar. Hudson’s introduction is based on the one Bob Call used with Wiggins, but on the second verse, Johnson sings “Kinda busy and you can’t come in,” indicating a familiarity with Eva Taylor’s song, which Alura Mack had covered in 1929.[17] In 1937, Lil Johnson recorded “Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” itself. But she was best known for double-entendre numbers such as “Get ’Em from the Peanut Man (Hot Nuts),” which decades later became the theme song of Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts, a long-lived rhythm-and-blues group that performs risqué shows at college fraternity parties.
Johnson was one of a number of 1930s blues singers, among them Lucille Bogan and Bo Carter, who specialized in ribald material. Both Bogan and Johnson came out of the “classic” blues tradition, both began recording in the 1920s (Bogan in 1923, Johnson in 1929), and both were accompanied on record by boogie-woogie pianists—Bogan by Eddie Heywood, Will Ezell, Cow Cow Davenport, and Charles Avery; Johnson by Avery and Montana Taylor. Bogan’s approach became cruder as her career progressed: in March 1935 she updated “Shave ’Em Dry Blues,” a verse-and-refrain hokum song recorded by Ma Rainey in 1924 with guitar accompaniment by the Pruitt twins; at the same 1935 session, Bogan cut an obscene version of “Shave ’Em Dry”—not released until many years later—that begins, “I got nipples on my titties big as the end of my thumb / I got somethin’ between my legs’ll make a dead man come.” Lil Johnson recorded her own “New Shave ’Em Dry” the following year.
By contrast, Bo Carter, born Armenter Chatmon, was a rural guitarist who grew up with Charlie Patton near Bolton, Mississippi, just south of the Delta. Carter was a member of the musical Chatmon family, who performed mostly for white audiences, and he played occasionally with the Mississippi Sheiks, a recording duo consisting of violinist Lonnie Chatmon (Carter’s brother) and guitarist Walter Vinson (or Vincson) that was popular among blacks and whites alike. Carter’s first recording session, in 1928, produced “Corrine Corrina,” a blues-country-pop song that’s been covered by everyone from Tampa Red to Cab Calloway, Bob Wills, Art Tatum, Big Joe Turner, Dean Martin, Bill Haley, and Bob Dylan. But his output in the 1930s ran heavily to phallic blues such as “My Pencil Won’t Write No More,” “Banana in Your Fruit Basket,” “Pin in Your Cushion,” “Ram Rod Daddy,” and “Please Warm My Weiner [sic].” Although their music had more of a white country flavor, the Mississippi Sheiks also recorded bawdy songs; “Bed Spring Poker,” for example, sounds like hokum blues in slow motion.
Blues and hokum intertwined at least through the mid-1930s, when the hokum bands faded out. After Georgia Tom committed himself exclusively to religious music in 1932, Tampa Red continued to perform blues and hokum songs as a highly successful solo artist. Big Bill Broonzy recorded occasionally as a member of the Hokum Boys and the Famous Hokum Boys from 1930 until 1936. Even Leroy Carr dabbled in hokum, cutting such songs as “Papa’s on the House Top” and “Don’t Start That Stuff,” although their lyrics are unusually clean. Less circumspect about alcohol, Carr turned Lucille Bogan’s “Sloppy Drunk Blues” into a blues standard, anticipating the booze-drenched R&B of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Hokum was also absorbed into the jazz tradition. “It’s Tight Like That” was covered by such jazz players as Jimmie Noone, McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, and a group featuring Jack Teagarden and Benny Goodman that recorded under the pseudonym Jimmy Bracken’s Toe Ticklers. In December 1928, Louis Armstrong cut a sort of answer song, “Tight Like This,” with an extended trumpet improvisation that transformed the nature of the jazz solo. In March 1929, Duke Ellington cut his own answer song, “Who Said ‘It’s Tight Like That’?”
Hokum jazz found its way into country music. Luis Russell, a Panamanian-born bandleader who helped make the transition from traditional New Orleans–style jazz to swing, recorded “It’s Tight Like That” on January 1929. On the flip side was “The Call of the Freaks,” an instrumental showcasing bluesy solos over weird-sounding harmonies. In September, Russell cut “The New Call of the Freaks,” adding a shimmering vibraphone (played by drummer Paul Barbarin) and a ragged trio singing, “Stick out your can, here comes the garbage man.” In April 1934, at his band’s first recording session, the pioneering western-swing singer Milton Brown cut “Garbage Man Blues,” discarding the eerie arrangement of “The New Call of the Freaks” while expanding on the vocal chorus (but spoiling the pun by changing “Stick out your can” to “Get out your can”). In March 1936, at his last session before his fatal auto accident, Brown recorded “Keep A Knockin’,” based on the Lil Johnson version and featuring Bob Dunn’s electrified steel guitar (Dunn had become the first musician to record with an electric instrument the previous year). In May 1938, Bob Wills, Milton Brown’s former band mate in the Light Crust Doughboys, recorded “Keep Knocking (but You Can’t Come In).”
With the rise of hokum came the popularity of jive talk, which proved to be a broader-reaching and longer-lasting trend. A blend of jazz musicians’ lingo and underworld argot, jive, unlike the mocking African American dialect of blackface minstrelsy, was perceived as raffishly urbane and sophisticated—in a word, “hep.”
Three prime movers of jive crossed paths in the review Connie’s Hot Chocolates, which opened at Connie’s Inn in Harlem in the spring of 1929 and by summer was running concurrently at the Hudson Theatre on Broadway. Featuring the hit “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” the show made Fats Waller’s reputation as a songwriter, established Louis Armstrong as a pop singer, and helped launch the career of Cab Calloway. Waller would not become known for his racy lyrics and spoken interjections until the mid-1930s. Armstrong is considered to be the first musician to popularize jive talking, as well as the related art of scat singing. But it was Calloway who made jive his specialty and established it—through records, films, and even animated cartoons—as a staple of mainstream American entertainment.
Like jive talking, scat singing—or at least the singing of nonsense syllables, à la the Edsels’ 1961 hit “Rama Lama Ding Dong”—made its way into rock ’n’ roll. Jelly Roll Morton claimed that “the first man that ever did a scat number in history of this country was a man from Vicksburg, Mississippi, by the name of Joe Sims, an old comedian. And from that, Tony Jackson and myself and several more grabbed it in New Orleans.”[18] A white vaudevillian, ’Gene Greene, sang nonsense syllables on his 1911 hit “King of the Bungaloos,” as did Al Jolson later the same year on his first recording, “That Haunting Melody.” In 1922, Cliff Edwards sang wordlessly on his first issued recording, “Virginia Blues,” with Ladd’s Black Aces, and on “Nobody Lied” and “Homesick,” with Bailey’s Lucky Seven (both band names were pseudonyms for the Original Memphis Five). Don Redman did a scat-like vocal as a member of Fletcher Henderson’s band on “My Papa Doesn’t Two-Time No Time,” from April 1924, and Louis Armstrong made his recorded vocal debut with a snatch of jivey speech at the end of Henderson’s “Everybody Loves My Baby,” from November of the same year.
But what was to become the dominant style of scat singing, represented most prominently by Ella Fitzgerald, can be traced to the February 1926 recording of “Heebie Jeebies” by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five—Armstrong’s recorded debut as a full-fledged singer. Armstrong later said that he “started to Scatting [sic]” after accidentally dropping the lyric sheet during the session, but the record itself, with its smoothly executed vocal, belies that account.[19] Accident or not, “Heebie Jeebies” was successful enough that, less than four months later, Armstrong cut “Skid-Dat-De-Dat,” whose title virtually defined the new idiom. Armstrong may also have become the first artist to record a song with the word “jive” in the title when he cut the instrumental “Don’t Jive Me” (written by his wife Lil Hardin) in June 1928, although it was not released until 1940. The following month, Cow Cow Davenport recorded “State Street Jive,” a rehash of his “Cow Cow Blues” piano motifs with a running commentary—“Boot that thing, boy! You hear me talkin’ to ya”—by Ivy Smith.
Cab Calloway first met Louis Armstrong in 1928 at Chicago’s Sunset Café, where Armstrong was the star soloist with Carroll Dickerson’s band and Calloway was the house singer. “I suppose that Louis was one of the main influences in my career,” Calloway later reminisced. “Louis first got me freed up from straight lyrics to try scatting.”[20] The following year, Armstrong moved to New York, leading what had been Dickerson’s band at Connie’s Inn while performing in Hot Chocolates on Broadway. Calloway took over the Alabamians, the group that replaced Dickerson’s at the Sunset Café, and brought them to New York at the end of 1929. But after losing a battle of the bands to the Missourians, the house band at the famed Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, the Alabamians left town without Calloway, who joined the cast of Hot Chocolates.
Calloway’s showmanship had made an impression at the Savoy: “I would run across the stage, directing the band, singing along with it into my megaphone, leading the guys in call and response, and the audience loved it,” he recounted.[21] In March 1930, after Hot Chocolates closed, he took over the Missourians, a group originally from St. Louis that had been influenced by Bennie Moten’s band. “In their rough, unsubtle way,” writes Gunther Schuller, “the Missourians produced a brand of exciting, elemental jazz that few, if any, bands could match at that time.”[22]
Although he had signed a management contract with Moe Gale, a co-owner of the Savoy, Calloway was scheduled to debut with the Missourians at Harlem’s brand-new Plantation Club. The day before that club was to open, however, it was destroyed, presumably by the white mobsters who ran the rival Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington led the house band. When Ellington and his musicians went to Hollywood to appear in the 1930 Amos ’n’ Andy movie Check and Double Check (starring the white radio stars Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll in blackface makeup), the same mobsters demanded that Calloway and the Missourians fill in for them, much to Calloway’s delight.
With Ellington pursuing an increasingly hectic tour schedule, Cab Calloway and His Orchestra, as the Missourians were renamed, became the house band at the Cotton Club in early 1931. (Ironically, the Missourians had been the house band at the Cotton Club before Ellington took over in 1927.) The club was the most luxurious and prestigious in Harlem, with elaborate floor shows that featured singers, dancers, and comedians as well as musicians. Celebrities and journalists were often in attendance, and regular live network radio broadcasts brought the performers to national attention. But though all the entertainers were black, few blacks were allowed in the audience, and the shows were geared strictly toward whites. With his light complexion, straight hair, and polished enunciation, Calloway, born into a solidly middle-class African American family in Rochester, New York, and raised in Baltimore, was eminently qualified to bridge the racial divide.
Calloway dropped Moe Gale and signed with Ellington’s manager, Irving Mills, a white singer and song plugger turned publisher, songwriter, bandleader, and all-around musical entrepreneur. The Calloway orchestra made its first record in July 1930 as the Jungle Band, the same pseudonym Mills had been using for some of Ellington’s recordings. Even on this early date, the group sounds more refined than it had as the Missourians, reflecting Calloway’s stern approach to discipline. And on the hopped-up rendition of “St. Louis Blues,” Calloway already displays his over-the-top singing style, including a chorus of scat-like double talk.
After cutting some dozen other tunes, Calloway collaborated with Mills and lyricist Clarence Gaskill to write “Minnie the Moocher,” which he recorded in March 1931. As Calloway later acknowledged, the song follows the minor-blues chord progression of “St. James Infirmary,” which Louis Armstrong had recorded in December 1928 and Calloway had recorded in December 1930 (using a speedier version of the arrangement on the Missourians’ February 1930 recording of “Prohibition Blues”). The title is adapted from “Minnie the Mermaid,” a pop novelty that the white bandleader Bernie Cummins had recorded in 1930; the lyrics, as well as part of the melody, are based on “Willie the Weeper,” which was written by Grant V. Rymal, Walter Melrose, and Marty Bloom in 1927 and recorded that year by King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Frankie “Half-Pint” Jaxon, and Doc Cook (or Cooke).
The verses sung by Jaxon and by Cook’s drummer Andrew Hilaire are taken from the Rymal-Melrose-Bloom composition (Oliver’s and Armstrong’s versions are instrumentals); but an earlier 1927 recording titled “Willie the Chimney Sweeper,” by the white Atlanta journalist and radio broadcaster Ernest Rogers, is similar to folk texts of “Willie the Weeper” published in 1926 and 1927 by Sigmund Spaeth and in 1927 by Carl Sandburg.[23] The pop song is clearly of folk origin, but the folk song, describing the extravagant pipe dreams of an opium-addicted chimney sweep, has a vaudeville or medicine-show feel. The folk texts explicitly refer to Willie’s “hop habit” or “dope habit,” which Rymal, Melrose, and Bloom discreetly call a “dreamin’ habit,” although they do mention in one verse that Willie “smoked a little hop.”
Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher” displays an awareness not only of the pop version of “Willie the Weeper” but of the folk song as well, particularly with the line, “She had a million dollars worth of nickels and dimes / And she sat around and counted them all a million times,” which appears in the folk texts but not in the pop song. Another line, “He took her down to Chinatown / He showed her how to kick the gong around,” uses underworld slang to veil its reference to opium smoking. But Calloway’s best-remembered line is the nonsensical refrain “Ho de ho de ho / Hi de hi de hi,” which he professed to have made up on the spot when he forgot the lyrics during a live radio broadcast. Like Louis Armstrong’s “Heebie Jeebies” story, it’s a dubious claim, especially since folk versions of “Willie the Weeper” also have a wordless refrain.
“Minnie the Moocher” was a huge pop hit; for the rest of Calloway’s long career it was his theme song, and “hi-de-ho” was his signature phrase. In early 1932, Calloway made his film debut in the Betty Boop cartoon “Minnie the Moocher,” which opens with footage of Calloway doing a sort of moonwalk dance in front of his band. Then it cuts to an amazing piece of animation that features a ghostly walrus “singing” a new recording of “Minnie the Moocher” where Calloway briefly scats in Armstrong’s style. The walrus copies Calloway’s dance moves perfectly, thanks to the rotoscope technique invented by Max Fleischer, the producer of the Betty Boop series, in which the drawings are traced frame by frame from filmed images.
Later that year, Calloway sang “Minnie the Moocher” with his band in The Big Broadcast, the first in a series of thinly plotted feature-length movies intended to give radio stars a visual showcase. The film established Bing Crosby as a screen idol and gave valuable exposure to Kate Smith, the Boswell Sisters, and the Mills Brothers, as well as Calloway. In 1933, Calloway made two more Betty Boop cartoons, “Snow-White,” where he sings “St. James Infirmary” in the guise of Koko the Clown, and “The Old Man of the Mountain,” where his Old Man character duets with Betty Boop on “You Gotta Ho-De-Ho (to Get Along with Me).” The same year, a tail-coated Calloway appeared in the zany W. C. Fields comedy International House, singing, dancing, and conducting his band in a high-speed version of “Reefer Man.”
Calloway was one of the few black artists, along with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, and the Mills Brothers, to record steadily through the early years of the Great Depression, when record sales were at their nadir. He continued to appear in feature films and short subjects throughout the 1930s and afterward. He recruited top-flight musicians, and by the end of the decade his band was one of the finest in jazz. He scat-sang and made slangy references to drugs, but he did not make a habit of using jive talk in his lyrics until 1938, when he recorded “The Boogie-Woogie,” with its jiving introduction, and “Jive (Page One of the Hepster’s Dictionary),” a sort of advertisement for the pamphlet he originally published that year. And though he was always a sharp dresser, he did not wear his trademark zoot suits until the early 1940s, when they first came into fashion.
Among the most influential singers of the early 1930s, besides Calloway and Bing Crosby, were the Mills Brothers and the Boswell Sisters. Barbershop harmonies had fallen from fashion after World War I, but the jazzed-up stylings of the Mills and Boswell siblings brought harmony singing back into the mainstream and a set the stage for the pop and R&B vocal groups of future decades. The Mills Brothers recorded with Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington’s band; in December 1932, they cut “Doin’ the New Low Down” with Cab Calloway, accompanied by Don Redman’s band. The Boswell Sisters often recorded with the Dorsey Brothers’ band; in November 1932, they covered Calloway’s hit “Minnie the Moocher’s Wedding Day.” Connie Boswell, who pursued a solo career after the sisters disbanded, recorded with Bing Crosby and with Bob Crosby’s and Woody Herman’s bands. In October 1931, the Boswell Sisters, the Mills Brothers, and Bing Crosby teamed up to record a medley of songs, including “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” from that year’s edition of George White’s “Scandals,” the perennial Broadway revue.
A few male vocal groups had enjoyed success in the 1920s, notably the Revelers, a white quartet that began recording as the Shannon Four in 1917 and scored its biggest hit in 1926 with “Dinah,” an even bigger hit that year for Ethel Waters. (The Revelers also inspired the ill-fated German sextet the Comedian Harmonists.) From 1927 to 1930, the Rhythm Boys—Bing Crosby, Al Rinker, and Harry Barris—recorded with Paul Whiteman’s band and on their own, combining harmony, scat singing, and humor in a jazzy style that prefigured the Mills Brothers’. “Actually, some of our music came from listening to what they were doing,” Donald Mills told Crosby’s biographer Gary Giddins.[24] A number of white sister duos and trios—including the Brox Sisters, the Trix Sisters, the Ponce Sisters, the Duncan Sisters, and the Keller Sisters (who sang with their girlish-sounding brother Frank Lynch)—achieved fame in vaudeville during the same decade. Most black vocal groups of the era specialized in spirituals, but some, such as the Four Harmony Kings and the Taskiana Four, also performed pop songs and appeared in Broadway reviews. One group recorded sacred music as the Norfolk Jubilee Quartette and secular music as the Norfolk Jazz Quartette. The Southern Quartet, another black group that sang both pop and spiritual songs, harmonized a prototypical doo-wop version of Trixie Smith’s “My Man Rocks Me (with One Steady Roll)” in 1924, singing “my baby” instead of “my man.”
Unusually for an African American quartet at that time, the Mills Brothers were squarely rooted in the barbershop tradition. John Mills Sr. was a barber in Piqua, Ohio, who sang in a barbershop quartet. His four sons, all born between 1910 and 1915, sang together from an early age, with the oldest, John Jr., providing accompaniment on guitar and the second youngest, Harry, playing kazoo. At one show, Harry lost his kazoo and, cupping his hands over his mouth, produced a kazoo imitation that sounded remarkably like a trumpet. The other brothers learned to imitate instruments as well, with John Jr. taking the bass parts and Herbert and Donald mimicking saxophones, trumpets, or trombones.
The Mills Brothers were not the first singing group to replicate instrumental sounds. An 1887 vocal performance of “General Grant’s Funeral March” by gang of African American convicts in Norfolk, Virginia, was described as “absolutely startling in its likeness to a full brass band.”[25] A black quartet was reported to have performed an “Imitation of Caliope” [sic] and “Imitation of Band” at a church function in Indianapolis in 1894.[26] The Revelers included a crude mock-instrumental break, featuring what sounds like a kazoo imitation, on their July 1925 recording of “Every Sunday Afternoon.” The Taskiana Four did a growling trumpet imitation over a proto-doo-wop background on “Dixie Bo-Bo,” from July 1927. (Adelaide Hall also did a growling trumpet imitation on Duke Ellington’s “Creole Love Call,” from October 1927.)
But no other group could equal the Mills Brothers’ instrumental verisimilitude, mellifluous harmony, or glossy ease. In 1928, the brothers began singing on a radio station in Cincinnati; in September 1930, they went to New York and were hired by William Paley, the head of the CBS radio network. They made their first record, “Tiger Rag,” for Brunswick in October 1931; combining barbershop harmonies with snappy jazz rhythms, fleet scat singing, and a faux-trumpet solo, it was a No. 1 hit. In December, they joined with Bing Crosby to record another No. 1 hit, “Dinah,” with Crosby scatting stiffly over the brothers’ nimble harmonies. A couple of months later Crosby and the Mills Brothers gave a similar treatment to “Shine,” a 1910 coon song by Cecil Mack and Ford Dabney that Louis Armstrong had revived in March 1931.
The Mills Brothers turned out a steady stream of hits through the 1930s. They performed on Rudy Vallee’s and Bing Crosby’s popular radio programs and hosted their own CBS network show. They appeared in Hollywood musicals such as Twenty Million Sweethearts and Broadway Gondolier—both starring Dick Powell—and cartoons such as “I Ain’t Got Nobody” and “Dinah,” where Max Fleischer’s patented “bouncing ball” prompts the audience to sing along. In 1942, the Mills Brothers recorded their all-time best-seller, “Paper Doll,” a 1915 composition by Johnny S. Black; they continued to score occasional hits until the late 1960s, but their music became progressively less jazzy, and they gradually dispensed with their scat singing and instrumental effects.
The Mills Brothers’ nascent influence on the doo-wop sound can be detected on their February 1932 recording of Don Redman’s composition “I Heard” (which Redman himself talk-sings in the 1933 Betty Boop cartoon of the same title). Here, and on the group’s September 1934 version of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Rockin’ Chair,” John Mills Jr. uses a “talking bass” technique that the Ink Spots’ Hoppy Jones later adopted and that eventually became a doo-wop staple. The Mills Brothers spawned a number of early imitators, among them the Three Keys (including George “Bon Bon” Tunnell), the Three Spades, the Four Blackbirds, the Four Southern Singers, the Five Jinks, the Five Jones Boys, the Mississippi Mud Mashers, and the Delta Rhythm Boys—plus the more gospel-oriented Charioteers and Golden Gate Quartet—but the Ink Spots were by far the most important, inspiring every rhythm-and-blues vocal group that came after them. The Mills Brothers made the R&B charts through the 1940s and had a direct effect on doo-wop through such covers as the Cadillacs’ altered 1954 version of the brothers’ 1948 recording of “Gloria.”[27] In 1958, the Mills Brothers acknowledged their impact on rock ’n’ roll with a successful cover of the Silhouettes’ smash “Get a Job.”
Because of their career longevity and the devotion of rhythm-and-blues enthusiasts, the Mills Brothers are relatively well-remembered as forerunners of doo-wop. But since the Boswell Sisters broke up in the mid-1930s and were emulated as an ensemble only by such white artists as the Andrews Sisters and the King Sisters (no black female vocal group made the pop charts until the Teen Queens did in 1956, followed by the Bobbettes and the Chantels in 1957), they have largely been consigned to the nostalgia category, although some jazz critics have recognized their brilliance. The paucity of public appreciation is especially unfortunate as the Boswell Sisters were one of the most innovative American vocal groups ever. While they made no more than an oblique impression on rock ’n’ roll, they anticipated rock music by adopting jazz rhythms and African American vocal inflections with an authenticity that few other white artists could match. So genuine was their approach to jazz that Ella Fitzgerald modeled her style after Connie Boswell’s. “I tried so hard to sound just like her,” Fitzgerald said.[28]
Born between 1905 and 1911, Martha, Connie, and Helvetia “Vet” Boswell grew up in New Orleans, where they acquired a taste for jazz while studying classical music. Connie, who would become the lead singer, admired both Mamie Smith and Enrico Caruso; unable to walk due to a childhood injury or a bout with polio (the accounts differ), she performed while seated or concealed by a long gown. The sisters appeared on a New Orleans radio station, singing pop songs and playing classical pieces on piano, cello, and violin. In 1925, they recorded the vaudeville-style blues “I’m Gonna Cry (Cryin’ Blues),” which was issued by the Victor label under Connie’s name; in 1928 they performed in Chicago, then moved to Los Angeles, where they had a daily radio show. In 1930, they recorded a song with Jackie Taylor’s band for Victor and several more on their own for OKeh, but except for “Heebie Jeebies,” these are not particularly jazzy.
The Boswell Sisters made their breakthrough in 1931, moving to New York, signing with the CBS radio network, and recording the first of their dozens of records on the Brunswick label, all of which featured some variant of the Dorsey Brothers’ band until September 1933. Their debut session, in March, yielded the hit “When I Take My Sugar to Tea,” including such Boswell hallmarks as abrupt tempo changes, hot instrumental solos, and a transposition of the chorus into a minor key. The tempos shift even more frequently, and the sisters scat-sing in unison, on their next hit, “Roll On, Mississippi, Roll On,” recorded in April. The Boswells sing close-harmony nonsense syllables at breakneck speed on “Everybody Loves My Baby,” where Connie also scats and imitates a banjo, her horn-like contralto taking on a distinctly African American cast. On the accelerated version of “Heebie Jeebies” the group filmed for The Big Broadcast, the pulsing harmonies uncannily foreshadow those on Joe Bennett and the Sparkletones’ 1957 rockabilly hit “Black Slacks.”
Connie Boswell was mainly responsible for the group’s arrangements, which departed radically from pop-singing tradition. Typically opening with a more-or-less straightforward rendition of a Tin Pan Alley standard, the sisters would segue effortlessly into what the musician and author Richard M. Sudhalter describes as a “wholesale reconstruction of melody, harmony, and lyrics.” Some of the recorded arrangements would have been even more unconventional if Brunswick’s manager, Jack Kapp, hadn’t obliged the Boswells to tone them down.[29]
The Boswell Sisters made a series of hit records, along with frequent radio broadcasts and occasional movie appearances, until Martha and Vet retired in 1936, ostensibly to enjoy domestic life. Connie, who had been cutting her own records since 1931, pursued a solo career that lasted through the 1950s, changing the spelling of her name to “Connee.” She continued to record hits, including a couple of best sellers with Bing Crosby—“Bob White (Whatcha Gonna Swing Tonight),” in 1937, and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” in 1938. She performed in movies and stage shows and on radio and television programs, seemingly unhindered by her physical disability. But while she left her stylistic imprint on Ella Fitzgerald, Kay Starr, and other jazz and pop singers, she could never fully recapture the magic of the Boswell Sisters’ records.
Although he was not as popular as Cab Calloway, the Mills Brothers, or the Boswell Sisters, Leo “Scat” Watson was highly influential, bridging the gap between the scat-singing styles of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. A Kansas City native, Watson cut his first sides in 1932 with the Washboard Rhythm Kings, a hokum-jazz group whose shifting personnel performed material ranging from “Minnie the Moocher” to “Tiger Rag” to “Sloppy Drunk Blues” (the Kings’ June 1931 “Call of the Freaks” was the immediate model for Milton Brown’s “Garbage Man Blues”). In 1933, Watson recorded as a member of the Spirits of Rhythm, an African American string-band-cum-vocal-harmony-group that included three tiples—ukulele-like Latin American instruments—plus a guitar, a bass, and a suitcase used as a drum.
The Onyx Club, originally a speakeasy that catered to musicians, was the first jazz venue between Fifth and Sixth Avenues on New York’s Fifty-second Street, a block that became known as Swing Street. The Spirits of Rhythm were regulars at the Onyx after it reopened as a legitimate nightclub in early 1934, following the repeal of Prohibition. Later that year, the group recorded on its own and with Red McKenzie, the white singer and comb player from the Mound City Blue Blowers. Soon afterward, the Spirits of Rhythm disbanded, only to re-form in 1941, when they recorded behind the Scottish singer Ella Logan. Meanwhile, Watson appeared at the Onyx Club with a group that soon became John Kirby’s sextet; he recorded with Artie Shaw’s and Gene Krupa’s big bands, with a British band led by the jazz critic Leonard Feather, and with his own group.[30] He continued to perform and record through the mid-1940s, including a stint with Slim Gaillard, but his eccentric attitude, irascible temperament, and proclivity for alcohol and drugs undermined his career, and he drifted through a number of nonmusical jobs before dying of pneumonia in 1950.
Beginning as a growling Louis Armstrong imitator—on the Washboard Rhythm Kings’ “Underneath the Harlem Moon,” his fellow vocalist Wilbur Daniels calls him “Satchel” (short for Satchelmouth, Armstrong’s nickname)—Watson developed a unique style that seamlessly combined words, nonsense syllables, trombone imitations, and musical quotations into a what Leonard Feather is said to have called a “vocal stream of consciousness.”[31] Together with guitarist Teddy Bunn, Watson gave the Spirits of Rhythm an improvisatory feel, so that they sounded like a jazzier if less polished version of the Mills Brothers. But his greatest importance was as an inspiration to such late-1930s jive acts as Slim and Slam, the Cats and the Fiddle, and the King Cole Trio.
Stuff Smith’s singing was only lightly seasoned with scat syllables and jive lyrics, but his bluesy, buoyant brand of swing helped set the tone for the jump music that followed. A violinist and singer from Ohio, Smith had switched from classical music to jazz after hearing Louis Armstrong. He toured with Alphonso Trent’s band before forming his own combo with trumpeter Jonah Jones, adding drummer Cozy Cole after the group began an extended residency at the Onyx Club in February 1936. That month, he recorded his own novelty song “I’s A Muggin’,” which became a pop hit and was covered by Andy Kirk, Mezz Mezzrow, Django Reinhardt, and the Three T’s (a group of musicians from Paul Whiteman’s band that included Jack Teagarden on trombone, his brother Charlie Teagarden on trumpet, and Frankie Trumbauer on saxophone). Smith made a mark on the hepster scene the same year with the pot-smoking songs “You’se a Viper,” sung by Jonah Jones, and “Here Comes the Man with the Jive.”
But when the Ink Spots recorded “That Cat Is High” in 1938, they were referring to drunkenness. The group was formed in Ohio (though its members were from Indianapolis) in 1933 when Deek Watson and Hoppy Jones, formerly of the Four Riff Brothers, joined up with Charlie Fuqua and Jerry Daniels, who had been working together as a duo. All four founding Ink Spots played string instruments—guitar, tenor guitar (a small four-string guitar tuned like a mandolin), ukulele, tiple, even a cello that Hoppy Jones tuned like a bass—and they initially sounded more like the Spirits of Rhythm than the Mills Brothers. Following the Mills Brothers’ path, they moved from Cincinnati to New York, where they came under Moe Gale’s management. In the fall of 1934, they toured Britain with the English bandleader Jack Hylton, who had first intended to book the Spirits of Rhythm.[32]
In January 1935, they recorded four sides for Victor, including “Your Feet’s Too Big,” written by the Tin Pan Alley composer Fred Fisher with the lyricist Ada Benson. By the time the Ink Spots rerecorded the song for Decca in May 1936, Jerry Daniels had been replaced by Bill Kenny, who sang in a high tenor voice—inspired by the sentimental Irish American balladeer Morton Downey—but did not play an instrument.[33] Unlike the better-known hit recording of “Your Feet’s Too Big” made by Fats Waller in 1939, both Ink Spots versions have a slight rock ’n’ roll feel—not just a doo-wop flavor but hints of the sort of rhythmic phrasing later used by Elvis Presley or Jerry Lee Lewis. It is Waller’s rendition, however, that forms the basis for Chubby Checker’s “Your Feet’s Too Big,” recorded for his 1961 album For Twisters Only. And it was Checker’s recording that prompted the Beatles to include “Your Feet’s Too Big” in a performance later released on the album Live! at the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany; 1962.
In 1938, the Ink Spots cut “Brown Gal,” a wistful, racially charged ballad cowritten and first recorded by Lil Hardin Armstrong in 1936. In late 1949, Big Al Sears, a veteran swing saxophonist who turned to R&B, recorded the song as “Brown Boy” with a group called the Sparrows, featuring lead singer Clarence Palmer. Without Sears, the same group, now called the Jive Bombers, rerecorded “Brown Boy” in 1951. In 1956, the Jive Bombers recorded it as “Bad Boy,” this time scoring a Top 10 R&B hit that crossed over to the pop charts. Quickly covered by several other doo-wop groups, “Bad Boy” was later recorded by such rock artists as Mink DeVille and Ringo Starr.
Although they had been regularly featured on NBC radio since 1935, the Ink Spots did not have a hit record until they cut “If I Didn’t Care,” by the white songwriter Jack Lawrence, in January 1939. An instant smash, it became the model for almost every Ink Spots record that followed, with its arpeggiated guitar introduction, followed by Bill Kenny’s mawkishly romantic tenor over softly crooned background harmonies, then Hoppy Jones’s “talking bass” on the bridge, and finally Kenny’s falsetto climax. The group had used all these elements before, but not in combination. After “If I Didn’t Care,” they virtually ceased to sing scat, talk jive, play instruments (other than Charlie Fuqua’s guitar), or alternate lead vocalists, as they had previously. Instead, they scored hit after formulaic, sentimental hit through the 1940s, a number of which were revived by doo-wop groups in the following decade. By far the most successful of these covers was the Platters’ version of the Ink Spots’ 1939 hit “My Prayer”—a No. 1 smash on both the pop and R&B charts in 1956 (the song had been adapted from the tango “Avant de Mourir,” which the Romanian Gypsy violinist Georges Boulanger recorded in 1924). The Ink Spots survived a number of personnel changes but fragmented in the 1950s, with several groups claiming the Ink Spots name.
Cab Calloway’s exuberant style left an impression on bands as well as singers. To exploit his popularity, along with Duke Ellington’s, their manager, Irving Mills, took over drummer Willie Lynch’s group in 1930 and renamed the it the Mills Blue Rhythm Band, although it included Mills in name only. The Blue Rhythm Band recorded material from Calloway’s and Ellington’s repertoires, much of it composed by Mills; in 1931, the group recorded three versions of “Minnie the Moocher” for three different labels. Mills also used the band to fill in between Calloway’s or Ellington’s sets or to substitute when they were unavailable.
Recording under different names with different leaders, arrangers, and singers, the Mills Blue Rhythm Band failed to establish a distinctive stylistic identity. But though none of its early members was especially well known, the group was always musically solid. After Lucky Millinder assumed the leadership in 1933, he recruited such notable players as trumpeter Henry “Red” Allen and alto saxophonist Tab Smith, and the band had several hit records before breaking up in 1938.
The Alabama-born, Chicago-bred Millinder, a conductor who seldom sang and never played an instrument, then took over a Philadelphia-based band led by pianist Bill Doggett but went bankrupt in 1939. Millinder organized his own big band the following year, including Doggett and the guitar-playing gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. That group often played straight-ahead swing arrangements and, before disbanding in 1952, featured a number of eminent jazz musicians, among them trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Freddie Webster, saxophonists Frank Wess and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, bassist George Duvivier, and drummer Panama Francis. But Millinder’s band is remembered today mostly as a precursor of rhythm-and-blues.
Except for its big-band sonorities, Millinder’s first hit, the bluesy “Big Fat Mama” (featuring a vocal by guitarist Trevor Bacon), is indistinguishable from postwar R&B. “Apollo Jump,” from the same September 1941 session, features a honking tenor saxophone solo by Stafford Simon that precedes Illinois Jacquet’s landmark solo on Lionel Hampton’s “Flying Home” by nearly nine months. Tharpe plays a Chuck Berry–like electric guitar solo on her pop-gospel number “That’s All,” from November 1941, more than six months before T-Bone Walker, Berry’s principal inspiration, cut “Mean Old World,” the record that established his style. Tharpe’s February 1942 recording of “I Want a Tall Skinny Papa,” one of her few forays into secular music, is a sort of answer to “Big Fat Mama,” with a similar proto-rock feel. But after rerecording the song in 1943 for the Armed Forces Radio Service, Tharpe left Millinder to pursue a strictly spiritual career. In 1944, she recorded “Strange Things Happening Every Day” with a combo including pianist Sammy Price, and it became a No. 2 rhythm-and-blues hit. With its chugging, boogie-like beat, it’s been cited as a rock ’n’ roll antecedent and an influence to Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash.[34]
Wynonie Harris joined Millinder’s band in March 1944, after Trevor Bacon left to join Tab Smith’s new group. Originally from Omaha, Harris was a blues shouter who modeled his style after Big Joe Turner’s. His first recording session, in May 1944, produced the minor pop hit “Hurry, Hurry,” a slow blues that had already been a minor hit earlier that year for Benny Carter’s band with singer Savannah Churchill. On the same date, Harris cut “Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well,” which had been recorded for Bluebird two years earlier by Doc Wheeler and His Sunset Orchestra, including tenor saxophonist Sam “the Man” Taylor, who would later play with Millinder.[35] But Millinder’s label, Decca, did not release his version with Harris until 1945, by which time Harris was no longer working with Millinder. Nonetheless, “Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well” became a No. 1 rhythm-and-blues hit, prompting Bull Moose Jackson, the singing tenor saxophonist in Millinder’s band, to record “I Know Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well.”
After recording under his own name for the Philo, Apollo, Hamp-Tone, Bullet, and Aladdin labels, Harris cut Roy Brown’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight” for King on December 28, 1947. Brown had recorded the song himself only after offering it to Harris, who initially turned it down. Although Brown told writer John Broven, “I really don’t know what the inspiration of the song was,” he could have been influenced by the vaguely similar “There’s Good Blues Tonight,” published by the white husband-and-wife songwriting team of Abe and Edna Osser and inspired by the radio commentator Gabriel Heatter’s catchphrase “There’s good news tonight.” Les Brown’s band recorded “There’s Good Blues Tonight” with singer Doris Day in February 1946, one day before Millinder cut it with singer Annisteen Allen, and Tommy Dorsey’s band recorded it with singer Sy Oliver a few days later.[36] But the lyrics of “Good Rockin’ Tonight” also include the stock characters Deacon Jones and Elder Brown, both mentioned in “Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well.”
The transition between Lucky Millinder’s takeover of the Mills Blue Rhythm Band and Wynonie Harris’s recording of “Good Rockin’ Tonight” nearly fifteen years later provides perhaps the clearest illustration of the transformation of big-band swing into rhythm-and-blues and rock ’n’ roll. Bill Doggett, after switching from piano to organ, went on to earn his own place in rock ’n’ roll history: in June 1956, less than two years after Elvis Presley recorded “Good Rockin’ Tonight” for Sun, Doggett cut the instrumental “Honky Tonk (Parts 1 & 2)” for King with guitarist Billy Butler and saxophonist Clifford Scott. A No. 1 R&B hit, “Honky Tonk” failed to reach the top of the pop charts only because another double-sided smash, Presley’s “Hound Dog,” backed with “Don’t Be Cruel,” came out around the same time.
Irving Mills briefly managed yet another big band that helped lay the foundation for rhythm-and-blues. Jimmie Lunceford, born in Mississippi, was raised in Oklahoma City and then Denver, where he studied classical music with Wilberforce Whiteman, Paul Whiteman’s father. After graduating from Fisk University in Nashville in 1926, Lunceford played in several New York jazz bands before taking a job as a high school music teacher in Memphis. He founded a student band, the Chickasaw Syncopaters, which turned professional in 1929 and eventually became the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra, also known as the Harlem Express. The group struggled until 1934, when Mills took Lunceford under his wing, arranging for him to record for Victor and play a long engagement at the Cotton Club. Lunceford split with Mills after just a few months, but by then his name was made.
Lunceford’s band was renowned for scrupulous precision, stylistic versatility, and choreographed stage moves. Lunceford employed a number of talented arrangers, notably Sy Oliver, who gave the ensemble a relaxed 2/4 rhythm—in contrast to the unaccented 4/4 of most swing bands—that became known as the “Lunceford bounce.” Even before Benny Goodman touched off the swing craze in 1935, Lunceford’s hot arrangements won him a following among white college students.[37] Some who heard Lunceford on stage insist that his was the greatest big band of the era, surpassing even Ellington’s or Basie’s.[38]
Beginning in late 1934, after he switched to the Decca label, Lunceford had a string of pop hits that ran through the mid-1940s, including “Rhythm Is Our Business,” “Organ Grinder’s Swing,” and “Blues in the Night”—the last from the 1941 movie of the same title, in which Lunceford appeared. Band members sang on many of Lunceford’s numbers, either singly or, as on “My Blue Heaven,” in Mills Brothers–like harmony. Joe Thomas’s burly, bluesy tenor saxophone influenced younger players such as Arnett Cobb, who, along with Illinois Jacquet, popularized the honking style.[39] And Eddie Durham, the trombonist, guitarist, and arranger, was the first musician to play electric guitar in a straight-ahead jazz band, performing with the instrument in Lunceford’s ensemble but not recording with it until March 1938 as a member of the Kansas City Five, a group drawn from Count Basie’s band.[40]
Like many other swing bands of period, both black and white, Lunceford’s played sweet as well as hot material, often featuring the falsetto crooning of alto saxophonist Dan Grissom on the former. Together with the Ink Spots’ Bill Kenny, Grissom and his rival Pha Terrell, the crooner with Andy Kirk’s band (who had a big hit in 1936 with “Until the Real Thing Comes Along”), were the stylistic forebears of the silky doo-wop and R&B singers of subsequent decades.
For the first ten years after its inception in 1936, Down Beat magazine’s readers’ poll included both swing- and sweet-band categories, but the distinction was often blurred, with bands like Tommy Dorsey’s or Glenn Miller’s voted sweetest and Benny Goodman’s or Duke Ellington’s most swinging. Society orchestras such as Guy Lombardo’s, which advertised “The Sweetest Music This Side of Heaven,” were relegated to a separate “corn” list, although Lombardo could play hot when the occasion demanded, and Lunceford, with Grissom singing, covered Lombardo’s 1927 smash “Charmaine!”
It was a sweet band that formally introduced the shuffle beat, one of the basic elements of early rhythm-and-blues and rock ’n’ roll. The shuffle can be defined as a rhythm in 4/4 time in which each of the four beats consists of three eighth notes, with the first two tied together. In poetry, it would be called trochaic tetrameter. The shuffle is inherent in the “double running bass” variety of boogie-woogie that Artie Matthews included in his 1915 composition “Weary Blues.” But even before swing bands adopted boogie bass lines, a sweet band led by trumpeter Henry Busse began playing a boogie-less shuffle beat.
Busse, who immigrated to the United States from Germany around the time of World War I, was a charter member of Paul Whiteman’s band. He cowrote a couple of Whiteman’s early hits, “Wang Wang Blues,” from 1920, and “Hot Lips,” from 1922, which became Busse’s theme song. His muted trumpet solo on “When Day Is Done,” from 1927, has been cited as a prototype for the sweet-jazz style. By 1928, Whiteman was paying Busse $350 a week, much more than he paid Bix Beiderbecke or Bing Crosby.[41] But Busse split from Whiteman that year to form his own band, which recorded for the Victor, Columbia, and Decca labels.
Busse’s musicians came up with the shuffle rhythm either at the Sui Ren in Galveston in 1932, according to a 1938 article in Down Beat, or at the Forest Club in Miami in 1933, according to a 1970s interview with the band’s pianist, Paul Sprosty.[42] By Sprosty’s account, “One night I was trying to be cute so I played a juggajuggajuggajugga kind of fast beat on one of the tunes. Ted Tillman, the drummer, decided to prove he could sound just as ridiculous and answered with a chooka/chooka/chooka/chook. Suddenly the dancers speeded up . . . shuffling . . . jumping . . . getting all excited. Every time we played that way, the response was overwhelming. Within three weeks, Sandy Runyan [actually Runyon], one of our saxophonists, made the first of many arrangements known—as all of our arrangements were—as ‘Henry Busse arrangements.’”
Jan Savitt claimed to have been born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1913, the son of a musician in the czar’s imperial band. But he was probably born in the Jewish shtetl of Shumsk, in what is now Ukraine, in 1908.[43] Raised in Philadelphia, he was a violin prodigy who played in the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski. In the mid-1930s, he became the musical director of a local radio station, then switched to another station and in 1937 formed a dance band, the Top Hatters. In 1938, five years after the debut of the Lone Ranger radio series, the group recorded its first hit, “Hi-Yo Silver,” featuring singer Bon Bon Tunnell. (The song was also a hit that year for the cowboy star Roy Rogers; the title phrase would turn up on Big Joe Turner’s 1953 hit “Honey Hush.”) By that time, the Top Hatters had come up with their trademark beat, named in the title of their March 1937 recording “Shuffle Rhythm.”
Savitt’s rhythm was similar to Busse’s but faster and subtler, with the triplet figure usually played only by the piano. In the February 1938 issue of Down Beat, Savitt is reported to have accused Busse of stealing his beat, saying that Busse “ought to be ashamed of himself.” Busse responded: “I don’t mind the guy’s imitating my band so much, but that he should tell everybody that HE originated it and I should be ashamed to copy HIM! THAT IS TOO MUCH!”[44] In a letter published in the following month’s issue, Savitt replied that he had never disparaged Busse and claimed that the shuffle rhythm had been used by Bach and Brahms as well as George Gershwin and many traditional New Orleans jazzmen. Savitt added that Busse’s beat was in 6/8 time, while his own shuffle rhythm was “fundamentally a moving bass in four-four time and a push-beat treble consisting of a series of dotted eighth notes and a sixteenth note tied to an eighth with the ensuing syncopation assuming the character of four downbeats and four afterbeats to each bar.”[45] Nevertheless, Busse began to use the term “shuffle rhythm” for his own beat.
Critics consigned Busse’s music to the cornball category, but Gunther Schuller compares Savitt to Jimmie Lunceford and Count Basie, saying, “Savitt’s band played with such consistently impeccable ensemble and propulsive swing that it kept even its famous shuffle rhythm . . . from becoming a stale cliché.”[46] Still, the shuffle was generally regarded as a gimmick, and in the short run, few other bandleaders picked it up. In April 1939, Lionel Hampton recorded “Shufflin’ at the Hollywood,” with Cozy Cole playing a fast shuffle on the drums. In June 1940, the banjo player Lou Breese, whose band included a number of Busse’s former sideman, updated the 1926 standard “Breezin’ Along with the Breeze” with a prominent shuffle beat.
The musician most often credited with popularizing the shuffle was Louis Jordan. John Chilton, Jordan’s biographer, writes: “It’s unlikely that he was impressed by the Busse band’s stilted phrasing, but he enjoyed the emphatic bouncy rhythm that enlivened their music. He tried to hear as many of their radio shows as he could, and he also liked the shuffle rhythms created by another white band . . . led by Jan Savitt.”[47] Chilton’s notion that Jordan got his shuffle rhythm from Busse and Savitt is intriguing but dubious. Chilton has the Arkansas-born Jordan listening to Busse and Savitt on the radio while living in Philadelphia, but Jordan left Philadelphia for New York in 1935, before Savitt began broadcasting with his band. Jordan did not adopt the shuffle rhythm until the early 1940s, and when he did it was in conjunction with a boogie-woogie bass line, as on “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie” or “Saxa-Woogie,” both from 1941. In 1944, Jordan scored perhaps the biggest hit of his career with a boogied-up version of Johnny Mercer’s “G.I. Jive,” featuring a mid-tempo shuffle noticeably slower than Busse’s or Savitt’s beat. (Mercer’s own rendition also topped Billboard’s R&B chart, but Jordan’s topped both the R&B and pop lists.) He used a faster shuffle rhythm on his signature hits “Caldonia” and “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie.”
Jordan’s musical tastes may have been as broad as Chilton maintains, and he was surely familiar with Busse and Savitt, who were very successful at the time. Most likely, Jordan’s shuffle represents a confluence between the Busse-Savitt rhythm and the boogie-woogie, both of which entered the pop-music mainstream in the mid-1930s, shortly before Jordan formed his Tympany Five.
Jordan’s band can be seen as the model for the rhythm-and-blues combos that flourished after the postwar decline of the big bands, but small groups were not uncommon in the big-band era. One of the most popular was John Kirby’s sextet, which followed Stuff Smith’s band into the Onyx Club in 1937. Kirby had played bass with the hard-swinging bandleaders Fletcher Henderson and Chick Webb, but on his own he courted white audiences with politely swung versions of Tin Pan Alley standards (“Blue Skies”), folk chestnuts (“Loch Lomond”), and classical pieces (“Anitra’s Dance).”
While copying Kirby’s instrumentation, Jordan took a virtually opposite approach, managing to attract white listeners while drawing heavily on blues, boogie-woogies, and African American slang. It has been suggested that Jordan was influenced by the Harlem Hamfats, a band founded in 1936, two years before the Tympany Five, but it’s probably more accurate to say that both Jordan and the Hamfats reflected the musical vision of Mayo Williams, who put together the Hamfats and produced Jordan’s early records.
A star athlete at Brown University, Williams had been one of the first black players in the National Football League. As a talent scout and producer for the Paramount and Vocalion labels, he recorded Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, Papa Charlie Jackson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, Leroy Carr, Cow Cow Davenport, and Pinetop Smith, among many other blues artists. In 1934, Decca, a British label, hired Jack Kapp to run its newly established American branch; as the former manager of Brunswick, Vocalion’s parent label, Kapp had already worked with Williams, whom he hired to oversee Decca’s race division.
Mayo Williams had also recorded jazz musicians such as Clarence Williams, Fletcher Henderson, and Johnny Dodds, on their own and as accompanists to classic blues singers. At Decca, he began to use jazz players to back country bluesmen. The combination of horns and strings in rural or semi-rural African American music was not unprecedented: the Dixieland Jug Blowers’ December 11, 1926, session included not only Johnny Dodds but the band’s regular alto saxophonist, Lockwood Lewis, along with a violinist and three banjo players. In August 1934, Williams recorded a single side with the Tennessee-born, St. Louis–based singer-guitarist-pianist Peetie Wheatstraw and a nonce group, the Blue Blowers, that included a trombone and a clarinet. (Robert Johnson adopted Wheatstraw’s falsetto whoops, which anticipated those of Little Richard.) In September 1935, Williams produced a session with the Georgia-born singer-guitarist Bumble Bee Slim and a similar group, the Rhythm Riffers, that featured two saxophones and a trumpet.
The husband-and-wife country-blues team of Lizzie Douglas and Joe McCoy, both singer-guitarists, first recorded for Columbia in 1929, billing themselves as Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe in apparent emulation of Tampa Red and Georgia Tom. The following year, they began recording on Vocalion for Mayo Williams, who brought them to Decca in 1934. After the couple split up in 1935, Memphis Minnie left Decca, and Williams assembled a new band with Joe McCoy singing and playing guitar, his younger brother Charlie McCoy on mandolin, Herb Morand on trumpet, Odell Rand on clarinet, and Horace Malcolm on piano, plus a bassist and drummer. Although all the musicians were living in Chicago, Williams came up with the name Harlem Hamfats, “Harlem” having by then become synonymous with all things African American.
The McCoy brothers hailed from the Jackson, Mississippi, area. In the 1920s, Joe McCoy migrated to Memphis, where he hooked up with Memphis Minnie, while Charlie McCoy remained in Mississippi and recorded with the seminal Delta bluesmen Tommy Johnson and Ishmon Bracey, as well as with Bo Carter and Walter Vinson as the Jackson Blue Boys, Mississippi Hot Footers, and Mississippi Mud Steppers. Herb Morand, who co-led the Hamfats with Joe McCoy, was born in New Orleans, where he worked in trumpeter Chris Kelly’s legendary jazz band. He toured the Southwest with Nat Towles’s Creole Harmony Kings and joined Cliff Jackson’s Krazy Kats in New York before moving to Chicago, where he played with Johnny Dodds in the Beale Street Washboard Band. Odell Rand, an Illinois native, played an E-flat clarinet in New Orleans style, and the Atlanta-born Horace Malcolm performed blues and jazz at house parties and nightclubs in Chicago.
The Harlem Hamfats’ first recording session, in April 1936, produced the group’s biggest hit, “Oh! Red,” a snappy blues in 2/4 time with trumpet, piano, mandolin, and clarinet solos in between Joe McCoy’s vocal choruses. It was popular enough to inspire several cover versions, including a sleekly harmonized vocal arrangement by the Ink Spots in 1938 (the flip side of “That Cat Is High”) and an elegantly understated instrumental by Count Basie and his rhythm section in 1939. “Oh! Red” was recorded by Sammy Price in 1940 and by Howlin’ Wolf in 1952; redone in New Orleans style as “Sick and Tired,” it was an R&B hit for Chris Kenner in 1957 and a crossover pop hit for Fats Domino in 1958. The song entered the Jamaican tradition in the late 1960s and early 1970s via rocksteady and reggae renditions (titled “Sick and Tired” or “Oh Babe”) by Ewan McDermott and Jerry Matthias, Ken Boothe and Delroy Wilson, Derrick Morgan, and Neville Grant.
“Oh! Red” had its greatest influence, however, as the basis for Chuck Berry’s first hit, “Maybellene,” in 1955. In his autobiography, Berry claims that he adapted “Maybellene” from “Ida Red,” a white country song he’d heard as a teenager.[48] “Ida Red” had been recorded by a number of country artists from 1924 on, the best-known version being Bob Wills’s from 1938. But “Maybellene” sounds practically nothing like “Ida Red”; instead, it closely follows the tune of “Oh! Red,” which Berry, who was born in St. Louis in 1926, would likely have heard as a youth. And Berry’s refrain, “Maybellene, why can’t you be true? / You done started back doin’ the things you used to do,” echoes the Hamfats’ line, “Oh, Red, what’cha gonna do? / I’m sick and tired [of] chastisin’ you.”
The Harlem Hamfats continued to record for Decca until 1938, frequently recycling the “Oh! Red” theme under different titles. Among their other material was “Let’s Get Drunk and Truck,” a pop-style novelty first recorded for the Bluebird label on April 1, 1936—a couple of weeks before the Hamfats’ debut session—by Tampa Red and the Chicago Five, featuring Arnett Nelson on clarinet and Black Bob Hudson on piano. In October 1936, the Hamfats cut a version of “The New Call of the Freaks” titled “The Garbage Man,” with jazzy instrumental solos brasher than those on Luis Russell’s original but without Russell’s “freakish” harmonies. The flip side of that record was “Southern Blues,” where Joe McCoy sings the line “the blues jumped a monkey and run him for a solid mile” in Louis Armstrong’s growling style, following Herb Morand’s Armstrong-like trumpet introduction. It’s a mangled version of a line dating back at least as far as Blind Lemon Jefferson’s December 1926 recording of “Rabbit Foot Blues”—more than a year before Jim Jackson cut “Old Dog Blue”—in which Jefferson wails, “Blue jumped a rabbit, run him one solid mile.” The line would turn up again on Hot Lips Page’s 1944 recording of “The Blues Jumped the Rabbit,” which Wynonie Harris adapted in 1946, substituting “Mr. Blues”—Harris’s nickname—for “The Blues.”
The Hamfats are sometimes cited as the fathers of jump blues, but despite occasional boogie bass lines and other up-to-date touches, their style is a crude fusion of blues and hokum with New Orleans–style jazz rather than with swing, as the word “jump” would imply. Even “Hamfat Swing,” an instrumental from November 1936, is firmly in the traditional mold. The writer James Lincoln Collier identifies the formation of the Harlem Hamfats with the beginning of rock ’n’ roll; he quotes the jazz historian Paige Van Vorst as saying, “This group successfully combined New Orleans jazz and Mississippi Delta blues into one music, something that is the likely antecedent of rhythm-and-blues.”[49] But that is an exaggeration: although their music was antecedent to rhythm-and-blues, the jazz and country-blues elements in the Hamfats’ music are never fully integrated. With such exceptions as “Weed Smoker’s Dream”—one of the group’s most modern songs, which became a hit for Peggy Lee after Joe McCoy rewrote it for Lil Green as “Why Don’t You Do Right?”—the Hamfats’ sound made more of an impact on blues than on jazz or pop music, and their influence on rhythm-and-blues was mainly indirect.
Besides making their own records, the Harlem Hamfats recorded as accompanists to singers Johnnie Temple, Rosetta Howard, and Frankie “Half-Pint” Jaxon in 1937 and 1938. The sessions with Temple, a Mississippi-born singer-guitarist, suggest a jazzier take on the blues of Peetie Wheatstraw; those with Howard, a Chicago native, update the classic-blues sound of the previous decade (although her biggest seller was “If You’re a Viper,” a laid-back cover of Stuff Smith’s “You’se a Viper”).[50] The rollicking songs the Hamfats cut with Jaxon—an Alabama-born, Kansas City–bred former minstrel trouper—are as close as the band ever came to rock ’n’ roll: with their verse-and-refrain hokum structures, “She Brings Me Down,” “Wet It,” “She Sends Me,” and “She Loves So Good” form a link between vaudeville and rhythm-and-blues.
After their Decca contract expired in 1938, the Hamfats cut sixteen sides for Vocalion in 1939 before disbanding. During their brief career, the Hamfats functioned exclusively as a studio ensemble, never performing together on stage.
Other, even shorter-lived Chicago bands, some sharing the same core personnel, sprang up to copy the Hamfats’ style. The State Street Swingers, with clarinetist Arnett Nelson and pianist Black Bob Hudson, made their first record for Vocalion in July 1936, following up in August with a cover of “Oh! Red” sung by Washboard Sam, Big Bill Broonzy’s putative half-brother. In October 1936, Arnett Nelson and His Hot Four cut their only record—“Oh! Red,” backed with “You Waited Too Long”—for the ARC label; the group included Hudson and probably Broonzy, with Casey Bill Weldon singing and playing slide guitar. Nelson and Hudson also accompanied Lil Johnson when she recorded “Let’s Get Drunk and Truck” in August 1936, less than a week after the Hamfats cut the song.
Little is known about Arnett Nelson—he toured with Yankee Robinson’s Circus in 1915, played in bands led by the Chicago trumpeter Jimmy Wade in the 1920s, and wrote the tune “Buddy’s Habits”—or about Alfred Bell, a trumpeter who sometimes recorded with Big Bill Broonzy.[51] Equally obscure is Ollie Shepard, a blues singer and pianist who recorded more than fifty sides between 1937 and 1942, mostly for Decca, accompanied by various jazz combos. Like the Harlem Hamfats, these musicians have been overlooked by both jazz and blues historians because their styles fall between the two genres—too coarse for jazz lovers, too commercial for blues fans. Yet the jazz-blues fusion of the late 1930s, as clumsy and formulaic as it sometimes was, left its mark on rhythm-and-blues and western swing, brought country blues to a more mainstream audience, and paved the way for the electrified blues of the postwar years.[52]
On Louis Jordan’s earliest recordings, beginning in December 1938, his band sounds like John Kirby’s, only more exuberant, with Jordan adding comedy vocals such as the one on “Barnacle Bill the Sailor” (an expurgated take on a bawdy folk song published anonymously in 1927 as “Ballochy Bill the Sailor,” then bowdlerized by the country singer-songwriters Carson Robison and Frank Luther and first recorded in 1930 by Hoagy Carmichael and His Orchestra, including Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang, and Gene Krupa).[53] At his second session, in March 1939, Jordan recorded a smooth swing arrangement of “Keep A-Knockin’,” for which Perry Bradford claimed composer’s credit, although the melody and lyrics were only slightly altered from previous versions. (Bradford was probably familiar with a 1921 recording of “You Can’t Come In” by the African American blackface comedy team of Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, since OKeh Records issued it on the flip side of “Darktown Court Room,” recorded by the black vaudevillian Shelton Brooks at a session set up by Bradford.) The middling success of Jordan’s “Keep A-Knockin’” prompted other renditions by Jimmy Dorsey’s big band with vocalist Helen O’Connell, by the classic blues singer Lizzie Miles, and by Nora and Delle, a black female duo whose jivey vocal harmonies anticipate both postwar R&B and rockabilly. But it was most likely Jordan’s record that inspired Little Richard’s rock ’n’ roll smash.
Jordan recorded few blues until November 1941, when he cut his breakthrough hit, “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town,” which Casey Bill Weldon had originally recorded for Vocalion in September 1936. Substituting his suave saxophone and seductive croon for Weldon’s twangy steel guitar and bluff wailing, Jordan thoroughly urbanizes the country blues. In the words of John Chilton, “It was the telling blend of vocal and instrumental feeling on ‘I’m Gonna Move . . . ’ that really launched Louis Jordan as a major recording star.”[54] Berle Adams, Jordan’s agent, said that Mayo Williams had brought Weldon’s composition to Jordan, but Jordan himself said he’d first heard the song “on the tracks in Dallas, Texas.”[55]
A mysterious figure, Weldon may have been born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, as Big Bill Broonzy maintained. He is usually assumed to be the same singer-guitarist who recorded for Victor as a member of the Memphis Jug Band in 1927 and 1928 under the name Will Weldon, but this has been disputed, as has his supposed brief marriage to Memphis Minnie around the same time.[56] He is presumed to have sojourned in Kansas City before moving to Chicago (or perhaps he just adopted a pseudonym, like Kansas Joe McCoy), for in March 1935 he recorded four sides for Vocalion as Kansas City Bill Weldon, accompanied on piano by Peetie Wheatstraw; on some of the labels he is further identified as the Hawaiian Guitar Wizard. By October 1935, when he cut his next session as Casey Bill (signifying K. C. Bill), he seems to have appropriated Wheatstraw’s whooping vocal style. What made his sound distinctive, lending some of his material the feel of western swing, was his slide guitar, which he played in the Hawaiian manner, holding the instrument horizontally across his lap. Weldon recorded quite successfully as a leader for the Bluebird and Vocalion labels through 1938 and as a sideman for such artists as Peetie Wheatstraw, Bumble Bee Slim, and Memphis Minnie. But in the early 1940s, he vanished and, aside from a couple of uncorroborated reports, was never heard from again.
At a July 1942 session produced by Milt Gabler, three months after Jimmie Lunceford cut his hit version of “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town,” Jordan recorded his own sequel, “I’m Gonna Leave You on the Outskirts of Town,” as well as Ollie Shepard’s “It’s a Low Down Dirty Shame,” a slow blues number that Shepard had recorded in October 1937. The two tracks were paired on the same disc, which rose to No. 3 on Billboard’s Harlem Hit Parade. On “I’m Gonna Leave You,” Jordan simply fits new lyrics to the melody of “I’m Gonna Move,” but on “It’s a Low Down Dirty Shame,” he polishes Shepard’s rough-hewn original—already a better-integrated blend of blues and jazz than the Harlem Hamfats’ material—into a proto-R&B gem. Shepard’s recording, his first release, features just his own piano and vocal, Edgar Saucier’s alto saxophone, and an unknown drummer, with Shepard playing a boogie-woogie bass line only on the final chorus, beneath Saucier’s solo. Jordan, singing like Jimmy Rushing, uses a shuffling boogie beat throughout, giving the song a feel remarkably like that of postwar rhythm-and-blues.
At the same session, Jordan cut “Somebody Done Changed the Lock on My Door,” which Casey Bill Weldon had recorded for Bluebird in 1935 and for Vocalion in 1936. But Jordan’s initial version was not released; instead, Decca ultimately issued his January 1945 rerecording of the song as the flip side of “Caldonia,” a No. 1 R&B hit that also made the pop Top 10. Here, as on “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town,” Jordan substitutes urbanity for rural grit, refining even Weldon’s falsetto whoops. In August 1945, Wynonie Harris covered “Somebody Done Changed the Lock on My Door” in his own shouting style, accompanied by Jack McVea and His All-Stars; the track was released on the Apollo label as the flip side of “Wynonie’s Blues,” the first of Harris’s records under his own name to make the Harlem Hit Parade.
If only because Jordan and Harris picked up his songs, Casey Bill Weldon can be regarded as a missing link between country blues and R&B.[57] In general, however, the blues made less of an impression on jazz than vice versa. “Lord, I wanna hear some swingin’ music, I wanna hear Fats Waller’s sound,” sang Sonny Boy (John Lee) Williamson on his 1941 recording of “Ground Hog Blues”; but no prominent jazz singer seems to have expressed any such admiration for a blues artist.
One musician who did link country blues to R&B, biographically if not musically, was T-Bone Walker, who as a teenager in Dallas led Blind Lemon Jefferson around the speakeasies of the “Deep Ellum” district. Walker’s stepfather, Marco Washington, played bass with the Dallas String Band, which recorded “Hokum Blues” in 1928. Walker played banjo in a medicine show and in accompaniment to Ida Cox in a traveling carnival; he cut his first record, for Columbia, in 1929, singing like Leroy Carr and playing guitar like Scrapper Blackwell. After touring Texas with Cab Calloway’s band, he billed himself as the “Cab Calloway of the South.” He played with a number of other bands, as well as with Ma Rainey, before moving to Los Angeles in the mid-1930s, where he took up the electric guitar and joined Les Hite’s big band. When that group recorded in New York around June 1940, Walker sang “T-Bone Blues,” with its “Yancey Special”–like bass line, but the steel guitarist heard on the record is Frank Pasley, who anticipates Chuck Berry’s 1957 slide-guitar showpiece “Deep Feeling.” Louis Jordan covered “T-Bone Blues” in January 1941, replacing the steel guitar with his saxophone but changing little else.
Not until July 1942, when Walker recorded “Mean Old World” and “I Got a Break, Baby” with Freddie Slack’s trio in Los Angeles for the fledgling Capitol label, was his electric guitar captured on vinyl. On these sides, made two years before Cecil Gant’s “I Wonder” initiated the surge of West Coast independent-label recordings that propelled the rhythm-and-blues revolution, the mature Walker style that inspired Chuck Berry, B. B. King, and a host of other guitarists appears fully formed. The musicians’ union imposed its recording ban the following month, and Walker didn’t cut his next session until March 1944, as a guitarist in Slack’s big band. In October 1944, following a series of engagements at the Rhumboogie Cafe in Chicago, Walker recorded a half-dozen sides under his own name for the affiliated Rhumboogie label, accompanied by Marl Young’s eight-piece band.[58] These include “Sail On Boogie,” a jump-style adaptation of Bumble Bee Slim’s 1934 country-blues classic “Sail On, Little Girl, Sail On,” and “T-Bone Boogie,” a medley of verses from Big Joe Turner’s songs set to a speeded-up version of Count Basie’s “Boogie Woogie” arrangement. With a frantic tenor-saxophone solo by Moses Gant and an insistent guitar break by Walker that one imagines Chuck Berry must have heard, “T-Bone Boogie” grounds rock ’n’ roll solidly in the jump-blues tradition.
After a second Chicago session with Young’s band, Walker switched to the Los Angeles–based Black & White label and in September 1946 recorded his biggest hit, “Bobby Sox Blues,” backed by tenor saxophonist Jack McVea’s quintet. Although it’s a slow blues and not a rocker, the song, about an obsessed pop fan (“You’ve got a head full of nothin’ but stage, screen, and radio”), prefigures the teen anthems of the 1950s. In September 1947, Walker cut his most famous song, “Call It Stormy Monday but Tuesday Is Just as Bad,” which was originally released as the flip side of the now-forgotten “I Know Your Wig Is Gone.” He had several more R&B hits through 1950, but his influence was far out of proportion to his record sales. Not only did other guitarists copy his jazzy chord progressions and slinky single-note runs, punctuated with percussive slides and bends, but his flamboyant stage antics, including picking the guitar behind his head while doing a full split, inspired players ranging from Chuck Berry to Jimi Hendrix.
A lesser-known figure linking R&B to its antecedents is Sam Theard, a singer, songwriter, dancer, and comedian whose career stretched from southern vaudeville to Hollywood. Born in New Orleans, he is said to have left home in 1924 to tour with the elegant tap dancer Jack Wiggins, one of the first of the so-called class acts.[59] Theard began recording in 1929, accompanied by Cow Cow Davenport and Tampa Red, singing mostly double-entendre hokum songs in emulation of “It’s Tight Like That.” His early records were credited to Lovin’ Sam from Down in ’Bam, after the title of Perry Bradford’s song “Lovin’ Sam from Alabam,” which Mamie Smith recorded in 1921 and the tap-dancing team of Rufus Greenlee and Thaddeus Drayton, another class act, performed in the 1922 Broadway show Liza.[60]
Theard departed from the standard hokum formula on “You Rascal You,” a comically baleful cuckold’s complaint he recorded with Davenport in July 1929. The song took a couple of years to bubble up into the popular mainstream: the Louisville-based washboard and kazoo player Walter Taylor recorded the first cover version in February 1930, followed in June by the vaudeville veteran Socks Wilson, who usually performed under the name Kid Wilson with his wife, Coot Grant. Clarence Williams also cut the song in June 1930, and Tampa Red and Georgia Tom recorded it as a double-sided single in July. Later in July, the New Orleans–born, Chicago-based clarinetist Jimmie Noone, one of Benny Goodman’s models, recorded a klezmer-like minor-key version, and in August, Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band cut “You Rascal You” with Frankie “Half-Pint” Jaxon. In October, Andy Kirk recorded the song with the Seven Little Clouds of Joy, a smaller variation of his big band.
Louis Armstrong cut “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You,” the most enduring rendition of the song, in April 1931, but the version recorded in May by Red Nichols and His Five Pennies—a white nonet including Nichols on trumpet, Glenn Miller on trombone, Jimmy Dorsey on alto saxophone, and Ray McKinley on drums—was a bigger hit at the time. “You Rascal You” was also recorded in 1931 by the Mound City Blue Blowers, the Washboard Rhythm Kings, the Mills Brothers, and the big bands of Fletcher Henderson, Luis Russell, Cab Calloway, and Jack Teagarden, the last featuring Fats Waller. In 1932, Armstrong, wearing a leopard-skin tunic, performed the song with his band in the film short “A Rhapsody in Black and Blue” and, as the detached head of a spear-throwing African warrior, sang it in the Betty Boop cartoon “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You.” “You Rascal You” has since been recorded by everyone from Louis Prima to Serge Gainsbourg.
Theard continued to record in Chicago under the name Lovin’ Sam through the 1930s, maintaining his prurient approach with songs such as “Rubbin’ on That Darned Old Thing” as his style evolved from hokum to swing. He recorded for Vocalion with pianist John Oscar in 1930 and with Oscar and Kansas Joe McCoy in 1931. Switching to the Decca label, he recorded in 1934 with Banks’ Chesterfield’s Orchestra (led by drummer Louis Banks, with Albert Ammons on piano) and in 1936 with Oscar’s Chicago Swingers (including Odell Rand on clarinet). In August 1937, leading his own Swing Rascals, Theard recorded “Spo-Dee-O-Dee” for Vocalion, defining the title with such lines as “The chickens wouldn’t lay no eggs, wouldn’t flap no wings / if that rooster didn’t serve that thing.” He changed the tune and made the lyrics jivier but less sexual when he recorded “Spo-De-O-Dee” [sic] for Decca in June 1940 with Tiny Parham’s Four Aces, featuring Parham on electric organ. A year earlier, the song had been covered by the Four Clefs, a Chicago group whose members all sang and played instruments.
In 1947, the singer-guitarist Stick (or Sticks) McGhee, accompanied by his brother, the singer-guitarist Brownie McGhee (who was the longtime partner of the harmonica player Sonny Terry), cut “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” for Mayo Williams’s Harlem label, with new, oenophilic lyrics but the same basic melody as the one on Theard’s first “Spo-Dee-O-Dee.”[61] The record was not a big seller, but when McGhee rerecorded the song in February 1949 for Atlantic with a quintet that included his brother, pianist Wilbert “Big Chief” Ellis, and bassist Gene Ramey, it became a huge R&B hit, sparking a craze for drinking songs. The song was also a hit later that year for both Wynonie Harris and Lionel Hampton.
A white country band, Loy Gordon and His Pleasant Valley Boys, covered “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” in August 1949 for Atlantic, and Malcolm Yelvington did a rockabilly rendition in October 1954 for Sun, which released it just after Elvis Presley’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight.” Johnny Burnette’s trio cut the song on July 2, 1956, the same day the group recorded “Train Kept A-Rollin’.” Other rockabilly versions include one by Sid King and the Five Strings from 1955 (“Drinkin’ Wine Spoli Oli”) and another by Glenn Reeves from 1956, as well as Donny Baker and the Dimensionals’ “Drinkin’ Pop-Sodee Odee (Pop Pop),” from 1953. The fourteen-year-old Jerry Lee Lewis is said to have performed “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” in 1949 at a promotional event for a car dealership—his first public show.[62] Lewis recorded the song for Sun in 1957 and again in 1958, but these takes went unreleased for decades; he cut the song for Smash in 1963, and it was issued as an album track in 1966. In 1973, an inebriated-sounding Lewis, accompanied by such British rockers as Peter Frampton and Rory Gallagher, recorded “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” in London, and the resulting single made the American pop and country charts.
Sam Theard last recorded as Lovin’ Sam on a March 1938 session for Bluebird with Burns Campbell’s band; he makes heavy use of jive talk on swing numbers such as “You’re Solid with Me” and “That’s Chicago’s South Side,” singing, “I’m just beatin’ up my chops, just to hip you that you’re tops” and “If you want to get your solid kicks, truck on out south and dig them mellow chicks.” In April 1941, he recorded as Spo-De-O Sam with Sammy Price’s band on his own composition “Lead Me Daddy Straight to the Bar,” a jiving takeoff on Will Bradley’s “Beat Me Daddy (Eight to the Bar).”[63]
According to John Chilton, Louis Jordan met Theard while playing nightclubs in Chicago.[64] In November 1943, Jordan first recorded “You Can’t Get That No More,” Theard’s humorously rueful composition about wartime rationing, on a V-Disc, exempt from the union recording ban then in force because it was intended for military listeners only. He rerecorded the song for Decca in March 1944, on the same date that he cut “G.I. Jive,” and after almost a year’s delay it followed “G.I. Jive” onto the R&B and pop charts. In June 1946, Jordan recorded Theard’s “Let the Good Times Roll”; released on the flip side of “Ain’t Nobody Here but Us Chickens,” it was a major R&B hit. “Let the Good Times Roll” was a minor pop hit for Ray Charles in 1960 and was also recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis and by B. B. King and Bobby Bland, among others.
In March 1947, Tiny Bradshaw recorded a pair of songs credited to Theard and Henry Glover—“I’ve Been Around” and the proto-rocker “Take the Hands Off the Clock”—both melodically similar to “Let the Good Times Roll.” In July 1947, Wynonie Harris cut another proto-rocker, “Hard Ridin’ Mama,” cowritten by Theard and the prolific R&B composer Rudy Toombs; the song was covered by Manhattan Paul (Paul Bascomb) with the Three Riffs in October 1948. Theard may have sung on Hot Lips Page’s March 1949 recording of “The Egg or the Hen,” a song that Theard may have cowritten.[65] In 1950, Hal Singer recorded “Rock Around the Clock”—written by Singer and Theard and a proto-rocker if ever there was one—with Theard, credited as Spoo-Dee-O-Dee, harshly growling the vocal part. In February 1951, Harris recorded Theard and Glover’s composition “I’ll Never Give Up.”
In February 1950, Count Basie recorded the jump blues “If You See My Baby,” cowritten by Theard and pianist Teddy Brannon, with a shouted vocal by Vernon Gardner, the lead singer of the Deep River Boys. In May 1950, Wynonie Harris cut “Stormy Night Blues,” by Theard, Brannon, and Henry Glover. In March 1951, the alto saxophonist and blues singer Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson recorded another Theard and Brannon composition, “Home Boy.” In August of that year, trumpeter Roy Eldridge sang on his recording of Theard and Brannon’s “Baby, What’s the Matter with You?” Theard then faded from the music scene, only to reappear in the 1970s as an actor in Los Angeles, performing on the television shows Sanford and Son and Little House on the Prairie and in the movies Norman . . . Is That You? (with Redd Foxx and Pearl Bailey) and Which Way Is Up? (with Richard Pryor). He died in 1982, a virtually forgotten figure.
Sammy Price and Hot Lips Page can also be regarded as rhythm-and-blues progenitors. Both were born in 1908 and raised in Dallas, where they were exposed to the blues; both gained early experience in territory bands—Price as a dancer with Alphonso Trent’s Orchestra, Page as a trumpeter with the Oklahoma City Blue Devils and Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra. But while Page attained a measure of celebrity from the late 1930s until his death in 1954, Price was known primarily as an accompanist until the 1950s and achieved only minor recognition thereafter.
Price taught himself piano, modeling his style after that of Ida Cox’s husband, Jesse Crump, and began touring on the Theatre Owners Booking Association vaudeville circuit in 1927.[66] In October 1929, he cut a single, Dixieland-style side with a quartet in Dallas for Mayo Williams on Brunswick. He moved to Kansas City, Chicago, and Detroit before arriving in New York, where Williams had him play on Cow Cow Davenport’s Decca session, then hired him as the label’s staff pianist. From 1938 until 1954, Price recorded behind such singers as Jimmie Gordon, Trixie Smith, Coot Grant and Kid Wilson, Blue Lu Barker, Johnnie Temple, Peetie Wheatstraw, Georgia White, Big Joe Turner, Nora Lee King, Helen Humes, Wee Bea Booze, Cousin Joe, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Beginning in March 1940, Price also recorded for Decca with his own group, the Texas Blusicians, which usually included alto saxophonist Don Stovall and sometimes featured jazz luminaries such as trumpeter Freddie Webster or tenor saxophonist Lester Young. Price cut blues, boogies, ballads, and swing tunes—everything from “Sweet Lorraine” to “Do You Dig My Jive?”—singing himself on some numbers and using little-known vocalists such as Yack Taylor, Ruby Smith, and Jack Meredith on others. Most of his repertoire consisted of cover versions or thinly veiled rewrites of other artists’ material; and while his music incorporated many of the elements that later coalesced into rhythm-and-blues, his style was thoroughly conventional, never jelling into a clear-cut semblance of postwar R&B. During the 1940s, Price played clubs on Fifty-second Street as well as Cafe Society in Greenwich Village. He made his first trip to Europe in 1948 and returned many times before his death in 1992, enjoying considerably greater acclaim there than at home.
Although he apparently got his nickname by practicing Henry Busse’s “Hot Lips,” Oran Page was regarded as a Louis Armstrong imitator, initially at least.[67] By his own account, he played behind Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith early in his career; other sources have him working in a number of jazz bands before recording with the Blue Devils in 1929.[68] He spent the early 1930s with Bennie Moten, then joined Count Basie’s band, where he was recognized as an exceptional trumpeter with a distinctive growling tone. But Page was quickly signed as a solo artist by Louis Armstrong’s manager, Joe Glaser, and stayed behind in Kansas City when Basie left for New York in 1936. Page made his New York debut soon afterward and began recording with his own band in 1938. Over the next decade and a half, he led various large and small groups; he became a Fifty-second Street fixture and toured as a member of the white clarinetist Artie Shaw’s big band in 1941, singing on Shaw’s hit recording of “Blues in the Night.”
Page’s style lay somewhere between Louis Armstrong’s and Louis Jordan’s, with a particular emphasis on the blues, which Page shouted in a rasping voice that grew rougher with the passing years. While maintaining its bluesy essence, his music followed commercial trends, leaning toward swing in the 1930s, rhythm-and-blues in the 1940s, and mainstream pop in the 1950s. But Page also participated, together with Thelonious Monk, Charlie Christian, and other jazz experimenters, in the early-1940s Harlem jam sessions that spawned the bebop genre, and he made occasional use of Latin rhythms, as on the driving “Harlem Rhumbain’ the Blues,” from December 1940. Many prominent musicians passed through his bands, especially saxophonists, among them Don Byas, Lucky Thompson, Buddy Tate, Ike Quebec, Paul Quinichette, Ben Webster, Hal Singer, Earl Bostic, and Sam “the Man” Taylor.
“The Blues Jumped the Rabbit,” from March 1944, is one of the most R&B-like of Page’s earlier recordings. Like many country blues, it’s a collection of unrelated verses, including Blind Lemon Jefferson’s title line (Page also borrowed lines from Jefferson’s “Dry Southern Blues” for his own “Uncle Sam’s Blues” and “Old Man Ben”). After pianist Ace Harris plays the Basie-style “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie” introduction, Page sings, “When you lose your money, please don’t lose your mind,” a line from Jesse Crump’s composition “’Fore Day Blues,” which Ida Cox recorded in July 1927. (In November 1929, the country bluesman Blind Joe Reynolds recorded his adaptation of Crump’s song, “Outside Woman Blues,” which Eric Clapton sang on Cream’s 1967 album Disraeli Gears.) On the final, instrumental chorus of “The Blues Jumped the Rabbit,” the great jazz drummer Big Sid Catlett plays a slamming backbeat, nearly three months before Lucky Millinder’s “Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well.”
In late 1947, Page and his band toured with Wynonie Harris, and it was that group, including Hal Singer on tenor saxophone, that accompanied Harris on “Good Rockin’ Tonight.” On the same December 1947 series of sessions for King, just before the second musicians’ union recording ban, Page’s band backed Big Maybelle, who in 1955 would sing “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” the original R&B version of Jerry Lee Lewis’s first hit. In June 1949, Page and Pearl Bailey sang “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” the Frank Loesser standard introduced that year in the movie Neptune’s Daughter. Unlike several other versions of the song, their record was not a nationally charted hit, but it was successful enough that Page began recording more pop-oriented material with different female vocalists.
In May 1951, less than three months before Tiny Bradshaw cut “The Train Kept A-Rollin’,” Page recorded a western-themed R&B romp, “I Want to Ride Like the Cowboys Do,” complete with handclapped backbeats. During the same period, he also performed Dixieland material as part of the traditional-jazz revival movement. Page enjoyed increasing popularity in Europe, where he spent summers in the early 1950s, but he suffered a heart attack in October 1954 and died a month later.
The most celebrated rhythm-and-blues forerunner was Fats Waller, whose fame rivaled even Louis Armstrong’s. Until the 1930s, the Harlem-born Waller was known primarily as an organist and theatrical songwriter, but after he signed an exclusive contract with the Victor label in 1934 and began recording mainly vocal material with his new sextet, the Rhythm, he became an international pop star, appearing in movies, touring Europe, even performing on an early BBC television broadcast in England. Although Waller’s sound generally bears scant outward resemblance to R&B—he recorded few blues and practically no boogie-woogies—his leering, winking approach carried over into the suggestive humor of postwar black music.
Waller began to sing while performing on radio in early 1930s, after the Great Depression put his recording career on hold. His first regular program, Paramount on Parade, had only been on the CBS network for three months before Waller made his first vocal recordings, with Ted Lewis’s band.[69] Eight days later, on March 13, 1931, with just his own piano accompaniment, he cut a more exuberant version of one of the songs he’d recorded with Lewis, “I’m Crazy ’Bout My Baby.” Here, his mature singing style seems fully formed, lacking only some of its ultimate effervescence, as he delivers such typical asides as “Mercy! Oh, you slay me, you sweet thing” during his piano solo.
Waller’s next recording session, three years later, produced “I Wish I Were Twins,” the first in a steady series of pop hits that continued until his death in 1943. In August 1935, he recorded his first chart-topper, “Truckin’,” a song about a Harlem dance craze that was written by Ted Koehler and Rube Bloom for a review at the Cotton Club that year. But with its striding rhythms, “Truckin’,” aside from its subject matter and Waller’s hearty shouts of “Yeah,” has little in common with postwar rhythm-and-blues. Most of his material, including his original compositions, is even less R&B-like, and he makes sparing use of jive talk—as opposed to mere slang—even on his jivier songs, such as “The Joint Is Jumpin’” (which incidentally features a hard backbeat behind Waller’s extemporized monologue).[70] An exception is “It’s You Who Taught It to Me,” from November 1939, where he sings “I can mug, cut the rug, tiptoe like a jitterbug.” Just as a bluesman’s slurred syllables may imply more than his lyrics denote, Waller’s brashly insinuating voice, broadly satirical manner, and brilliant keyboard technique make relatively plain speech sound like hepster lingo.
About as close to rhythm-and-blues as Waller got was “Hold Tight (Want Some Sea Food Mama),” which he recorded in January 1939, just as the version the Andrews Sisters had cut with Jimmy Dorsey’s band the previous November entered the pop charts. The sisters’ record (released under Dorsey’s name) was the bigger seller, but Waller’s cartoonishly lecherous delivery seems better suited to such lines as “I like oysters, lobsters, too. I like my tasty butterfish. / When I come home late at night, I get my favorite dish.” According to the radio section of the April 24, 1939, issue of Time magazine, “In Harlem Hold Tight’s fishy lyrics are considered no ordinary clambake stuff, but a reasonable duplication of the queer lingo some Harlem bucks use in one form of sex perversion.”[71]
The magazine’s anonymous reporter goes on to maintain that “Hold Tight was originally conjured up in Harlem’s ‘Congo’ district where a black and elemental breed of cats drink cheap King Kong liquor, puff reefers and shout a frank and sexy jive talk all their own.” In fact, just five days before the Andrews Sisters cut the song, it was recorded for the first time by the New Orleans clarinet and soprano saxophone master Sidney Bechet, at Bechet’s first recording session as a bandleader. On “Hold Tight,” his sextet, including the electric guitarist Leonard Ware, is joined by a vocal duo credited as the Two Fishmongers, said to be Willie Spottswood and Eddie Robinson.[72]
In a letter to the editor published in Time’s May 15 issue, Lou Levy, the Andrews Sisters’ manager, tells how two white dancers, Jerry Brandow and Lenny Kent (whom Levy calls Larry), approached him with a snippet of a song they’d heard “in a New York or Philadelphia night club where a colored band was playing.”[73] That band might have been Bechet’s quartet, then working at Nick’s Tavern in Greenwich Village, or Ware’s trio, with Spottswood and Robinson on piano and bass. Kent, Patty Andrews (the sisters’ lead singer), and Vic Schoen (their arranger) tweaked “Hold Tight” into final form, adding a new introduction, and after considerable dispute, composers’ royalties were awarded to Brandow, Kent, Ware, Robinson, and Spottswood. But others continued to claim credit for at least parts of the song, among them Sy Oliver, Count Basie, Gene Krupa, singer Jerry Kruger, dancer and trumpeter Taps Miller, and Sidney Bechet, who explained that Clarence Williams had deemed the lyrics too lewd to publish in 1924.[74]
“Hold Tight” was clearly inspired by “Nagasaki,” the tongue-twisting 1928 Warren-Dixon standard, “where the fellers chew tobaccy and the women wicky wacky woo.” (“Nagasaki” in turn was likely inspired by Albert von Tilzer, Stanley Murphy, and Charles McCarron’s Hawaiian-themed 1916 composition “Oh, How She Could Yacki Hacki Wicki Wacki Woo,” a big hit that year for Arthur Collins and Byron Harlan.) As Levy lets on, the Andrews Sisters’ distinctive scat expression “foo-ra-de-ack-a-sa-ki” is adapted from the Bechet record’s phrase “floogie Nagasaki,” a confused cross between “Nagasaki,” with its Fujiyama mama, and “The Flat Foot Floogie,” Slim and Slam’s landmark hit from February 1938. “Foo-ra-de-ack-a-sa-ki” was picked up by Fats Waller (who also referenced Bechet’s “Hold Tight”) and found its way into Leo Watson’s “It’s the Tune That Counts,” from August 1939. Melodically, “Hold Tight” strongly resembles Count Basie’s riff tune “Out the Window,” from October 1937.
After “Hold Tight” was denounced as obscene by the influential newspaper columnist
Walter Winchell, some radio stations stopped playing it. Nevertheless, it was a major
hit for both Waller and the Andrews Sisters. “Winchell came out implying that it was
a dirty song,” Maxene Andrews commented. “So it was banned from the airwaves, which
increased the sales of the records because people wanted to know what was terrible
in the song.”[75] Waller’s version, where his band members serve as a responsive chorus, may have
influenced Louis Jordan. More importantly, as a proto-
R&B song that achieved mass popularity at the hands of both black and white artists
in spite (or because) of its sexual connotations, “Hold Tight” was a harbinger of
the rock ’n’ roll revolution.
“The Flat Foot Floogie” was probably the song that ignited the jive explosion, even though it contains no actual jive talk except for spoken interjections such as “Solid!” and “Man, that’s a killer!” Instead, it consists mainly of the nonsense refrain “The flat feet floogie with a floy, floy / Floy joy, floy joy, floy joy, floy joy.” A huge smash for its creators, singer-guitarist Slim Gaillard (who also played piano and vibraphone) and bassist Slam Stewart (whose specialty was to scat-sing in unison with his bowed solos), “The Flat Floot Floogie” was a lesser hit for Benny Goodman, for the white New Orleans trumpeter Wingy Manone, and for Louis Armstrong with the Mills Brothers; it was also recorded by Fats Waller, Count Basie, Woody Herman, and Django Reinhardt—all in 1938.
Gaillard, who modeled his singing style on Cab Calloway’s, Louis Armstrong’s, and especially Fats Waller’s, went on to invent a hepster language all his own, which he called “vout” (rhymes with “shout”). “Slim Gaillard is a tall thin Negro with big sad eyes who’s always saying, ‘Right-orooni’ and ‘How ’bout a little bourbon-orooni,’” wrote Jack Kerouac in his ur-beatnik novel On the Road. “And then Slim goes mad and . . . yells crazy things in Spanish, in Arabic, in Peruvian dialect, in Egyptian, in every language he knows, and he knows innumerable languages.”[76]
Later in life, Gaillard would claim that he was born in Cuba and that when he was twelve, his father, a steward on an ocean liner, had accidentally left him on the island of Crete for six months. More likely, he was a native of Detroit, where he worked as a guitar-playing tap dancer before moving to New York around 1937. He cut his first two sides in April 1937, as the singer with a band led by trumpeter Frankie Newton, a Fifty-second Street regular. Discovered by the pioneering disc jockey Martin Block, a Swing Street habitué, Gaillard was already performing on radio station WNEW when he met Slam Stewart and invited him onto his program. The two clicked immediately, and Block became their manager, securing a recording contract with Vocalion.[77] In January 1938, Slim and Slam recorded “The Flat Foot Floozie,” but Vocalion, objecting to the word “floozie,” refused to release it, so the duo rerecorded the song the following month. With the help of Lou Levy, Gaillard had “The Flat Foot Floogie” published by the Green Brothers and Knight, one of whose principals, Bud Green, appropriated a share of the composers’ credit.
The flip side of Slim and Slam’s “The Flat Foot Floogie” was “Chinatown, My Chinatown,” a Broadway standard from 1910 that Fletcher Henderson had revived as a jazz tune in 1930.[78] Gaillard first sings the chorus as Stewart scats responsively; then he engages Stewart in some jivey dialogue, borrowing the phrase “kicked the gong around” from Cab Calloway. In an interlude that’s totally unacceptable by today’s standards, Gaillard breaks into mock-Chinese gibberish, to which Stewart replies, “Chop chop chop chop chop.” (Gaillard is no more respectful on “African Jive,” from July 1941, where he intersperses faux-African nonsense chanting with phrases such as “scotch and soda” and “fried chicken.”)
In June 1938, Slim and Slam recorded their second hit, “Tutti-Frutti,” a song about ice cream that contains no jive talk besides the endless repetition of the title phrase. It remained for Little Richard to add the immortal “awop-bop-aloo-mop alop-bam-boom” to his September 1955 recording of “Tutti-Frutti” in New Orleans with members of trumpeter Dave Bartholomew’s band—Richard’s debut for the Specialty label and his first hit. According to Robert “Bumps” Blackwell, who produced the session, the singer had already cut several tracks that day in a more typical jump-blues style—similar to those he’d recorded two years earlier for the Peacock label in Houston—when, during a break, he began singing, “Awop-bop-a-loo-mop a-good Goddamn—tutti frutti, good booty.” It was a number he’d been performing while touring the South with his own band.[79]
Blackwell had to coax Richard into singing the raunchy lyrics for Dorothy LaBostrie, a young songwriter who happened to be at the studio, so that she could clean them up. The recorded version, written on the spot, has nothing in common with Gaillard’s text except for the title flavor, but though one swings while the other rocks, the two songs are similar enough in metrical structure and nonsensical concept to suggest that Little Richard’s “Tutti”—which enshrined gibberish as a hallmark of rock ’n’ roll—is based, however indirectly, on Slim and Slam’s. It’s also possible that Little Richard was influenced by the jiving 1939 swing anthem “Wham (Re-Bop-Boom-Bam),” which was written for Glenn Miller by Eddie Durham and Taps Miller and also recorded by Andy Kirk, Jimmie Lunceford, Teddy Wilson, Jack Teagarden, Roy Eldridge, Will Bradley, and Mildred Bailey, among others.
Jive talk, scat singing, foreign languages, and sheer nonsense were all conspicuous in the American pop-music mix from the late 1930s through the war years. In early 1938, the Andrews Sisters, who were not Jewish, scored their first No. 1 hit with “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen,” an English-language rewrite of a Yiddish theater song from 1932. The sisters followed with “Ti-Pi-Tin,” “Pross Tchai,” and “Say ‘Si Si,’” songs of Mexican, Russian, and Cuban derivation, respectively. Slim and Slam parodied the ethnic trend in August 1938 with “Vol Vist Du Gaily Star,” whose lyrics include such verses as “Vol vist du gaily star / I found my lucky star / Vol vist du gaily star / Lombello.” The song ends with a dialogue where Gaillard asks, “What do you think ‘Vol vist du gaily star’ means?” Stewart responds, “Man, I don’t know. What does it mean, man?” “Don’t mean a thing,” Gaillard answers. “Just a little jive talk, in the floogie language.”
Slim and Slam had a few more hits before Stewart left to join the Spirits of Rhythm in 1939, reuniting with Gaillard for occasional performances and recordings, as well as appearances in the movies Hellzapoppin’ and Almost Married. Gaillard continued to explore the comic possibilities of vout with his Flat Foot Floogie Boys, which at different times included tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, drummers Kenny Clarke and Chico Hamilton, and singer Leo Watson. After serving in the Army Air Corps, Gaillard resumed his career in Los Angeles, recording his final hit, the weirdly free-associative “Cement Mixer (Put-Ti-Put-Ti),” in December 1945 with drummer Zutty Singleton and bassist Bam Brown. Later the same month, he took part in a historic session with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie that included a bebop-tinged take on “Flat Foot Floogie.”
Gaillard recorded prolifically for various labels through the early 1950s, reprising his hits on the fancifully titled medleys “Avocado Seed Soup Symphony” and “Opera in Vout.” He dropped out of show business for a while in the 1960s, but by the following decade he was singing in nightclubs and acting on such television shows as Along Came Bronson and Marcus Welby, M.D. A part in the 1979 miniseries Roots: The Next Generations brought him wider attention, and in the early 1980s Dizzy Gillespie persuaded him to make an international comeback. Gaillard moved to London, where he recorded his final album in 1982, appeared in the movie Absolute Beginners in 1986, and was the subject of a BBC documentary in 1989. He died of cancer in 1991.
Before 1938, the word “jive” showed up in the titles of jazz instrumentals such as Duke Ellington’s “Jive Stomp” (1933), Lionel Hampton’s “Jivin’ the Vibres” [sic] (1937), and Red Norvo’s “Jiving the Jeep” (1937), as well as in blues songs such as Frankie “Half-Pint” Jaxon’s “Jive Man Blues” (1929), Coot Grant and Kid Wilson’s “Jive Lover” (1932), and Bumblebee Slim’s “The Jive of Mine” (1936). But it was not generally used to refer to jitterbug jargon until Cab Calloway recorded “Jive (Page One of the Hepster’s Dictionary)” in August 1938, at the same session where he cut “The Boogie-Woogie.” A proliferation of jive songs followed, and jive talk enjoyed mainstream pop appeal through the mid-1940s, turning up in such incongruous settings as Alfred Hitchcock’s grim 1944 war movie Lifeboat, in which William Bendix, as a Lindy-hopping merchant seaman whose wounded leg must be amputated, boasts, “I can outjive the rest of those hepcats even with a bum gam.”
The concurrent emergence of jump music and jive talk led to their combination in songs such as the Four Clefs’ “The Jive Is Jumpin’” and Cab Calloway’s “(Hep-Hep!) The Jumpin’ Jive,” from June and July 1939, respectively. The former was a mere blip on the musical radar screen, while the latter was a massive hit, Calloway’s biggest after “Minnie the Moocher.” Although Calloway shares the composers’ credit for the “The Jumpin’ Jive” with the white songwriters Frank Froeba and Jack Palmer, the song was first recorded by Lionel Hampton, in June 1939. The white bandleaders Van Alexander and Jimmy Dorsey (with singer Helen O’Connell) also recorded it before Calloway, and the Andrews Sisters recorded it after him, while Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller performed it on radio broadcasts. But Calloway’s version was the most popular by far.
“The Jumpin’ Jive” has a couple of nonsense words in common with “Hold Tight”—the enigmatic “foo,” for example—and Calloway cements the connection by using the phrase “de-boodle-de-ack-a-saki” in his introduction, which is not heard in the other versions. Calloway’s combination of hepster lingo and mumbo jumbo (“Palomar, shalomar, Swanee shore / Let me dig that jive once more”) set the tone for the jive songs of the era.
In late June 1939, between Lionel Hampton’s and Cab Calloway’s recordings of “The Jumpin’ Jive,” the Cats and the Fiddle made their studio debut. Formed in Chicago in 1937 in the mold of the Spirits of Rhythm, the group comprised lead singer Austin Powell, who played tenor guitar, bass singer Chuck Barksdale, who played bass fiddle, first tenor Jimmie Henderson, who played the tiple, and second tenor Ernie Price, who played both tiple and guitar. Even before their first recordings, they appeared in the 1938 movies The Duke Is Tops, a musical starring Lena Horne, and Two-Gun Man from Harlem, a western starring the black singing cowboy Herb Jeffries.
Signed to the Bluebird label by Lester Melrose, the Cats and the Fiddle cut both jive songs and harmony ballads, the latter closer in feel to 1950s doo-wop than anything the Ink Spots recorded. Their jive songs included “Gang Busters,” “Public Jitterbug No. 1,” “That’s On Jack, That’s On,” and the marijuana paean “Killin’ Jive” (“You will think you’ve blown your top / Oh, baby, you start laughin’ and you can’t stop”)—all from 1939. They also perform “Killin’ Jive” in The Duke Is Tops, twirling their instruments or playing them behind their backs but omitting the “Johnny B. Goode” opening riff that Ernie Price plays as part of his tiple solo on the “Killin’ Jive” record.
Explicitly referencing Cab Calloway and Fats Waller, the Cats and the Fiddle raised jive to a new level with their clever lyrics, snappy scat singing, fluid harmonies, and solid musicianship. But the closest they ever came to a hit was “I Miss You So,” a romantic ballad written by Jimmie Henderson and recorded in December 1939 at the group’s second studio session, with Henderson singing the lead. Henderson never profited from his song’s success, however; he died of meningitis in 1940 and was replaced by Herbie Miles. After the Cats rerecorded “I Miss You So” with Miles for the Regis label in 1946 (prompting Bluebird to reissue the original), it was covered in 1947 by the Charioteers, the King Cole Trio, and the Lionel Hampton Sextet (with vocals by Roland Burton and the Hamp-Tones). But it was the Orioles’ 1950 version (released in 1951 and again in 1953) that made the song a pop/doo-wop standard, covered by Bill Kenny’s brother Herb Kenny (1953), Chris Connor (1956), Fats Domino (1958), Steve Gibson and the Red Caps (1959), Paul Anka (1959), Lee Andrews (1960), the Mills Brothers (1960), Little Anthony and the Imperials (1965), and Charlie Rich (1968), among others.
With varying personnel, the Cats and the Fiddle continued to perform and record through the early 1950s. In late 1940, Herbie Miles was replaced by the Virginia-born guitarist Tiny Grimes, who left in 1942 and joined Slam Stewart in California; the following year, Grimes and Stewart formed a trio with the virtuoso jazz pianist Art Tatum. Returning to New York, Grimes recorded with such jazz greats as Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, and Billie Holiday, meanwhile cutting rhythm-and-blues material with singers such as Gatemouth Moore, Walter Brown, and the Three Barons. He straddled the two genres on sessions with Hot Lips Page, Dud Bascomb, and Earl Bostic, as well as with his own bands, which often included tenor saxophonist Red Prysock and pianist Freddie Redd. Around 1950, he led a kilted R&B group called the Rocking Highlanders; a couple of years later, he played on singer Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s first sides. On his quintet’s November 1951 recording of “Tiny’s Boogie Woogie” (or “Tiny’s Boogie”), Grimes, playing his four-string electric guitar, sounds like a more sophisticated Chuck Berry. But with the rise of rock ’n’ roll, he went back to straight-ahead jazz, enjoying a long career before his death in 1989.
Like Tiny Grimes or Hot Lips Page, the clarinetist and alto saxophonist Skeets Tolbert blurred the line between jazz and R&B, leaning even further toward the latter. Raised in North Carolina, he attended college in Charlotte, where he joined Taylor’s Dixie Serenaders. After moving to New York in 1934, he played in a short-lived band fronted by the Olympic sprinter Jesse Owens, then took over trombonist Snub Mosley’s group, performing at clubs such as the Black Cat in Greenwich Village and the Cafe Creole in Midtown, where the ensemble was cited by Maurie Orodenker in Billboard as “one of the best on the street of the rock-and-rollers.”[80] Signed to Decca with John Hammond’s help, Tolbert cut jump-blues and jive songs with his Gentlemen of Swing between 1939 and 1942 but never recorded again after the first musicians’ union ban, although he did make several Soundies.[81]
Most of his records feature vocals by band members or by singers such as Babe Wallace, whose “Fine Piece of Meat” contains the verse “Yes, I know you’re just as hip as can be / Whenever you’re near, you do things to me / You got mellow cheeks and the right size feet / Baby, you’re a fine piece of meat.” Tolbert also cut a couple of songs by Jesse Stone, including “Papa’s in Bed with His Britches On,” which was covered by Cab Calloway. But Tolbert’s own composition “Hit That Jive, Jack,” which he recorded in December 1940, is his most famous song, if only because the King Cole Trio covered it in October 1941.[82]
While Skeets Tolbert’s name is scarcely mentioned in jazz reference books, Nat “King” Cole remains one of the best-loved figures in American pop-music history. But Cole is now recognized almost exclusively as a balladeer, his early career as a jazz pianist and jive singer nearly forgotten. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, he grew up in Chicago, where he absorbed Earl Hines’s stride-piano style. He first recorded in 1936 with a band led by his brother Eddie Cole, a bassist. Later that year, the brothers went on tour with a revival production of the Sissle and Blake review Shuffle Along. Eddie soon quit, but Nat went west with the show, remaining in Los Angeles after the troupe ran out of money and disbanded in 1937.
With bassist Wesley Prince and guitarist Oscar Moore, he formed the King Cole Trio to work in West Coast nightclubs. Beginning in September 1938, the group cut a series of transcription discs—for radio play only—that were broadcast by stations around the country. The repertoire on these discs consists largely of jive songs, including such nursery-rhyme takeoffs as “Three Blind Mice” “Patty Cake, Patty Cake,” and “Georgie Porgie.” The material is stylistically similar to the trio’s later records, but female vocalists are sometimes added. On the transcription take of Cole’s jivey composition “I Like to Riff,” recorded in April 1939, Prince and Moore sometimes sing in responsive harmony to Cole’s vocal lead, imparting more of a rock ’n’ roll flavor than on versions of the same song recorded for the Ammor label in November 1940 or for Decca in July 1941, where Prince and Moore scat-sing in unison with Cole rather than harmonizing.
It was at the November 1940 session that Cole, Moore, and Prince made their first retail records as the King Cole Trio. In May and July of that year, they had recorded eight sides with Lionel Hampton for Victor under Hampton’s name, including two, “Dough-Ra-Me” and “Jivin’ with Jarvis,” that feature Hampton, Cole, and Moore singing together as the Hampton Rhythm Boys. “These were some of my biggest-selling hits that year,” Hampton writes in his autobiography, “and they also helped Nat.”[83]
In December 1940, the King Cole Trio cut the first of four sessions for Decca, recording a pair of standards (“Honeysuckle Rose” and “Sweet Lorraine”), an original instrumental (“This Side Up”), and a comic novelty (“Gone with the Draft”), but no real jive songs. With support from disc jockeys such as Al Jarvis (to whom “Jivin’ with Jarvis” had been dedicated), the records were successful enough to launch the trio on a national tour. The group’s second Decca session took place in Chicago in March 1941 but again produced no true jive songs, although “Scotchin’ with the Soda,” like “Gone with the Draft,” is jive in all but vocabulary. Cole moved on to New York, performing at Nick’s Tavern in Greenwich Village and then Kelly’s Stable on Fifty-second Street. The trio recorded “I Like to Riff” at its third Decca session, in July 1941; its final, October session for the label, also in New York, yielded the jive classics “Are You Fer It?” and “Hit That Jive, Jack,” as well as the similar-sounding but practically jiveless “Call the Police.”
Cole’s “Hit That Jive, Jack” is faster and more jittery but, surprisingly, less jivey than Skeets Tolbert’s cucumber-cool original, substituting the phrase “goin’ downtown to see a man,” for example, for Tolbert’s “goin’ to the corner to dig the man.” As the flip side of Cole’s first big R&B hit, the bluesy “That Ain’t Right,” “Hit That Jive, Jack” reached a wide but still limited audience. Cole’s first pop hit was the love song “All for You,” an October 1942 recording for the tiny Excelsior label that Capitol rereleased the following year, during the recording ban.
Just before its studio debut for Capitol in November 1943, Cole’s trio, with Johnny Miller now on bass, recorded four sides for the Premier label, which afterward changed its name to Atlas. Oscar Moore then arranged for his older brother, guitarist Johnny Moore, to record with his own trio for Atlas. The resulting records were the first for Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, with singer-pianist Charles Brown; that group had a landmark R&B hit, “Drifting Blues,” in 1946, popularizing a cool approach to the blues that echoed the King Cole Trio’s jazzier nonchalance. Two of the Three Blazers’ Atlas sides feature Frankie Laine, a white singer whose Cole-like crooning on “Maureen” and “Melancholy Madeline” is at opposite poles from the intensely emotional style that would soon make him a pop star.
At its first Capitol session, the King Cole Trio recorded “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” a Cole composition the group had already performed for the movie Here Comes Elmer. The song is a jived-up variation of an African American folk tale, a different version of which was recorded in 1947 by Willie Dixon’s Big Three Trio as “Signifying Monkey.” A bigger smash than “All for You,” “Straighten Up and Fly Right” made Cole’s name, but though he had hits in 1946 with the nonsense song “The Frim Fram Sauce” and the jive-like “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66”—the latter covered by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, Louis Jordan, Perry Como, Chuck Berry, and the Rolling Stones, among others—his output on Capitol for the duration of his career consisted mainly of romantic ballads. Following a number of personnel changes, his trio broke up in 1951, and Cole reinvented himself as a standup singer, seldom seen playing piano.
Dimly remembered today, the King Cole Trio was highly influential, inspiring such jazz trios as Art Tatum’s and Oscar Peterson’s. Besides being a superb singer, Cole was one of the finest jazz pianists ever, combining propulsive rhythms with progressive harmonies that anticipated the bebop of Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell. Oscar Moore, elaborating on the electric innovations of his fellow Texas native Charlie Christian, paved the way for modern jazz guitarists such as Kenny Burrell and Grant Green. As for the group’s jive songs, Gunther Schuller writes, “the taste and sheer skill with which the King Cole Trio handled such material was of such high order that they all but turned it into a new art form.”[84]
Cole was a principal model for both Ray Charles and Chuck Berry. Charles, by his own admission, imitated Cole (as well as Charles Brown) in the early part of his career, making some of his first records with a guitar-bass-and-piano trio. He even cut a 1949 session for Swing Time with Johnny Miller and Oscar Moore, crooning like Cole’s clone on the standard “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now.” “He influenced me above all others,” Charles writes of Cole in his autobiography. “Musically, I walked in his footsteps until I found a stride of my own.”[85] Berry, too, was deeply indebted to Cole, less for his jive songs, ironically, than for his ballads. “Listening to my idol Nat Cole prompted me to sing sentimental songs with distinct diction,” Berry writes.[86]
Perhaps the jivingest of the jive singers, possibly excepting the bebop vocalist Babs Gonzales, was Harry “the Hipster” Gibson, a white singer-pianist who combined jive with boogie-woogie in a frenzied act that prefigured 1950s rock ’n’ roll. On the remarkably rock-like “4F Ferdinand, the Frantic Freak,” from 1944, he pounds out a Pete Johnson–esque boogie while talk-singing couplets such as “He’s got epileptic fits, a very bad rash / Now he’s 4F Ferdinand in the draft.” Watching the Soundies that Gibson made the same year, where he stands at the piano or crouches atop the bench, mugging and rolling his eyes as he attacks the keyboard, one is inescapably reminded—despite Gibson’s superior technique—of Jerry Lee Lewis, if not Little Richard. “Everybody acted like a gentleman until I got into it,” Gibson reminisced.[87]
Born into a musical family in the Bronx, Harry Raab began playing in a white jazz band at age thirteen; a couple of years later he joined a black band and was invited to the Rhythm Club, a musicians’ hangout in Harlem. He picked up pointers from Harlem pianists and learned Fats Waller’s style by listening to his records. He was filling in for the regular pianist at a Harlem nightclub in the late 1930s when he was discovered by Waller himself, who hired him to play during intermissions at his steady gig at the Yacht Club on Fifty-second Street.[88] Soon, Gibson—he’d taken the surname from a brand of gin—was a Swing Street institution, incorporating many of Waller’s stage mannerisms but with boogie rhythms and a jivier vocabulary. He began writing his own material and in April 1944 recorded an album for the classical Musicraft label—Boogie Woogie in Blue, featuring Big Sid Catlett on drums and including a jive glossary on the inside cover.
The album included his self-referential song “Handsome Harry, the Hipster” (“He’s frantic and fanatic / With jive he’s an addict”), where he plays the “Johnny B. Goode” opening riff in his piano solo before breaking into a torrid boogie-woogie. Gibson claimed to have coined the word “hipster” after musicians started using the word “hip” to replace “hep.” He even recorded a song called “It Ain’t Hep,” explaining the change with lines such as “Man, you ain’t hip if you don’t get hip to this ‘hip’ and ‘hep’ jive.”
The success of Boogie Woogie in Blue landed Gibson a yearlong engagement at Billy Berg’s club in Hollywood, where he was often billed together with Slim Gaillard; a number of the shows were recorded for broadcast by the Armed Forces Radio Service. In 1946, Gibson appeared in the teen movie Junior Prom, turning a classroom into a dance hall with a jiving performance of “Keep the Beat.” The same year, he recorded his signature song, “Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine?” for Musicraft, with Gaillard on guitar and Zutty Singleton on drums. In its March 25, 1946, issue, Time magazine reported that the Los Angeles radio station KMPC had banned both Gibson’s and Gaillard’s records on the grounds that “be-bop,” as program director Ted Steele referred to their music, “tends to make degenerates out of our young listeners.”[89]
After returning east with the touring company of the Mae West stage comedy Come On Up, Gibson worked nightclubs with the likes of Louis Armstrong, Stuff Smith, and the jive comedian Lord Buckley. In 1947, he recorded an album for the Diamond label and a half-dozen transcription discs for Armed Forces Radio. In 1953, perhaps inspired by Buckley, he recorded several jived-up fairy tales for Aladdin (“the little beanstalk said, ‘Hey boy, lay a deuce on the man, take me to your pad, and stash me out in the back yard’”). In 1957, Gibson issued a single and an EP on his own Hip label, but he did not record again until 1974, when he cut a pair of singles in California. Two years later, he made the album Harry the Hipster Digs Christmas, including such spoofs as “Twas the Night Before Christmas Boogie.” Embracing the role of hippie godfather, he recorded two more albums in the 1980s, the second not released until after his 1991 suicide.
Partly because of an association with drug abuse that musicians such as Gibson did little to dispel, jive fell from mainstream favor after World War II, lingering on among beboppers and beatniks, as well as rhythm-and-blues singers, who tended to celebrate alcohol rather than drugs. In other words, jive went underground, resurfacing briefly during the rock ’n’ roll explosion of the mid-1950s, as when Little Richard sang, “Oh, big conniver, nothin’ but a jiver / I done got hip to your jive” on his 1956 hit “Slippin’ and Slidin’ (Peepin’ and Hidin’).” Over time, jive talk faded from rock music, as the genre distanced itself from its African American roots; meanwhile, R&B artists updated their lyrics with newer slang.
While jive songs were often associated with small groups, jump music, although sometimes performed by combos such as the Savoy Sultans, was largely the province of the big bands. Along with Count Basie’s, Andy Kirk’s, and Jimmie Lunceford’s bands, those of Erskine Hawkins, Lionel Hampton, Buddy Johnson, and Jay McShann were part of the musical movement that led to the birth of rhythm-and-blues. All these bandleaders were originally from the Midwest, South, or Southwest; arriving in New York in the 1930s or early 1940s, they brought with them a bluesy sensibility lacking in such established Harlem bands as Claude Hopkins’s, which could (and did) make a tune called “Swingin’ and Jivin’” sound stiff and lame.
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Erskine Hawkins took up the trumpet as a teenager, inspired by Louis Armstrong. At State Teachers College in Montgomery, he joined the ’Bama State Collegians, a student band that toured to raise money for the school. The Collegians were so well received at their 1934 Harlem debut that the group turned professional; two years later, they returned to New York and recorded for Vocalion, with Hawkins—already known for his flashy high-note playing—as their leader. Under Moe Gale’s management, the band became the Erskine Hawkins Orchestra in 1938, recording for Bluebird and performing regularly at the Savoy Ballroom.
Mixing hot and sweet material, Hawkins patterned his ensemble sound after Jimmie Lunceford’s, with rich, danceable arrangements by trumpeter Sammy Lowe, pianist Avery Parrish, and alto saxophonist Bill Johnson. The personnel roster was unusually stable, with several of the original ’Bama State Collegians remaining until Hawkins reduced his big band to a combo in 1953. Among the band’s stalwarts were alto saxophonist Jimmy Mitchelle (who also sang the blues or crooned in the style of Dan Grissom or Pha Terrell), baritone saxophonist Haywood Henry, tenor saxophonist Paul Bascomb, and trumpeter Wilbur “Dud” Bascomb, Paul’s younger brother.
Hawkins’s biggest hit was “Tuxedo Junction,” a catchy riff tune written by Hawkins with Bill Johnson and tenor saxophonist Julian Dash and recorded in July 1939. The tune was a No. 1 hit for Glenn Miller the following year and was also covered by Jan Savitt, Gene Krupa, Ella Fitzgerald, and the Andrews Sisters, to name a few. Among other noteworthy Hawkins recordings are the classic “After Hours,” a mellow Avery Parrish piano boogie from June 1940, and “Tippin’ In,” an Ellington-esque swing tune from January 1945. Hawkins maintained his popularity after World War II, turning toward rhythm-and-blues with songs such as “Big Fat Sam,” from December 1947, where Jimmy Mitchelle’s singing about a Birmingham glutton is accompanied by a chorus of band members and a handclapped backbeat.
Paul and Dud Bascomb left Hawkins in 1944 and formed their own band in New York, performing at the Downbeat Club on Fifty-second Street.[90] Dud had played the famous trumpet solo on “Tuxedo Junction,” often mistakenly credited to Hawkins. Paul’s saxophone solo on “Big John’s Special,” from September 1936, may contain the first true example of R&B-style honking on record. In 1946, the brothers split up to lead separate groups, Dud’s oriented more toward bebop and Paul’s toward rhythm-and-blues. Drummer Albert Alston plays a pounding backbeat on Paul Bascomb’s “Leap Frog Blues,” recorded for the Alert label in 1946. Bascomb switched to the Manor label the following year and began singing under the name Manhattan Paul. His boisterous “Rock and Roll” (usually dated to 1947 but more likely recorded in 1948, after Wynonie Harris’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight”) alternates verse-and-refrain and standard blues choruses, with a swing rather than rhythm-and-blues saxophone solo. While remaining jazzy, Bascomb’s style becomes more R&B-like on the sides he cut for the States label in 1952. But the shuffling “Mumbles Blues,” which he recorded for Mercury in August of that year, is outright rock ’n’ roll, with a stuttering vocal that anticipates the Rivingtons’ “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow” and the Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird” by a decade.[91]
Julian Dash, a Hawkins sideman from 1938 until 1953, cut his own jazzy R&B records for Mercury, Vee-Jay, and other labels in the early 1950s. Bill Johnson formed his Musical Notes, a combo that set vocal harmonies to jump rhythms, in 1946. “Rock, rock, rock, everybody,” Johnson shouts on “Elevator Boogie,” recorded for RCA Victor in August 1947. Several of Johnson’s recordings were later covered by such doo-wop groups as the Orioles (“Don’t You Think I Ought to Know”) and the Flamingos (“Dream of a Lifetime”). Haywood Henry played rock ’n’ roll shows as a member of Alan Freed’s mid-1950s stage band, along with Sam “the Man” Taylor and Big Al Sears. And Sammy Lowe went on to arrange and conduct recording sessions for such rock and soul artists as the Platters (“My Prayer”), Sam Cooke (“Sad Mood”), the Tokens (“The Lion Sleeps Tonight”), and James Brown (“It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World”). Among the musicians on “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” are Dud Bascomb and Haywood Henry. Erskine Hawkins himself continued to perform into the 1980s, dying in 1993.
Lionel Hampton had perhaps the most enduringly successful career of any jazz musician. Born in Louisville, raised in Birmingham and Chicago, he learned to play drums in a youth band sponsored by the Chicago Defender, an African American newspaper. In high school, he played in a band led by an older teenager, Les Hite; after Hite moved to California, he got Hampton a job in Paul Howard’s Los Angeles–based band, which Hite took over in 1930. “He wanted me because I had a different style on drums,” Hampton recalled. “I was already playing with a heavy afterbeat, getting that rock-and-roll beat that wouldn’t even get popular until the 1950s.”[92] Backbeats can indeed be heard on many of the sides Hampton recorded with Howard for Victor in 1929 and 1930, but they are mostly supplied by banjo player Thomas Valentine.
Louis Armstrong, sojourning on the West Coast, fronted Hite’s band from the summer of 1930 to the spring of 1931. On a recording session in October 1930, Hampton played a vibraphone that Armstrong had noticed in the studio, popularizing the xylophone-like device as a jazz instrument; it soon became his instrument of choice, although he continued to play drums and two-fingered piano. Hampton was leading his own band at a Los Angeles club in August 1936 when Benny Goodman dropped in; duly impressed, he hired Hampton to record with him in a quartet including Teddy Wilson on piano and Gene Krupa on drums. For the next four years, Hampton toured with Goodman’s quartet, quintet, and sextet, racially integrated groups that performed between the shows of but not together on stage with Goodman’s all-white big band. Meanwhile, Hampton recorded for Victor under his own name with various pickup bands, which, since they did not perform live, could include both black and white musicians. These recordings, featuring Johnny Hodges, Coleman Hawkins, Harry James, and other instrumental stars, are generally in a mainstream swing mold; with such exceptions as “The Jumpin’ Jive,” they scarcely hint at rhythm-and-blues.
Hampton formed his own, all-black big band in late 1940 and, after a couple of Victor sessions, began recording for Decca the following year. The band’s studio output was quite conventional until May 1942, when Hampton cut “Flying Home,” a tune he had previously recorded with Goodman’s sextet (including Charlie Christian) in October 1939 and on his own in February 1940. Hampton always maintained that he’d come up with the melody himself but had to share the composer’s credit with Goodman; John Hammond, however, attributed the theme to Charlie Christian.[93] Hampton’s 1940 recording of “Flying Home,” featuring a Budd Johnson tenor saxophone solo that was punctuated with several honks, had already been a hit. What made the 1942 recording stand out—besides Hampton’s flag-waving arrangement—was the tenor saxophone solo by Illinois Jacquet, a nineteen-year-old from Houston who’d just switched from alto sax to join Hampton’s band. “I experimented at the Apollo Theatre, and one day I played a solo similar to the one I did on the record, and the house stood,” Jacquet recalled. “When we got ready to make the record, as I was walking to the mike, Marshall Royal, who was the straw boss in Hamp’s band, said, ‘Go for yourself, man,’ because he knew I could do it. And I heard that.”[94]
At first, Jacquet’s solo follows the basic contours of Budd Johnson’s, in a style grainier than but otherwise similar to that of Jacquet’s idol, Herschel Evans, who’d played with both Hampton and Count Basie before dying in 1939, a month shy of his thirtieth birthday. But then, as trombones riff insistently behind him, Jacquet breaks into a series of irresistibly urgent cries—not honks—that he repeats before playing a final chorus. After the full band comes in, the number climaxes with a vibraphone figure that anticipates the “What makes your big head so hard?” rhythm in Louis Jordan’s “Caldonia.”
“Flying Home,” in its 1942 incarnation, quickly became Hampton’s theme song, an ideal vehicle for his energy—he’d been billed as “the World’s Fastest Drummer”—and showmanship.[95] “I would come up with things like this at the Apollo,” Hampton told writer Ted Fox. “I used to have this part in ‘Flyin’ Home’ [sic] where the lights would go out and you’d see airplanes projected on the scrim behind the bandstand. You’d hear the motors humming and that’s when the saxophone player, Illinois Jacquet . . . started playin’. . . . The band would be shouting down, and we used to have a lot of acrobatic stuff with the horns. . . . Everybody’d be rockin’. We were the originators of that.” Malcolm X described one of Hampton’s shows at the Savoy Ballroom: “The people kept shouting for Hamp’s ‘Flyin’ Home,’ and finally he did it. . . . I had never seen such fever-heat dancing.”[96]
Jacquet left Hampton in 1943 and joined Cab Calloway’s band, with which he appeared in the movie Stormy Weather, starring Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Lena Horne. Although he made no commercial recordings with Calloway, some of the band’s radio performances were captured on transcription discs, including “105 in the Shade,” where Jacquet’s horn leaps into an unusually high register. Jacquet left Calloway and formed a quintet in Los Angeles in 1944; in July of that year, he played together with Nat “King” Cole, guitarist Les Paul, and others in a benefit concert staged by the promoter Norman Granz at L.A.’s Philharmonic Auditorium. The performance was recorded for broadcast on Armed Forces Radio, and Granz had the recordings released commercially, first on Moses Asch’s Disc label and then, after Disc went bankrupt, on Mercury. A ten-minute jam titled “Blues” was divided among three 78-rpm sides, with “Blues, Pt. 2” containing a saxophone solo where Jacquet, after working up a head of steam, breaks into prolonged, freakishly high shrieks.
The show became the basis for Jazz at the Philharmonic, the long-running concert series with which Jacquet toured and recorded into the 1950s. “Blues, Pt. 2,” coming on the heels of “Flying Home,” secured his reputation as a frantic saxophone howler, the object of popular adulation and critical scorn. Following a stint with Count Basie at the end of World War II, Jacquet divided his time between Jazz and the Philharmonic and his own groups. In August 1945, his band backed Wynonie Harris on “Wynonie’s Blues” and “Here Comes the Blues.” Through the end of the decade, he recorded for Aladdin, Apollo, Savoy, and Victor—fiery tunes that mixed swing, blues, and bebop as well as original ballads such as “Black Velvet” and “Robbin’s Nest” that helped redeem him in critics’ eyes. In the 1950s, he turned toward straight-ahead jazz, recording mostly for Norman Granz’s Clef label; his 1952 hit “Port of Rico,” with Count Basie playing organ, prefigured the soul-jazz of Jimmy Smith and others. He struggled through the 1960s and 1970s but made a comeback in the 1980s, leading a big band until his death in 2004. But his chief legacy is the fervid saxophone style that inspired a generation of R&B honkers, setting the feverish tone for the rock-guitar rhapsodies that followed.
Jacquet’s replacement in Lionel Hampton’s band was Arnett Cobb, also from Houston. On the same March 1944 date that the band cut “Hamp’s Boogie Woogie,” Cobb played a honking, wailing, huge-toned solo on the rearranged “Flying Home, No. 2.” Cobb formed his own group in 1947, recording for Apollo, OKeh, and other labels through the 1950s in a swinging style only lightly tinged with R&B.
In August 1945, Helen Humes, who’d sung with Count Basie and others, recorded the bluesy “Be-Baba-Leba” with Bill Doggett’s band, including Wild Bill Moore on tenor saxophone. Adapted from saxophonist Big Jim Wynn’s “Ee-Bobaliba” and likewise shifting from a blues structure to twelve-bar verse-and-refrain, Humes’s hit version is virtually pure R&B, with an intermittent backbeat and boogie bass line. In December 1945, Hampton sang on his own variation, “Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop,” which despite its clunky rhythm was a much bigger hit. Later the same month, Wynonie Harris covered “Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop” with members of Hampton’s band for Hampton’s short-lived Hamp-Tone label. Louis Prima cut it with his big band in April 1946, but the best-selling version was the one recorded in May 1946 by Tex Beneke, the tenor saxophonist who assumed the leadership of Glenn Miller’s band after Miller’s death in 1944. The song’s appeal proved broad enough that it was recorded by Leon McAuliffe, the western-swing steel guitarist; Natalino Otto, the pioneering Italian swing singer; and Ernest Léardée, a Martinican violinist and saxophonist who helped introduce the biguine to Paris. Humes reprised “Be-Baba-Leba” with Dizzy Gillespie’s big band in the 1946 film Jivin’ in Be- Bop. The rhythm-and-blues singer Thurston Harris revived the song in 1958, giving it an all-out rock ’n’ roll treatment. The following year Chuck Berry recyled Harris’s (and Humes’s) opening line, “Oh well, oh well, I feel so fine today,” on his “Back in the U.S.A.,” changing “fine” back to Wynn’s original “good.”
Hampton’s boisterous brand of jazz did not appeal to critics such as Gunther Schuller, who wrote in the 1980s that “Hampton foreshadowed the empty-minded hysteria of today’s more outrageous rock singers. Nor is the distance between rock and Hampton’s 1940s’ early form of rhythm-and-blues all that great, certainly not in respect to its rhythmic, dynamic, and energy levels.”[97] But with his populist approach, Hampton was able to maintain his big band well into the 1960s, long after most swing-era outfits had folded. In his autobiography, he complains that his style was misconstrued during a tour of England in 1956. “There we were giving concerts of music in a program I had worked out . . . a kind of history of jazz. Meanwhile, people think it’s mostly rock and roll.”[98] He had no apparent qualms, however, about performing alongside Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and other rockers in the 1957 Alan Freed movie Mister Rock and Roll. By the 1960s, Hampton’s music had lost whatever allure it may have had for rock fans, but he continued to perform and record, mostly with small groups, almost up to his death in 2002, at the age of ninety-four.
No bandleader made the transition from swing to rhythm-and-blues more smoothly than Buddy Johnson. Even his earliest recording session, done for Decca in November 1939, has a strong R&B feel, thanks largely to the harmony vocals of the Mack Sisters. A song written by Johnson for that session, “Stop Pretending (So Hip You See),” was a hit for the Ink Spots in 1940 and was also covered that year by Fats Waller. His second session, in October 1940, featured his younger sister Ella singing on the eerily minor-ish “Please, Mr. Johnson,” which Amos Milburn transformed into a Charles Brown–style blues in 1952. “Boogie Woogie’s Mother-in-Law,” a showcase for Leonard Ware’s steel guitar recorded in April 1941 at Johnson’s third session, was the basis for the Mississippi bluesman Elmore James’s 1952 “Hawaiian Boogie.” The hit ballad “Baby, Don’t You Cry,” crooned by Warren Evans on Johnson’s November 1941 recording, was covered by Charles Brown in 1945; Ray Charles, setting the song to his bossa-like “new swingova rhythm,” made it a hit again in 1964.
Trumpeter Chester Boone sings on Johnson’s “I Ain’t Mad with You,” from January 1942, which Gatemouth Moore accelerated into “I Ain’t Mad at You, Pretty Baby” in May 1945. A few days later, Count Basie segued between two songs on his V-Disc recording “High Tide/I Ain’t Mad at You,” featuring a raucous, scatting vocal by Taps Miller; Basie rerecorded the paired tunes for Columbia a few months later. Wynonie Harris borrowed the line “I ain’t mad at you, don’t be mad with me” for his August 1945 recording of “Wynonie’s Blues.” Jesse Price, a drummer and singer who’d played with Basie in Kansas City, cut an altered “I Ain’t Mad at You” with an octet in October 1946 and with a quartet in April 1947. Basie scored a pop hit with his May 1947 recording of his peculiarly rising and falling “I Ain’t Mad at You,” again featuring Taps Miller. In August 1949, Jimmy “Baby Face” Lewis, a Harlem-based singer-guitarist, adapted the song as the hard-rocking “I’m So Good to You (Pretty Baby).” Huey “Piano” Smith used elements of Lewis’s and Moore’s versions to write the even harder-rocking “Roberta,” which the white New Orleanian Frankie Ford, backed by Smith’s band, sang on the flip side of his 1959 rock ’n’ roll hit “Sea Cruise.” The British rock group the Animals covered “Roberta” on the 1965 album Animal Tracks.
But though Johnson has been slighted by jazz historians and sometimes categorized as an R&B artist, he was steeped in swing. His November 1941 cover of Sam Theard’s “I Wonder Who’s Boogiein’ My Woogie,” which Theard recorded with Oscar’s Chicago Swingers in May 1936, provides a good example. Melodically based on Speckled Red’s “The Dirty Dozen,” Theard’s original is already jazzy, but in a traditional way, with striding rhythms and an Armstrong-like trumpet solo that quotes “Old Folks at Home.” Johnson’s riffing version, sung by Chester Boone, sounds more like a Lunceford or Basie arrangement, with a sleek tenor saxophone solo by the former Louis Jordan sideman Kenneth Hollon.
Having studied piano in his home town of Darlington, South Carolina, Johnson moved to New York in 1938. After touring Europe with the Tramp Band, a washboard group that performed in hobo costumes at the Cotton Club and Apollo Theatre, he began recording with his own combo, which he gradually expanded into a big band. Buddy himself sang on his first charted hit, “Let’s Beat Out Some Love,” from July 1942, but it was Ella Johnson’s bluesy, ingenuous vocals that sparked Johnson’s biggest sellers—“When My Man Comes Home,” also from July 1942, and “That’s the Stuff You Gotta Watch” from October 1944. Among the band’s other singers were Arthur Prysock and Etta Jones.
Prysock’s lush baritone is featured on the hit ballad “They All Say I’m the Biggest Fool,” while Buddy sings on “Fine Brown Frame” (a 1948 R&B smash for Nellie Lutcher), both from the same date as “That’s the Stuff You Gotta Watch.” A November 1945 session yielded the gorgeous ballad “Since I Fell for You” and the strutting blues “Walk ’Em,” both composed by Buddy Johnson: the former exposed Ella Johnson’s vocal shortcomings but was revived as an R&B hit by Annie Laurie in 1947 and became a standard after Lenny Welch’s 1963 recording crossed over to the pop charts; the latter, with its shuffling backbeat, defined the band’s trademark postwar dance rhythm.
Like Lionel Hampton, Johnson was able to keep his big band together long after the swing era ended. Between residencies at the Savoy Ballroom, he maintained a tour schedule so hectic that he was nicknamed the King of the One-Nighters. Although he sometimes performed for whites and occasionally crossed over to the pop charts with hits such as “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?” from June 1949, he concentrated his efforts on southern black audiences. “They don’t want the Ellington type of music in the halls where I play. . . . They come to dance and they want to hear that beat,” he told the writer John S. Wilson in 1950. “We’ve set our style now and we can’t change it to please New York because our bread and butter is in the south.”[99]
Johnson’s music veered even further toward rhythm-and-blues, complete with honking tenor saxophone solos by Purvis Henson, after he switched to the Mercury label in 1953. He recorded a pair of R&B hits that year, “Hittin’ on Me” (“I don’t want no man who always hittin’ on me / The last man that hit me has been dead since ’43”) and “I’m Just Your Fool,” both sung by Ella Johnson. Also in 1953, Buddy’s band appeared in the “Biggest Rhythm and Blues Show,” a package tour whose Cleveland concert was promoted by Alan Freed. The group also performed for Freed’s first East Coast show, the “Mayday Moondog Coronation Ball” in Newark, New Jersey, in May 1954; for his first New York show, the “Rock ’n’ Roll Jubilee Ball,” in January 1955; and for his “Diddley Daddy” show (headlined by Bo Diddley) in Boston in May 1955, as well as for the “Rock ’n’ Roll Revue” presented in New York in February 1957 by Freed’s rival disc jockey Jocko Henderson.[100]
Some of Johnson’s mid-1950s recordings are out-and-out rock ’n’ roll, in big-band form. These include “Ain’t Cha Got Me (Where You Want Me),” from July 1953; “So Good,” from August 1955; and “They Don’t Want Me to Rock No More,” from June 1957—all sung by Ella Johnson. Buddy talk-sings on his final R&B hit, “Rock On!” from January 1957, which was backed with another rocker, “Oh! Baby Don’t You Know.” But though he tried to keep up with the times, Johnson, entering middle age, could no longer attract young audiences. After an album for Roulette and a single for the Old Town label, he retired in the early 1960s, just as his health began to fail. He died in 1977; Ella Johnson, who quit the music business in order to care for her brother, died in 2004.
Jay McShann led the last territory band to achieve national prominence. Born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, he taught himself piano behind the backs of his disapproving parents, inspired by James P. Johnson’s accompaniment on Bessie Smith’s “Back Water Blues,” a record he found in his father’s furniture-moving truck. Modeling his style after Earl Hines’s, he played in a few bands before moving to Kansas City, where, after hearing Pete Johnson and Big Joe Turner, he added boogie-woogies and blues to his repertoire. He formed a combo in 1938 and expanded it to a big band, including the teenage Charlie Parker on alto saxophone. With the help of the journalist Dave Dexter, McShann obtained a recording contract with Decca, hiring the blues singer Walter Brown, a Dallas native, shortly before the first session.
On that April 1941 date, the band cut “Swingmatism,” a state-of-the-art jazz arrangement, but at the insistence of producer Dave Kapp (the brother of Jack Kapp and the man who’d signed Count Basie to Decca), the remaining material consisted of blues and boogies, using only a rhythm section on three of the six sides. Kapp’s judgment was vindicated when the initial release—“Confessin’ the Blues,” featuring Walter Brown singing with the rhythm section—became a big hit. (It was covered by the Chicago bluesman Little Walter in 1958 and by the Rolling Stones in 1964.) The flip side, “Hootie Blues,” where Brown sings with the full band, caught the ears of forward-looking musicians around the country for its single-chorus solo by Charlie Parker, which hints at the bebop revolution Parker was about to launch.
Conceived as a Basie-style swing band, McShann’s group was marketed as a jump-blues combo. Eager to repeat the success of “Confessin’ the Blues,” Dave Kapp omitted most of the brass and reed instruments throughout McShann’s second session, in November 1941, with Walter Brown singing the blues on all but one tune. After touring the South and Midwest, McShann’s ensemble made its triumphant New York debut at the Savoy Ballroom in February 1942, defeating Lucky Millinder’s group in a battle of the bands. Critics who saw the full band in performance complained that the recordings didn’t do it justice, so Kapp included all sixteen members on the group’s July 1942 session, shortly before the union recording ban took effect.[101] Only two of the four numbers were blues, sung by Walter Brown; one was a ballad, marking the recorded debut of singer Al Hibbler, who would soon find fame with Duke Ellington’s band; and one, “Sepian Bounce,” was a swinging instrumental.
McShann’s solo on “The Jumpin’ Blues,” from that date, contains the seeds of Nat “King” Cole’s “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66,” or at least its distinctive Oscar Moore guitar riff, while Parker’s solo opens with the same phrase as his 1946 bebop classic “Ornithology.” A true jump blues in the original sense of the term, with Walter Brown singing “Forget your troubles and jump your blues away” as the band riffs propulsively in swing rhythm, “The Jumpin’ Blues” illustrates the close connection between two nascent genres that would soon part company—bebop and rhythm-and-blues. “A lot of that stuff we were doin’ was strictly on that bop kick,” McShann acknowledged. “So I said, ‘Wait a minute. We keep this shit up here, we ain’t gonna be swingin’.”[102]
When the recording ban ended, McShann did one more session for Decca, without Parker, before being drafted in 1944. Given a medical discharge after a few months, he re-formed his big band in New York but disbanded it in Los Angeles and formed a combo, replacing Walter Brown with the suave Arkansas-born shouter Jimmy Witherspoon. McShann recorded for several independent labels, cutting “Ain’t Nobody’s Business,” a bluesy standard first popularized by Bessie Smith, for Supreme in November 1947. Released in 1949 under Witherspoon’s name (since McShann was under contract to Mercury at the time), the record shot to the top of the rhythm-and-blues charts.[103] McShann had two more R&B hits under his own name around the same time with the blues instrumentals “Hot Biscuits” and “Buttermilk,” both recorded for the Down Beat label in July 1948.
But in the early 1950s, McShann stopped touring and recording and settled in Kansas City, performing locally with a sextet. He returned to the studio in September 1955 to cut several tracks for Vee-Jay in Chicago, one of which, “Hands Off,” written and sung by the Kansas City native Priscilla Bowman, quickly became a No. 1 R&B hit. The lyrics date back at least as far as Big Bill Broonzy’s “Keep Your Hands Off Her,” from October 1935, but McShann’s arrangement is surprisingly modern, rhythmically similar to the one on the Cadillacs’ doo-wop classic “Speedoo,” recorded around the same time. (The opening bars of “Hands Off” have a strikingly reggae-like feel, and the song was reportedly popular in Jamaica.) “Hands Off” is the obvious basis for Ann Cole’s “Got My Mo-Jo Working (but It Just Won’t Work on You),” which Muddy Waters adopted as his theme song; Elvis Presley put the two songs together on a June 1970 studio jam that was released on the album Love Letters from Elvis.[104]
With the success of “Hands Off,” McShann again took to the road, stopping in Chicago in January 1956 to record another Vee-Jay session with Bowman. In what may have been his closest brush with rock ’n’ roll, McShann backed Bowman at Chicago’s Regal Theater on an early-1957 bill that included Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Gene and Eunice, the El Dorados, and Big Joe Turner. Later that year, Bowman went off on her own, and McShann reunited with Jimmy Witherspoon to record the nostalgic album Goin’ to Kansas City Blues for RCA Victor. His next recording, the 1966 album McShann’s Piano, was made possible by Dave Dexter, who had become a powerful executive at Capitol, having signed the Beatles to the label.
In the 1960s, McShann began touring Europe, where he would perform frequently until the mid-1990s. From 1969 on, McShann recorded prolifically in the United States, Canada, and Europe, playing (and occasionally singing on) standards as well as his older material. Together with Count Basie, Big Joe Turner, and others, he appeared in the 1979 film The Last of the Blue Devils, documenting a 1974 reunion of Kansas City musicians that McShann later characterized as “a good drunk weekend.”[105] He also appeared in the Clint Eastwood–directed “Piano Blues” segment of Martin Scorsese’s 2003 PBS video series The Blues. He died in Kansas City in 2006, at the age of ninety, remembered more as a master of jazz, blues, and boogie-woogie than as the successful and influential R&B artist he had also been.
Louis Prima spanned the historical gamut from traditional New Orleans jazz to small-combo jive to big-band jump to rhythm-and-blues and rock ’n’ roll, with Italian-accented novelty songs thrown in. Born into the large Italian-American community in New Orleans, Prima abandoned the violin, his first instrument, to follow in the footsteps of his cornet-playing older brother, Leon. In his early teens, he formed his first band, including clarinetist Irving Fazola; influenced primarily by Louis Armstrong, he played trumpet in a number of groups, including a theater orchestra with which he also sang and danced in costumed skits. He played with Red Nichols in Cleveland in 1932 and made a record for Bluebird with the Hotcha Trio (including pianist David Rose, the future composer of “Holiday for Strings” and “The Stripper”) in Chicago in 1933, scat-singing like Armstrong on “Chinatown, My Chinatown” and “Dinah.” He was back in New Orleans in 1934, performing at a nightclub owned by his brother, when he was discovered by Guy Lombardo, who persuaded him to move to New York.
Even with Lombardo’s help, Prima was unable to land a Big Apple gig for months after his arrival. Beginning in September 1934, however, he made a series of recordings for Brunswick with a septet billed as His New Orleans Gang, although most of the musicians were not New Orleanians. Stylistically, the music falls between Dixieland and swing, with Prima singing on nearly every number in what one listener called “that hoarse, horny voice of his.”[106] Finally booked for the opening week of the Famous Door on Fifty-second Street in March 1935, he was an overnight sensation, packing the house with musicians, adoring women, wide-eyed teenagers, and journalists.[107] Soon Prima was being featured on a nationally broadcast CBS radio show called Swing It.[108]
Reporting in the December 28, 1935, issue of The Billboard (as Billboard magazine was then called), Jerry Franken identified the Famous Door as the spawning ground for the white combos he termed jam bands and cited Prima’s group, with Pee Wee Russell on clarinet, as the spearhead of this new trend. “The music of a jam band is the music of a hot Negro orchestra made more compact, even hotter,” Franken wrote. “That may explain why people like it—because it is savagely rhythmic, almost primitive in its qualities.”[109] Prima’s “jam band” style—a crude update of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven sound, with more singing—is displayed on the critically respected pop hits he recorded for Brunswick between April and June of 1935. For example, on his de-Latinized “The Lady in Red,” a song introduced that year by Xavier Cugat, he intertwines improvised licks with Russell, then sings in a style that colors Armstrong’s rhythmic growl with Fats Waller’s sense of parody and a foretaste of Harry “the Hipster” Gibson’s frenzy.
In the fall of 1935, at the height of his early success, Prima moved to Los Angeles with his combo and opened his own Famous Door club, not affiliated with the original one. Before long, he was appearing in movies—short subjects showcasing his band, such as Swing It, as well as feature films such as Rhythm on the Range, The Champ’s a Chump, You Can’t Have Everything, and Manhattan Merry-Go-Round, where he played small parts as a musician or bandleader, often himself. In February 1936, he recorded his own composition “Sing, Sing, Sing” for Brunswick; the following year, Benny Goodman cut a double-sided version for Victor, driven by Gene Krupa’s pounding drums, that became the best-known anthem of the swing era.
Later in 1936, Prima expanded his group to twelve pieces and played a heavily publicized engagement in Chicago, where he also recorded four sides for Vocalion. But the big band was poorly received, and in late 1937 Prima returned to the Famous Door in New York for an extended engagement with a new combo. In 1938, he took his group on the road, touring mostly around the East Coast, meanwhile recording for Decca and appearing in more movies. He formed another big band, featuring singer Lily Ann Carol, which he called the Gleeby Rhythm Orchestra on his 1940 recordings for Varsity. Turning increasingly to pop and novelty material, he alienated critics while drawing overflow crowds to large theaters around the country.[110]
Besides major downtown venues, Prima’s big band regularly played black theaters such as the Royal in Baltimore, the Howard in Washington, D.C., the Regal in Chicago, the Paradise in Detroit, and the Apollo in Harlem. After attending a performance at the Howard in January 1942, Eleanor Roosevelt invited Prima to the White House, where, he later claimed, he greeted the president in hepster fashion, saying “Hello, Daddy!”[111] With his olive complexion, wavy hair, and broad features, Prima looked as though he might be of mixed race, and his gritty, New Orleans–accented singing sounded passably black. Three of his 1944 recordings for the Hit label—“I’ll Walk Alone,” “Robin Hood,” and “The White Cliffs of Dover”—made the Harlem Hit Parade, and he became one of the first white artists to cover an R&B song when he cut “Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well?” [sic] for Majestic in 1945.
Around the end of World War II, Prima was approached by the songwriter Barbara Belle, whom he hired as his personal manager. Prima wrote (or at least took credit for writing) a song with Belle, Anita Leonard, and Stan Rhodes called “A Sunday Kind of Love,” which he first cut for Majestic in February 1946. But the label did not release that or Prima’s second, September recording of the song, finally issuing his third recording, from January 1947. By then, bandleader Claude Thornhill had already recorded “A Sunday Kind of Love” with singer Fran Warren, and it was Thornhill’s version, along with Jo Stafford’s, that made the charts. The song became a pop standard, covered by Ella Fitzgerald, Billy Eckstine, Dinah Washington, Frankie Laine, and Kay Starr, and, beginning with the Harptones’ 1953 rendition, a doo-wop favorite, recorded by the Marcels, Regents, Mystics, Earls, and Devotions. Yet none of these versions, possibly excepting the Harptones’, rivals Prima’s wistfully rasping original.
In April 1944, Prima recorded “Angelina,” a song about a pizzeria waitress that mixes Italian phrases (“Ti voglio bene”) with references to minestrone, spumoni, lasagna, and the like (“What’s the story with the chicken cacciatore?”). It was a hit, and Prima followed with “Please No Squeeza da Banana,” “Felicia No Capicia,” and “Baciagaloop (Makes Love on the Stoop).” Italian immigrants had been caricatured in song as far back as the 1880s, when Frank Dumont published “The Dagoe Banana Peddler,” with verses such as “Plenty garlic and nice maccaroni [sic], / For my dinner I want ev’ry day, / In de winter I buy me a monkey, / And in front of your house I will play.”[112] Irving Berlin’s earliest songs include at least a dozen Italian-dialect numbers, among them “Sweet Italian Love” (1910), “Dat’s-a My Gal” (1911), and “Hey Wop” (1914). Songs about Irish, German, Jewish, and other immigrants were also popular, but the vogue for Italian-themed material lasted longest, continuing into the 1950s and 1960s with hits such as Rosemary Clooney’s “Botch-A-Me,” Dean Martin’s “That’s Amore,” and Jay and the Americans’ “Cara, Mia.”
Besides Italian novelties, Prima’s repertoire included everything from Louis Jordan’s “Caldonia” to the calypso “Rum and Coca-Cola,” the 1917 minstrel song “It Takes a Long, Tall Brown-Skin Gal to Make a Preacher Lay His Bible Down,” the country-flavored “Mary Lou” (with the Riders of the Purple Sage), the Yiddish-inflected “(You’ve Got to Have a Little) Mahzel,” and the purely nonsensical “Hitsum-Kitsum-Bumpity-Itsum.” One of the trademark hits that he continued to perform for the rest of his working life, along with “Angelina,” was “Robin Hood,” apparently inspired by the 1938 Errol Flynn swashbuckler.
Ever the entertainer, Prima had been disparaged by critics for his off-color comic stage antics since his early days on Fifty-second Street. In 1937, he made the “corn trumpet” list in the Down Beat readers’ poll; by 1945, he was being dismissed in Metronome magazine as a “buffoon” whose act “consists solely of repeating the same questionable Italian jokes, wild-arm-and-leg waving, and screeching of idiotic lyrics.”[113] Nevertheless, Prima’s career flourished during the immediate postwar years. Like Lionel Hampton and Buddy Johnson, he was able to maintain his big band after others had foundered, and he scored two of his biggest hits with “Bell Bottom Trousers” in 1945 and “Civilization (Bongo, Bongo, Bongo)” in 1947. (The former, a cleaned-up version of a bawdy British sea chantey, was also a hit for Tony Pastor, Kay Kyser, Guy Lombardo, and Jerry Colonna, while the latter also charted for Ray McKinley, Woody Herman, Jack Smith, and the Andrews Sisters with Danny Kaye.)
In 1948, while on tour in Virginia, Prima auditioned and immediately hired a sixteen-year-old local singer named Dorothy Jacqueline Keely Smith. As Keely Smith, she would be Prima’s musical partner for the next dozen years, humorously contrasting his brash exuberance with her deadpan insouciance. But Prima soon had to break up his big band; his career hit bottom in the early 1950s and did not rebound until he moved to Las Vegas and formed a new combo, the Witnesses, with tenor saxophonist Sam Butera in 1955, two years after he married Smith. For the rest of the decade, Prima was a late-night fixture at the Casbar Lounge of the Sahara Hotel—one the first of the lounge acts that came to typify the Las Vegas entertainment scene.
Reviewing a 1957 Prima performance at the Mocambo club in Hollywood, the Down Beat critic John Tynan wrote, “No, this isn’t jazz. Often, in fact, it’s downright rock ’n’ roll.”[114] Playing more to adult audiences than teenagers, he gave vintage material a modern feel, making new hits out of chestnuts such as “That Old Black Magic” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” On his 1956 album The Wildest, the first of several Capitol LPs seeking to capture the excitement of his Las Vegas shows, he segues together a pair of songs he first recorded as two sides of a 1945 V-Disc—“Just a Gigolo” (originally from the late 1920s) and “I Ain’t Got Nobody” (originally from the mid-1910s)—adding a shuffling backbeat, a boogie-ish bass line, a pop-style vocal chorus, and Butera’s honking saxophone. On the same album, he introduces his own composition “Jump, Jive, an’ Wail,” styled loosely after Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll.”
By the end of the 1950s, Prima was riding a wave of popularity, appearing in movies and on television shows and cutting a string of albums and singles for the Dot label. But after Smith divorced him in 1961, his career went cold. He replaced her with a younger singer, Gia Maione (whom he also married), and played long engagements in Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe with Sam Butera and the Witnesses, recording for his own Pr1ma [sic] label. In 1967, he supplied the voice for King Louie, the jive-talking orangutan in the animated Walt Disney movie The Jungle Book, based on Rudyard Kipling’s stories. But in 1975, he underwent surgery for a benign brain tumor and lapsed into a coma, dying three years later.
In 1985, just before he split from the rock band Van Halen, singer David Lee Roth had a hit with his high-energy take on “Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody.” In 1998, the Brian Setzer Orchestra made the charts with a cover of “Jump, Jive, an’ Wail,” just as Prima’s original was being heard on a television commercial for the clothing chain the Gap. Prima’s Jungle Book song “I Wan’na Be Like You” was covered by Los Lobos on their 1993 album Just Another Band from East L.A., by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy on the soundtrack album (but not the actual soundtrack) of the 1996 movie Swingers, and by Smash Mouth on the soundtrack of the 2003 sequel The Jungle Book 2. Prima’s own recordings have been featured on dozens of movie soundtracks and his compositions on dozens more. Revered by today’s swing and lounge-music revivalists, Prima ranks higher in critical esteem now than he ever did during his lifetime.
Prima was an anomaly, an artist who transcended musical eras by fitting swing tunes to a rock beat. For the most part, jump and jive music gave way to bebop and rhythm-and-blues shortly after World War II. But at its height, the swing craze united society in much the same superficial way that disco did in the 1970s, bringing people of different racial, ethnic, and social backgrounds together under the same musical umbrella. Enlisted to boost wartime morale, swing acquired the additional impetus of patriotic fervor. A number of movies served as big-screen USO shows, with flimsy plots to underpin the musical and comedic performances. Among these films was Thousands Cheer from 1943, starring Gene Kelly as a circus aerialist turned army private and Kathryn Grayson as a colonel’s daughter who stages a variety show for the troops. The featured bands include Kay Kyser’s, Bob Crosby’s, and Benny Carter’s; the musical numbers include Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2 (played by José Iturbi), “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie” (danced by Eleanor Powell), and “Honeysuckle Rose” (sung by Lena Horne).
Toward the end of the movie, just before Kelly’s climactic trapeze act, Judy Garland sings “The Joint Is Really Jumpin’ Down at Carnegie Hall,” accompanied by Iturbi, a classical pianist with a flair for showmanship. Iturbi begins with a series of classical flourishes, and Garland delivers the decorous introduction: “Millions have heard you play Chopin, the critics applaud and approve, / But millions more would simply adore to hear you get in the groove.” Iturbi then plays a boogie bass line, an offscreen orchestra chimes in, and Garland sings verses that echo the Andrews Sisters’ “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” while anticipating Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven”: “They’re playing deetlee-yada, deetlee-yada with Shostakovich, / Deetlee-yada, deetlee-yada, Mozart and Bach, / Deetlee-yada, deetlee-yada, and they don’t know which, / ’Cause anything can happen when they start to rock.”
In the same way that Walter Murphy and the Big Apple Band’s “A Fifth of Beethoven” marked the peak of disco fever, “The Joint Is Really Jumpin’ Down at Carnegie Hall” represents the point at which swing achieved its broadest acceptance, when jive talk and boogie rhythms extended from African American ghettos to the lily-white enclaves of the cultural elite. In the postwar years, jump and jive would fade, but not entirely disappear, from the musical mainstream, as the big bands broke up and pop singers came to the forefront. But just as disco morphed into “dance” music, swing evolved into rhythm-and-blues, which, along with country music, kept the spirit of jump alive until it could reemerge under the banner of rock ’n’ roll.
1. “‘Jitter-Bugs’ Thrill at N.Y. Jam-Session: 17 Bands Swing for 3-Hours in Huge ‘Clam-Bake,’” Down Beat, June 1936, 1.
2. John Chilton, Let the Good Times Roll: The Story of Louis Jordan and His Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994 [orig. Quartet Books, 1992]), 64.
3. Allan Sutton, Pseudonyms on American Records (1892–1942): A Guide to False Names and Label Errors, 2nd ed. (Denver: Mainspring Press, 2005), 73, 167, 183, 288, 289, 304.
4. Sutton, Pseudonyms, 138; Jeffrey Magee, The Uncrowned King of Swing: Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 34. Henderson made his first recording on October 11, 1920, accompanying Lucille Hegamin on “Dallas Blues,” but the record was never issued. Henderson’s band is credited on a number of instrumental titles, including blues, issued by the Black Swan label as early as 1921, but some of these were actually recorded by white groups, and Henderson’s name was used in order to keep up the pretense that Black Swan recorded only black artists.
5. Magee, The Uncrowned King of Swing, 76.
6. Rex Stewart, Boy Meets Horn, ed. Claire P. Gordon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 65.
7. Cab Calloway’s Cat-ologue, rev. 1939 ed., www.tcswing.com/PDFs/Hepsters%20Dictionary.pdf. This is an expanded update of the booklet Calloway originally published the previous year.
8. Marshall Stearns and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994 [orig. Macmillan, 1968]), 315, 316.
9. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 126–129.
10. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance , 329.
11. Samuel B. Charters, The Country Blues, 2nd pbk. ed. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1977 [orig. Rinehart, 1959]), 109.
12. Fred E. Cox, John Randolph, and John Harris, “The Jug Bands of Louisville,” Storyville, September 1993, 166, 167, 175–177; Marshall Wyatt, liner notes to Folks, He Sure Do Pull Some Bow! Vintage Fiddle Music 1927–1935: Blues, Jazz, Stomps, Shuffles & Rags, Old Hat Records CD-1003 (2001). Cox, Randolph, and Harris base their tale of B. D. Tite on secondhand information gathered years after the events described and admit that this part of their account “may be called historical fiction.” Wyatt cites Pen Bogert, a reference specialist at the Filson Club Historical Society in Louisville, as having been unable to verify the existence of some of the musicians identified as Tite’s early colleagues by Cox et al.
13. David A. Jasen and Gene Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around: Black Popular Songwriters, 1880–1930 (New York: Schirmer, 1998). 172.
14. The Five Harmaniacs—1926–27, Puritan Records 3004 (1978).
15. Jelly Roll Morton, “‘Ungai Hai,’ the Sign of the Indians,” disc 6, track 7, Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax, Rounder 11661-1888-2 (2005). The song is transcribed on pages 102 and 103 of the PDF file on disc 8. “To-Wa-Bac-A-Wa” is the title of a traditional chant of the Mardi Gras “Indians” in New Orleans, recorded under such spellings as “Two-Way-Pak-E-Way” and “Two Way-Pocky-Way” by modern Indian troupes such as the Wild Magnolias, the Golden Eagles, and the Guardians of the Flame. Bits of the chant found their way onto R&B records by Dave Bartholomew (“Carnival Day,” 1949) and Huey “Piano” Smith (“Don’t You Know Yockomo,” 1958), and the Dixie Cups, a female vocal trio from New Orleans, released “Two-Way-Poc-A-Way” as a would-be pop single in 1965. On his Library of Congress recordings, Jelly Roll Morton sings an older version of the chant, transcribed as “T’ouwais Bas Q’ouwais.” But the “Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” melody is heard only on the Louis Dumaine recording, which has nothing in common with the Indian chant besides the title.
16. Donald M. Marquis, In Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man of Jazz, 1st pbk. ed. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1980 [orig. Louisiana State University Press, 1978]), 108; Danny Barker with Alyn Shipton, Buddy Bolden and the Last Days of Storyville (London: Cassell, 1998), ix, 20, 21; Alyn Shipton, A New History of Jazz (London: Continuum, 2001), 83; Ingemar Wågerman, liner notes to Gota River Jazzmen, “. . . Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Play,” Grjcd Records GRJ06 (2003). Marquis says that Bolden “played ‘Bucket [sic] Got a Hole in It’ when he spotted friends or someone of the sporting crowd and wanted to liven things up” but gives no reference. Barker quotes a brother of Bolden’s colleague Buddy Bottley, Dude Bottley, who says that “Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” was part of Bolden’s repertoire, but according to Alyn Shipton, Dude Bottley is a product of Barker’s literary imagination. Wågerman, drawing his information from the Bolden web page formerly maintained by Carlos “Froggy” May at www.geocities.com/BourbonStreet/5135/Bolden.html, identifies the song as a “Bolden original, according to Happy Schilling.” George “Happy” Schilling was a white New Orleans trombonist, born in 1886, who led a band in the 1910s and 1920s.
17. In 1935, the white crooner Gene Austin wrote “I Hear You Knockin’ but You Can’t Come In (The Knock Song),” with a melody different from Lil Johnson’s “Keep on Knockin’,” for the Mae West movie Klondike Annie, but it was reportedly censored out. Austin filmed a Soundie of the song in 1942, and Tommy Dorsey recorded it as “The Knock Song” in 1949. Austin, meanwhile published “Keep A-Knockin’, but You Can’t Come In” under his own name in 1948.
18. Jelly Roll Morton, “The Origins of Scat and ‘Scat Song,’” disc 3, track 10, Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax, Rounder 11661-1888-2 (2005). The quotation is transcribed on p. 51 of the PDF file on disc 8.
19. Louis Armstrong, “Jazz on a High Note,” Esquire, December 1951, reprinted in Louis Armstrong in His Own Words, ed. Thomas Brothers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 131, 132.
20. Cab Calloway and Bryant Rollins, Of Minnie the Moocher and Me (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976), 58, 59.
21. Calloway and Rollins, Of Minnie the Moocher and Me, 73.
22. Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 327.
23. Sigmund Spaeth, Read ’Em and Weep: The Songs You Forgot to Remember (New York: Halcyon House, 1939 [orig. Doubleday, Page, 1926]), 116–119; Sigmund Spaeth, Weep Some More, My Lady (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1927), 122–127; Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927), 204, 205.
24. Gary Giddins, Bing Crosby: A Pocket Full of Dreams, The Early Years 1903–1940 (Boston: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown, 2001), 165, 639.
25. “A Strange Band,” New Orleans Weekly Pelican, February 5, 1887, cited in Lynn Abbott, “Play That Barber Shop Chord: A Case for the African-American Origin of Barbershop Harmony,” American Music 10, no. 3 (Autumn 1992): 303, 322.
26. “City Happenings,” Indianapolis Freeman, April 7, 1894, referred to in Doug Seroff and Ray Funk, liner notes to The Human Orchestra: Rhythm Quartets in the Thirties, Clanka Lanka Records CL-144 (1985), cited in Lynn Abbott, “Play That Barber Shop Chord: A Case for the African-American Origin of Barbershop Harmony,” American Music 10, no. 3 (Autumn 1992): 303, 322.
27. Billy Vera, “‘Gloria’: History of a Song,” www.doowopcafe.net/Gloria.html.
28. “Ella Fitzgerald,” Tower Records Pulse! April 1988, 74.
29. Richard M. Sudhalter, Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915–1945 (Oxford University Press, 1999), 372, 373.
30. Arnold Shaw, 52nd Street: The Street of Jazz (New York: Da Capo Press, 1977 [orig. The Street That Never Slept, New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan,1971]), 88, 90.
31. Will Friedwald, Jazz Singing: America’s Great Voices from Bessie Smith to Bebop and Beyond (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992 [orig. Scribner’s, 1990]), 141.
32. Marv Goldberg, More Than Words Can Say: The Ink Spots and Their Music (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998), 1–21.
33. Goldberg, More Than Words Can Say, 30.
34. Gayle F. Wald, Shout, Sister, Shout! The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007), 68–70.
35. Around 1939, the Indiana-born trombonist Doc Wheeler, né Wheeler Moran, took over the leadership of the Sunset Royal Orchestra, which then changed its name to the Sunset Orchestra. The band, originally from Florida, had previously been known as the Sunset Royal Serenaders. Under the leadership of singer and banjo player Steve Washington, the Serenaders had come up with an innovative arrangement of Irving Berlin’s “Marie” in which the musicians sang elaborate responses to Washington’s simple vocal lines. After Washington died in 1936, the group was taken over by pianist Ace Harris, who later played in Erskine Hawkins’s band. Meanwhile, Tommy Dorsey appropriated Washington’s arrangement and scored a No. 1 hit with “Marie” in 1937, establishing the vocal technique as a fixture of swing, one that also influenced rhythm-and-blues.
36. John Broven, “Roy Brown, Part 1: Good Rockin’ Tonight,” Blues Unlimited, January/February 1977, 6. “There’s Good Blues Tonight,” while not a major hit (and not a blues), was popular enough to have also been recorded by Erskine Hawkins, Hal McIntyre, Bobby Sherwood, Martha Tilton, and the Pied Pipers, all in 1946. Lightly seasoned with jive expressions such as “groovy,” “chick,” and “gate” (short for “alligator,” with a meaning roughly equivalent to “cat”), the song has little in common with “Good Rockin’ Tonight” besides the title and the line “So hold your baby tight.” But on Millinder’s version, which Brown probably heard, Annisteen Allen adds the introduction “I’ve got good news tonight” before the title phrase. Brown’s first line goes, “I heard the news, there’s good rockin’ tonight.”
37. Eddy Determeyer, Rhythm Is Our Business: Jimmie Lunceford and the Harlem Express (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 52, 86.
38. Determeyer, Rhythm Is Our Business, 91.
39. Larry Birnbaum, “Arnett Cobb: Soul Wrenching Sax,” Down Beat, April 1981, 25.
40. George Barnes, a sixteen-year-old white jazz guitarist, recorded two tracks (“Sweetheart Land” and “It’s a Low Down Dirty Shame”) on electric guitar as an accompanist to Big Bill Broonzy on March 1, 1938, a couple of weeks before Durham made his first electrified recordings with the Kansas City Five. Jim Boyd recorded three tracks (“Slow and Easy,” “Hot Dog Stomp,” and Jimmie Lunceford’s hit “Rhythm Is Our Business”) with an electrified standard guitar as a member of the Dallas-based western swing band Roy Newman and His Boys on September 27 and 28, 1935.
41. Don Rayno, Paul Whiteman: Pioneer in American Music, Volume I: 1890–1930 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008), 188.
42. Carl Cons, “Busse & Kyser Grit Molars as Idea Thieves Cash In on Their Brain Kids,” Down Beat, February 1938, 11; Patricia Willard, liner notes to The Uncollected Henry Busse and His Orchestra 1935, Hindsight Records HSR-122 (1978).
43. Stephen J. Danko, “A Brief Biography of the Joseph Sarvetnick Family,” http://stephendanko.com/blog/403.
44. Cons, “Busse & Kyser Grit Molars,” 1.
45. Shuffle Rhythm Used by Bach & Brahms,” Down Beat, March 1938, 1, 15.
46. Schuller, The Swing Era, 765.
47. Chilton, Let the Good Times Roll, 32.
48. Chuck Berry, The Autobiography (New York: Harmony Books, 1987), 143.
49. James Lincoln Collier, Jazz: The American Theme Song (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 175; Paige Van Vorst, liner notes to Harlem Hamfats, Hot Jazz, Blues & Jive 1936–1937, Folklyric Records FL-9029 (1986), quoted in James Lincoln Collier, Louis Armstrong: An American Genius (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 349.
50. Paige Van Vorst, “The Harlem Hamfats, Part II,” The Mississippi Rag IV, no. 5 (March 1977): 9.
51. Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 178, 402 [Yankee Robinson’s Circus].
52. Charters, The Country Blues, 182, 183 [brought country blues into the mainstream].
53. Immortalia: An Anthology of American Ballads, Sailors’ Songs, Cowboy Songs, College Songs, Parodies, Limericks, and Other Humorous Verses and Doggerel Now for the First Time Brought Together in Book Form (privately published, 1927), 109, 110, www.horntip.com/html/books_&_MSS/1920s/1927_immortalia_(various)/index.htm.
54. Chilton, Let the Good Times Roll, 88.
55. Arnold Shaw, Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues (New York: Collier Books/Macmillan, 1978), 78; Louis Jordan radio interview with Scott Ellsworth on the Los Angeles station KFI, April 26, 1971, quoted in Chilton, Let the Good Times Roll, 88. Chilton also writes that Lester Melrose “told Music & Rhythm that he had taken Weldon’s recording to Jordan,” but an examination of Music and Rhythm, a jazz magazine published in Chicago from November 1940 to August 1942, revealed no such statement. As a talent scout and producer for such labels as Columbia, Bluebird, OKeh, and Vocalion—but not Decca—Melrose was responsible for standardizing the blues sound by using studio bands, similar to the ones that Williams employed, to back such artists as Big Bill Broonzy, Tampa Red, Jazz Gillum, Washboard Sam, Memphis Minnie, and Casey Bill Weldon.
56. Paul and Beth Garon, Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), 20, 21, 287.
57. “Hey Lawdy Mama (blues song),” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hey_Lawdy_Mama_(blues_song); Chris Welch, Cream: The Legendary Sixties Supergroup— Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce, Eric Clapton (San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2000), 93. Another country blues that passed into the swing repertoire is “Hey Lawdy Mama,” which was first recorded by the Atlanta bluesman Buddy Moss as “Oh Lordy Mama” in 1934. Another Atlanta bluesman, Curley Weaver, cut “Oh Lawdy Mama,” accompanied by Blind Willie McTell, in 1935. The Georgia-born, Chicago-based bluesman Bumble Bee Slim recorded “Hey Lawdy Mama” in 1935 and a slightly different variation titled “Meet Me in the Bottom” in 1936. Count Basie cut an instrumental version of “Hey Lawdy Mama” with just a rhythm section in 1938, and Sammy Price sang “Oh Lawdy Mama” with his combo in 1940. Louis Armstrong recorded “Hey Lawdy Mama” with a septet in 1941, and Andy Kirk made Billboard’s R&B chart in 1952 with “Hey Lawdy Mama (Meet Me in the Bottom),” featuring singer June Richmond. Richmond recorded the song a few more times with Kirk’s and other bands, including Roy Milton’s Solid Senders, a pioneering rhythm-and-blues combo. Although “Hey Lawdy Mama” did not make its way into rock ’n’ roll via early R&B, a 1965 version by the Chicago bluesman Junior Wells on his influential album Hoodoo Man Blues was transformed into the rock song “Strange Brew” by the British trio Cream.
58. Robert Pruter and Robert L. Campbell, “The Rhumboogie Label,” http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/rhumboogie.html. Citing the minutes of the musicians’ union in Chicago, Pruter and Campbell give the October 1944 date for the Rhumboogie label’s first session rather than May 1945, which is given in most discographies.
59. Tony Russell, liner notes to Jazzin’ the Blues, Vol. 3, Document Records DOCD-5536 (1997).
60. Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance, 296. A different song, “Lovin’ Sam, the Sheik of Alabam,” was written by Jack Yellen and Milton Ager in 1922 (the two later composed Ain’t She Sweet” and “Happy Days Are Here Again”) and recorded by several artists, most successfully by Nora Bayes. There was also a 1914 show called Lucky Sam from Alabam’ staged by the Black Patti Troubadors, whose star, the opera singer Sissieretta Jones, was called the Black Patti after the white diva Adelina Patti.
61. Nick Tosches, Unsung Heroes of Rock ’n’ Roll (New York: Scribner’s, 1984), 71. According to Tosches, “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” was originally sung by McGhee and his army buddies during World War II, with the chorus “Drinkin’ wine, motherfucker, drinkin’ wine! Goddam!” but this seems unlikely, given the song’s strong melodic resemblance to Theard’s “Spo-Dee-O-Dee.”
62. Nick Tosches, Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story (New York: Delta/Dell, 1982), 64, 65; Jimmy Guterman, Rockin’ My Life Away: Listening to Jerry Lee Lewis (Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press, 1991), 39. According to Guterman, “Those at the event differ on what Jerry Lee played and sang.”
63. Sammy Price, What Do They Want? A Jazz Autobiography, ed. Caroline Richmond (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 96. The discography at the back of Price’s autobiography, compiled by Bob Weir (not the Grateful Dead guitarist), lists Theard as the singer on “Lead Me Daddy Straight to the Bar.” Other discographies tentatively identify Spo-De-O Sam as Price himself, which is not impossible, as Theard and Price had similar-sounding voices.
64. Chilton, Let the Good Times Roll, 128, 129.
65. “ACE Title Search,” www.ascap.com/ace/search.cfm?requesttimeout=300&mode=results&searchstr=350008887&search_in=i&search_type=exact&search_det=tswpbv&results_pp=30&start=1; Mike Leadbitter, Leslie Fancourt, and Paul Pelletier, Blues Records 1943–1970: “The Bible of the Blues,” Volume Two (London: Record Information Services, 1994), 335. ASCAP gives Raphael Barrow, Henry Glover, and Sam Theard as the composers of “The Egg or the Hen.” Leadbitter, Fancourt, and Pelletier’s discography gives Theard as the singer on “Cheetie Bo Joe,” another song recorded by Page at the same session. Other discographies do not include Theard on the session at all, and the singer on both songs sounds like Page rather than Theard.
66. Price, What Do They Want? 23, 28, 29. Price’s autobiography is often unreliable. For example, he claims to have outplayed Hersal Thomas at shows in Houston and Galveston in 1927, a year after Thomas’s death.
67. Douglas Henry Daniels, One O’Clock Jump: The Unforgettable History of the Oklahoma City Blue Devils (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 88.
68. Hot Lips Page as told to Kay C. Thompson, “Kansas City Man,” The Record Changer, December 1949, 9; Todd Bryant Weeks, Luck’s in My Corner: the Life and Music of Hot Lips Page (New York: Routledge, 2008), 31–35.
69. Paul S. Machlin, Stride: The Music of Fats Waller (Boston: Twayne, 1985), 4, 5.
70. Two 1929 recordings credited to Fats Waller and His Buddies also include backbeat sections—“Lookin’ Good but Feelin’ Bad,” with drummer Gene Krupa, and “Won’t You Get off It, Please?” with drummer Kaiser Marshall.
71. “Hold Barred,” Radio, Time, April 24, 1939, 44.
72. John Chilton, Sidney Bechet: The Wizard of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987 [orig. Macmillan Press, 1987]), 112.
73. Lou Levy, letter to the editor, Time, May 15, 1939, 2.
74. Chilton, Sidney Bechet, 116, 117.
75. William Ruhlmann, “The Andrews Sisters: Three Sides to Every Story,” Goldmine, January 20, 1995, 28.
76. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Penguin, 1991 [orig. Viking Press, 1957]), 176, 177.
77. Shaw, 52nd Street, 225, 226; Max Jones, Jazz Talking: Profiles, Interviews, and Other Riffs on Jazz Musicians (New York, Da Capo Press, 2000 [orig. Macmillan Press, 1987]), 229, 230; Joop Visser, liner notes to Slim Gaillard, Laughing in Rhythm, Proper Records, Properbox 62 (2003), 9–13; Arnold Passman, The Deejays (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 47–49. Although West Coast radio announcers had played records on the air, rather than presenting live music, as early as the mid-1920s, the sensational success of Martin Block’s Make Believe Ballroom on the New York station WNEW, beginning in 1935, established the disc-jockey format as a staple of radio programming nationwide. Block based his show, where he would pretend that the musicians whose records he played were actually performing in the studio, on The World’s Largest Make Believe Ballroom, which Al Jarvis had introduced in 1932 on a Los Angeles station where Block was working. Artists and record labels initially opposed the format, leading to the musicians’-union recording bans of 1942 and 1948.
78. Magee, The Uncrowned King of Swing, 148, 149.
79. Charles White, The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Quasar of Rock (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994 [orig. Harmony Books, 1984]), 40, 49–51.
80. M. H. Orodenker, “Cafe Creole, New York,” “Night Club Reviews,” Billboard, April 30, 1938, 20.
81. Nigel Haslewood, “The Jump Bands—No. 3, Part 1: Skeets Tolbert and the Gentlemen of Swing,” Storyville, December 6, 1993, 220–231; Nigel Haslewood, “The Jump Bands—No. 3, Part 2: Skeets Tolbert and the Gentlemen of Swing,” Storyville, March 1, 1994, 16–27.
82. Haslewood, “The Jump Bands—No. 3, Part 2,” 19. Skeets Tolbert shares the writers’ credit for “Hit That Jive, Jack” with John Alston, presumably the tenor saxophonist known as Johnnie Alston whose band backed Wynonie Harris on a December 1945 recording session. However, Tolbert told Nigel Haslewood that his co-composer was a different tenor saxophonist, Harold Austin, and that Austin played on the “Hit That Jive” session instead of Otis Hicks, who is listed in most discographies. The melody of “Hit That Jive, Jack” appears to have been adapted from a portion of Fletcher Henderson’s 1936 hit “Christopher Columbus,” a different portion of which was incorporated into Benny Goodman’s anthem “Sing, Sing, Sing.”
83. Hampton, Hamp: An Autobiography, 71.
84. Schuller, The Swing Era, 824.
85. Ray Charles and David Ritz, Brother Ray: Ray Charles Own Story, 2nd pbk. ed. (New York: Da Capo Press, 2003 [orig. Dial Press, 1978]), 44.
86. Berry, The Autobiography, 90.
87. Harry Gibson interview, 1991, text and audio clip, www.hyzercreek.com/harry.htm and www.hoyhoy.com/artists.htm.
88. Harry “the Hipster” Gibson, liner notes to Everybody’s Crazy But Me, Progressive Records PRO 7042 (1986), www.hyzercreek.com/harryautobio.htm and “Harry’s autobiography” link on the Harry Gibson section of www.hoyhoy.com/artists.htm.
89. “Be-bop Be-bopped,” Radio, Time, March 25, 1946, 52.
90. Eric Townley, “The Man from Birmingham: An Interview with Paul Bascomb,” Storyville, August/September 1979, 214.
91. The Rivingtons may have heard the cover version of “Mumbles Blues” cut by Bobby Lewis for Chess in September 1952 or the rerecording Lewis made for Mercury (and/or Spotlight) around 1958. Lewis is remembered mostly for his 1961 smash “Tossin’ and Turnin’.”
92. Hampton, Hamp: An Autobiography, 26.
93. John Hammond, letter to Rudi Blesh, July 1, 1970, quoted in Blesh, Combo: USA; Eight Lives in Jazz (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1971), 174, 223; Al Avakian and Bob Prince, liner notes to Charlie Christian with the Benny Goodman Sextet and Orchestra, Columbia CL 652 (1955). Hammond writes that on a broadcast of Benny Goodman’s Camel Caravan radio show in August 1939, “Charlie came up with the riffs of ‘Flying Home’ which is erroneously listed as being composed jointly with Benny and Lionel Hampton.” Avakian and Prince quote Mary Osborne, a white guitarist who went on to perform and record with both white and black jazz artists, describing a Christian performance with Alphonso Trent’s band in Bismarck, North Dakota, that she witnessed in 1938: “I remember some of the figures Charlie played in his solos. They were exactly the same things that Benny recorded later on as Flying Home . . . and all the others.”
94. Larry Birnbaum, “Illinois Jacquet: Still Flying Home,” Musician, December 1988, 78.
95. Hampton, Hamp: An Autobiography, 38, 39.
96. Hampton, Hamp: An Autobiography, 78, 79; Ted Fox, Showtime at the Apollo (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983), 153; Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine, 1987 [orig. Grove Press, 1964]), 77. In his 1989 autobiography, Hampton elaborates on the story he’d told to Fox. He also confirms Malcolm X’s secondhand account of a pot-smoking fan at the Apollo Theatre who jumped off the second balcony during a performance of “Flying Home,” inspiring trombonist Gerald Valentine to compose “Second Balcony Jump” for Earl Hines’s band. That story is doubtful, however, not least because Hines recorded “Second Balcony Jump” in March 1942, two months before Hampton cut his landmark version of “Flying Home.”
97. Schuller, The Swing Era, 394.
98. Hampton, Hamp: An Autobiography, 117.
99. John S. Wilson, “Buddy Johnson Shows How to Keep a Band Working,” Down Beat, December 29, 1950, 4.
100. John A. Jackson, Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll (New York: Schirmer/Macmillan, 1991), 52, 64, 86, 97, 155.
101. Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddix, Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop—A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 212, 213.
102. Jay McShann as told to John Anthony Brisbin, “I Always Thought Blues and Jazz Went Together: Part One of a Two Part Interview,” Living Blues, January/February 2000, 22.
103. Driggs and Haddix, Kansas City Jazz, 224.
104. Judge Charles L. Brieant, opinion in Stratchborneo v. Arc Music, 357 F. Supp. 1393 (S.D.N.Y. 1973), http://cip.law.ucla.edu/cases/1970-1979/Pages/strachborneoarc.aspx; Robert Gordon, Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002), 149. Muddy Waters recorded his “Got My Mojo Working” for Chess on December 1, 1956, nearly two months before Ann Cole cut her version for Baton, but Waters had learned the song from Cole when his band accompanied her on a tour of the South. After Waters claimed the copyright for himself, Baton’s proprietor, Saul Rabinowitz, who had acquired the rights to the song from its composer, Preston Foster, sued Chess’s publishing arm, Arc Music. Arc settled out of court, conceding the composer’s credit to Foster.
105. Jay McShann as told to John Anthony Brisbin, “Music Was a Good Life: Part Two of a Two Part Interview,” Living Blues, March/April 2000, 54.
106. Shaw, 52nd Street, 109.
107. Garry Boulard, Louis Prima (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002 [orig. Center for Louisiana Studies, 1989]), 32, 33.
108. Shaw, 52nd Street, 108.
109. Jerry Franken, “Rise of Jam Bands,” Billboard, December 28, 1935, 49.
110. Boulard, Louis Prima, 60, 64, 65.
111. Boulard, Louis Prima, 63.
112. Sheet music for Frank Dumont’s “The Dagoe Banana Peddler,” copyright 1888, http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/inharmony/detail.do?action=detail&fullItemID=/lilly/starr/LL-SSM-ALD3007&queryNumber=1.
113. “Lombardo Leads in Corn Contest,” Down Beat, December 1937, 23; Barbara Hodgkins, “Louie Phooey,” Metronome (June 1945), cited in Garry Boulard, Louis Prima, 76, 77.
114. John Tynan, “Heard in Person: Louis Prima–Keely Smith,” Down Beat, October 31, 1957, 37.