This transcript of the radio show is an approximation of what I said in the show. The real spoken parts may differ slightly.
And for this show number one hundred and twenty-three a mix of tunes that I haven't played on here before. Now I collect a lot of my music as a result of this show, like, I'm looking for some tune and it comes with an album with some twenty-five more on it. Well that gives me a lot to choose from in the shows where I don't do a specific subject, like today. And that starts with an instrumental goodie that I found on a CD titled Blues and Beat of Paul Bascomb. Well here is his Nana.
01 - Paul Bascomb - Nana
02 - Oscar's Chicago Swingers feat. Lovin' Sam Theard - I Wonder Who's Boogiein' My Woogie Now
Lovin' Sam Theard with a recording from 1936 on Decca, backed up by a group named Oscar's Chicago Swingers and you heard a great dirty blues, I Wonder Who's Boogiein' My Woogie Now. Now Theard was primaraly a comedian and blues singer and his bawdy songs about sex and drugs cover most of his recorded repertoire. But he also was a productive song writer with two songs that made great impact on the Rhythm & Blues. One was You Rascal You, well that is the title that most of us remember it from, but officially it was titled I'll Be Glad When You're Dead and that was made famous by Louis Armstrong and many others.
And then the classic Let the Good Times Roll that he wrote in 1942, and that made noise way into the rock 'n roll era. From 1972 he settled in Hollywood and became an actor and a lot of people will know his face from the TV series Sanford and Son and Little House on the Prairie and from movies like Norman Is That You, Which Way is Up and the Sting II - but they'll probably be oblivious of his musical past.
Next Joe Turner and on this one he's being backed up by Wild Bill Moore's Lucky Seven. He recorded this in 1946 for the National label. Here is I Got Love For Sale.
03 - Big Joe Turner - I Got Love For Sale
04 - Marion Abernathy - It's A Low Down Dirty Shame
(jingle)
05 - James 'Blazer Boy' Locks - New Orleans Women Blues
06 - Baby Face Leroy - My Head Can't Rest Anymore
And so you got a whole lotta music, four in a row without my bla bla in between. Well I'll make up for that. After Joe Turner's Love For Sale you got Marion 'The Blues Woman' Abernathy with It's A Low Down Dirty Shame and she recorded that in December of 1947 - by far the most productive month ever in the music business when all record labels hurried to get as many recordings done for the next year when the American Federation of Musicians had ordered a ban on recording.
Then that soundalike of Charles Brown that you got just after the jingle, that was the New Orleans Women Blues of James 'Blazer Boy' Locks and he recorded that for the Regal label in 1949. After the great success of Nat King Cole, several small-scale combos stood up that imitated his mellow and cool style and Johnny Moore's Three Blazers was maybe the best known with their lead singer Charles Brown. But they weren't the only ones and whether these imitators were inspired by Nat King Cole or Charles Brown, or maybe both, well that really doesn't matter I think. The most famous singer who started with a trio heavily inspired by either Cole or Brown was of course Ray Charles, well, you can say he evolved into his own style.
I wonder whether it has upset Nat King Cole that so many musicians walked away with his formula. By the time they got popular with it, though, Cole more and more had turned to popular tunes and more jazzy arrangements, and Charles Brown had left Johnny Moore starting out for his own where his blues quickly grew away from the cool and lighthearted style of Cole and became more and more troublesome. And when Ray Charles entered the scene his version of the style, I normally use the word gloomy to describe them, rather fitting in smoky joints than the supper club style of Cole.
Now I have one more track to account for, and that was the blues I played last. You heard 'Baby Face' Leroy Foster - My Head Can't Rest Anymore and that was the very first issue for the J.O.B. label, recorded in Chicago in 1950.
Next up is another recording of December 1947. On the Modern label you'll get blues shouter Jimmy Witherspoon accompanied by the band of Al 'Cake' Wichard. Here is the Sweet Lovin' Baby
07 - Al 'Cake' Wichard Sextette & Jimmy Witherspoon - Sweet Lovin' Baby
08 - Cootie Williams - Divorce Me COD Blues
The trumpet of Cootie Williams - and of course his whole band with him - backed up Mack Edmondson with a nice arrangement of the 1946 hillbilly classic Divorce Me COD originally of Merle Travis. For the occasion the word Blues was put behind the title making it the Divorce Me COD Blues
Next Saunders King at his best with the Stay Gone Blues recorded for the the Rhythm label and released in 1949 but recorded a few years before. It was the flip of S.K. Jumps that made it to number 14 on the Rhythm & Blues hit list. Here is the Stay Gone Blues.
09 - Saunders King - Stay Gone Blues
10 - Alabama Jug Band - I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate
And that was a jump back of over a decade with the Alabama Jug Band and their song I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate recorded for Decca. And we stay with the label with one of the great female blues singer of the thirties, Alberta Hunter. By '39 when this tune was recorded she was already in her mid-forties but miss Hunter never was afraid of a little lie on her age. When her mother died in 1954 she decided to leave the music business and got herself a falsified high school diploma stating a date of birth way later than the real date in 1895 and so at the age of nearly sixty years old she enrolled in a nursing school.
She worked in health care until 1977 and had to be sent off for retirement when no-one believed her lies on her age anymore. She was 81 years old then but retirement wasn't her thing and so she resumed her singing career. I've seen a clip on Youtube where she performs as an elderly lady, singing a dirty blues from her own repertoire from the thrirties, 'My Man Is A Handyman', putting on a sparkling, glamorous and entertaining show. Everyone could wish for a great-grandmother like her, with so much energy and still so in the middle of life at the age of ninety.
So here she is with Fine and Mellow.
11 - Alberta Hunter - Fine and Mellow
12 - Lizzie Washington - Working Man Blues
And that was another deep dive in blues history with Lizzie Washington and her Working Man blues recorded for the Gennett label in April of 1927. I mentioned this label last week in my special on the Black Patti label, as Fred Gennett was a business partner of J. Mayo Williams in that label. Gennett itself was a significantly bigger label with over 300 releases in the year 1927 alone.
And I stay with the female pre-war blues with Bessie Smith. From 1930 is her He Treats Me Like A Dog that she recorded for Vocalion. Bessie Smith definitely was one of the greatest blues singers of the twenties and thirties but her life was cut short by a car accident in 1937.
Accounts of the accident that was described in detail by a doctor who was on the scene shortly after the accident happened, indicate that the legend that had formed around her death, that she would have survived if she hadn't been transported to G. T. Thomas Afro-American Hospital in Clarksdale MS, but to a whites hospital instead, weren't true. Instead it was the long wait for an ambulance combined with the serious injuries of Smith that caused her to die in the hospital later that morning.
She was so popular that some 10,000 people filed past her coffin and the funeral was attended by some 7,000 people. Her husband though, he refused to place a headstone for her and it wasn't until 1970 that she got one when Janis Joplin took the initiative for placing a stone on her grave.
But back to better times, when this blues legend was still alive. Here is Bessie Smith with He Treats Me Like A Dog
13 - Bessie Smith - He Treats Me Like A Dog
14 - Robert Johnson - Sweet Home Chicago
Sweet home Chicago from 1936 recorded in San Antonio for the Vocalion label. That was Robert Johnson and well, talking about myths about someone's death, well here's another one. He died under suspicious circumstances in 1938, and most accounts say he was poisoned. His grave is unknown, some three places bear a marker indicating it's his grave, and most likely none of them are right. But the most legendary story is that Johnson shortly before, had sold his soul to the devil on a crossroads somewhere in rural Mississippi. The tall black man he met there at midnight, was the devil who tuned his guitar and promised him success in music in exchange for his soul, but instead Johnson died not long after that.
The crossroads of highways 61 and 49 in Clarksdale, MS now bears a marker showing three blue guitars. It's by the way, not that far from where Bessie Smith had her fatal accident, also on route 61 near Clarksdale.
Well I stay for another one in the thirties, but with a lighter subject. Here's a song on a bad combination - beautiful but dumb. Here is Lonnie Johnson.
15 - Lonnie Johnson - Beautiful But Dumb
16 - Ollie Jackson - Baby Got To Have It
17 - Memphis Slim - Mistake In Life
A mistake in life - you heard Memphis Slim and that was on the Chicago independent label Melody Lane - the record label of the music store with the same name on 55th street in the Windy City, and later it went by the name of Hy-Tone. Before that you got some authentic shellac sound, straight from a 78 of the Juke Box label that was Ollie Jackson with Baby Got To Have It.
And that ends this episode of the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman, and I think once again I proved that I'm not the legend - the musicians are. Today was full of saucy stories, of the man who made a bad deal with the devil, about the myths around the death of one of the greatest blues women, about a lady who restarted her musical career in her eighties, and how everyone tried to mimick Nat King Cole. The blues were surrounded with great stories and time turned them into legends. Well I hope you like them and of course you can let me know and send me an e-mail. Rockingducthman@rocketmail.com is the addres. And should you have missed the point of one of these stories, don't worry 'cause there's always my web site where you can read back what I told you today, review the play list and see what'll be on for next week. Search the web for the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman and you'll find it immediately.
As for now, have a rocking day, and remember, don't get them blues, just enjoy 'em. See you next time, here on the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman!