This transcript of the radio show is an approximation of what I said in the show. The real spoken parts may differ slightly.
And today's show brings us to Chicago - perhaps the most active hotbed of jazz, blues and Rhythm & Blues of the nation for a long time. Its prominence rose in the twenties with the Great Migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the industrialized cities up North. There were quite some cities alike - but only New York and Chicago had a vibrant Black music scene throughout several decades combined with important and active record companies to put their music on record.
Now jazz and blues in New York and on the West Coast have been documented extensively - but the Chicago scene was somewhat forgotten and that gap is what the Red Saunders Research Foundation has filled. I'll tell you more about their tremendous work but first some music from the Windy City and I wanna start with a recording of the band that was led by the drummer after whom the foundation is named - Theodore "Red" Saunders. Here he is with his band, with a 1953 recording on the Blue Lake label - Riverboat.
01 - Red Saunders - Riverboat
02 - T-Bone Walker - My Baby Left Me
The sensation of the Rhumboogie club on 343 E. 55th Street on Chicago's South Side - T-Bone Walker, and this My Baby Left Me was released on the house label of the club.
Today's spotlight, here on the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman, is not on a musician, neither on a record label, an important producer or anyone else active in Rhythm & Blues at the time itself. No, this is dedicated to a research foundation - and I'll tell you why that can be exciting enough to devote a radio program to it. This Red Saunders Research Foundation dedicates its work to the postwar Chicago Rhythm & Blues and jazz scene. Both, as they state on their home page, as there were hardly any boundaries between them - nowadays respected jazz musicians could play one day in a bebop combo or an adventurous jazz jam session, and the other day honk their saxophone to back up a doowop group. The notion that jazz is as serious music as Beethoven's Ninth comes from after the rock 'n roll craze.
Their web page is at www.redsaunders.org - or find them with a search for the Red Saunders Research Foundation. At first glance you might get the idea that these are some forgotten nineties pages tucked away on a university web server - but it's what's in the grooves that counts and in this case, that means that a wealth of very detailed information on the Chicago scene. I mean - just look at any of their pages on record labels. Every detail - complete personnel of any session, matrix numbers, dates, most detailed circumstances and things that happened on or around them - spiced up with numerous label scans and pictures of musicians. Artists have complete biographies with cuts from newspapers such as the Chicago Defender about their gigs in lounges and joints in town whose names become legendary on instant. And record labels - they cover the obvious, like Chess, but also the obscurest labels come by, such as Club 51, Cool, Glo-Tone Old Swing-Master and the extremely obscure labels of J. Mayo Williams, Harlem, Chicago, Southern and Ebony, that I featured earlier here on the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman.
And one of these obscure labels is the Melody Lane Record Shop label - later renamed to Hy-Tone. From that label, Jo-Jo Adams backed up by Freddie Williams and his band. Here is Don't Give It Away.
03 - Jo Jo Adams - Don't Give It Away
04 - Tom Archia - Macomba Jump
The Macomba Jump of saxophonist Tom Archia and that instrumental is named after the Macomba Lounge, owned by Leonard Chess - yes, the man who later started the Chess label and before, was involved in the Aristocrat label - and this instrumental was released on that label.
Just to get an idea how detailed the information on the web site of the Red Saunders Research Foundation is - their page on Tom Archia contains an elaborate story - some three page-downs on a computer screen full of text - of the later owner of the Chess label, Leonard Chess who got in troubles with the Chicago local of the almighty American Federation of Musicians around the leader of his house band - that is, of a small neighborhood club with a tiny bandstand in definitely not the best part of town. OK - Chess managed to get nice musicians playing in the house. But that is only a small part of the dozens of page-downs of information you get from this group of experts, just as the discography and biography of one musician, Tom Archia, before, a completely forgotten Rhythm & Blues and jazz musician and band leader. You may think, boring stuff? Not in the least.
Tom Archia is also to be heard on the next one - a band credited as Jump Jackson and his Orchestra, here fronted by Benny Kelly. Here is their Hey Pretty Mama.
05 - Jump Jackson - Hey Pretty Mama
06 - Tommy Dean & His Gloom Raiders - Cool One Groove Two
Pianist Tommy Dean and his Gloom Raiders - and Dean gets an elaborate page on the site of the Red Saunders Research Foundation - even though he rather was a St. Louis based musician as part of the Windy City's scene. I guess his frequent appearances in Chicago studios for the local labels will be the reason that his bio was included on the site.
Now the Foundation did some more very interesting findings on musicians, also some that were not from Chicago. Like how they debunked the widespread belief that Bea Booze, who had a number one hit with See See Rider in 1942, was just the stage name of a singer named Muriel Nichols.
It's all in a web page containing groundbreaking research on some of the obscurest and most confusing record labels ever - the independent labels of producer J. Mayo Williams, that went by the names Harlem, Chicago, Southern and Ebony. Now Williams used to be one of the most influential and important producers of pre-war African-American music - from the mid-twenties at Paramount and later for Brunswick and Vocalion where he brought about any bluesman and woman you could think of to the recording microphone - and in between he had run his legendary Black Patti label. From 1934 to '44 he headed the Race department of Decca - that immediately became the leading label for the blues.
But his postwar indies commercially went nowhere and feature some of the very obscurest artists - and virtually none of these records have ever been re-released. Williams ran his business from a small office in New York but part of the recordings were done in Chicago.
Now one of the records released on his Harlem label was a version of See See Rider of a Philadelphia-born singer named Muriel Nichols, but for some reason, Williams had her name printed on the label as Muriel "Bea Booze" Nichols. For that, every blues and jazz conaisseur thought they were the same woman. But the real Beatrice Booze was born in Baltimore, MD and and listed in the 1920 census as such, and she got to the attention of J. Mayo Williams in 1942 in his Decca years after Lionel Hampton had introduced her to the studios.
The record is included as a label scan on the page - together with numerous others. Here it is - Muriel Nichols with See See Rider, on the Harlem label.
07 - Muriel Nichols - See See Rider
08 - Sunnyland Slim - Roll, Tumble And Slip (I Cried)
Roll, Tumble And Slip a.k.a I Cried - you got Sunnyland Slim with a recording on the tiny Opera label and Slim was billed on the label as Delta Joe - just one of his pseudonyms, how about Doctor Clayton's Buddy that he used for his recordings on the Victor label. Now it apparently was a useful way to record with different record companies at the same time, but I doubt, if it helped establish a name. It's Sunnyland Slim as we remember him, and also that was not his real name - that was Albert Luandrew.
Slim recorded for numerous recording companies but one may not be left unmentioned - the tiny Tempo-Tone label. It's not for its just four releases out of six sessions that this label was worth a full page on the Red Saunders Research Foundation. It's that these sessions had waxed six legends of Chicago's blues - Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Sunnyland Slim, Floyd Jones, Leroy Foster, and Jimmy Rogers. So much talent together - on such a small label.
Not only these smallest labels are documented on the site of the Foundation - you can also find the stories of some labels of which the names got much more attention - such as Chess and Vee-Jay.
From the early days of the Chess label - just after its rename from Aristocrat - here is Muddy Waters. Recorded in December of 1947 it never saw daylight until 1984 when it was included on a Chess LP. Here is Mean Disposition.
09 - Muddy Waters - Mean Dispostion
10 - Hattie Randolph - He's Leaping Of Joy
From 1955 on the Drexel label, that was Hattie Randolph with He's Leaping Of Joy - an outstanding little piece of jazz from a label and the singer obviously has no problems with the sudden tone changes on this one. It was written by her father, Zilner T. Randolph, a trumpet player who'd been in the band of Louis Armstrong, and the whole family grew up in music - at some point there had been a family band. The label is best known for the doowop music it put out, especially the Gems. I have the only re-issue CD that exists - titled the Best of Drexel Records and that is an obvious bootleg.
One of the things with the site of the Red Saunders Research Foundation - you just can't stop reading and that made me take way too long for producing this show. And so I was reading about King Kolax - quite a name but with surprisingly little recordings under his own name and even less that ever got a re-release and that way most of his stuff is extremely hard to find.
The next is taken from a very clean 78 on the Vee-Jay label. It's from 1954 and most likely arranged by another legend of the Chicago scene - the eccentric musician who called himself Sun Ra. Here is King Kolax and his band with Vivian - and I think it's no coincidence that that's the name of one of the owners of the Vee-Jay label.
11 - King Kolax - Vivian
12 - Four Blazes - Rug Cutter
The Four Blazes with Rug Cutter - originally a classic of Duke Ellington. The Four Blazes, they scored one number 1 hit in 1952 with Mary Jo - they get ample footage on the website of the Red Saunders Research Foundation - plus a pretty good appendix on a group from Los Angeles with the same name and active from 1945 to '48. The two groups are often confused, not in the least because around the same time, they both had a Chicago Boogie - two entirely different songs.
And this brings me to another page - one out of two - where the history of the United and States labels are spelled out. From that label - and it's got of course complete discographical information - a recording from November of 1951. Here is guitarist Tiny Grimes and his band with a great shuffler - Rocking The Blues Away.
13 - Tiny Grimes - Rockin' The Blues Away
14 - Tab Smith - Joy At The Savoy
Another mainstay of the Chicago scene - Tab Smith. Now his alto saxophone cries over numerous releases of the United label - no artist recorded more with United than he did - but here is a much earlier release on the Southern label of J. Mayo Williams. Pardon the skipping grooves and crappy quality - that's how the streaming music services delivered it to me. The title of this goodie was Joy At The Savoy.
Next a great from the Chicago scene that didn't get his own page - probably because the time when he was such a great, is out of the scope of the Red Saunders Research Foundation. They deal with post-war Rhythm & Blues and jazz where Sykes rather was a star from the thirties. His name does pop up though - at a page on Sax Mallard. Mallard plays the sax on this Victor recording. Here is That's My Gal of Roosevelt Sykes
15 - Roosevelt Sykes - That's My Gal
And Roosevelt Sykes ends today's show, that I dedicated to the groundbreaking work of the Red Saunders Research Foundation - a group of people very knowledgable on the postwar Chicago Rhythm & Blues scene. And some avid record collectors as well - most of the numerous label scans on the site come from collections of members Robert Campbell, George Paulus, Robert Pruter or Armin Büttner.
The Red Saunders Research Foundation web site is the first place to go when you have to find out anything about Rhythm & Blues from Chicago. It answers all your questions - and it will tell you about your ignorance about the vibrant music hotbed and the music that was played in South Side clubs with roaring names as the Rhumboogie or the Club Delisa. Many, many times I landed on here while researching for the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman, and several of their pages inspired me to do a special on a record label they covered.
The site may not be very modern looking - and navigating it is some of a hassle as an index on their pages is painfully missing - but Google is their friend as well, and on the home page of my site I put a search box that allows you not only to search the site of my radio program - but also their pages.
And as this is the end of today's show, I do want to mention my site where you can read back all of today's story and playlist and see what will be on next week. Search Google for the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman and it will show up first.
I hope you liked what I brought you today, I'm afraid some more talk than you're used from me. Pardon me for that, listeners and if you feel the urge, you can scold me for that and send an e-mail to rockingdutchman@rocketmail.com. Positive feedback is also greatly appreciated.
Next week there will be more Rhythm & Blues from your favorite program. See you then - here on the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman!