This transcript of the radio show is an approximation of what I said in the show. The real spoken parts may differ slightly.
And once more, the best of Rhythm & Blues here on the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman, with a great mix of tunes for your enjoyment and education. A mix that starts with an instrumental lament for the death of a great clarinettist, Jimmie Noone. Noone is considered one of the greats of the New Orleans scene, but by 1944 he had moved to Los Angeles, where he played in the traditional New Orleans jazz band of the weekly Orson Welles Almanac radio show, a show that highly contributed to the revival of traditional New Orleans jazz.
At the morning before his fifth appearance on radio, Noone died of a heart attack. Orson Welles asked trombonist Kid Ory, also from the Crescent City and living in L.A., to fill in and do a tribute to Noone.
This Blues For Jimmie Noone was later recorded for the Crescent label, the label of Nesuhi Ertegün, the brother of Ahmet Ertegün who'd later founded the Atlantic label. Now the Crescent label was short-lived and released just eight records, all of Kid Ory and his band, but they are considered important for the revival of traditional old-time jazz.
So here's a great piece of history to start with. Kid Ory and his Creole Jazz Band with the Blues for Jimmie Noone.
01 - Kid Ory's Creole Jazz Band - Blues for Jimmy
02 - Royal Rhythm Boys - Beat It Out Bumpin' Boy
On the Decca label from 1939 Slim Gaillard and Slam Stewart billed as the Royal Rhythm Boys with Beat It Out Bumpin' Boy. In this one you heard the typcial gimmick of Slam Stewart - playing the upright bass with the bow and humming the same tune one octave higher.
Slim and Slam were a very innovative and comical duo with, as their main feature, Slim Gaillards own-constructed hepcat style nonsense language, that he dubbed Vout-O-Reenee.
Now Gaillard had a pretty unusual youth compared to most musicians in the New York scene, where he landed eventually. He was born in Cuba - at least to his own account - as the son of a Black Cuban mother and a German-Jewish father, and with them he sailed the world until at the age of 12 when he lost his parents out of sight on the Greek island of Crete. From there, he was on his own, he worked on a ship that brought him to the Middle East and finally took a ship that he thought would sail him back to Cuba - but he ended up in Detroit instead where he did all kinds of jobs, including transporting bootleg liquor, while studying the piano and the guitar.
After he met Duke Ellington, who visited the Motor City with his band, Slim decided that music was his destiny and he set off for New York to join the thriving jazz scene. It's there where he met Slam Stewart with whom he did these famous songs - with lyrics in his Vout-O-Reenee, but also fragments in Yiddish and Arabic, languages he'd picked up in his teenage years on the ship.
Time for more music again. From 1941 on the OKeh label - here is Count Basie with Feedin' The Bean.
03 - Count Basie - Feedin' The Bean
04 - Bea Booze with Sammy Price - War Rationin' Papa
(jingle)
05 - Bill Johnson & His Musical Notes - Shorty's Got To Go
06 - Saunders King - Write Me A Letter Blues
That was a whole lotta music, four in a row, after Count Basie you got the War Rationing Papa of Bea Booze - backed up on the piano by Sam Price, recorded in early 1942. Bea Booze was born in Baltimore and made name in the New York blues scene. She signed with Decca and her version of See See Rider made it to number one on the Harlem Hit Parade.
Another version of this blues, recorded on J. Mayo Williams' Harlem label, by Philadelphia born Muriel Nichols has left many blues conaisseurs think that Bea Booze was the stage name of Nichols, simply because Williams had credited her on that record as Muriel Bea Booze Nichols. The confusion was cleared up just a few years ago thanks to the work of the Red Saunders Research Foundation - even though this was in the New York Rhythm & Blues scene, where the Foundation devotes its research to Chicago.
Now - you got more. Shorty's Got To Go of vocal and instrumental jive group Bill Johnson and his musical notes, and they recorded this for RCA Victor. Shorty is a cover of Lucky Millinder's song but hey this is a real memorable version. They recorded another take for the AFRS Jubilee show, the radio program aimed at African-Americans in the armed forces.
Then finally from Saunders King the Write Me A Letter Blues - straight from the 78 on the San Francisco based Rhythm label. King was from Oakland, CA that had a modest but thriving Rhythm & Blues scene, and a few highlights of that scene is recorded on that Rhythm label. Saunders King may well have made a greater impact in Rhythm & Blues if he hadn't had so much misfortune in life. In 1942 his wife committed suicide, in '46 he got shot by his landlord and he served some time in the prison of San Quentin for heroin posession.
Next from 1947 a young Etta Jones, still ninteen years old when she did this. Jones started recording even three years before, in '44, with Barney Bigard and Georgie Auld and produced by Leonard Feather, four of the most beautiful blues she ever done and all of them have featured this radio program before. On this, she is being backed up by the band of J.C. Heard. Here is the Richest Guy In The Graveyard.
07 - Etta Jones - The Richest Guy In The Graveyard
08 - Andrew Tibbs - Toothless Woman Blues
On the Aristocrat label, the Toothless Woman Blues - in the typical style of Andrew Tibbs. The session of September 1948 was backed up by the band of Dave Young, who also did Tibbs' famous - or infamous - Bilbo Is Dead and Union Man Blues, two sides of a platter that caused quite some uproar for its cynical political content.
Dave Young was a notable saxophone player in Chicago, having a longtime stint at the Ritz, good but not running up with changing tastes - he missed out on both bebop and the honking sax style and interest for him faded, and his contract at the Ritz ended in early '49.
The next musician on my play list moved to Los Angeles in 1941 to join his elder sister Nellie Lutcher - and then we're talking about her brother Joe. He played the cafe Society and he had worked for Nat King Cole, the Mills Brothers and Sammy Davis Jr. when he signed with the Spcialty label. On there Art Rupe only gave him slow blues to play that he didn't like that much and so he also recorded on the label where his sister was - Capitol. Next is one of these Capitol recordings - the No Name Boogie. On saxophone is here Joe Lutcher.
09 - Joe Lutcher - No Name Boogie
10 - Pete Brown - Pushin the Mop
Pushing The Mop - another saxophonist, that was Pete Brown and he recorded this for the Savoy label in 1945. In the thirties and forties he was a valued sax player and he'd been playing alongside many greats - such as Jimmie Noone, Lionel Hampton, Jimmie Gordon, Leonard Feather, Dizzy Gillespie, Sammy Price and Louis Jordan. Unfortunately his health hampered him through the fifties and he died in '63.
Next another Brown - Walter Brown, and he died even much younger, at the age of 39 in 1956, of the complications of a life full of heroin, amphetamines and alcohol. His addiction severely hampered his career, including a break from Jay McShann in 1943 who got fed up by his unreliability. Brown and McShann got back toghether on many occasions, including several recording sessions between '47 and '51 - his last recording session. Here a recording from '45 - It's A Good Deal Mama.
11 - Walter Brown - It's A Good Deal Mama
12 - Dud & Paul Bascomb - Somebody's Knocking
Somebody's knocking - you got saxophonist Paul Bascomb and his brother Dud on the trumpet fronting the big band that evolved from a septet that they started in 1944. That was after they left the band that they helped found, and that started as the Bama State Collegians, a student band and when the whole group, by then long graduated, moved to New York, it was led by Erskine Hawkins, and the whole band took his name.
Paul Bascomb is the best known of the two, but that's mainly because he recorded for the United and States labels and these have been well re-released by the Delmark label. His brother didn't record that extensively but his career saw new heights touring Japan and Europe with Sam Taylor, Buddy Tate and James Brown. He did record for an album for the Savoy label but that wasn't released until 1986.
Next a recording of one of the great songwriters of Rhythm & Blues - Percy Mayfield. From him the Advice For Men Only, that he recorded for the Specialty label, but it never got released at the time.
13 - Percy Mayfield - Advice
14 - Paula Watson - I Love to Ride
On the MGM label Paula Watson with I Love To Ride, and it shows off again her strength was in novelty songs. We know her of course of her hit A Little Bird Told Me that she did for the Supreme label. A cover of Decca recording artist Evelyn Knight soon became a much bigger hit and the lawsuit that followed was lost by the Supreme label, ending its operations. To add insult to injury, Decca soon became the home of Paula Watson.
The case was important in music history as it encouraged the already widespread custom of major labels to have their white artists cover succesful Rhythm & Blues songs and with that, effectively putting the Black artists and their small, independent record labels out of business. It hampered the career of many Rhythm & Blues artists and for me it serves as one of the many examples of the racial discrimination that was so widespread in the fifties. You could only hope that at least songwriter royalties were being paid, but in most cases these also got into the wrong hands, as record label owners so often had claimed the song's composership instead of the real songwriter.
It proved to be, though, an important ingredient in the making of Rock 'n Roll as the sounds of African American music crossed over to the white audience. Well here on the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman, I've always explained how segregation and discrimination played a key role in the history of our popular music - and here's just one example of it.
And now that we get to this subject, listeners, there's another thing that puzzles me that I want to share with you. Rhythm & blues and all of the African-American music from before - say, everything I play here on this radio program, was made by African-Americans and targeted at African-Americans. In the segregated society of America before the Civil Rights movement, there were few opportunities for a black artist to get recognition for the general audience.
Now African American music moved on - from Rhythm & Blues, to soul, to hiphop and rap, and it's fair to say, that they belong to the African American heritage. But the strange thing of it, listeners, the conservation of it seems to be pretty much exclusively in white hands. Ever since the blues revival of the sixties, it was the initiative of white intellectuals to keep the old Black styles from being entirely forgotten. No, maybe even way before, with Alan Lomax who did his field recordings for both Black and White folk music to be saved in the extensive catalog of the Library of Congress.
And so you find me, and I'm a white guy too, as the producer of one of the very few radio programs spotlighting music that every African American should be proud of as part of his cultural heritage and his race's vast contribution to nowadays poplular music. I know and understand why, in general, interest in music from a generation that has nearly completed died out, that that interest is relatively small, and that my program serves a niche audience. But I think that African Americans could be more interested in the history of their own sub culture.
From that thunder speech to what I usually do on here - digging up obscurities. Next you'll get Floyd 'Horscollar' Williams with the Horsecollar Blues. Williams' name pops up first on the very obscure recordings J. Mayo Williams did for his own Chicago label, but then, on one side his band backs up one of the great blueswomen of the mid-forties, and I played some of her before today - Etta Jones.
This Horsecollar Blues is a screatching saxophone instrumental released somewhere in the fifties on an as obscure label, named That's It. Here it is.
15 - Floyd 'Horsecollar' Williams - Horsecollar Blues
And with that, I'm afraid the show's done. I don't often get to only fifteen tracks in an hour and that tells me, listeners, that I done just too much talking today and really, I hope you didn't get tired of my blabber mouth. So bash me if you did, at my e-mail address rockingdutchman@rocketmail.com. Now of course, positive feedback is also welcome.
Indeed I done quite some stories on today's show and if you wanna read back what I just told you today, like about Paula Watson's hit song or the bizarre story of the teenage years of Slim Gaillard, well it's all on my web site and the easiest way to get there is to search the web for the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman. Key that in in Google and you'll be taken straigt to the site. For today's show, look for number 184 in that long list of episodes that I already done.
There will be more hot Rhythm & Blues from me in the next show. Until then, don't get the blues. Always look forward to the next time, here on the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman!