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 we're going back to the year 1940 with a mix of tunes from the Chicago-based Bluebird label. Bluebird was the budget label of RCA Victor and some of the labels appear with Victor's famous 'His Master's Voice' dog looking in the horn of the phonograph - together with the actual bluebird on the label.
I wanna start today's set with a blues of Sidney Bechet. He was born in 1897 in a Creole-of-Color family in New Orleans, traditionally a better situated class of Black people in the Crescent City. Bechet gained his status as a jazz virtuoso only after he settled in France and a performance at the Paris Jazz Fair in 1950. He'd been in Europe before - and twice got deported back to New York after convictions of assault - both at women. In America, he has always struggled for finding work in music and that pretty much contrasts with his nowaday's status as a musical genius.
Here he is on Bluebird 8509 from 1940 with Sidney's Blues.
00 - 8509 - Sidney Bechet - Sidney's Blues
00 - 8514 - Bo Carter - My Little Mind
Bo Carter, a bluesman most known for his dirty blues with titles such as Please Warm My Wiener and Banana in Your Fruit Basket - but also for the original version of Corrine Corrina, later the signature song of Frankie Half Pint Jackson and a major hit for Big Joe Turner in 1956. You got My Little Mind from 1940 on the Bluebird label, that I spotlight today, here on the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman.
Bluebird was established as a low-budget subsidiary of RCA Victor in 1932, in the deepest of the Great Depression. Head of the division was the colorful Eli Oberstein and he rolled in the music business as a salesman for OKeh. When his boss Ralph Peer moved to the competitor, Victor records, Oberstein followed him and from 1930 he started as a producer. For that he went out with mobile equipment to the Southern states for recording country musicians. Next to his involvement with the Bluebird label, Oberstein set up several record labels, such as Crown, Royale, Varsity and Top Hat. Many bluesmen were brought to Bluebird by another illustrous man of Chicago's music scene, Lester Melrose - he worked as an independent, freelance A&R man in the Windy City.
Oberstein had, let's say, colorful practices, or call it his own way in managing the music business of Bluebird. In 1939, he was fired from RCA Victor without explanation.
Bluebird was a general-interest label and it did not have a segregated series for race music. It did blues, hillbilly, jazz and big band swing. Some of Bluebirds great names in swing include Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw and Glenn Miller. Benny Goodman had a strategic reason to sign with the cheap Bluebird: his records were in demand with the young people, and most of them could only afford low-priced records. Bluebirds went for 35 cents each, or three for a dollar.
What I play today, is a selection of the African-American music from their catalog somewhere in 1940. I'll play from other years in later shows - I promise. And where most recordings were done recently, the next one is an oldie of Jelly Roll Morton. It was issued on Victor before, in 1928 and by then he worked closely together with Lester Melrose, a collaboration that started in '23. This is a re-release - not a re-recording. Here is the Georgia Swing.
00 - 8515 - Jelly Roll Morton - Georgia Swing
00 - 8519 - Cats & The Fiddle - Hep Cat's Holiday
(jingle)
00 - 8524 - Lil Green - Romance In The Dark
00 - 8529 - Jazz Gillum - Key To The Highway
Jazz Gillum was that with the Key to the Highway - a blues classic now most remembered from the version that Big Bill Broonzy did solo. On this one, you also hear Broonzy backing up Gillum on the guitar.
You got more, before Gillum that was the Romance In The Dark of Lil Green and then before the jingle you got the jive group the Cats and the Fiddle with the Hepcat's Holiday.
The Cats and the Fiddle started in 1937 when Austin Powell teamed up with an existing trio. Powell had been the front man of Choc Logan and his Twelve Gentlemen Of Swing - not to be confused with the band with the same name of Skeets Tolbert in New York. Choc Logan performed in the Savoy ballroom of Chicago. Before that, Powell had been in another vocal group, the Harlem Harmony Hounds - again, not in New York but in the Windy City.
This Hepcat's Holiday was done on July 31 of 1940 and it was issued in September. By 1940, the Cats done quite a few records for Bluebird.
Later, in 1942, the group played at the Garrick club in Chicago when a teenage girl, named Ruth Jones, did a song with them. The club owner, Joe Sherman, hired her on the spot, and the young lady was backed up by the Cats and the Fiddle for a short time under her new stage name - Dinah Washington. In December of '42, Lionel Hampton took her with him after he heard her sing in the Garrick. Now for the Cats, Hampton apparently didn't have an offer.
For the next one we go to Lonnie Johnson. This bluesman and guitarist already had a twenty-year career behind him. At age 18 he went to England with a revue for a two-year tour, and when he returned in 1919, he had to find out that all of his family had died of the Spanish Flu epidemic the year before, except for his brother James. Together they moved from New Orleans to St. Louis and Lonnie found success when he won a blues contest and won a recording contract with OKeh in 1925. After a few years with Decca, he switched to Bluebird in 1939 and this is from one of his sessions there. Here is Get Yourself Together.
00 - 8530 - Lonnie Johnson - Get Yourself Together
00 - 8534 - Walter Davis - If It Hadn't Been For You
If It Hadn't Been For You - that was Walter Davis, an another St. Louis based musician and he must have traveled a lot back and forth to Chicago, he did a 180 sides for the record labels there between 1932 and '52. Due to a stroke in 1953, he wasn't able to perform, and so got him a job as a night clerk in a hotel and he became involved in the church as a preacher.
For the next one we go to a very colorful lady - Alberta Hunter. As a young woman, about 1915, she sang the blues in the Chicago Panama Club, a white-only venue and she draw the clientele from the main event downstairs to the first floor with her improvised blues. By 1917 she played the prestigious Dreamland and toured Europe. She had a career on both sides of the ocean until 1957, when her mother died. She was 62 years old then, and she decided it was time for a career change. With a little lie on her age and a falsified highschool diploma she went to a nursing school and spent 20 years working in healthcare. She was sent on retirement when her employer thought she was 70 years old - in fact she was 82. For Alberta Hunter not an age yet to spend at home, so she rolled back into the music business with much success.
There's a few YouTube clips out there where she performs in her late eigthies with the dirty blues she done in her youth - such as My Man Is A Handy Man and I Want A Rough And Ready Man. I suggest you look them up. I think the world would be a better place if everybody had a great-grandma like her.
But here is a recording from 1940 - she was a middle-aged woman already. Listen to My Castle's Rocking.
00 - 8539 - Alberta Hunter - My Castle's Rockin'
00 - 8545 - Tommy McClennan - My Baby's Doggin' Me
Delta blues singer Tommy McClennan was that with My Baby's Doggin' Me. McClennan lived in Yazoo City, MS when A&R man Lester Melrose scouted him and he got a recording contract with Bluebird. The story tells that Melrose had to make a hurried exit as people thought - white man, Nothern accent - that he was recruiting laborers.
For the next one we have another re-issue of a twenties instrumental. The Bucktown Stomp of Johnny Dodds had been on the Victor label, before in 1928, and it was re-released as Bluebird 8549.
00 - 8549 - Johnny Dodds - Bucktown Stomp
00 - 8559 - Leadbelly - Alberta
The folk and blues singer Leadbelly with Alberta on Bluebird 8559. Huddie Ledbetter as his real name was, well he rose to great fame for his original blues and folk songs that now are standards. That's how we remember him now, but Leadbelly saw the inside of prison more than once, for murder and attempt to murder. A three-page article in Life Magazine of April 19 of 1937, tells how he got pardoned twice after musical pleas to the governer, having served only a small part of his sentence.
The article is all but prejudiced, suggesting that he just got away for two capital crimes with his musical talents. And by '37, a magazine like this will probably have been prejudiced towards African-Americans in general, like all of white society was. But it shows another aspect of changed times, and I think nowadays it would be unthinkable that someone gets pardoned twice, for murder and attempt to murder.
The article has a rare full-color page size picture of Leadbelly, and a picture of his hands playing the guitar, with the subtitle "these hands once killed a man" - and also a dramatic picture of Leadbelly's wife Martha Promise. The article tells, nowadays Leadbelly drives John A. Lomax through the country assisting him with his field recordings. The Wikipedia article on John Lomax says he did record Leadbelly's musical plea for pardon, but it's unlikely that the governor ever listened to it. Leadbelly's release rather was a combination of a necessary cutting of costs in de midst of the Depression, and his good behavior in prison.
John Lomax considered Leadbelly as his major finding and he played a key role in rehabilitating him. The singer started a new career, every now and then supported by John Lomax's son Alan, until he died of ALS in 1949.
Next pick that I'm doing from the catalog of Bluebird, is Washboard Sam, one of the more prolific bluesmen at Bluebird. Together with Vocalion he did some 160 sides. Here is his I'm Going To St. Louis.
00 - 8569 - Washboard Sam - I'm Going To St. Louis
00 - 8575 - Tampa Red - What Am I Going To Do
What Am I Going To Do - you heard Tampa Red on the kazoo - and the guitar of course. He was even more productive than Washboard Sam whom I played before this one, Tampa Red recorded a stunning 350 songs, 250 of them before 1941. Now his name is associated with hokum, some kind of bawdy party music with a lot of double entendre lyrics - but this definitely doesn't fall in that category.
For the next from the Bluebird catalog I took a song of a very influential blues harp player - Sonny Boy Williamson - that is Sonny Boy the First. The man who later used the same name never recorded for Bluebird. Here is I Been Dealing With The Devil.
00 - 8580 - Sonny Boy Williamson I - I Been Dealing With The Devil
00 - 8589 - Florida Kid - Hitler Blues
Hitler is a bad man - just in case we didn't know yet. That was the bluesman named Florida Kid - his real name was Ernest Blunt and it's unknown whether he indeed was from Florida. He did one session for Bluebird and that yielded four singles for the label.
And the warning about Hitler ends today's show - there's very little time left so let me just mention my e-mail address in case you want to provide feedback - that is rockingdutchman@rocketmail.com. And all of today's show is on my website, do a Google search for the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman and it will show up first. Today's show is number 190 in that long list of shows I done already.
Next week I'll get you more Rhythm & Blues - until then you'll have to do without me. Well - I guess that shouldn't give you the blues. See you again, here on the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman!