This transcript of the radio show is an approximation of what I said in the show. The real spoken parts may differ slightly.
And it's a great mix of Rhythm & Blues again for today and for a start I wanna go back to the show of last week, where I played versions of blues classics and jazz standards, and compared the original recording with a later version. If you remember that show well, you may have noticed that I played yet other versions in the background of my talking. Now one of them, I stumbled upon that while researching for that show, it was a version of Hey Lawdy Mama of Louis Armstrong, that I never heard before. Well it's way to good to only play it while I'm talking. So here it is once more. Of course the maestro toots the trumpet and does the singing with his typical voice. From 1941 on Decca Louis Armstrong with Hey Lawdy Mama.
01 - Louis Armstrong - Hey Lawdy Mama
02 - Eddie Durham - Moten's Swing
And we stay with the Decca label, with a version of Moten's swing done by Eddie Durham in 1940. The original of course was done by the band of Bennie Moten in 1931 - but the arrangement was his. I'll get you that one for another show. Durham was a composer and arranger for many bands including Bennie Moten's, Jimmie Lunceford and Count Basie.
Eddie Durham played both the trombone and he pioneered on the electrical guitar with some of the earliest recordings for that, from the mid-thirties - he is sometimes credited for doing the first amped guitar solo on record, in 1938 that was, but there are more credits like that, it depends on what you count as a guitar solo. Durham played the Gibson ES 150, the first commercially available electrical guitar. ES stood voor Electrical Spanish, and 150 for the price for a set including an amplifier and a cable.
But it was Charlie Christian who made the breakthrough for the instrument - he pioneered on it as early as 1936 and by '39 Mary Lou Williams, the pianist of Andy Kirk's band, recommended him to music producer John Hammond and he hooked him up with Benny Goodman - leader of one of the first racially integrated big bands. With Goodman, Christian made national fame. Unfortunately his health declined rapidly, after he had contracted tuberculosis in the late thirties. He died in '42 when he was only 25 years old.
The next one is also a goodie on Decca - actually there's a whole lot of them in today's show. This set is partially made from leftovers of other shows and that includes the sets I did on the Decca 7000 series - made up of music aimed at African-Americans. The next one is from that series, recorded in 1939. Here is Peetie Wheatstraw with the Machine Gun Blues.
03 - Peetie Wheatstraw - Machine Gun Blues
04 - Bill Gaither - Hard Way To Go
(jingle)
05 - Nora & Delle - Keep a Knockin' (But You Can't Come In)
06 - Sonny Boy Williamson I - Insurance man blues
And you got four in a row - after Peetie Wheatstraw's Machine Gun Blues that was Hard Way To Go of Bill Gaither. Gaither was billed as Leroy's Buddy on this Decca issue of 1939. He'd been a close friend of blues pianist Leroy Carr who died in 1935 and used this name in honor of his friend. The came the jingle and the obscure vocal duo Nora & Delle with Keep a Knockin' (But You Can't Come In) and that was from 1941 - also on Decca. And then finally the first one today not on Decca. Sonny Boy Williamson recorded for Bluebird and you got the Insurance Man Blues. This Sonny Boy Williamson is seen as one of the most influential harmonica players of the blues and in his days he was extremely succesful with a 120 sides on his name until he was murdered in 1948.
Now - not only his music lived on in many covers of hits like Sloppy Drunk Blues and Good Morning Schoolgirl - but also his name, as a Delta-based bluesman Alex Rice Miller adopted it and went by the same name putting out hits in the fifties on the Trumpet and Checker labels.
The bluesman that you just heard - nowadays we call him Sonny Boy Williamson the First. He was born in the Delta and like so many bluesmen he settled in Chicago in 1934 and there he was discovered by Lester Melrose, and he secured Williamson a recording contract with the Bluebird label. His earliest recordings have been done in the Sky Club in Aurora, IL, the top-floor nightclub of the Leland hotel, that at daytime served as a recording and broadcasting studio. Later he recorded in the studios of RCA Victor that owned the Bluebird label.
And for the next record we go back to the Decca label. From 1942 here is Big Joe Turner who had had moved from the 7000 'Race' series, aimed at African-Americans, to the 8000 Sepia series - Black artists with the potential to cross over to the mainstream market. It had a lot of swing bands - and also Nat King Cole and Louis Jordan. In this case Turner got teamed up with a white boogie woogie pianist - Freddie Slack - in segregated America still a rarity. Here's one of the results of that session - here is Blues In The Night.
07 - Big Joe Turner - Blues In The Night
08 - Roosevelt Sykes - Ice Cream Freezer
The Ice Cream Freezer of Roosevelt Sykes from 1946 - one of the earliest releases of the Specialty label. Sykes was a big man known for always having a huge cigar in his mouth and as a young man he had earned his nickname Honeydripper for his success with the ladies. He was born in Arkansas but raised in St. Louis and during his pre-war career he travelled a lot back and forth between his home city and the South.
In '41 he settled in Chicago and formed his band the Honeydrippers. Now much to his chagrin, West Coast performer Joe Liggins had his epic monster hit The Honeydripper in '45 and that effectively deprived him of his moniker. He always had to state since, that he was the only original Honeydripper.
Sykes left the Windy City in '54 when the electric blues took over, and went to New Orleans where he could easily find work. The blues and folk revival brought new interest in him but his home base remained in the Crescent City where there was always a place for him to pound the piano - until his death in 1983.
On with a recording from 1946 - here are on the Manor label, the Cats & The Fiddle with June Davis and her J.D. Blues.
09 - June Davis & The Cats & the Fiddle - J.D. Blues
10 - Gabriel Brown - Down In The Bottom
On the Gennett label that was Gabriel Brown with Down In The Bottom. The Gennett label owned by Joe Davis that is, when he bought the brand name together with the wartime rationing of shellac that came with it - we're talking 1944.
Gabriel Brown was born in the Florida Panhandle and he was discovered in the mid-thirties by folklorist Zora Neale Hurston and got recorded by Alan Lomax in his efforts to preserve the rapidly disappearing folk and blues. Brown moved to New York and got involved in opera and the Federal Arts Theatre. For Joe Davis he did what he was best in - the blues - he worked with Davis up to 1952.
Now for the next one you will get the band of Jump Jackson fronted by Benny Kelly. Here is Not Now Baby.
11 - Jump Jackson & Benny Kelly - Not Now Baby
12 - Muddy Waters - You're Gonna Miss Me
Muddy Waters was that with You're Gonna Miss Me, recorded in late of 1948 for the Aristocrat label. The session he'd done in December of '47 had yielded two well-selling singles but there was nothing more in that same succesful style - just Muddy Waters and his guitar and the slap bass of Big Crawford. 1948 was the year of the second recording strike of the American Federation of Musicians so new recordings had to wait until the Chicago local of the Union no longer enforced it.
His real name was McKinley A. Morganfield and his first recordings were done in 1941 and '42 for Alan Lomax in Clarksdale, MS. The year after he moved to Chicago but he had trouble finding work. His first recording was in 1946 for J. Mayo Williams. A session in that same year for Columbia went unreleased. It wasn't until Muddy Waters' second session for the Aristocrat label that sales took up - with his Can't be satisfied.
And we stay for a moment with the Aristocrat label with Robert Nighthawk. He cut his Black Angel Blues backed by Willie Dixon on the bass and pianist Ernest Lane. On the label the trio was billed as the Nighthawks.
Robert Nighthawk was born Robert Lee McCollum in Helena, AK in 1909. He learned to play the guitar pretty late - at age 22 - and started a life as a wandering musician and in '35 he landed in St. Louis. In 1937 he recorded as Robert Lee McCoy and Rambling Bob for Bluebird, and later when he moved to Chicago, for Decca as Peetie's Boy. The stage name of Robert Nighthawk came when he found out that after ten years, his song "Prowling Night Hawk" was still remembered.
Well here he is with the Black Angel Blues.
13 - Robert Nighthawk - Black Angel Blues (Sweet Black Angel)
14 - Howlin' Wolf - How Many More Years
That was Howlin' Wolf with How Many More Years on the Chess label, but recorded for the Memphis Recording Service of Sam Phillips in 1951. Sam Phillips always mentioned him as his greatest finding - more a finding even than Elvis Presley.
This song was before Chester Burnett - as his real name was - got a contract with Chess and moved to Chicago. Burnett never learned to read and write until his forties, but he was financially succesful and he was one of the few Southern bluesmen who didn't hop the freight train to Chicago but he drove himself up in his own car, with a stack of 4000 dollars in his pockets. In Chicago he married a middle-class woman who helped him manage his finances. He was know to pay his band members a nice salary and health insurance.
And after that an obscure fifties Rhythm & Blues singer, Dolly Cooper. Her name pops up when the Savoy label contracts this Philadelphia-based lady. She does a few sides for them and for the Modern and Dot labels and then disappears off the radar again. That's not much of a biography but she was a gorgeous young woman and did some great music. Here she is on the Savoy label with You Gotta Be Good to Yourself.
15 - Dolly Cooper - You Gotta Be Good to Yourself
16 - Bessie Smith - Chicago Bound Blues
Now a little bit of shellac noise in this goodie from as far back as 1923 - hey, that record is over ninety years old, so don't expect a pristine sound. Bessie Smith was that for the Columbia label and that was an acoustical recording, that means that that the musicians had to crowd around a huge horn that on the other side had a needle that wrote the sound signal in the wax.
The frequency characteristics of these horns are - to our modern ears - more than awful. In these days, of course, you played the record back on, again, a purely mechanical phonograph with as awful sound quality. Even though the record has seen better days, the sound quality as we hear it now is definitely better than back then. This was played on a modern hi-fi turntable with a good quality needle that fits these old 78s perfectly.
Well a few cracks and pops in the grooves never stopped me to play it here on the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman and I hope you don't mind - the music is way too good to leave the records unplayed. And I hope you agree with me - well of course you can let me know at rockingdutchman@rocketmail.com. Feedback is greatly appreciated and I will always reply you.
And if you want to read back what I told you today, there's my web site that you can go to, and easiest way to get there is to search Google for the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman and it will show up first in the search results. This was show 196 in that long list of shows that I done already.
For now time's up so have a rocking day. I'll get you a new shot of Rhythm & Blues next week. Until then - see you again here, on the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman!