This transcript of the radio show is an approximation of what I said in the show. The real spoken parts may differ slightly.
And applause for me as this is the two hundredth show, two hundred episodes of the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman. That's nearly four years already and the show is still alive and kicking. And I must say, listeners, when I started this four years ago, I set my goal for one year, 52 shows, and I would just see what I would do after. Well it's become addictive. So I'm gonna tell you, you may count on more shows - more Legends of the Rocking Dutchman.
For today some great music of course, while I look back on what I done these four years. You got groundbreaking hits of Rhythm & Blues, but also the eeriest obscurities. One of the shows I done was on a few very obscure record labels. I'm gonna play one that had been released on one of these obscure labels. Here is from show 160 Cousin Ida with the Rough and Ready Man, that was released on a label named Asa.
01 - Cousin Ida - A Rough And Ready Man
02 - Blind Richard Yates - I'm Gonna Moan My Blues Away
One of the most wonderful blues that I have, I'm Gonna Moan My Blues Away of Blind Richard Yates. This goodie is from 1928 and it was released on the legendary Black Patti label. I did an episode showcasing this label that has the most wanted, most expensive 78s ever - Black Patties go for thousands of dollars for a record, no matter what the condition is.
The label was named after an as legendary opera singer, Sissieretta Jones and she was an African American woman - the peak of her career about the turn of the century. Now recording technology was around in these days but she's never been recorded.
The issues on the Black Patti label were blues, and the label was owned by J. Mayo Williams, one of the most influential producers of pre-war African-American music. I did a special on him long time ago, but his name pops up in my show on numerous occasions. He's headed the Race music departments of three labels - Paramount from the mid-twenties, just after that Vocalion, and from 1934 to '42 Decca. Any of these labels, while he worked for them, they grew out to the most influential label for the blues.
So it's time for some music from these labels. Let's start with a goodie from Paramount. From 1925 the Rough and Tumble Blues of Ma Rainey.
03 - Ma Rainey - Rough and Tumble Blues
04 - Bertha Chippie Hill - Hangman Blues
(jingle)
05 - Bumble Bee Slim - Sail On Sail On
06 - Lee Brown - My Little Girl Blues
Four in a row all connected to J. Mayo Williams - after Ma Rainey you got the Hangman Blues of Bertha Chippie Hill on the Vocalion label and then after the jingle a release on Decca's Race series - Sail On Sail On of Bumble Bee Slim, and that sounds pretty typical for the blues that Decca brought in 1935. And finally ten years later the My Little Girl Blues of Lee Brown on one of the indies of J. Mayo Williams - the Chicago label.
There's a huge contrast between the succesful way Williams managed the Race music departments of the record labels he worked for, and the labels he tried to manage in his own right. Williams was a great producer and A&R man - but he never managed to setup a succesful record company, where you need more skills than just being able to contract the right artists.
I also did the amazing story on J. Mayo Williams' secretary Aletha Dickerson - who just one day had to find out her boss had walked out of the office to work for the competitor - Vocalion - and he left his work for Paramount for her. She managed well. Now the Race department was the only profitable branch of Paramount - and when she left, in the deepest of the Depression, the company collapsed.
Well we owe a lot to J. Mayo Williams - and in fact he casts a shadow over that other important producer of the thirties - Lester Melrose. I played a lot of the music he produced but I never spotlighted him - and I promise, listeners, to do so in a future show.
I did many shows on Decca's 7000 series that Williams managed. I spelled out the catalog from 1940 onwards and I just did the last show on this series last week. You'll get more from Decca though, from the Sepia series that started in 1940 for artists that had the potential to cross over to the white audience. Now most didn't but it's easy to tell from the music that this grew out to the Rhythm & Blues of the forties.
Let me start that with the very first issue of that 8500 Sepia series. Here is Louis Jordan with Do You Call That a Buddy.
07 - Louis Jordan - Do You Call That a Buddy
08 - B.B. King - She's A Mean Woman
Recorded in the studio of Sam Phillips in Memphis, that was B.B. King with She's A Mean Woman, released on the RPM label. I done the story of what was later to become the Sun studio in two episodes and there will be more like that in a future show. Of course, Sam Phillips got immortal for discovering Elvis Presley - and the rockabilly artists that came after him. But his heart was with the blues and for that, *he* always said that not Elvis, but Howlin' Wolf was his greatest find ever. Howling Wolf didn't make him rich though. After a few sessions in Memphis, he signed with Chess and he set off for Chicago.
Now - B.B. King's debut may have been with the Bullet label, but his breakthrough came with the recording opportunities at Sam Phillips' studio. And the studio also was the career launcher for Ike Turner, and for his saxophonist Jackie Brenston, and Rosco Gordon.
I also done numerous shows on record labels. Some of the big ones - and like with Decca, I could easily do numerous shows on OKeh, Brunswick, Bluebird. I did showcase most of the released of Aladdin, for instance, up to the late forties. But there were also smaller and often pretty much forgotten labels. How about the odd story of the Old Swing Master, a record label that was started by the owner of a Chicago recording studio, Egmont Sonderling - and the name for the label was the moniker of his business partner, Chicago DJ Al Benson. He started the label after he lost a lot of money on the bankruptcy of one of his clients, the Vitacoustic label. In order to get some of the money back he started releasing the yet unreleased Vitacoustic masters - and later other unreleased material too.
From that label, released in '49 here is Kitty Stevenson, who never lived to see her record released as she died in a Detroit hospital a year before. She's backed by the band of Todd Rhodes. Here is Blues By Myself.
09 - Kitty Stevenson - Blues By Myself
10 - Red Saunders - Hambone
Hambone of Red Saunders and his band, together with the Hambone Kids, on the OKeh label from 1952. During the sixties, another take of this got two succesful releases, in fact, they gained much more attention than this one. Red Saunders was a drummer and band leader and his band was leading in the afterwar Chicago Rhythm & Blues scene.
Saunders lent his name to the Red Saunders Research Foundation, a group of music experts that extensively documented the lively Chicago scene after the war. I done a show especially to spotlight their groundbreaking work - no city in afterwar Rhythm & Blues has been documented so extensively on-line and a lot of information that I tell you in shows come from their website.
I have a friend, a man in his mid-eighties and he's a volunteer DJ at WSLR of Sarasota, FL, where I had my debut on air - before I started this program. This DJ goes by the name of Dadee-O - and he spent his young days in the Windy City and on his own, as a white kid, he went to the clubs of Chicago's South Side, that had legendary names such as Club DeLisa, the Rhumboogie, the Macombma Lounge and Club 51.
Each of these clubs were home to greats of Rhythm & Blues - like the Rhumboogie that had T-Bone Walker play off the roof of the joint. The Red Saunders Research Foundation has an extensive page on this place and the label it put out under the same name. It's at the Rhumboogie and its label where T-Bone Walker made national fame. Here he is with his Sail On Boogie.
11 - T-Bone Walker - Sail On Boogie
12 - Cab Calloway - Harlem Camp Meeting (from the short Hi-De-Ho)
This is from the musical short Hi-De-Ho starring the band of Cab Calloway and this raging instrumental is from the opening scene, where the Pullman Porter brings a telegram for Cab Calloway stating that he should open with another song next day in the Cotton Club. "Wake up everybody in the band! There's rehearsing to be done", with this as a result, taken from the bunk sleepers in the train coach - in pyjamas. You heard the whistle blow somewhere in the beginning.
I did a show on short musical movies, and the soundies, and that were three-minute movies that you could watch from a coin machine. You had to spare a dime, twice the amount of the jukebox and the next movie started to play in the machine that you could only watch on your own. You didn't even have the choice on what to watch - it was just the next movie. The introduction of these coin machines was pretty much hampered due to the war - but eventually they've been quite popular for some years.
Next the music from such a soundie - here is Mr. Jackson from Jacksonville of June Richmond.
13 - June Richmond - Mr. Jackson From Jacksonville
14 - Earl Hines - Straight Life
You heard Ernie "Bubbles" Whitman introduce Earl Hines in his AFRS Jubilee show, a syndicated radio show aimed at the armed forces during the war and the years after. Syndicated radio simply means recorded before and distributed for broadcasting - pretty much like the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman, be it that I can just transfer the files to the radio stations over the internet, and these shows had to be distributed on 16 inch 78 rpm records. These records could hold 15 minutes of music, and in the middle of the show, the record had to be flipped over.
The shows were aimed at African-American soldiers and in my show where I spotlighted the AFRS radio programs, I told you a lot about the segregation that was in the army - that was like the Deep South. it's pretty ironical that America fought world's worst racist with a segregated army. Black soldiers were not thought fit for combat and that way most were assigned supporting tasks only. Many African-Americans felt they were denied the right to defend their own country. When personnel shortage on the battlefield became a true problem, president Eisenhower allowed Black military to volunteer for combat divisions and many did, even if it meant a lower rank.
Segregation and discrimination always have been a leading theme in my shows - the history of Rhythm & Blues is the history of the segregated, African-American subculture. The blues were born from the field hollers of the 19th century plantation slaves. They could bloom in a Jim Crow drenched society of inequality and repression, got fused with that other African-American born style, jazz, and evolved into the Rhythm & Blues of the late forties and early fifties, that was picked up by the white kids - and then it was Rock 'n Roll.
For that, the African American culture needed a touch of cool - and one of the - highy underrecognized - promotors of that was Cab Calloway. Back in 1930, he played the Cotton Club where the patrons where whites only. But he did not turn to the popular Tin Pan Alley standards - instead he showcased the coolness of African American life and I'm sure, everyone thought, that Cab Calloway is a true hepcat. He even had to explain the jive slang he sung to the white crowd - by means of his dictionary of jive slang.
Here he is - with Aw You Dawg, and for a reason that was spelled D-A-W-G.
15 - Cab Calloway - Aw You Dawg
16 - Albert Ammons & Pete Johnson - Boogie Woogie Dream
The Boogie Woogie Dream of Albert Ammons & Pete Johnson - and with that I remember the show on the history of boogie woogie that I did just a few weeks ago. Not many people will know about the origins in the 1870s in Eastern Texas and the possible connection with a Beethoven sonata - yeah, I try to educate you together with the great music.
I done much more in these two hundred shows - like I debunked the myth of Robert Johnson, who by legend would have sold his soul to the devil to learn to play guitar - in fact it was a bluesman from Hazelhurst, MS named Ike Zimmerman who practiced with him - be it, it was on a graveyard. Or the story of Bea Booze, and despite what many blues experts thought, that was not the stage name for Muriel Nichols.
Now if you missed that, I suggest you look it up on the website of this program - a web search for the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman will get you there. Once in, there's a search box on the home page where you can try to find out if I told anything on your favorite artist - chances are fair I will. On my site you can also find today's story and find out what will be on for next week's - that will be show number 201.
And then you can provide feedback to my show - either from the web site or send an e-mail to rockingdutchman@rocketmail.com.
For now I'm done - more Rhythm & Blues next week. See you then, here on the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman!