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 some tunes that I've been listening to during my last flight to and back from Florida. I came back last week - that is last week as I'm producing this show cause you may know that this radio program is syndicated - recorded in advance - and it depends on the radio station that you're listening to, how many weeks after that the show is broadcasted.
Well it doesn't matter for the story. I have a pretty old-fashioned mp3 player that I especially use for flying, a stick-shaped thingy that runs on a simple AAA battery and so I never run out of music, I just change that battery instead of having to rely on how long you do with the home-charged battery of your Ipod or whatever gadget people use. Thing is - it just plays the music in one particular order and you can't select what to hear except for skipping a tune. Pretty oldschool, huh? And so it's half a surprise what you'll hear next.
Today you'll hear a selection of that music that I tried getting myself asleep with, pretty useless of course because the music is way too exciting. Or funny. Just take this humorous song of Gene Phillips with his Rhythm Aces. Recorded in 1947 for the Modern label here is the snuff dipping mama - it makes me laugh out loud every time I hear it.
01 - Gene Phillips & His Rhythm Aces - Snuff Dipping Mama
02 - Duke Henderson - Hey Dr. Kinsey
Now more humor from 1953 on the Flair label with Duke Henderson and Hey Dr. Kinsey - a song about the Kinsey reports - and the bringer of bad news - like about the percentage of women unfaithful in their marriage - gets the blame from Duke Henderson. The reports were published in 1948 for male sexuality and 1953 for female. Well nowadays the findings of the institute are pretty much common knowledge but by then they caused quite some uproar, as they pretty much challenged what people believed about human sexual behaviour. And here Mr. Henderson sings about his doubts too.
Well there was more that kept me from sleeping in that plane. Just as a contrast came this goodie from as far back as 1927 on the legendary Black Patti label - the short-lived record company of the influential producer J. Mayo Williams. For collectors, records of that label belong to the most valuable that exist.
Of course on here it's what's in the grooves that counts. Listen to that extraordinary piano accompaniment on Mozelle's Blues - here is Mozelle Alderson.
03 - Mozelle Alderson - Mozelle Blues
04 - Count Basie feat. Jimmy Rushing - Good Morning Blues
(jingle)
05 - Robert Ketchum - She's Gone From Me
06 - Hot Lips Page - Down On The Levee (Levee Lullaby)
The great trumpeter Hot Lips Page with Down To The Levee a.k.a. the Levee Lullaby from 1938 on Decca. Fifteen years later than that was the pretty obscure Robert Ketchum with She's Gone From Me and that was before Hot Lips Page. It was on the Peacock label and it's really hard to find information on this man. And then you got one song from before the jingle that I have to tell you about and that was Jimmy Rushing fronting Count Basie's band and you heard the Good Morning Blues, a Christmas song in disguise, from 1937 on Decca.
Next the follow up song for Left a Good Deal in Mobile of Joe Liggins and his Honeydrippers titled A Brand New Deal In Mobile. The lead singer is Herb Jeffries and in the original he is homesick for his old town, Mobile AL, that he left to go up north for work. In this sequel a woman with a heart of steel up in Cincinatti OH broke his heart and he'll go back to his shack in Mobile to find himself a reliable woman and start a family life.
The great migration of African-American workers from the rural south to the industrialized cities up north yielded a lot of blues that sing of nostalgia and homesickness for their old southern life, where they were born and rooted. The move to the big city traded one kind of problematic life for another and looking back the good memories of a time past get the singer the blues.
Listen to A Brand New Deal In Mobile.
07 - Joe Liggins & The Honeydrippers - Brand New Deal In Mobile
08 - Helen Humes & Leonard Feather's Hiptet - Suspicious Blues
The suspicious blues - you heard Helen Humes backed up by Leonard feather and his hiptet - a combo formed for the occasion featuring Herbie Fields on Sax, Prince Robinson on the clarinet, and Bobby Stark on the trumpet. Leonard feather played the piano and he is also credited as the songwriter. He was from London from a Jewish family and in 1939 he settled in New York. He gained fame as a composer and songwriter of several jazz and blues standards but even more writing about jazz, such as the encyclopedia of jazz and the liner notes on hundreds of jazz albums.
Well the lines between jazz, blues and Rhythm & Blues are pretty thin and often people call it jazz that I play on here, pretty much as many as that say that I play rock 'n roll. Now that's OK with me, these are just labels after all, but there's an enormous amout of jazz that I won't play and the same counts for rock 'n roll. The line that I draw - apart from relying on what I like - for this program, actually is a racial one.
America was a segregated society and black and white lived their own lives, mostly separated. Ever since jazz began most musical innovations were done by African-American musicians, and then after some time white musicians got interested. They whitened it, that means taking off the rawest elements and then brought it to greater public. That process is called crossover and one of these crossover moments was when in the mid-thirties swing became immensely popular - and the making of rock 'n roll was another one.
I generally play the African-American music that I mostly find more authentic, more genuine. Saying that, I know I'm doing wrong on the many fine white musicians and orchestras. Well there are enough radio programs that showcase mainstream swing from the thirties and forties, or rock 'n roll from the fifties, but there's only a few of 'em that showcase what was called race music and later Rhythm & Blues.
Now during that years where swing swept the nation you see at least some de-segregation within the music and so Helen Humes not only sang with Leonard Feather but also with Harry James. In biographies on her you often read that after the war she switched from jazz to Rhythm & Blues - but actually her style didn't change that much. Maybe she switched from jazz on the bluesy side to blues on the jazzy side but that sounds a bit like the joke about the instructions that someone gets over the phone how do dismantle a bomb and not to confuse the grayish green wire with the greenish gray wire.
Discussions on styles and labels tend to be endless so let's just quit it and play some music. Next from the Coral label, from somewhere around 1952 Martha Davis with What's Become Of You.
09 - Martha Davis - What's Become Of You
10 - Joe Houston - Sabre Jet
Now that was quite a contrast, after the moody and jazzy song of Martha Davis that honker of Joe Houston. Saber Jet was released in 1952 on Bayou, a subsidiary of Imperial that only saw 18 releases, including two of that other great honker on the saxophone - Big Jay McNeely.
Next another Joe - Joe Lutcher who was the younger brother of Nellie. After his duties in the navy in 1945 he led the house band of the society cafe in Los Angeles, hence the name of his band the Society Cats. Later in 1953 he joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church and didn't want to have anything to do anymore with his former life as a Rhythm & Blues musician.
From 1947 on the Specialty label, here is Blues for sale.
11 - Joe Lutcher - Blues For Sale
12 - Tiny Bradshaw - Breaking Up The House
From 1950 on the King label Breaking Up The House - that was Tiny Bradshaw and we know hom mostly from the early fifties, the pre-rock 'n roll era this song also comes from. Now a lot of people only connect Bradshaw with this time, but he his musical career started in the early thirties with an eight recordings he did for the brand new Decca label in 1934 fronting his own band. Still from '34 to '44 he didn't record though he remained active in music. His early recordings may have been pretty much forgotten, they were included on a CD in the Classics series and for sure, I'll play some of it in a next show.
For now Marion Abernathy with the Little John Blues. This is from 1947 on King and it features Hot Lips Page on the trumpet.
13 - Marion Abernathy - Little John Blues
14 - La Verne Roy & Arlene Talley - Rock And Roll
The obscure LaVerne Roy and the CD that I took it from credits another blues lady, Arlene "Little Miss Blues" Talley with a stomper simply titled Rock And Roll, from 1950. In the years following Wynonie Harris' version of Good Rocking Tonight, the phrase rock and roll had become hot in Rhythm & Blues together with strong back beat songs - just like Good Rocking Tonight. This is just one of the many of them and certainly a good one. Both ladies are seldomly heard of - Arlene Talley shows up as a singer fronting the band of Frank "Floorshow" Culley, a sax honker whose name isn't on the top ten of R&B musicians either.
It took a long search but I did find a biography on Arlene Talley on a webpage on her from - of all places - Belarus, in connection with an appearance in 2006 as a guest of Harlem Speaks in The Jazz Museum, and at least in 2006 she still was a regular performer in a Harlem club named St. Nicks Pub. The story tells how she started in the music business as a young teenager working with the best of musicians including Art Blakey and Illinois Jacket. Well you may wonder how that story ended up on a web server in Minsk - and nowhere else. For anyone interested I put a link to that obscure page on my web site - easiest to find by doing a google search for the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman, then follow the episodes link and click on show number 71 - that's this one.
(http://home.nestor.minsk.by/jazz/news/2006/10/1713.html)
For now, a blues of Red Callendar and this was from 1950 on the Bayou label. Vocals are Duke Upshaw and Callender does the bass on here.
15 - Red Callendar - Soldiers Blues
16 - Eddie Williams & his Brown Buddies - Broken Hearted
17 - Sax Kari - Disc Jockey Jamboree
You heard Sax Kari and his band with the Discjockey Jamboree from 1954 on the Checker label. Before that Eddie Williams and his Brown Buddies and the vocal on here was Floyd Dixon and that saw the light in 1949 on the Supreme label.
Before that you got Red Callender as I said but I forgot to mention the title of it, well, that was the Soldiers Blues. Well I try to account for all songs that I play, after all, that's what disc jockeys do on the radio - play music and tell you what was on the turntable. And I get you a bit more information on the music and I hope you appreciate the stories that I tell.
As for the play list you can always find them on my web site, and that's simplest to find searching Google for the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman and my site will show up first. It will show you the information on all shows that I did, including this one, number 71, including what I told you today and the play list. You can also peek forward to what'll be on next week.
And of course you can let me know what you thought of the show and send me an e-mail, the address is rockingdutchman@rocketmail.com. For now it's time to say goodbye and I hope to see you next time, where I play more of that exciting music from the thirties, forties and fifties, here on the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman!