Listening to Prestige 413: Memphis Slim

Prestige Bluesville released two Memphis Slim albums in 1961, each of them culled partly from an earlier session (April 26, 1960) and partly from this one. Although Slim had, throughout most of the 1940s and 1950s, fronted a rhythm and blues ensemble with a couple of saxophones, and one might have thought that side of him would have appealed to Bob Weinstock's jazz-oriented sensibilities, Prestige--like Folkways, which recorded him at about the same time--decided to emphasize his folk blues persona. The April session put him together with Lafayette Thomas, a rhythm and blues guitarist from the West Coast who was taking a folk blues sabbatical in New York, and jazz bassist Wendell Marshall. For this November session, Marshall is dropped, and Thomas is replaced by Buster Brown, here called Buster "Harpie" Brown, on harmonica.

Both sessions, though, belong to Memphis Slim's inventive boogie-woogie and blues piano playing, and his distinctive vocals.

One of the interesting things about different blues singers, as they expanded their audience from their neighbors in the delta to white folks from the north, is their different levels of intelligibility. Sometimes you didn't even have to be from the north. Early blues scholars and musicologists puzzled over some of Charley Patton's lyrics. Some they had to guess at, some they couldn't get at all. When Patton's friend and blues partner Son House was rediscovered in Rochester, New York, the scholars beat a path to his door, played some of the old records, and asked, "What's Charley saying here? And here? And here?"

House just laughed. "Nobody could ever understand what Charley was saying. You could be standing on the bandstand right next to him and you wouldn't understand."

Muddy Waters is supposed to have told Mick Jagger that too much attention to diction took away from the emotional power of the song, and it's an interesting idea, although Mick--and Elvis before him--were smart enough to know that you can't imitate the unintelligibility of a Delta blues singer, although Elvis himself was from pretty close to the Delta.

And Muddy may have something. People who don't speak a word of Italian can still be moved to tears by grand opera. On the other extreme from Charley Patton, whose music is emotionally searing, you have Josh White, whose diction is supper-club perfect, as opposed to coffee-house casual, and doesn't deliver that much of an emotional punch. Of course, diction is only part of that story. You can understand all the words to both Josh White's and Billie Holiday's version of "Strange Fruit," but only one of them will tear your guts out.

Robert Pete Williams is closer to the Patton end of the spectrum, and if you really wanted to get every word he was saying, you'd have to listen awfully closely, which of course is why you don't. You can get the drift of "Parole Renied Again," and feel the lonesome desperation a prisoner's hopes dashed, without understanding every word.

Muddy Waters' first recordings for the Library of Congress, when he was still in the Delta. By the time he started recording for Chess, even though it was still "race records," he'd spent some time in the North and while he wasn't thinking in terms of communicating with white audiences, his Delta accent has still thinned out some. Chuck Berry came to Chess a few years later. He was from St. Louis, and had grown up listening to Louis Jordan and Cab Calloway, and to the very different accents of the white country and western singers he heard and admired on the radio. The brilliance and wit of his lyrics, the incisiveness of his character development and social commentary, demanded that the words be understood.

Memphis Slim was originally from Memphis, but he made Chicago his home for many years, and, as with Muddy Waters, the North had its effect on his diction, although it's still very much his own, and he's certainly not sacrificing anything on the altar of making sure he's understood, although when the lyric is clever, as in "Beer Drinking Woman." the words come across clearly.  By the time he was reinventing himself as a purveyor of folk blues for Bluesville and Folkways, he knew his audience would be the white leftists for whom Lead Belly and Big Bill Broonzy and Brownie McGhee had reinvented themselves, creating a new audience and a new blues style. More power to them. They played their music, and got paid for it. And Memphis Slim was one of the greats.

How much he's adapted himself to a new audience can be heard in his Dragnet intro to an original blues he's been singing for a long time, "Beer Drinking Woman" (it's also on one of his Folkways albums with Willie Dixon).

His version of "My Baby Left Me" is very different from Arthur Crudup's (the one covered by Elvis)., but they have an opening verse in common. There are variations, but the basic structure is the same -- his baby has left him without saying a word, so he doesn't know if it was something he did or something that she heard.

"When Your Dough Roller Is Gone" sounds as though it's going to be another clever one, "dough roller" working as both allusion to sexual and breadwinning prowess, but it turns out to be a pretty straightforward blues about a lost lover. So is "Darling, I Miss You So," for all that the title sounds more like something Perry Como would sing. There's a comedy routine about what blues lyrics can and can't be about. It includes names that would never fit into a blues, like Sierra, Sequioa, Auburn or Rainbow. "Darling" comes close to making that list, but frankly, Memphis Slim could sing a blues about a woman named Sequoia, or even Muffy, and make it work.

And as good as his singing is, his piano playing seals the deal. If there are limitations on the possibilities of blues or boogie-woogie piano styles, you couldn't prove it by Slim. He includes some instrumental numbers in this session,  and each of them is a treat.

Slim is the engine that drives this whole session, and Buster Brown doesn't have that much to so. But when he is featured, as in "IC Blues" or "Motherless Child," he more than holds up his end.

These tracks were meshed with the earlier session and put out on two Bluesville albums, Just Blues and No Strain, both released on Bluesville during 1961.




Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1955-56, and Vol. 3, 1957-58 now include, in the Kindle editions, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. All three volumes available from Amazon.

The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT.
– Terry Gibbs

Jon Richards: Greenland

Listening to Prestige 412: Robert Pete Williams

November of 1960 was pretty much devoted to the blues at Bob Weinstock's label. Robert Pete Williams is another artist brought to Bluesville by folklorist Kenneth. S. Goldstein, Free Again is a more than apt title for the album: Williams had just been released from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, where he was serving time for murder (he had shot a man in a bar fight in 1956: he claimed self defense).

By that time he had been playing music around Baton

Rouge, Louisiana, since the 1930. while he supported himself by working in a sawmill. He had never made much money from the local fish fries, dances an church picnics he played at, but he was developing a unique guitar style and a powerful if idiosyncratic command of the blues, composing his own material, largely on the spot and improvised. He was discovered in prison by folklorists Harry Oster and Richard Allen.

Oster had found a circuitous route to the Angola prison. The son of Polish-Russian Jewish immigrants, a WWII vet and a Columbia Business School MBA, he then switched directions and took a BA from Harvard and a PhD from Cornell in English, and following the route of the migrant academic, took a position in the English Department at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, in 1955. If he didn't exactly travel in the same Baton Rouge social circles as Williams, their paths would cross soon enough as his burgeoning interest in folklore (He co-founded the Louisiana Folklore Society in 1956)  took him inside the walls of Angola to record the songs and reminiscences of inmates.

Struck by Williams's talent, as John and Alan Lomax had been by Lead Belly a generation earlier, and like the Lomaxes, he successfully petitioned the governor of Louisiana to give Williams a pardon. But it came with more strings than had been attached to Lead Belly's pardon. He had been able to go to New York (officially listed as the Lomaxes' chauffeur) and create something of a career for himself as a musician. Williams was placed on something called "servitude parole," which was like indentured servitude, only worse. He was ordered to work 80 hours a week on a farm near Baton Rouge, with only room and board for compensation. In "Death Blues," he compares his life in prison to his life of so-called freedom:

You know, they, they do allow a man a break up there.  But I ain't had nary here, since I been here.   

So there was no flying to New York for a Bluesville recording session in Englewood Cliffs with some of Prestige's finest musicians. Dr. Goldstein had to come down to Baton Rouge to record him there, with just his guitar.

Which for a Delta blues singer like Williams, with a style as idiosyncratic as his, is probably the best way to present him. He doesn't often bother with niceties like rhyme, and his songs often drift between free associative asides and equally free-associative sung parts. "Death Blues" is mostly talking -- addressed to a loved one, confessing thoughts of suicide and revealing that he sometimes feels dead already, before breaking into song with the heartbreaking "I don't blame nobody, nobody but myself."

The early country blues of Charlie Patton, Peetie Wheatstraw and the like are rightly prized for their authenticity. Decades later, the focus of the blues had shifted from the Delta to places like Chicago,  and Po' Henry Dorsey, a valued octogenarian blues singer from Louisiana, was to tell a 21st century interviewer that his chief influences had come from John R., the popular rhythm and blues disc jockey from WLAC in Nashville whose shows went out over clear channel starting in the 1950s. Coming a generation after the blues pioneers, Williams's music is still as authentic as it gets. The subject matter of his songs as recorded by Oster and Goldstein is largely his prison experience, with titles like "Parole Renied Again."

One of his most powerful songs. "I've Grown So Ugly," dessribes what prison will do to a man, changing him to the point where his girlfriend no longer recognizes him:

I left Angola
1964
Go walking down my street
Knock on my baby’s door
My baby come out
She asks me who I am
And I say, honey,
Don’t you know your man?
She said my man’s been gone
Since 1942
And I’ll tell you Mr. Ugly,
He didn’t look like you

The song, also called "Grown So Ugly," has been covered a couple of times by more contemporary artists. The iconoclastic Captain Beefheart recorded it in 1967, probably drawn to its dysphoric theme. In 2004, it was recorded by the Black Keys,  a white rock duo known for its blues influences.They're a good band, and they do a creditable job on the song, but it is very much the blues filtered through the prism of white privilege. Hopefully Williams got some royalties from the Beefheart version; he died in 1980, so the Black Keys were too late for him. An arrangement of it by the modernist classical composer Steven Mackey has been recorded by the Brentano String Quartet.

Williams's servitude parole ended in 1964, and he was able to play the Newport Folk Festival that year, and continue touring and playing folk and blues festivals in the USA and Europe. He would make several more albums, but Free Again is regarded by many as his best recorded session.

Listening to Prestige 411: Al Casey

Al Casey's second album for the Prestige family of labels has hum shifted from Swingville to Moodsville, but he's playing the same smart, snappy swing that he learned as a teenager in Fats Waller's band, and brought up to date in a regular gig with King Curtis that began in 1957.

Necessarily in the shadow of the flamboyant Waller, Casey stepped out on his own after the Fat Man's death in 1943, switching from acoustic to electric guitar, playing with Louis Armstrong, and winning the Esquire Magazine jazz critics poll for best traditional guitarist in both 1944 and 1945. He

remained in demand, playing with a wide variety of jazz greats who were looking for a traditional guitar sound (and some who weren't--he played with Charlie Parker). He made his debut for Prestige in 1950 in a group led by Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, and his debut as leader ten years later.

The rest of the quartet is Belton Evans, who was playing a lot of drums for Prestige's blues and swing sessions in those days; and Jimmy Lewis, who would go on to make a name for himself in soul music. Both of them had played on his first Prestige album, and knew him from the King Curtis days. It's possible that Lee Anderson is from the same pool, but there's little to be discovered about him.

The Los Angeles Times obituary for Casey says that his job with the Fats Waller band was to  "keep

the band tight during Waller’s fun yelps and scats," and it's training he didn't lose when allowed to stretch out and take center stage as leader. On this session, comprising standards and one short blues number by Jimmy Lewis, he steps out and plays inventively in a style of his own, but still runs a tight ship.

The album was simply called Al Casey Quartet. It came out on Moodsville, and strangely has never been rereleased on CD as part of Concord's Original Jazz Classics.

Listening to Prestige 410: Curtis Jones

Curtis Jones was another blues veteran who had a career in the 1930s, recording for Bluebird, Vocalion and Okeh, all of them budget labels (cheaply pressed, cheaply sold) specializing in race record, then faded from the recording scene sometime in the early 1940s, then resurrected a career in the Chicago folk music coffee houses in the 1950s. He was a little unusual for the folkie coffee house scene in that the tended to favor guys who played portable instruments like guitars, and Jones was a piano man, although he had started out on guitar, and could certainly have returned to it if that was where his bread and butter lay. A working musician does what he has to.

But Chicago had always had a blues piano scene, starting with Leroy Carr and including the likes of Memphis Slim and Champion Jack Dupree. And it was a good town for finding the kind of bluesmen that Bob Weinstock wanted to bring to New York--traditional blues with a touch of jazz thrown in--although Jones didn't stay long. He recorded the one album for Prestige Bluesville, then one back in Chicago in 1962 for Delmark, a latecomer to the jazz and blues independent label scene. Then he headed east again, but didn't stop until he got to Europe, where he would spend the rest of his life, dividing his time between the continent and Morocco.

Bluesville's producer Ozzie Cadena put Jones together with organist Robert Banks, veteran of several Prestige blues sessions, and Johnny "Moose" Walker, a Chicagoan and another fine blues piano player/organist. Organ and piano are pretty well covered for this session, though, so Walker, who also played bass for Muddy Waters. is heard on guitar. The primary instrumental voice, however, belongs to Jones's piano, and he really is one of the top notch blues stylists on the instrument.

Jones's biggest hit in the 1930s was "Lonesome Bedroom Blues," a 1937 recording for Vocalion. He reprises it here, and it would become the title cut for his Delmark album. The title cut for this one is "Trouble Blues," co-writing credit given to Jones and Cadena. Cadena is credited as sole composer for "Please Say Yes," which breaks away from the traditional 12-bar-blues structure often favored by Jones, and uses verse-chorus in a manner reminiscent of Ray Charles. He goes to Armand "Jump" Jackson for two songs, and to Pinetop Smith for "Pinetop's Boogie" (left off the original album, included on the CD reissue). The rest are all his own. Jazzdisco only has "NYC" as the location of the recording studio, while Wikipedia puts it at the Van Gelder studio in Englewood Cliffs.



Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1955-56, and Vol. 3, 1957-58 now include, in the Kindle editions, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. All three volumes available from Amazon.

The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT.
– Terry Gibbs