Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
This was recorded in St, Louis, where Henry Townsend came in his youth, and spent most of his life. It wasn't his first recording (it was his first LP) and it wasn't his last. In fact, it didn't even come close in either direction. Townsend is perhaps the only, certainly one of the only recording artists to make records in nine decades, starting in 1929, and finishing up with a last session in 2006, shortly before his death.
When I said Townsend came to St. Louis in his youth, I was understating the case. Born in Mississippi, he was raised in Cairo, Illinois, until the age of nine, when he hopped a freight in order to avoid a beating from his stepfather, and headed south. He got by doing the sort of odd jobs available to a small boy in the city, shining shoes, serving as a runner for bootleggers, and cleaning theaters. It was while cleaning the Booker T. Washington Theater that he heard Lonnie Johnson play and decided to become a blues musician.
He was in the army during World War II, spent some time in Chicago after the war, and toured Europe in the 1950s when interest in his kind of blues was on the wane stateside, but St. Louis continued to be his home base, and the city to which he always returned.
Townsend was recorded in his home city by Kenneth S. Goldstein and Samuel Charters, with the assistance of Ann Charters, as part of their continuing commitment to finding and recording original blues musicians for Bluesville. His repertoire seems to come partly from his head, partly from recordings: "Cairo's My Baby's Home," though it references the city that he too once called home, was originally recorded in 1929 by Henry Spaulding, with whom Townsend hung out in the early days, and who recorded for Brunswick around the same time Townsend was making his first recording for Columbia.
Townsend described his recording process in a 2002 interview with Steve Pick:
I don't (decide what songs to record). It's all up to me. I don't decide, I just ad lib. I don't have anything written down, I don't know what I'm gonna do until I do it. I carry a little tape recorder with me. It will pick up whatever I sing. To keep it from getting stolen, I do a quick copyright on it. I go to the Post Office and mail it back to me, sealed in an envelope.
If something goes wrong, I've got that proof."
Townsend worked a lot with other blues musicians, like Roosevelt Sykes and Walter Davis. For this session, he was accompanied by St. Louisan Tommy Bankhead, a cousin of Elmore James and a popular fixture on the St. Louis blues scene.
Jon Pareles of The New York Times described Townsend, aftera 1993 New York concert:
Townsend sang epic-length blues, many stretching far beyond 10 verses, that presented a landscape of unending desolation and betrayal.
He sings in weary, plaintive tenor, with quavers and slides that make remembered pain sound immediate. His gentle vocal lines, and a silently tapping left foot, hold together music that always seems on the verge of shattering.
Samuel Charters, who wrote the liner notes for the album, used his soapbox to get in a few digs at blues trends he deplored:
Already [by the late 1930s] there was considerable commercial exploitation of the blues, particularly by the Bluebird label, and it seemed for a number of years that the music had lost its vitality. Instead of the individual performance of the single performer, there were "jump" or "jive" blues bands ...and so-called "rhythm and blues"... rushing the singer along with an incessant rhythm and with reiterated accompaniment patterns that became almost banal. It was during this period, too, that the electric guitar first [became] widespread, and techniques developed on the acoustical guitar, the variations in tone and the use of string sounds to emphasize the vocal line, were replaced by the flat, blaring tone of the mechanical instrument.
Charters may have had the purist's tunnel vision in his inability to recognize the artistic validity of newer trends in the blues (and even Henry Townsend used an electric guitar), but God bless him for it. His purist's vision enabled him to rescue an important American art form that was in danger of being forgotten. Folklorists John and Alan Lomax, in an early generation, did much the same thing. At a time when the blues were at a pinnacle of popularity, the folklorist-purist Lomaxes viewed the blues much the way a blues purist would view disco. They were looking for a singer who recalled the ballads and play-party songs of an earlier era. That's how they found Lead Belly, who had spent most of the years of the blues explosion in prison, and that's how they were able to give us one of the great talents of the twentieth century.
The Bluesville release was called Tired of Bein' Mistreated. The same album would be rereleased some years later by Folkways as The Blues in St. Louis, Vol. 3.
If Don Ellis gave us an album in which virtually everything was unexpected, Prestige brings us back to familiar ground with Johnny "Hammond" Smith. In those days, it seemed that people couldn't get enough of that soul jazz organ sound, and Smith was one of the most reliable of the bunch, solid for listening or dancing. He used the same Philadelphia cohorts he'd been using, came up once again with a nicely chosen mixture of originals and standards--and, in point of fact, distributed the results of this session over the same two albums as the last session, Stimulation, which was released right away, and Opus de Funk, which waited until 1966.
So I don't have a lot to add to my commentary on the February 14th session. This is an extension of that one, and it's still good music.
Esmond Edwards produced both dates. "Sticks and Stones" became the flip side of "The End of a Love Affair." from the February session, as the first 45 RPM single off the album. "Sad Eyes" was the A side of a 45 with "Opus de Funk," released in tandem with the 1966 release of the second album.
There comes a time in every long book, novel or nonfiction, when you're trapped in the middle. You can barely remember starting it, you can't imagine ever finishing it, you can no longer imagine why anyone would want to read it. I guess I'm pretty much at that stage now. It's been five years of my life, twelve years in the history of Prestige. And yet my enthusiasm hasn't flagged. I can thank the music for that, and the incredible musicians who made it. I still look forward to every session, and I still find myself spurred to write about it by the freshness of the music, the stories of the unique individuals who made the music, my own memories of who I was when I first heard it or the excitement of hearing it and discovering it for the first time.
The 1960s, which we are just nosing into here, were a time of great social change, and a time when a number of musicians chafed at calling the music they were playing "jazz." It was a name that grew out of a music that was disrespected, a name associated with back-alley sexual encounters, a name that does not reflect on the importance of what many have called "America's classical music." But to me, whatever its origins, the name has been hallowed by Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet, consecrated by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, immortalized by Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins and Stan Getz...and Don Ellis and Johnny "Hammond" Smith and Shirley Scott and Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson and Walt Dickerson and people like Al Francis or Eddie McFadden who made brief contributions and disappeared, and the name of "jazz" is ennobled by their presence.
You can't necessarily count on it that an album that calls itself "new ideas" will actually deliver new ideas, but this one does. Don Ellis not only presents a departure from anything Prestige has been doing in this new jazz era, each track of the album is a departure from the track before.
Ellis came from very nearly out of nowhere. He had played with the Glenn Miller Orchestra. He had played with the Maynard Ferguson Orchestra, which was a good deal more progressive, but still a dance band. Then suddenly he was in the center of the avant garde, working with George Russell, Paul Bley, Steve Swallow. He made one album in 1959
with Charles Mingus (Mingus Dynasty) and a couple in 1961 with George Russell. One was with Russell and Eric Dolphy for Riverside, but that one wasn't released until years later.
Even the photos of him follow the same out of nowhere pattern. The earliest shows him crew cut, chubby faced and whiter than Wonder Bread. A photo taken around the time of New Ideas shows him gaunt, still white, but looking more like Andre Gregory than Glenn Miller.
His first album as leader in 1960 was How Time Passes, for the Candid label, with Jaki Byard, Ron Carter and Charlie Persip. A second album for Candid, featuring Paul Bley and Steve Swallow, was recorded in April of 1961, just three weeks before New Ideas, but it would not see the light of day until 1988. Time Passes was all Ellis originals. The second album came to be called Out of Nowhere, and in 1988 it must have really seemed to be coming out of nowhere. And it came out of nowhere considering the direction Ellis's music was taken, because this was an album of standards, and ones that were so standard they were virtually chestnuts -- "My Funny Valentine," "I'll Remember April," "Just One of Those Things." Perhaps Candid didn't release the album because they were expecting something more like How Time Passes, a real Don Ellis album, not a bunch of standards. Or perhaps they decided not to release it because they were expecting an album of standards, and they got...certainly not something Glenn Miller or even Maynard Ferguson would have recorded. In other words, a real Don Ellis album.
Whatever that nay be. Ellis's muse was forever dancing on ahead. This was his only album for Prestige, and as he moved through record labels (pausing for a few years and several albums on Columbia), he moved through ideas and formats. Much of his later and best-known work was for larger ensembles.
At this point in his career. the George Russell influence is certainly there. There are suggestions of Tristano, still a powerful influence on the jazz avant garde. Suggestions of Gil Mellé, though he's more of a musician than Mellé was. Like Mellé, he would go on to film scoring, The French Connection being his best known. He was known for his experiments with time signatures, but he's nothing like Dave Brubeck. For one thing, he had a sense of humor. One of his compositions is called "Beat Me, Daddy, 7 to the Bar;" one of his time signatures is 3½ / 4 and another is 15/16. One can hear in his work suggestions of avant garde composers like Moondog (he somehow manages to suggest some of Moondog's ambient street noises on the trumpet). How Time Passes was subtitled Third Stream Jazz, and no less an authority on the third stream than Gunther Schuller said of him, when Ellis was his student in 1960 at the Lenox, MA, School of Jazz:
[Ellis] represents one of the few true syntheses of jazz and classical elements, without the slightest self‐consciousness and without any loss of excitement and raw spontaneity that the best of jazz has always had.
By the time of New Ideas, the Third Stream was no longer a dominant force in Ellis's development, but you can hear it.
We've heard Jaki Byard on three earlier Prestige sessions, one with a trio and two with Eric Dolphy. Equally at home in mainstream or avant garde settings, he was also one of the first to bring jazz to the world of higher education, creating the Jazz Studies program at the New England Conservatory of Music.
Ron Carter and Charlie Persip are more associated with mainstream than avant garde, but they both make important contributions. Persip is inventive and unexpected. So is Carter, but he's also the pulse of the ensemble, keeping it on track through time signature changes.
New Ideas features a remarkable vibes player named Al Francis, and his entire recorded output seems to have been this album and a trio session from 1986 called Jazz Bohemia Revisited. Why there's not more, or why Ellis didn't go on working with him, it's impossible to say, but the jazz world lost a distinctive and original voice when they passed over Francis. It's painful to think of all the music he made between 1961 and 1986 that we'll never hear.
Ellis would go on working with small groups for a couple of years, often with Paul Bley. In 1963, he was trumpet soloist for the New York Philharmonic with Leonard Bernstein conducting, and again with Gunther Schuller conducting, for Schuller's composition Journey into Jazz.
In 1965 he put together his first orchestra, and the work with large ensembles became his best known. He's also known for an instrumental innovation, the four-valve trumpet, which was more than just a gimmick: it allowed him to play quarter-tones.
Ellis died young, at 44, leaving behind him several lifetimes worth of experimentation.
Esmond Edwards produced the session, and New Ideas was released on New Jazz.
I'm making a Listen to Two for this Ellis session, because it's the only album he made for Prestige, and since one track is not enough to do justice to his range. Neither are two, actually.
It's unusual for a horn man who's used to the format of a big band to make an album in a quartet setting. Basie-ites, when stepping out (as they often did) tend to gather a few other instruments around them. often other Basie-ites. Newman had recorded a lot with his own groups, during his Basie years, always following that pattern, with an ensemble or at least a quintet. His two previous Swingville albums featured Frank Wess on one, Frank Foster on the other.
But 1961 was a year of changes for Newman, He left the Basie band to strike out on his own. And he got involved in another project that was larger than himself, albeit of a very different sort than playing in a band. He was one of the founders of Jazz Interactions, a nonprofit group dedicated to jazz education and the promoting of jazz. Newman's wife Rigmor was the first president of the organization, and Newman the first vice president. As he explained in an interview for the National Jazz Archive:
We founded the organisation to promote jazz, because it was in such a serious plight at the time. Everybody talked about it, but nobody did anything to alleviate the problem...[we] formed Jazz Interactions with the idea of promoting jazz on an educational basis. We thought we could do that best by going into the schools, getting with the young people, and acquainting them with jazz.
Many of the kids carried pocket radios around, listening only to the rock’n’roll; there was a part of their heritage they knew nothing about. We did a pilot programme, and invited the New York State Council of the Arts, the Musicians’ Union and some people from the School Board. Finally we got a grant—the first jazz organisation to be funded. With our in–school programmes, we didn’t go there just to play for them; we went to give them some knowledge, but in a way that it didn’t bore them, listening to us talk all the time. We played, and we mixed it up.
...We have chosen to go and help the young people. In my day, musicians coming up got no help at all.
For much of the rest of his life he was deeply involved with Jazz Interactions.
Playing on his own with just a rhythm section, he still manages to stir up the rousing fervor that comes with striking up a band--as, for example, on the Gershwin tune, "Strike Up the Band." This near-anthemic celebration of music and of celebrations was written by George and Ira for a musical of the same name that flopped. Generally a great tune from that golden age would emerge like a phoenix from the ashes of an unsuccessful show, but "Strike up the Band" went virtually unrecorded from its debut in 1927 until Sonny Stitt and Bud Powell recorded it in 1951--once again, the dreaded beboppers keeping the Great American Songbook alive when very few else were. Chris Connor recorded it in 1957, and since then, it has taken its place among the standards.
Newman's soft and romantic side comes out with "The Very Thought of You," a tune written by British émigré and radio bandleader Ray Noble. It's a dreamy beautiful melody that's never lacked for interpreters, and with good reason. It's always nice to hear, and it's particularly nice to hear Newman and Tommy Flanagan giving it equal portions of nostalgia and innovation.
So yes, Newman can carry a quartet album, and deliver a rewarding experience. Flanagan is splendid throughout; Wendell Marshall and Billy English do fine jobs. Esmond Edwards produced for Swingville, and the album was entitled Joe's Hap'nin's.
That Walt Dickerson is largely unremembered is remarkable not only because he was so good, but also because his talent and artistry did not go unrecognized in his own time. This, his second album, got a 4 1/2 star review from Down Beat, just as his first album had.
This one finds Dickerson in a more introspective mood, but with the complexity and originality, and some of the pyrotechnics, that he displayed on his first album. Here he is playing ballads, mostly of his own composition. "Sense of Direction," the tune that leads off the album, is multi-directional, by turns stately and jaunty.
"Ode to Boy" suggests a nod to Beethoven, but there isn't much joy in it, although a lot of beauty. It really is an ode to a boy--Dickerson's brother, who drowned at sea while in the Navy. And while it doesn't summon up Beethoven, it suggests another equally classic work--it's reminiscent of John Lewis's "Django." Austin Crowe, Dickerson's longtime partner on piano, supplies a sensitive second voice.
"Togetherness" was a word invented in the mid-1950s as a slogan for the women's magazine McCall's, and it generated a lot of derision at the time. It's hard to say exactly what Walt Dickerson was thinking when he titled this piece, but it took an awful lot quick thinking and quick playing to achieve any kind of togetherness on this piece, taken at a breakneck tempo that would have left them breathless on 52nd Street. They all manage in fact -- in fact, they knock it out of the park, and drummer Edgar Bateman, new to Dickerson's team, comes through with a solo that matches the tempo and the mood of the piece...a mood that McCall's may not have exactly intended.
Bateman was a Philadelphia comrade of Dickerson's, though he was originally from St. Louis (where Oliver Nelson was a high school classmate), and made this, his recording debut, at the age of 31. He would continue to record with Dickerson off and on over the years, and with Eric Dolphy, John Handy and others. He remained a Philadelphian, and was always involved with that city's jazz scene.
"What's New?" was originally written in 1938 as an instrumental by Bob Haggart for the Bob Crosby Orchestra, and entitled "I'm Free." When Johnny Burke added lyrics to it a year later for Bob's brother Bing, he created the persona of someone who is decidedly not free. Meeting an old girl friend, who has become quite free of him, he reveals in what he tries to make a casual conversation that his heart is still bound to her. The Burke lyrics are understated and devastating, and it's impossible to hear the melody any other way. Dickerson, in his introspective mode, plays it accordingly.
"Good Earth" starts with Crowe, Dickerson and Eustis Guillemet Jr., and then becomes all Dickerson, with the vibist doing what he's best at, and strong assistance from Guillemet. "Why" starts with Guillemet, and again he's a powerful presence throughout.
Eustis Guillemet Jr. was from New Orleans, born and raised in the Tremé district, and he spent most of his life in the Crescent City, playing with Professor Longhair's group when he was young. He didn't record a lot, but he played with a lot of the great names, including Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway.
The albumends with two standards, both of them widely recorded ("You Go To My Head" especially popular) and both benefiting from being given the Dickerson treatment,
Esmond Edwards produced, and the album was released on New Jazz.
This is an extremely unusual addition to the King Curtis canon, and perhaps not the one you'd reach for first, in that it features Curtis as a singer. There's some saxophone playing, and it's good, but it definitely takes a back seat to the singing.
Which raises an interesting point. Curtis is a wonderful saxophone player, and it's great that he had the opportunity to show what he could do as a jazz musician on a number of recordings, many of them on Prestige. It's great that Prestige the 1950s-60s interregnum opened the door to an expansive definition
of jazz. Their Swingville label reminded people that there were plenty of great musicians around who had been passed over as the winds of innovation kept sweeping jazz forward. Producers led by Esmond Edwards made a particularly wise decision to let these people play creatively, not simply reproducing the sounds of the swing era. And as the soul jazz era began, Prestige had the insight to realize that there had been a previous soul jazz era, the one called rhythm and blues, and to record and release some of the musicians like Willis Jackson who had been overlooked by the jazz public.
In the late 1950s, as my passion for rhythm and blues developed, I bought a lot of records without ever having heard them first. You pretty much had to, if you lived in the country. I'd pick up records by Muddy Waters or Amos Milburn or Roy Brown. I'd pick up records because they were on Aladdin, or Checker. And I picked up a 45 by King Curtis on Atlantic -- "Just Smoochin'" b/w "Birth of the Blues." I think "Birth of the Blues" was the B side, but it was the side I wore out. I bought his first jazz album, Soul Meeting, when it came out.
But probably Curtis's most lasting impression came as the bandleader and saxophone soloist on a number of Atlantic rhythm and blues records. You listened to a record like "Saved" by LaVern Baker, you looked forward to every new release by the Coasters, partly for the outstanding vocal performances, partly for the innovative songwriting by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, but also--and this was very much a part of it--because you knew there was going to be a killer solo by King Curtis.
So why isn't this the same? A vocal recording with some hot instrumentals? Well, on the Atlantic recordings, the saxophone solos were always a highlight of the record -- you knew they were coming you waited for them, and they never disappointed. They had their own identity, a song within a song.
There's nothing like that here, and though Curtis is a good singer, his vocals don't strike to the gut the way his sax solos do.
But once you accept that, and listen to the album again, there's a lot to like.
For one thing, there's a fine eclecticism to Curtis's blues choices. "Nobody Wants You When You're Down and Out" is a depression-era classic, but actually it may have been prescient. Written in 1927, it preceded the stock market crash by two years. Bessie Smith's 1929 version captured the mood of the country, but, improbably, no one else touched until the 1950s, when it became a late-blooming standard. "Ain't Nobody's Business" is even older, dating back to 1922, and it's always been a standard for blues and torch vocalists, even though modern mores would disagree with Bessie Smith's and Billie Holiday's assertion that spousal abuse is nobody's business. "Trouble in Mind" also dates back to the 1920s, and is credited to composer Richard M. Jones, but its folk roots go back much farther. It is even more ubiquitous than "Ain't Nobody's Business."
"Bad, Bad Whiskey" was a 1950 hit for Amos Milburn, and Curtis was actually the first to cover it.
"Deep Fry" and "Jivin' Time" are the album's two instrumentals, and they were recorded at the end if the day. "Deep Fry" has the tenor sax spotlight. It's eight minutes long, with solo space for all the principals, and it does leave you wishing there were more tracks like it, but this is far from Curtis's only album, and he has a right to try something different. There's some nice tenor on "Jivin' Time" too, but even more nice work by the guitars. In general, Curtis leaves most of the instrumental turns to his bandmates, and they come through. Curtis does some guitar work, but mostly it's Al Casey, formerly with Fats Waller, is his regular guitarist, but on this session he's joined by Hugh McCracken, for contractual reasons using the pseudonym of Mac Pierce for this session, although it's hard to say why, because McCracken worked with pretty nearly everyone on every label. More likely, because this is a youthful McCracken at the outset of his career, it has to do with union status.
Trouble in Mind, recorded when he was 19, was one of his first gigs. He had dropped out of school at age 16 to make music and help support his family, His mother was working as a hat check girl in a New Jersey club where Curtis had an engagement. She convinced him to listen to her son, and he hired him for the session.
He once did sessions for Aretha Franklin and Paul McCartney in different studios for different labels on the same day, and he was McCartney's first choice as guitarist for Wings, but he elected to stay home with his young children and keep doing studio work. He had an approach to studio sessions that I suspect might not go over so well today, According to his obituary in the New York Times,
He would improvise his part once he apprehended the drift of a producer’s intention, his wife said. He arrived early the day Roberta Flack was recording “Killing Me Softly With His Song” and began fooling around on his classical guitar as he waited for the session to begin. Joel Dorn, the producer, asked him to play his riff again, and it became the song’s introduction.
Jimmy Lewis is a powerful presence on the electric bass throughout the session, and it was a relatively new instrument for him, He had played a standup bass with both Count Basie and Duke Ellington, among others, but switched to the electric bass when he joined Curtis. He would go on to make a record with a group that no one would expect to use an electric bass--the Modern Jazz Quartet. It was for a 1965 album, Jazz Dialogue, which featured the MJQ with a big band.
The King Curtis combo was pianist Paul Griffin's first major engagement, but hardly his last. He's probably best remembered for his work with Bob Dylan on Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, and Aja; he also played piano on Don McLean's mega-hit, American Pie.
Belton Evans played with almost everyone in the blues and traditional jazz field, and with almost as many different first names, although he always stuck with Evans.
"But That's All Right" has backing vocals by the Cookies. The Cookies had a substantial career as a backup group, and had a couple of hits in their own right ("Don't Say Nothin' Bad About My Baby"). At this time, their most important credit had been as Ray Charles's backup singers, and Charles's own group, the Raelettes, was formed around Margie Hendricks, an original Cookie. They give "But That's All Right" a real Ray Charles sound.
Trouble in Mind was released on Tru-Sound, a short-lived Prestige subsidiary. Tru-Sound had two different catalogs. One was all gospel, and the other was more varied, but albums by King Curtis made up the lion's share of their list. Two 45s came from the session, both released on Tru-Sound: "Trouble in Mind" b/w "But That's All Right" and "I Have to Worry" b/w "Jivin' Time."
I've spoken before about how the rhythm and blues tenor honkers were often also the most soulful, sensitive balladeers. We heard that just recently, with Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson, and we hear it again here with Jimmy Forrest, although that's not the only note struck by this versatile tenorman. Unlike Jackson, Forrest isn't doing a Moodsville session, so the ballads are only a part of it.
Forrest's big hit, and one of the greatest rhythm and
blues records of all time, was "Night Train," his reworking of a Duke Ellington riff. He also had an instrumental hit with "Bolo Blues," back in 1953, which he reprises here. Listening to both versions, the most striking difference is in the tone. The earlier version cuts like the bolo it was named for; the Prestige version is warmer, but it also ventures into an area we've seen before with other rhythm and blues veterans, a sort of mellow honk. Forrest gives a hint of the Dionysian excitement--more than a hint, really--but keeps it within the subtler context of bebop ballad improvisation.
"Bolo Blues" is one of only two Forrest originals on the album. He comes back (going with the album order here) with "I Cried for You," a tune which has equally been recorded as a ballad or an uptempo swinger, and Forrest ratchets up the energy for it. And he does seem to have his own ideas about tempo in general. Joe Liggins's original recording of his tune, "I've Got a Right to Cry," takes it in brisk swing time (as does Mose Allison, on a recording contemporaneous to Forrest), but Forrest makes takes tongue out of cheek and makes it a romantic ballad, which certainly fits the title.
Forrest's 1961 "Bolo Blues," at just over four minutes, is about a minute longer than his original hit version, made in the days when 45 RPM was coming into its glory, and 78 RPM records were still hanging on for a last hurrah. The new version was also released on 45, and though Forrest had the benefit of LP production values, most of these album cuts are under five minutes long, with "By the River Sainte Marie" the longest at 5:13. The format for all of these is essentially the rhythm and blues juke box format, with the emphasis on the primary soloist and very little solo space for the other musicians.
"By the River Sainte Marie," with a melody by Harry Warren, does have an extended solo by Tommy Potter, which is unusual for the session, and also unusual for Potter, who rarely soloed. Potter, best known for his work with Charlie Parker, was near the end of his career, although he did continue to work with Forrest on all his Prestige albums.
Right at the beginning of his career, and getting solo space on "I Cried For You," is Joe Zawinul. Zawinul would break out as a star with Cannonball Adderley and his electric piano playing on the Zawinul-composed "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" (on a Wurlitzer, although he would soon switch to the Fender Rhodes which he helped to popularize, and on which he achieved his greatest fame). Zawinul's career trajectory was swift. He had emigrated from Austria in 1959 with a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music, but left Berklee after a month to go on the road with Maynard Ferguson. After that came a gig with Dinah Washington (he played on her hit record, "What a Difference a Day Makes"). Then this album with Jimmy Forrest, and by June of 1961 he was in the studio with Adderley for the first time, for a recording session with Nancy Wilson.
Esmond Edwards produced the session. The Prestige release was called Out of the Forrest. "Bolo Blues" was the single, with "Remember," from the earlier Forrest Firealbum (Larry Young on organ) on the flip side.
At a younger age, I spent some time looking for this guy without success. The reason--Mose Allison covered his "One Room Country Shack" on his debut album, Back Country Suite. A huge Allison fan from the moment I first heard him, and always a fan of good songwriting, I wanted to hear more from the composer of this terrific blues. But the liner notes said that Mose had learned the song from a record by an old blues singer named Mercy Dee. Research tools being harder to come by in 1958, blues reference material being scarce and rhythm and blues reference material nonexistent, I ran into a dead end.
Mercy Dee Walton recorded his R&B hit version of "One Room Country Shack" for Specialty in 1953, and he did actually bill himself as Mercy Dee, although I was only able to track him down when I discovered his full name. Allison was the first to cover it, and since then, it has become a blues standard, recorded by Johnny "Guitar" Watson, Paul Butterfield, Snooks Eaglin, John Lee Hooker, Otis Spann, Al Kooper and Shuggie Otis, Blood, Sweat and Tears, and many others.
Rhythm and blues records generally don't have the kind of complete session notes that jazz records do, but the Specialty recording of "One Room Country Shack" does credit Jesse Sailes on drums. Sailes has never gotten the acclaim that has gone to other studio drummers like Earl Palmer and Hal Blaine, but he was an important figure, appearing on records by blues and R&B greats like B. B. King, Elmore James and Amos Milburn, but also on jazz sessions by Louis Armstrong and Jay McShann, and even on records by Doris Day and folkies Terry Gilkyson and the Easy Riders.
Many of the details about his Bluesville session remain nearly as elusive as did Mercy Dee himself. when I started looking for him. Some of his discographies don't acknowledge its existence at all. Some of them have K. C. Douglas credited as accompanying him on the guitar. One of them lists the session as having been produced by Kenneth L. Goldstein and recorded by Rudy Van Gelder.
In fact, the record was made in Berkeley, CA, by Chris Strachwitz, one of a series of recordings of Walton by Strachwitz in the winter and spring of 1961, some for the label he had just started, Arhoolie, and this one which was licensed to Bluesville. It did not include Douglas, although the guitarist had been in the studio with Strachwitz for the Sidney Maiden session which preceded this one. Maiden does join Walton,
most notably with some very hot playing on "Five Card Hand." Otis Cherry is credited as the drummer, with Marcellus Thomas providing backup vocals. Strachwitz had met Thomas when he drove Big Joe Williams to a recording session, and had done a couple of sides with him, but decided he wasn't distinctive enough to merit a whole album, Perhaps he had gotten here, as well, by driving one of the principals.
The precision with which Walton describes the isolation of country living in "One Room Country Shack" ("Only crickets and frogs to keep me company / And the wind howling round my door") is typical of the way he could use language to capture a moment. Often, as in the case with "Shack," those moments had to do with farm life and hard labor, to which Walton was no stranger. He had worked as a farm laborer in Texas before moving to California, and he want back to it again in California in the late 1950s, as the success of "Shack" became a dim memory and the money started to dwindle. In "Have You Ever Been Out in the Country," he shows what it's like to be working in the fields:
High noon I fall up under some shade tree, tryin' to figure what move to make
12:30 I'm right back down between two middles, tryin' to get my numbers straight
In "Pity and a Shame," he delivers the kind of wry observation on the vagaries of love that one associates with his one-time Specialty labelmate, Percy Mayfield:
Now it's a pity and a shame, the tricky actions of a woman's brain,
Soon as you find you want her and her only, right away she;'ll go and make a change.
He can put you right in the middle of the action at a poker table in "Five Card Hand":
I got a five card hand, and I don't know which way to play,
I need a queen like you, to make my hand OK
Now the Kid drew aces, and he stacked them back to back,
I looked at my hand and not a smile did I crack
And like Mayfield, he has a sense of fatalism, both about women and life in general. From "Sugar Daddy" (from this session, but issued on Arhoolie:
Sometimes I get so thrilled and excited, holding some fine chick in my arms,
Then I get sad thinkin' about all the foolish bachelors who's money'll be spent long after he's gone.
And from "Shady Lane":
You may be a wino or a gambler or have your picture in the hall of fame,
Take your pick, one is as good as the other when they lay you down in shady lane.
Since tomorrow isn't promised to no man, all your planning may be in vain,
So swing today and be merry, tomorrow you may be way down in shady lane.
And tomorrow came soon for Mercy Dee Walton. He died in 1962, of a cerebral hemorrhage.
The Bluesville album was called A Pity and a Shame.
Sidney Maiden was very lightly recorded in his lifetime, so we can thank Prestige Bluesville for this, his only LP recording. Maiden was a West Coast transplant from Louisiana who hooked up with Mississippian K. C. Douglas in Oakland, and they worked together frequently, making a few records under Douglas's name and a few under Maiden's. Their style probably reflects their adopted West Coast home more than their southern upbringing: they don't really sing or play Delta blues. With Maiden's harmonica and Douglas's guitar, their style, if anything, is more reminiscent of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, New Yorkers by way of the Piedmont country.
Douglas was reunited with Maiden for the Bluesville session, and their eclectic set includes a couple of numbers associated with Terry and McGhee, "Fox Chase" (here called "Sidney's Fox Chase") and "Sweet Little Woman."
Maiden’s song selections in general are interesting, and the credits for them are interesting too. We live in a world where any combination of notes is likely to be litigated, and any hit song will bring lawsuits out of the woodwork. This probably got started with the plagiarism suit against George Harrison for allegedly pirating the tune of the Chiffons' "He's So Fine" for his "My Sweet Lord," and it really kicked into high gear recently when the estate of Marvin Gaye won a $5.3 million lawsuit against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams. Gaye's estate claimed, and a judge upheld, that Thicke/Williams's "Blurred Lines" had plagiarized Gaye's "Got to Give It Up."
There's a certain magic in the words "5.3 million dollars" that one would not find in discussions of music of a different era. Miles Davis took composer credit for a tune written by Jackie McLean, "Dig." McLean considered suing Miles, and consulted a lawyer, but the lawyer told him that even if he one, the royalties for a jazz composition would not cover the cost of the lawsuit.
So it was with the blues. Composer credit for "Sidney's Fox Chase" on the Bluesville album goes to Sidney Maiden. It's probably a tune that predates the 20th century, but it's certainly best known by Sonny Terry, and its first prominent exposure was Terry's performance of it in John Hammond's 1938 "Spirituals to Swing" concert at Carnegie Hall. A 1944 recording gives "Arranged by Sonny Terry" in lieu of any composer credit at all. The flip side of that record is "Sweet Woman," composer credit to Sonny Terry, although it was probably composed by Terry's mentor Blind Boy Fuller, and its antecedents are likely earlier than that. Here, co-composer credit is given to Maiden and fellow Oakland resident Jesse "Lone Cat" Fuller.
In those days, songs, especially in the blues and rhythm and blues worlds, were somewhat protean, coalescing, separating and re-coalescing, with no one paying too much attention, unless by chance one flew beyond its niche audience and became a hit in the pop (white) world. Such was the case with "Earth Angel," probably written by Jesse Belvin, with parts of it lifted from other sources. "Earth Angel" became a huge national hit, enough of a moneymaker for Belvin to sue for credit, and eventually receive partial credit.
Maiden's name is on all of the songs on this album, and he likely as not did write most of them, but a few co-writing credits are interesting. "My Black Name" is credited to Sonny Boy Williamson/Sidney Maiden, but Williamson first recorded it in 1941. B. B. King would later record it, in 1964, as "I Can Hear My Name," composer B. B. King. "Sidney's Worried Life Blues," credited to Sidney and Big Maceo Merriweather, was recorded by Big Maceo in 1941, with Sidney's name nowhere near Maceo's composer credit, and the same song, as "Someday Baby Blues," written by Sleepy John Estes and Hammie Nixon, was recorded in 1936. "Me and My Chauffeur Blues" (Sidney Maiden/Memphis Minnie) was recorded by Memphis Minnie, again in 1941, which was coincidentally around the time that Maiden arrived in Oakland and began to be exposed to a wide range of recorded blues.
All of this is interesting rather than shocking. There was no $5.3 million at stake, nothing to make it worth suing anyone for. "Worried Life Blues" and "Me and My Chauffeur Blues" did, later on, make some money for someone. "Worried Life Blues" has become one of the most recorded blues songs of all time, with versions by nearly every big name blues artists, by rhythm and blues stars like Chuck Berry and Ray Charles, even as a jazz tune by Oscar Pettiford. And then into bigger money territory when recorded by rock stars the Animals, the Blues Magoos, and Eric Clapton. Very little of which benefitted Merriweather, who died in 1953, or Maiden, whose name was only attached to his version. "Me and My Chauffeur" was recorded by Nina Simone, Big Mama Thornton, and Geoff and Maria Muldaur, among others, but its closest brush with big bucks came in a recording by an early (pre-Grace Slick) version of the Jefferson Airplane. Memphis Minnie lived to 1973, but the last 13 years of her life were confined to a nursing home after a stroke, barely getting by on social security, so it doesn't seem that she saw much from "Me and My Chauffeur."
Any blues becomes personal in the hands of a good bluesman or woman, and that's the case with all of the songs on this collection. Sidney Maiden is worth a listen.
This is the first part of a two-session, double-album extravaganza released by Prestige as The First Annual Prestige Swing Festival, Spring 1961. The festival appears to have taken place entirely in the Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs--I can find no record of an actual festival. And it appears to have been the only annual Swing Festival.
Nevertheless, a cause for celebration. Prestige had put together various collections of All Stars over the past few years, including one other set of Swingville All Stars (in March of 1960, with Taft Jordan, Hilton
Jefferson, and Al Sears as the front line), and all of their all star sessions were worthy of the name, but this one has some solidly heavy hitters, and a bunch of them. The heyday of swing was also the heyday of the 78 RPM record, so your typical swing session recording was three and a half minutes or less--maybe a little more if they decided to split a song over two sides. And the typical swing recording was section players with one soloist.
But bebop changed some of that, and the long playing record changed the rest of it, and this aggregation includes a number of all stars who deserve solo space, and who get it, and the length of the selections reflects that. "Jammin' in Swingville" is nine and a half minutes, "Spring's Swing" eight minutes, "Love Me or Leave Me" a little over seven. "Cool Sunrise" nearly eleven.
"Love Me or Leave Me" is the standard by Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson, first recorded by torch singer Ruth Etting in 1928, picked up by Billie Holiday in 1941, then covered a few scattered times in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It was Etting's signature song, and Etting was basically a forgotten star by the 1950s, but it turned out her life, including a disastrous marriage to a brutal gangster, was more interesting than her career. It became a movie with Doris Day and James Cagney, and "Love Me or Leave Me" became the movie's title song, and jazz musicians as well as pop singers started recognizing its potential.
"Jammin' in Swingville" and "Swing's Spring" are both credited to Vivian Hamilton, who I'm guessing was the wife of Jimmy. Her only credited compositions are on albums by Jimmy (although "Spring's Swing" was recorded in 2005 by Swiss-born, Chicago-based tenor saxophonist Sam Burckhardt), and Jimmy was the arranger for this session. "Cool Sunrise" is credited to Esmond Edwards, so important as a producer for Prestige during these years, but rarely listed as a composer. All of them provide an ample basis for joyous interpretation.
Swing, as its name suggests, is a joyful music, and extended jams like these sound like a lot of fun, like good friends getting together and producing something delightful. Let's hope this was the case, and why not? These guys were old enough, and far enough past their years of stardom, to have been able to simply enjoy getting together and making music. We continue to owe Prestige big time for recording these Swingville sessions.
Edwards produced. The title of the double album was Things Ain't What They Used to Be. When they were rereleased separately, that became the title of the record that had "Spring's Swing" and "Love Me or Leave Me" on it. The other separated LP was called Years Ago. A later rerelease as double album and CD was called Jam Session in Swingville.
Samuel Charters brought another field recording to Prestige Bluesville, journeying to South Carolina to record veteran bluesman Pink Anderson. Charters is listed as engineer on the this project, and Kenneth S. Goldstein as producer.
Kenny Goldstein was overall producer for the whole Bluesville series. having been brought on board when Bob Weinstock decided to start the subsidiary label. Goldstein, a folklorist, had been producing a range of
recordings for Riverside and Folkways. His interests in folklore were wide-ranging; he received the first Ph.D. in folklore offered by the University of Pennsylvania, and began teaching there in the early 1960s. He was co-founder and director of the Philadelphia Folk Festival. He was a special assistant to the Smithsonian and an adviser on folk arts to the National Endowment for the Arts.
Pink Anderson got his start as a young teenager in that strange American institution, the medicine show--playing music to attract a crowd so that his bosses could sell patent medicine (concoctions that weren't actually patented, were available without prescription, and were generally worthless). The patent medicine hucksters gradually went out of business as government started to enforce stricter regulations on what you could or could not claim that a medicine would do, but it was a great training ground for entertainers in the first part of the 20th century, and it's said that Anderson stayed with the medicine show circuit into mid-century.
He was first recorded by folk singer/folklorist Paul Clayton in 1950, but the recording wasn't actually released until 1956, when it became half of a Riverside album called American Street Songs. The other side of the album was given over to songs by the Reverend Gary Davis. The Davis curs were produced by Goldstein, which would have been Goldstein's first exposure to Anderson. The album was accurately titled--Davis was a street preacher, and his repertoire, mostly his own compositions, was from that world. Anderson's side was called "Carolina Street Ballads" and that's what it was. Not much blues. Mostly the familiar ballads -- "John Henry," "Wreck of the Old '97" -- that would strike a chord with passing listeners and get a few coins tossed his way. He even included a Jimmie Rodgers song, "In the Jailhouse Now."
Like Willie Nelson's Texas fans, who were so country that they didn't know they were country, the audiences--street audience or medicine show audience--for Pink Anderson were similar. They didn't care so much about whether it was the blues, or a song a song about a railroad disaster, the sinking of the Titanic, or whatever. And yet Anderson was a real bluesman, and everything he sang came out as blues.
On his Bluesville debut album, he is much more focused on the blues. With the exception of Big Joe Williams's "Baby, Please Don't Go," all the other songs listed as "uncredited traditional blues," which is a little strange. since many folk singers--certainly many white folk singers--had no problem putting their own names on, and getting the publishing right for, traditional folk songs. Some of the blues on the album are familiar, like "Mama, Where Did You Stay Last Night?" but with Anderson's own variations. Others string together the sort of "traveling lyrics" that were common to many blues in many combinations. There wasn't a strong proprietary sense about lyrics in Anderson's day. Guitar styles were much more personal and more closely guarded. It's said that Charley Patton used to do a lot of the showy tricks for which Jimi Hendrix later became famous--playing the guitar behind his back, tossing it in the air, plucking the strings with his teeth--so that other guitar players wouldn't be able to figure out exactly what he was doing.
Anderson has a powerful guitar style, a lot of single-string picking and a strong, full-toned, percussive approach. It's not hard to imagine what he would have sounded like had he joined the Great Migration to Chicago and gotten into the electric blues scene.
Anderson's first name was appropriated by the British rock group Pink Floyd, and his whole name lives on in the person of his son, the contemporary bluesman Little Pink Anderson. The Bluesville LP is titled Pink Anderson--Carolina Bluesman, Vol. 1. "Try Some of That" did not make it onto this album, but was later included in a Bluesville compilation called Bawdy Blues, as the serious blues collectors started to discover they could make a few extra bucks marketing to the party records crowd.
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