Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
By 1961, Yusef Lateef had completed his move from Detroit to New York. In 1960, he enrolled in the Manhattan School of Music. He would continue his studies off and on, eventually getting a BA (1969) and and MA (1970), then going on to get his Ed.D. And he was, although still playing in a jazz context, using jazz musicians and recording for a jazz label, already moving counter to a lot of what jazz was expected to do, perhaps more toward what he would come to call autophysiopsychic music --“music from one's physical, mental and spiritual self.” He was continuing to work a lot with musicians who had come with him from Detroit--in this case, Barry Harris and Ernie Farrow,
half-brother of Alice McLeod, who became Alice Coltrane--and who had become accustomed to his middle eastern influence and his often unusual instruments. But he had begun working with a New Yorker on drums--Lex Humphries, who had been with him on two previous albums for Riverside.
Lateef called this one Eastern Sounds, and that's a fitting title. Most of the compositions are his, and they reflect his love for Arabic music, but not just that. The sounds are truly eclectic. "Blues for the Orient" is a good example of this, starting with the two-worlds yoking in the title. Lateef plays the flute, and to my ear it's more Near Eastern than what we used to call "the Orient" - China, Japan, Korea, etc. But it's haunting and multicultural. And at the same time, Barry Harris, accompanying him, is playing the blues.When Harris takes an extended solo, he starts off on his own world music tangent, but then brings it around to the blues--and not the soul jazz, funk-drenched blues that were becoming so popular in the early 1960s, but very boppish, very Detroit-ish blues, earthy and cerebral at the same time. He and Lateef complement each other in unconventional but undeniable ways.
"Plum Blossom" is in a way more western, in other ways not. Harris is definitely in a boppish mood, and Lateef is not far away, but he's working with a most unusual instrument. The session notes call it a bamboo flute, but that it is not. It's sometimes called a xun, sometimes a Chinese globular flute. It looks a little like an ocarina, with it's globular shape, but it's played more like a jug from a rural jug band, by blowing into the top, but with finger holes around the ovoid shape.
It's not hard to tell why Lateef reached out of his Detroit orbit to pull in Lex Humphries. Probably best known in 1961 as the drummer on Art Farmer and Benny Golson's immensely popular and solidly hard bop Meet the Jazztet album, but he was capable of reaching outside what were usually thought of as jazz time signatures, which is what made him so valuable to Lateef and later to Sun Ra. His drumming on this session is a revelation, outside the box but always on point.
So you have three musicians, two from Detroit and one from New York, two searching outside the normal traditions of jazz and one working creatively within those traditions. Redefining jazz, yes, but jazz is always about redefinition, so it's not so far-fetched to say that Lateef, Harris, Humphries and Farrow are working in the tradition, playing jazz, finding new ways, and the old ways, to play jazz.
Ernie Farrow contributes importantly as well, playing bass and also an instrument called, in the session log and liner notes, a rabat, but Rabat is the capital of Morocco, not a musical instrument. He seems to have been playing a rabab, an Arabic stringed instrument played with a bow. Both the xun and the rababare ancient instruments.
But the biggest splash was not made by one of Lateef's compositions, but by an unlikely selection. One of the three non-Lateef numbers was Jimmy McHugh's "Don't Blame Me," from an obscure 1932 Broadway revue called Clowns in Clover, but that's not the unlikely one. Obscure Broadway revues or obscure grade B films often produced memorable tunes (like the melody from the forgotten
prison break movie Unchained), and "Don't Blame Me" had already entered the jazz repertoire, with recordings by Teddy Wilson, Coleman Hawkins and J. J. Johnson. No, much more unlikely for an against-the-grain jazzman with a taste for the Near East were two lush orchestral themes from big-budget movies, "Love Theme from The Robe" and "Love Theme from Spartacus."
And even more unlikely, not only did "Love Theme from Spartacus" become the breakout hit from the album, it remained one of Lateef's most popular numbers, and a lot of other jazz musicians subsequently had a go at it, including Bill Evans, Ramsey Lewis, Gabor Szabo and Ahmad Jamal. And it's not hard to see why. It has a good groove from Harris, very full and very beautiful, and exotic flute solos from Lateef. It gets to you.
Eastern Sounds came out on Moodsville, and it certainly sets a mood. It generated three 45 RPM singles, although two of them were "Love Theme from Spartacus," once with "Snafu" from this session, and once with "Sea Breeze" from the earlier Cry! -- Tender. The other 45 was "Blues for the Orient," which was coupled with the standard "I'll Remember April," from Into Something, recorded in December of 1961. Esmond Edwards produced.
One of the interesting things about this album is Forrest's choice of tunes--all of them good, all of them open for improvisation and development, and most of them not on the set list of any other modern jazzman.
"Tuxedo Junction" was written and premiered by Erskine Hawkins in 1939; then, after a 1940 cover by the Andrews Sisters, it became a favorite of white dance bands--Glenn Miller, Harry James, Ray Anthony. From that time to this, you could count on the fingers of one hand the number of modern jazz musicians who've covered it, and you'd have fingers left over if you left out the white musicians. Why? because it's strictly from
Squaresville? Glenn Miller? You might not think that if you listened to Erskine Hawkins's original, and you would certainly start doing some serious rethinking after listening to what Jimmy Forrest and his crew do to it.
And that's the key to this session--Forrest and his band having a good time and making some good music with some tunes that might well be regarded as guilty pleasures--like "Moonglow," the old Benny Goodman warhorse, which has been recorded by pretty nearly everyone, with the exception of most modern jazz artists (Dizzy Gillespie was one exception), or "Organ Grinder's Swing," composed by Will Hudson, who also wrote "Moonglow."
Detroiter Hugh Lawson worked often with Yusef Lateef, so he was used to doing unusual things with unexpected material.
Calvin Newborn never achieved the recognition that his brother Phineas did, but he had an interesting career. He and Phineas started out in a family band organized by their father, Phineas Sr., and the Newborns became B.B. King's backup band on his first recordings. They went on to become staples of the Memphis music scene, where they were the house hand for Sun Records, and Calvin gave Chester Burnett his first guitar lessons--lessons that would serve young Burnett well when he became Howlin' Wolf. They also befriended a young white kid who used to come and listen to them play in a local club, and was a frequent dinner guest at their home. He also followed their lead to Sun Records, at a time when label owner Sam Phillips was saying "If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars." The Newborns' protégé, Elvis Presley, was that white man.
Tommy Potter, one of the original bebop bassists, was near the end of his recording career, and his sessions with Forrest were among his last.
Clarence Johnston often worked with Forrest. His association with Prestige goes back to the mid-1950s, and two albus with James Moody, at which point I wrote about him extensively.
Esmond Edwards produced. Six of these tracks appeared on the Prestige album Sit Down And Relax With Jimmy Forrest. The seventh, "That's All," was included on a later New Jazz album, Soul Street.
This was recorded in 1961 for Argo as Dig Him!, but then was rereleased in 1968 on Prestige as We'll Be Together Again. If it were just a Prestige/Fantasy or Prestige/Concord Original Jazz Classics rerelease, I wouldn't count it, but this was Prestige vinyl from the 1960s, so it counts.
Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons are together again for this outing. They were mainstays of Prestige in the early days, with eight albums together, but there had been a ten year hiatus. The title song (at least for the Prestige release) is appropriate for their partnership, and they do right by this romantic ballad, led by Ammons, whose approach to romantic ballads was always spot on.
Who was the most romantic balladeer in jazz? That question will get wide variety of answers. Miles Davis. Wynton Marsalis. Bill Evans. Bobby Hackett. Chet Baker. Gerry Mulligan. Erroll Garner. But most of the answers will be tenor sax players. That instrument was brought into its own by Coleman in the 1930s. Along with the violin, it is said to be the instrument closest in emotional nuance to tie human voice. So of all the romantic ballad voices in jazz, the tenor sax is the one you're going to keep coming back to. Coleman Hawkins, who staked out the territory with "Body and Soul" n 1939. Ben Webster. Lester Young. Dexter Gordon. Earl Bostic.
And as I've written before, some of the sweetest romantic sounds to be coaxed out of the tenor sax have come from guys who are more associated with the frantic, honking, driving sounds that cone from the rhythm and blues end of jazz. David "Fathead" Newman. Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson. Hal "Corn Bread" Singer (still going at 103, and a survivor of the terrible 1921 Greenwood massacre in Tulsa, OK), Big Jay McNeely, Arnett Cobb.
And Gene Ammons.
He and Stitt, who can also handle a ballad, do some pretty ones here. "We'll Be Together Again" was written by Frankie Laine's musical director, Carl T. Fischer, with lyrics by Laine. Laine, it turns out, was quite a prolific lyricist, but this was the only one for which he had much of a hit.
"Red Sails in the Sunset" was written by Jimmy Kennedy and Wilhelm Grosz (as Hugh Williams). Grosz was a refugee from Nazi Germany and known as an avant-gardist, but he had a number of successful collaborations in the pop field with Kennedy. Kennedy is also known for a couple of not-so-romantic songs, "Teddy Bears' Picnic" and "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)."
"But Not For Me" is by the Gershwins, who need no introduction, and "My Foolish Heart" is by Ned Washington and Victor Young, who don't need much of one, especially if you're a movie fan. "Autumn Leaves" is one of the most familiar songs in the pop music canon, even if its composer, Hungarian Joseph Kosma, isn't a household name. Jazz historian Phillippe Baudoin has labeled it the eighth-most recorded song by jazz performers, which is either some nifty research or an interesting guess. And "Time on My Hands" is by three solid pop music professionals, Harold Adamson, Mack Gordon, and Vincent Youmans.
The rest are Stitt compositions. "New Blues Up and Down" is Ammons and Stitt, and is a followup to their popular "Blues Up and Down," from a 1950 Prestige album. And they add up to a hell of a showcase for the talents of these two saxophone wizards, from romantic to wild, with some swinging mid-tempo ("Red Sails," "But Not for Me") in the middle.
This session was recorded in Chicago, with a group that Ammons and Stitt had on the road. John Houston goes back a long way with Sonny Stitt--he was on a 78 RPM session for Prestige in 1952 that cut two songs, "Blue Mambo" and "Cool Mambo." And he has another interesting historical mention. In 1957, John Coltrane led a quartet at the House of Jazz in Philadelphia. This group must have been preparing some of the ideas that would emerge full blown a few years later, because McCoy Tyner and Reggie Workman were in it. But on the nights when Tyner couldn't make it, the pianist who filled in was Houston.
So perhaps this band was put together in Philadelphia, because that's where they also picked up Buster Williams, heard here on his first recording session. Charles "Buster" Williams is credited as "Charles Williams" here, and that's interesting, because the bassist with Ammons and Stitt was nearly another Charles Williams--Buster's father.
Charles Williams, Senior, was a bass player called on for a lot of gigs around Philadelphia and his hone town of Camden, NJ -- sometimes more than he could make, and he started recommending his son, then in high school, when he was double booked. Young Buster was a recent high school graduate when Dad recommended him to Ammons and Stitt for a Philadelphia gig, and the two jazz legends liked the kid enough to take him along on the road. It was the beginning of a successful career in jazz for Buster, which would bring him back to Prestige late in the decade.
Drummer George Brown is a little harder to trace, partly because there's another George Brown who who achieved more fame as a drummer, with the funk group Kool and the Gang. Brown the jazz drummer spent most of his career in France, but he did record with Wes Montgomery among others.
Ammons recorded a second session in Chicago a few days later for Argo, with an organ trio, but that one was only rereleased as Original Jazz Classics.
The Prestige release came in 1968, at which point the title was bittersweet, as Ammons was in prison for a second time for narcotics possession, and we can only imagine what music was lost to these terrible laws and their racist enforcement.
It's hard to listen to this one directly after the Joe Newman-Oliver Nelson-Shirley Scott session and not miss Shirley, but of course, that's not the way anyone would have listened, especially since the album with Scott wouldn't actually be released for another five years. And once you shake your head free and listen to this one for its own sake, it has much to offer. A great deal to offer.
It has Newman and Nelson, of course. But it also has Ray Barretto, who brings a certain something to every session he plays on. And it has Hank Jones.
This is Jones's sixth session for Prestige, but he had been on the scene since the mid-1940s, when he joined Hot Lips Page at the Onyx Club on 52nd Street. Like Newman, he was of the swing-to-bop school, a style of music that may not have been cutting edge in 1961, but was, and is, timeless. Nelson could play straight-ahead jazz too, and write for a straight-ahead group. but his abilities as a composer always kept him around the cutting edge.
Nelson composed four of the six tunes on this album ("Main Stem" is Ellington; "Tangerine" is Johnny Mercer and Hollywood composer Victor Schertzinger), and they're very much tailored to this group. "Tipsy" is my favorite, tuneful and inventive, with room for solos by Oliver, Newman and Jones, with propulsive backing by George Duvivier, Charlie Persip and Barretto (with an inventive solo bt Duvivier).
I've written about Joe Newman's later work as an educator with Jazz Interactions. But here's a little about where he came from: New Orleans, where "I thought that jazz had been here ever since the world began." In an interview for the national jazz archive, he talks about his father, who he knew as a chauffeur, until he suddenly discovered he was also a musician, and the music his father brought into the house, and how he became part of it.
started playing trumpet when I was six years old, and I learned to play it within two years, by myself. At eight, I had my first formal lesson.
That came about when some musicians were having a band rehearsal at my house with my father; I was out on the back step, blowing along with them. They heard me, and they stopped, but I was still out there blowing. I didn’t see them standing there at the screen door; next thing I heard was: “Why don’t you give that kid some lessons?” That’s really how I got started.
Before that, I’d wanted to play tenor saxophone. I used to have a lead pipe plumbing fixture, and it was sort of shaped like a saxophone; I blew that and made music with it.
Another kid played a banjo, my brother had a trumpet made from some tubing and a funnel, and we used to play little parties. Then one of my playmates stole my lead pipe; so I had another one made, that looked more like a saxophone.
At eight years old, I could play some songs, and I started to do gigs with some of the same men my father had worked with. My mother would let me go if they’d come get me and bring me home. These were three and four piece bands; then after a while I started working with some bigger bands around New Orleans—about thirteen pieces, something like that. Such as Henry Hart, Bill Phillips. Richard Gray and his Society Syncopators—that was one of the first bands that operated in the Carlton area, what they called Uptown in New Orleans.
All that was just part of his life, just part of growing up in New Orleans.
It wasn’t until recently, when I started to put together lectures on Louis Armstrong, for colleges and different places, and I was reading books to gather material, that I saw these names of so many guys that I grew up around—playing with my father, friends of our family. These guys were creating it then, man, and I didn’t know it. Some of the earlier history was being made.
The album was called Main Stem, and the 45 RPM single that came from the album was the title track, split over two sides. Esmond Edwards produced for Prestige.
The jazzers are back from vacation, and back at Rudy's, and who better to start with than Shirley Scott, Prestige's reliable breadwinner in those days. And this time with some solid collaboration from two of the best in the business, Joe Newman and Oliver Nelson.
Scott continues to draw inspiration from, and give inspiration to, the players around her. And in the tune that they started the day with, they draw inspiration from another source as well. "Blue Seven" was originally recorded by Sonny Rollins for his 1956 Prestige album, Saxophone Colossus. It was one of those improvised-on-the-spot numbers that Rudy Van Gelder used to call the "five o'clock blues," but this one clicked. Scott was the first to pick it up, but it has become a minor jazz standard since then.
Rollins gave Scott and Co. a lot more than just a few variations on standard blues changes, and they were able to pick it up and run with it. At 11:17, it was the longest cut on Saxophone Colossus, giving Rollins plenty of room to demonstrate the scope of his improvisatory genius. Scott is much tighter, at seven minutes and with three soloists, so it's a very different interpretation, and a highly satisfying one. Scott had some formats that she worked well in: organ trio, quartets with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and Stanley Turrentine. Familiarity can mean growth in jazz, and we're lucky to have those albums with her regulars, but we're also lucky that Bob Weinstock and Esmond Edwards put her in new situations from time to time. Newman and Nelson and Scott weave in and out and around each other in a gorgeous piece of music. The history of this era, session by session, is the discovery of so many brilliant pieces of music that were written or improvised for one recording session, and never played again. This is one that escaped that scrap heap of time.
These folks do pretty well with more familiar tunes, two, like Rube Bloom and Harry Ruby's "Give Me the Simple Life" and Phil Silvers/Jimmy Van Heusen's "Nancy (With the Laughing Face"). In fact, you don't have to get very far into this album before you realize that this is exceptional work, jazz the way it should be played by artists of the first rank, connecting with each other to an unusually well-attuned degree, even for jazz, which is always about that.
Shirley Scott's output was so prodigious that maybe an album or two got lost in the shuffle. And she isn't played now as often as she once was, and women have never quite gotten their due in the jazz world--Scott did better than most, but even so, she probably never really got her due. This album may have been one of those that got lost in the shuffle. It wasn't released until 1966. Today, when almost everything makes its way to YouTube, you can only find a couple of tracks from Blue Seven. But it is worth seeking out. Oh, my, yes.
Esmond Edwards produced. One track, "How Sweet," was left off the LP, but made it onto another Scott album, Now's the Time, and later onto the CD reissue of Blue Seven. "Blue Seven" was also released as a 45 RPM single, and I hope it got some jukebox play.
Victoria Spivey had been brought back to recording in July, by Chris Albertson and Lonnie Johnson, to record three tracks on Johnson's Bluesville album, Idle Hours (the title track a Spivey composition). That session was all the encouragement Spivey needed to get back in the saddle, and recording for Bluesville was just the beginning. In 1962 she would form her own label, and become one of the most active participants in the blues revival, recording classic blues artists and newer artists alike. On one occasion in 1962, she did both. She put together an album called Three Kings and the Queen, featuring herself, Lonnie Johnson, Roosevelt Sykes and Big Joe Williams (not the one who
recorded with Count Basie). The Williams cuts feature a young harmonica player and backup vocalist named Bob Dylan, on one of his first recording sessions.
For this Bluesville date, Albertson and Spivey rounded up a couple of Spivey's old friends, who like her had been out of the limelight for a while.
Lucille Hegamin, born in 1894 in Macon, Georgia, began singing in traveling tent shows around the South when she was in her early teens. In 1914, she moved to
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Chicago, where she became a successful cabaret singer, working with the jazz musicians (including Jelly Roll Morton and Tony Jackson). She claims to have been the singer who popularized "St. Louis Blues" in Chicago, and while old-time entertainers have been known to claim all sorts of things, this is quite likely true. "St. Louis Blues" was written by W. C. Handy in 1914, and it would have been a perfect vehicle for a cabaret singer like Hegamin. It was a typical Handy composition in that it incorporated strains of tunes and snatches of words that were in circulatation at the time, but it was unusual in that it also brought together two newly popular musical forms: the blues and the tango. Probably the version of "St. Louis Blues" that she sings on this session is very close to the version she sang in Chicago--more cabaret than blues, owing little to Bessie Smith's later recording which became a kind of template for most of the versions that followed it.
It's a staple of American musichistory that Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" was the first commercial recording by an African American singer. Less widely known is that Hegamin came second, with a recording of "Jazz Me Blues" (more jazz than blues) which also became a hit, as did her followup recording, "Arkansas Blues," which she repeats on this album.
By the early 1930s, Hegamin had packed it in as performer. She got a degree in nursing, and worked in that profession until she was summoned out of retirement by Spivey. She would record again for Spivey's album, and continue singing for a few more years until ill health stopped her.
Alberta Hunter was born in 1895 in Memphis. Her father, a Pullman porter, left soon after she was born and her mother supported the family by working as a maid in a brothel. Like Hegamin and so many others, Hunter left home for Chicago to try and make it as a singer, but she did it earlier than most. She was eleven years old. Her mother followed her after a few years.
She worked when she had to, sang when and where she could, including brothels, until she came under the mentorship of Tony Jackson.
The first half of the twentieth century is dotted with the names of African Americans who contributed in ways we can never know. Josh Gibson is said by many who saw him to have been the greatest baseball player who ever lived, yet he never played a game in the major leagues. Buddy Bolden may have been one of the greatest innovators in jazz, but he never recorded.
Tony Jackson is one of those. A New Orleans transplant to Chicago, like Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, he was legend to anyone who ever heard him. It's said he could sing a whole opera, from the soprano to the bass parts, and get it all right. He could sing the blues. Even Jelly Roll Morton, famous for never giving credit to anyone but himself, credited Jackson with teaching him, and said that the only musician he ever met who was better than him was Tony Jackson. And this is a real sidebar to history, but the sartorial stereotype of the cabaret entertainer--arm garters, checkered vest, derby hat? That was Jackson.
He was also openly gay, at a time when that was not easy.
He is also said to have written dozens of songs that were stolen by others, and while there's no proving it, it's probably true. The one song he was able to retain credit for was "Pretty Baby," although co-credit was taken by Gus Kahn and Robert Van Alstyne when they used it in a Broadway show.
And he coached and encouraged young Alberta Hunter as a songwriter as well as a performer, and she became one of the best and most successful composers of the first blues era--her "Downhearted Blues" was one of Bessie Smith's best-known recordings.
Hunter had one of the most successful blues careers of the 1920s, and remained in show business until 1957, when her mother died. Her mother had been her biggest supporter, and as Hunter explained later, with her gone, the urge to perform went away. She lied about her age, faked a high school diploma, and enrolled in nursing school. Although she heeded Spivey's call to make this album, she was essentiallu out of show business. She would work as a nurse for the next twenty years, until she reached the mandatory retirement age of 70...so they thought, She was actually 82.
She decided to start singing again, although she wasn't convinced that she had much of a career ahead of her. As she described her chances in an interview with Billy Taylor:
If somebody had walked in and said to you, "I know a woman that can sing," you say "Well, ah, what does she look like?" and, well, maybe you wouldn't tell him exactly what I look like because I'm kind of ugly, you know, but you'll say, "She's all right." "OK, how old is she?" "82." "Man, you must be crazy."
But she found an ally in Barney Josephson, the entrepreneur who had opened Cafe Society, New York's first integrated nightclub, back in 1938. Billie Holiday first performed "Strange Fruit" there. Hunter had performed there often, and in 1976 Josephson had opened a new club in Greenwich Village, The Cookery, and he booked Hunter for a two week engagement. Josephson would later say:
Alberta came out and did her first show and I knew this was it. This lady was going to be big, big great star. Even better and bigger than she was before in her life.
He was right. The two week engagement lasted six years. She sang her classic hits, and new songs she had just written, like the one about the two fisted, double jointed man:
I don't want a man who'll bring his kids no dog or cat,
But will bring home a skunk or a lion, and say, "Here kids, play with that."
And you could tell it would take a man like that to be man enough for this woman, even in her mid-eighties.
I went to see Alberta Hunter at the Cookery several times, once with my mother. She was in town to meet up with some Italian friends, so we all went. They loved the music, of course, but the highlight of the night for me was when my mother spotted the elderly Barney Josephson across the room. She went over, said hello and introduced herself, and reminded him that they had met before, at Cafe Society.
"Chirpin' the Blues" is one of her classics, first recorded in 1923. "I've Got Myself a Workin' Man" is from her new repertoire.
It takes a woman who's pretty confident to invite two scene-stealers like these to share her debut album with her, and Victoria Spivey was all of that. Her straight-ahead blues belting makes a nice contrast to her two friends' cabaret styles. "Let Him Beat Me" is a song you wouldn't find many women singing today, but to a singer from certain generation it was a badge of toughness. Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith both sang songs on the same theme. "Black Snake Blues" is a familiar theme in the blues, but Spivey, another strong composer, twists it a little. Her black snake is both the snake-in-the grass woman who steals her man and the penis by which he's led away. Spivey also contributes some piano backing to her songs.
Hegamin is accompanied by a group led by Willie "the Lion" Smith, Hunter and Spivey by Buster Bailey Blues Busters. That means that some very fine veteran musicians were gathered together for this day of music making in an New York recording studio.
Willie "the Lion" Smith served in France during World War I, and he got the nickname for his bravery and ferocity in battle (his version), or he gave it himself (the version of others). Regardless, he was a lion at the piano, one of the innovators of the stride style of playing.
Trumpeter Henry Goodwin started young in the music business, touring Europe with Claude Hopkins at the age of 15. He played with Cliff Jackson and Elmer Snowden, two musicians also later brought to Bluesville by Chris Albertson, and with Lucky Millinder, Cab Calloway, Kenny Clarke, Sidney Bechet and others. Clarinet/tenor sax player Cecil Scott led his own bands in the 1920s and 1930s, hiring such luminaries as Dicky Wells, Roy Eldridge, Johnny Hodges and Chu Berry. Drummer Gene Brooks was younger. Born in 1920, he arrived on the New York scene in the 1940s, and was much in demand for studio work, playing behind jazz, blues and rhythm and blues singers.
Smith's group gave way to Buster Bailey's for the next two sessions. Clarinetist Bailey comes from as distinguished a pedigree as you can get. Starting with W. C. Handy when he was just 15, he went on to play with King Oliver, Fletcher Henderson and Louis Armstrong. His band had some all stars too: J. C. Higginbotham, Cliff Jackson and Zutty Singleton have all been heard on previous Prestige recordings. Trumpeter Sidney de Paris was one of the masters of his instrument and his era. He played with Benny Carter, Art Hodes, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, and in later years led a group with his brother, Wilbur.
The Bluesville release was called Songs We Taught Your Mother.
August 1961 seems to have been blues month in the Prestige family. Perhaps all the jazz musicians (and producers) were over in Europe at jazz festivals. In any event, we don't see any jazz until near the end of the month, but lots of good blues, from various points south and then from New York City (but except for Gary Davis, not Englewood Cliffs--maybe it was Rudy Van Gelder who was on vacation). August 14 saw Sam Charters returning to Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he had first recorded Pink Anderson for Bluesville back in April.
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Anderson is another rediscovery by Charters of a bluesman from the 1920s, although he wasn't entirely lost (folklorist Paul Clayton recorded him for Riverside in 1950) and for that matter wasn't entirely a bluesman. Unlike Memphis Willie B. and many of the other old-timers, Anderson had never abandoned music. He continued through the decades to scrape out a living by busking, playing the streets and backyard barbecues, and doing something that really does seem to belong to a much earlier time: traveling with a medicine show.
The medicine show was a feature of the American countryside in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In a time when doctors were scarce and not always reliable. traveling peddlers, giving themselves bogus medical credentials, would travel through rural areas selling magical elixirs to cure anything--mostly harmless herbal concoctions with maybe some alcohol or opiates thrown in. And they would draw a crowd with entertainment, so that the snake oil salesman could start to work his wiles.
Remarkably, these traveling medicine shows lasted a lot longer than most people realize--certainly more than I realized. The one Pink Anderson toured with didn't fold up until the mid-1940s. And the tradition lasted longer than that. The "jig shows" that Buck Clarke describes touring with in the 1950s were essentially medicine shows without the snake oil.
So although Pink Anderson's professional career dates back to the late 1920s, the era of the first blues craze, he followed a tradition that went back much further--the tradition of the songster, the street singer, the medicine show performer, the entertainer who would sing anything passersby wanted to hear. Willie Nelson talks about getting his start playing rural honky tonks in Texas where audiences were so country that they didn't know what country was. They'd request an Ernest Tubb song and then one by Irving Berlin--they'd heard it on the radio, or in someone's parlor, and they liked it, so sing it, young feller.
And that describes Pink Anderson's repertoire. He certainly didn't learn "Wreck of the Old '97" from any blues record, because no blues singer ever recorded it. More likely, it came from Vernon Dalhart, one of the first recorded country music stars. Anderson gives it his own tempo, is own intonation, his own guitar part, and it comes out with a bluesy feel, but still not exactly the blues, and what does it matter? Anderson played for the people, and that's a noble undertaking.
Lead Belly did a version of "The Titanic," one that included the ship's racist (and apocryphal) denial of passage to Jack Johnson, and the heavyweight champion's revenge when the ship sank. Anderson does the more familiar folkie version, the one his streetcorner audiences--later, folk festival and coffehouse audiences--would have known, and could sing along with on the chorus.
The danger of tailoring your material and your delivery too closely to the tastes of your audience is an obvious one. When that audience dries up, you may find yourself irrelevant. The great blues singers like Charley Patton and Robert Johnson were singing for themselves, of private frustrations and miseries and demons, and their songs have a universality that others may lack. But Anderson's warmth and professionalism, and especially his guitar playing, hold up.
Charles Henry "Baby" Tate was another South Carolinian who frequently performed with Anderson (and with Blind Boy Fuller and Peg Leg Sam), but on this particular day, Charters chose to record each of them separately. Tate is much more of a traditional 12-bar bluesman, but it's not hard to imagine them performing together: both play in that Atlantic coast blues fingerpicking style known as "Piedmont blues," well known in New York folkie circles through the playing of the Reverend Gary Davis and Brownie McGhee.
Each plays his own version of "Betty and Dupree," called "Dupree Blues" on Tate's album. The versions are similar, with more guitar fills from Tate, and some variations in the lyrics, but the same story of the poor Joe who can only get his girl a diamond ring by robbing the jewelry store. Tate does "
Both sessions were supervised and engineered by Charters, with Charters and Kenny Goldstein sharing the producer credit. Anderson's Bluesville session was released as The Blues Of Pink Anderson - Ballad And Folksinger, Vol. 3. Tate's was The Blues Of Baby Tate - See What You Done Done.
Memphis Willie B., as he was generally known, was one of those forgotten bluesmen who had dropped out of music, then got a second chance at a career as white America rediscovered the blues in the 1960s. He had begun his career as an ensemble harmonica player in jug bands, notably the Memphis Jug Band, but when he added guitar to his repertoire he began playing solo, working around Memphis and up and down the Delta, playing with Robert Johnson and Rice Miller (Sonny Boy Williamson II) among others. He made it to New York in 1934, where he recorded for Vocalion accompanying fellow Memphis Jug Band performer Hattie Hart.
He joined the Army during World War II, and saw action in North Africa and Italy, then finished up his army duties as the driver for a colonel in the quartermaster corps, where his actual main job was playing the guitar and entertaining the troops. After the war, though, he found he hadn't much of a career to pick up, as his old style didn't mesh well with the new rhythm and blues, so he gave up on music, and thus it stayed until 1961, when Sam Charters, in Memphis and still blazing a mostly lonely trail rediscovering the classic blues musicians, got into a conversation with Will Shade of the old Memphis Jug Band, and Shade told him about a blues singer from the old days whom he'd run into a couple of weeks previous:
His name's Willie B....that's what we call him. He's one of those real hard blues singers like you're always asking about.
Willie B. was invited to a Saturday night gathering at Shade's. Charters got to hear him play "the real old hard blues," liked what he heard, and got Willie into a Memphis recording studio.
It was a long session, yielding enough material for two LPs. Borum drew on a range of material. It included many original blues, some dating back to earlier times. "Overseas Blues" was written in 1945 while he was still in the army in Italy, in response to a rumor that his unit, which had already seen plenty of action, was to be deployed to the Pacific to engage in the war against Japan.
Others were songs that had entered his repertoire at one time or another. "Every Day I Have the Blues" had achieved considerable popularity in the 1950s with recordings by Count Basie with Joe Williams and by B. B. King, but it's a much older song than that, going back to Borum's heyday in the mid-1930s. It was first recorded in 1934 by Aaron "Pine Top" Sparks of St. Louis, then in the late 1940s by Memphis Slim as "Nobody Loves Me," and with Slim taking the composer credit. The many subsequent versions generally changed the title back to "Every Day I Have the Blues," giving composer credit to both artists. It's likely that Slim picked up the song in the earlier decade, had been performing it ever since, and had made it his own. It's likely, also, that Borum, who would certainly been exposed to a lot of Slim's music around Memphis and the blues circuit that they both traveled, would have been playing the song since way back when.
"The Stuff is Here" is one of that urban genre of blues that playfully glorified drugs. It was written in 1934 by Clarence Williams and first performed by his wife, Eva Taylor. Most of its recorded versions are by women in the "classic blues" style with jazz accompaniment, but Borum does it with harmonica and guitar, and makes his own song out of it.
Sam Charters produced along with Kenneth S. Goldstein, by now heading up the Bluesville label for Bob Weinstock. The two Bluesville albums were called Introducing Memphis Willie B. and Hard Working Man Blues. Willie B. was not afraid to get a little raunchy, and his "Car Machine Blues" was included in Bluesville's Bawdy Blues compilation.
Memphis Willie B.'s first recorded session was to be his last, although he did have a successful career renaissance at blues clubs and festivals through the 1960s, before slipping quietly back into obscurity until his death in 1993. But he seems to have liked what he accomplished on that day. Charters reports that when he listened to the playback, he said:
I was kind of nervous, you know, but that's really the blues. That's the blues just like we were talkin' about.
