Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
These were Victoria Spivey's last recordings for Prestige Bluesville, before starting her own record label, in partnership with her companion Len Kunstadt, a jazz and blues historian twenty years her junior. The label was to stay active for over two decades, run by Kunstadt after her death in 1976. There weren't many other blues artists, or many other female artists, or many other artists of color, who were able to assume that kind of control of the business end of a music career.
Gigi Gryce, acutely aware of how composers and songwriters, especially African-Americans, were routinely cheated out of their publishing rights, started his own publishing company and signed up a few of his fellow musicians, but he was squeezed out and became so disillusioned that he essentially quit the music business.
Charles Mingus and Max Roach started their own label, Debut Records, in 1952. They released some excellent music, including the "greatest jazz concert ever," Jazz at Massey Hall, but folded in 1957.
Mary Lou Williams, in the late 1950s, and Betty Carter, in 1969, were two other Black women who started their own record labels and ran them successfully. Carter described the experience:
People thought I was crazy when I did it. 'How are you gonna get any distribution?' I mean, 'How are you gonna take care of business and do that yourself?' 'Don't you need somebody else?' I said, 'Listen. Nobody was comin' this way and I wanted the records out there, so I found out that I could do it myself.' So, that's what I did. It's the best thing that ever happened to me.
Williams and Carter both released their own records. Spivey, like Mingus and Roach, actively ran a record business, signing and recording other artists: it was an important blues label. Artists included Lucille Hegamin, Buddy Tate, Willie Dixon, Otis Spann, Big Joe Turner, and Lonnie Johnson.
Johnson joined Spivey for the first of these two sessions; the second one was just the lady and her piano. Both of them were stripped down to the essentials. Spivey was one of the great songwriters of the blues, in addition to her talents as a performer, and this stripped-down session is an excellent showcase for her. Johnson and Spivey went way back, and his jazz-inflected blues style fit hers perfectly.
He wasn't there for the four songs she recorded on September 26. Or at least, he wasn't there to accompany her. The Prestige session log lists two songs recorded by Johnson on the 21st, and two more on the 26th, but all went unissued.
The Bluesville album was called Woman Blues. Two tracks, "I'm a Red Hot Mama" and "That Man," were also part of a compilation album, Bawdy Blues, that came out right around the same time (Woman Blues is BVLP 1054, Bawdy Blues is BVLP 1055). This was around the time that record companies were realizing there was more to dirty songs than Oscar Brand's Barrack Room Ballads or Rusty Warren or Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts, and they just had to mine the old blues catalog to find it.
Lonnie Johnson is back, this time with an old friend. Victoria Spivey, who had not been active professionally for a decade, may well have been another reclamation project by producer Chris Albertson, as Johnson had been, but it was reunion for the two old entertainers. In the 1920s, Spivey was one of the reigning queens of the blues who changed the face of American music in the 1920s, after Mamie Smith's recording of "Crazy Blues" blasted away the prevailing wisdom that there was no market for records by a black singer. And Lonnie Johnson was a superb jazz violinist and guitarist who found that he could make a living as a blues singer, although it wasn't what he loved most. But when Johnson was brought in to accompany Spivey, on songs like 1927's "Dope Head Blues," you got something of a taste of just how good he was.
Both Johnson and Spivey were consummate entertainers, whose careers lasted beyond the end of the First Blues Craze of the 1920s. As all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing motion pictures began to gain popularity, Spivey was cast in one of the first of them, King Vidor's Hallelujah! She continued with a career on stage (including the hit Broadway musical Hellzapoppin'!), until retiring from show business in 1951. She made her return with this album and a couple for Prestige, then--always a strong, independent woman--started her own record label. She died in 1976.
The three tracks with Spivey are the highlight of the album, but not because there's anything wrong with Johnson's solo tracks, just because she's the new girl in town. Two of those are Spivey compositions ("I Got the Blues So Bad" and "Idle Hours," originally recorded for Okeh in 1926-27). She was one of the great American songwriters. Johnson was no slouch either, and the rest of the songs are his. Never fully committed to the blues as a way of life, Johnson is often much more drawn to romantic love as subject matter, though he manages to fit it nicely into the 12-bar blues format.
Added to the mix is pianist Cliff Jackson, heard once before with the Swingville All Stars.
Prestige used some of its jazz rhythm section regulars on a number of their Bluesville recordings, which is one of the reasons the Bluesville recordings are so interesting. Lonnie Johnson always considered himself more of a jazzman than a bluesman--he had built a career in blues because that was where the money was--he was able to get a recording contract as a blues singer. For his first Prestige session, producer Chris Albertson put him together with tenor sax man Hal "Cornbread" Singer, pianist Claude Hopkins, bassist Wendell Marshall and drummer Bobby Donaldson.
Next, he was matched with Elmer Snowden, like Johnson a Chris Albertson discovery after years of obscurity. Snowden was a master guitarist and former bandleader (Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford. Benny Carter, Roy Eldridge and Chick Webb all played in his band when they were starting out, and his group, the Washingtonians, formed the nucleus of the Duke Ellington Orchestra). Wendell Marshall rounded out their trio, and they played some blues songs, a standard, and a number of instrumental pieces.
This time around, with Esmond Edwards producing, it's just Johnson and his guitar (sometimes piano) and vocals. It's a good choice: Johnson alone is compelling listening, And it's still not exactly a traditional blues album--he includes a couple of standards and a rhythm and blues ballad by Buddy Johnson, and his guitar and piano work--especially his guitar work--is subtle and exciting.
Losing Game is the title of the album, but any collection by Lonnie Johnson is going to be a winning game. It was released on Bluesville.
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 EXPECT VOLUME 4, 1959-60, BY THE END OF THIS YEAR.
This may have been the best known of Lonnie Johnsons albums for Prestige. It featured a second guitarist who was also a second Chris Albertson career revival: Elmer Snowden, an important bandleader in the 1920s and 30s who had recorded little, and had completely fallen off the radar. Like Johnson, he was working a menial job in Philadelphia when Albetrson found him.
Elmer Snowden has one particularly unusual credential, He was the leader of a Washington, DC-based group called the Washingtonians. He brought the band to New York, but was having trouble getting bookings, so he sent to DC for an up-and-coming piano player, fella named Duke Ellington. You know the rest of the story
.In addition to Washingtonians like Bubber Miley and Tricky Sam Nanton, Snowden over a long career as bandleader had Count Basie. Jimmie Lunceford. Benny Carter, Roy Eldridge and Chick Webb, so he must have been no slouch at developing and mentoring future bandleaders. He had started out as a banjo player, but as the call for the banjo in jazz faded away, he switched to guitar (though he would make a jazz banjo album for Riverside in the 1960s).
Accompanied by Wendell Marshall on base, the two guitar players had a day of it, recording 22 songs, of which ten were chosen for the original vinyl album release, although almost all of them would eventually come out on CD. There were some vocals, more instrumentals, as Johnson got his wish to be seen as more than just a blues singer. Just a couple of old guys who know everything and can play all night.
The ten selections that made the album are pretty representative of the whole session. "Haunted House" is an original 12-bar blues by Johnson. He also sings the Eubie Blake-Andy Razaf chestnut "Memories of You" with a lighter, breezier voice: Lonnie Johnson the jazz singer.
"Blues for Chris" is their first instrumental, a tribute to their rediscoverer and producer Chris Albertson. Composer credit is given to Albertson and Elmer Snowden, and it's a fun piece, with some nice blues licks by both guitarists and some solid work by Wendell Marshall.
"I Found a Dream" is another Johnson composition, but this one a dreamy ballad. The two guitars manage some bluesy licks with a Charles Brown feel, but the vocal channels pop balladeers of a different era. Johnson doesn't seem to have listened much to contemporary balladeers like Sam Cooke or Clyde McPhatter. He draws more on the style of Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots, or the Irish tenors of his generation like Morton Downey or Dennis Day. But he ramps up into full vaudeville mode with "St. Louis Blues," not paying too much attention to W. C. Handy's careful construction, just having fun. And it is fun. Then he sort of marries all these styles, including his blues style, in an old pop song, "I'll Get Along Somehow," written by Arthur Marks and Buddy Fields. Listening to this one, my first thought was, "this could be the hit single," and it appears that Bob Weinstock thought the same thing, as it became a 45 RPM release.
Johnson and Snowden put their guitars together for a jam session on a traditional jazz tune, Kid Ory's "Savoy Blues," and the results are delightful. It's only one like it on the album, but "C-Jam Blues" and "Lester Leaps In" did eventually get released.
Johnson had recorded Bessie Smith's "Backwater Blues" back in the 1920s, and with Snowden's help on guitar, he gives it the full blues treatment here.
Snowden's "Elmer's Blues" has a decidedly modern rhythm and blues feel. Well, maybe not modern for 1960, but certainly modern for 1950; not bad for a couple of old guys from the 1930s. Pretty damn good, in fact. And they finish up with Johnson's "He's a Jelly Roll Baker," which also made it onto a later Bluesville anthology called Bawdy Blues. The album was called Blues & Ballads, and was a Bluesville release. "I'll Get Along Somehow" was the first 45, with "Jelly Roll Baker" on the flip side, and it was also the second 45, this time with "Memories of You."
Listening to Prestige Vol. 3, 1957-58, is just about ready to go to press! I'll announce shortly when I'm ready to start taking orders.
I've skipped over one session, with guitarist Al Casey. I'll come back to it as soon as I find my notes.
Prestige plucked Lonnie Johnson from obscurity for this recording, and a few more that he'd make for their Bluesville line, but then he kind of fell back into it. As the blues craze of the 1960s developed, it was a rising tide that lifted two kinds of boats. The ethnic folkie crowd, energized by Columbia's release of Robert Johnson's 1936-37 recordings, started looking for and resurrecting the careers of Mississippi Delta bluesman like Son House, Furry Lewis and Mississippi Fred McDowell. The young British blues enthusiasts who came to dominate the American pop charts loved the high-octane, electrified Chicago blues. The Rolling Stones demanded that Howlin' Wolf be featured on the white teen-oriented TV show Shindig when the made their American debut in 1965, and the careers of artists like Wolf, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker were in the ascendant.
Lonnie Johnson fit neither of these categories. He was from an earlier generation than the Chicago bluesmen, and he was from a different musical aesthetic than the Delta bluesmen, closer to jazz. He was, in fact, the first and most important innovator of the single-string guitar solo, the basis of nearly all jazz guitar improvisation.
Johnson made his first mark as a blues singer, winning a recording contract with Okeh at a 1925 blues competition.
But that was 1925, right in the middle of the decade of the first blues craze. After the unexpected commercial success of Mamie Smith's recording, "Crazy Blues," had shown that there was a black audience that would buy records, all the record companies wanted a piece of it, and they all figured that the way to get it was through the blues. At first that meant the urban, jazz-oriented blues of Mamie Smith, Alberta Hunter, and especially Bessie Smith. Then it meant the rural blues of street singers and rural juke joint performers like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Charley Patton.
And those guys weren't necessarily bluesmen. They were songsters. They were trying to make a buck, and that meant playing anything their audiences wanted to hear. Sometimes those audiences were black, and sometimes they were white. Sometimes they wanted to listen and sometimes they wanted to dance, so the songster had to be prepared. You can hear a vestige of this in Robert Johnson's "Hot Tamales and They're Red Hot."
Then an important audience became the record company, and the record companies wanted blues, so they became bluesmen, and the best bluesmen were successful. Lonnie Johnson, later in life, would come to resent the label a little, feeling it was too restrictive and did not show the scope of what he could do. But in 1925 he was desperate to get a recording contract, and the blues was his ticket of entry, though once inside the door, he was able to expand his scope, recording with both Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, among other jazzmen, including guitarist Eddie Lang, with whom he made some exciting recordings even though music was supposed to be made on a strictly segregated basis in those days.
But the blues was his meal ticket, and so it remained until that cafeteria dried up.The Depression was a time of shrinkage and retrenchment for the record companies, and the black artists were the first to be retrenched.
With the rise of independent rhythm and blues labels in the 1940s, he began to build a second career, but it ultimately dried up too, and he had settled back into obscurity for most of the 1950s.
His next comeback, and the contract with Prestige, coincided with another Prestige debut. Iceland-born Chris Albertson, who had begun making a career in radio in England, Iceland and Norway, latched onto American Armed Forces Radio as a disc jockey in Iceland, and followed his love of jazz to the United States, where found work as a disc jockey with a Philadelphia radio station. His special interest was in traditional jazz and blues, and one night he played some records by Lonnie Johnson, wondering over the air what had happened to the forgotten blues great.
He didn't have to wonder for long. A listener called the station. The hotel where he worked had a janitor named Lonnie Johnson, and though he never talked about music, he was always very careful of his hands. Could it be...?
It was. Albertson had him as a guest on his show, then brought him to Bob Weinstock's new Bluesville label, where Johnson was signed as an artist and Albertson as a producer.
Albertson put him together, for his first effort, with some first rate jazz musicians, all of them veterans with roots in traditional jazz, but nonetheless representing two different generations,
Pianist Claude Hopkins was Johnson's contemporary, born in 1903 to Johnson's 1899, and when Johnson was making his first blues recording in 1925, Hopkins was on his way to Paris as musical director of Josephine Baker's revue.
There's always work for a good piano player and bandleader, and Hopkins stayed busy throughout the following decades, including the 1950s, as there was still a demand for a pianist in the traditional style, not everyone being on board with this modern stuff. In fact, 52nd Street, once the cathedral of bebop, was by the end of the 1950s represented only by two Dixieland clubs, Eddie Condon's and Jimmy Ryan's.
When Johnson made that first recording for Okeh, his other future bandmates were barely out of diapers. Tenor saxophonist-to-be Hal Singer was six, bassist Wendell Marshall five and drummer Bobby Donaldson three.
All three of them were seasoned veterans by 1960, and all four of Albertson's musicians could play the blues, especially Singer, whose instrumental "Corn Bread" had topped the rhythm and blues charts in 1948. Together, they add jazz depth to a session that is Johnson's. and very rightly so. His single-string guitar soloing may not have been revolutionary any more, but few did it as well as he.
The album came out on Bluesville as Blues by Lonnie Johnson. The 45 RPM single was "You Don't Move Me" / "Don't Ever Love."
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