part 3, chapter 6 stomp it on down: boogie-woogie episode...

Part 3, Chapter 6 Stomp It On Down: Boogie-Woogie Episode 2 of 3

71

In the first programme of this series, I showed how boogie-woogie emerged from its blues roots in the Southern United States and drifted to the big cities of the North. I now want to go into how it travelled from Chicago's black South Side and took a side-turning, away from the blues mainstream, to the summit of white popular music, to a world where learned theses compared this new marvel with Schoenberg and Bartók. It all started with the release, in 1929, of a few copies of a recording by a young pianist, Meade Lux (short for Luxemburg) Lewis. Lewis, Northern-based, was never really a part of the Southern heart of the blues, and his one or two accompaniments to blues singers of the time tended to be rather thin and lack essential blues warmth. It was his one solo recording that was to put boogie on its way to stardom:

With that first recording of the very influential 'Honky Tonk Train Blues' by Meade Lux Lewis,

boogie already shows a drift away from its blues roots. Lewis's performance there was a polished and inventive pianistic exercise, rather than a folk-blues concept; not an emotional response to the big locomotive sounds so important to the blacks in the poor sections of town, more of a musician's response. Thus the piece already was something of a jazz

performance. The story has often been told of how,

in 1935, the American jazz critic John Hammond Jr. found a worn copy of Lewis's

record and set out to trace him, eventually finding him washing cars in a Chicago garage. Hammond worked

hard to get Lewis's classic recorded again, but with little success until, rather surprisingly, he persuaded the English Parlophone company to issue it. America then followed suit, and this was the modest start of the boogie boom. In May 1936, Lewis played at the first Swing Concert at the Imperial Theatre, New York, followed by six weeks at Nick's Tavern in Greenwich Village. Sadly, response was poor and Lewis went back to Chicago on relief, but Hammond persevered and at 10.15 on the evening of 23 December 1938, Lewis walked onto the stage of Carnegie Hall, part of the great From Spirituals to Swing concert. This time he was joined by his old Chicago friend, Albert Ammons, and the Kansas City pianist Pete Johnson. Now the public were ready for them and they were a sensation. Overnight, boogie became the craze of the nation. All three were given a long engagement at the Café Society nightclub, and radio shows with Benny Goodman and others followed. When Ammons first saw the grand pianos on the stage of Carnegie Hall, a contemporary account quotes him as saying to Lewis, 'Hey, do we play on them machines?' Told yes, he replied, 'Man, we is across the tracks at last!' And so was boogie-woogie. It's important to realise that the 'Big Three' of the boogie revival, Lewis, Ammons

2 – THE BOOGIE BLUES Tr ansmitted 11 July 1979

MEADE LUX LEWIS, piano solo. Chicago, Illinois c. December 1927 20246-2 Honky Tonk Train Blues Paramount 12896, Broadway 5063


72

and Johnson, all played a hybrid music, a fusion: the blues, polished, tidied up, but played with jazz overtones. Johnson and Ammons often worked as orchestral pianists in jazz bands and so had a foot in both blues and jazz camps. They evolved a much more formal, highly specialised style, a sort of jazz-boogie, and it was this that appealed, first to the jazz fans, and then, through them, to the mass white audience, reared as they were on the jazz-based swing music of the day. And here is Pete Johnson in 1939, powerful, dynamic, playing a driving solo, unhurried and perfectly in control – 'Climbin' And Screamin' ':

Pete Johnson came from a jazz background. His father was a musician and Pete played the drums in the school band until he was 18. He then decided to learn to play the piano and was taught by, among others, one Slamfoot Brown, reputedly the fastest ragtime player of the day. Jazz-boogie at its very best there in Pete Johnson's 'Climbin' And Screamin' '. I've mentioned both blues and jazz. It's essential to understand that there have been two parallel streams of influence in the black American contribution to twentieth-century popular music. The jazz stream, discovered early by white audiences, emerged in the 1920s. The blues stream, originally called 'Race' music by the white record companies and marketed quite separately to jazz and popular music, remained astonishingly concealed from, and totally ignored by, the white world. One of the most beneficial side effects of the boogie boom was that several gifted blues-stream pianists were brought out of obscurity and recorded, thus leaving a fine legacy of music that otherwise would almost certainly have been lost. Among these pianists were Cripple Clarence Lofton and Jimmy Yancey. Both were much closer to their blues roots than the 'Big Three' and, though liked by jazz fans, neither was so broadly acceptable to the white audience, or indeed ever to make the concert hall or nightclub circuit. Lofton, born back in 1887, was an eccentric and extrovert figure, but one whose playing often displayed compelling intensity. In the late thirties he ran for a time a small saloon on State Street called The Big Apple, where, while playing for his customers, he was liable to break off in mid-flow and dance around the piano snapping his fingers. He was the only one of the five pianists I'm featuring in this programme to have recorded for the black 'Race' labels in the thirties. Besides providing a superb accompaniment for the blues singer Red Nelson, he also recorded four sides under his own name, but here I'm going to play a masterly solo from the revivalist period, recorded in 1943. It's a rather untypical glimpse of Lofton in unusually restrained mood, playing a train blues that makes, I think, an interesting contrast to Lewis's 'Honky Tonk Train Blues'. Lofton's response to locomotive sounds was much more emotional and poetic, much more a part of the blues. We can almost see the huge freight engine as it pulls slowly through the marshalling yards, caught by sunlight and shadow as it winds its heavy way in and out of tunnels and underpasses:

CRIPPLE CLARENCE LOFTON, piano solo. Chicago, Illinois December 1943 130- South End Boogie Session 10-002

PETE JOHNSON, piano solo. New York City Sunday, 16 April 1939 R-127- Climbin' And Screamin' Solo Art 12004


73

Cripple Clarence Lofton, who played that sombre 'South End Boogie', came from Chicago. And so did Jimmy Yancey. A quieter, more reflective figure than Lofton, he was a one-off, very talented, pianist, with a highly distinctive and personal style and held in very high regard by his fellow pianists. Yancey was born before the turn of the century and undoubtedly there was much in his blues that survived from an earlier era. Although he started life as a dancer – remarkably, he appeared at a Royal Command Performance for King George V in 19116 – his piano roots went back a long way and he's said to have been playing his blues piece, 'The Fives', before World War I. Indeed, when I asked the blues pianist Memphis Slim to demonstrate the style of his own piano-playing father, one could hear a great similarity to Yancey's 'Fives' in what he played. Always an amateur – from 1927 on he worked as a groundsman for the Chicago White Sox baseball team – Yancey never recorded commercially on the black 'Race' labels, and it wasn't until the success of his friends, Ammons and Lewis, that he was 'discovered' and emerged on the wave of the boogie boom. Thoughtful and sensitive, Yancey recorded some extremely introspective and personal blues, especially with his wife, Estelle 'Mama' Yancey. But here he's in witty and light-hearted mood, as he plays his 'Yancey's Bugle Call':

'Yancey's Bugle Call', recorded in 1940, is a fine example of his very distinctive and idiosyncratic

sense of timing, but it was obviously the more dramatic forms of boogie that most captured the public imagination; the all-powerful, rolling boogie, with the massive left-hand walking basses thundering out the beat; the piano-breaking idiom with all the tough, remorseless energy of the heavy locomotive, the seemingly unstoppable force of jazz-boogie in full flow.

But Meade Lux Lewis shows that boogie can also take its time, in one of his

most sparkling and inventive solos, a relaxed but rocking piece full of subtle accents and

variations, his two hands quite beautifully integrated, producing a dazzling series of rhythmic patterns:

6 Later research by Jane Bowers and Howard Rye has established that Jimmy Yancey's trip to

England in fact took place between February 1913 and January 1914, rather than in 1911. The appearance before royalty which he recalled has not been located but was almost certainly a private engagement which would likely leave no record in the public prints. The 1913 Royal Command Performance, which took place on 26 June, was a production of the Dion Boucicault comedy, London Assurance, at St. James's Theatre.

MEADE LUX LEWIS, piano solo. New York City Friday, 4 October 1940 RS-794-A Tell Your Story Blue Note 15

JIMMY YANCEY, piano solo. Chicago, Illinois Friday, 6 September 1940 053438-1 Yancey's Bugle Call Victor 27238


74

The revival of boogie, as in that 1940 recording of 'Tell Your Story' by Meade Lux Lewis, brought it wide popularity and it thrived. Fine swing bands helped to popularise it with good jazz arrangements and many jazz pianists recorded their own versions of boogie themes, but the rot set in. Inevitably, Tin Pan Alley took over. There was commercial dilution and synthetic boogie pop songs appeared: 'Beat Me, Daddy, Eight To The Bar'; 'Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy'; 'Scrub Me, Mama, With A Boogie Beat'. There was 'Swanee River Boogie', 'Loch Lomond Boogie'. Even the classics were not immune. Bach was played to a boogie beat. Scores of imitative pianists appeared who had only mastered the merest superficialities of the idiom, and finally, in the face of all this rubbish, public interest waned. The critic Max Harrison has pointed out that boogie's strength lay in the fact that it was a living part of the environment that bred it. Removed from its roots to concert hall and nightclub, its vitality was drained away. Mechanical formula and repetition replaced natural inspiration drawn direct from its cultural roots. Later recordings of even the best practitioners became repetitive and sterile. Performances were often reduced to flashy show-off pieces played, just for the sake of it, at breakneck speed. There was nothing fresh to be said. Boogie, no longer an exciting novelty, faded from the public view. Was this then the end? Was Boogie dead? No, not at all. In the next programme, I'll be showing you how the blues mainstream ran its separate course. How, back in the blues, hidden away from the white audience, boogie remained an integral part of the music. But now let's go out on a cheerful note, jazz-boogie at its peak – and it was at its peak when played by the massive, solid figure of Albert Ammons. Sitting almost motionless – it was said that he sat so still while playing that a full glass of gin could be balanced on his head – he poured out a rolling torrent of powerhouse piano. He was the epitome of the boogie boom. This is what caught the public fancy and was the basis of the sound, the style, that was to echo round the world. Now, to end, one of his finest and most typical performances. Partly based on Pine Top Smith's old boogie classic of 1928, here Albert Ammons combines enormous power and dynamic rhythms in his 'Boogie Woogie Stomp'. No one could compete with Ammons when he played like this:

ALBERT AMMONS, piano solo. New York City Friday, 6 January 1939 441-5 Boogie Woogie Stomp Blue Note 2

part 3, chapter 6 stomp it on down: boogie-woogie episode...

Documents