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All diaries in this series:
Link to Part I of the Funky Parade
Link to Part II of the Funky Parade
Link to Part III of the Funky Parade
Link to Part IV of the Funky Parade
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The African Diaspora was a grim and terrible series of events, but the forced settlement of Africans in North and South America also resulted in a range of incredibly good musical genres, which developed across varying cultures, despite oppression and marginalization.
Gospel, for instance, was performed in both Black and White congregations. I mention it first because it invites crowd participation. The core of the music is played by the best musicians available to the church, but they often utilize Rhythm with a capital “R” to bridge gaps in musical skills through the services.
Folk tunes, Pop songs, and Dance numbers metamorphosed into Blues and Jazz in the Southern US. Similar dynamics created a vast amount of regional styles in Latin America too, with recognizable African rhythms leading to cross-continental influences as Radio and recordings proliferated.
Along with other phenomena, New Orleans marching bands lie at the roots of African-American popular music. The bass drum pounds the basic beat for the musicians calling at the front of the parade, and triggers the clattering responses made by the following crowd. I am using this image as the name of my series, and will revisit this scene while telling a story or two.
My series of mini-essays doesn’t even begin to be a history of Jazz or Blues -- “Serious” practitioners of these brilliant musical forms include Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, Big Bill Broonzy, and Bessie Smith. However, I’ve chosen to begin by writing about their contemporaries, like Ma Rainey, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, and Louis Jordan, who were noted for showmanship and humor to various degrees.
Sometime in the 1950’s, rhythmically-oriented derivations of these styles became labeled as Rhythm & Blues, Soul Music, and Rock N’ Roll. I first heard the pronoun “Funky” in the early 1960’s attached to various styles of Jazz and R&B, and after a while the word Funk was assigned to Bass-Heavy Dance music – but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Composer William C. Handy, a hard-working African-American, published “St. Louis Blues” just before WWI, and “Dixieland Jazz” became popular after the war – popular enough to draw excellent African-American musicians like King Oliver and Louis Armstrong to big northern cities like Chicago and New York. Radio and the record industry brought new opportunities as well. Handy’s predecessor in sheet-music success, Ragtime’s creator Scott Joplin, is not a part of our parade, and I hesitate to call Louis Armstrong’s music Funky, yet all the funky qualities of humor, skill, and entertainment reside in his legacy, including his origins in New Orleans.
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The record industry divided Jazz and Blues into separate markets. One of the latter’s hit-makers during the 1920’s was Ma Rainey:
Wikipedia says: "Ma" Rainey (born Gertrude Malissa Nix Pridgett) … was one of the earliest African American professional blues singers and one of the first generation of blues singers to record. She was billed as the Mother of the Blues. She began performing as a young teenager and became known as Ma Rainey after her marriage to Will Rainey, in 1904. They toured with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels and later formed their own group, Rainey and Rainey, Assassinators of the Blues. Her first recording was made in 1923. In the next five years, she made over 100 recordings, including "Bo-Weevil Blues" (1923), "Moonshine Blues" (1923), "See See Rider Blues" (1924), "Black Bottom" (1927), and "Soon This Morning" (1927).
Before her retirement in 1935, she toured around the Eastern USA, both North and South. She was as much a producer as she was a performer and honed her craft in traveling tent shows. William “Sun Brimmer” Shade of the Memphis Jug Band told a story to Sam Charters about joining one of Ma Rainey’s tours with an act that involved handing a live rattlesnake. It did not end well, to say the least, although nobody was hurt, but Charters’ book The Country Blues gets to quote Ms. Rainey exclaiming something about “That f****n’ snake …” Funky indeed!
Entertainment and variety were hallmarks of her act, but as a musician she stood as an equal with Louis Armstrong and Dr. Thomas Dorsey, the great Gospel performer. Listen to her groundbreaking version of “See See Rider” -- www.youtube.com/...
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Cab Calloway was called “Mr. Cotton Club” by the tap-dancing Nicholas Brothers. He distinguished himself as a flamboyant singer and bandleader who wasn’t afraid to make people laugh, or tackle subjects like prostitution, drugs, infidelity, or even premature death in his material. He took over a well-rehearsed classy band called The Missourians, who were devastated by the Great Depression, and achieved a big break at the Cotton Club when they substituted for Duke Ellington while he went on tour.
Calloway wore elegant stylish clothes, often colored white, with exaggerated details – his tailcoats had LONG tails, his baggies were REALLY baggy pants. His wardrobe must have cost thousands, and he danced all over the place, singing, scatting, waving his conductor’s baton willy-nilly, mugging and doing contortions while his musicians cooked with blazing fire.
Yes, Calloway played the clown, but I don’t hold that against him at all. As a matter of fact Koko the Clown played Cab Calloway in Max Fleischer’s cartoon version of “St. James Infirmary.” The Fleischer Studio shot film of Calloway dancing to the song and roto-scoped his moves onto Koko as part of “Betty Boop as Snow White” (1933) Here is the entire crazy thing, with Calloway bringing on the Funk later in the show, even after the wicked witch-queen “ghosts” him: www.youtube.com/...
Calloway was featured in more Fleischer cartoons, as was Louis Armstrong (Hello, Pops – guess you belong in this parade, no matter what I think.) Warning: The racism and sexism of the period are more than a little bit disturbing in these films.
HOWEVER — There is nothing wrong at all about this clip of Cab Calloway, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and the Nicholas Brothers tearing the roof off of the nightclub set at the climax of “Stormy Weather” in 1943 —
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Entertainment on the surface, with awesome chops underneath personifies pianist/singer/comedian Thomas Wright "Fats" Waller. He performed in a transitional style called “stride piano,” like Duke Ellington, which involves keeping the rhythm and changes with the left hand and encourages looser, even whimsical, “tickling the ivories” with the right -- elements heard from Ragtime to Boogie-Woogie to Modern Jazz and Funk.
Here’s Wikipedia’s poignant paragraph about what this smiling, relaxed piano man could do: … many songs he wrote or co-wrote are still popular, such as "Honeysuckle Rose", "Ain't Misbehavin'" and "Squeeze Me". Fellow pianist and composer Oscar Levant dubbed Waller "the black Horowitz." Waller is believed to have composed many novelty tunes in the 1920s and 1930s and sold them for small sums, attributed to another composer and lyricist.
Standards attributed to Waller, sometimes controversially, include "I Can't Give You Anything but Love, Baby". Biographer Barry Singer conjectured that this jazz classic was written by Waller and lyricist Andy Razaf and provided a description of the sale given by Waller to the New York Post in 1929—he sold the song for $500 … He further supports the conjecture, noting that early handwritten manuscripts in the Dana Library Institute of Jazz Studies of "Spreadin' Rhythm Around" are in Waller's hand. Jazz historian P.S. Machlin comments that the Singer conjecture has "considerable justification". Waller's son Maurice wrote in his 1977 biography of his father that Waller had once complained on hearing the song, and came from upstairs to admonish him never to play it in his hearing because he had had to sell it when he needed money. Maurice Waller's biography similarly notes his father's objections to hearing "On the Sunny Side of the Street" playing on the radio. Waller recorded "I Can't Give You…" in 1938, playing the tune but making fun of the lyrics; the recording was with Adelaide Hall who had introduced the song to the world at Les Ambassadeurs Club in New York in 1928.
Well, the above-mentioned recording is pretty darn funny, and recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London to boot, but that ponderous church organ he’s playing doesn’t sound as funky as his piano does in this cut with Ada Brown: www.youtube.com/...
I highly recommend seeking out Fats Waller on YouTube – when I saw him as a kid on TV during the Black and White 1950’s, when they’d run any and all things from the 30’s and 40’s to fill air time, I was totally impressed and sorry to hear that he’d been gone before I was born.
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While I was growing up in the Fifties, I was certainly aware of how Rock and Roll changed Pop Music, but had no idea of how it was related to other forms – especially African-American Music. Segregation was part of the fabric of my upbringing in suburban Salt Lake City, and anyone who says different is lying. I had almost no effective access to African-American Music until Rock N’ Roll threw the door open for R&B greats like Fats Domino, Big Joe Turner, Chuck Berry, and Sam Cooke. Nat King Cole was an exception, but then Nat King Cole was exceptional in every way!
Simply put, Rock and Roll was a logical mutation of what was called Rhythm and Blues, which in turn was an outgrowth of Boogie-Woogie and Swing Era Music. The absolute giant of African-American Swing was Louis Jordan, and I can hear his influence in Funk Music that is made today.
Wikipedia says: Louis Thomas Jordan was a pioneering American musician, songwriter and bandleader who was popular from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. Known as "The King of the Jukebox", he was highly popular with both black and white audiences in the later years of the swing era.
Jordan was one of the most successful African-American musicians of the 20th century, ranking fifth in the list of the all-time most successful black recording artists according to Billboard magazine's chart methodology. Though comprehensive sales figures are not available, he had at least four million-selling hits during his career. Jordan regularly topped the R&B "race" charts and was one of the first black recording artists to achieve significant crossover in popularity with the mainstream (predominantly white) American audience, having simultaneous Top Ten hits on the white pop charts on several occasions. After Duke Ellington and Count Basie, Jordan was probably the most popular and successful African-American bandleader of his time.
Jordan’s long list of hits included “Choo Choo Ch-Boogie,” “Caldonia,” and my favorite “Let the Good Times Roll.” He toured with a small combo called the Tympany Five which outplayed many a Big Band, and cost a lot less to keep on the road. He’s rightly called the “Father of Rhythm and Blues,” and is also in in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Segregation had changing times kept Louis Jordan out of my youthful consciousness, but I bet every ambitious African-American looked up to him and his career as something for which to strive. I am posting this particular video of “Caldonia” as a documentation of his showmanship -- www.youtube.com/...
Kos readers are encouraged to take advantage of the Internet’s de facto library of formerly hard to find recordings to hear more of the great artists in my Parade of Funk.
Sometime in the early 1950’s, music journalist Jerry Wexler coined the term Rhythm and Blues, and it rapidly replaced the rather ugly name “Race Music” in the recording industry and on the radio.
Part II of my Funk Parade will continue from that period of time.
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All diaries in this series:
Link to Part I of the Funky Parade
Link to Part II of the Funky Parade
Link to Part III of the Funky Parade
Link to Part IV of the Funky Parade
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