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| Speaks to the energy.... |
I’d heard a Louis Jordan something like 40 years before I ever knew his name. God bless Tom & Jerry...
He was born in the tiny town, Brinkley, Arkansas in 1908, but Louis Jordan became King of the Jukebox at his very impressive peak. Jordan also rates as one of the transitional figures in 20th- century popular music:
“Jordan began his career in big-band swing jazz in the 1930s, but he became known as an innovative popularizer of jump blues, a swinging, up-tempo, dance-oriented hybrid of jazz, blues and boogie-woogie. Typically performed by smaller bands consisting of five or six players, jump music featured shouted, highly syncopated vocals and earthy, comedic lyrics on contemporary urban themes. It strongly emphasized the rhythm section of piano, bass and drums; after the mid-1940s, this mix was often augmented by electric guitar. Jordan's band also pioneered the use of the electronic organ.”
His father, James Aaron Jordan, started him on both the clarinet and what would become his signature instrument, the alto sax. When the elder Jordan wasn’t teaching, he organized and coached the community band, the Brinkley Brass Band. By the 1920s – the year’s indistinct here; you get everything from 1920 (Blackpast.org) to the late 1920s (Wikipedia) – the younger Jordan’s talent earned him a spot in Ma and Pa Rainey’s touring company, the Rabbit Foot Minstrels. The general fuzziness of Louis Jordan’s younger years continued (online at least), but they generally agree that he wound up in Philadelphia for some time in the early 1930s, and either with or without his entire family, before moving to New York around 1936, where he split time singing in front of Chick Webb’s legendary orchestra (profiled here) with Ella Fitzgerald. I saw stray notes here and there about Jordan getting typecast as a comedic foil during his time with Webb, but that period wrapped up fairly quickly. By 1938, Jordan poured his considerable talents into a band of his own.
The original line-up of Louis Jordan’s Tympany Five featured nine players, but by the time they started their residency at Harlem’s Elks Rendezvous Club the line-up had shrunk to six members - Jordan on sax and lead vocals, Courtney Williams on trumpet, Lem Johnson played tenor sax, Clarence Johnson the piano, while Charlie Drayton laid down boogie-woogie bass lines and Walter Martin laid down the shuffle rhythm on the drums. Unlike the big bands, which often featured nearly 20 players and sometimes bloated to over 30, leading a smaller set up made Jordan’s band more affordable, while also letting each member earn more. And that both prefigured the standard rock ‘n’ roll lineup and changed the business:
“But the breadth of Jordan's success and the size of his combo had larger implications for the music industry. The blues singer Gatemouth Moore said, ‘He was playing...with five pieces. That ruined the big bands ... He could play just as good and just as loud with five as 17. And it was cheaper.’”
Jordan’s recording career started around the same time – and he had the luck of starting with Decca, the label he would stay with until the mid-1950s. Success didn’t come overnight – his first singles were novelty numbers like “Honey in the Bee Ball” and “Barnacle Bill the Sailor,” songs they played behind “an obscure vocalist” named Rodney Sturgess – but Decca heard potential and, by 1941, they moved him over to their “Sepia Series,” a 35-cent series for artists with “cross-over potential.” But that would come later...
A surprising something happened in the same year. After some time opening for the Mills Brothers (profiled here) at Chicago’s Capitol Lounge, Louis Jordan and the Tympany Five singed on for a headlining residency at the Fox Head Tavern in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Jordan later recalled playing a couple steps off the beaten path as the turning point in his career because it gave his band time and space to sharpen the act, particularly on the comedy side. And the band absolutely blew up from there.
The “hernia condition” (scare quotes by Wikipedia) that kept Jordan out of World War II almost certainly helped, but, with an assist from Berle Adams, his agent with the General Artists Corporation agency, he navigated the war years brilliantly. He recorded nine “prime” sides immediately before the 1942 strike by the American Federation of Musicians shut down all recording. A move to Los Angeles connected him to movie business and a promotional pipeline called “soundies” – e.g., Follow the Boys (1944), Caldonia (1945), Beware! (1946), and Reet, Petite and Gone (1947; whole damn movie, btw) - film shorts that featured popular singers and musical acts of the day (including Bing Crosby, profiled here). Finally, Jordan took advantage of the only recording option not halted by the strike – the V-discs recorded for the troops at the front. And that’s without counting the heavy rotation he got on jukeboxes.
He was born in the tiny town, Brinkley, Arkansas in 1908, but Louis Jordan became King of the Jukebox at his very impressive peak. Jordan also rates as one of the transitional figures in 20th- century popular music:
“Jordan began his career in big-band swing jazz in the 1930s, but he became known as an innovative popularizer of jump blues, a swinging, up-tempo, dance-oriented hybrid of jazz, blues and boogie-woogie. Typically performed by smaller bands consisting of five or six players, jump music featured shouted, highly syncopated vocals and earthy, comedic lyrics on contemporary urban themes. It strongly emphasized the rhythm section of piano, bass and drums; after the mid-1940s, this mix was often augmented by electric guitar. Jordan's band also pioneered the use of the electronic organ.”
His father, James Aaron Jordan, started him on both the clarinet and what would become his signature instrument, the alto sax. When the elder Jordan wasn’t teaching, he organized and coached the community band, the Brinkley Brass Band. By the 1920s – the year’s indistinct here; you get everything from 1920 (Blackpast.org) to the late 1920s (Wikipedia) – the younger Jordan’s talent earned him a spot in Ma and Pa Rainey’s touring company, the Rabbit Foot Minstrels. The general fuzziness of Louis Jordan’s younger years continued (online at least), but they generally agree that he wound up in Philadelphia for some time in the early 1930s, and either with or without his entire family, before moving to New York around 1936, where he split time singing in front of Chick Webb’s legendary orchestra (profiled here) with Ella Fitzgerald. I saw stray notes here and there about Jordan getting typecast as a comedic foil during his time with Webb, but that period wrapped up fairly quickly. By 1938, Jordan poured his considerable talents into a band of his own.
The original line-up of Louis Jordan’s Tympany Five featured nine players, but by the time they started their residency at Harlem’s Elks Rendezvous Club the line-up had shrunk to six members - Jordan on sax and lead vocals, Courtney Williams on trumpet, Lem Johnson played tenor sax, Clarence Johnson the piano, while Charlie Drayton laid down boogie-woogie bass lines and Walter Martin laid down the shuffle rhythm on the drums. Unlike the big bands, which often featured nearly 20 players and sometimes bloated to over 30, leading a smaller set up made Jordan’s band more affordable, while also letting each member earn more. And that both prefigured the standard rock ‘n’ roll lineup and changed the business:
“But the breadth of Jordan's success and the size of his combo had larger implications for the music industry. The blues singer Gatemouth Moore said, ‘He was playing...with five pieces. That ruined the big bands ... He could play just as good and just as loud with five as 17. And it was cheaper.’”
Jordan’s recording career started around the same time – and he had the luck of starting with Decca, the label he would stay with until the mid-1950s. Success didn’t come overnight – his first singles were novelty numbers like “Honey in the Bee Ball” and “Barnacle Bill the Sailor,” songs they played behind “an obscure vocalist” named Rodney Sturgess – but Decca heard potential and, by 1941, they moved him over to their “Sepia Series,” a 35-cent series for artists with “cross-over potential.” But that would come later...
A surprising something happened in the same year. After some time opening for the Mills Brothers (profiled here) at Chicago’s Capitol Lounge, Louis Jordan and the Tympany Five singed on for a headlining residency at the Fox Head Tavern in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Jordan later recalled playing a couple steps off the beaten path as the turning point in his career because it gave his band time and space to sharpen the act, particularly on the comedy side. And the band absolutely blew up from there.
The “hernia condition” (scare quotes by Wikipedia) that kept Jordan out of World War II almost certainly helped, but, with an assist from Berle Adams, his agent with the General Artists Corporation agency, he navigated the war years brilliantly. He recorded nine “prime” sides immediately before the 1942 strike by the American Federation of Musicians shut down all recording. A move to Los Angeles connected him to movie business and a promotional pipeline called “soundies” – e.g., Follow the Boys (1944), Caldonia (1945), Beware! (1946), and Reet, Petite and Gone (1947; whole damn movie, btw) - film shorts that featured popular singers and musical acts of the day (including Bing Crosby, profiled here). Finally, Jordan took advantage of the only recording option not halted by the strike – the V-discs recorded for the troops at the front. And that’s without counting the heavy rotation he got on jukeboxes.
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| Damn, right. |
It’s hard to overstate just how successful Jordan was during the 1940s. He ate the R&B charts (then known as the “race charts”) alive, scoring 18 No. 1 hits, on top of 54 in the Top 10. On the back of hits like “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,” “Five Guys Named Moe,” “G. I. Jive,” “What’s the Use of Getting Sober,” and a call-back to his first (1938) hit “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town,” “I’m Gonna Leave You on the Outskirts of Town,” Jordan’s songs “spent a total of 113 weeks in the top slot, almost twice as many weeks as any other artist in the history of rhythm & blues.” An analysis by Billboard’s Joel Whitburn ranked Jordan as the fifth most successful musician from 1942 to 1995. He had his first crossover hit in 1943 with “Ration Blues” (a song from his Fox Head Tavern days), which charted at No. 1 on both the R&B and country charts, as well as just missing the Top 10 on the popular charts (No. 11), but Jordan scored his share of Top 10s there as well (nine total, though “G. I. Jive” was his only No. 1).
Jordan’s earnings went through the roof over the same period. When he and the Tympany Five signed on at the Capitol Club in 1941, he took home the “standard union scale” of $35/week, while the Five split another $35 among them. By 1948, when he headlined San Francisco’s Golden Gate Theater, he and his band (reportedly) cleared $70,000 in two weeks.
A two-part song called “Saturday Night Fish Fry” was Jordan’s last hurrah. Recorded in 1949, it split to either side of a 78 rpm record and it broke all kinds of ground – e.g., the first song to slip the word “rocking” as well as the first to use “distorted electric guitar.” Some, NPR among them, hold up that single as an exemplar of “jump blues,” the kind of sound that “literally made its listeners jump to its pulsing beat.” It also featured “double-string electric guitar riffs that Chuck Berry would later admit to copying.” Again, Louis Jordan bridged two popular music eras.
After a dozen years of unbroken success, Jordan started to flounder in the early 1950s. His first mistake came with his counter-intuitive (indeed, counter-career) decision to start a big band of his own. His longtime label, Decca, cut him off in 1954, which led him to chase after other labels, first Aladdin in 1954, then “X” records (which changed its name to Vik while Jordan was still on-board) and finally Mercury Records in 1956. Because rock ‘n’ roll had started its slow, steady domination of the charts by that time, Jordan (et. al.) took his final swing at keeping up with the times by releasing an album called Somebody Up There Digs Me. It featured updated versions of some of his most popular singles, including “Caldonia,” “Ain’t Nobody Here but Us Chickens” and “Salt Pork, West Virginia.” The album flopped and, effectively, ended his career. Mercury cut him loose in 1958 and, while he would record on various labels through the 1960s and even into the 1970s, he would never get the same kind of traction. The funny thing: despite his influence on various future legends – not just Chuck Berry, but also Little Richard and Ray Charles – Jordan never cared for rock ‘n’ roll.
I never touched on Jordan’s personal life, but that’s mostly because it didn’t seem to impact his career – at least not directly – but a couple of his five marriages gave him some tumultuous times. His marriage to his childhood sweetheart, Fleecie Moore ended in an affair with a dancer/singer named Ida Fields and Moore going after him with a knife. Karma paid him back in spades when Fields sued him for bigamy (despite knowing he was married when she married him) and used the proceeds from the divorce settlement to bill herself as “Mrs. Louis Jordan, Queen of the Blues and her Orchestra,” a run that only stopped when he cut off payments.
On a more serious level, his financial problems piled up by the early 1960s to where the IRS put a lien on his income for unpaid taxes and he had to sell off some personal memorabilia at fire sale prices. No small part of the problem was the fact that Jordan couldn’t claim publishing royalties for all those famous singles; despite co-writing his share, he failed to credit himself on too many of them - and even made the mistake of giving Fleecie Moore writing credits on "Caldonia." Some of his admirers took note: in one of the rare classy moves in his life, Ike Turner anonymously arranged to have Jordan’s booking agency write him a check for $20,000 to help stop the bleeding.
Still, Louis Jordan had one hell of a career, if a largely forgotten one for reasons I still can't make out. His marital problems never blew up into anything scandalous, for all his financial woes, he had no reported problems with drugs or alcohol, and I didn’t see or read anything that suggested he wasn’t anything but respected and admired by his contemporaries and the people who came after him. In fact, a guy named Chris Barber toured with him through the UK in the early 1960s offered this remembrance:
“...playing with him was just frightening. It's a bit like an amateur guitar player from a back street who has just bought a Spanish guitar, working with Segovia. He didn't make you feel small, but he was just so perfect in what he did. ... I still remember watching him singing, but he would accompany himself on the alto, and you were convinced he was playing the alto while he was singing. ... the breath hadn't gone from his last word before he was playing his alto and it seemed to be simultaneous.”
Louis Jordan died of a heart attack in February 1975. That may feel like an abrupt end to his story, but it matches what I read in most of the sources. Speaking of...
Sources
Wikipedia – Louis Jordan
Allmusic.com Bio
Blackpast.org Bio
McGill University Bio (the most thorough source by far, for anyone who wants all the twists and turns)
About the Sampler
“Louis Jordan became famous as one of the leading practitioners and popularisers of ‘jump blues,” a swinging, up-tempo, dance-oriented hybrid of jazz, blues and boogie-woogie. Often performed by smaller bands (typically five or players), jump music featuring shouted, highly syncopated vocals and earthy, comedic lyrics on contemporary urban themes.”
That felt like a good lead for the sampler. Frames it nicely, if nothing else.
Whether due to the time it took to get this post organized or just digging most of what Louis Jordan put down, separation anxiety bit hard during the selection process – which is why the sampler wound up with 24 songs, i.e., four past my ideal for musicians I like. Fortunately, I already linked to at least a half dozen of them above. The rest come from all over his long peak – though I did include several versions from that 1956 Mercury recording because those played better in my ears – e.g., “Caldonia,” “Salt Pork, West Virginia,” “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,” and “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t (My Baby).”
As for the rest, I’m list ‘em:
“That Chick’s Too Young to Fry,” “Run Joe,” “(You Dyed Your Hair) Chartreuse,” “Let the Good Times Roll,” “Buzz Me Blues,” “Texas and Pacific,” “Open the Door, Richard” (another big hit, btw), “Boogie Woogie Blue Plate,” “Stone Cold Dead in the Market” (a patois-drunk duet with Ella; also, I failed to mention Jordan’s many collaborations), “Teardrops from My Eyes,” “Reet Petite and Gone,” “Beans and Cornbread,” “Blue Light Boogie,” and “Don’t Worry ‘Bout that Mule.”
While I sometimes organize the songs in the sampler a certain way, I skipped it this time. It’s all good. It also has a very distinct style, though not wildly different what Cab Calloway (profiled here) was doing a little before and around the same time. Both men changed the face of music, if only by being the clear, front-facing star of the acts they led.
The next one shouldn’t take as long as this one did. Just have to do a little planning about where I go next. Till then...
Jordan’s earnings went through the roof over the same period. When he and the Tympany Five signed on at the Capitol Club in 1941, he took home the “standard union scale” of $35/week, while the Five split another $35 among them. By 1948, when he headlined San Francisco’s Golden Gate Theater, he and his band (reportedly) cleared $70,000 in two weeks.
A two-part song called “Saturday Night Fish Fry” was Jordan’s last hurrah. Recorded in 1949, it split to either side of a 78 rpm record and it broke all kinds of ground – e.g., the first song to slip the word “rocking” as well as the first to use “distorted electric guitar.” Some, NPR among them, hold up that single as an exemplar of “jump blues,” the kind of sound that “literally made its listeners jump to its pulsing beat.” It also featured “double-string electric guitar riffs that Chuck Berry would later admit to copying.” Again, Louis Jordan bridged two popular music eras.
After a dozen years of unbroken success, Jordan started to flounder in the early 1950s. His first mistake came with his counter-intuitive (indeed, counter-career) decision to start a big band of his own. His longtime label, Decca, cut him off in 1954, which led him to chase after other labels, first Aladdin in 1954, then “X” records (which changed its name to Vik while Jordan was still on-board) and finally Mercury Records in 1956. Because rock ‘n’ roll had started its slow, steady domination of the charts by that time, Jordan (et. al.) took his final swing at keeping up with the times by releasing an album called Somebody Up There Digs Me. It featured updated versions of some of his most popular singles, including “Caldonia,” “Ain’t Nobody Here but Us Chickens” and “Salt Pork, West Virginia.” The album flopped and, effectively, ended his career. Mercury cut him loose in 1958 and, while he would record on various labels through the 1960s and even into the 1970s, he would never get the same kind of traction. The funny thing: despite his influence on various future legends – not just Chuck Berry, but also Little Richard and Ray Charles – Jordan never cared for rock ‘n’ roll.
I never touched on Jordan’s personal life, but that’s mostly because it didn’t seem to impact his career – at least not directly – but a couple of his five marriages gave him some tumultuous times. His marriage to his childhood sweetheart, Fleecie Moore ended in an affair with a dancer/singer named Ida Fields and Moore going after him with a knife. Karma paid him back in spades when Fields sued him for bigamy (despite knowing he was married when she married him) and used the proceeds from the divorce settlement to bill herself as “Mrs. Louis Jordan, Queen of the Blues and her Orchestra,” a run that only stopped when he cut off payments.
On a more serious level, his financial problems piled up by the early 1960s to where the IRS put a lien on his income for unpaid taxes and he had to sell off some personal memorabilia at fire sale prices. No small part of the problem was the fact that Jordan couldn’t claim publishing royalties for all those famous singles; despite co-writing his share, he failed to credit himself on too many of them - and even made the mistake of giving Fleecie Moore writing credits on "Caldonia." Some of his admirers took note: in one of the rare classy moves in his life, Ike Turner anonymously arranged to have Jordan’s booking agency write him a check for $20,000 to help stop the bleeding.
Still, Louis Jordan had one hell of a career, if a largely forgotten one for reasons I still can't make out. His marital problems never blew up into anything scandalous, for all his financial woes, he had no reported problems with drugs or alcohol, and I didn’t see or read anything that suggested he wasn’t anything but respected and admired by his contemporaries and the people who came after him. In fact, a guy named Chris Barber toured with him through the UK in the early 1960s offered this remembrance:
“...playing with him was just frightening. It's a bit like an amateur guitar player from a back street who has just bought a Spanish guitar, working with Segovia. He didn't make you feel small, but he was just so perfect in what he did. ... I still remember watching him singing, but he would accompany himself on the alto, and you were convinced he was playing the alto while he was singing. ... the breath hadn't gone from his last word before he was playing his alto and it seemed to be simultaneous.”
Louis Jordan died of a heart attack in February 1975. That may feel like an abrupt end to his story, but it matches what I read in most of the sources. Speaking of...
Sources
Wikipedia – Louis Jordan
Allmusic.com Bio
Blackpast.org Bio
McGill University Bio (the most thorough source by far, for anyone who wants all the twists and turns)
About the Sampler
“Louis Jordan became famous as one of the leading practitioners and popularisers of ‘jump blues,” a swinging, up-tempo, dance-oriented hybrid of jazz, blues and boogie-woogie. Often performed by smaller bands (typically five or players), jump music featuring shouted, highly syncopated vocals and earthy, comedic lyrics on contemporary urban themes.”
That felt like a good lead for the sampler. Frames it nicely, if nothing else.
Whether due to the time it took to get this post organized or just digging most of what Louis Jordan put down, separation anxiety bit hard during the selection process – which is why the sampler wound up with 24 songs, i.e., four past my ideal for musicians I like. Fortunately, I already linked to at least a half dozen of them above. The rest come from all over his long peak – though I did include several versions from that 1956 Mercury recording because those played better in my ears – e.g., “Caldonia,” “Salt Pork, West Virginia,” “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,” and “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t (My Baby).”
As for the rest, I’m list ‘em:
“That Chick’s Too Young to Fry,” “Run Joe,” “(You Dyed Your Hair) Chartreuse,” “Let the Good Times Roll,” “Buzz Me Blues,” “Texas and Pacific,” “Open the Door, Richard” (another big hit, btw), “Boogie Woogie Blue Plate,” “Stone Cold Dead in the Market” (a patois-drunk duet with Ella; also, I failed to mention Jordan’s many collaborations), “Teardrops from My Eyes,” “Reet Petite and Gone,” “Beans and Cornbread,” “Blue Light Boogie,” and “Don’t Worry ‘Bout that Mule.”
While I sometimes organize the songs in the sampler a certain way, I skipped it this time. It’s all good. It also has a very distinct style, though not wildly different what Cab Calloway (profiled here) was doing a little before and around the same time. Both men changed the face of music, if only by being the clear, front-facing star of the acts they led.
The next one shouldn’t take as long as this one did. Just have to do a little planning about where I go next. Till then...
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