Crash Course Timeline No. 54: Louis Jordan, Jukeboxes and Jump Blues

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:

Crash Course Timeline, No. 36: The Harlem Hamfats, Session Musician Superstars

A reason you may have heard of them...

I often type “this post will be short” at the top of these posts, only to delete after going on for four pages. This post, however, will be short. Because it cannot be otherwise.

The Harlem Hamfats barely survived to the Internet age. The entries on individual members top out after a couple paragraphs at most (e.g., Kansas Joe McCoy, and he was the long one) and their Wikipedia page doesn’t run much longer. Normally, that’s enough to convince me to skip an act, but two things recommended them for a short entry. First:

“They were perhaps the first studio recording band to become a performing act in their own right, and they recorded extensively.”

Chicago's pioneering producer J. Mayo Williams brought together The Harlem Hamfats to give Decca Records an in-house band to record that labels talent in the second half of the 1930s. For anyone familiar with the name, Williams bounced between Chicago labels from the mid-1920s until leaving Decca in the mid-1940s. Specializing in what the times dubbed “race records,” Williams recorded several of the early blues greats (e.g., Blind Lemon Jefferson (profiled here), Tampa Red (profiled here with Son House), plus jazz trailblazers, Jelly Roll Morton (profiled here) and King Oliver. By the time he'd moved onto Decca, the trend toward popular singers had picked up steam - i.e., the same shift that, along with the musicians strike of the early 1940s, did in the big bands - which meant Williams needed a stable of musicians he could rely on for recording sessions. Enter the Harlem Hamfats.

As sometimes happens, Wikipedia's entry on Kansas Joe McCoy (guitar/vocals) omits Williams’ role and states that he formed the Harlem Hamfats with his younger brother, Papa Charlie McCoy (guitar/mandolin), after divorcing his wife, a guitarist known as Memphis Minnie. As suggested by Kansas Joe’s name, he didn’t hail from Harlem. None of the Hamfats did. The McCoy’s weren’t even from Kansas; both grew up in Mississippi and came up in the New Orleans’ music scene. Some other members came from New Orleans as well - Herb Morand (trumpet/vocals), John Lindsay (bass), and Odell Rand (clarinet) - while the rest - Horace Malcolm (piano), Freddie Flynn (drums) and Pearlis Williams (also, drums) came from Chicago. It’s likely other members came in and out, but that’s the list I have.

The second thing that recommended the Harlem Hamfats for an entry actually involves a couple things:

Crash Course Timeline, No. 34: Bing Crosby, American Colossus

His happy place, from what I gather.

“396 chart singles, including roughly 41 No. 1 hits. [Bing] Crosby had separate charting singles every year between 1931 and 1954; the annual re-release of 'White Christmas' extended that streak to 1957."

“For fifteen years (1934, 1937, 1940, 1943–1954), Crosby was among the top ten acts in box-office sales, and for five of those years (1944–1948) he topped the world.”

“If he’s not the most important vocal artist of the 20th century, he’s in the top 1 1/2.”
- Will Friedwald (American author/critic)

That last quote comes out of a good, but fairly hagiographicPBS documentary, while the other two came from Wikipedia - which, for the record, was the only one of the few sources I read willing to pick through the garbage. I’ll get to that, but I wanted to start this post by driving home the main truth about Bing Crosby: the man was fucking HUGE, nothing less than a colossus of American popular culture. When they asked GIs to name who they thought contributed most to winning World War II, they named Crosby. His famous 1941 recording “White Christmas” (released on vinyl in discs, V-Records, and shipped to the troops) sold 50 million copies, making it the best-selling single of all-time (and No. 2’s a ways behind; full, weird list here); A Public Broadcasting Service timeline of his career pegged his all-time sales land somewhere between 500 million and 1 billion - after a certain point, why count? - and he spent the 1930s and 1940s, two entire decades, as the most successful vocal artist, quite likely in the world. As noted by the once-best-selling artist in Africa, Dorothy Masuka, once said, “Only Bing Crosby the famous American crooner sold more records than me in Africa.”

Now, for how that happened.

He didn’t start as “Bing,” for one. His parents, Harry Lowe Crosby, Sr. and Catherine Helen Crosby named him Harry Lillis Crosby, Jr. at his birth in 1903. A child of the Pacific Northwest, he was born in Tacoma, Washington, and grew all the way up in Spokane, even attending college at Gonzaga University. As for the nickname he made famous, Crosby told several stories - e.g, a story about the sounds me made firing an imaginary gun - but Wikipedia, which I trust for its comparative sobriety, gives the honors to a one-time neighbor, Valentine Hobart, who named him “Bing” after an old comic called “Bingo from Bingville.” (Another story has it that was Bing’s favorite comic.)

Though a decent student and a solid athlete, Crosby fell in love with singing at age 14, when he got a summer job working at Spokane’s Auditorium, a venue for vaudeville acts and orchestras. He watched the performances from the wings and, thanks to an audiographic memory, Crosby could perform the songs he heard when he got home after his shifts; when the legendary (and complicated) Al Jolson came to town, he discovered his first idol.