I recently purchased a cd "The Very Best of King - Federal - Deluxe volume one" and one song titled "Soft" by Tiny Bradshaw is outstanding. Have any of you used the song at a dance? I also like "My Ding A Ling" by Dave Bartholomew, but it is a little risque for a dance. The other good songs are "Cuttin' In" by Johnny "Guitar" Watson, "Grandpa Can Boogie Too" by Lil Greenwood, "Raggedy Blues" by Pete "Guitar" Lewis, "Step It Up And Go" by Rudy Moore and "Jim Wilson Boogie" by Little Willie Littlefield.
Thank you.
R&B, Jump Blues
Moderators: Mr Awesomer, JesseMiner, CafeSavoy
-
Lorenzo1950
- Posts: 10
- Joined: Sat May 24, 2003 8:13 am
- Location: Baltimore, Md
- Contact:
So are R&B and Jump Blues the same? if not, how are they related? I have always thought of them as separate; with jump blues being primarily defined by Louis Jordan (outside of him and Roy Milton I haven't listened to a ton of it).Peter wrote:being that R&B started here in Los Angeles and was the center for that type of music I don't beleive the fact they [Roy Milton and his Solid Senders] were a LA based band would be that big of a deal....
I beleive Roy had 1 or 2 number one hits. Roy Milton had a great line up of musicians Dootsie Williams-Camille Howad but kept them restrained in his Ideals. Thats why I'm so glad they left him and recorded on their own where they flourished putting out more hits then the Solid Senders ever did.
Bands that were tops and stayed tops were Big Jay McNeely,Eddie Cleanhead Vinson,Hadda Brooks,Johnny Otis etc...if you enjoy that realm of music....and some of it is awesome no doubt.
and frankly, I had not really related R&B to Jump Blues at all until Peter's above post over in the "most hated albums thread". it just shows what a little newbie I am
Like Gene Harris is the archetype of Groove swing, Louis Jordan is the archtype of Jump Blues.djstarr wrote:So are R&B and Jump Blues the same? if not, how are they related? I have always thought of them as separate; with jump blues being primarily defined by Louis Jordan (outside of him and Roy Milton I haven't listened to a ton of it).
R&B is perhaps the only musical term more broadly used and rampantly misused than "Swing" such that it has lost descriptive meaning for me. If it matters, I always ask what someone means by R&B when they use the term. I have heard it used to describe anything from Buddy Guy electric blues to Luther Van Dross's smooth jazz. I casually used it in the Buddy Guy context (i.e. "Rhythmic" Blues, or Blues with a lot of strong rhythm, which would link it to Jump Blues) loosely when this list was in its yahoo incarnation, and five people must have jumped down my throat for it.
This is from the liner notes to a jump blues compilation:
Blues Masters, Volume 5: Jump Blues Classics Liner Notes
That raucous child of blues and country, rhythm & blues, came into the
world squalling and jiving to a heavy back beat, piano triplets, and
demented, muscular tenor sax blowing. As an invitation to get up and
dance like a madman, the music had no peers or precedents. Although hot
vocals by big-voiced shouters, both male and female, commanded the
spotlight, propulsive instrumentals spread the jump blues doctrine from
jukebox ro jukebox. For one glorious decade from 1948 to 1958, this big
beat reigned supreme.
Jumping the blues had its origins with the orchestral jazz bands of
Kansas City and St. Louis in the 1920s, were exposure to blues and
ragtime popularized the simple arrangements and rhythmic drive. By the
late 1930s, jump had been added to the swing music formula, and
jitterbugs and Lindy-hoppers filled the dance halls. When swing got
sweeter and milder, rhythm & blues carried on the hard-blowing jump blues
tradition, providing music for dancers.
The antiphonal (call-and-response) characteristic of African music so
evident in country blues and gospel was adopted by jump blues, often with
the voice of the saxophone played against the vocalist, who shouted
rather than sang the lyrics. The saxophone was playted with athletic
power and exhuberance; the saxman squeezing out honks, bleats, and
squeals to the delight of the crowds and the dismay of traditional jazz
fans. Strong backbeats were provided by the drummer's snares and rim
shots on tghe second and fgourth beats of every bar and reinforced by the
bass player marking every beat.
While the link between rural blues and urban jump blues is largely in the
traditional eight- and 12-bar blues form, the distinguishing marks are
in instrumentation -- saxophones, bass, drums, percussive piano, and
sometimes trumptes and trombones. The lyrical content is earthy, dealing
with love, loss, drinking, and automobiles -- the folk music of the city,
When white bands added electric guitars and jumped the blues, they called
it rock 'n' roll.
Without the booting, honking tenor sound, jump blues couldn't jump and
and rock wouldn't roll. The undisputed king of rock 'n' roll saxophonists
was Wilbert "Red" Prysock, and his biggest hit was "Hand Clappin'," a
frantic rocker that was quickly adopted as a signature tune by hip disc
jockeys all across theo cuntry in 1956. Red's big, fat tones were first
heard in grammar school in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he was born
in 1926. By the mid-1950s his popularity was so great that he had five
albums on the market simultaneously. He can sing, too, but prefers to
leave the crooning to brother Arthur Prysock, with whom he now tours.
Two music veterans, Jesse Stone and Joe Turner, combined their
supernatural powers to produce the first great anthem of the rock 'n'
roll era, "Shake, Rattle, And Roll." One of the biggest hits of 1954, the
tune hung on the charts for 32 weeks, three of those at #1 on the
jukebox.
"I threw a bunch of phonetic phrases together and came up with 30 or 40
verses," Stone recalls. "Then I picked over them. I got a line about `a
one-eyed cat peepin' in a seafood store' from my drummer, Baby Lovett.
He was always comin' out with lines like that." Big Joe's original single
peeked into the pop charts for a couple of weeks, but Bill Haley had one
of his biggest hits with a carefully sanitized version that eliminated
most of the good humor and the one-eyed cat. Several million people have
also heard Elvis do the tune. Although Turner died in 1985, Jesse Stone,
thankfully, is still around at this writing.
Louis Prima, a cat with nine musical lives, began his career in his
hometown of New Orleans. but moved to New York City in 1935, when he was
just 24, His special combination of jazz, blues, and raucous Italian jump
found instant favor, and he could write, too. "Sing, Sing, Sing" and "A
Sunday Kind Of Love" are two examples of his cerebral side. "Jump, Jive,
An' Wail," recorded for a Capitol album in 1956, shows the other side --
the foot-stompin', hollerin', shuckin' and jivin' that electrified black
and white audiences for a generation or two (especially in Las Vegas).
If he had a secret weapon, it was tenor man Sam Butera, but Louie's
vocals lit the fuse every time. Musically related to blues shouters
Wynonie Harris and Joe Turner, Prima had no problem keeping up with rock
'n' roll when it came along, and if not for his unexpected final chorus
on August 24, 1978, he would still be drawing good-timing crowds today.
"Good Rockin' Tonight" started as a quasi-spiritual wtritten by Roy
Brown, then a crooner of mainstream pop songs. Its transformation into
the first rock 'n' roll call to party was accomplished by Wynonie Harris,
whose version rocketed to the #1 slot and stayed on the charts for six
months in 1948. Harris, born in Omaha in 1915, was the prototypical
hard-drinking, chick-chasing, money-wasting rock superstar, and his songs
mirrored his short life.
Harris' stage mannerisms were closely watched by young Elvis Presley in
Memphis in the early 1950s. King Records producer Henry Glover told Nick
Tosches in 1977, "When you saw Elvis, you ewere seeing a mild version of
Wynonie." Elvis recorded "Good Rockin' Tonight," and so did Pat Boone,
but the version that will forever define the term is Wynonie's alone. By
the late '50s his career had hit bottom, and his health soon followed.
He died of cancer on June `14, 1969.
Roy Brown's "Good Rockin' Tonight" opened the floodgates of "rockin'
songs" in '48 and elevated the singer/songwriter to the position of top
nightclub entertainer in his hometown of New Orleans. While the rest of
the world slumbered on, rock 'n' roll was nicely browning in the oven.
One of the many sequels, Brown's "Rockin' At Midnight," was a #2 R&B hit
in 1949, with Billboard judging it "an effective holler stomp." A scant
35 years later it was reprised as a rock hit by The Honeydrippers, a
short-lived alliance of Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, and Nile
Rodgers. Brown himself had enjoyed a revival in the late 1970s, and
performed at the Jazz & Heritage Festival in New Orleans just two weeks
before his death in May 1981 at the age of 55.
Little Johnny Jones brought his laid-back piano style to Chicago from his
hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, in the postwar years and played on a
lot of other people's sessions. The rolling "Hoy Hoy" was recorded in
Chicago in 1953 with Elmore James on guitar and marks one of the few
times Johnny took the feature spot. His gravelly vocal in the springboard
for fine mellow sax work by J.T. Brown. Jones' sudden death in 1964 at
the age of 40 kept him from participating in the blues revival of the
1970s.
Out on the Eastern seaboard, they still do the Shag to "The Train Kept
A-Rollin',' a jump opus recorded in 1951 by Myron "Tiny" Bradshaw and his
band, which included tenor ace Red Prysock. Bradshaw, born in 1905,
started out in hot jazz bands and finished his career with a cover of The
Royal Teens' "Short Shorts" in 1958. In between he made a name for
himself with a tough and sly R&B big band style that had the hepcats
packing the ballrooms from coast to coast. He died in November 1958, but
not before launching the careers of Prysock and Sil Austin.
Destined by cruel fate to have only his alotted 15 minutes of fame,
vocalist Rudy Greene was plucked from the Tampa, Florida, club scene in
December 1956 to record for Ember Records in New York City. The first
release from his only session, "Juicy Fruit," an infectious and tricky
rocker, was a regional hit on the way to becoming a national sensation
when the label hit big with "Walkin" With Mr. Lee" by Lee Allen, and
Green's opus was forgotten. A second record died from promotional neglect
and Greene faded from sight, leaving only one of those two-minutes-plus
gems of musical excitement that characterized the youthful exuberance of
rock 'n' roll.
The kind of music that Jackie Brenston made should have made him the idol
of a million adoring fans and the object of pilgrimages to his boyhood
home for years after this death in 1979. Brenston, a boozing sax player
born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1930, was completely devoid of any
teen idol characteristics. Still, he produced some of the rawest,
funkiest R&B heard in the 1950s, starting with a huge hit, "Rocket 88,"
a tune closely patterned after Jimmy Liggins' "Cadillac Boogie." "In My
Real Gone Rocket," an obvious followup to his monster hit of 1951, was
backed by Ike Turner's band, and Brenston spent most of the rest of his
short career as sax player in Turner's Kings of Rhythm.
The younger brother of original Honeydrippers bandleader Joe, Jimmy
Liggins, born in 1922 in Newby, Oklahoma, decided that making music was
easier than driving the Liggins band bus and taught himself to play
guitar. "Every song I recorded, I wrote myself," he sauid. "I wrote
`Cadillac Boogie' because Joe had this big Cadillac and I was following
him, driving a van that had his instruments. I thought, `That's be a good
song, and I'll call it `Cadillac Boogie,' because Lionel Hampton had
`Beulah's Boogie' and Louis Jordan had `Choo-Choo-Ch-Boogie.'" His
straight-ahead rhythm romp "Cadillac Boogie" rode up the charts as the
flipside of his first hit, "Tear Drop Blues," in July 1948. Jimmy
continued to record until 1952, when he went into the production and
distribution end of the business.
Cynthia Coleman was born in 1939 into an influential and widely known
family of gospel singers, preachers, and businessmen, the Colemans of
Newark, New Jersey. After singing in a family gospel group, she went out
on her own as Ann Cole, R&B singer. Her rough-edged and powerful pipes
were equally suited to bluesy ballads and searing jump numbers. "Got My
Mo-Jo Working (But It Just Won't Work On You)" was a feature of her stage
shows in 1957, when it was heard by Muddy Waters. The great bluesman cut
a similar version that later became his signature tune. Ann's original,
backed by the New York group The Suburbans, is a New York jump tune
without peer. Cole's promising career was cut chort by an auto accident
in 1960 that left her confined to a wheelchair. She has since returned
to her roots, singing in the family church.
"Hop, Skip And Jump" has the sound of a 1956 rocker, but it was recorded
in 1948 -- ample rproof that Roy Milton was in the front row of the
jumpin' jive schoolroom. Milton, a singer with Ernie Fields back in 1928,
formed his own big band and made hits starting in 1946. His band had that
satisfying mixture of big band jazz, swing, and boogie, and also featured
a super-talented piano player, Camile Howard. "Hop, Skip And Jump" made
#3 on both the best-seller and the jukebox charts and lasted for 11
weeks. Roy and The Solid Senders scored 21 hits =on the R&B charts, and
he remained active in music up until his death in 1983.
The first and foremost practitioner of the art of rockin' saxophonology
was Cecil "Big Jay" McNeely. Big Jay had to be seen to be appreciated,
falling on his knees, rolling on his back, jumping off the stage, all the
while blowing his brains out. Enough of the Big Jay magic fell into the
grooves to give him a hit record with "Deacon's Hop" in 1949 (Billboard
loved that "wicked honking tenor" and "driving rhythm"). Big Jay is a
native of Los Angeles, where he was born in 1927 and where he still blows
like crazy today.
Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, born in Vinson, Louisiana, in 1924 and raised
in Texas, got his big break in 1947 when superstar guitarist T-Bone
Walker couldn't make a show at the Bronze Peacock in Houston. Brown
grabbed T-Bone's guitar and improvised a crowd-pleasing boogie that
earned him a recording contract. With "Rock My Blues Away" in 1956, he
combined his early country & western influences with jump blues into a
tasty rock 'n' roll stew, stirred well by Bill Harvey's hot little band.
In later years he becanme a country favortite, scorching the stages with
his stunning guitar and violin renditions of Southern rock and blues.
"Big Mama" Thornton's "Hound Dog" was an enormous R&B hit in 1953,
holding on to the top spot for seven weeks, but it lay forgotten after
that until Elvis Presley sold six million copiesd of his version in 1956.
Wiilie Mae Thronton, of Montgomery, Alabama, played drums and harmonica
besides delivering leather-lunged vocals, and hit the road with the Hot
Harlen Revue when she was just 15 years old. The late '60s blues revival
brought her out of retirement, and she remained active until her death
of a heart attack in 1984 at the age of 57.
Holding the door open for other gospel singers sucxh as Sam Cooke and
Atretha Franklin, Wynona Carr brought her spirtitual shouts into R&B
after a healthy career as "Sister Wynona Carr." "`Til The Well Runs Dry"
was recorded with the Bumps Blackwell Band in 1956 in Los Angeles as the
jump side of hit ballad "Should I Ever Love Again." Wynona became a
mainstay of the West Coast club scene and recorded into the early 1960s.
Benjamin "Bullmoose" Jackson came out of Lucky Millinder's sax section
to make many fine ballad hits, a selection of wildly lascivious novelty
numbers, and some wild rockers. His "Why Don't You Haul Off And Love Me,"
originally a #1 country hit by Wayne Raney, made it to #2 on the R&B
charts in 1949, one of several successful crossover hits in those
exciting days. Moosey was born in Cleveland in 1919, enjoyed a brief,
glorious revival from 1984-1989, and was still belting out songs just two
months before his death in July 1989.
Ruth Brown, born in Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1928, was the premier female
vocalist in the early 1950s, scoring five #1 hits. In recent years the
incomparable Ms. Rhythm has added a Tony Award to her mantelpiece. More
than 35 years after she recorded the song "Hello Little Boy," it remains
vivid in her memory. "It was at the end of a long night in the studio,
3 or 4 a.m.," she says. "We were all dead tired and more than a little
crazy. We were watching the clock and didn't want to run into overtime.
I never sang like that before, or since!" Driven along by the
hard-rocking Paul Williams band, "Hello Little Boy" is as spontaneous and
"live" as a studio recording can be.
-- Peter Grendysa, Words On Music, Ltd.
Blues Masters, Volume 1: Urban Blues
Liner Notes
RD-BLOWING JUMP BLUES TRADITION, PROIVIDING MUSIC FOR DANCERS.
THE ANTIPHONAL (CALL-AND-RESPONSE) CHARACTERISTIC OF AFRICAN
-- Cub Koda, Goldmine Magazine
Blues Masters, Volume 5: Jump Blues Classics Liner Notes
That raucous child of blues and country, rhythm & blues, came into the
world squalling and jiving to a heavy back beat, piano triplets, and
demented, muscular tenor sax blowing. As an invitation to get up and
dance like a madman, the music had no peers or precedents. Although hot
vocals by big-voiced shouters, both male and female, commanded the
spotlight, propulsive instrumentals spread the jump blues doctrine from
jukebox ro jukebox. For one glorious decade from 1948 to 1958, this big
beat reigned supreme.
Jumping the blues had its origins with the orchestral jazz bands of
Kansas City and St. Louis in the 1920s, were exposure to blues and
ragtime popularized the simple arrangements and rhythmic drive. By the
late 1930s, jump had been added to the swing music formula, and
jitterbugs and Lindy-hoppers filled the dance halls. When swing got
sweeter and milder, rhythm & blues carried on the hard-blowing jump blues
tradition, providing music for dancers.
The antiphonal (call-and-response) characteristic of African music so
evident in country blues and gospel was adopted by jump blues, often with
the voice of the saxophone played against the vocalist, who shouted
rather than sang the lyrics. The saxophone was playted with athletic
power and exhuberance; the saxman squeezing out honks, bleats, and
squeals to the delight of the crowds and the dismay of traditional jazz
fans. Strong backbeats were provided by the drummer's snares and rim
shots on tghe second and fgourth beats of every bar and reinforced by the
bass player marking every beat.
While the link between rural blues and urban jump blues is largely in the
traditional eight- and 12-bar blues form, the distinguishing marks are
in instrumentation -- saxophones, bass, drums, percussive piano, and
sometimes trumptes and trombones. The lyrical content is earthy, dealing
with love, loss, drinking, and automobiles -- the folk music of the city,
When white bands added electric guitars and jumped the blues, they called
it rock 'n' roll.
Without the booting, honking tenor sound, jump blues couldn't jump and
and rock wouldn't roll. The undisputed king of rock 'n' roll saxophonists
was Wilbert "Red" Prysock, and his biggest hit was "Hand Clappin'," a
frantic rocker that was quickly adopted as a signature tune by hip disc
jockeys all across theo cuntry in 1956. Red's big, fat tones were first
heard in grammar school in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he was born
in 1926. By the mid-1950s his popularity was so great that he had five
albums on the market simultaneously. He can sing, too, but prefers to
leave the crooning to brother Arthur Prysock, with whom he now tours.
Two music veterans, Jesse Stone and Joe Turner, combined their
supernatural powers to produce the first great anthem of the rock 'n'
roll era, "Shake, Rattle, And Roll." One of the biggest hits of 1954, the
tune hung on the charts for 32 weeks, three of those at #1 on the
jukebox.
"I threw a bunch of phonetic phrases together and came up with 30 or 40
verses," Stone recalls. "Then I picked over them. I got a line about `a
one-eyed cat peepin' in a seafood store' from my drummer, Baby Lovett.
He was always comin' out with lines like that." Big Joe's original single
peeked into the pop charts for a couple of weeks, but Bill Haley had one
of his biggest hits with a carefully sanitized version that eliminated
most of the good humor and the one-eyed cat. Several million people have
also heard Elvis do the tune. Although Turner died in 1985, Jesse Stone,
thankfully, is still around at this writing.
Louis Prima, a cat with nine musical lives, began his career in his
hometown of New Orleans. but moved to New York City in 1935, when he was
just 24, His special combination of jazz, blues, and raucous Italian jump
found instant favor, and he could write, too. "Sing, Sing, Sing" and "A
Sunday Kind Of Love" are two examples of his cerebral side. "Jump, Jive,
An' Wail," recorded for a Capitol album in 1956, shows the other side --
the foot-stompin', hollerin', shuckin' and jivin' that electrified black
and white audiences for a generation or two (especially in Las Vegas).
If he had a secret weapon, it was tenor man Sam Butera, but Louie's
vocals lit the fuse every time. Musically related to blues shouters
Wynonie Harris and Joe Turner, Prima had no problem keeping up with rock
'n' roll when it came along, and if not for his unexpected final chorus
on August 24, 1978, he would still be drawing good-timing crowds today.
"Good Rockin' Tonight" started as a quasi-spiritual wtritten by Roy
Brown, then a crooner of mainstream pop songs. Its transformation into
the first rock 'n' roll call to party was accomplished by Wynonie Harris,
whose version rocketed to the #1 slot and stayed on the charts for six
months in 1948. Harris, born in Omaha in 1915, was the prototypical
hard-drinking, chick-chasing, money-wasting rock superstar, and his songs
mirrored his short life.
Harris' stage mannerisms were closely watched by young Elvis Presley in
Memphis in the early 1950s. King Records producer Henry Glover told Nick
Tosches in 1977, "When you saw Elvis, you ewere seeing a mild version of
Wynonie." Elvis recorded "Good Rockin' Tonight," and so did Pat Boone,
but the version that will forever define the term is Wynonie's alone. By
the late '50s his career had hit bottom, and his health soon followed.
He died of cancer on June `14, 1969.
Roy Brown's "Good Rockin' Tonight" opened the floodgates of "rockin'
songs" in '48 and elevated the singer/songwriter to the position of top
nightclub entertainer in his hometown of New Orleans. While the rest of
the world slumbered on, rock 'n' roll was nicely browning in the oven.
One of the many sequels, Brown's "Rockin' At Midnight," was a #2 R&B hit
in 1949, with Billboard judging it "an effective holler stomp." A scant
35 years later it was reprised as a rock hit by The Honeydrippers, a
short-lived alliance of Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, and Nile
Rodgers. Brown himself had enjoyed a revival in the late 1970s, and
performed at the Jazz & Heritage Festival in New Orleans just two weeks
before his death in May 1981 at the age of 55.
Little Johnny Jones brought his laid-back piano style to Chicago from his
hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, in the postwar years and played on a
lot of other people's sessions. The rolling "Hoy Hoy" was recorded in
Chicago in 1953 with Elmore James on guitar and marks one of the few
times Johnny took the feature spot. His gravelly vocal in the springboard
for fine mellow sax work by J.T. Brown. Jones' sudden death in 1964 at
the age of 40 kept him from participating in the blues revival of the
1970s.
Out on the Eastern seaboard, they still do the Shag to "The Train Kept
A-Rollin',' a jump opus recorded in 1951 by Myron "Tiny" Bradshaw and his
band, which included tenor ace Red Prysock. Bradshaw, born in 1905,
started out in hot jazz bands and finished his career with a cover of The
Royal Teens' "Short Shorts" in 1958. In between he made a name for
himself with a tough and sly R&B big band style that had the hepcats
packing the ballrooms from coast to coast. He died in November 1958, but
not before launching the careers of Prysock and Sil Austin.
Destined by cruel fate to have only his alotted 15 minutes of fame,
vocalist Rudy Greene was plucked from the Tampa, Florida, club scene in
December 1956 to record for Ember Records in New York City. The first
release from his only session, "Juicy Fruit," an infectious and tricky
rocker, was a regional hit on the way to becoming a national sensation
when the label hit big with "Walkin" With Mr. Lee" by Lee Allen, and
Green's opus was forgotten. A second record died from promotional neglect
and Greene faded from sight, leaving only one of those two-minutes-plus
gems of musical excitement that characterized the youthful exuberance of
rock 'n' roll.
The kind of music that Jackie Brenston made should have made him the idol
of a million adoring fans and the object of pilgrimages to his boyhood
home for years after this death in 1979. Brenston, a boozing sax player
born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1930, was completely devoid of any
teen idol characteristics. Still, he produced some of the rawest,
funkiest R&B heard in the 1950s, starting with a huge hit, "Rocket 88,"
a tune closely patterned after Jimmy Liggins' "Cadillac Boogie." "In My
Real Gone Rocket," an obvious followup to his monster hit of 1951, was
backed by Ike Turner's band, and Brenston spent most of the rest of his
short career as sax player in Turner's Kings of Rhythm.
The younger brother of original Honeydrippers bandleader Joe, Jimmy
Liggins, born in 1922 in Newby, Oklahoma, decided that making music was
easier than driving the Liggins band bus and taught himself to play
guitar. "Every song I recorded, I wrote myself," he sauid. "I wrote
`Cadillac Boogie' because Joe had this big Cadillac and I was following
him, driving a van that had his instruments. I thought, `That's be a good
song, and I'll call it `Cadillac Boogie,' because Lionel Hampton had
`Beulah's Boogie' and Louis Jordan had `Choo-Choo-Ch-Boogie.'" His
straight-ahead rhythm romp "Cadillac Boogie" rode up the charts as the
flipside of his first hit, "Tear Drop Blues," in July 1948. Jimmy
continued to record until 1952, when he went into the production and
distribution end of the business.
Cynthia Coleman was born in 1939 into an influential and widely known
family of gospel singers, preachers, and businessmen, the Colemans of
Newark, New Jersey. After singing in a family gospel group, she went out
on her own as Ann Cole, R&B singer. Her rough-edged and powerful pipes
were equally suited to bluesy ballads and searing jump numbers. "Got My
Mo-Jo Working (But It Just Won't Work On You)" was a feature of her stage
shows in 1957, when it was heard by Muddy Waters. The great bluesman cut
a similar version that later became his signature tune. Ann's original,
backed by the New York group The Suburbans, is a New York jump tune
without peer. Cole's promising career was cut chort by an auto accident
in 1960 that left her confined to a wheelchair. She has since returned
to her roots, singing in the family church.
"Hop, Skip And Jump" has the sound of a 1956 rocker, but it was recorded
in 1948 -- ample rproof that Roy Milton was in the front row of the
jumpin' jive schoolroom. Milton, a singer with Ernie Fields back in 1928,
formed his own big band and made hits starting in 1946. His band had that
satisfying mixture of big band jazz, swing, and boogie, and also featured
a super-talented piano player, Camile Howard. "Hop, Skip And Jump" made
#3 on both the best-seller and the jukebox charts and lasted for 11
weeks. Roy and The Solid Senders scored 21 hits =on the R&B charts, and
he remained active in music up until his death in 1983.
The first and foremost practitioner of the art of rockin' saxophonology
was Cecil "Big Jay" McNeely. Big Jay had to be seen to be appreciated,
falling on his knees, rolling on his back, jumping off the stage, all the
while blowing his brains out. Enough of the Big Jay magic fell into the
grooves to give him a hit record with "Deacon's Hop" in 1949 (Billboard
loved that "wicked honking tenor" and "driving rhythm"). Big Jay is a
native of Los Angeles, where he was born in 1927 and where he still blows
like crazy today.
Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, born in Vinson, Louisiana, in 1924 and raised
in Texas, got his big break in 1947 when superstar guitarist T-Bone
Walker couldn't make a show at the Bronze Peacock in Houston. Brown
grabbed T-Bone's guitar and improvised a crowd-pleasing boogie that
earned him a recording contract. With "Rock My Blues Away" in 1956, he
combined his early country & western influences with jump blues into a
tasty rock 'n' roll stew, stirred well by Bill Harvey's hot little band.
In later years he becanme a country favortite, scorching the stages with
his stunning guitar and violin renditions of Southern rock and blues.
"Big Mama" Thornton's "Hound Dog" was an enormous R&B hit in 1953,
holding on to the top spot for seven weeks, but it lay forgotten after
that until Elvis Presley sold six million copiesd of his version in 1956.
Wiilie Mae Thronton, of Montgomery, Alabama, played drums and harmonica
besides delivering leather-lunged vocals, and hit the road with the Hot
Harlen Revue when she was just 15 years old. The late '60s blues revival
brought her out of retirement, and she remained active until her death
of a heart attack in 1984 at the age of 57.
Holding the door open for other gospel singers sucxh as Sam Cooke and
Atretha Franklin, Wynona Carr brought her spirtitual shouts into R&B
after a healthy career as "Sister Wynona Carr." "`Til The Well Runs Dry"
was recorded with the Bumps Blackwell Band in 1956 in Los Angeles as the
jump side of hit ballad "Should I Ever Love Again." Wynona became a
mainstay of the West Coast club scene and recorded into the early 1960s.
Benjamin "Bullmoose" Jackson came out of Lucky Millinder's sax section
to make many fine ballad hits, a selection of wildly lascivious novelty
numbers, and some wild rockers. His "Why Don't You Haul Off And Love Me,"
originally a #1 country hit by Wayne Raney, made it to #2 on the R&B
charts in 1949, one of several successful crossover hits in those
exciting days. Moosey was born in Cleveland in 1919, enjoyed a brief,
glorious revival from 1984-1989, and was still belting out songs just two
months before his death in July 1989.
Ruth Brown, born in Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1928, was the premier female
vocalist in the early 1950s, scoring five #1 hits. In recent years the
incomparable Ms. Rhythm has added a Tony Award to her mantelpiece. More
than 35 years after she recorded the song "Hello Little Boy," it remains
vivid in her memory. "It was at the end of a long night in the studio,
3 or 4 a.m.," she says. "We were all dead tired and more than a little
crazy. We were watching the clock and didn't want to run into overtime.
I never sang like that before, or since!" Driven along by the
hard-rocking Paul Williams band, "Hello Little Boy" is as spontaneous and
"live" as a studio recording can be.
-- Peter Grendysa, Words On Music, Ltd.
Blues Masters, Volume 1: Urban Blues
Liner Notes
RD-BLOWING JUMP BLUES TRADITION, PROIVIDING MUSIC FOR DANCERS.
THE ANTIPHONAL (CALL-AND-RESPONSE) CHARACTERISTIC OF AFRICAN
-- Cub Koda, Goldmine Magazine
Thanks Rayned!
Ok, I lied - my first exposure to jump blues was Louis Prima; after "Big Night" came out, Louis Prima's greatest hit's CD was very popular --- I still enjoy "5 months, 2 weeks, 2 days" as a great song to Balboa to.
And I play Ruth Brown's "Baseball Boogie" from time to time -- "will you hit that ball?", "is your bat ready?" he he he.
Ok, I lied - my first exposure to jump blues was Louis Prima; after "Big Night" came out, Louis Prima's greatest hit's CD was very popular --- I still enjoy "5 months, 2 weeks, 2 days" as a great song to Balboa to.
And I play Ruth Brown's "Baseball Boogie" from time to time -- "will you hit that ball?", "is your bat ready?" he he he.
I listed it over on the "essentials" thread. But, I've found that for the most part the 3-disc OKeh Rhythm and Blues Story is close to all the jump blues I need. Sure, I've got a Roy Milton disc and a couple of Louis Jordan discs. But, I play from neither of them as much as the OKeh collection (which ain't that much, but still, it's got good stuff on it).
For the Joe Williams fans here, that collection has several songs with Joe singing for Red Saunders & His Orchestra.
For the Joe Williams fans here, that collection has several songs with Joe singing for Red Saunders & His Orchestra.
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GemZombie
- Posts: 772
- Joined: Wed Nov 20, 2002 2:46 pm
- Location: Alpharetta, GA (Formerly SLO, CA)
- Contact:
I've always considered R&B and Jump Blues different. I prefer R&B to jump blues... but I recognize it's a fine line that may separate them.
It's also difficult since R&B has a totally different meaning depending on what time period your talking about, but I suppose that's the same with any music genre (Rock, Jazz, Country).
I happen to really like 40's and 50's R&B.
It's also difficult since R&B has a totally different meaning depending on what time period your talking about, but I suppose that's the same with any music genre (Rock, Jazz, Country).
I happen to really like 40's and 50's R&B.
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Mr Awesomer
- Posts: 1089
- Joined: Mon Nov 18, 2002 10:21 pm
- Location: Altadena, CA
- Contact:
Some interesting little reads:
http://www.emplive.com/create/mus_resc/term.asp?id=88
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhythm_and_blues
http://www.history-of-rock.com/rhythm_and_blues.htm
I've hence force removed the term "R&B" from my vocabulary. Looking at it's history, it's a bullshit term.
http://www.emplive.com/create/mus_resc/term.asp?id=88
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhythm_and_blues
http://www.history-of-rock.com/rhythm_and_blues.htm
I've hence force removed the term "R&B" from my vocabulary. Looking at it's history, it's a bullshit term.
Reuben Brown
Southern California
Southern California
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SirScratchAlot
- Posts: 213
- Joined: Wed May 07, 2003 12:54 am
- Location: in the LA hood....
- Contact:
"R&B started here in LA, "T-bone Walker was here,Roy Milton was here,Charles Brown was here,Jimmy Witherspoon was here,Joe and Jimmy Liggens was here,I was here,and others too. By 48 or 49 it was set-we had an art form, though we didn't know it then"...Johnny OtisCafeSavoy wrote:R&B is a child of jump blues. I wouldn't say jump blues or R&B started on the West Coast; that's kind of a large statement.djstarr wrote: So are R&B and Jump Blues the same? if not, how are they related?
I have more quotes like this from those musicians who are creditied as the Pioneers. but I'd have to start ripping apart my books...
It wasn't the City "that started it" is was all those musicians from all over the country That came to the place that could make them famous, as Los Angeles had more record companies and Radio stations playing "Race"(then called) music then anywhere else in the country.
obviously idea's ,concept and sounds are born all over just as in dance, but once a place that attracts and nurtures a sound I beleive it where it rightfully becomes a birthplace, with origins or seeds coming various locations to create a birthplace. (thats might little take on it)
\\\"Jazz Musicians have dance in them, and Jazz dancers have music in them, or Jazz doesn''''t happen.\\\" Sidney Bechet
