DJ: Huey Smith played piano on some of the first New Orleans R&B sessions. And after that it was [Little] Richard. And he played the shit. JD: To me there’s three kinds of piano that make me nuts: gospel, New Orleans piano, and real boogie-woogie like when Albert Amnions and Meade Lux Lewis got together and they were both chuggin’. You can listen to [jazz players] Bud Powell, Tatum, it’s all spectacular. But it doesn’t make you feel the same way boogie-woogie makes you feel, the same way New Orleans piano makes you feel. When I first heard that Huey Smith stuff—[1959’s] “High Blood Pressure” and “Don’t You Know Yockomo”—that piano stayed in my brain. Where does New Orleans piano start for you?
DJ: Professor Longhair was an institution.
JD: Did anybody do that shit before him?
DJ: His shit came out of a lot of them guys. He always told me about guys I never heard of. He used to tell me about a guy named Kid Stormy Monday. They were all known for playing “Junker’s Blues” and Fess’ eight-bar blues, New Orleans style. There was a million guys who played eight-bar blues, and they all had these piano players’ cuttin’ contests.
JD: I know what Jelly Roll Morton sounds like, and then there’s Fess. There had to be a lotta cats in between, with a trick here and a trick there, that eventually became Fess’.
DJ: My aunt Andre who taught me to play used to play a style that was called the “butterfly stride.” James Booker played that stuff. That style with Booker’s left hand. It’s a trick where you bend certain notes with the stride. Not just a straight stride. All of them piano players had something coming up in them days. The butterfly stride came after Jelly Roll. Edward Franks played piano on a lot of New Orleans sessions. There was a record that me and Allen Toussaint and Edward did as three piano players with [saxophonist] Red Tyler, [saxophonist] Lee Allen, [drummer] Earl Palmer—all of the old fifties studio band that we could roust up for something. Edward Franks had had a stroke and played only with his right hand. Edward played rings around us all with one fuckin’ hand.
What Fess did—and I guarantee you this is where he shifted the gears—was he envisioned stuff. Fess looked at the piano and heard other things in his head. He heard Caribbean; one day he said, “I just
Dr. John in the dressing room of San Francisco’s Boarding House, 1983 did a record, ‘Mardi Gras in New Orleans,’ and they’re gonna play it every year at Mardi Gras,” and he says, “Man, I wanna produce it next. I wanna cut this record and I want four banjos, but I don’t want ‘em to play the strings, I just want to use it like a snare drum. And just a bass drum.” And he says, “I want three trombones like elephant calls on this song.”
All of my favorite piano players—Art Neville, Allen Toussaint, Huey Smith, Edward Franks—they were all ridiculously different, but all had in common a certain respect for Professor Longhair’s funky thing. In a recording session, we’d say, “Let’s play this shit a little more funky butt,” and somebody’d play a little Professor Longhair lick, and we’d come back and play a tune, funky style. That was why most of the record labels came [to New Orleans]: the Bihari brothers [from Modern Records], all of them [label] people from California, Art Rupe, and all of them people. Lew Chudd had producer Dave Bartholomew, and that was his whole company [Imperial], with Fats [Domino] and all of that … they started the whole New Orleans R&B scene almost single-handed. Their studio band was basically Red Tyler, Lee Allen, various piano players, whether it was Edward Franks and later Allen Toussaint or Huey Smith, various guitar players.
I used to hear Smiley Lewis’ band with Tuts Washington—they called him Papa Yellow then. They could play locked-in together in a way I’ve never heard any other piano player and guitar player play. They could play different chords to the same tune in between each other, where both chords worked. It was like a magical thing that those two guys did.
JD: You’ve been playing for fifty-some years and you heard 1,005 different guys, not only in New Orleans but all over the world, so you pick shit up that you don’t even know you picked up …
DJ: If you play a gig with a guy, all of them guys leave that little chunk of something on you. Once Professor Longhair needed a band for a gig, so we got a steady gig, and I wound up doing a record with Fess. That guy left a huge stain. Watching Papa Yellow left a huge stain. Watching Allen Toussaint on a million sessions. Watching [James] Booker, watching Huey Smith—between him and Allen Toussaint, I worked more dates with those two guys than any other piano player.
JD: Talk to me about Fats Domino as a piano player.
DJ: If you listen, Fats was a band piano player: “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” with Lloyd Price, that great piano intro. Fats is old school, comes out of Albert Amnions. If you ever listen to any of his old records, he actually recorded a lot of Albert Ammons songs way back in the fifties on Imperial Records.
JD: What do New Orleans guys think of him as a piano player?
DJ: Dave Bartholomew made him into a huge act. Dave and him wrote a lot of great fuckin’ songs. More than anybody but the Beatles. I dig Fats ‘cause Fats, to me, covers that corner that certain real blues guys had that makes ‘em stick out in left field. They’re country—and when I say country, I mean hillbilly country. ‘Cause the Ninth Ward where Fats was from when he came up was in the sticks. It was part of the city of New Orleans, but there was no streets. No streetlights. Fats has that in him. He could sing. When I hear Fats, I’m hearing Jimmie Rodgers, the old hillbilly. He sang that song “Waitin’ for a Train.” He knew that shit. Fats has a country side to him, he played the blues, he had Champion Jack Dupree’s shit mixed up with Albert Ammons. He had a little bit of a lot of all of what I grew up hearing. Champion Jack Dupree did make the original record of “The Junker’s Blues,” but Fats made the first real hit record on it called “The Fat Man” [in 1949]. But Fats played the shit out of “The Junker’s Blues” on “The Fat Man.” Fats could play.
JD:When I heard him I heard the hits. “Blueberry Hill,” “I’m in Love Again.” The commercial shit.
DJ: “Going Home.” These were the songs. [Sings] “Every Night About This Time.” [Sings] “Please Don’t Leave Me.” That sounds like a hillbilly song. But it’s blues. And the way he played it: Some of them songs was gutbucket blues, some of ‘em was that country shit, but it’s all this little weird mixture. They were big R&B records. They wasn’t on no Dick Clark then. Might have been in Cash Box or Billboard. They were probably only played where race records were played. But they wasn’t pop records until about the time he cut [sings] “Ain’t That a Shame.” All of a sudden Fats is big, and it just kept going from there. But prior to that, I think he had “My Blue Heaven.”
I’d go hear Fats’ band, and I tried to always get there ‘cause his guitar player was my teacher. So I’d go to watch him. And he’d sing some Little Willie John songs. I watched him in rehearsal in Local 496. I knew everything—their Latin songs they played. The band was really special. They wasn’t what it sounded like from the record dates.
New Orleans is a small area where everything overlaps. That’s the good thing, and it’s the problem with it. I don’t care what culture winds up in New Orleans, they become part of New Orleans.
JD: In schoolyard basketball, the one thing you know is you gotta play with guys who are better than you. You’re gonna get your ass kicked, but you’re gonna end up bein’ a better player than when you started. It’s the only way to learn.
DJ: I understand the principle to that, but these guys was all up on so many things that I wasn’t. I’d hear a little piece of something, but I didn’t know the fundamental shit about any of it. I absorbed little pieces of this and that. But I missed the boat.
JD: I don’t think those guys would’ve even given you the chance to fuck up unless they thought you had somethin’.
DJ: Them guys threw me out more times … and it was okay. I liked hanging out with these guys. I didn’t give a fuck. At the time I was living at Cosimo [Matassa]’s studio [where many early R&B and rock & roll hits were r
ecorded]—my old lady had kicked me out of the pad. I’m homeless before it’s fashionable, I’m living in a studio, my whole life was a disaster. When Cosimo locks me out of the studio, I’m staying in a condemned part of a building with rats and maybe a wino for company every now and then.
JD: That’ll motivate ya.
DJ: I’d have to wait till Cosimo would come open the studio, sneak in and try to look presentable, go in his little bathroom, clean up, and cop my little hit, then come back over and try to look legit.
JD: Good judgment comes from experience, experience comes from bad judgment. When I first heard you play the Gris Gris record at Atlantic, I couldn’t believe how young you were. I knew you musta done a million things, and been a jillion places to get that shit to filter through.
DJ: I’ve been through some weird shit, just to survive, but you love something about the music and there’s something that … it don’t matter where the music’s coming from sometimes. Whatever that thing is. It’s like watching Professor Longhair when he used to do this one gig and he’d place the chicken on the piano and he’d wear these white gloves and a turtleneck shirt with a necklace with a watch on it. And a full tux. He’d eat the chicken, take the gloves off, and play. And it was like—I’d never seen anybody do that before. Sit down and eat and play a gig. He would talk more trash with the people. Give everybody a drink on the house! Between every song. Real old school. But his version, his take on life—there’s no amount of money, no amount of schooling that would give me whatever that was.
Dave Bartholomew’s band used to work at a joint, and Fess used to live by there, and there’d be times I’d see Fess and he’d be talking, and we’d walk for a long time and he’d tell me these fuckin’ killer stories. He’s your hero—you wanna hang by the guy. He’d tell me this shit, and he’d take me and he’d say, “That’s where I’m playing,” and I was like, Oh, my God. Back then it wasn’t safe. Now it’s crack dealers with pieces.
JD: You still listen to a lot of music?
DJ: Anything I get my hands on, I listen. New, old. I don’t like a lot of it. I’ll listen anyway. I’m gonna check it out, whatever I got, and if I don’t like it I skip through it. They got a button, you skip to the next track. Sometimes I skip right off to the next record.
MARCIA BALL ON BIG EASY BLUES
I grew up in blues country. And I had piano players in my family. First, my grandmother, who played ragtime piano, was an influence on me. She had a pile of Tin Pan Alley sheet music. So I got to hear a lot of that. My aunt played beautiful piano and played a certain amount of boogie-woogie. I can remember trying to stretch my little hands, so I could boogie. So that started it. But then in my part of south Louisiana, southeast Texas, there was Cajun, zydeco, rhythm & blues, and blues, and it was all mixed up. And we got the New Orleans stuff. We got Fats Domino. Of course, everyone had Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and Fats Domino. I remember when the record “Corinna Corinna” was popular. I was ten, eleven, twelve years old, and I had an aunt in New Orleans who liked blues, and she would buy records that other people didn’t have. When I was about thirteen, I saw lrma Thomas play in New Orleans on a big package show. That was the first time I ever saw a woman get onstage and lead the band, be the star of the show. Blew my mind.
New Orleans is a blues town, a piano town. Pianos and horns are big in New Orleans, as opposed to guitars and harmonicas in Chicago. I love the Chicago players, Pinetop Perkins and Sunnyland Slim and Otis Spann—who is the king of all that to me. But New Orleans stuff is rhythm & blues, and the accent is on the rhythm. Professor Longhair and Tuts Washington before him, Roosevelt Sykes, Big Maceo, and all those guys who played early New Orleans piano—all the way back to Jelly Roll Morton—there’s been a wonderful tradition of syncopation in the blues, and that’s a New Orleans thing.
Musically, Professor Longhair was a huge influence on me, along with the people he influenced, James Booker and Dr. John. I love the syncopation; I love the rumba beat and the Latin influence he brought to the music.
Another big influence would be Fats Domino. I don’t think anybody who plays music today wasn’t moved in that direction by Fats Domino. What he does with that 6/8 thing—which is the hallmark of his music—is still enormous in my music.
A lot of women went before me and opened all these doors for me that I’ve been able to walk through without having to think about it. Old blues women like Bessie Smith: They paid hard, hard dues. Etta James. I had a real mentor—someone who was important to me as a piano player and as a performer, and who is from the Gulf Coast as well. Her name is Katie Webster, and she passed away in 2001. She was born in Houston and spent most of her young years along the Gulf Coast. She was a great piano player. She played with Otis Redding; she opened a show for him one time, and he just snagged her, and she became his piano player, his bandleader. Really, she is one of the important women piano players of the style and really of the blues in general.
There are other women, too, who gained respect for their music—not just as a novelty act but as a musician, a singer—who have inspired me: Koko Taylor, Janis Joplin, Bonnie Raitt. All the way up the line, they’ve opened doors for me, and I’ve been able to walk right through because of them,
CHRIS THOMAS KING’S TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY BLUES
BY JOHN SWENSON
Chris Thomas King as Blind Willie Johnson in Wim Wenders’ The Soul of a Man
The blues tent at New Orleans’ 2002 Jazz and Heritage Festival was packed with sweaty, expectant fans, many of whom knew Chris Thomas King for his role as Delta blues giant Tommy Johnson in O Brother, Where Art Thou? Over the course of his set, those fans got what they wanted, but not without a healthy dose of what King wanted them to hear—what he calls his “twenty-first-century blues.” To the driving sound of an electronic beat, Thomas insisted on making hip-hop an integral part of the show: “This is the blues of the twenty-first century,” he rapped, as if throwing down a gauntlet, “and I don’t give a damn if you’re not down wit’ me.”
Some fans left the tent, muttering imprecations against hip-hop. Those who stayed saw the future of the blues performed by its most daring practitioner.
King grew up as a child-prodigy guitarist learning the blues at the feet of some of the music’s masters at the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, club Tabby’s Blues Box, owned by his father, Ernest Joseph “Tabby” Thomas. For the past decade, King has been trying to forge a new concept of music yet meeting tremendous resistance at every turn. Ironically, it’s his performance as an acoustic bluesman that has given him the status required to play his futuristic music on his own terms. King followed his success in O Brother by playing the lead role and acting as musical director for the New Orleans stage production Goodnight Irene: The Legacy of Lead Belly, and he was cast as Blind Willie Johnson in Wim Wenders’ The Soul of a Man. King’s portrayal of Johnson is central to his concept of merging traditional blues with the ethos of hip-hop. He feels they are essentially the same music.
“Hip-hop came from the same neighborhood as the blues,” argues King. “What Cash Money and Juvenile are doing is coming from the same neighborhood where Blind Willie Johnson recorded in 1925 in New Orleans. A couple of blocks away, in that same neighborhood. A lot has changed, a lot hasn’t changed. The underground, the hard-core hip-hop, was coming from the same place as the blues came before. It was the grandkid of the blues, with new instruments. Just like blues was acoustic at one time, then Muddy Waters plugged in and went electric, I sampled it, I digitized it. So my thing is, where Muddy Waters electrified it, I digitized it. Bring the blues to the twenty-first century, that’s my approach to it.”
King’s dad, Tabby Thomas, is best known as one of Louisiana’s greatest blues figures, the King of Swamp Blues. His 1961 national hit, “Hoodoo Party,” is a treasure of Louisiana blues history. Chris Thomas King, then, was literally born to the blues. Born Chris Thomas on October 14, 1964, he grew up surrounded by music. Thomas started out on trumpet in sixth grade but was f
ascinated by his father’s guitar and tried to play it when he wasn’t home. At his dad’s club, the young Thomas learned from such bluesmen as Guitar Kelly, Silas Hogan, and Henry Gray. But even as he soaked up the classic blues influences, the guitarist was listening to more contemporary influences, such as Jimi Hendrix, funk, and early hip-hop. “I wanted to play music that reflected the world I was living in,” he says. “I couldn’t really relate to the older blues themes at the time.”
What opened his eyes to the possibilities of the blues was a European tour with his father, on which he saw blues musicians treated with the respect that was denied them at home. He returned to Louisiana, recorded a demo tape, and was discovered by Arhoolie Records. His first album, The Beginning, came out in 1986. After moving to Austin, Texas, Thomas signed with Hightone, releasing the well-received 1990 album Cry of the Prophets. He wanted to follow that record with a more contemporary vision of the blues, but the album was turned down by the label.
Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues Page 40