by Tom Piazza
Morton also had a natural tendency to codify. In these recordings he outlines his principia of jazz music, the delicate balance among the voices of the ensemble, the importance of dynamics and attention to correct tempos, the crucial role played by the rhythmic displacement he called the Spanish Tinge, the central compositional role of riffs and breaks. He took the tacit operating assumptions of jazz and made them into conscious animating principles. Morton had an essentially dramatic imagination, for which the instruments of the jazz band functioned as the dramatis personae of an ongoing musical narrative. This understanding of jazz was also the subtext of many New Orleans loyalists’ antagonism to the well-oiled machine of 1930s big-band swing.
The Morton recordings were first commercially issued in 1947 on the Circle label, in a small edition intended for specialists and collectors, and with boxy, horrible sound that may have contributed to their allure for some of the more Atlantis-minded fans. Lomax also published a book in 1950, titled Mister Jelly Roll, stitched together from Morton’s winding narrative. In the 1950s the recordings were issued again, this time on the Riverside label, one of the premier jazz labels of the decade, a version that got much wider circulation. They were also subsequently issued on the Australian collector’s label Swaggie and in fragmentary form in many other places. In 1993, Rounder put out a four-disc series of the music and not the talking, and included for the first time some of the formerly suppressed, X-rated songs that Morton performed for Lomax only after repeated urging. But the omission of the spoken material was a major missed opportunity, for it is the interaction between the storytelling and the music that gives this material its enduring claim on our attention and that places it near the center of the map of American vernacular historiography.
These sessions, in fact, marked the birth of the oral-history idea, the starting place for everything from Studs Terkel’s Homeric compendia of American proletariana to Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me, the premise being that the sound, the actual spoken language, of participants in American life, whether on the macro or the micro scale, can give us more of a sense of the texture of lived life than a macerated and processed, disembodied, “objective” history. Of course the idea of personal history was not new, and the popularity of such vernacular and personal memoirs as those of Ulysses S. Grant, Frederick Douglass, and Henry Adams had long since established the value of an intensely subjective witness to larger historical patterns in American culture. But with these sessions the idea got lashed to the technology of sound recording for keeps.
Lomax had a rationale behind all of his work—namely, the advancement of the vernacular culture of the masses, as opposed to the high culture that represented the social structures of the elite. This was a strong motivator for him; it gave his work its moral and ethical topspin, as well as contributing to some of his blind spots and his occasionally idiosyncratic sense of proportion. John A. Lomax, in his 1940 Library of Congress interview with Atlanta bluesman Blind Willie McTell, kept prodding McTell to sing some “complainin’ songs.” “Don’t you know any songs like ‘Ain’t It Hard to Be a Nigger, Nigger’ . . . ?” To some extent, you can hear his son trying to pull some of the same strings in the Morton interviews. In places you can hear Morton’s annoyance with Lomax’s attempts to steer him, although they are all between the lines.
At one point, for example, Morton is decrying the idea that jazz is frantic and loud. “Somehow,” he says, “it got into the dictionary that jazz was considered a lot of blatant noise and discordant tones, and as something that would be even harmful to the ears. . . . Jazz music is based on strictly music. You have the finest ideas, from the greatest operas, symphonies, and overtures, in jazz music. There’s nothing finer than jazz music because it comes from everything of the finest class music.”
Here Lomax clears his throat in what sounds to me like discomfort at what he takes to be the class anxiety in Morton’s rundown, and asks for an example of the kind of discordant jazz Morton is talking about.
“Well,” Morton replies, “it’s so noisy it’s impossible for me to prove to you, because I only have one instrument to show to you. But I guess the world is familiar with it. Even Germany don’t want it, but she don’t know why. . . . You can’t make crescendos or diminuendos when one is playing triple forte. You’ve got to be able to come down in order to go up. If a glass of water is full, you can’t fill it any more. But if you have a half a glass, you have an opportunity to put more water in it, and jazz music is based on the same principle. . . . I will play a little number now of the slower type, to give you an idea of the slower type of jazz music. You can apply it to any type tune. It depends upon your ability for transformation.” As he plays his example, he remarks, “I’ve seen this blundered up so many times it has given me the heart failure.”
The values implicit in Morton’s nostalgia have everything to do with the sense of possibility implicit and explicit in the ideal of a multicultural society, a multicultural culture—the grand oxymoron that actually seemed to come to life, for a while, in certain cities, and in the work of certain of our greatest artists. In fact the actualizing of that principle may be one gauge, maybe the strongest, for the worth and magnitude of a body of work—the degree to which an artist can sustain a dynamic set of tensions among disparate social, class, regional, and ethnic elements—whether that of Herman Melville or Duke Ellington or Bob Dylan. In any case, Morton was a true auteur, and he always rooted his organizing vision in the principles he found in the life of the community that gave birth to jazz. My guess is that this is the secret of Lomax’s fascination with him—that Morton’s ego as an individual was harnessed in service to what was ultimately a communal ideal.
The Rounder Records box is the first time all of this material has been available in one package. It also includes a full CD of interviews that Lomax conducted with a handful of Morton’s contemporaries, including clarinetist Alphonse Picou and banjo and guitar player Johnny St. Cyr, who recorded with Morton’s Red Hot Peppers as well as Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five. In addition, there is an excellent booklet containing reproductions of photos, newspaper stories, and old advertisements, along with solid annotation by John Szwed and a copy of the newly reissued paperback of Lomax’s Mister Jelly Roll.
The set arrives, too, at a moment in which the fate of New Orleans is once again at the center of the national narrative, and Morton’s love and nostalgia for his birthplace will give anyone with ears a clue to why New Orleanians love New Orleans. Describing the high jinks during a celebratory parade at the dawn of the twentieth century, Morton goes on and on, until words fail him and he says, “It was really a swell time. . . . We had plenty fun, a kind of a fun I don’t think I’ve ever seen any other place. Of course there may be nicer fun, but that particular kind . . . there was never that kind of fun anyplace I think on the face of the globe but New Orleans.”
In true New Orleans fashion, these profoundly important, historically resonant recordings proffer a kind of serious fun—both intellectual and aesthetic, set against the precipice of time and mortality and history—that you won’t find any other place.
From Bookforum, February/March 2006
This was the last piece I wrote for the Oxford American; it appeared in their 2006 Music Issue. For the first few years of the Music Issue, starting in 1997, the contents had been driven by the writers’ ideas about which musicians interested them; the CD that accompanied each issue was the reflection of that traffic jam of idiosyncrasy. But little by little the magazine’s content became dictated by the music the editors wanted to see on the CD; a list of musicians would be drawn up, and then writers got to take their choice. The Music Issue may have been just as much fun to read after that change, but it wasn’t as much fun to write for, and I went on to other things.
In 2006, though, the year after Katrina, the lead-off tune was pianist Joe Liggins’s earthshaking 1950 track “Going Back to New Orleans,” and when editor Marc Smirnoff called to see if I would write a piece about Lig
gins, I couldn’t say no. Here’s the result.
Going Back to New Orleans
I always assumed that Joe Liggins was from New Orleans. His 1950 recording “Going Back to New Orleans” is one of the all-time best musical tributes to the Crescent City, full of insider references to its French and Spanish heritage, its food and special locales.
The tune itself was written by the little-remembered drummer Ellis Walsh, who also cowrote the Louis Jordan classic “Saturday Night Fish Fry” (likewise full of New Orleans references); Liggins’s arrangement really summons a New Orleans feeling, making the most of the tune’s slightly ominous minor-key cast, and containing an interlude in which a wailing tenor and soprano sax (or clarinet—it’s hard to tell) strive to outdo one another. And it appeared on Specialty Records, which, although based out of Los Angeles, had recorded some of the seminal New Orleans R&B sessions by Guitar Slim, Lloyd Price, Big Boy Myles, Roy Montrell, and others, not to mention Little Richard’s best early sides.
And, too, there was a big direct line between N.O. and L.A. stretching back to the early days of jazz. The Original Creole Orchestra, with the legendary cornetist Freddie Keppard, had toured California as early as 1911. Jelly Roll Morton spent a couple of years based there before World War One, and trombonist Kid Ory did the same just afterward, making a couple of the earliest recordings of New Orleans jazz there in 1922. In the 1950s and 1960s it was a famous magnet for Crescent City players, including Mac Rebennack (a.k.a. Dr. John), Earl Palmer, Plas Johnson, Chuck Badie, and too many others to list.
But Liggins, it turned out, wasn’t from New Orleans. He was from Guthrie, Oklahoma, born in 1915, and a member of the great forgotten generation of jump blues performers that included his brother Jimmy, Amos Milburn, Roy Milton, Charles Brown, Ivory Joe Hunter, Hadda Brooks, and Camille Howard. They came along in the post–World War Two bubble, after the jazz-centered big band era but before rock and roll blew off the roof. Many of them were not Southerners but came, like Liggins, from the Southwest, particularly Texas and Oklahoma.
Joe Liggins was himself a product of the big band era, and he was trained in that arena. His tastes seemed to run to bands like those of Buddy Johnson and Lucky Millinder and the Savoy Sultans, blues-and-ballad-based dance music, without a lot of the kind of personality that might distract the audience from the business at hand—a dance partner, a drink, whatever. He moved to San Diego in 1932, then Los Angeles in 1939, and began working with local dance bands on the West Coast.
After World War Two, many bands started to scale back in size; by 1950 even Count Basie was working with a septet rather than a full big band. Liggins really hit his groove in this context, crafting smooth, tightly scripted, functional jukebox small-band dance music for black audiences. The war had greatly accelerated the migration of African-Americans from rural areas to big cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles. The war work in factories on the West Coast was a big magnet, and the war itself gave a sense of optimism to the African-American community at large, a sense that the country would pull together against the common enemy and that afterward a lot of the outdated discrimination might begin to fall away as we all recognized ourselves as Americans first. The disillusionment was coming, but it hadn’t hit yet. Above all, people seemed to want normalcy and common ground.
This black urban audience was served by countless little independent record labels that sprang up after the war to provide music that the major labels weren’t really on top of, mostly for the burgeoning jukebox market. Some of those labels became as famous as Atlantic and Chess; others stayed as obscure as Bel-Tone and Sittin’ In With. Los Angeles was a center for many of them. These small labels recorded a lot of groundbreaking material—Ray Charles’s gospel-blues fusion (Swing Time and, later, Atlantic), Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie’s bebop (Guild, Musicraft, Dial, Savoy), Muddy Waters’s electric blues (Aristocrat and, later, Chess); they were in a position to take chances on things that hadn’t yet proved their commercial viability.
But most of what they recorded was workmanlike and predictable, formulaic dance-and-romance music that could be pumped out to service the needs of smaller, often local audiences with easily defined tastes, and make a small profit repeatedly rather than capture a large market. The point of many of those recordings was never to challenge or expand conventions but rather to find a certain angle and work it, to be, at best, a personality within an intelligible ecosystem, the record-industry equivalent of B-movies or potato chips. The audience didn’t necessarily want surprises, unless they were easy to assimilate.
Liggins recorded his first big hit, “The Honeydripper,” in 1945 for one of these labels, Los Angeles’s Exclusive Records, run by New Orleans–born transplant Leon René, an entrepreneur and composer of songs as varied as “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano,” and “Rockin’ Robin.” “The Honeydripper” was in many ways an archetypal jump blues record, with its insistent shuffle beat, heavy on the tenor saxophone, and with a chorus of band members singing the jive lyrics in good-natured unison (“He’s a killer . . . a solid old cat . . .”). It sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was reportedly heavily bootlegged by the Mob for their jukeboxes.
Liggins’s music could be upbeat, or romantic, or suavely bluesy, but it never contained much irony. And it was very, very simple, even at its slickest. The formula made for some of the biggest R&B hits of the late 1940s, including not just “The Honeydripper,” but “Pink Champagne” (“that stole my love from me”) with its easy bounce and belly-rub tempo, and “Rag Mop,” which harked back to older “game” records such as “I’se A-Muggin’ ” by Stuff Smith and His Onyx Club Boys, and pointed also to later ones like Shirley Ellis’s “The Name Game.” In the early 1950s there probably wasn’t a jukebox in a black neighborhood bar in America that didn’t have at least one of those Liggins discs on it.
It was never one of my favorite genres. I always felt as if something was missing from the mix, a sense of some resistance in the scheme of things. In blues, for example, the singer was almost always restless and pushing against an oppressive situation, whether social, economic, or romantic. In early rock the subtext was always miscegenation—the breaking of racial barriers and taboos, black music often for white audiences. With the bebop of Parker and Gillespie the resistance was encoded in the music itself, a steeplechase reflecting the complexity of postwar social change. Jump blues didn’t have that sense of resistance in it; it was, generally speaking, satisfied with its own assumptions.
“Going Back to New Orleans” is a big exception. Liggins’s arrangements tended to be tight, smooth, functional, little-big-band arrangements. But something got loose with the N.O. record. First of all, it is set mostly in a minor key, which imparts a mysterious atmosphere at odds with Liggins’s standard jolly boogie-woogie optimism. The intro smacks into the listener with bold rhythmic displacements influenced, I would guess, by what Dizzy Gillespie’s big band was doing on songs like “Ow!” and “Jumpin’ with Symphony Sid.” Liggins slides into gear singing Walsh’s excellent site-specific lyrics.
Goin’ back home, tee-nah-nay,
To the land of the beautiful queen;
I’m goin’ back home, to my bay-bee,
I’m goin’ back to New Orleans.
The middle section goes briefly into a major key, but it is played over a rhumba beat as Liggins sings about having been to Cuba and South America and France but how he likes the women in New Orleans better; the rhumba is a knowing reference to the Latin flavor that always inflects New Orleans music, what Jelly Roll Morton called the Spanish Tinge.
And then, after the tune slides back into minor for eight more bars and Liggins declares New Orleans his home, the tenor saxophone, probably played by Maxwell Davis, begins a solo. It starts with eight bars of more or less regulation R&B tenor, but in the second eight bars, the tenor is joined by the clarinet, or soprano sax, probably played by Little Willie Jackson, and suddenly things
are in a different neighborhood; the heat gets ratcheted way up and the record starts to sweat heavily. The bridge comes in the next eight bars, with the tenor playing alone again, and then the clarinet joins him again for the final eight and they pull and wail against each other until Liggins’s rolling, insouciant piano comes in to smooth things out for a little before a reprise of the vocal. After a restatement of the beginning’s jagged rhythmic intro, we are set back down in the day-to-day.
After all those relentlessly simple records, all that bubble-gum R&B, what happened to Joe Liggins for those three minutes?
Going back home, always a big theme in American music, took on a new resonance in the postwar years, especially after a few of those years had gone by. Usually the direction proposed was from north to south, with the singer tired of the big city and longing for family and the simple life he or she once knew. The theme was especially big in country music, with songs like “The Fields Have Turned Brown” and “Detroit City.” It was perhaps slightly less prominent in blues, since down home, despite the fact that the weather suited your clothes, was a place where you could get lynched pretty easily. Still, there are plenty of blues about country people being taken advantage of in the city and hoping, like Muddy Waters, to get lucky and make “Train Fare Home.” Years later, Bob Dylan turned the convention on its head in “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” in which the singer declares he has had enough and is going back to New York City.
