Twang Jr is enjoying playing piano after getting his grade 1, and has a few boogie type pieces under his belt and a few bluesy licks. Not being much of a piano player myself I want to make a mix tape of cool groovy pieces to give him some ideas. I do like a spot of Dr. John, Bill Payne or Dr. Longhair myself but all pitch in with ideas peeps!
Piano blues and boogie
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Jimmy Yancey might be a good person to start with, because he’s not flash and fast (like the most famous boogie woogie pianists Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis). The bass (left hand) riff in Yancey Special is relatively easy to get the hang of and works well at any tempo.
(BTW that would be PROFESSOR Longhair, but you knew that)
Doh of course it’s Prof. Just back from skiing and slightly dozy. Great choice BTW Mousey.
I’m fond of a little Kenny “Blue Boss” Wayne – who could forget his classic “Let’s Do The Shag” (his stuff is pretty good piano and band boogie). I also found some albums by a guy called David vest in a 2nd hand rack whilst bargain hunting and they are petty good.
I’d also recommend Jools Holland’s album “Hop The Wag” and you could check out Johnnie Johnson and Pine Top Smith’s albums – I have one of Johnnie’s that an hour of searching this morning still hasn’t helped me find. I hate it when that happens.
Blues piano? Got to be Johnny Johnson!
Champion Jack Dupree is a good place to start. Plenty licks to be had and he was one of the true originators.
As an aside – he knew jelly Roll Morton and also taught blues piano to the fella who plays in my current band. That’s pretty cool.
This guy is one of the originators of the Stride style of playing, along with James P. Johnson.
Willie “The Lion” Smith, here playing “Echoes Of Spring”
here’s over 2 hours worth. it’s good stuff.
My man Cow Cow Davenport is a fave…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0fvsdc7XEU
Damn
The incomparable Art Hodes reminiscing about Cow Cow. Rather lengthy but stick with it!
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COW COW DAVENPORT
BY ART HODES
(From Jazz Journal May 1959, p. 10-12 less photo)
Yes sir, You could have dropped a bomb in Chicago in 1938—you wouldn’t have disturbed anyone. Not jazz-wise. In that short a time—less than twenty years —jazz had been and gone. That’s why I could be found honeymooning in New York City, April of ’38. Of course, I too had heard that ‘the streets were paved with gold’, I’d heard of the successes the boys were enjoying, the jazz boys who had left Chicago long before me . . . Wingy, Joe Marsala, Wettling, etc. Still, I wouldn’t have left, even then. What finally decided me was when I lost a job because the boss decided he’d rather have an accordionist. That decided it . .
It could get awful cold in New York too, especially if you weren’t workin’. But somehow we survived the lay-offs— the getting-established period—and almost from the beginning the ‘hot’ collectors discovered me, took me in hand, and led me on what I still believe was a righteous path. First to ‘find’ me was Herman Rosenberg. I was sittin’ in at the Hickory House with the Marsala boys. That was the time when Frankie Laine was singing as often as they’d let him, for five dollars a week. In fact that’s where we met, and later we tried to make a go of it—Laine and Hodes. It was during those years too, 1938 through 1942, that Jazz Information (no better jazz magazine have I seen . . . not for what it stood for) came into being. Gene Williams and Ralph Gleason were the boys at its helm, the same boys who later got me to take on the job of jazz commentator on Station WNYC. They wrote the script and handed me the records. Dan Qualey appeared about then with his Solo Art label. followed by Commodore, HRS and Blue Note, each doing a little something to keep this jazz alive and, incidentally, keeping more than one jazz man alive into the bargain. Yes, it was a glowing period
It was Herb Abramson, a collector who a few years later was to help form Atlantic Records, who brought Cow Cow Davenport along and introduced him. I arranged for him to do a guest shot on the program. Cow Cow and I got our picture in the newspaper and I got to know him pretty well. But I’m getting ahead of myself . . .
By this time Jazz Information had folded and the magazine Jazz Record had originated. It belonged to Dale Curran and Art Hodes and it was Dale’s idea. We picked up where someone else left off. So it was . . . so it has always been. Naturally, after hearing Cow Cow play I invited him to ‘talk to me’ for Jazz Record. We got him down to Greenwich Village and we talked . . . someone asked him how he got the Cow Cow title . .,
“When I began playin’ the ‘Cow Cow Blues’ I was trying to imitate a train and I originally called them the ‘Railroad Blues’. I was trying to get in a part where the switchman (with many of whom I had a personal acquaintance) boarded the train from the cow-catcher or front of the train. The word ‘cow; somehow stuck with me and once, working in a theatre, I ended a song with ‘Nobody here can do me like Papa Cow Cow can do’. The audience immediately picked up the song and those who liked the number were anxious to get acquainted with me. After the show they would walk up addressing me as ‘Papa Cow Cow’ and from then on I have been called by such a moniker”.
Charles Davenport must have been close to fifty when I met him . . . born in Anniston, Alabama, April 23, 1894. As I remember him he was a round sort of smilin’ man nice colour, nice eyes looked like he’d been eating regular He never complained and he never asked for anything, yet I can’t remember him playing any dates while I knew him— except the few we gave him. He wasn’t playing piano when we met, just singing. Of course, I asked him to play for me. but his hands weren’t making it too good — he’d had pneumonia and it had stiffened his fingers. He really didn’t have to play, not the way that guy sang. I remember Jazz Record cut a date, and we used Cecil Scott on clarinet, Henry Goodwin on trumpet and George Lugg, trombone. For rhythm we had Pops Foster, and Baby Dodds or Kaiser Marshall, drums. I played piano. That was the band that followed Bunk Johnson into the Stuyvesant Casino. It was decided that “Cake Walkin’ Babies” would be a good tune for Cow Cow, so after he learned the lyrics we cut. What a showman! He’d apparently been impressed by Ted Lewis. Anyway, what came out made us all happy. He did two sides and I believe Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry did another two. Atlantic has the date and I suppose, in good time, they’ll issue it.
How did Cow Cow play? Well, it’s easier to describe his playing than his singing style. Like just a while ago I sat down at the piano and played some “Cow Cow”. After a bit I got rolling and I could feel the effect Cow Cow wanted to convey when he came up with this bit you can now call a style. He’d get the left hand walkin’ and he’d whip it up with his right hand . . . that boogie woogie style that Cow Cow claimed that Pine Top Smith picked up from him . . .
“I happened to hit Pittsburgh at the Star theatre on Wile Avenue. Being a piano player I would go around to all the honky-tonks in town. I went with a friend of mine to the Sachem Alley, and there I met Pine Top Smith. He had heard my “Cow Cow Blues”, wanted to meet me. He sat down playin’. didn t know what he was playin’, so I said, ‘Boy, look here, you sure have got a mean boogie woogie’. Pine Top didn’t know what he was playin’ nohow. I began to tell him what it was, then he tried to sing it. He never could rhyme it together, just said ‘Come up here gal, to this piano . . . playin’ my boogie woogie'”.
Today you go to a store, lay your money down, and buy the jazz you want to listen to on records. Today the jazz musicians do alright cuttin’ dates. Scale is good and sessions are frequent. Not so yesterday. Cow Cow told us, “I worried the man to get him to hear my blues. This Mr. Miller decided he’d let me cut it on piano rolls. He didn’t know if it was good or bad, didn’t know if it would sell, and neither did 1. I said, ‘Give ’em to me, I’ll sell ’em myself’. I carried them to several music stores, but they didn’t know what it was all about. A music store on 6th Street told me they wouldn’t give me seventy-five cents for a hundred of them. So I went from house to house with my ‘Cow Cow Blues'”.
If our magazine had never done another thing, it helped get one job done. That I will never regret. George Avakian was doing our record reviews, and so Cow Cow came to his attention. George felt very badly that Cow Cow had never gotten on ASCAP—the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publ.shers. If you’re a writer of popular music, this membership certainly brings in an income and Cow Cow was in the position where he needed an income. George got busy and soon I picked up a Downbeat with a screaming headline about ASCAP being amiss (actually, it was much stronger). Anyway, it got results. Cow Cow got his ASCAP button; and he deserved it. Besides the “Cow Cow Blues” he’d written “Mama Don’t Allow It’. (Heck, we musicians were always playing that one . . . it was a good tune). And he also wrote “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You”. His songs had humour; like he wasn’t complaining about life . . . Cow Cow Davenport . . . born into a family where his mother ‘admired’ him ’cause he could play; his father, a very religious man, didn’t like that ragtime music. He sent Cow Cow then Charles, to a Baptist College to become a preacher and he wound up as a piano player who’d “get invitations to all the socials”. Cow Cow ran away from college and joined a carnival show where he met Bob Davis—”the first man who ever showed me one key to the other”. But when a ‘real’ piano player came along it looked as if Cow Cow was through. But he wasn’t; he just wouldn’t quit. “They din’t like to fire me because I’d been with them. But I could sing, so I got on stage,-started to sing my own songs. And I began to write songs I wanted to sing”.
From this point Cow Cow worked his way up in the business until he had a road show of his own and a bus for transportation. Everything looked g eat for a while; but Lady Luck turned her cheek and, as Cow Cow told us—”My last stop was Mobile, I didn’t have enough money to pay expenses. I had to borrow some money from somebody, so I s’tarted to pawn my bus. I would put it up for security. So I pawned m, bus too many times; down South they put you in jail for that. They caught me and gave me six months in Camp Kilby, out from Montgomery. It gave me a chance to think. All my show folks left, bus gone and me in prison. I couldn’t do any farm work, in fact, I couldn’t do anything. I had never worked before. After I got my whippings they decided I couldn’t work. They put me with the old men as a gardener. Naturally, I sat down on the ground. I caught pneumonia. It must have settled in my right arm”.
Sometime before I left New York City for the Mid-west I lost track of Cow Cow . . . let’s see; that makes it before 1950. I’d heard that he went back to Cleveland, Ohio, where he’d settled in ’37 . . . that was after he’d decided to give up show business. And so, December 2nd 1955, in this same town of Cleveland, Charles “Cow-Cow” Davenport died. Funny thing, when his dad objected to his playing piano, he left home and eventually played professionally . . . just like in his song “Mama Don’t ‘Low”, where he says “We don’t care what mama don’t ‘low . . . gonna play my music anyhow”.
We know “the world’s a stage and we are but players” . . . But when a good player leaves the stage we miss him Cow-Cow Davenport was a real good