QRS R. 7049 – James (Stump) Johnson and his Piano – 1928

Posted on January 17, 2025 by R. Connor Montgomery

The Jazz Age saw several notable pianists by the name of “James Johnson”: stride master James P. Johnson, Lonnie Johnson’s brother James “Steady Roll” Johnson, songwriter and bandleader J.C. Johnson (who, in fact, was not named “James”, but is sometimes misidentified as such), and the St. Louis blues singer James J. “Stump” Johnson. Perhaps one day every one of those Johnsons will have his time in the Old Time Blues limelight, but today we turn our attention only to the last, with his first and surely most popular recording.

James Jesse Johnson was born on January 17, 1902, to Henry F. and Betty Johnson of Clarksville, Tennessee. When he was about seven years old, his family relocated to St. Louis, Missouri. Growing up in a city rich in blues and ragtime, Johnson taught himself to play piano. Standing just under five feet tall and just over two-hundred pounds as an adult, he earned the nickname “Stump” from his squat stature. With the aid of his brother Jesse Johnson, a prominent music promoter and owner of the De Luxe Music Shoppe in St. Louis, he made a career for himself as a musician. In late 1928, brother Jesse arranged for A&R man “Uncle” Art Satherley to bring Stump and his sister-in-law Edith North Johnson to the studio for their recording debut with a pair of discs for the short-lived QRS label, produced by the manufacturer of the eponymous piano rolls. Subsequently, he made a series of sporadic recordings for various labels in the years that followed, both under his own name and under several pseudonyms, typically not making more than one or two records at a time. His next record date came in August of 1929 with a Chicago session for the Brunswick company, making a single record under the name “Shorty George” with Tampa Red backing him on guitar. In October of the same year, he went to Richmond, Indiana, to cut four sides with a small ensemble at the Gennett studio to be released on Paramount. The following month, he was back in Chicago making two records for Okeh as “Snitcher Roberts” with pianist Alex Hill and guitarist Harry Johnson (presumably his brother of the same name). Although Johnson himself was a competent piano player, a number of his recordings found him only taking the vocal while other pianists provided his accompaniment. He next made one further Paramount in February of 1930 at their new Grafton, Wisconsin, recording facility. It would be two more years before Johnson record again, breaking that dry spell with a February, 1932, session for Victor in Dallas, Texas, waxing another two sides, on which he was accompanied by fellow pianist Roosevelt Sykes (a.k.a. Willie Kelly)—plus one accompanying blues singer Walter Davis. His last pre-war recording session was in Chicago in August of ’33, for RCA Victor’s Bluebird subsidiary, producing three sides featuring the piano of Aaron “Pine Top” Sparks and guitar of Joe C. Stone (believed to be a pseudonymous J.D. Short), one of which found him in duet with Dorothea Trowbridge. As work for a musician became scarcer during the Great Depression, Johnson turned to work as a deputy constable and tax collector for the city of St. Louis, and he served in the army during the Second World War. More than thirty years after his previous session but still in fine form, Stump made his final recordings in St. Louis in 1964, one of which appeared on the Euphonic label. Only five years later, on December 5, 1969, Stump Johnson died from esophageal cancer at the Veterans’ Administration Hospital in his hometown of St. Louis, Missouri.

QRS R. 7049 was recorded in Long Island City, New York, in December of 1928 (some sources suggest January, 1929) and released the following year. It was also issued on Paramount 12842. As the label indicates, it features James “Stump” Johnson singing and accompanying himself on the piano.

An instant classic, “The Duck—Yas—Yas—Yas” (better known as “The Duck’s Yas Yas Yas”) was undoubtedly Stump’s most famous and successful song, spawning cover versions for decades to come, by artists ranging from hokum kings Tampa Red and Georgia Tom to jazz bands like Eddie Johnson and his Crackerjacks. Stump himself re-recorded the song at least twice.

The Duck—Yas—Yas—Yas, recorded c. December 1928 by James (Stump) Johnson.

Though not as big of a hit as the former, “The Snitchers Blues” was evidently another of Johnson’s signature songs, as he recorded it several times over the course of his career, and adopted it’s title as his nom de disque for his Okeh recordings of 1930. Stump’s exclamation at the end of “What? Well give me another drink then, that’s all right then,” was apparently a candid remark in reference to the booze offered to him and other black musicians in the studio by the record producers in hopes of loosening them up and getting better performances.

The Snitchers Blues, recorded c. December 1928 by James (Stump) Johnson.

Paramount 12855 – Will Ezell – 1929

Posted on December 23, 2024 by R. Connor Montgomery

At Old Time Blues, we have developed a tradition of honoring both the legends and the lost of recorded American music—and quite often both are one and the same. In that vein, let us take a look herein at the life and career of Texas native ragtime pianist, boogie-woogie pioneer, and Paramount recording star Will Ezell, and a record that some have hailed as the birth of rock ‘n’ roll.

William Ezell was born in Brenham, Texas, on December 23, 1892, one of six children born to Lorenza and Rachel Ezell. Beginning in his teenage years, Will was playing piano in juke joints and lumber camp barrelhouses around eastern Texas and western Louisiana—the country where boogie-woogie was born. As an itinerant piano player, Ezell was known to have played in various locations from Dallas to New Orleans, where he was living by the time of the First World War. It was perhaps during this time in Louisiana that he encountered blues singer Elzadie Robinson—a native of the Shreveport area—and the two struck up something of a partnership. Around 1925, Ezell and Robinson traveled north to Chicago, where they made their phonograph recording debut for the New York Recording Laboratories of Port Washington, Wisconsin, manufacturers of Paramount Records. Subsequently, between 1926 and 1931, Ezell recorded somewhat prolifically for Paramount, both solo and as an accompanist. A few of his notable piano recordings include “Barrel House Man”, “Heifer Dust”, “Mixed Up Rag”, “Bucket of Blood”, and “Pitchin’ Boogie”. As an accompanist, Ezell played piano behind such blues singers as Lucille Bogan, Bertha Henderson, Side Wheel Sally Duffie, Blind Roosevelt Graves, and of course Elzadie Robinson. In 1929, he appeared with Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Papa Charlie Jackson, Charlie Spand, and the Hokum Boys on the “Hometown Skiffle”, a “descriptive novelty” record featuring Paramount’s top stars. It has been reported, of uncertain veracity, that Paramount commissioned Ezell to escort the body of their star recording artist Blind Lemon Jefferson home to Texas upon his untimely demise in late 1929. When the Great Depression struck and severely affected Paramount’s recording activities, Ezell’s output slowed considerably, and he made his final known recordings in early 1931, accompanying Sam “Slim” Tarpley on one record. Although he made no further recordings, his existing body of work began to see reissues as early as the 1940s. Subsequently, he reportedly went back on the road, returning for a time to Louisiana, before settling in Chicago permanently by the end of the 1930s, where he found work for the WPA. According to John Steiner—who revived the Paramount label in the late 1940s—Ezell later made appearances alongside fellow former Paramount artists Blind Leroy Garnett and Charlie Spand at the Big Apple Tavern in Chicago, owned by prolific pianist Cripple Clarence Lofton. Ezell called Chicago his home for the rest of his life, and he died there on August 2, 1963.

Paramount 12855 was recorded at the Starr Piano Company’s recording laboratory in Richmond, Indiana, on September 20, 1929. Will Ezell is on the piano, and is accompanied by Blind Roosevelt Graves on guitar, his brother Uaroy Graves on tambourine, and probably “Baby Jay” James on cornet.

Ezell’s hard-driving “Pitchin’ Boogie” is often suggested to be an early antecedent of rock ‘n’ roll, with its stomping barrelhouse piano beat coupled with the guitar and cornet of the Graves brothers’ Mississippi Jook Band making for a prototype of the early rock band lineup.

Pitchin’ Boogie, recorded September 20, 1929 by Will Ezell.

On the “B” side (which the original owner evidently enjoyed more than the former), “Just Can’t Stay Here” dishes out more of the same stuff, but arranged more as a standard twelve-bar blues song than a rent party rollick.

Just Can’t Stay Here, recorded September 20, 1929 by Will Ezell.

Columbia 15510-D – Lubbock Texas Quartet – 1929

Posted on December 9, 2024 by R. Connor Montgomery

This record likely contains the earliest audio recordings of music from Lubbock, Texas, and quite possibly such from the Llano Estacado region in the Panhandle of west Texas (a number of southwest Texas “cowboy country” musicians had recorded previously, such as Jules Verne Allen).

Preceded by a number of earlier vocal groups in Lubbock town in the 1910s and beginning of the ’20s, the group known as the Lubbock Texas Quartet was formed in earnest around 1922 by Tony Q. Dyess a musical entrepreneur and promoter of the “shape note” tradition. Dyess was born in Brazos County, Texas, on December 15, 1881, and lived in Vernon prior to taking up residence in Lubbock. In its early years, the quartet was often known locally as the “Lubbock Peerless Quartet”, the “Home Brew Quartet”, or the ‘Lubbock Quartet”—or simply by the names of its members: Dyess, Holland, Wendell, and Wilson. The group soon affiliated itself with the successful Stamps-Baxter music publishing company in Dallas, and were accordingly promoted variously as the “Lubbock Stamps Quartet” or sometimes simply “Stamps Quartet”, sharing the latter title with a number of other Stamps groups. The quartet’s Personnel varied throughout its years of existence, but from the late 1920s through the early 1940s members included Tony and Doc Dyess, Clyde Burleson, Cecil and Glenn Gunn, Wilson Carson, Minnis Meek, Louis Brooks, and Homer Garrison, with the occasional addition of pianist Marion Snider. In December of 1929, the quartet traveled three-hundred miles to Dallas to record but a single phonograph record for Columbia, who were conducting a series of session in the city on one of their field trips south. The group never recorded again subsequently, but they continued to perform in the Texas Panhandle throughout the following decades, they sang on Lubbock’s KFYO and other stations, in addition to frequent live performances throughout Texas and the surrounding states, even venturing as far as West Virginia. The group appears to have dissolved around 1943, as the war was escalating in Europe.

If you are interested in reading a more exhaustive examination of the Lubbock Texas Quartet and all of their history, I recommend a look at Curtis L. Peoples’s essay The Lubbock Texas Quartet and Odis “Pop” Echols: Promoting Southern Gospel Music on the High Plains of Texas, published in the Journal of Texas Music History in 2014, from which most of the information included in this article was sourced.

Columbia 15510-D was recorded on December 9, 1929, in Dallas, Texas; their only two recordings. The Lubbock Texas Quartet likely consists of tenors Clyde Rufus Burleson or possibly Cecil Lee Gunn, baritones Minnis Monroe Meek and Wilson Lloyd Carson, and possibly bass Louis M. Brooks, though all are unconfirmed; they are accompanied by an unknown guitarist, probably Carson. It is reported to have sold a total of 12,776 copies, and remained in “print” until at least Columbia’s “Royal Blue” era around 1933-34; this pressing dates to around 1931.

Their first song, and without a doubt the better remembered of their two due to its appearance in several reissue compilations, is “Turn Away”, composed by prolific songwriter and Methodist Reverend B.B. Edmiaston and published by the Stamps-Baxter Music Company of Dallas, Texas.

Turn Away, recorded December 9, 1929 by Lubbock Texas Quartet.

The mournful “O Mother How We Miss You” is quite a lovely song in spite of its rather morose theme, and includes a brief solo guitar passage by the group’s accompanist. It has been suggested that this song was the more popular of these two in its own day.

O Mother How We Miss You, recorded December 9, 1929 by Lubbock Texas Quartet.

Paramount 12650 – Blind Lemon Jefferson – 1928

Posted on September 24, 2024 by R. Connor Montgomery

Back in the days of 78 RPM, it was not an altogether uncommon sight to find records bearing elaborate and often colorful “picture labels” (not to be confused with picture discs), individuating special releases or records by big-time hit-makers from the hoi polloi. The Columbia company was perhaps the chief exploiter of this gimmick, issuing special label designs on many discs by their stars Paul Whiteman and Ted Lewis in the 1920s, and one more on their subsidiary Okeh for Seger Ellis. On the other hand, the New York Recording Laboratory of Port Washington, Wisconsin, manufacturer of Paramount records produced only three such picture labels, which were used for only three different records; the first was in 1924 for their top star “Ma” Rainey, the next for white preacher Rev. J.O. Hanes in 1927, and finally, in 1928, one for their new big moneymaker, Blind Lemon Jefferson.

On a striking bright label of white and (appropriately) lemon yellow—in stark contrast to Paramount’s standard black and gold design—were emblazoned the words “Blind Lemon Jeffersons’ [sic] Birthday Record”. As to exactly what day it was celebrating, that is not concretely known. The most commonly agreed upon date attributed to Lemon Jefferson’s birth is September 24, 1893, supported by both the 1900 and 1910 United States censuses, but others have been suggested. Lemon himself gave a date of October 26, 1894, to one Edward Seaman, registrar of his 1917 draft card, which also seems to be supported by his reported age of twenty-five in the 1920 census. His 1930 obituary in the Wortham Journal gave his age as forty-five, suggesting he was born as early as 1884. Others still have proposed a birth date of July 11, 1897. Some oddities exist surrounding Lemon’s census records, which further complicates matters. In his entry in the 1900 census, the enumerator, one Leonard Carrier, appears to have reported his birth date as “Sept 24”, with the number written in small print above the month, despite the fact that dates of birth were not recorded in that census, only months, and no other birth dates were recorded for other individuals in the same or adjacent pages. Why then, did Mr. Carrier seemingly write down the full date of birth for Lemon and only Lemon? Did he somehow foresee that this six-year-old blind boy would one day be a star, and this information would be valuable one-hundred years from then? Did Lemon’s mother or father give the full date (which incidentally is the only date or month recorded for the entire Jefferson family) and he decided to write it down for the heck of it, despite no space for it being given? Or could this errant “24” have some other obscure meaning, perhaps lost to time? Those are questions which I, at this time, cannot answer. Perhaps some census expert may have better insight. The same census also reported Lemon’s name as “Jefferson, Lemmon\Bl”, which has been misinterpreted to mean that Lemon’s real, full name was “Lemmon B. Jefferson”. That is not the case—in fact, the “Bl” next to his name was to denote his blindness (some censuses contained a separate column to indicate whether the subject was blind, but 1900 did not); so it seems that, at least by the United States federal government, he was already dubbed “Blind Lemon Jefferson” by the age of six. The anomalous spelling of “Lemmon” can be easily discounted as well, for the census was taken orally and filled out be the enumerator, thus numerous spelling errors are present. In any event, Lemon’s “Birthday Record” was released to the public in August of 1928, which could be interpreted as belatedly celebrating his July birthday, or preemptively celebrating his September birthday—that is assuming it was not simply a marketing gimmick irrespective of the actual date of his birth, a prospect that may well be the most probable.

Paramount 12650 was recorded circa March and June of 1928, respectively, and was released in August of the same year, with the first advertisement for it appearing in the Chicago Defender on August 4, 1928.

“Piney Woods Money Mama” is one of Lemon;s lyrical masterworks, one of many songs he recorded which appear to be mostly original, rather than drawn from the “floating verse” tradition, as so many blues songs of his day were. “She got ways like the devil and hair like a Injun squaw; she’s been tryin’ two years to get me to be her son-in-law.”

Piney Woods Money Mama, recorded c. March 1928 by Blind Lemon Jefferson.

On the “B” side, the hoodoo-tinged “Low Down Mojo Blues” is perhaps not as memorable a song as the former, but still a testament to Lemon’s songwriting genius and expressive guitar playing.

Low Down Mojo Blues, recorded c. June 1928 by Blind Lemon Jefferson

Okeh 8455 – Blind Lemon Jefferson – 1927

Posted on March 14, 2023 by R. Connor Montgomery

Blind Lemon Jefferson, circa 1926; as pictured in the Paramount Book of Blues.

In his all-too-brief four year recording career, Blind Lemon Jefferson produced nearly one-hundred songs that helped to define the country blues and open the door for future guitar-slinging blues singers to record their art. All but one of those records appeared on the Paramount label—a few of which have been examined previously on Old Time Blues—this time around, we turn our attention to the odd one out.

As 1926 turned to ’27. Blind Lemon Jefferson’s recording career entered its second year. The previous one had seen a bountiful debut, producing a total of twenty recorded songs to his credit (roughly one-fifth of his total recorded output), all for Paramount Records of Port Washington, Wisconsin. The Texas bluesman was becoming a sensation, and other record companies soon took notice. It wasn’t long before the Okeh record company—then a subsidiary of Columbia Records and top competitor to Paramount with their extensive catalog of popular “race” records featuring the music of black artists—was the first to act Early in 1927, Jefferson was contacted by Atlanta-based Okeh representatives Polk C. Brockman (best remembered for orchestrating Fiddlin’ John Carson’s recording debut) and T.J. Rockwell. They extended an invitation to Jefferson for a recording session in Atlanta, to which he obliged. The singer arrived at his destination in mid-March, a little later than expected, for Jefferson had made an unplanned stop in Shreveport, Louisiana, as he had never “seen” the city before. Thus, on March 14, 1927, Lemon Jefferson recorded seven songs for Okeh, and one more the next day. The first two of those titles were released the following month, comprising Okeh 8455. When the record began to gain steam on the market, Paramount evidently threatened legal action against Okeh for “poaching” one of their top stars, and as a result, the remaining six sides were never issued. While the recordings are now presumed lost, what is known of those six songs reveals a rather different character than most of the material he recorded for Paramount. Of those six titles, “Elder Green’s in Town” was a version of “Alabama Bound”, and “Laboring Man Away from Home” was a rendition of the English ballad “Our Goodman” (also recorded by others as “Cabbage Head Blues” and “Drunkard’s Special”). “English Stop Time” was an instrumental piece similar to “Buck Dance” pieces recorded by many blues and ragtime guitarists. “Woman’s Labor Man” (or “Laboring Man Blues”) and “‘Stillery Blues” were evidently original songs never otherwise recorded or published. When Lemon returned to the Paramount recording laboratory in Chicago the next month, he remade “My Easy Rider” as “Easy Rider Blues”, coupled with a re-recording of “Match Box Blues”. The company saw to it that Lemon didn’t get away again, and all of Jefferson’s further recordings were for Paramount.

Okeh 8455 was recorded on March 14, 1927, in Atlanta, Georgia. It was first advertised for sale on April 23 of the same year. Great efforts have been taken to coax out as much music as possible out out of this, quite frankly, wiped out record.

On the “A” side of Okeh 8455, Lemon sings a re-telling of his famous “Black Snake Moan”, one of his more popular Paramount recordings, which he had recorded about five months prior to his Okeh session.

Black Snake Moan, recorded March 14, 1927 by Blind Lemon Jefferson.

The “B” side contains Jefferson’s first recording of another of his most memorable—and most widely covered—hit songs: “Match Box Blues”. Jefferson subsequently re-recorded two more takes of the soon-to-be blues standard upon his return to Paramount, each one noticeably different than the others.

Match Box Blues, recorded March 14, 1927 by Blind Lemon Jefferson.