Showing posts with label Jelly Roll Morton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jelly Roll Morton. Show all posts
This is the land of knee-tremblers and wee bastards
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the Bucket-of-Blood, the Upholstered Sewer, that's where you heard jazz
Some guy came in for
some innocent diversion, only he had about a grand on him.
We had about six gals there, all sizes and all types. They worked on a percentage, so many drinks
- phonies - drunk a night, so much earned. Well, this
unlucky guy comes in. I strike up a tune and the big parade
starts. First one gal sidles up to this fall guy; he doesn't give her a tumble.
Then another, and still another. By this time he's downed several and is more
amiable. Soon he latches on to one he likes. You know these girls could promise
strange worlds with their eyes - it didn't pay to gaze too deeply. Well, he
invites one of the gals to drink with him, and soon she's warming him up, and
he buys me one - and then she invites one of her "girl friends" to join
her - and pretty soon it's one big happy family, with our friend for the
afternoon buying drinks for the house, about ten of us, and the drinks comin'
so fast that nobody got a chance to really drink except, of course, our
indiscreet friend. And somehow he passed
out and had to be assisted upstairs. Just before my shift was up, he awoke - refreshed,
but very short of dough. Very short. He was very outspoken about it, but no one
knew where it had strayed, except - "Remember, you were buyin' everybody
drinks - remember?" And so he started drinking again, and fell off one of
the stools. This time the dishwasher helped him up, but somehow his hand got caught
in this man's pocket. But the man with the grand (minus) wasn't that drunk. He
put up a squawk. So there was nothing for Old Man McGovern to do but fire the
dishwasher. So he got his hat and coat on and with his head hanging low, walked
out - out, past the front window to the side door that also led back of the bar
(partitioned off) to the kitchen, where I later saw him back at work, washing
dishes.
the days when jazz and sex were practically inseparable
pdf, with thanks to the original sharer
“Any
time I got broke, in a sporting house I would go,” said Morton, and the best
houses clamored for his services. He even worked for Emma Johnson’s Circus
House, where naked dances and sex acts were performed, close up, for paying
customers—a distinctly New Orleans brand of theatrical entertainment. While the
erotic acts progressed, Morton played music to match, both setting the tempo
and following it. He usually worked from behind a screen, but to get around
this impediment, Morton often cut a hole at eye level with a pocket knife, so
he could ogle the action while his fingers stroked the keys. The ambience
inspired a red-hot music, which became still more brilliant and rhythmically
free at the Frenchman’s, an after-hours saloon nearby, at the corner of
Bienville and Villere. After working the brothels or catching cornetist Joe
Oliver at the Big 25 (at Franklin and Iberville) or hoisting a few at Billy
Phillips’s place (around the corner from Tom Anderson’s), the New Orleans
professors headed for the Frenchman’s. They started filtering in at about 4
A.M., ready to blow off steam after a long night’s work. This was where they
gambled, drank, took turns at the piano, and tried to cut each other with their
newest and flashiest keyboard repertoire. More than at the brothels, where the
piano men played for money, here they played for each other. Music lovers,
insomniacs, and late-night women swarmed the place, a hothouse for a newly
emerging sound that still had no particular name, except for “New Orleans
music.” In the front room, a bar and nearby piano kept spirits high, while a
table in the back room accommodated food, drink, and cards. Morton went so far
as to call this “the place where jazz originated,” the birth of an art form
attended by whores dripping diamonds and delivered by bone-tired musicians
stoking up with a toot of cocaine or winding down with a pinch of heroin.
loud, degenerate music promoting deviant behavior of all kinds
epub or mobi, with thanks to the original sharer
Eventually, though, the new sound played by
Bolden and his emulators became so popular—among working-class audiences both
black and white—that it began to draw attention from some unwanted quarters as
well. Police would show up at so-called cutting contests and begin “whipping heads” to restore
order. And eventually the city’s reformers began to take notice, and they did
not like what they heard. To their ears, the new sound was dangerous, an
affront to their notions of respectability, restraint, temperance, and civil
order. This new black music represented excess and licentiousness, a direct
flouting of traditional moral values. Perhaps most perniciously, it promoted
contact—much of it of the most scandalous type—across the color line, and in a
context of social equality that was simply intolerable to most Southern whites. Even before Bolden began to
make his mark, reformers had already started protesting about the detrimental
effects of so-called coon music. In 1890, the Mascot had railed against a
“nigger band” then playing in one of the city’s more notorious venues: “Here
male and female, black and yellow, and even white, meet on terms of equality
and abandon themselves to the extreme limit of obscenity and lasciviousness.”
Soon the Daily Picayune was also taking up arms against the new sound, calling
it “demoralizing and degrading”—something “wholly forced and unnatural.”
she’d grind her rear end like an alligator crawling up a bank
Dressing up as Baby Dolls was reported to have begun when a group of
uptown (that is, above Canal Street) prostitutes decided to show up a group of
downtown (below Canal Street) prostitutes on Mardi Gras. Each woman had to put
up her own money to make her costume, including “green money” overflowing from
the garter belt that rested snugly on her thigh. During Carnival, these women
smoked cigars, flung money at men, and challenged other groups of masked “sportin’”
women. They were known for “walking raddy” (a kind of strut that would end with
the steps needed to “shake on down”), “shake dancing,” singing traditional
Creole songs and blues, turning tricks, drinking, smoking reefers, and “starting
and causing” street fights complete with brick throwing and razor flashing. The
name they adopted for themselves, “Baby Dolls,” was based on what their pimps
called them. Like the Mardi Gras Indians, they “masked” twice a year: on
Carnival and on St. Joseph’s Night, March 19.
Arseholes, Bastards, Fucking Cunts and Pricks
As with Lucille Bogan,
Wilson and Baker cut a clean version of ‘Think Twice’ that hit the charts. A
joy-filled, upbeat, driving soul duet in a hurry, it catalogues the mutual
recriminations of a break-up. Each singer reminds the other of what they’ll miss
if they leave. The ‘unclean’ take is known as Version X. It’s almost as direct
as Lucille Bogan’s record but even funnier. There’s a deliciously wry collision
between the swear-filled lyrics and the singers’ church-rooted singing styles.
They both take a gleeful, childish delight in singing dirty. ‘Think twice
before you call me a dirty whore,’ sings Lavern Baker. ‘I got news for you
little boy: don’t fuck with me no more.’ Jackie Wilson responds in kind: ‘Now
wait a minute, horny bitch. I had just about enough of your shit. Bye, bye,
whore, whore-ore-ore.’ He breaks the last word up in classic, melismatic gospel
style – the way a Pentecostal preacher might decry the whore of Babylon
perhaps. Lavern Baker comes right back at him. ‘I gave you all the reefer, all
the cocaine and you still fuck it up.’ She has the last word, too. ‘I got news
for you, little boy, there ain’t another cunt like me. Oh, baby, think twice.
Yeah, you dirty bastard, think twice.’
couples rubbing against each other in drunken, snaky dances
epub or mobi, with thanks to the original sharer
James
Cotton would recall the Waters band being booed when they opened for Vaughan at
Washington’s Howard Theater—but at the rowdier rock ’n’ roll shows, Waters did
just fine. This was a time when Wolfman Jack was
broadcasting from the Mexican border, and one of his typical segments would
segue from Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans singing “Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah” to Jerry
Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire,” then into a rap that would go something
like: “Here’s Elmore James and his funky-funky
slide guitar. Makes me want to get naked every time I hear it, baby…and I
wantcha to reach over to that radio, darlin’, right now, and grab my knobs!”
I’m gonna salivate your pussy till my peter get hard, I’m the winding boy
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