 William Claxton photo of Jimmy at Newport 1959 James Andrew Rushing was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on August 26, 1901, according to his 1936 Social Security Number application*. This is contrary to most published bios which show his birth year as 1903. The document also shows his mother's name as Cora Beuford, although every other bio refers to her as Cora Freeman. He was a good student and graduated from Douglass High School. His grandmother and grandfather were Easter and Alan (?) Rushing and his grandfather, George, who was born or lived in Milledgeville, Georgia, was 4 years old when slavery was abolished. Easter lived well past 1905. (from Norma Robertson's posting on ancestry.com) Jimmy's father, Andrew Rushing, and his mother Cora, were both both musicians. He studied violin and singing as a child, and against the wishes of his father he learned piano. In a 1963 interview in Stanley Dance's "The World of Count Basie" (Scribners New York 1980), Jimmy recalls... "Both my parents were musical. My mother played and sang in
the church choir. So did I. My father played trumpet in a brass band. But
I also had an uncle, Wesley Manning, who used to play and sing in the sporting
houses - forbidden territory to me - and he'd come home at night with a
hatful of money. 'Tricks Ain't Walkin' No More', which I recorded in 1956,
was a song he used to sing in the houses. He was the one who taught me
to play the blues. "I used to go by the red-light district on my way to school,
and I'd see the girls in the windows, looking very pretty. I was eager
to get in there, and one day I knocked on the door and a girl let me in.
"So I sat down at the piano and played, and everybody gathered around, and I guess I was satisfied; but if my daddy had passed by there, that would have been it! "He had bought me a violin, and he had forbidden me to touch the piano. When he left the house, he'd lock the piano and give my mother the key. We'd watch him away, and then she'd give me the key. When he came back at night, he'd say 'Get the violin out!' But I wouldn't know anything. It got to the stage where I just couldn't play it, and he told me, 'If I ever catch you on that piano again, or dancing, I'm gonna run you away from home!' I had really tried, but I was gone from there in about two weeks! He lived long enough to see my success with Basie, and he agreed to it, although he never said so. But he'd have a smile on his face and say, 'Well, I guess you're doing OK.' "He didn't approve of blues like Bessie Smith's. That was honky-tonk music to him. I was official pianist at our high school 'drags', as we called dances in Oklahoma City. Then I went to Wilberforce University, where I met quite a few great pianists, but my biggest thrill was when I met Jelly Roll Morton. "The first time I left home, I went to Chicago and heard a lot of bands and musicians. I liked roaming around by myself, and I went through states like Ohio and Texas, wherever I heard of bands and singers that were making an impression. Then in 1921 I left home again and went to California, where I sang professionally for the first time. That was in a little club with the Sunnyland Jazz Orchestra. Buster Wilson was the pianist. Papa Mutt Carey, Buddy Petit, Ed Garland, and a whole lot of New Orleans fellows were out there in the early twenties. When I went to the club where Jelly Roll Morton was playing, I thought he was the greatest thing I ever heard; so I made myself acquainted and we got real chummy. One night I got myself hired as intermission pianist and he played drums, although I could still only play in three keys. In those days, when a party came in a club, got himself seated and ordered a drink, the entertainers would ask if there was anything particular he wanted to hear. So on this occasion one of the girls wanted me to change keys...I guess she had a cold. I was swinging away in E-flat and she said, 'Change to B-flat,' but I kept on playing in E-flat. She came back and called me everything under the sun. Jelly Roll spoke up then. 'Don't worry about it,' he said, 'I'll play for her.' He was a great fellow.
(He traces blues to spirituals, "he-and-she songs," and work songs of slave days. "I heard a good blues singer we knew as Cut as long ago as 1918, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He had a little band and they played the blues in the sense we know it today. Their theme song was 'When You Come to the End of a Perfect Day'. They played it at medium tempo, and people flocked to hear them. Cut had drums, sousaphone, trumpet, alto and tenor saxophones. They'd play dances during the week at Nails Park, and the place was always packed. There were after-hours spots they would go to, too. Mostly they played blues, twelve-bar blues, with a few pop songs of the day thrown in. They were not from New Orleans. Most of them were born right around Tulsa. Ernie Fields was around, too, and he had two bands at that time. "Although I could only play in three keys, I made a living by playing piano, but after a time everything began to sound alike to me, and it was then they told me to sing. I was working with Carrie Williams, a very good blues singer out of Chicago. During intermissions, she had to sing suggestive songs like 'My Daddy Rocks Me'. She called on me one night and I nearly died. The first number I had to sing was 'You Got To See Mama Every Night or You Can't See Mama At All'. "When I got homesick and came back from California, in 1926, I worked in my dad's hamburger stand and got to be a pretty good cook. It was a good business, but I used to listen to records and go to see the touring shows, and music kept calling me. By 1927, the Blue Devils were gettimg very big in the state, and when they heard me sing one night I was gone again! We toured all over the Southwest and were recognized as one of the top bands. "There were no microphones in those days, and unless you could overshadow the horns they wouldn't let you sing. You had to have a good pair of lungs... strong!...to reach out over the band and the people in those big dance halls. Later on, they brought in megaphones for singers like Rudy Vallee, but the crooners and sweet singers couldn't make it before that. As I remember, microphones came into use around 1933, and then you got a different type of singer like Orlando Robeson with Claude Hopkins, and Dan Grissom with Jimmie Lunceford. There was a very good Texas blues singer with Troy Floyd's band called Kellogg Jefferson. He was a kind of male Bessie Smith, but he could also sing high and almost in an opera style. "Scat singing was just beginning to catch on with the public because of Louis Armstrong. George 'Fathead' Thomas, with McKinney's Cotton Pickers, was a good ballard singer and a scat man. A lot of singers tried to copy Louis, but not very successfully. George Thomas was one of the notable exceptions. He was the first I heard sing 'I Want A Little Girl'. He did a marvelous job on 'Baby, Won't You Please Come Home' and 'If I Could Be With You', too. When he was killed in an accident, I had a chance to take his place, but I couldn't because I had just joined Bennie Moten. I was well known in that part of the country by then, and Bennie's records were coming out on Victor. "The first record I ever made was 'Blue Devil Blues' by the Blue Devils when Walter Page was the leader. A guy had come to Kansas City from Chicago to make records for Vocalion. The number on the back, 'Squabblin', was Basie's tune. "Basie had come to the West with a show. He couldn't play the blues back then. He was an 'actor' when I first saw him. They would ballyhoo in front of the show, take a band and play a number, and have fellows singing. They would be out on the street, and Basie would explain the show as the crowd gathered around. We'd stand through all the ballyhoo until Basie would play. 'That guy's crazy,' we'd say, 'because he played so good.' ("Independently, Basie and Jimmy Rushing observe of each other that in the mid-Twenties Basie "couldn't play the blues then", and Rushing who could, "wasn't really a blues singer in those days." Ten years later they sang and played little else." - Eric Hobsbawm 'The Jazz Scene' Pantheon Books New York 1993) "The first time he heard the Blue Devils, we were ballyhooing on a big truck in Kansas City. There was a lot of that in those days. Wherever you were working, you had to go out and ballyhoo for the place. Coming back from downtown, we struck up with a good blues. Basie heard this and thought it was a record, but somebody told him, 'No, that's the Blue Devils!' He ran down and met all the fellows. Not long after that, he quit the show and joined our band. ("I didn't audition Jimmy,' Basie continued. 'Jimmy auditioned me. I was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a little show - Gonzel White and The Big Jamboree. We used to ballyhoo out on the sidewalk before each show, move the piano out, play a few tunes, and say, 'Right inside, folks!' The Blue Devils were in town at that time and Jimmy happened to pass by. He invited me up to the hall that night, when I met Walter Page. They let me sit in, and that was how we got acquainted." After his (Basie's) period with the Blue Devils and Bennie Moten came the Reno Club.
"Basie told me he thought he'd try getting a band together," Jimmy Rushing remembered. "At first, he had a little combo, just rhythm and two or three horns. Then they started jam sessions and began to broadcast. Blue Monday got to be a big night - Sunday night, Monday morning - at the Reno, and they wanted to put a rope between white and colored, but Basie said, 'Oh, no, we don't go for that!' And there was never any trouble. Blue Monday started as a thing for entertainers. We'd send out invitations to the other clubs around, and everybody would come in and blow, or sing, or dance. The other clubs started the same thing on different nights. Basie was very successful at the Reno, and the band increased in size. He was always very conscientious about his music, and Walter Page was like a daddy teaching some of the boys to read." - - - From Stanley Dance's 'American Institution' 1968 Down Beat magazine. ) "The best band in Kansas City in those days was reckoned to be Bennie Moten's. We battled all the bands around, but he avoided us until we caught him one night and tore him up. Then he began to take guys from the Blue Devils when Walter Page had trouble with bookings. Basie went first, then Lips Page and I. Later, Walter Page broke up his group and joined Bennie, too. We also got Ben Webster, and Moten's band was soon more exciting than it had ever been before. But those were difficult times, in the thirties, and business was just beginning to get better for us when Moten died during an operation for tonsils. After Basie got a little band together at the Reno Club, we still had to scuffle for a while till things clicked for us.
"Bennie Moten had been very well established in Kansas City, although he had started out with just three pieces. I guess the kids would die today if they heard just a piano and drums in a place that would six or seven hundred people. The pianist would sing and the drummer would sing, and then they'd sing duets together. They'd play blues and foxtrots. There were fellows then that never did get to the limelight, you know. Did you ever hear of the human-voice whistle? They'd have those and it would sound like someone singing. George and Julia Lee were one of the best teams you could ever hear. Around '23 or '24, Alphonso Trent and Troy Floyd had bands of six or seven pieces in Dallas, more or less what they'd call Dixieland bands today. Different bands and different entertainers were popular in different parts of the country in those days. Work was plentiful in the Middle West. Grant Moore worked out of Omaha and played in Chicago, around Minneapolis, down in Iowa, in Idaho, and all like that. He had great musicians and would play picnics, dances, boat trips, and excursions, for colored and white. Besides all the bands already established there, Bennie Moten and the Blue Devils would play in Kansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas. But because most of the recording was done in the East, they never got quite the same attention. "I used to listen to Alphonso Trent's band whenever I could. Though they played for both races, the dances were always segregated. They were one of the top attractions and played at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas for years, but they had to use the back door and go up on the freight elevator to the roof garden where they worked. They had a real routine, and for most of the years they could work at the best hotels in Texas. People knew them from their broadcasts. The rest of the time they would tour through states like Oklahoma and Colorado, or take a vacation. They were much better off than most of the guys who were gigging around. They powdered up and had beautiful clothes and automobiles. There weren't many personnel changes in that band. "There was more harmony in the bands then. I was offered all kinds of money to go with Trent, but I stuck with the Blue Devils and Bennie Moten. We had a lot of good musicians who were offered good jobs in the bands that were making big money, but they stayed because we had a better time together. Sometimes, when the Blue Devils finished playing a dance, after the cost of the hall, placards, and traveling expenses had been deducted, and the take was split 60-40, we had done so badly that the man gave us his part because he wanted us back. Maybe rain had stopped the crowd turning out, but he knew we had top musicians. Whether we each had a dollar and thirty-six cents coming, or seven dollars and ten cents, we knew we all had the same, and we were happy. It was averaged out and divided up in front of us. Maybe when we played a Fourth of July breakfast it would be as much as forty dollars apiece. They'd keep a bank for gasoline and the notes on the cars. In a cooperative like that, if a guy was late we'd bawl him out just as quick as any manager would.
William Morris Agency photo** "When it came to parties, we used to be like one big family. If one couldn't go, none of us would! People liked to entertain the band. That really began when Basie first started with us; but later, what with being around New York, mixing with other musicians, and with the guys who were taking the solos feeling they ought to have more money - well, it wasn't the kind of band I had originally come out of. New York is something else. Guys wouldn't think of rehearsing without putting in a charge. In Kansas City, when a man wasn't working and was asked to rehearse, it was always, 'Sure!' But here it's 'Forget it, man!' The music business used to carry a certain amount of brotherly love, but it isn't that way now. "As I said, Basie couldn't play the blues when he first came to Kansas City (and he wasn't 'Count' then), but he soon caught on when he heard Pete Johnson and some of the other great blues players around. In fact, he soon became, with Pete, the best of the blues pianists. Of course, Jay McShann is one of the very best still around today. I tried to get Columbia for send him when I was recording, but I haven't been able to persuade anyone to do that yet. I don't know what it is, but there are some players who come out of the West, the Midwest, who play just exactly what you want. Others, you can't tell them what you want. If I say, 'No, change that chord,' they don't feel it that way and it's something different. There's also the question of touch and time!
"Nat Cole is another one for playing the blues. He was a great admirer of Earl Hines, and you have to remember that. I used to sit down at night and listen to Earl Hines for hours in after-hours spots. He was a pacesetter in Chicago for years, and everybody tried to play like him. "This business switching styles can't be done honestly by one man. As soon as he can play his instrument well, he can express himself, and all his life he has only one self. "Basie used to please people with his piano, but he got away from it when bop came along. He got shy. I used to say, 'Come on, Basie, play one!' He'd say, 'Oh man, I can't play no more.' But Basie can play a whole lot of piano still. When people used to ask me about it, I would say, 'Well, Basie's gotten lazy, and he hides behind the band.' That was only partly true. We used to go to house parties where he couldn't be criticized, and Basie would play. How he played! Oh, God! You hear him on Bennie Moten's 'Lafayette' and 'Prince of Wales.' That's true Basie. But he wouldn't play like that now any more than the man in the moon. What if it's old, if it's good? He could still do it, but I think he got a little self-conscious about his playing. I know when I was with the band he would lay out and let the band take it on down. The record companies used to fight with him. 'The people want to hear the piano,' they'd say. 'That's what they want.' And that's why those Kansas City Seven records sold like they did; because there was some Basie on them. "You could take Basie, Duke, Earl, Nat Cole, and Erroll Garner, and out of all of them Garner would be the only one not self-conscious about his playing. The others couldn't even play in the way they were raised in, although if they did you would hear some of the finest music. For instance, people kind of frown on stride piano, even though it's hard and they can't play it. "I worked with Ralph Sutton in California. I hadn't woked that way in years, with just piano and drums, and I was so well pleased.Ralph carried such a heavy left hand , it sounded like a bass. We broke the show up for two weeks, and I didn't feel tired once. I've seen the time when I've had five or six pieces in there, but they couldn't carry the time the way he did playing stride piano. "I've been trying to get Ralph and me together as a combo for the past year. He can play all the stuff like Willie The Lion. I wanted to have him with a small combo in Toronto, but the guy there couldn't see it. In a way, Ralph doesn't even need drums, but he can be more relaxed when he can hear that beat all the time and he doesn't have to play so hard. It's the same with me. I'm more relaxed when I can hear the beat clearly all the time I'm singing.
Bennie Moten Band 1931 (Rushing - upper right / Basie - lower 2nd from left) "To go back to the old days, to the twenties... I remember when we had a small combo of seven or eight pieces. The sousaphone was just beginning to go out, and they were bringing in the bass fiddle. We had a drummer who used to beat the side of a leather case and get a sound like a rimshot. Believe me, that kind of beat does something to you. When a guy took a solo - a 'Boston' in those days - everybody in the band used to hit that beat; and on a swing tune you were home free. You had no worries. Then they brought the after-beat in on the high-hat, and now drummers like Sam Woodyard are bringing it back with rimshots. I like it, especially on a going-out chorus. Sometimes, when the drummer is playing fast - not clear and definite - the average guy in the horns can't hear the beat and gets lost. Many times I've heard musicians like Earle Warren and Dicky Wells say, 'What's the matter with the drummer? Why doesn't he stay in there?' When you've got a big ensemble going, you've got to be able to feel those drums, not just hear them. I've noticed on a lot of records you hear all top but no bottom to the drums. You must feel that bottom, and they should put a microphone on the bass drum. "Not that they used the bass drum the way they ought. I walked behind a drummer on stage one time, and he had his right foot wrapped around his stool.
"Even before I heard Chick Webb, the drummer with the Blue Devils, and all those in the other bands in the Midwest, used to play that four on the bass drum. They all played but one way. Where they got this thing about neglecting the bass drum and carrying all the time on top, I don't know. A lot of young people don't know what's missing. They've been brought up without it and they don't know how it should be. "Alvin Burroughs, who was with the Blue Devils, and later with Earl Hines, was one of the great drummers. He came to us from Little Rock, Arkansas. Another drummer who was the Jo Jones and Gene Krupa of the day before yesterday was A.G.Godley. He was with Alphonso Trent's band for a long time until he quit playing and went to work. They used to use those little sock cymbals with their hands. (You can hear them on 'Squabblin'' by the Blue Devils. They used to shove the spotlight on A.G.Godley and he would drum for half an hour, years before Buddy Rich. There was another fine drummer out of Chicago, in Grant Moore's band. We used to call him 'Jeans'. "In the old days, too, you could name almost as many good women pianists as men. Besides Mary Lou Williams, there were Countess Johnson and Julia Lee in Kansas City, another girl in Oklahoma, and a girl out of Minneapolis. But apart from pianists, there never were too many girls who could play in bands. "So today (January 23, 1963) I was surprised to find that Patti Brown could sit in with a big band. I knew that she had worked with Quincey Jones, but she was so relaxed on my date. And you can't be relaxed unless you know what you're doing. I think this album ('Five Feet of Soul' -Colpix 446) was sort of on the new side for me, compared to what I've been doing. We have a little touch of the 'progressive' in it. It's all right for pop tunes, and I think people will like it, but I wouldn't get away from the things that made me popular in days gone by.
Basie and Rushing "When we went out with Basie once in the forties, he changed his style to a certain extent. He had a bunch of new arrangements, and some fellow yelled out, 'Come on, Count! What the heck! You trying to sound like Stan Kenton?'"I always say that Basie had a style he never should have changed. He came back to some extent, and he keeps it pretty simple, but the public grows with you and likes to hear you the way you came up. Once you've established yourself, they don't want you to get too far away from there. When I talk to people in the audience, they so often tell me, 'I have all your old records, and I won't let anybody borrow them.' Or, 'When I want a big kick, I play the old arrangements - you and Basie.' It's dangerous to get too far from what they identify you with. "I understand how fly-by-night things like bossa-nova are introduced and promoted, but when they've gone you've got to get back to the main source - the blues. I can sing anything I want, maybe two or three songs before the blues, but the minute I begin 'Goin' to Chicago', or something like that, I hear the scream start. So if I told a guy who requested 'Goin' to Chicago' that I didn't sing it now, or said I couldn't remember it - that would be very funny. "I play the Playboy clubs and a lot of other clubs across the country, but I never thought the time would come when I would go up on the bandstand, call this or that familiar number, and some of the cats on the stand would say, 'Don't know it!' And they don't. They're younger musicians and most of them don't know anything farther back than Charlie Parker. "I've been asked several times, 'What's going to happen to American jazz?' It's a big question. 'Well, Jim,' people ask, 'what will happen when you and Duke and Basie have gone?' We are not the patterns anymore. Years ago, when you'd hear a pianist, you'd say, 'He sounds like Earl Hines.' Or it might be Fats Waller, or Pete Johnson, the boogie-woogie man. You don't get that anymore. Musicians are afraid to pattern themselves on the great artists for fear someone will tell them, 'You sound like so-and-so.' Everybody's trying to create I don't know what. Maybe I should say a style of their own; but they try to be so different that they lose the soul. "I met a fellow out in Detroit some years ago, a pianist who could play his ass off. He was very good. He came to New York, went to Juilliard, finished there, and went out on his own. Now when he plays for you, he mixes in the progressive style and augments the blues chords. That causes trouble, because you can't add to the blues. But it's different, even if he does lose the blues! The blues are just the old church chords, two- or three-part harmony, and that's all. When he makes the big chord, it's something else, and he loses the feeling. "When I get to singing, with someone like that behind me, I may be feeling pretty good, but he'll strike one chord and take everything away from me. Such a lot of beautiful songs and solos have been built around the blues chords that the big chord seems like a big mistake to me. "There are not as many good blues pianists as there used to be, but Jimmy Smith - though he plays organ - is a real blues man. He builds his whole repertoire around the blues. Ray Bryant is a very good blues pianist today, and so is Sir Charles Thompson, if you can make him play it. The 'progressive' kick has changed many people. A lot of musicians feel they're obsolete if they play the way they really should, the way they were taught years ago. They think that makes them 'webby', as though they'd got spider webs on them! Not Basie, though. It's amusing. Sometimes, when he takes the solo, and then the band comes in , it's like two entirely different things. He is true to his first love in music. "When I go in front of an audience, I'll admit I sometimes have a certain amount of fear in me, because maybe the people are not going to accept what I'm doing today. That's bad for any artist, especially if what you're doing is not in line with what's happening today. If you don't get the right amount of applause, you feel you're not doing the right thing, and you get nervous. Automatically, you begin to wonder if you're too old or passé, and that will work on you if you're not careful. It's not a matter of ability or, if you like, artistry. I remember singing 'I Want a Little Girl' one night - and that's normally one of my big ones, after 'Goin' to Chicago' - and the crowd just looked at me, as much to say, 'What is that?' That drug me. Other times people know it and request it. But the performer always has his problems before he goes on. He tries to figure what will hit the crowd, like going for the jackpot. If I sing 'When You're Smiling', and they scream, I do another like that; and meantime someone will probably yell for 'Goin' to Chicago'. When I get a good reaction on that, I go right into 'St.Louis Blues'. It's surprising, though, how difficult it is to pick right. "When I come out with a new album, guys will say, 'It's a typical Jimmy Rushing record.' Well, who else would it be? If I'm going to do blues, it's going to be a typical Jimmy Rushing record because I don't think any other way. It's impossible for me to be like anybody else. If it doesn't sell, if a guy doesn't like it, that's something else. "I'm funny about recording something someone else has done and made a hit out of. When I did 'I'm Walking Through Heaven with You', I took the tempo a little up as compared with Lunceford's. I'm not being egotistical, but after I made 'Goin' to Chicago', a lot of people said, 'Nobody can sing that but Jimmy.' In the same way, I don't think anybody could make 'I'm Walking Through Heaven' other than Lunceford's Dan Grissom; so if I'm going to record the same number I want a different tempo or something. Like this number of Billie Holiday's they wanted me to do. 'Oh, no,' I said, 'I have always cherished Billie and I don't feel anyone else can do the things she did.' The artist who establishes a number, in other words, has the edge. Like some of those Louis Armstrong made. Nevertheless, I love that song of his, 'Someday You'll Be Sorry', and I'm going to try to do that on my next album." - (1963) Jimmy became ill in 1971 and his performing almost ceased. On June 8, 1972, he died of leukemia at the Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital in New York City. He left behind a wife, Connie, two sons, Robert and William, an enormous body of work and the fond memories and respect of those who knew him. New Yorker magazine's veteran jazz critic Whitney Balliett wrote... "Jimmy Rushing, the great blues singer, died yesterday, at the age of sixty-eight. He was a short, joyous, nimble, invincible fat man who shouted the blues as if he were wearing kid gloves and carrying a swagger stick. His diction was faultless; in fact, it had an elocutionary quality, for his vowels were broad and sumptuous, his "b"s each weighed a pound, and he loved to roll his "r"s. His lyrics had a pearl-gray, to-the-manor-born cast to them. His voice - light, tenorlike, sometimes straining - was not much, but it was hand-polished and could be, despite his dandyish style, extraordinarily affecting, as in the mourning, deep-blue "How Long Blues" he recorded in memory of his friend Hot Lips Page. But most of the time Rushing's blues were elegant, lifting celebrations of life, and he sang them that way - his voice finally almost threadbare - until the day he died." "Jimmy Rushing and I were close friends in the band, and we always kept in contact. I had a Christmas card from him a while back, and then it seemed right after that they sent an announcement that said he had passed. "Well, for pity's sake," I said. I thought of all the laughs and good times we'd had. We made some records together for Columbia out in California, but I don't think they ever were issued. Irving Townsend was in charge of the session, and I remember we did 'Outskirts Of Town'." - - - Helen Humes in 1973, from 'The World of Count Basie'. * Document supplied by thomas peter kunesh - King of Research.
** Image used by permission: University of Missouri - Kansas City Libraries, Special Collections Department.
*** Document supplied by thomas peter kunesh - King of Research.
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"There's a difference between the blues of the New Orleans
guys and anyone else and the difference is in a chord, but I can't figure
the name of it. It's a different chord, and they all make it. I know people
stamp New Orleans as the home of the blues, but I don't because I found
the blues everywhere in my travels. In the old days, a lot of people used
not to like the blues. If you played the blues, you were nothing to the
public... but they were always a kick to me. They always had a good feeling.
Guys would walk around with guitars and mandolins, playing and singing
the blues on the streets and on the corners. The blues tells a story in
itself. It can make you happy or give you a feeling to swing. Here, lately,
it's gotten to the place where they've given it a new name...'soul music'.
It's always been a soul music.
Inside the Club Reno
"Now, Earl Hines is a good one. He may say he can't play the blues, but he will for me. He used to play for Chippie Hill at the Golden Lily and the Sunset in Chicago. Guys like that are not always comfortable playing their natural style. They feel they've been playing it so long they need to dress it up to make it sound different today. And that's not good. It's a serious thing that they are made to feel they have to be different. Regardless of everything, Earl Hines is Earl Hines, a great pianist.
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