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[27] The Forty Fours |
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Fattening Frogs For Snakes
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Wednesday, 28 December 2005 10:43 |
The Forty-Fours
for Mark Braun & Bill Lynn
While the .44
was a popular gun
throughout the South,
immortalized on record
by Chester Burnett
who confessed on Chess,
I wore my .44 so long, it done made my
shoulder sore,
this is instead
a tribute to the piano players
& that particular beat
that came from the Delta
& the piney woods
of Louisiana
where Eurreal
Little Brother Montgomery
came up in a sawmill town,
Kentwood, Louisiana,
just south of the Mississippi line,
where his daddy ran a barrelhouse
& all the piano players
used to come to play
when the peoples
got their pay.
2
Little Brother was born in Kentwood
on April 18, 1906
& grew up under the piano
listening to Rip Top,
Papa Lord God,
& the top players of the day.
He ran away from home
at the age of 11
& by 1919 or 1920
in Ferriday, Louisiana,
just across the river
from Natchez, Mississippi,
(& later the home
of the great
Causasian pianist,
Jerry Lee Lewis)
Little Brother
met Dehlco Robert
& Long Tall Friday
& together they created The 44's.
3
Little Brother maintains
that this song is the
hardest barrelhouse blues
of any blues in history to play
because you have to keep
two different times going
in each hand.
& Bob Palmer points out,
The Forty-Fours
wasn t a boogie
or a rocker. It was a
medium-slow blues
with an extravagant,
ascending bass line
that seemed to operate
in an altogether different
rhythmic sphere
than the familiar
downward-tumbling melody. The piece
impressed everyone
who heard it. It became
the ultimate test piece
on which Mississippi & Louisiana pianists
would gauge each other's mettle.
4
Montgomery
has always resented the fact
that Lee Green,
a pianist from southern Mississippi
who learned it from him
& from Long Tall Friday,
& Roosevelt Sykes,
from Helena, Arkansas,
both recorded their versions of the tune
in 1929, a year before Little Brother
cut his own, definitive version,
Vicksburg Blues. & Palmer adds,
Montgomery & his friends
were already playing pieces
with boogie-woogie-style bass patterns,
which may well have been created
in the logging & turpentine camps
& oil boomtowns of Texas,
Louisiana & Mississippi
around the turn of the century. They knew
these eight-to-the-bar patterns
as Dudlow Joes. And Willie Dixon,
a native of Vicksburg, says:
They used to call boogie piano
Dudlow Joes in Mississippi.
I didn t hear it called boogie
till long after. If a guy
played boogie piano, they d say
he was a Dudlow player. Later on
guitars played boogie too.
And Jerry Brock says, Dudlow Joe? Man,
he was from New Orleans!
Sunnyland Slim adds, It was in the 30s
that people started talkin about rockin , like
rock this house.' But they been playin it,
with the shuffle in it
to make it move, since at least 1923
or 24. All them Mississippi people
that you never heard of,
they been rockin all their fuckin life.
Detroit
August 13, 1982/
New Orleans,
March 5, 1998
postscript to the 44s
Robert Palmer adds
parenthetically
that
(West African words
such as the Hausa buga
& Mandingo bug,
both of which mean
to beat as in
to beat a drum,
may represent
the linguistic roots
of the word boogie,
though the words bogy,
booger, and possibly
boogie
have long been common
in English slang, & have
in fact been used
to refer to blacks,
or to dark apparitions
like the bogy man. Blind Lemon Jefferson
was using the term booger rooger,
apparently slang
referring to a particularly wild party,
at least as early as 1917-18,
& the New Orleans pianist & songwriter
Clarence Williams
remembered hearing Texas pianist
George W. Thomas play a tune
with a boogie-woogie bass part
--later published
as New Orleans Hop Scop Blues --
in Houston in 1911. The first recording
with the term boogie-woogie in the title
was Pine Top's Boogie Woogie,
made by the Alabama-born pianist,
Clarence Pine Top Smith,
in 1928. It was a hard-rocking dance record
& a race hit
& spawned numerous imitations,
including an early 50s recording
by Delta pianist Joe Willie
Pine Top Perkins, later a mainstay
of the Muddy Waters band.)
Detroit
August 16, 1982/
New Orleans,
March 5, 1998
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