[Dixielandjazz] Lil Armstrong

[Robert Ringwald]

Robert R Calder wrote in part about Lil Armstrong:

There is even the boogie performance from
around 1950, delivered all with a womanly straightforwardness.



May I ask, What is “a womanly straightforwardness?”

-Bob Ringwald


From: ROBERT R. CALDER 
Sent: Thursday, September 04, 2014 2:20 PM
To: Bob Ringwald 
Cc: Dixieland Jazz Mailing List 
Subject: [Dixielandjazz] Lil Armstrong

I can't understand how anybody might suppose it wasn't Lil on the Jimmie Rogers Blue Yodel No.9, for hardly anybody else produced that stomping rhythm -- which is quite plain on a number of Hot Five records and keeps cropping up, even on the much later recordings with Bechet in France.  I wonder whether anybody has sat down to listen to the various blues accompaniments by her, with for instance Lonnie Johnson and even as I recall Peetie Wheatstraw, Decca gigs such as Sam Price also had, as well as some of the things under her own name.  There is even the boogie performance from around 1950, delivered all with a womanly straightforwardness. 

No candidate at all for the attribution, Harvey Brooks was a Harlem stride pianist, remembered from New York by Earle Howard (himself a splendid player who seems not to have recorded other than for Impulse! records at a concert of Americans in Europe -- there was an EP in Sweden which seems to have been mainly his singing -- who knows it). I asked an esteemed Iberian listmate to include both in his discography of Stride players, Brooks long before he was filmed as a member of Kid Ory's band was on the soundtrack of the film in which Cary Grant asks Mae West "hevn't you ever found a men you thought could make you really heppy?" to hear the response "lotsa times!" and mimes to Brooks's playing

He was Mae West's MD and he's on the Paul Howard recordings some of which had young Lionel Hampton on drums and Lawrence Brown on trombone and George Orendorff showing the creative influence of King Oliver. If you want to make sure it wasn't Brooks on Blue Yodel #9 he plays well on some very good recordings. 

why vamp when you're ready,
Robert R. Calder
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Bob Ringwald
Amateur (ham) Radio Station K 6 Y B V
Fulton Street Jazz Band
916/ 806-9551

Just think, if it weren't for marriage, men would go through life
Thinking they had no faults at all.