Boogie All the Time: Music of the Medicine Show Years

Recently the conversation at our house turned to medicine shows (this kind of conversational turn happens a lot around here). As a result, I dug out Good for What Ails You: Music of the Medicine Shows, 1926−1937, from Old Hat Records—a bonanza of eccentric, beyond-category music from the old, weird America. The accompanying 72-page booklet comprises a history of the traveling medicine show, interviews with show veterans, and useful annotations for each track.  As The Wire put it, “Factor in assorted skillet lickers, jug stompers, fruit jar drinkers, ramblers, crackers, tarheels and tobacco tags, and you have a buried history of vernacular music, therapeutic culture and politics second to none. 

Not only is this set a mother lode of blues, old timey, and uncategorizable roots music, it can serve to clue You in on even more great stuff. For example, Swing, You Cats by Hezekiah Jenkins led me to The Panic Is On, his unblinking ode to the Great Depression. Even the booklet can lead you to a whole new world. Its discussion of Hadacol, “a Vitamin-B tonic laced with alcohol” developed and sold by former Louisiana senator Dudley J. LeBlanc, character right out of “O Brother, Where Art Thou,” led me to a raft of tunes like Hadacol Boogie, Everybody Loves That Hadacol, and Hadacol Bounce, all of which seem to focus more on the tonic’s second ingredient than the first. Check out this 2004 version of Hadacol Boogie by Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Guy! 

The Lewis/Guy performance is a latter-day example of the musical interaction across racial lines among medicine shows and their audiences that included hillbilly blues and jug band music as well as mainstream pop tunes and minstrel ditties reworked by Black songsters. Note; Some of these recordings include racially offensive terms used by both Black and White performers. The annotations point these terms and attitudes out, but excluding such recordings would sugarcoat thew way things were (and are).

If you have any interest in American music, its history, or the sheer exuberant entertainment value of this stuff, you owe it to yourself to pick up this set. The Old Hat website also has sound samples aplenty. As Bob Dylan said about Good for What Ails You, “I got nothing against downloads and MP3s, but getting this CD with all the pictures and liner notes,
well, it’s not as good as having it on the big 12” record, but at least there’s a booklet there, and believe it or not, folks, you can even read it in a power failure- as long as it’s daytime.” 

To give you a feel for this amazing conglomeration, here’s my current obsession—the Allen Brothers, a hillbilly jug band wailing the tar out of Bow Wow Blues:

And a Memphis blues classic from Frank Stokes:

Jim Dawgs: The Early Years of Ike Quebec

When writing about anyone beyond the most critically acclaimed, longest-lived jazz artists (and by no means limited just to jazz or artists), online biographical information can be sparse and repetitive. So it is for Ike Quebec, sometimes referred to online as “Ike Abrams Quebec,” who was born in Newark, new Jersey on August 17, 1918. thanks to Barbara Kukla’s invaluable Swing City: Newark Nightlife, 1926−1950, his birth name was Isaac Abrams. Where did “Quebec” come from? According to Kukla, who interviewed many Newark music veterans before her book’s publication in 1991, “he used the name ‘Quebec’ as far back as anyone remembers.” “Don’t know where it come from,” said a distant family member.

Quebec started out as a tap dancer, winning an amateur contest at Miner’s Theater in downtown Newark when he was 16. He picked up piano while with a traveling show—Harlem on Parade—and gigged at the Waverly Tavern and at all-night rent parties, and sounded like the great stride master Donald Lambert. At some point, he picked up the tenor saxophone, which he supposedly taught himself to play by locking himself in a room for weeks. He stated playing dates in New York with Roy Eldridge, Benny Carter, and Frankie Newton, among others, eventually moving there. He also spent time up at Minton’s Playhouse with musicians like Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke, and other bop pioneers, although his style remained an amalgam of Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster—aggressively swinging on up-tempo tunes and breathy and romantic on ballads. In 1944, he joined Cab Calloway’s big band, with which he remained affiliated on and off until 1951.

1944 was also the year he made his first recordings under his own name for Blue Note records. While with Blue Note, he became close to Alfred Lion, who began using him as an informal A&R man and talent scout. Reputedly, he brought Monk and Bud Powell to Lion’s attention. His friendship with Lion would later play an important part in his later career as well. He also made a couple recordings for Savoy, a Newark-based label that later also issued many key bop records by Charlie Parker and other modernists but was owned by a much less savory character than Lion.

Years ago, Mosaic Records issued The Complete Blue Note Forties Recordings of Ike Quebec and John Hardee, which had all of Quebec’s early Blue Note recordings. (I’m sure the researchers at Mosaic had lots of biographical and other info about him, but I don’t have access to the liner notes, alas.) That set is long out of print and pricey but, thanks to the late, lamented French Chronogical (sic) Classics label, Ike Quebec 1944−1946, many of these early Blue Notes and Savoys can be had on the used CD market at a less exorbitant price.

Quebec’s first recordings are outstanding, aided by sidemen like Tiny Grimes and Ram Ramirez. Tiny’s Exercise is a nice composition (year later, he did an excellent version on Profoundly Blue, a long out-of-print album on Muse). Indiana is a nice up-tempo romp, Blue Harlem was a hit when it came out, and She’s Funny That Way is a good example of Quebec’s early ballad style. Later recordings also featured a larger group with Buck Clayton (I Found a New Baby is especially noteworthy). The Savoy recordings featured both more traditional (Johnny Guarnieri) and distinctly modern (Bill de Arango).

By the late Forties, Quebec’s recording career petered out, as did his life in general, thanks to the epidemic of substance abuse that beset the music in those days. As far as the author of Swing City was concerned, his career ended there (in an appended biographic dictionary of Newark musical artist, she even has him dead by 1953.) Reports of his demise were exaggerated, though. In the late 1950s, thanks to his continued connection to Alfred Lion, he would experience a renaissance that continued until his death. In a future blog post, I’ll be talking about the series of 45s he made for Blue Note that revived his career. Meanwhile, here’s a sampling of the early Ike Quebec. In order; Blue Harlem, If I Had You,  , and Jim Dawgs (Ike's nickname).

Frank Strozier: What's Goin' On

Frank Strozier is one of those artists whose great talent never broke though to a wider audience. One of a number of Memphis-born musicians who came to maturity in the late 1950s early 1960s, he recorded extensively on alto as a sideman and led a few (too few) sessions, and finally left the music business out of frustration. There’s can’t something wrong with a system in which a Frank Strozier is unable to thrive.

A good example of what we’ve lost is Strozier’s 1977 What’s Goin’ On, his second album for Steeplechase Records (after a 15-year(!) lapse in recording as a leader. With fellow Memphian Harold Mabern on piano, Danny Moore (tp) Louis Hayes (dr) and Stafford James (bs), it’s a consistently excellent date. High points include Ollie, a tribute to Strozier’s friend Oliver Nelson, Chelsea Drugs, with Strozier on flute, and Psalm for John Coltrane, an intense, Trane-like ballad.

And then there’s the title track, which is why I acquired this recording. On What’s Goin’ On, Strozier gives it everything he’s got—a brilliant extended interpretation of Marvin Gaye’s original that burns with passionate intensity. Harold Mabern follows with an almost equally extraordinary solo, both performances supported to the max by James and Hayes. It’s the kind of music that inspires and uplifts—qualities we all need in times like these.  

Here are What's Goin' On and Ollie.