Image: King Oliver and His Creole Jazz Band, ca. 1923. Left to Right: Honoré Dutrey, trombone; Warren “Baby” Dodds, drums; Joe “King” Oliver, cornet; Louis Armstrong (kneeling), slide trumpet; Lil Hardin, piano; Bill Johnson, banjo (he also played bass); Johnny Dodds, clarinet.
[I drafted much of this for a book I’m working on about Louis Armstrong. I cut it and filed it away; then the other day I was reading Garvin Bushell’s memoir, and I realized that Oliver’s influence went deeper and wider than I knew.]
“At the Lincoln Gardens in Chicago in 1922, Joe Oliver was so wonderful, and he gladly let me play my rendition of the blues. That was heaven. Papa Joe was so elated that he played a half an hour overtime. I was so happy, I did not know what to do. I had hit the big time. I was up north with the greats. I was playing with my idol, the King, Joe Oliver. All of my boyhood dreams had come true at last.” – Louis Armstrong, Satchmo the Great
“My man in those days was ol’ Papa Joe Oliver. He was my friend and my teacher and my inspiration and a great creator.” – Louis Armstrong, Satchmo: A Musical Autobiography
“[King Oliver] is my idol, and he did more for the young musicians in my area than anyone that I know of. We’d be walking up Rampart Street and run into Joe Oliver. We might have a lesson or a piece of music that was bugging us . . . and I’d say, ‘Papa Joe, how you divide that?’ He’d stop, no matter where he was going, and show it to us, where the rest of the musicians would say, ‘Boy, I ain’t got no time,’ breaking an egg to get to the Eagle Saloon. That’s why we all love Joe Oliver, and he’ll live in our memories. ‘Cuz most of this five-part harmony in the big bands and things came from Joe Oliver’s creations.” – Louis Armstrong, Satchmo the Great
Oh play that thing! – often uncredited band members, at the end of the cornet or trumpet solo, on many recordings, by many artists, of King Oliver’s classic “Dippermouth Blues”
Some years ago I wrote a book on the intertwining histories and roots of “God Bless America” and “This Land Is Your Land.” While I was writing it, and afterward, people would occasionally ask me, “Which one is better? What’s your favorite?” I honestly didn’t know. It might have been “America the Beautiful,” and even though the book had a chapter on the astonishing background of that song too, I couldn’t very well answer with that, though I fantasized that it might have been taken as witty. While researching for that book, and subsequently, I kept coming across authors making grandiose claims for their subjects. “The greatest.” “The most popular.” “The one.” “The year of popular music.” “The most important.” I appreciate the enthusiasm – I do – and I understand the impulse to urge one’s readers (and oneself) that the book’s subject is important. But hyperbole makes me skeptical, unless I already share the predilection.
I’m more sympathetic to the writerly impulse than I once was. While I was thinking about the book I’m working on now, I claimed on social media that Louis Armstrong had popularized the blues solo. In an earlier draft of the book I’m writing about him, I called him the most influential musician in American history.
I’m skeptical.
Especially of the first claim.
Joe “King” Oliver, Armstrong’s mentor and inspiration, was the man who recruited him to come North, the land of opportunity. A cornet player like Armstrong, and twenty years his senior, Oliver played one of the most influential solos in recorded jazz, on his 1923 recording of “Dippermouth Blues,” which was named after one of Armstrong’s nicknames. It’s all blues, all swing, all concision and power, and catchy as a cold. It’s a classic recording of the instrumental twelve-bar blues; Martin Williams included it on the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz.
Armstrong plays backup cornet, improvising with the rest of the group during behind Oliver’s lead during the opening two choruses. Johnny Dodds plays a fine and memorable clarinet solo over two choruses, twenty-four bars. Twelve more bars of ensemble playing, and then the King takes over.
Oliver builds in intensity over three choruses. The first four bars play on two notes, the minor third and the tonic of the key. The second four bars add a third note and more syncopation, and the next four bars continue in the same range. Oliver climbs higher up the cornet’s range on each of the successive choruses, a classic strategy for building intensity and a template that rock guitarists use to this day (including me). The second twelve bars are slightly higher than the first, and his last chorus is higher still. At the end of the third chorus, the band stops, someone yells, “Oh play that thing!,” and the other horn players return for one more ensemble chorus to take the tune out.
“Dippermouth Blues” became a standard under that title and under an alternate, “Sugarfoot Stomp.” Armstrong would record it again at least three times over the following decades, under both titles, the first time as the star member of Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra as soon as 1925, shortly after leaving Oliver’s band and in the period when he was backing up classic blues singers like Bessie Smith. He recorded it for the last time more than 30 years later, a time when he was paying tribute to his elders and friends with albums in their honor: Louis Armstrong Plays W. C. Handy (1954), Satch Plays Fats: A Tribute to the Immortal Fats Waller (1955), Louis Armstrong Plays King Oliver (1959). His last “Dippermouth Blues” came on Satchmo: A Musical Autobiography (1957) – a tribute to his own career. Crucially, on each of the recordings, on his cornet or trumpet solo, he pays homage to Oliver’s solo, paraphrasing it closely during the first two choruses. He wasn’t the only trumpeter to quote Oliver. Martin Williams observed that other soloists would “reproduce [Oliver’s solo], sometimes note for note, when performing [‘Dippermouth Blues’ or ‘Sugarfoot Stomp’]. Indeed,” Williams adds, “Oliver’s choruses became a stop-gap for uninspired trumpeters when playing the blues in C or B-flat well into the 1940s.” And almost all the recordings, including all of Armstrong’s, cap the trumpet or cornet solo with a band mate shouting, “Oh play that thing,” just as on Oliver’s original.
“Well into the 1940s” puts us at the tail end of the age of the classic big bands, the swing era, which Oliver’s phrasing predated and predicted. And though nobody made more of Oliver’s influence than the man he had hired to play second cornet in 1922, the influence of the blues solo went everywhere. The blues solo is in . . . well, blues, and jazz, and rock – and also in country and bluegrass. Whenever you hear a mournful violin or pedal steel guitar playing an improvised melody to accompany a country singer, or a hot mandolinist picking fancy to accompany a bluegrass singer, that’s a legacy of the blues and jazz. It’s not part of the Western European vernacular traditions that influenced country music in the US.
Oliver’s solo not only presaged decades of jazz, blues, country, bluegrass, and rock soloists formally and harmonically – his sound influenced the Woodstock generation. How did a cornet player, 38 years old in 1923, influence the sound of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar in 1969, you ask?
The wah-wah pedal.
In 1921, Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds were playing in Chicago for a week. In her band were saxophonist and clarinetist Garvin Bushell, who 40 years later would record and perform with John Coltrane, and cornetist James “Bubber” Miley. Bushell and Miley went to see King Oliver and His Creole Jazz Band every night. In 1988 Bushell published a memoir, Jazz from the Beginning, “as told to Mark Tucker.” He described Oliver’s impact.
I was very much impressed with their blues and their sound. The trumpets and clarinets in the East had a better “legitimate” quality, but the sound of Oliver’s band touched you more. It was . . . more expressive of how the people felt. Bubber and I sat there with our mouths open. . . . You heard the trumpet doing a different thing, half-cocked with a tin mute. That’s where Bubber got his growling, from Joe Oliver. . . . It was in Chicago, after hearing Oliver, that Bubber changed his style and began using his hand over the tin mute that use to come with all cornets.
[Note: “legitimate” means “classical-sounding.” I’m guessing that Bushell put it in scare quotes to note the racism of the vocabulary.]
Two years later, Miley, back in New York, joined Elmer Snowden’s band featuring pianist Duke Ellington, who soon took over the leadership. Miley took Joe Oliver’s growling further and, with trombonist Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton, developed a wah-wah style that Ellington asked Miley’s and Nanton’s successors to learn for the rest of his career if they didn’t know it already. In 1926, Miley co-wrote “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” with Ellington, Ellington’s first hit (which people of my generation might know from Steely Dan’s 1974 cover version), and which starred Miley’s wah-wah trumpet. Miley’s wah-wah was here to stay. By the 1950s, guitarists were experimenting with developing wah-wah effects, and in 1966 the wah-wah pedal went on the market. Its most famous exponent became Jimi Hendrix.
More than one hundred years after Oliver’s recordings, musicians still play that thing.
Here's "Dippermouth Blues," King Oliver and His Creole Jazz Band, 1923.
Here's Duke Ellington and Bubber Miley's 1927 recording of "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo." It was their second recording of the tune, and the hit version.