Yesterday's
Blues
Louis Jordan Helped Shape
An Era, Usher In Rock 'n' Roll
Doyle M. Pace
"So if you happen to be just passin' by, . . . Stop in at the Saturday night fish fry"
These lines from "Saturday Night Fish Fry," a 1945 classic by Louis Jordan, are quite familiar to blues fans all around the Kansas City area, since we look forward to a double helping of it every weekend as it heralds the piscine sacrifice in a cauldron of boiling oil to propitiate the gods of the blues soul, zydeco, and rhythm and blues — or what ever the hell it is that Chuck Haddock says.
In general, though, the music of Louis Jordan, who billed himself as "The King of the Blues" or "The King of the Jukebox" is hard to categorize.
Certainly, it wasn't the down-home blues nor the uptown blues, but the blues were in there, as well as jazz, pop boogie-woogie and even some Latin sounds in a style that he called "jump blues," and his shuffling rhythms foretold the rock and roll beat of the '50s.
Louis Thomas Jordan was born in the town of Brinkley, Ark., in 1908. His father, James Jordan, was a professional musician and teacher who had studied with W. C. Handy and toured with the famous Rabbit Foot Minstrels.
The elder Jordan encouraged his son to follow in his footsteps, and taught him to play the saxophone when Louis was only 7 years old. Later Louis would also master the clarinet, trumpet, and several other instruments, but he always favored the sax.
When Louis was barely into his teens, he joined his father's
musical group, the Brinkley Brass Band. During school vacations
he toured with groups like The Rabbit Foot Minstrels, Silas Green
from New Orleans and Jimmy Pryor's Imperial Serenaders, and made
the TOBA circuit through
Mississippi with Ma Rainey.
The experience that he got on the vaudeville stage was good training for the kind of stage act that he later developed. After high school, Jordan attended Arkansas Baptist College in Little Rock where, in addition to playing music, he also played semi-pro baseball.
In 1932, Jordan and drummer Chic Webb recorded with a group in
New York called the Jungle Band. The next leg of Jordan's musical
odyssey took him to Philadelphia, where he worked with the
Charlie Gaines Orchestra for three years. During this period, he
backed Louis Armstrong on a
recording for Victor Records.
After Philly, he returned to New York, where he worked with the Kaiser Marshall band, playing gigs at the Apollo Theater, the Ubangi Club, the Harlem Opera House and the Elks Rendezvous, as well as touring with the band in adjacent states. In 1936, Chic Webb asked Jordan to join his band. In spite of being handicapped from a spinal disorder that left him dwarfed and hunchbacked, Webb was an exceptional drummer and leader of one of the country's leading African-American orchestras.
Another promising young artist with Webb at that time was a vocalist by the name of Ella Fitzgerald. Webb quickly recognized that Jordan and Fitzgerald made a musically dynamic pair and frequently featured them in his program. While he was with the Webb orchestra, Jordan honed his skills as an instrumentalist and singer of novelty songs. In 1938, Jordan left Webb and struck out on his own, forming a nine-piece band that he called the Elk's Rendezvous Band, after the Harlem club where he had a long-running gig. Jordan cut a couple of recordings for Decca before changing the makeup and name of his band to Louis Jordan and the Tympany Five. The personnel of the band was constantly changing, and ironically, it rarely had just five members. Usually there were six or seven.
From 1939 through 1942, Jordan kept a harrying pace as he toured all across the U.S.A., as well as meeting frequent and extensive recording schedules. Calling on his early training on the vaudeville stage, Jordan began working out comedy routines for each song. These zany skits were greeted with gaiety and enthusiastic approval by his audiences, and Jordan gained a reputation as a consummate showman who never disappointed his growing following of white as well as black fans.
In 1941, The Tympany Five recorded an old blues number,
"I'm Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town," backed by
"Knock Me a Kiss." The record became a hit, crossing
from the "race record" genre into the pop charts of
white music and soared to number three in Billboard Magazine's
ratings.
Louis Jordan had become a star. A profusion of hits followed in rapid succession. "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby." "Five Guys Named Moe," "Ain't Nobody Here but Us Chickens," "Open the Door Richard" and "Let the Good Times Roll" are a few of the sides recorded by Jordan in the mid-'40s that seemed to define the decade.
In all, he had 18 records to hit the charts in the space of four or five years. Weary with years of war, the nation was ready for the light-hearted, swinging good times that Jordan was singing about. While at the zenith of his popularity in record sales, radio and jukeboxes, Jordan began another venture that presented his musical acts to an even wider audience. He was featured in several short films called soundies. Soundies were the forerunners of today's TV music videos. They presented visual, as well as audio, interpretations of songs that were viewed on a machine that was like a video juke box.
Jordan's tightly rehearsed stage routines were perfectly suited for the soundies format. His success in the soundies led to several roles in feature films. Movies such as "Follow the Boys," " Meet Miss Bobby Socks" and "Swing Parade of 1946" were not Oscar contenders, and the main function of the plot was to segué from one song to another. However, Jordan's energetic performances and dynamic personality were enough to carry the movies, and they were very popular.
Louis Jordan's private life was about as frenetic as his public life. He was married five times, sometimes wooing or even marrying the next wife before divorcing the previous one.
It was just such a situation that led to a sudden and nearly permanent set back to his success story. Jordan's third wife, Fleecie, suspected that he was not being true blue, so she took a butcher knife and proceeded to carve Louie into bits. Fortunately , he did recover after being laid up for awhile, and he bounced back with even more vigor than before, resuming his taxing schedule of traveling, performing and recording to the point of sheer exhaustion, until he finally had to start taking periodic rests.
Jordan's popularity and record sales stayed high well into the early 1950s, when the music that he had paved the way for helped to topple the reign of the "King of the Jukeboxes."
In 1953, Decca canceled Jordan's contract and replaced him with one of the first rock and roll artists, Bill Haley. Jordan did not give up; he continued performing and recording until his death 20 years later. The quality of his work never diminished. It was just that the preferences of the record buying audience changed.
Louis Jordan suffered a fatal heart attack in 1975. He is buried in the Mt. Olive Cemetery in Saint Louis.
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Last Modified 5 August '98