00 Blackbirds Notes.txt
LEW LESLIE'S BLACKBIRDS OF 1928
Columbia OL 6770, 1968
LP rip by Dick Baker, October 2009
SIDE ONE
1) BLACKBIRD MEDLEY:
I Can't Give You Anything but Love
Doin' the New Low Down
I Must Have That Man
Baby!
Dixie
Diga Diga Do
Porgy
I Can't Give You Anything But Love
DUKE ELLINGTON AND HIS FAMOUS ORCHESTRA.
Recorded 2/17/33, mx B 13079-B; B 13080-B. Previously unissued take of Brunswick 6516. (6:08)
2) I CAN'T GIVE YOU ANYTHING BUT LOVE
ETHEL WATERS WITH DUKE ELLINGTON AND HIS FAMOUS ORCHESTRA. Recorded 12/22/32, mx B 12783-A, Brunswick 6517. (3:03)
3) DOIN' THE NEW LOW DOWN
MILLS BROTHERS, CAB CALLOWAY WITH DON REDMAN AND HIS ORCHESTRA. Recorded 12/29/32, mx 12811-A, Brunswick 6517. (3:05)
4) I MUST HAVE THAT MAN
ADELAIDE HALL WITH DUKE ELLINGTON AND HIS FAMOUS ORCHESTRA. Recorded 1/7/33, mx B 12773-C, Brunswick 651 B. (3:07)
5) I MUST HAVE THAT MAN
ADELAIDE HALL WITH DUKE ELLINGTON AND HIS FAMOUS ORCHESTRA. Recorded 1/7/33, mx B 12773-D. Previously unissued take of Brunswick 6518. (3:07)
6) BABY!
ADELAIDE HALL WITH DUKE ELLINGTON AND HIS FAMOUS ORCHESTRA. Recorded 12/21/32, mx B 12774-A. Previously unissued take of Brunswick 6518. (3:04)
SIDE TWO
1) DIGA DIGA DO
MILLS BROTHERS WITH DUKE ElLINGTON AND HIS FAMOUS ORCHESTRA. Recorded 12/22/32, mx B 127Bl-A, Brunswick 6519. (3:04)
2) I CAN'T GIVE YOU ANYTHING BUT LOVE
MILLS BROTHERS (Four Boys and a Guitar). Recorded 12/22/32, mx B 127B2-A, Brunswick 6519. (2:42)
3) DOIN' THE NEW LOW DOWN
BILL ROBINSON WITH DON REDMAN AND HIS ORCHESTRA. Recorded 12/29/32, mx B 12810-A, Brunswick 6520. (2:30)
4) SHUFFLE YOUR FEET (AND JUST ROLL ALONG)
BANDANNA BABIES
DON REDMAN AND HIS ORCHESTRA WITH HARRY AND DONALD MILLS (of the Mills Brothers). Recorded 2/2/33, mx B 13007-A, Brunswick 6520. (2:42)
5) PORGY
ETHEL WATERS WITH DUKE ElLINGTON AND HIS FAMOUS ORCHESTRA. Recorded 12/22/32, mx B 12784-A, Brunswick 6521. (3:09)
6) ST. LOUIS BLUES
CECIL MACK CHOIR WITH ETHEL WATERS. Recorded 12/23/32, mx B 12790-A, Brunswick 6521. (3:18)
7) EXPLOITATION RECORD
DOROTHY FIELDS, JIMMY McHUGH, INTRODUCED BY JACK KAPP. Recorded 2/21/33, mx B 13099-A (previously unissued). (2:08)
All selections composed by Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh, except "St. Louis Blues," which was written by W. C. Handy.
Nowadays, a Broadway musical is expected to be a creature of logic, with characters and situations that are vaguely credible and story lines that might have awed Eugene O'Neill. In fact, today's producers and critics alike seem to think that the book of a musical is more important than the music itself. This is a far cry from the Broadway of the 1920s, when Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Vincent Youmans, Richard Rodgers, Sigmund Romberg, Rudolf Friml and Cole Porter were pouring out their melodies faster than the public could savor them.
Those were the days when people went to musicals to hear music. One style of music that stood apart from all the others found its soul not in Tin Pan Alley, but up above 125th Street in Harlem. This was the all-Negro revue, performed and usually written entirely by Negroes. The show that set the style and took Broadway by storm was Shuffle Along, which opened on May 23, 1921, at the 63rd Street Music Hall. With a score by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake and a loosely constructed book by the comedy team of Miller and Lyles, Shuffle Along brought Harlem jazz downtown and lit up a fairly dull theater season with its hot rhythms, frantic dancing, knockabout humor and a lovely score featuring that novelty favorite, "I'm Just Wild About Harry." Before Shuffle Along bade farewell to Broadway, it had chalked up the incredible total of 504 performances, which would compare with about 3,000 performances today.
Shuffle Along inspired many followers. First came Edith Wilson in Put and Take (8/23/21) at Town Hall; then Creamer and Layton's Strut Miss Lizzie (6/19/22) with Hamtree Harrington and Cora Green; the Plantation Revue (7/17/22) with Shelton Brooks (composer of "Some of These Days" and "The Darktown Strutters' Ball"), Will Vodery, Edith Wilson and Florence Mills; followed by Liza (11/27/22) and How Come? [4/16/23).
James P. Johnson and Andy Razaf's Runnin' Wild (10/29/23) gave the world its perennial palpitating dance craze, the "Charleston," introduced by Elizabeth Welsh in a cast including Miller and Lyles and Adelaide Hall. Other scores by Sissle and Blake, Porter Grainger, Freddie Johnson, C. Luckyeth Roberts, Clarence Williams, Ford Dabney, Fats Waller and others introduced a covey of now-standard jazz tunes, including "Ain't Misbehavin'." Among the celebrated Negro headliners were Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Monette Moore, Josephine Baker, Valaida Snow, Eva Taylor, Sara Martin, Alberta Perkins, Mae Barnes, Evelyn Preer, Daniel Haynes, Jabbo Smith, Tim Moore, James Baskette, Lena Wilson and countless others, who appeared as welcome bursts of vitality and high style, usually during Broadway's lagging hot summer months.
Some of the productions were out-and-out revues, with no story whatever; while others managed to invent a slight thread of a story from which to suspend the songs and dances. As these shows designed more and more primarily for white audiences, most of the humor fell into predictable stereotypical gags about gambling, knife wielding, crooked politicians and spooky graveyards at night. In other words, they presented the Negro as white audiences of the period preferred to see him: ignorant, but full of hell.
If this type of musical seems riddled with condescension from today's point of view, certainly no one in the 1920s ever thought so, or at least said so in print. These musicals were cheerfully patronized by white and black audiences alike, for they provided some of the best entertainment of the era. This album presents the score of one of the best of these shows, Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1928.
* * *
Lew Leslie was a familiar figure on both sides of the Atlantic during the 1920s. His first major Broadway production, Dixie to Broadway, in 1924, made a star of Florence Mills, a piquant pixie whose bright and innocent charm bewitched theatergoers. In September 1926, Leslie introduced Miss Mills to London in a revue called Blackbirds, at the Hippodrome. A few months later, he starred her at the posh Parisian night spot, Les Ambassadeurs, on a bill with Paul Whiteman. For almost two years, Leslie collected a coterie of some of the most sophisticated Negro performers of the time, generally shuttling them between London and Paris in various editions of the Blackbirds. Mabel Mercer, Edith Wilson, Aida Ward, Johnny Hudgins, Cora Green, Johnny Dunn and Will Vodery were among his staples.
Leslie planned a triumphant return to Broadway, with Florence Mills at the helm of his skillful stock company; but on November 1, 1927, Miss Mills, having just returned to New York, suddenly passed away.
Although deeply shaken by the loss of this lovely performer, Leslie continued his plans for a Broadway edition of Blackbirds by engaging the young, white songwriting team of Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields, who were composing material for the Cotton Club. They had written some numbers also for Harry Delmar's Revels (11/28/27), which was Bert Lahr's first Broadway appearance; but their songs were dropped prior to the opening. One of them, "I Can't Give You Anything but Love, Lindy," an ode to Charles A. Lindbergh, was destined to become better known after a slight revision in its title.
Leslie first tried out his American Blackbirds as a floor show in the New York Les Ambassadeurs, on 57th Street, where it made quite a hit with the town's Smart Set. To replace Florence Mills, he raised Aida Ward from featured to top billing, which she shared with Adelaide Hall, who was given the torchy numbers. Comedy honors went to Tim Moore, known to television audiences of a later generation as Kingfish on the Amos 'n' Andy show.
"I Can't Give You Anything but Love, Lindy" was resurrected and became the big love song of the score, when the word "Lindy" was replaced with "baby." There had been a song simply called "Baby!"; and when it was dropped from the score, the word became available for use in the other title. Although "Baby!" was dropped early in production, and of course never reached Broadway, it was published, rather widely recorded, and is heard on this album.
After its nightclub engagement, Blackbirds went through the normal routine of pre-Broadway tryouts. While playing at Nixon's Apollo in Atlantic City during the last week of April 1928, it was decided that the evening required an extra bit of flash in the "eleven o'clock spot" toward the end of the second act. It was then that Bill "Bojangles" Robinson was recruited at the last minute from vaudeville to make his Broadway debut.
When the show opened a week later on May 9, 1928, at the Liberty Theatre on 42nd Street, the critics hailed Bojangles's one and only number, a hot specialty dance called "Doin' the New Low Down." Describing this moment in the show, Alexander Woollcott of the World wrote, "A sleek, pleased young man about Harlem named Bill Robinson walks nattily on, and, after bowing right and left in response to the huzzas of a seemingly enormous following, proceeds to justify and increase them by dancing as expert and tickling and delightful a tap dance as you may ever hope to see or hear. There is no sound in all the noisy, flagrant evening which approaches in gaiety and infectiousness the neat confiding whisper of his gifted shoon to that delighted stage."
Brooks Atkinson described the comedy aspect of the proceedings. "Even in what is supposedly an authentic Negro entertainment the comedians appear in blackface. Tim Moore, whose wild talk and wild lunges supply most of the fun, puts on his make-up according to form, and his enormous mouth opens capaciously between streaks of light tan color. As a blustering uptown bully he puts a good deal of fun into a burlesque boxing match. With three other players, none of them slaves to card etiquette, he feels his way cautiously through a Harlem poker game. When he sees a dancing skeleton in a graveyard, the look or horror, gradually turning to terror, in his eyes makes for eloquent Negro comedy. Such humor as Blackbirds of 1928 affords comes chiefly from Tim Moore's threatening personality and robust physiognomy, and Mantan Moreland's nervous card-concealing art in the poker game."
Unlike many Negro revues, Blackbirds did not emphasize brightly colorful scenery. Variety's review mentions: "As to production it is nearly nil, drapes constituting the principal stage dress. Blackbirds depends on its players and numbers."
In truth, Blackbirds did not open to unanimous raves. The reviews were quite mixed, with waggish Woollcott on the bleak side calling it "just a third-rate Broadway musical show, tinted brown"; while the equally astute Burns Mantle of the Daily News took the opposite stand: Mr. Leslie's Blackbirds is, I think, the best of the black revues of recent seasons. A large, swiftly moving, panoramic entertainment, dotted with talent and never permitted to sink into sluggish attempts at wit in imitation of the whites."
Although the production was successful from the start, it turned into a major hit when Leslie instituted a series of Thursday midnight performances. These were usually attended by the stars of other Broadway shows; and the public flocked to see not only Blackbirds but the stars in the audience as well. Before the show departed its berth during the summer of 1929, to begin a long tour on the road, it had managed to reach a then-astronomical run of 518 performances, beating Shuffle Along's record of 504 performances, and thereby becoming the longest-running Negro musical in all theater history. It gave the world one of the most popular songs ever written, "I Can't Give You Anything but Love," and made stars of Bill Robinson and Adelaide Hall, he in Hollywood, and she in London theaters and clubs. Moreover, it established Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh in the top rank of American songwriters, a position which each maintains till this day.
* * * By the 1930s, the public began to weary of the rather ritual all-Negro revue, partially because of social changes, and partially because the shows became virtually indistinguishable from each other. Except for Marc Connelly's The Green Pastures (2/26/30), a dramatic pageant about the Bible, with the Hall Johnson Choir providing a background of spirituals, the most important Negro productions of the decade were actually operas. First came Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts (2/20/34), a gossamer fantasy about Spanish saints which was actually the very first opera ever presented for a regular long-run engagement on Broadway. This was followed a year later by the celebrated folk opera Porgy and Bess (10/10/35), a financial failure at first, but which in its many revivals and tours brought generations of the greatest Negro singers to the farthest reaches of the globe.
In later years, Billy Rose produced Oscar Hammerstein's Negro version of Carmen, Carmen Jones (12/2/43); and Harold Arlen composed several shows using casts either completely or largely composed of Negroes: St. Louis Woman (3/30/46); House of Flowers (12/30/54) and Jamaica (10/31/57). It was in Jamaica, incidentally, that Adelaide Hall made her return to Broadway in a supporting role.
Just when it seemed that the all-Negro musical had withered away, David Merrick surprised everyone by recasting Hello, Dolly! in mid-run with a colored cast headed by Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway (12/12/67). The dazzling reviews and the public's enthusiasm are a strangely solitary link to a theatrical form that once flourished along the Gay White Way.
* * *ABOUT THE RECORDING
In 1928, selections from Blackbirds were widely recorded by most of the major labels. Jack Kapp, Brunswick's recording director, was particularly fond of the score and brought into the studios some of the original cast members: Adelaide Hall, Bill Robinson, Elizabeth Welsh, and the original theater orchestra. The result was four 78 rpm single records of most of the leading numbers except, strangely, the biggest hit of the show, "I Can't Give You Anything but Love."
During the summer of 1932, Kern and Hammerstein's Show Boat was enjoying a successful Broadway revival; and Kapp decided to do something which, up to that time, never had been attempted: to produce under one cover an album of selections from a Broadway musical. For his Show Boat album, Kapp signed Helen Morgan and Paul Robeson, who were appearing in the production; and James Melton, Frank Munn, Olga Albani, and Victor Young's Orchestra, all of whom were standard recording artists for Brunswick. The resulting album of four 12" 78s, although containing only a handful of songs from the score, was so successful that it remained in print (first on Brunswick and later on Columbia) from 1932 to 1946.
Next, Kapp decided to re-record Blackbirds in an album that would contain not only most of the songs, but the greatest array of Negro artists available. He selected his personnel from three sources: 1) members of the original 1928 Blackbirds cast (Adelaide Hall and Bill Robinson); 2) those who had appeared in the sequel Blackbirds of 1930 (Ethel Waters and the Cecil Mack Choir); and 3) standard recording artists under contract to Brunswick (Duke Ellington, the Mills Brothers, Cab Calloway and Don Redman).
To accommodate the varied professional commitments of all these top-flight performers, it was necessary to spread out the recording sessions over a two-month period, unlike today's show album, which is usually recorded all in one day. The completed set of six 10" 78s was a far more comprehensive survey of the score than the Show Boat album had been, for it contained at least one version of every song in the Blackbirds score except for "Magnolia's Wedding Day"; and it restored "Baby!" (which had been cut from the score) for good measure.
The running order of the original album has been retained on this reissue, though several variant takes have been used. In addition, the two halves of the opening medley, originally issued on both sides of a 78, have been combined. This union enhances the circular construction of the medley, which both opens and closes with "I Can't Give You Anything but Love." Instead of take "A," which had originally been used, this reissue uses the variant "B" version, here released for the first time.
Similarly, Adelaide Hall's "Baby!" is the "A" take (recorded 12/21/32), instead of the previously issued "C" take (recorded 1/7/33). It was felt that the "A" version is freer and has the additional interest of a short vocal introduction missing on the standard take. Those interested in Miss Hall's improvisatory style will note that in addition to the standard "C" take of "I Must Have That Man," we have issued for the first time a "D" take for comparison.
As a special bonus, this reissue also contains a most nostalgic and amusing exploitation record, pressed originally only for dealers and those in the trade. It is the voice of Jack Kapp, introducing the composers in a delightful musical "plug" for the album. As recordings by Broadway songwriters are far too few anyway, this is a most unusual and charming contribution to the field.
While listening to this album, it is interesting to remember that an Adelaide Hall number follows an Adelaide Hall number, a Mills Brothers tune another by the same group; because these selections originally backed each other on the reverse sides of the same 78. Thus a condition imposed by the marketing requirements of 1933 today provides a novel "spotlight" for some of the artists.
Here then is Columbia's 40th anniversary reissue of a historical album from one of Broadway's best loved revues.
Notes by Miles Kreuger
March 8, 1968
* * *PERSONNEl OF DUKE ELLINGTON'S ORCHESTRA
Trumpets: Arthur Whetsel, Cootie Williams, Freddie Jenkins
Trombones: Joe Nanton, Laurence Brown, Juan Tizol
Clarinet: Barney Bigard
Soprano/Alto Sax: Johnny Hodges
Alto/Baritone Sax: Otto Hardwicke
Clarinet/Alto/Baritone Sax: Harry Carney
Piano: Duke Ellington
Guitar: Fred Guy
String Bass: Wellman Braud
Drums: Sonny Greer
(There is a slight variation of personnel from session to session.)
PERSONNEL OF DON REDMAN'S ORCHESTRA
Trumpets: Langston Curl, Shirely Clay, Sidney de Paris
Trombones: Claude Jones, Fred Robinson, Benny Morton
Clarinets/Alto Sax: Edward Inge, Rupert Cole
Clarinet/Alto Sax: Don Redman
Tenor Sax: Robert Carroll
Piano: Horace Henderson or Don Kirkpatrick
Banjo: Talcott Reeves
Brass Bass/String Bass: Bob Ysaguirre
Drums: Manzie Johnson
* * *BLACKBIRDS RECORDING SESSIONS
*Take numbers originally released on 78s.
**Take numbers included in this reissue.
It is quite likely that additional takes were recorded, but these are the only ones which have been verified. The performers on each title are indicated by their initials in parentheses.
12/21/32 Adelaide Hall, Ellington's Orch.
B 12773-A, B I Must Have That Man (AH EO)
B 12774-A**, B Babv! (AH EO)
12/22/32 Mills Bros., Ethel Waters, Ellington's Orch.
B 1278l-A*** Diga Diga Do (MB EO)
B 12782-A*** I Can't Give You Anything but Love (MB)
B 12783-A*** I Can't Give You Anything but Love (EW EO)
B 12784-A*** Porgy (EW EO)
12/23/32 Cecil Mack Choir, Ethel Waters
B 12790-1A*** St. Louis Blues (CMC EW)
12/29/32 Bill Robinson, Mills Bros., Cab Callaway, Redman's Orch.
B 128l0-A*** Doin' the New Low Down (BR RO)
B 128ll-A***, B Doin' the New Low Down (MB CC, RO)
1/7/33 Adelaide Hall, Ellington's Orch.
B 12773-C***, B** I Must Have That Man (AH EO)
B 12774-C***, D Baby! (AH EO)
2/2/33 Harry and Donald Mills, Redman's Orch.
B 13007-A*** Shuffle Your Feet/Bandanna Babies (HDM RO)
B 13010-A Shuffle Your Feet/Bandanna Babies (HDM RO)
2/17/33 Ellington's Orch.
B 13079-A*, B** Blackbird Medley (Part One) (EO)
B 13080-A*, B**, C Blackbird Medley (Part Two) (EO)
2/21/33 Jack Kapp, Dorothy Fields, Jimmy McHugh
B 13099-A** Exploitation Record (JK DF JMH)
Mono OL 6770
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