Like most people born in North America, I’ve had a relationship with Black music for as long as I can remember. But the question I posed before I sat down to write today’s essay was not which Black musician was my favorite, or even which one had the most influence on my life and thought. I was just trying to recall which Black musician was my first—the earliest really vivid memory of a Black performer.
I was at least eight or nine that day, visiting the flat that my father shared with his new wife (and possibly their newborn daughter, although this may have happened before my sister was born) in New Mexico. I think it stands out in my mind because it remains one of my happiest memories of that time of my life, not least because my father was happy on that day—in my scattered childhood memories he was often a sad or serious or angry man, so I learned to cherish his moments of joy very deeply.
I can’t say whether the music that was playing was the source of that joy, or merely a symptom—a record he wanted to hear because he was already in a good mood. All I know is that all of the sudden my father was bopping around the apartment, sashaying and snapping his fingers as he sang along to Fats Waller’s version of “Your Feet’s Too Big”—which went something like this.
I think it was the joy of the moment that burned the memory into my mind—and of course, the virtuoso piano performance and comedic timing that Waller was bringing to the table couldn’t have hurt. Almost 40 years later, I could still remember the way the song began:
“Say, up in Harlem at a table for two
There were four of us: me, your big feet, and you…”
For the sake of this essay, I decided to look for information to contextualize this recording. I already knew that there was an overflowing river of culture coming from North America in the 20th century, especially music, and I knew that 90% of the musical innovation of jazz, blues, gospel and rock originated in the African-American community. But where did Fats Waller fit into that history?
I tried to start at the beginning. The first commercial recording of an African-American singer was made in 1890, to capture the voice of a New York performer named George W. Johnson. But in the course of trying to learn about Johnson and other early Black recordings, I stumbled onto the existence of “Coon Songs”, racist parodies of Black music that were enormously popular as sheet music even before musical recordings were a common commercial product.
This was a dark and ugly rabbit-hole that I wasn’t prepared to write about, at least not today. So I skipped ahead, past the decades when early recording studios would hire White performers to record melodies and lyrics created by Black composers and poets. Then past the 1912 breakthrough when the Gramophone company standardized the playback speed for their phonograph recordings to 78 rpm, and began selling playback devices that defaulted to 78 rpm.
Finally I made it to 1920, when Okeh Records broke the color barrier. In spite of threats from Northern and Southern pressure groups who insisted that they would boycott the label if they recorded a Black singer, producer Fred Hager decided to make a record with a Black woman named Mamie Smith, who entered history as the first African-American Blues recording artist with her rendition of “Crazy Blues” and “It’s Right Here for You”. When those recordings sold a million copies in less than a year, the dam holding back Black musicians burst, and the market was soon flooded by an outpouring of Black talent in the form of “race records”—Black music written and performed by Black people, for what studios assumed was a Black audience.
Fats Waller was part of that flood, a child prodigy who had been playing the piano and the organ since the age of six. When his mother died in 1920, just as the first race records were being recorded, Fats was taken under the wing of the greatest pianist of the previous generation, James P. Johnson.
Johnson’s legacy and achievements as a performer and a composer could fill and have filled several books. The Cliff’s Notes version is this: he invented jazz piano as we know it, particularly the style called Stride Piano. His biography calls him “The Quiet Man Who Made the 20’s Roar”, and that label fits him well. He was the bridge between old and new, the last great master pianist of the ragtime era, and the first master of the jazz era. If you’ve ever seen a Hollywood movie about the 1920’s, you’ve heard his music—he wrote the musical Runnin Wild, including a song called “Charleston”, one of the most popular songs of the decade and by far the one song most likely to define that time period in the popular imagination.
There are many recordings of Johnson performing, both as a soloist and as a side man for some of the famous Blues performers of the era, notably Bessie Smith. But I was particularly delighted to stumble across this rare recording of a duet with Fats and his old sensei playing a duet in 1937. It’s just a couple of minutes, but the sense of fun that Fats brought to all his performances is there. It is that overflowing sense of humor and joy that made him a star, “the cheerful little earful” of jazz.
From my perspective, Johnson would have been important to history even if he had left us no legacy but Fats. It was thanks to his famous mentor that Fats got his first opportunities to record, first as an accompanist to Sara Martin in 1922, and then went on to become an accomplished and prolific recording artist in his own thereafter. Fats generally recorded several songs every year until his death in 1943. His first documented recording of his own composition is an organ piece from 1926, "Lennox Avenue Blues”, but he would copyright over 400 songs in his lifetime, many of them co-written with his closest collaborator, the composer and poet/lyricist Andy Razaf.
Andy Razaf described his long-time partner as "a bubbling bundle of joy", and looking back on that memory hearing his music for the first time, I would agree.
As soon as the needle touched the record and Fats Waller began to play, the spirit of joy had entered the room.
And needless to say, that spirit of joy was Black.
Resources:
Fats Waller (biography) by Maurice Waller
Jazz Life and Times: Fats Waller (biography) by Alyn Shipton
Jazz Standards: Biography of Andy Razaf
Library of Congress: African-Americans on Early Sound Recordings, 1892-1916