By Peter Gerler
Riverside Blues, King Oliver – 1923
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_WbQYdQty0
(video by Bob Erwig)
Once when I was eleven, I was sitting on the floor of our wood-paneled den listening to the stereo, when my father walked in. He went to a cabinet and brought out a yellow-labeled 45 single that said Riverside Blues by Doc Evans and his Dixieland Band. I put the record on, and it engraved an impression, as might the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. I had never heard anything like it.
Or so I thought, until thirty-five years later when I heard the tune’s original pressing, by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, from October 1923. Oliver’s Okeh cut of Riverside Blues opened as a choir of horns singing into the wind. The summoning cornets, deep-slide trombone, siren-like clarinet and inexorable rhythm might have come from a cathedral.
Around the time of Evans’ birth, a 22-year-old Joseph Oliver began troubling the waters along the Mississippi, in uptown New Orleans, where the sanctified churches had picked up the plantation ring shout music and the parade bands marched the hymns.
But Joe Oliver’s loose tone brought him grief; he couldn’t get a handle on his volume. The Eagles sent him home. His slide-trombone friend Kid Ory said about him, “You can tame an elephant down if you got the patience.” He began to stick things into the bell of his cornet—bottles, cups, cans, kazoos—anything to mute the sound—which made a different sound. Pretty soon, Joe’s horn began “talking.” They said he could hold a conversation with you.
His conversation spoke of the universal condition of beaten down and lifted up, loss and redemption, the light inside and the one on the horizon. It spoke of what W.E.B Dubois called the “sorrow songs,” and of the blues. From the unremitting swing of Joe Oliver’sRiverside Blues emerged a joyful acceptance.
He played that way in New Orleans until 1918, in taxi-dance halls where the guttural clarinetist Johnny Dodds feared passing the hat “because he did not have the ‘gift of gab’ to counter the insults and gibes made by the white customers.” Oliver himself was funny about his dark color. Clyde Bernhardt, a later sideman, recalled “When he see somebody real dark he strike a match and whisper, ‘Who dat out dare? What dat movin?’ All that kind of stuff. Everybody laugh and he laugh the loudest.”
For four years he gigged mostly around Chicago when, in 1922, he brought out a sprung-from-the-swamp flock of mostly Crescent City “musicianers” who, said their drummer, Warren “Baby” Dodds, “had known each other so long we felt that we were almost related. That outfit had more harmony and feeling of brotherly love than any I ever worked with.” At the Lincoln Gardens over on Chicago’s South side, the music of King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band was described as “hypnosis at first hearing.”
The group included a 21-year-old Louis Armstrong, whom Oliver had “adopted” and mentored back in the Crescent City. Before Louis had left New Orleans to join the Creole Band in 1922, he had taken over his mentor’s chair in Kid Ory’s greased-and-running band and worked two years in Fate Marable’s tightly disciplined riverboat orchestra. In Chicago, it became immediately obvious that it was Louis—fifteen years Joe’s junior–who had the playing power.
They recorded Riverside Blues in Chicago on October 26, 1923, for the Okeh label. They had already cut some 27 previous sides that year, the early ones at Gennett’s bootstrapped studios in Richmond, Indiana. There, working against the pounding of passing trains and the weight of heat needed to soften the wax masters, Louis stood in the back so as not to overpower his mentor’s playing. (They might have all stood “in the back,” since Richmond was a center of Klan activity.)
The tune had come from two minds, the first belonging to Joe’s New Orleans friend Richard M. Jones. One night in 1911, a 26-year-old Oliver had played to an empty house at Abadie’s Café in the red light “Storyville” district. Fed up, he stepped into the street, opened into a Bb blues and pied-pipered the crowd out of Pete Lala’s café, a block down. His musical nemesis, Freddie Keppard, had been leading the band there that night.
Richard Jones had been Joe’s leader at Abadie’s. In Chicago, it was Jones who brought the Oliver band into Gennett, and probably later into Okeh. Under his own name, Jones would later release a barrelhouse take of Riverside Blues, titled 29th and Dearborn. He would also compose the evergreen Trouble in Mind.
Likely the chief composer of Riverside Blues, Thomas A. Dorsey had taken the blues from his native Georgia rent parties and bordellos and brought them to Chicago as the jazz age settled in. His soulful, slow-drag style could bring church-like release to late-night dancers in the town’s “buffet flats.” Following his later work with Ma Rainey, Dorsey would found the American gospel music movement, writing Take My Hand, Precious Lord and Peace in the Valley—recorded many years later by Elvis Presley.
In fact Riverside Blues resembles a sanctified church sermon, the preacher issuing a battle cry, supplicants confessing, the house rocking with old-time call and response–and in the end, Armstrong’s evolved cornet sounding victory, as if for all time.
Paramount Records would cut the tune again, to lesser effect, the day before Christmas, 1923. It would be the Creole Band’s last recording. Fifteen years later and seven months after Louis Armstrong’s band played the 2200-seat Savannah Municipal Auditorium, Joe Oliver died sick, broke, and alone in that decorous city.
