Where Dead Voices Gather by Nick Tosches

Author:Nick Tosches
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780316077149
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

There ain’t a high-brown gal in town

who wouldn’t throw her cracker papa down

to be the bride of this colored Romeo.

In addition to its American release, “Lovin’ Sam” was released in England, coupled with “St. Louis Blues,” on the Parlophone label. British Parlophone here seems to have perceived Miller as black: the record bears the imprint “Race Series (The Negro and His Music),” with “St. Louis Blues” designated as Number 21 in this series, “Lovin’ Sam” as Number 22.

“Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now),” another Yellen-Ager song, had been previously recorded by Miller in 1925. Since then, the song’s popularity had inspired the blackface act of Sweet William and Bad Bill, the names under which William LaMaire and John Swor, a brother of Bert Swor, recorded for Brunswick-Balke-Collender in 1927.

“The Ghost of the St. Louis Blues” was a new song by Billy Curtis and J. Russel Robinson, a former associate of W. C. Handy. Here Miller was joined by Phil Pavey, who had sung harmony with him in the Field Minstrels. Pavey in February of this year had made his own records for Okeh: “Utah Mormon Blues” and three other titles. On them, he may have been accompanied by the New Orleans–born pianist Spencer Williams (1889–1965), who was credited as the co-author of three songs in the Miller repertoire: “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” “I Ain’t Gonna Give Nobody None o’ This Jelly Roll,” and “The Blues Singer (from Alabam’).”

Williams was indicted and tried for murder following a deadly stabbing in Harlem in 1931. From the New York Times, November 18 of that year:

“Spencer Williams, a Negro songwriter whose compositions include ‘I Ain’t Got Nobody’ and ‘The Birth of the Blues,’ was held without bail in Homicide Court yesterday for a hearing next Tuesday charged with homicide in connection with the fatal stabbing of Harold Bakay, a Harlem night club dancer, at 131st Street and Seventh Avenue on November 7. The stabbing, the police said, followed an altercation between the two men over a girl dancer. Williams is 38 [sic] years old and lives at 400 West 153d [sic] Street.”

Upon his acquittal, Williams left America for Europe, where he lived, first for almost twenty years in London, then in Stockholm from 1951 until 1957. Returning to America, he made his home in the black community of St. Albans, Queens, where the already forgotten R&B shouter Wynonie Harris then made his home. It was eight years later, at Hillcrest Hospital in Flushing, Queens, that Williams died in the summer of 1965, the summer of the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” the summer of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.”

“The Ghost of the St. Louis Blues” would have the most diverse release of Miller’s records: in addition to its original Okeh release, it would be issued on the American and British Parlophone labels, on the French and Australian Odeon labels.

The seventh session took place a week later, on September 12, 1929, when Gene Krupa replaced Stan King on drums. Born in 1909, Krupa was the youngest of the Georgia Crackers.

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