The Godfather of R&B
“How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible...”― William Gaddis
“Johnny Otis had class,” that is what Sugar Pie DeSanto had to say about the man who named her and brought her to the big time.
Born 100 years ago today, Johnny Otis left a huge mark on music, being a true Renaissance man of the mid-20th century sound machine….composing, singing, djing, band-leading, talent scouting, club-owning….doing all of it extraordinarily well and with a prophetic vision. Called The Godfather of Rhythm and Blues, he helped define the movement with records like the Willie and the Hand Jive, the genre Bending Mambo Boogie (the first R&B Mambo recording), and Rockin’ Blues (and so many others). His band was a whose-who of the biggest sensations on the charts: Wynonie Harris, Charles Brown, Illinois Jacquet, and Little Esther. He discovered Etta James (check out an early recording, Dance With Me Henry), Sugar Pie, the colossal Saxman Big Jay McNeeley, Johnny Ace (check out Pledging My Love, with Otis on vibraphone), Jackie Wilson and Big Mama Thornton, to name a few. For Thornton he produced and played drums on the original recording of Hound Dog. Rock ‘n’ Roll, beta edition.
It is mind numbing to think about everything Otis was involved in during his lifetime, a career that went from the mid-30s with his first band, The West Oakland House Rockers, formed after ditching Berkeley High School, til the mid-90s, with a band featuring his grand children who would play outside the Johnny Otis Market he owned in Sebastopol, CA (he was a Northern Californian through and through).
I spoke to legendary Chess recording artist Sugar Pie Desanto yesterday about Johnny Otis. She was at her home in Oakland, getting ready for the release of her new album. At 86, she was radiating with the energy she is famous for, reminiscing about her time with Otis:
“It was 1954. I won the weekly talent show at the Ellis Theater in San Francisco. Johnny came up to me after the show and chose me—out of all the entertainers in the show—he chose me to go to LA and make a record. He said, ‘You are going to Los Angeles and make a record.’ I was flabbergasted so I said to him, ‘You talking to me?’ I thought he was a nutter. But he loved the entertainer I was (and still am). I thought he was trying to be fresh. But he wasn’t.
Johnny had an idea of a sound for me—not the sound I had been building in Oakland with my husband at the time Pee Wee (Kingsley). But he had an idea for a record. I walked into the studio in Los Angeles. I was surprised at all the musicians who were there. It is not like it is today…back then all the musicians were in the studio together, recording together. It was overwhelming for me…such a huge band…I had never done that kind of recording. I was so little, they had to make a pile of books for me to stand on to reach the microphone. I recorded Please Be True at this session as well as a duet with a guy named Hank.
While in the studio, Johnny looked at me and said, we cannot put no Peylia on a record (that was my original first name) so we are going to give you a new name. You are only 80 pounds but you got a big voice. You look like a little sugar pie, we’ll call you Sugar Pie.
He gave me the big time for the first time. He and his wife…they were cool. Whatever you needed, he would look out for you.”
Otis really did look after and celebrate the musicians he discovered and worked with. In 1970 he recorded a concert in Monterey featuring most of the living hitmakers of the rhythm and blues era of the 50s: Roy Milton, Roy Brown, Big Joe Turner, Little Esther, Ivory Joe Hunter….some of these cats had not played in front of a large audience in years. Otis led the band through an incredible all-star set celebrating the sound he helped create. He continued the goodness through the label he launched in the 70s, Blues Spectrum, which gave a recording and distribution outlet to the same aforementioned legends and more.
And with all that, Otis was kept up his own prolific recording gait, releasing one of my favorites of his later-period records in 1969, the nutso, brilliant, XXX-rated Snatch and the Poontangs. With his sons in tow, the guitar impresario Shuggie Otis and Nicky Otis on drum, Johnny just kept making record after record, through the 1980s, always experimenting, always with flair.
Otis died right after turning 90, in 2012, leaving a legacy that is hard to be matched (we have not even touched upon all the songs he wrote that became huge hits for other artists or the radio programs he produced through the decades). Happy 100th birthday to Johnny Otis, The Godfather of Rhythm and Blues and the mastermind of the popular music scene that ushered in Rock n Roll.
The program Night Train on KMUW Wichita will have an hour celebration of Otis’ music tonight and EMBCA will be hosting a discussion on his life on January 9, 2022 at 2 P.M. EST / 9 P.M
Poinsettia: How a U.S. Diplomat Made a Mexican Flower an International Favorite
Yes, it was Joel Poinsett who gifted the world the flower he brought back from Mexico (thus the “Euphorbia Poinsettia”). It has since become a holiday sensation….and no, I don’t get it. But before the Bah Humbug echoes through this page, I will say that the story of how it erupted into the Western public consciousness and became such a tradition is a great one. The article does not go into the mass killing of Poinsettias soon after the holiday season is done, year after year. That, I guess, is a story for another time.
Alvin Lucier, Composer At The Intersection Of Science And Sound, Dead At 90
Alvin Lucier passed away earlier this month. One of the pioneers in sound experimentation, his piece I Am Sitting In A Room is so ahead of its time…transformative and influential: it is almost dwarfed by the electronic/ambient era it helped usher in. Be good to yourself and take the time to listen to the whole piece. Be patient with it, it will bring you to alien lands from a very human place. The Wire celebrated Lucier’s life by making available an interview they ran in 2004…it is a great read that I suggest digging into while listening to another of his legendary soundscape projects, Music On A Long Thin Wire.
Yayoi Kusama’s Fascination with Nature Is Crucial to Understanding Her Art
“Legendary artist Yayoi Kusama is a global sensation. She has paved the way for Minimalism, Pop art, performance art, and immersive art installations…Although much has been written about Kusama’s popular “Infinity Nets,” her critically acclaimed “Infinity Mirror Rooms,” her mental illness, and even her rise to stardom, the artist’s eternal fascination with nature is an essential aspect of her prolific career that often goes unexplored.”
Falling Stars
By: Rainer Maria Rilke
Do you remember still the falling stars
that like swift horses through the heavens raced
and suddenly leaped across the hurdles
of our wishes—do you recall? And we
did make so many! For there were countless numbers
of stars: each time we looked above we were
astounded by the swiftness of their daring play,
while in our hearts we felt safe and secure
watching these brilliant bodies disintegrate,
knowing somehow we had survived their fall.
Translated by Albert Ernest Flemming
Johnny Otis! Johnny Otis! Yeah Johnny! My GodFather- I roadied for many years including Monterey. Brought him the records to play on his Sunday night radio show. What a band; what a leader, Johnny stopped Jim Wynn mid solo during rehearsal “This is rock and roll, not jazz!” You hear that trademark vibes and you know it’s a JO recording. He was a longtime Watts resident when we worked together- discovered talent at the Watts Barrelhouse club that he ran. EMBCA celebrating Johnny’s Greek heritage- cool. Must give it a listen. But when Johnny talked about Afro Americans it was “us” and “we.”
It was great to encounter the piece highlighting Alvin Lucier in the blog. I first met Alvin when I interviewed for my tenure track job as an ethnomusicologist at Wesleyan University. Alvin would ask all candidates who their favorite ‘modern’ composer was, and he routinely dismissed anyone who came up with a typical university music curriculum stand-by (Stravinsky or Schoenberg, for ex.). Instead, I got into it with him, talking about my appreciation of some so-called mystics (Pärt or Taverner), conceptual artists like himself, minimalists, and then challenging the separation of art music and music theatre, rock and pop composition…
In any case, he didn’t veto me, and starting in 1990 I ended up working just down the hall from (we were separated by Anthony Braxton, another extraordinary and unique musical genius!). To my thinking, he was one of the ‘Yankee’ artists at Wesleyan – a kind of New England brand of experimentalists from the days that John Cage was there in the ‘60s. It was a music department with no “normative” music (i.e. classical!) – it was a mix of anthropologists, experimentalist composers, ethnomusicologists and performers. It was an amazing and inspiring context to be working on music in the broadest sense—studying, performing, composing music from all over the world and from any era, and for a long time Alvin was the heart a sould of the composition program.
I seldom saw Alvin smile – he had a somewhat serious, even dour, demeanor, and he couldn’t stand pretense or bs. But he had such an uncompromising vision and he imparted that to generations of students as a compositional pedagogue. And he was really quite kind, generous, and humble … gentle.
One of my favorite memories of Alvin came from a presentation he did at the weekly music colloquium. He had a close friend in the artist Sol LeWitt. LeWitt is best-known for massive murals for which he creates a “score” only to have others enact the work. LeWitt had sent a postcard from Europe featuring an Alpine landscape, which Alvin turned into a score, which then became the subject of a LeWitt painting, and back and forth they went inspiring each other, working at the fruitful intersection of visual, sonic and conceptual art. Even late in his life he was always inspired by ideas and by sound.