Louis Jordan

Musician

• Born: July 8, 1908
• Birthplace: Brinkley, Arkansas
• Died: February 4, 1975
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

American jazz saxophonist, singer, and composer

An originator of rhythm and blues, Jordan became one of its most popular singers and bandleaders in the 1940’s.

Member of The Tympany Five

The Life

Louis Thomas Jordan (zhohr-DAHN) was the son of James and Adell Jordan. His mother died early in his childhood, and his father, a musician, encouraged him to practice music at a young age. Louis developed quickly as a reed player, working professionally in his early teens with a group called the Rabbit Foot Minstrels. Jordan was inspired by an even younger saxophonist, Lester Young.

Jordan performed with bands in the South and later in Philadelphia and in New York City. From 1936 to 1938, he played saxophone and sang with Chick Webb’s nationally famous band, where he befriended the band’s lead singer, Ella Fitzgerald. Jordan had already been married twice (and he would have three more wives), and Webb feared that Jordan’s romance with Fitzgerald would impede the organization, so he fired Jordan. He soon formed his own small band, the Tympany Five, which blossomed in the 1940’s, when Jordan also sang and played in a number of Hollywood motion pictures. Although he continued to perform, his success dwindled. After a heart attack in 1974, he died in February, 1975.

The Music

Jordan’s career up to 1938 had been with minstrel, blues, and jazz organizations, but he was a dynamic stage performer who needed a group to enhance his work. He selected the members of his Tympany Five carefully, and he rehearsed the group (which sometimes had six or seven members) exactingly to fulfill that opportunity. Through the early 1940’s, the music business referred to his style as race music, but he also attracted white audiences. Later his type of music, which stressed driving rhythms, highly syncopated vocals, comical lyrics, and urban themes, was designated rhythm-and-blues.

“G. I. Jive.”Johnny Mercer wrote a song that expressed the frustrations of Army life, recorded it himself, and later suggested that Jordan also record it. After the Tympany Five had played it on stage for several months, the group recorded it, its shuffle rhythm a carryover from many arrangements of previous blues. The humor of its lyrics and its repeated refrain ending in “Fall on your bunk—clunk!” suited Jordan’s lively style. The recording topped the rhythm-and-blues popularity charts for six weeks in 1944.

“Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby.”Popular music had a long history of employing “ain’t,” once an acceptable contraction of “I am not,” and this, coupled an ungrammatical title, made the 1944 song irresistible to rhythm-and-blues fans and to the larger popular audience. The theme of a girlfriend who may not be true had become a common topic in a precarious urban culture.

“Stone Cold Dead in the Market.”Over the years Jordan performed many duets with Fitzgerald. This song by Wilmoth Houdini was composed as a calypso, a form already familiar to Jordan and Fitzgerald. The recording was made in 1946, two or three years before Harry Belafonte and other performers created a calypso craze. It describes an unhappy woman killing the man in her life with her rolling pin. Fitzgerald spoke for the murderer; Jordan was a still but reflective corpse. Cole Porter had comically used the theme in “Miss Otis Regrets,” and so had Lorenz Hart in “To Keep My Love Alive.” Houdini, however, avoided lyrical sophistication and relied on many repetitions of the title and of the wife’s assertion that she had, after all, murdered “nobody but her husband.” It became increasingly common in post-World War II popular music for the lyricist to utilize simple and blunt assertions rather than witty phrases. Two radio networks, apparently worried that the murder resembled real domestic violence rather than the artful methods suggested by Hart, such as throwing the man off a balcony, banned the song.

“Choo Choo Ch’Boogie.”In 1946 this boogie-woogie song in quadruple time, with its catchy accented triplets, every second triplet accented, delighted audiences and persisted for a record eighteen weeks as the number-one rhythm-and-blues hit. The use of boogie-woogie to suggest the rhythm of a train was not new, but it had never been done with the élan of Jordan’s group. Few could resist Jordan’s repetitions of its incessant refrain line, “Take me right back to the track, Jack!” “Ain’t Nobody Here but Us Chickens.”The Tympany Five performed several chicken songs, none more popular than this one. This recording, another of the group’s successes in 1946, ranks among Jordan’s most popular. This humorous song probably owes much of its success to the fact that the chickens mirror the plight of many humans. The fact that the chickens are “nobody,” that they are “locked up” in a barnyard, that they have a gun pointed at them, and that they refer to the farmer as “boss man” perhaps resonated with African Americans.

Musical Legacy

To his background in jazz, blues, and gospel music, Jordan added incessant jumpy rhythms and comical patter to become a leader of the mode eventually categorized as rhythm and blues. His primary audiences were young, urban African Americans less interested in jazz than in an energetic, eccentric, and refreshingly humorous music. Jordan’s fame spread, and he enjoyed a popularity among white audiences almost as potent as that of Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller.

Jazz critics saw Jordan as someone who had opted out of an important tradition, but his work is now recognized as an anticipation of the popular music that came to the fore in the 1950’s. Of the various reasons offered for his lack of later success, one may be that his Tympany Five continued to feature brass and reed instruments at a time when listeners had come to favor guitars and drums. After his death, Jordan was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. His work was much admired by artists such as pianist Ray Charles, saxophonist Sonny Rollins, and lyricist and guitarist Chuck Berry.

Principal Recordings

albums (with the Tympany Five): Go Blow Your Horn (Part II), 1954; Rock ’n’ Roll Call, 1955; Man, We’re Wailin’, 1957; Louis Jordan and Chris Barber, 1962; Hallelujah, 1963; Let the Good Times Roll, 1963; I Believe in Music, 1973; Choo Choo Ch’Boogie, 1975.

singles (with the Tympany Five): “Barnacle Bill the Sailor,” 1938; “Honey in the Bee Ball,” 1938;“Doug the Jitterbug,” 1939; “Keep A-Knockin’,” 1939; “Sam Jones Done Snagged His Britches,” 1939; “You’re My Meat,” 1939; “You Run Your Mouth and I’ll Run My Business,” 1940; “If It’s Love You Want, Baby,” 1941; “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town,” 1941; “Inflation Blues,” 1941; “Knock Me a Kiss,” 1941; “Ration Blues,” 1941; “I’m Gonna Leave You on the Outskirts of Town,” 1942; “What’s the Use of Getting Sober (When You Gonna Get Drunk Again),” 1942; “The Chicks I Pick Are Slender and Tender and Tall,” 1943; “Five Guys Named Moe,” 1943; “That’ll Just ’bout Knock Me Out,” 1943; “G. I. Jive,” 1944; “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby,” 1944; “Caldonia,” 1945; “Mop! Mop!,” 1945; “My Baby Said Yes,” 1945 (with Bing Crosby); “Somebody Done Changed the Lock on My Door,” 1945; “You Can’t Get That No More,” 1945; “Buzz Me,” 1946; “Don’t Worry ’bout That Mule,” 1946; “Salt Pork, West Virginia,” 1946; “Reconversion Blues,” 1946; “Beware (Brother, Beware),” 1946; “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Cryin’,” 1946; “Stone Cold Dead in the Market (He Had It Coming),” 1946 (with Ella Fitzgerald); “Petootie Pie,” 1946 (with Ella Fitzgerald); “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,” 1946; “That Chick’s Too Young to Fry,” 1946; “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman (They’ll Do It Every Time),” 1946; “Ain’t Nobody Here but Us Chickens,” 1946; “Let the Good Times Roll,” 1946; “Texas and Pacific,” 1947; “I Like ’Em Fat Like That,” 1947; “Open the Door, Richard,” 1947; “Jack, You’re Dead,” 1947; “I Know What You’re Puttin’ Down,” 1947; “Boogie Woogie Blue Plate,” 1947; “Early in the Mornin’,” 1947; “Look Out,” 1947; “Barnyard Boogie,” 1948; “How Long Must I Wait for You,” 1948; “Reet, Petite, and Gone,” 1948; “Run Joe,” 1948; “All for the Love of Lil’,” 1948; “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie,” 1948; “Don’t Burn the Candle at Both Ends,” 1948; “We Can’t Agree,” 1948; “Daddy-O,” 1948 (with Martha Davis); “Pettin’ and Pokin’,” 1948; “Roamin’ Blues,” 1949; “You Broke Your Promise,” 1949; “Cole Slaw (Sorghum Switch),” 1949; “Every Man to His Own Profession,” 1949; “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” 1949 (with Ella Fitzgerald); “Beans and Corn Bread,” 1949; “Saturday Night Fish Fry,” 1949; “School Days,” 1950; “Blue Light Boogie,” 1950; “I’ll Never Be Free,” 1950 (with Ella Fitzgerald); “Tamburitza Boogie,” 1950; “Lemonade,” 1951; “Tear Drops from My Eyes,” 1951; “Weak Minded Blues,” 1951.

Bibliography

Chilton, John. Let the Good Times Roll: The Story of Louis Jordan and His Music. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. By far the best source of information on Jordan, this book has a valuable bibliography and a select discography.

Crowther, Bruce, and Mike Pinfold. Singing Jazz. San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books, 1997. This book outlines Jordan’s contribution to jazz singing in Webb’s band and thereafter.

Shipton, Alyn. A New History of Jazz. New York: Continuum, 2001. This source explains Jordan’s decision to develop a distinctive style by creating his own band.

Starr, Larry, and Christopher Waterman. American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3. 2d ed. New York: Oxford Univrsity Press, 2003. A chapter describes Jordan’s contribution to the development of rhythm and blues.

Tosches, Nick. Heroes of Rock ’n’ Roll. New York: Harmony Books, 1991. The chapter on Jordan maintains that he did more than any other person to prepare the public for rock music.