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Uptown—Downtown |
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For your information, I will give you Tony Jackson s Naked Dance * the way he played it years ago . . .
Not all the piano players in the District were of the same type and class as Tony Jackson. At that time, back in 1901 and 1902, we had a lot of great blues players that didn't know nothing but the blues . . .
I could sit right here and think a thousand miles away
Yes, I could sit right here and think a thousand miles away,
I got the blues so had I cannot remember the day . . .
This blues was a favorite of a musician wTe called Game Kid and it made Game Kid the favorite of the Garden District. He was a man that really wouldn't work. He was as ragged as a pet pig, wore a big smile on his face, and was a nice-looking brown-skin fellow until you got to his lips—he had nice, fat, greasy lips. Game Kid played the piano all day long after he got up, moving around from one girl's house to another—what we called the "good-time houses"—not for any financial purpose at all, but just to have a good time. That was when you could get a half-gallon can of beer for ten cents and a half pint of whiskey for twenty-five. So a real big sport in the party (not the piano player, of course, it didn't cost him nothing) would rush about ten straight cans of beer and get about a quart of whiskey. The whole doggone tiling wouldn't cost him over two dollars and made him a big sport for a whole evening at a good-time house. And there was the Game Kid playing the blues and just swilling all the lush in the world. He was a howler, I'm telling you, the best there was in the section when it came to playing blues. Of course, we had another man that was a very good blues player, too—old Buddy Carter—a man that could really play those blues and those thing we call stomps today.
* Tune 3, Appendix I, takes one back to tliose dark and impassioned hours at the westerns when a ragtime piano provided the soundtrack for the noble loves of Wm. S. Hart. |
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