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Those Battles of Music |
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pool and he had the knife right on me. Said I only used the piano as a decoy, which was true; and, of course, he had it in his mind that I was kind of nice looking. I suppose he was jealous of me. Imagine that! But he wasn't such a good-looking fellow, himself. Had some awful rubber-looking lips, Im telling you. So I said,
Alabama Bound,
Alabama bound, One of them good looking girls told me, "Baby,
Come on and leave this town."
I always had an inkling to write a tune at most any place I would ever land. So when I hit Mobile in 1905, I wrote Ala-bama Bound and all my friends considered it very good. There was Charley King from Mobile; Baby Grice and Frazier Davis from Pensacola, Florida; Frank Racheal, supposed to be the tops from Georgia; and Porter King, a very dear friend of mine and a marvelous pianist now in the cold, cold ground, also from Florida. Porter King was an educated gentleman with a far better musical training than mine and he seemed to have a yen for my style of playing, although we had two different styles. He particularly liked one certain number and so I named it after him, only changed the name backwards and called it King Porter Stomp.
I don't know what the term "stomp" means, myself. There wasn't really any meaning only that people would stamp their feet. However, this tune became to be the outstanding favorite of every great hot band throughout the world that had the accomplishment to play it. Until today, it has been the cause of great bands coming to fame and outstanding tunes use the backgrounds of King Porter in order to make great tunes of themselves.* In 1905, the same year as King Porter and Alabama Bound, I also wrote a number called You Can Have It, 1
* As any student of jazz knows, this pride of Jelly's in his King Porter Stomp is warranted by its great importance in the development of jazz. Benny Goodman, for instance, used King Porter as a theme for a number of years. Tune 11, Appendix I. |
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