CHAMPION JACK DUPREE: VOL. 1: 1940-1941 (2009)
1) Gamblin' Man Blues; 2)
Warehouse Man Blues; 3) Chain Gang Blues; 4) New Low Down Dog; 5) Black Woman
Swing; 6) Cabbage Greens No. 1; 7) Cabbage Greens No. 2; 8) Angola Blues; 9) My
Cabin Inn; 10) Bad Health Blues; 11) That's All Right; 12) Gibing Blues; 13)
Dupree Shake Dance; 14) My Baby's Gone; 15) Weed Head Woman; 16) Junker Blues;
17) Oh, Red; 18) All Alone Blues; 19) Big Time Mama; 20) Shady Lane; 21) Hurry
Down Sunshine; 22) Jackie P Blues; 23) Heavy Heart Blues; 24) Morning Tea; 25)
Black Cow Blues.
William Thomas Dupree was quite an interesting
character back in his days — for one thing, it's not that often that a musician
temporarily abandons his career to become a boxer, which he did in the late
1920s and from which he gained his "Champion Jack" nickname.
Eventually, he got beat up, and since that happened at about the same time that
he crossed paths with fellow blues pianist Leroy Carr, he seemingly decided
that punching them keys was, after all, a safer job than punching faces —
nevertheless, he was smart enough to keep the "Champion" moniker for
PR reasons, even if there was hardly anything champion-like about his playing
the blues.
Well, one thing that does look champion-like is
the sheer quantity of recordings that the man had done: spanning the pre-war
era of shellac 78"s and onwards all the way until his death in 1992, he
kept pumping out product at a breathless pace, despite never having shown any
compositional genius or truly outstanding musicianship. Hunting down all of his
mammoth discography is a nearly hopeless and, most importantly, thoroughly
ungrateful task. That said, there is nothing particularly unpleasant about his
style either: in small doses, Champion Jack Dupree is always palatable, and his
historical importance cannot be denied.
Most of the man's pre-LP-era output is now
conveniently available in the form of a 4-volume CD package, released in 2009
on the JSP label and annotated by blues expert Neil Slaven; since these 4
volumes cover more than a decade of music-making, I will comment on each
separately, even if you can probably guess that the Champion's style did not
evolve too seriously over those years. That style is simple — blues and boogie
piano playing, with minimal accompaniment: on the first 17 tracks here, the only
additional player is bassist Wilson Swain, with guitarist Jesse Ellery joining
the duo for the last eight. Dupree is a fun player, a decent entertainer, but
with fairly simple technique (well, I guess you can't easily combine piano
practice with a boxing career) and a nice, but unexceptional, singing voice, so
there's not much difference between all these tracks, except for the base
patterns — here he plays slow 12-bar, there he plays fast barrelhouse boogie,
and here he... oh no, not another slow 12-bar?...
Anyway, there are a few tracks here that still
deserve special mention. ʽCabbage Greensʼ, recorded here in two slightly
different versions, is a variation on the old ʽCow Cow Bluesʼ boogie that most
people probably know as Ray Charles' ʽMess Aroundʼ — and this gives us a good
pretext to compare Dupree's playing with Ray himself, not to mention its more
than obvious influence on a certain white guy named Jerry Lee Lewis: make the
necessary chronological adjustments and you will see that this is as wild as it
gets for 1940, just as Jerry Lee was as wild as it could get for 1956. In terms
of fun and recklessness, he clearly beats Leroy Carr (who wasn't much about
rompin' and stompin') and is closer in style to Pete Johnson, the notorious
sidekick of Big Joe Turner, although I'd say that Dupree's playing is rowdier
and more «populist», whatever that could mean under the circumstances.
More importantly, there's ʽJunker Bluesʼ here,
written by Dupree's piano mentor Willie Hall (better known under the
professional moniker of Drive 'Em Down) and, as far as I understand, originally
recorded by Dupree himself. This one is particularly important for launching
the career of Fats Domino nine years later — when he borrowed the melody
wholesale and changed the controversial lyrics from "They call me, they
call me the junker / Cause I'm loaded all the time" to the far safer
"They call me, they call me the fat man / Cause I weigh two hundred
pounds". If you had any doubts, the song goes on to be loaded with
references to reefer, cocaine, needles, and feeling high, so god bless good old
OKeh records for having the guts to release it in 1940, when, apparently,
middle-class white audiences were not
the target audience for this kind of stuff.
For that matter, the very titles of the songs
alone show that Champion Jack was not the kind of guy to shy away from socially
relevant topics and spend all his time on woman issues: there's ʽChain Gang
Bluesʼ, there's ʽAngola Bluesʼ (referring to Louisiana State Penitentiary, not
the African country), and there's ʽWeed Head Womanʼ (hmm, is this one more of a
woman issue or a weed issue?). As time goes by (and the Champ's slowly rising
popularity makes him more of a household name), these rough subjects do get
more and more eclipsed by standard, polite-mouthed blues thematics, though, and
ʽJunker Bluesʼ becomes ʽHeavy Heart Bluesʼ, with a slight accompanying drop in
tempo and energy. Still, on the other hand, he gives Leroy Carr's ʽHurry Down
Sunshineʼ a faster and rockier spin (as well as a completely different set of
lyrics), meaning that, even if he was willing to tone down the scathingness of
the words, the same did not apply to the boogie power of the music.
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