Jimmy Yancey
Famous Blues
Pianist
The most complete
biography of Jimmy Yancey can be found here.
Possibly
the most complete biography of his wife Estella
Listin to The Music -
click below
How Long Bluas
Santa Fe Blues
Alonzo
Yancey - Everybidy's Rag
[from
http://www.doctorjazz.co.uk/draftcards2.html#musdjey ]
The
broad outline of James Edward “Jimmy” Yancey’s early life probably
doesn’t differ much from what Bill Russell wrote in his notes for
Yancey’s 1940 RCA Victor album. He was born sometime near the turn of
the 20th century in Chicago, and as a very young child began performing
as a singer and dancer, possibly with his father, who was a singer and
guitarist. Before reaching his teens he was on the road with various
troupes from coast to coast, then all over Europe just before World War
I, including a command performance for King George V in London. While
still a teenager, he left the road and returned to Chicago. He had
never played piano onstage, but at some point had begun teaching
himself to play blues. Working at various non-music jobs after his
return to Chicago, he also began appearing at rent parties and various
clubs. [WWJ 368] At some point, probably
about 1925, he took a job at Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White
Sox baseball team.
By the time he met Russell in 1938, Yancey had acquired a devoted
following of blues piano enthusiasts. In the chapter titled “Boogie
Woogie” he wrote for Ramsey and Smith’s Jazzmen,
Russell included Yancey, enhancing his reputation further.
[JM] Then came the 1940 RCA Victor album, and
Yancey’s credibility (though not his income) was exponentially
enhanced. Before long he attained the status of a kind of blues piano
grandfather, though as Russell pointed out he was just entering his
forties when he was “discovered”. Being a legend did not yield large
financial rewards, however, and for a long time he did not even have a
piano in his apartment. Through the ‘40s he continued gigging in
Chicago, often accompanying his wife, the singer Estelle “Mama” Yancey.
A few small, fan-owned labels recorded him, and pilgrims from around
the country who wanted to get to the source sought him out in his
Chicago apartment. The renewed interest in early jazz brought some
high-profile attention, including an appearance with his wife at
Carnegie Hall in April 1948 on a bill with Kid Ory.
[WWJ 368] Shortly before his death on September
17th, 1951, hampered severely by diabetes, he made his last recording,
with Estelle, for the Atlantic label.
No public record of Yancey’s birth has yet been found. The date given
by most sources has until quite recently been February 20th, 1898 — the
date reported on his marriage license (1925), his Social Security
application (1937) and his death certificate. Recent investigation by
Jane M. Bowers calls this date into question.
[AM] To begin with, his draft card does
not agree, reporting a birth date of February 20th, 1900 and giving his
age as nineteen. But if Yancey was born in February 1900, he was
eighteen, not nineteen, when he registered on September 12th, 1918. (It
should be noted, perhaps, that the handwriting of the data entries
matches the signature of the registrar, Virginia Woods, who could have
miscalculated Yancey’s age without actually asking him.)
U.S. Census records exacerbate the confusion. Jimmy is not mentioned in
the 1900 census, although when the Yancey family’s data was recorded on
June 9th, he would have been just over three months old if born on
February 20th. He does appear in the 1910 census, when the family data
was collected on April 16th, and Jimmy was listed as nine years old —
suggesting a birth year of 1901, which would explain his absence from
the 1900 rolls, but is probably incorrect, because if born on February
20th, 1901, he would have been only seventeen on September 12th, 1918,
and therefore a year too young to be required to register. When the
1920 census recorded the Yanceys on January 7th, Jimmy was said to be
twenty, though if born on February 20th, he was actually a few weeks
younger.
Reporting his occupation as “Prof Actor”, Yancey names “Bert Earl”
(Burt Earle) as his employer, and gives “Garfield Theatre New York
City” as the employer address. The association with Earle, one of
several employers whom Yancey recalled to Russell and others from his
young touring days, has not been fully documented, but one piece of
hard evidence is extremely interesting: on March 28th, 1913, Yancey
applied for a so-called “emergency passport” at the American Embassy in
London, using a letter from “Burt Earle, Esq.” — presumably his boss —
as identification. On the same day, he applied for a regular
passport, to be delivered to the embassy in due course. Jimmy
needed a passport, according to his application(s), so he could work in
Russia, one of the few countries with stringent passport requirements
at the time. Probably to reduce risk of being turned down due to his
youth (though there was really no specific age requirement), Yancey
gave his date of birth as February 20th, 1895! This incident definitely
places Yancey in England in 1913, a date very much in line with
Russell’s careful report way back in 1940.
By Dave Lewis
Jimmy Yancey was a native of Chicago and learned to play piano from his
elder brother, Alonzo, who was a Ragtime picker. Yancey's father was a
buck and wing dancer, and the kids were part of the act; sometime
before 1915, the Yanceys appeared at Buckingham Palace before English
Royalty. During the First World War, Jimmy Yancey played baseball in a
Negro league team, the Chicago All-Americans. It is widely stated that
Yancey "invented" boogie-woogie; not possible given its rural
mid-western roots, and that traces of this style appear in sources
which lead back to the late 1870s. However, inasmuch as Chicago style
of boogie-woogie is concerned, Yancey is known to have been playing
such music in Chicago prior to 1920. In the early 1920s, Jimmy Yancey
was a regularly seen player on the rent party circuit in Chicago, and
under his spell a number of boogie pianists emerged, including Meade
"Lux" Lewis, Albert Ammons and, probably, Clarence
"Pinetop" Smith. In 1925, Yancey got a full time job as the
groundskeeper of Comiskey Park in Chicago, and afterwards cut back on
his rent party appearances.
In 1936, Meade "Lux" Lewis first recorded his piece Yancey Special, a
boogie-woogie solo in part based on Yancey's economic style of playing.
Not long after, record producers and critics began to inquire just who
Yancey was. In April of 1939, Jimmy Yancey finally, at age 41, was able
to enter the studio for his maiden voyage on record for a short-lived
label named Solo Art. Swiftly making up for the time he had lost,
Yancey recorded 17 pieces in 18 sides at this first session. Only the
first two made it to 78s, and the rest did not appear until after
Yancey's death. However, this got things rolling for Yancey, and later
that year he recorded the first of two sessions for Bluebird. The
following year Yancey recorded for both Bluebird and Vocalion. While
critics, who cited the purity and originality of Yancey's approach to
boogie woogie, acclaimed his discs, they did not sell well and this
chapter of Yancey's recorded work ended after just 15 titles. Yancey
returned to the studio just three times more in the decade left to him.
The tiny Sessions label of Chicago recorded another 16 titles with
Yancey in 1943, and these featured for the first time, Jimmy's wife,
Estella "Mama" Yancey on vocals. They had been married in 1917 and
often made music together at home, Mama having a beautifully soulful
blues voice that matched perfectly with Jimmy's pianism. Only three
sides in Yancey's recorded output bear Jimmy's own vocals, and these
confirm that the task of vocalizing on Jimmy's records was best left to
Mama Yancey. There was nothing more from Yancey until December 1950
when John Steiner recorded him in six sides for the resuscitated
Paramount label. Jimmy Yancey's final session was made for fledgling
indie Atlantic Records and spread over two days in July 1951,
producing, as in his first session, 17 masters. He was joined by Mama
Yancey on five of these. Two months later Jimmy Yancey died of a
diabetic stroke, only 53 years of age. Mama Yancey continued to record
for Atlantic, and other labels, long after Jimmy Yancey died.
Much has been written about Yancey's influence on younger boogie
pianists from south side, but little of this writing has much to say
about how different he was from the players who claimed his influence.
Yancey almost never uses walking bass patterns or octaves. He preferred
a falling triad figure in fast pieces, and a slowly wandering variant
of that same figure in slower ones. His right hand was endlessly
exploratory, always going to new and unexpected places. Yancey's chops
are obviously somewhat limited and he never shows off in the way that
Lux or Pete Johnson could. Nevertheless, the ingeniousness of Yancey's
playing is in its unpredictability and the way he makes his
sometimes-eccentric ideas make sense. Yancey had a famous stylistic
quirk-- at the end of every piece he would always turn back to the same
tag in E-flat, without regard for what he was doing before leading up
to that. The theoretical and formal implications of Yancey's work are
so interesting that it motivated Dutch minimalist composer Louis
Andriessen to compose a piece for wind ensemble entitled "On Jimmy
Yancey" (1973). Yancey seldom repeated pieces, apart from vocal
numbers, and is not known to have gone beyond two takes in making any
of his studio recordings.
On January 23, 1986, Jimmy Yancey was inducted into the Rock and Roll
Hall of fame, largely based on his contributions to the development of
Boogie Woogie as a style. Mama Yancey was present at this ceremony,
although she would die mere months later. Fortunately, in terms of
being to experience Jimmy Yancey we are not just limited to his studio
recordings. While there are no radio broadcasts of his playing extant,
home recordings of Yancey family music making exist in two batches, one
consisting of instantaneous-cut lacquers made in 1943, the other being
wire recordings made in 1951. The sound quality of these recordings is
extremely variable, but they offer a casual, candid glimpse into the
inner world of Jimmy Yancey's music making. Despite the influence he
may have had on boogie-woogie, which dominated the popular music scene
in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Jimmy Yancey's own music was made
for fun, enjoyment and relaxation-the commercial music world is damned.
Jimmy
Yancey Biography from:
http://www.musicianguide.com/biographies/1608004550/Jimmy-Yancey.html
Born on February 20, 1898, in Chicago,
IL; died of complications from diabetes on September 17, 1951, in
Chicago, IL; married Estella Harris (later known as "Mama" Yancey),
1919; children: one son.
The blues piano style known as boogie-woogie is familiar to
most people who have plunked out its basic patterns on a keyboard---so
familiar, in fact, that few of those people stop to think about where
the style came from. A teacher to many younger blues pianists, Yancey
was dubbed the father of boogie-woogie by some; and he was certainly
one of the first boogie-woogie musicians in the crucial blues center of
Chicago. Yancey made a living outside the music business for much of
his life, and his contributions to the traditions of boogie-woogie and
blues piano were captured only intermittently on recordings. The music
by Yancey that has survived, however, is enough to give modern
listeners an idea of what an original musician he was.
James Edward Yancey was born in Chicago on February 20, 1898.
Although he would work outside music as an adult, he was a professional
musician from early childhood. His father, Mose, who sang bass and
played the guitar, got involved in the new vaudeville and musical shows
that African Americans were beginning to put on in Northern urban
theaters, and soon he brought his young son on board to sing and dance.
As early as 1903, Yancey appeared at Chicago's Pekin Theater in a show
called The Man from Bam, and he remained part of
the company there for several years.
In 1908 the ten-year-old Yancey went on the road. Touring with
groups such as the Jeannette Adler Company, the Cozy Smith Troupe, and
the Bert Earle Company, he worked under the aegis of the Theater Owners
Booking Agency or TOBA, sometimes dubbed Tough on Black Artists, or
referred to with even more colorful interpretations of the acronym. For
the young Yancey, however, duty on the so-called chitlin' circuit
turned into a way to see the world. Joining a troupe that toured the
Orpheum theater circuit, he traveled to Europe and gave a command
performance in England for King George V, Queen Mary, and the royal
family at London's Buckingham Palace in 1913.
For all this time, Yancey was a singer and dancer, not a
pianist. He learned to play the piano from his brother Alonzo after
returning to Chicago soon after his European tour. Even then, he didn't
embark on the career that would make him famous. With his eye on a
career in baseball's Negro Leagues, Yancey played for several years
with a Chicago team called the All-Americans. Married in 1919 to
Estella Harris, a singer later known as Mama Yancey, he settled for a
steady baseball paycheck beginning in 1925, as a groundskeeper for the
Chicago White Sox. He and Estella raised one son, and he remained with
the White Sox until 1950, shortly before his death.
Beginning in the late 1910s, Yancey played the piano around
Chicago at small clubs and "rent parties," at which musicians would
perform and pass the hat to help out a financially strapped apartment
dweller. Prohibition in the 1920s and early 1930s added speakeasies to
the list of venues requesting his piano services, and his name became
well known around the city. Younger musicians sought him out; he
influenced and occasionally gave lessons to Pinetop Smith, Albert
Ammons, and Meade "Lux" Lewis, who switched from violin to the piano
after hearing Yancey play. These musicians all made recordings in the
1920s, but Yancey, either because of his part-time musician status or
because he was known as a shy man uncomfortable with self-promotion,
did not record.
In 1936, with a wider musical public becoming aware of
boogie-woogie, Meade "Lux" Lewis recorded a version of his mentor's
"Yancey Special," and white bandleader Bob Crosby later cut a version
of the same tune. Yancey, however, was temporarily sidelined by a
stroke during this period. He didn't make his recording debut until
1939, when he was sought out by New York bartender and blues piano
lover Dan Qualey to record for Qualey's Solo Art label. Along with
other pieces, Yancey recorded "The Fives," a number originally known as
"Five O'Clock Blues" that he had composed at the very beginning of his
piano-playing career. Other companies caught on quickly, and Yancey
recorded 78 rpm records for Victor (1939 and 1940), Vocalion and
Bluebird (1940), and Session (1943, making a group of recordings that
some historians consider his best). Not all his records were piano
solos; he sang on many pieces and recorded for Vocalion with singer
Faber Smith.
Boogie-woogie, with its barroom and party origins, was a music
generally noted for speed and power rather than subtlety, but Yancey's
style differed from the norm. In place of the usual repeated patterns
played by the pianist's left hand in the music's style, Yancey offered
varied rhythms that created complex relationships between the left- and
right-hand parts. Some writers detected a Latin influence in his style
comparable to the music of New Orleans jazz legend Ferdinand "Jelly
Roll" Morton. Jazz historian Max Harrison, author of the book Blues
Who's Who, wrote that "Yancey was undoubtedly the greatest
exponent of the boogie idiom and was, indeed, one of the very few
musicians in all jazz whose work ever attained to profundity."
Yancey's music was easily recognizable, due to highly
individualistic twists such as his tendency to bring every solo piece
to rest in the key of E flat, no matter where it had begun. Opinions
differed as to Yancey's vocal skills; All Music Guide
called him "an undistinguished blues singer," but writer Rudi Blesh (as
quoted in Blues Who's Who) characterized him as
"an archaic blues singer of the most touching accents." His vocal
version of the often-recorded "Death Letter Blues" was generally
thought to be one of his best records.
Yancey's recordings brought him national exposure, and he
began to appear in person beyond Chicago. He appeared on the CBS radio
network show We the People in 1939 and performed at
the Ross Tavern in New York City that same year. After World War II, he
began occasionally performing with Mama Yancey; the pair traveled to
Minneapolis and appeared in concert at New York's Carnegie Hall in
1948. That year, Yancey began a three-year residence at Chicago's Bee
Hive club, performing in the intermissions between the club's regular
stage acts.
Suffering from diabetes later in life, Yancey and his wife
held parties and jam sessions at their South Side Chicago apartment to
raise money. Those sessions were well attended by Chicago jazz fans,
and Yancey returned to the recording studio to make new records for the
Paramount label in 1950 and for Atlantic in 1951. He died on September
17, 1951, and was memorialized with a jazz funeral.
by James M. Manheim
Jimmy Yancey's Career
Began performing at age five; toured as singer and dancer in
vaudeville theaters, ca. 1910; performed for England's royal family,
1913; played semi-professional baseball; Chicago White Sox,
groundskeeper, 1925-50; performed on piano at parties and small clubs,
1920s and early 1930s; made recording debut on Solo Art label, 1939;
also recorded for Victor, Vocalion, Session, Bluebird, Paramount, and
Atlantic labels; appeared at Bee Hive club, Chicago, 1948-51; with
wife, "Mama" Yancey, performed at Carnegie Hall, New York City, 1948.
Information from Norma
Victor homesick.jn@virgin.net
This was the first
piece that I ever had published! It appeared in Blueprint
magazine. Regards, Norma
"At The Window-
Glimpses of a Chicago Piano Player" from the series
"Between The Ears"
BBC RADIO 3. 27/2/99
This thirty minute
programme was a tribute to Jimmy Yancey and concentrated
on the man rather than his music. Voices of surviving family and
friends
overlapped on a patchwork background of the sounds of daily Chicago
life: the
subway, the ballpark and a blues club. We learnt that Jimmy was quiet,
introverted and hen-pecked. In contrast, Estelle "Mama" Yancey was fun
loving, bossy and could swear, drink and smoke more than any man! Every
weekend
their south-side apartment was filled with friends and musicians, both
black and
white. While , Mama busied herself entertaining their visitors, Jimmy
would sit
quietly at the piano.
A sad note was struck
when his niece told how she and her aunt were invited
to collect Jimmy's posthumous "Little Oscar", [as she called it], from
the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. While they were both treated very
nicely,
no-one there seemed to remember who he was.
Three pieces by the
man described as 'The Mozart of the Blues' were
included here "Death Letter Blues", "Monkey Woman
Blues" and of course the melancholy, understated "At The Window".
Contributors included his niece, great niece, Dr John Steiner and Erwin
Helfer.
His great niece, who
must have been only a girl at the time, spoke touchingly
of Jimmy's death in 1951. Almost half a century has passed since that
day. -
Norma Victor
Footnote - On a recent
visit to Chicago, Jools Holland sought out Jimmy
Yancey's unmarked grave. He arranged for a marker to be placed there.
Jimmy's wife:
Mama Estella Yancey
Another Site with further info:
http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/session.html