Evocations of The Dance - Part II - A Eudora Welty Playlist

If you’re wondering what the first Evocations of the Dance post was, click here to find out.

The opening of Eudora Welty’s Powerhouse (1941) is one of those masterful pieces of writing you come up with in your dreams but which on real paper seems to elude you:

“He’s here on tour from the city – “Powerhouse and His Keyboard” – “Powerhouse and His Tasmanians” – think of the things he calls himself! There’s no one in the world like him. You can’t tell what he is. [...] He’s not coal black – beverage colored – looks like a preacher when his mouth is going every minute: like a monkey’s when it looks for something. Improvising, coming on a light and childish melody – smooch – he loves it with his mouth.”

Whitney Balliett, eat your heart out!

Shortly after reading this we learn that hardly anybody is dancing. Why not?

“It’s a white dance, and nobody dances, except a few straggling jitterbugs and two elderly couples. Everybody just stands around the band and watches Powerhouse. Sometimes they steal glances at one another, as if to say, Of course, you know how it is with them–Negroes–band leaders–they would play the same way, giving all they've got, for an audience of one... When somebody, no matter who, gives everything, it makes people feel ashamed for him.”

Welty is said to have written the story after she had been to a dance in 1940 at which Fats Waller and his band had been playing. Call me avant garde if you like, but I really think there’s something to be gained from listening to the tracks I’m going to post alongside reading the story.

The story is like a jazz solo, riffing and quoting from the songs played that evening. The story explores the complicated relationship between the black performer Powerhouse (based on Waller) and his mixed-race audience. That said, the blend of sweet, trite love songs and ‘hot’ jazz tunes suggests Welty’s expecting the reader to have a familiarity with the subtle musical textures.

Really, I suggest you download these records below and make a playlist to put on while you read the story. You’ll come away astonished at how much the music is part of the texture of the story.

01a Marie, The Dawn is Breaking – Fats Waller (1938) 01b Marie, the Dawn is Breaking (Berlin) – The Ink Spots (1953)

A typically ebullient performance from the star of the story, Fats Waller.  Clearly too late to have inspired the use of the song in the story, but too significant a recording of it not to have used it. There’s also a nice, straight version by our old friend, Al Bowlly, here.1

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02a Honeysuckle Rose – Fats Waller (1937)

The song’s author, and the inspiration for the story: I couldn’t not include this. His piano-playing is just as infectious as his singing, and passages here show how he was an influence on Tatum.

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02b Honeysuckle Rose – Leo Watson (1945)

I admire the way, like Armstrong on ‘Stardust’, Watson deconstructs a song; going further than Armstrong though, by adding the line ‘sock me on the nose’. I also like the snatches of trademark gibberish: Yama yama yama yama Routy vouty-vout.

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03 Pagan Love Song – Harold ‘Scrappy’ Lambert (1929)

The narrator comments on the group in Powerhouse that this is “the one waltz they will ever consent to play”. Lambert plays this as a rather soporific waltz, and every time you listen to it you fear he’s going to be too enervated to reach that falsetto note. (If you want adrenaline, watch the tapdancing marimba player Jack Imel player swing it here.)

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04a Tuxedo Junction - Glenn Miller (1939)

‘ “Whose?” asks Powerhouse, getting the reply: “You know whose” ’ Powerhouse is disappointed by the version that gets played. This is most likely the Glenn Miller recording, which adds trumpet flourishes and subtle use of dynamics to what is, as you can hear below, really a staight-down-the-line piece of swing.

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04b Tuxedo Junction - Erskine Hawkins (1939)

This version, by the tune’s composer, saxophonist Erskine Hawkins, was perhaps what Powerhouse would have preferred to have found on the jukebox. And, on reflection, so would I.

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05 Empty Bed Blues – Bessie Smith (1928)

Recorded when Smith had turned to racier songs to boost sales. One of the later verses features a quite amusing cabbage-based innuendo – a favourite in bawdy blues songs: He boiled my first cabbage And he made it awful hot He boiled my first cabbage And he made it awful hot When he put in the bacon, It overflowed the pot.

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06 Sent for You Yesterday And Here You Come Today - Count Basie (v. Jimmy Rushing) (1938)

I was tempted to post the Mercer recording of this, but when you listen to Rushing and Mercer side by side, it’s clear Rushing’s usually small and brassy voice sounds all grown up, with Rushing relishing the chance to sing the tune slightly behind the beat.

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07 The Goona Goo – Clifford ‘Boots’ Douglas (1937)

This just shows how well Welty knew her jazz. This is a gem – alright, with a fluffy tune and lyrics, but played to hell by the band. I like the piano player, who seems to pretend to be falling off his stool or something, only to bring the band back in before it all collapses.

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08 San – Paul Whiteman & his Orchestra featuring Bix Beiderbecke, Frankie Trumbauer, Jimmy Dorsey and Bill Challis (1928)

Powerhouse and his band have a system of number to identify the songs they play. This is ‘99’, which tells you something about the number of tunes a jazz musician carries around in his head. This is more Whiteman than Bix, (who’d had a breakdown less than a month ago), more sax than brass, but it’s a joyous recording nonetheless.

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09 Somebody Loves Me - Fletcher Henderson and his Orchestra (1930)

This song, though it might not seem it at first, is so strong, with the little throbs at the end of each chorus a gift to jazz performers. The choral shouting of the refrain here conveys something of the story’s daring conclusion – Powerhouse’s taunting repetition of the lyric ‘maybe it’s you’ to his white audience.

ABOVE: A pic of Welty created by John Sokol from quotations from ‘Powerhouse’.

If you want evidence that this is a valid way of reading Welty, hear the musicality with which she reads her own works:  Why I Live at the P.O. - Eudora Welty.

¹ (Both of these are foxtrots, although some early versions of the tune take it as a waltz. Is this important? Probably not.)