Clancy Hayes Sings - Lu Watters

 

Clancy Hayes Sings

Clancy Hayes Sings

Lu Walters And His Jass Band

Cover Design by David Stone Martin

Down Home Records MG D-3

1956

From the back cover: Back in 1920, a young drummer named Clancy Hayes had a notion. He was all of 13 and earning a fulsome 35 cents by playing Saturday nights in the pit at the Elite Theatre in his hometown of Caney, Kan. He was leading his own band, the "Harmony Aces". And that wasn't all. Clancy pumped the player piano in the local dancing academy and for this he pocketed a dollar a night. Still, Clancy wasn't altogether satisfied.

"I wanted," Clancy recalled not long ago, "to be a singer. And one thing for sure, I couldn't very well accompany myself on the drums. So I had to learn to play the banjo and guitar, which I promptly did."

From these beginnings, a career was born, a career which took Clancy Hayes ultimately to San Francisco where, starting in 1926, he worked intermittently through the years at NBC. By 1936, he had met Lu Watters and they soon were to become among the leaders in the burgeoning San Francisco jazz revival which, nearly two decades later, has yet to be dissipated.

On this album, jazz singer Hayes and Watters are united in a group of traditional favorites. They are all, as you might surmise, songs from another era, the oldest of the lot being "Frankie And Johnny", which dates back to at least the 19th century. (In his authoritative "Mauve Decade", Thomas Beer says the freewheeling ballad was sung during the siege of Vicksburg in the Civil War and there are reports of it being heard in 1850.)

To catalogue some of the others. "Strolling Down Chesapeake Bay" is an old opener on minstrel shows; "Roll Jordan" is, of course, a spiritual; "Nobody Knows When You're Down And Out" has long been associated with the great blues singer, Bessie Smith; "Auntie Skinner's Chicken Dinner" is in the old cakewalk tradition of pre-World War I; "Silver Dollar" is a barroom ditty which, surprisingly, as revived as a hit in England in the late 1940s. Two of the selections are novelties from the 1920s – "My Little Bimbo", which concerns a shipwrecked sailor and his romantic activities, and "Ragtime Rufus", a ragtime tune, obviously, is based on the classic "Humoresque". "Alcoholic Blues", naturally enough i a lament into prohibition (and is sung here in two eight-bar phrases in contrast to the standard blues treatment). "Alabama Bound", by Buddy deSylva, is the 1925 hit now turned standard.

For four of the songs – "Auntie Skinner's Chicken Dinner", "Ragtime Rufus", "Chesapeake Bay" and "Silver Dollar" – Hayes was accompanied by, first of all, himself on the banjo: Wally Rose, piano; Dick Lammi, bass: Bob Helm, clarinet, and Lu Watters, washboard (an illness prevented him at the time from playing his trumpet). The other features the same group augmented by Bill Dart, drums; Warren Smith and Don Noakes, trombones, and Pay Patton, banjo.

From Billboard - June 6, 1956: If modernists and Dixielanders agree on anything at all, it is the high place of Clancy Hayes in the hierarchy of jazz singers. His backing here comes from the Lu Watters Jazz Band, rather than Bob Scobey, but they are like branches of the same tree, and so the atmosphere is congenially familiar. Other than "Silver Dollar," "Peoria" and "Sailing Down Chesapeake Bay," not much of Haye's previously recorded repertoire is repeated here. Here he does "Frankie And Johnny," "St. James Infirmary," "Alcoholic Blues," etc. A top-notch buy for all segments of the jazz (and don't overlook pop!) market.

St. James Infirmary

Roll Jordan Roll

Frankie And Johnny

My Little Bimbo Down On The Bimbo Isle

I Wish I Was In Peoria

Alcoholic Blues

Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out

Auntie Skinner's Chicken Dinner

Sailing Down Chesapeake Bay

Silver Dollar

Ragtime Blues

Alabamy Bound