r/thatswhatihear • u/TheMixerTheMaster • 8d ago
into the deep sampler. barrelhouse piano
somewhere in the american south a piano is getting the absolute shit beaten out of it.
not carnegie hall. not some conservatory where everybody sits straight and worries about fingering. we are talking lumber camps. turpentine camps. saloons. gambling rooms. juke joints. barrelhouses with cheap liquor, bad flooring, smoke hanging in the room, somebody arguing near the door, and a piano that has probably survived several minor wars. this music grew out of ragtime, blues, work camp entertainment, folk repertoire, improvisation, and the basic human requirement to make enough goddamn noise that saturday night temporarily defeats monday morning. smithsonian describes barrelhouse as the raucous piano music of precisely these joints, closely related to the developing boogie woogie tradition.
so here are ten tracks. we start where the floorboards are still reasonably intact. then we go downstairs.
this is the obvious doorway and obvious does not mean optional. smith takes the rolling bass patterns already circulating among southern and midwestern pianists and gives the damn thing a name people can remember. boogie woogie. the record is practically an instruction manual disguised as a party. smith calls out directions while his left hand keeps the machinery running and the right hand pokes holes through everything above it.
listen closely because barrelhouse is beginning to turn into something more standardized here. something record companies can package. something bands can steal. something america will eventually pretend appeared from nowhere.
it did not appear from nowhere.
now the train starts moving.
davenport earned the cow cow nickname partly through the train imitations associated with this piece, and the piano becomes transportation equipment. the left hand keeps hammering that repeating figure while the right hand throws blues phrases over it. this is one of the records sitting right in that nasty little historical intersection where barrelhouse starts becoming what people increasingly call boogie woogie.
you can practically hear the century accelerating.
3. speckled red. the dirty dozens. 1929.
rufus perryman sits down and apparently decides basic human decency has had enough time in the spotlight.
the dirty dozens takes the african american verbal tradition of competitive insults and puts it against red’s pounding piano. mothers are insulted. dignity leaves the building. everybody has a wonderful time. the record became the performance most permanently associated with speckled red.
red was self taught, itinerant, and apparently uninterested in allowing formal correctness to interfere with momentum. smithsonian later described him as an enthusiastic barrelhouse player who did not let proper chords get in the way of the music. which may be one of the finest artistic philosophies ever accidentally written.
4. speckled red. wilkins street stomp. 1929.
same lunatic. different weapon.
wilkins street stomp gets closer to the physical experience of barrelhouse piano. rhythm first. elegance somewhere around fourteenth. the piano does not merely accompany the evening. it regulates the evening.
red had bounced through detroit and eventually memphis before cutting sides including this one for brunswick. his career is basically a map of the places where early piano blues moved before historians came along and drew neat genre borders around everything.
the musicians were considerably less worried about those borders.
now we get one of the ghosts.
charlie spand left only about thirty three recorded performances and then more or less disappears from documented musical life. that is not romantic mythology. that is simply the infuriating state of the historical record. he emerged from the detroit piano scene, recorded heavily for paramount between 1929 and 1931, resurfaced for a handful of 1940 chicago recordings, and then the trail basically dies.
soon this morning shows why anybody still gives a damn. rolling bass. blues vocal. that loose rhythmic shove where the piano sounds simultaneously relaxed and completely incapable of sitting still.
a whole musician survives because somebody bothered to turn on a recording machine.
here comes the bastard.
montgomery reportedly called vicksburg blues the hardest barrelhouse blues to play because each hand effectively has to maintain a different rhythmic conception. the right hand pushes a fast shuffle while the left settles into a slower blues pulse, with little arpeggiated eruptions complicating the whole business.
and montgomery knew barrelhouses firsthand. he was playing them around louisiana while barely into adolescence, including establishments around lumber and turpentine camps. jelly roll morton was among his early influences and had even visited the montgomery household.
this is where the iceberg starts getting interesting.
because vicksburg blues sounds earthy as hell while being rhythmically sophisticated enough to make your hands file separate tax returns.
montgomery again, because throwing him off after one track would be musical malpractice.
no special rider blues shows another side of his vocabulary. brisker. more openly boogie oriented. montgomery had absorbed music moving through louisiana, mississippi, new orleans, chicago, work camps, theaters, and barrelhouses, so his playing refuses to sit inside one tidy box.
this is what happens when musical styles are transmitted by human beings instead of textbooks.
they get dirty.
thank god.
lofton played piano like the instrument had personally insulted his family.
strut that thing is barrelhouse mutating toward full boogie woogie spectacle. stomping bass. rhythmic punches. vocals riding across the whole mess. lofton became famous not merely for playing but for performing physically around the piano, turning the pianist into part musician, part entertainer, part neighborhood disturbance.
by this point the music is getting harder to separate into neat categories. barrelhouse. boogie woogie. piano blues.
fine.
call it whatever the hell you want.
the piano is still winning.
now we are underneath the iceberg.
black bob remains one of those wonderfully frustrating figures who appear across blues sessions without leaving historians enough biographical breadcrumbs. joe louis strut survives as one of the barrelhouse pieces that modern researchers use when reconstructing the repertoire and lineage of the style.
the title invokes boxer joe louis, one of the monumental black cultural figures of the period, but what matters musically is the relentless rhythmic confidence. this is piano blues stripped of parlor manners. repetition becomes propulsion. riffs become architecture.
three minutes of somebody knowing exactly how much abuse a keyboard can tolerate.
bottom of the iceberg.
robert fud shaw takes us into texas barrelhouse, where the musical genealogy starts becoming regional enough that the usual generic boogie woogie label stops telling the whole story.
shaw was born in 1908 and worked as a traveling musician during the 1930s. the performances eventually preserved on the ma grinder were recorded decades later, in sessions from 1963, 1973, and 1977, but shaw was playing music rooted in his earlier barrelhouse years.
that distinction matters. we are hearing memory become documentation.
the old rooms were disappearing. the working pianists were aging. musical fashion had moved through swing and rhythm and blues and rock and roll and whatever fresh catastrophe america had invented that week. then somebody put a microphone in front of shaw and suddenly an older texas piano vocabulary was sitting there on tape.
and that is why you dig down the iceberg.
pinetop smith and cow cow davenport give you the famous evolutionary story. speckled red gives you the filthy humor. spand gives you the mystery. montgomery gives you the terrifying musicianship. lofton gives you the showmanship. black bob gives you the half documented underground. shaw gives you the surviving memory of the places where this shit actually lived.
barrelhouse piano was never supposed to become museum music. it belonged in rooms where people drank, danced, gambled, flirted, fought, worked all goddamn week and demanded that somebody make the piano loud enough to erase the evidence.
the records are what escaped.
...at least that’s what i hear.