Klarinet Archive - Posting 000176.txt from 2004/04

From: ormondtoby@-----.net (Ormondtoby Montoya)
Subj: [kl] Louis Armstrong & W.C. Handy anecdotes
Date: Sun, 11 Apr 2004 13:28:51 -0400

(from tracks on "Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy", Columbia CL 591) :

During a recording session, the engineer asked Louis to talk into a
certain microphone for a sound check. Louis used the occasion to tell
the following story:

> My mother sent me down to the pond [in
> Louisiana] to get a pail of water one day, and
> when I come back, my mother was on the
> porch and she wanted to know "Where's that
> water?" I said "Mama, there's a big old rusty
> alligator in that water." She said, "Well, boy,
> go get that water. Don't you know that
> alligator is as afraid of you as you are of
> him?" I said, "Well, Mama, if that alligator is
> as afraid of me as I am of him, then that water
> isn't fit to drink!

Louis's well-known version of "Careless Love" includes lyrics such as
"....milkless milk, silkless silk, that's why we have a pure food
law.... How did food get into this?"

I had always thought that this was 'nonsense' improvising by Louis.
But those words were the actual lyrics that W.C. Handy wrote for the
song. During an interview, Handy talked about hearing Louis for the
first time on a Mississippi steamboat called the S.S. Capitol:

> That's when the blues were new. There is
> always some motivating force that directs my
> attention to composing some particular
> number.

> One day at noon, I heard a minister speaking
> to a crowd on Broadway. He was chiding
> them for adulterating goods and merchandise
> and food. They're adulterating everything....
> and I said they're adulterating love. So I
> went back to the office and caught a train to
> Chicago where Louis played with Erskine
> Tate's orchestra at the Vendome, and I wrote
> "Loveless Love". I used the terms that
> people were using then in the days of
> milkless milk and silkless silk. I orchestrated
> it and carried it into Tate. Tate played it, and
> I sent it off and had it printed.

Reading between the lines, I assume that Handy was referring to soy milk
and synthetic fabrics and other such 'modern' substitutions.

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