Speckled Red

Speckled Red (born October 23, 1892 in Monroe , Louisiana , † January 2, 1973 in St. Louis , Missouri ; actually Rufus Perryman ) was an American blues and boogie woogie pianist and singer.

Live and act

Speckled Red was the older brother of Piano Red ; their nicknames came from the fact that both were albinos . However, the brothers grew up separately and never recorded each other. Speckled Red and Piano Red both played a noisy barrelhouse piano / boogie-woogie style, with Speckled Red also frequently playing slow blues, such as his two versions of The Right String (But the Wrong Yo-Yo), which Speckled Red first recorded in 1930; his brother had a hit hit with the song twenty years later.

The family moved to Detroit , then Atlanta , when Speckled Red was teenagers , after his father disregarded the racial segregation laws in force at the time. Eventually, the family settled in Hampton ( Georgia down), where his birth was registered a few years later. The family itself, which consisted of Perryman and seven brothers and sisters, had little musical background; therefore Speckled Red was self-taught . He was influenced by his idol Fishtail, as well as by Charlie Spand , James Hemingway and Will Ezell (inspired by Paul Seminole in a movie theater in his early youth) and learned to play the organ in a local church.

In his youth he played at parties; he then moved back to Detroit as a young adult, performing everywhere, including nightclubs and brothels. He was finally discovered by a talent scout from the Brunswick label just before he moved to Memphis . There he had his first recording session in 1929, during which his two classic tracks for Brunswick were created, Wilkins Street Stomp and his hit The Dirty Dozens.

Speckled Red's song The Dirty Dozens, a legendary exchange of insults and vulgar remarks, became an integral part of African-American culture.

I want all you women to fall in line

And shake yo shimmy like i'm shakin 'mine

You shake yo shimmy and you shake it fast

If you can't shake the shimmy, shake yo 'yes yes yes

You a dirty mistreater, a robber and a cheater

Stick you in a dozens and you poppa aint yo cousin

And yo mama do the lordylord

In the following year 1930 he took up again; in Chicago , the remarkable title The Dirty Dozens No. 2, which, however, was nowhere near as successful as its predecessor. The pianist was then without a record deal and then appeared mainly in bars around Memphis and St. Louis .

In Aurora (Illinois) in 1938 he recorded some tracks with the slide guitarist Robert Nighthawk and the mandolin player Willie Hatcher for Bluebird Records (St. Louis Stomp, Welfare Blues), but they brought him little success. In the 1940s he moved to St. Louis and continued his career by playing mostly in pubs and small restaurants and doing job-side jobs.

His rediscovery was made possible because Charlie O'Brien, a St. Louis cop and blues fanatic, used his professional investigative methods to track down old blues musicians who had gone missing in the 1950s. O'Brian tracked Speckled Red on December 14, 1954, after which he was soon able to conclude a recording contract with the young Chicago label Delmark Records as their first blues artist. In 1957 he recorded three tracks, Dad's Piece, Oh Red and Early in the Morning; In the late 1950s and 1960s he experienced a certain reawakening of interest in his music, although his skills were still considerable. During these years he appeared in the traditional jazz scene around St. Louis , mostly as a pianist for the Dixie Stompers, had appearances with the Dixie Matinee and at the St. Louis Jazz Club. In 1956/57 recordings were made for the Tone, Delmark, Folkways and Storyville Records labels .

In 1959 he toured Europe with Chris Barber ; During his stay in Denmark he recorded several of his old tracks for the album The Dirty Dozen . In 1960, Steve Lane produced the solo album Oh! Red recorded. In 1961 he played at the University of Chicago Folk Festival and in Dayton, Ohio with Gene Mayl's Dixieland Rhythm Kings. At the end of the 1960s he had only a few appearances due to his age; he died on January 2, 1973.

For the authors John Jörgensen and Erik Wiedemann , Speckled Red is one of the most important blues and boogie woogie pianists of his time, but he had little success with the audience.

Discographic notes

• 196 ?: Blues in Europe Storyville
• 1971: Oh Red VJM
• 197 ?: Piano Blues Storyville
• 1991: Blues Masters, Vol. 11 Storyville
• 1994: Complete Recorded Works 1929-1938 Document
• 1996: Dirty Dozens Delmark
• Barrelhouse Blues Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
• In London 1960 VJM

literature

• John Jörgensen, Erik Wiedemann : Jazzlexikon , Munich, Mosaik, 1967

swell

1. ↑ MusicWeb Encyclopaedia of Popular Music - Speckled Red
2. ↑ Biography about Speckled Red at learnlink ( memento of the original from July 6, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ↑ [1]
4. ↑ Speckled Red - The Dirty Dozens
5. ↑ AMG, CD Universe

Web links

• Biography at AllMusic
• The Barrel-House Blues of Speckled Red Album - Information from Folkways Records