Speak Easy Jazz

Hot, sweet sounds played on America's band stands,

records and radio that became its first popular music

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                 © 2025 - Kenneth Lelen - All Rights Reserved

 

Barbara Stanwyck (1907 - 1990) —
dancer in 1922-23 Ziegfield Follies

Speak Easy Jazz Concerts 

This program offers some of the hot, sweet tunes that were hits from 1919 to early 1930s. This music was popular with the era's speakeasy denizens — the stage door johnnies, flappers, college kids, vaudeville dancers, boot-leggers, crooners and doughboys. The hallmarks of these 100-year-old tunes are the syncopated rhythms, memorable melodies and clever lyrics.

Many jazz tunes were first heard when played by small combos on band stands, vaudeville stages, juke joints and radio broadcasts. You could also could hear jazz on 78 rpm records positioned in a device called a Victrola – a small cabinet that enabled listeners to "play" a record on a turntable that fed sound into an external horn.

Musical luminaries of the 1920s

The rascals who produced these jazz gems were up-and-comers — the vocalists, songwriters, song pluggers, band leaders, pianists, as well as guitar, clarinet, horn and sax players. Don't forget musicians on kazoos, tenor banjos and comb & tissue paper.

Any list of 1920s jazz cats includes such musical luminaries as Lonnie Johnson, Al Jolson, Gene Austin, Rudy Vallee, Louis Armstrong, Irving Berlin, Fats Waller, Eddie Lang, Hoagy Carmichael, Nick Lucas, Isham Jones, Cliff Edwards and Paul Whiteman.

Such an esteemed group of jazz artists includes as well such vocalists as Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters, Sophie Tucker, Ruth Etting, Alberta Hunter and Mildred Bailey.

We also can't omit singer-songwriter Victoria Spivey and her Chicago Four, pianist-arranger Lil Hardin Armstrong and the Hot Five combo she led with husband Louis, or songwriter Dorothy Fields, who wrote lyrics of more than 400 songs for Broadway musicals and Hollywood films.

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Mound City Blue Blowers

This jazz combo made 30 recordings between 1923 and 1936. Earliest members included Dick Slevin (kazoo), Jack Bland (banjo), Eddie Lang (guitar) and Red McKenzie (comb & tissue paper). Lack of drum kit led to use of a suitcase brushed with small hand brooms.

Later members included: Frankie Trumbauer (sax), Jack Teagarden (trombone), Coleman Hawkins (sax), Muggsy Spanier (cornet), Glenn Miller (trombone), Nappy Lamare (banjo), Jimmy Dorsey (trombone) and Bunny Berrigan (trumpet).

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Jazz hits from the 1920s include:

• April Showers           • Sweet Sue–Just You          • Marie

• It Had To Be You       • If You Knew Susie             • Bye Bye Blues

• Tip-Toe Thru Tulips    • April Showers                   • Bye-Bye Blackbird

• Toot-Toot Tootsie       • She's Funny That Way       • Stardust

• My Blue Heaven        • Carolina In The Morning    • Makin Whoopee

• Five-Foot-Two           • Honeysuckle Rose             • If I Had You     

• Ain’t Misbehavin'       • It All Depends On You        • After You've Gone

• CA Here I Come        • I'll See You In Dreams       • Always

• Avalon                      • Ain't She Sweet                • Blue Skies

People adore these up-tempo tunes today as much as they did back in the 1920s. Songs in the Speak Easy Jazz program include:

Sheik Of Araby was composed in 1921 by Harry Smith and Francis Wheeler, with music by Ted Snyder, in response to the popularity of Rudolph Valentino in the movie of the same name. It is said that New Orleans jazz artists were first to put the song in their repertoire, insuring its longevity.

 

Oh, Lady Be Good! was composed by George and Ira Gershwin for the 1924 musical, Lady, Be Good! The Broadway play featured the premier appearance of the brother-sister dance team Fred and Adele Astaire and ran for 330 performances.

Cliff Edwards (1895 - 1971)
"Ukulele Ike" and admirer

This Gershwin tune spawned a host of hit recordings by such artists as Paul Whiteman and his orchestra (1924), Cliff "Ukelele Ike" Edwards (1925), Jack Hylton and his orchestra (1926), and Buddy Lee with the Gilt-Edge Four (1926). In the 1930s the song was a hit for jazz artists Benny Goodman, Slim & Slam, Artie Shaw and Count Basie.

In 1947, Ella Fitzgerald's recording of "Lady Be Good" was notable for her scatting. Her 1959 recording of the song helped establish the Gershwin Songbook at the very top of America's greatest music.

Jimmy McHugh (1894 - 1969)
Dorothy Fields  (1905 - 1974)

  I Can’t Give You Anything But

  Love — It was composed in 1928 by

  Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields for

  "Blackbird Revue," a Broadway show

  that ran for two years.

  One urban legend says the song was

  written in an hour after they heard

  a young couple lament the lack of

  resources as they window-shopped at

  Tiffany's on Fifth Avenue in New York.

  According to author Jack Burton, the

  musical pair heard the young man say,

  "Gee, honey, I'd like to get you a

  sparkler like that, but right now, I

  can't give you nothin' but love!"

Today, "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" is a well-loved standard played in every repertoire, in every venue and at every speed.

Bessie Smith (1894 - 1937)

Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out — This song was composed by Jimmie Cox in 1923

and popularized in a recording by songster Bessie Smith in September 1929 — only a few weeks before the Stock Market Crash. This ragtime-era song bemoans the  vicissitudes of fortune and fickleness of friends amidst hard times.

"Nobody Knows You" was a standard for jazz and blues artists, everyone from Sidney Bechet in 1938 and Leadbelly in 1948 to Scrapper Blackwell in 1959. More recently it became a hit recording for British guitarist Eric Clapton in 1992 on his deceptively titled album, Unplugged.

 

Ain't Misbehavin', according to popular legend, was composed on a child's piano in 1929 by Thomas "Fats" Waller (1904-1943) while "lodging" in alimony prison.

Fats Waller (1904 - 1943)

Fortunately, Fats had deals with a few Tin Pan Alley publishing firms that paid him a flat fee, not a royalty, for each song he wrote. It is said he would offer the same song to two publishers to "augment" his return. In this case he earned enough on one song to get out of jail. Sadly, Fats never saw another dime on the song.  

Other recordings of "Ain't Misbehavin'" were covers by singing star and actress Ruth Etting (1897-1978), crooner Gene Austin (1900-1972), and band leader Leo Reisman (1897-1961) in 1929. That same year Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) played it in a popular musical revue called Hot Chocolates at Connie's Inn, a Harlem speakeasy.

Connie's Inn, like its rival, the Cotton Club, featured entertainment by black performers in a music pit and barely clad female dancers on a stage. The audience included mostly white males, businessmen, and their secretaries seated at dimly lit tables.

All that jazz

It's been said that long before he wrote "Stardust," "Up a Lazy River" or Georgia On My Mind," Hoagy Carmichael would travel from his college dorm in Bloomington, Indiana to Miami, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles just to hear the jazz he loved and meet its musicians. But he wasn't the only one looking to soak up all that jazz.

Hoagy Carmichael (1899-1981)

Indeed, some say the public's attachment to jazz was lubricated by several factors. They included an easy access to bootleg liquor, the proliferation of 78-rpm records, rise of radio, the growth of both legitimate stage and Broadway musicals, and the marvel of "talkies."

Ultimately, ragtime and jazz music helped upend the social and sexual mores of the day as much as the back seats of Henry Ford’s Tin Lizzie autos. Today, because of how jazz music shaped our culture, we call the 1920s — America's first post-War era — as a time known both as the Roaring Twenties and as the Lost Generation.

 

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 © 2025 — Kenneth Lelen — All Rights Reserved