Fletcher Henderson article

[jazzbo]

Interesting article including biographical details about Fletcher Henderson.

http://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/730-sugarfoot-stomp

[AllenLowe]

except the opening paragraphs is so dumb I find it offensive:

"Jazz owes its origins to the bump and grind of turn-of-the-century brothels and the colored waif orphanages of the South’s great cities, but where is the wellspring of swing? If you say Chicago, the answer is no. Benny Goodman would be the first to tell you so.

The fountainhead of swing, children, is a little white frame house with a tin roof, on the black side of the tracks in Cuthbert, a red-dirt Georgia cotton-gin town. This is where they used to lock Fletcher Henderson in the parlor with a piano, beginning about 1903 when he was six. If he didn’t practice, he got whipped. He was a sweet-faced child, with his mother’s light skin and his father’s old eyes. Sometimes the house grew quiet and Fletcher curled up on the floor to take a nap. Even at an early age, he showed signs of what the great white jazz mahout John Hammond would one day call “lassitude.”

 

complete nonsense. I love FLetcher but he couldn't and didn't swing until he heard Louis Armstrong.

and there is a lot of bogus stuff, sorry, in this article; waits too long to mention Redman, who was way ahead of Fletcher in the early day  - and this, just cliched garbage, sorry:

"Some of Henderson’s best work happened when he would rake the cheap veneer of lyrics right off a trite white Tin Pan Alley song and make it new. He could peel a hurtful racist song down to its studs, then renovate it into a statelier mansion in which a black soul could stand at its full height. While white America was still drunk on ragtime and bogus blackface “coon-shouter” songs, Henderson minimized lyrics and substituted jazz breaks. Louis Armstrong learned the hard way that Henderson didn’t have much respect for scat singing, and he began to pour his whole story into his horn."

no citations in this article, no documentation of anything. About half made-up. That thing about Armstrong at the end is total stupidity.

 

 

 

Edited December 28, 2015 by AllenLowe

[jazzbo]

It's not a perfect article. I seem to have enjoyed it more than you.

[AllenLowe]

it's not my favorite.

[jlhoots]

I actually pretty much like that whole issue & the accompanying CD.

[Larry Kart]

 The credit line on the Henderson article says "Cynthia Shearer is the author of two works of fiction." Make that three.