`Elegant, Lifting Celebrations of Life'

If you had been a young man living in Oklahoma City in the nineteen-thirties – not a place and time often recalled with fondness -- this is what you remember:

“In those days I lived near the Rock Island roundhouse, where, with a steady clanging of bells and a great groaning of wheels along the rails, switch engines made up trains of freight unceasingly. Yet often in the late-spring night I could hear [Jimmy] Rushing as I lay four blocks away in bed, carrying to me as clear as a full-bored riff on [Oran] `Hot Lips’ Page’s horn. Heard thus, across the dark blocks lined with locust trees, through the night throbbing with the natural aural imagery of the blues, with high-balling trains, departing bells, lonesome guitar chords simmering up from a shack in the alley, it was easy to imagine the voice as setting the pattern to which the instruments of the Blue Devils Orchestra and all the random sounds of night arose, affirming, as it were, some ideal native to the time and to the land.”

Ralph Ellison’s evocation of his youth makes it sound like an earthly paradise – spring, the windows open, Jimmy Rushing’s voice drifting down the street. This comes from “Remembering Jimmy,” first published in the Saturday Review in 1958 and collected in Shadow and Act (1964). Both men were born in Oklahoma City – Rushing in 1903, Ellison 10 years later. Rushing sang with Jelly Roll Morton, Bennie Moten and, for 13 years, Count Basie. He and Ellison were friends, and one wonders if Rushing ever read Invisible Man. Ellison self-deprecatingly describes his remembrance of Rushing as a “shamelessly nostalgic outburst,” but it’s more than that. He gives a close reading of Rushing’s style and its historical context, celebrates jazz, and works at dispelling the notions that all blacks were poor and benighted and black culture was second-rate. He writes of Rushing:

“…one of the significant aspects of his art is the imposition of a romantic lyricism upon the blues tradition (compare his version of `See See Rider’ with that of Ma Rainey), a lyricism which is not of the Deep South, but of the Southwest: a romanticism native to the frontier, imposed upon the violent rawness of a part of the nation which only thirteen years before Rushing’s birth was still Indian territory. Thus there is an optimism in it which echoes the spirit of those Negroes who, like Rushing’s father, had come to Oklahoma in search of a more human way of life.”

Only a writer as sensitive to words as he was to music could have pulled off this analysis:

“Jimmy [Rushing] has always shown a concern for the correctness of language, and out of the tension between the traditional folk pronunciation and his training in school, he has worked out a flexibility of enunciation and a rhythmical agility with words which make us constantly aware of the meanings which shimmer just beyond the limits of the lyrics.”

Rushing’s voice is a calmative and a mood-elevator, excellent for city driving. I’ve been listening to two CDs – Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good to You and Who Was It Sang That Song? – recorded almost 40 years ago, on Oct. 30, 1967, by the Jimmy Rushing All Stars. On hand for a party in Manhattan’s Great Northern Hotel were such comrades-in-arms as Buck Clayton on trumpet; Dickie Wells, trombone; Julian Dash, tenor; Sir Charles Thompson, piano; Jo Jones, drums; Gene Ramey, bass. Much of the lineup and material are drawn from the old Basie band. Rushing, accompanying himself on piano, revives his old warhorse “Tricks Ain’t Walking No More,” which the late Whitney Balliett described as “an ingratiating piece of Americana.” In 1957, in a review of the album The Jazz Odyssey of James Rushing Esq., Balliett wrote:

“Jimmy Rushing, the huge, suave blues shouter, has always sounded as if he were wearing spats and a morning coat and had just had a good laugh. His supple, rich voice and his elegant accent have the curious effect of making the typical roughhouse blues lyric seem like a song by Noel Coward.”

Balliett, as usual, captures an artist’s essence in a minimum of words, all stylish. Rushing’s manner and voice distill the elegant-versus-raffish tension Balliett identifies. Here’s what the jazz critic wrote for The New Yorker at the time of Rushing’s death, on June 8, 1972. It’s a perfect characterization of the singer’s one-of-a-kind voice:

“Jimmy Rushing, the great blues singer, died yesterday, at the age of sixty-eight. He was a short, joyous, nimble, invincible fat man who shouted the blues as if he were wearing kid gloves and carrying a swagger stick. His diction was faultless; in fact, it had an elocutionary quality, for his vowels were broad and sumptuous, his `b’s each weighed a pound, and he loved to roll his `r’s. His lyrics had a pearl-gray, to-the-manor-born cast to them. His voice – light, tenorlike, sometimes straining – was not much, but it was hand-polished and it could be, despite his dandyish style, extraordinarily affecting, as in the mourning, deep-blue `How Long Blues’ he recorded in memory of his friend Hot Lips Page. But most of the time Rushing’s blues were elegant, lifting celebrations of life, and he sang them that way – his voice finally almost threadbare – until the day he died.”

What a pleasure to celebrate three masters – Rushing, Ellison, Balliett. Here’s how Ellison closed his appreciation of Rushing:

“…the abiding moods expressed in our most vital popular art form are not simply a matter of entertainment; they also tell us who and where we are.”

ADDENDUM: Thanks to Dave Lull for sending me a video from Youtube of Rushing singing "I Left My Baby" on the CBS show "The Sound of Jazz," from 1957. Enjoy the company Rushing keeps: Count Basie, Ben Webster, Dickie Wells, Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins, Gerry Mulligan, Vic Dickenson, among others. And enjoy the smile on Rushing's face.