'The Kind You Can Carve on an Orange'

On this date, Aug. 1, in 1936, Fats Waller recorded “Until the Real Thing Comes Along,”originally written for the revue Rhapsody in Black in 1931 under the title “Till the Real Thing Comes Along.” The writing credits read like a musical assembly line: Mann Holiner, Alberta Nichols, Sammy Cahn, Saul Chaplin and L.E. Freeman. The song’s loping rhythm is pleasantly inoffensive, and when Waller turns on the filigree we suspect his motive is less than musically reverent. We don’t hear his voice for the first minute and a half, and then in the first verse he sings: “I’d work for you, I’d even slave for you / I’d be a beggar or a knave for you [whatever that is].” Waller’s trademark interpolations are as subversive as those of his contemporary, W.C. Fields: “My heart is yours, what more can I say? / [You want me to rob a bank? Well I won’t do it].” In the final verse, his final proposition is less than Platonic:

“If that isn’t love, it'll have to do, baby, yes

Until the real thing comes along

[Here’s the real thing, baby].”

In 1966, Phillip Larkin reviewed Ed Kirkeby’s biography of Waller, Ain’t Misbehavin’, for the Guardian. Kirkeby managed Waller for the last five years of his life, and Larkin is not impressed, calling the book “anecdotal and not particularly distinguished.” After Armstrong and Bechet, Waller is probably Larkin’s most beloved jazz musician:  

“Like many fat people, he discovered that the way to prevent people laughing at him was to make them laugh with him; when he had their attention, he could dominate them with his powerful virtuoso piano playing.”

We share Larkin’s love because Waller was a pure entertainer. He felt no guilt for wanting to make people happy, art be damned. For that reason he was a great artist. Larkin tells us that a part of Waller, whose father was an Abyssinian Baptist preacher, “had lost its way and wanted to go home.” He writes: 

“Fats Waller’s face . . . was the kind you can carve on an orange; squeeze it one way and it laughs, another and it weeps or looks puzzled.”

[The review, “Very Good Friend,” is collected in Larkin’s Jazz Writings (Continuum, 2004). His All What Jazz is mandatory reading for listeners and readers alike. Even when I disagree with his judgments, which I often do, Larkin is never less than interesting, and that’s the minimum we expect of any writer.]