Biography

Radio Contact: Kevin Johnson
promo@delmark.com

Click Here for more Delmark Releases!

Harry "The Hipster" Gibson

Who Put The Benzedrine In Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?

Delmark Records – DE-687

Harry “The Hipster” was not merely a comical guy who made jazz-influenced novelty records in the 1940s; he was truly a master pianist with a style firmly rooted in the music he loved in his youth, playing a mixture of rag, stride, blues, boogie, traditional jazz, and the occasional bop influence. Gibson picked up where his mentor Fats Waller had left off; Harry’s classic recordings combine swinging jazz piano with surrealist lyricism. This CD is hazardous to the ears of squares as Gibson’s incorrigible disregard for the status quo is evident on nearly every song. The first ten tracks are from a 1989 studio session and tracks 11-16 are from a semi-professionally recorded ’76 live performance with an unknown blues-rock band.

Warning! EXPLICIT LYRICS- many drug references in lyrics.

1 Hey, Man! You Just Made My Day (2:58)
2 I Got Framed (2:49)
3 I Wanna Go Back To My Little Grass Shack (4:03)
4 Who Put The Benzedrine In Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine? (2:19)
5 Get Hip To Shirley MacLaine (3:51)
6 I Flipped My Wig In San Francisco (2:21)
7 Back In The Days Of Dixieland And Bop (3:39)
8 Boogity Woogity Blues (2:23)
9 Thanks For The Use Of The Hall (2:01)
10 Get Hip To Shirley MacLaine (Alternate Take) (3:24)
11 They Call Him Harry The Hipster (3:15)
12 Me & Max (7:02)
13 Who Put The Benzedrine In Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?, Live
(5:21)
14 Lowdown Slowdown Inflationary Blues (3:21)
15 "Maple Leaf Rag" And A Little Bit Of "The Entertainer"
(3:49)
16 Ragtime Raggedy Ann (3:11)

(Personnel on 1-10)
Harry "The Hipster" Gibson - vocals, piano
Jeff Silvertrust - trumpet
Sheldon Brown - tenor saxophone
Jon Davis - guitar
Clark Suprynowicz (#1-3,5-7,10), Jimmy Gibson (#4,8,9)-bass
David Rokeach - drums

all songs written by Harry Gibson
except track 15 (public domain), track 2 (Lieber/Stoller) with many Harry ad libs added.

Tracks 1 to 10 recorded at Mobius Studios in San Francisco, CA on April 27, 1989. Oliver DiCiceo, engineer

Tracks 11 to 16 recorded live at The Icehouse in Pasadena, CA on March 29, 1976 "with an unknown blues-rock band", The Rock Boogie Blues Jammers.

Album production & supervision: Bob Koester & Jeff Silvertrust

Alternate take #10 not included on Airplay Direct because of 15 song limit per page for Airplay Direct rules.

Harry Gibson, a fascinating character and supremely talented pianist/singer/songwriter/entertainer, and one of Dr. Demento's faves, featured on "Dr. Demento's Delights!!"

Liner notes from Thomas Magee

Harry "The Hipster" Gibson was at the peak of his music career from 1944 through the 1950s. During those years he worked at many of the jazz clubs in New York and other cities, made records for Musicraft and other labels, did broadcasts for Willis Conover and the Armed Forces Radio Jubilee program, made "soundie" juke box films of some of his most popular songs, and also appeared and performed in a couple of movie features after being introduced to the Hollywood film crowd by Orson Welles, who had taken a liking to him. Gibson had gotten favorable write-ups in DownBeat magazine before and after KMPC Radio in Los Angeles banned his records from their broadcasts, causing a minor scandal that very quickly led to some major controversy. Columnists for various newspapers continued to praise his piano playing, generally tending to describe his stage act as "wild" and "zany." Along the way, there were exhilarating high times, and discomforting low times. Harry Gibson took it all with the existential attitude that is the mark of a true hipster. His dear friends Bird and Billie died early deaths. Miraculously, The Hipster managed to survive into the '90's.

Gibson's piano style remained firmly rooted in the music he loved in his youth; a mixture of rag, stride, blues, boogie, traditional jazz, and an occasional bop influence. With his notable musical knowledge, he could have composed bop tunes equal in quality to the finest of that style, yet he chose to be an entertainer, and never considered himself a bop musician. He picked up where his mentor Fats Waller had left off, and had a ball with it. Gibson's classic "Stop That Dancin' Up There" is a remarkable combination of swinging jazz piano and surrealist lyricism. Harry "The Hipster" was not merely a comical guy who made jazz-influenced novelty records. He was truly a master pianist, with a repertoire that spanned several decades of musical history, but his singular innovation was his uninhibited performance style. Pianists before Hipster sat still while playing. Harry began doing things that were later copied by others, back when Little Richard was really little Richard.

Gibson worked steadily through the 1950s, earning good money. When rock began to displace jazz music in nightclubs, his music became an unnecessary commodity in the commercial music business. He abandoned his eccentric stage act and "Hipster" image in 1960, and began traveling around the country, working under other names while playing in any strip joint or cheap dive that had a piano. By 1968 he was living a back in California.

He gigged around LA with a young rock band before disbanding, starting over again with other rhythm sections. In July, 1976, Gibson was having problems with drummers. Hipster called me to come to his crib to "play some tunes" with him and his bassist, Henry Franklin, who's known as a fine jazz musician. We played some of Gibson's material for a little while, then Harry turned and looked over at me from his piano. "Solid, man. We're blowin' at Donte's tomorrow night. You got eyes?" I was gassed! It was the beginning of a great mutual friendship that would last for the rest of his life.

This Delmark release contains material that is hazardous to the ears of squares. It's guaranteed to offend fundamentalists, DEA agents, and rehab counselors from coast to coast. Gibson's incorrigible disregard for the status quo is evident on nearly every song. He recorded the studio tracks in 1989, backed by a highly capable group of San Francisco musicians. Harry was in top form for the date, and the whole session is a rompin', stompin', jumpin', swingin' ball to listen to. Every tune is a solid gas.

The Hipster lived fast, died broke, and left a quantity of unreleased recordings which outnumber his more than eighty issued ones.



ALL MUSIC Biography by Scott Yanow

Harry "the Hipster" Gibson, a talented if eccentric pianist/vocalist, had his brief moment of fame before fading into obscurity. He started out playing on 52nd Street as a stride pianist and in 1944 even performed "In a Mist" at an Eddie Condon Town Hall concert. But it was his crazy compositions (including "Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine," "Handsome Harry the Hipster," and "Stop That Dancin' Up There") and frantic singing style (predating rock & roll by a decade) that gave him an underground reputation. Gibson's definitive recordings were made for Musicraft in 1944 and 1947, and his unusual showmanship was captured on a few soundies during the period. However, Gibson's excessive drug use resulted in his quick decline after 1947. He did record a somewhat demented Christmas album in 1974 and some new songs for Progressive in 1986, but largely wasted his great potential.

ALL MUSIC review by Scott Yanow

After his heyday in the mid-'40s, pianist-singer Harry "The Hipster" Gibson faded away from the limelight. He continued playing on a part-time basis and this Delmark CD released for the first time a live performance from 1976 and some studio tracks from 1989. Although the backup bands are not overly impressive (the 1976 group is an amateurish blues-rock band), Gibson proves to still be in his musical prime, taking several fine piano solos. However it is the Hipster's frequently hilarious storytelling (which deals with tales of the drug life) that are most memorable, particularly "Me & Max," "I Got Framed" and "I Flipped My Wig in San Francisco." It makes one regret that Gibson did not do more with his career.

Harry "The Hipster" Gibson was a jazz pianist, singer, proto-rapper and songwriter.

Born : June 27, 1915 in The Bronx, New York.
Died : May 03, 1991 in Brawley, California.

Gibson played New York style Stride piano and boogie woogie while singing in a wild, unrestrained style. His music career began in the late 1920s, when he played stride piano in Dixieland jazz bands in Harlem. He continued to perform there throughout the 1930s, adding the barrelhouse boogie of the time to his repertoire, and was discovered by Fats Waller in 1939.[ Between 1939 and 1945, he played at various Manhattan jazz clubs on 52nd Street ("Swing Street"), most notably the Three Deuces, run by Irving Alexander, and Leon and Eddies, run by Leon Enkin and Eddie Davis.

WIKIPEDIA

Harry "The Hipster" Gibson (June 27, 1915 – May 3, 1991), born Harry Raab, was an American jazz pianist, singer, and songwriter. He played New York style stride piano and boogie woogie while singing in a wild, unrestrained style. His music career began in the late 1920s, when, under his real name, he played stride piano in Dixieland jazz bands in Harlem. He continued to perform there throughout the 1930s, adding the barrelhouse boogie of the time to his repertoire.

Early life

Gibson was Jewish. He came from a musical family that operated a player piano repair shop. He began playing piano in the 1920s as a child, in the Bronx and Harlem. His first professional piano gig was at age 13 with his uncle's orchestra. He began playing boogie woogie and talking in a jive style. He was invited into black speakeasies in Harlem to play piano while still a teenager.

Career

In the 1930s, after Prohibition ended, Gibson played regularly in Harlem nightclubs. He punctuated his piano stylings with a running line of jive patter, which can be traced directly to recordings of the late-1930s jazz personality Tempo King (1915–1939), who was described by columnist Walter Winchell as "the white Fats Waller".[6] King peppered his vocals with enthusiastic exclamations. After King's untimely death in June 1939, Gibson made King's vocal mannerisms his own.

Gibson was fond of playing Fats Waller tunes, and when Waller heard Gibson in a club in Harlem in 1939 he hired Gibson to be his relief pianist at club dates. Between 1939 and 1945, Gibson played at Manhattan jazz clubs on 52nd Street ("Swing Street"), most notably the Three Deuces, run by Irving Alexander, and Leon and Eddie's run by Leon Enkin and Eddie Davis. During one audition for a nightclub engagement, where he played piano for a girl singer, he gave his true name of Harry Raab. The club owner insisted on a "showbiz" name, shouting, "I'm calling you two The Gibsons!" Harry adopted Gibson as his professional name.

In the 1940s, Gibson was known for writing unusual songs considered ahead of their time. He was also known for his unique, wild singing style, his energetic and unorthodox piano styles, and his intricate mixture of hardcore, gutbucket boogie rhythms with ragtime, stride and jazz piano styles. He took the boogie woogie beat of his predecessors, but he made it frantic, similar to the rock and roll music of the 1950s. Examples of his wild style are found in "Riot in Boogie" and "Barrelhouse Boogie". An example of his strange singing style is "The Baby and the Pup". Other songs that he recorded were "Handsome Harry, the Hipster", "I Stay Brown All Year 'Round", 4-F Ferdinand the Frantic Freak", "Get Your Juices at the Deuces" and "Stop That Dancin' Up There".

Gibson recorded often, but there are very few visual examples of his work. In 1944, he filmed three songs in New York for the Soundies film jukeboxes, and he went to Hollywood in 1946 to appear as himself in the feature-length film musical Junior Prom. He preceded white rock-and-rollers by a decade: the Soundies he recorded are similar to Jerry Lee Lewis's raucous piano numbers of the 1950s.

Like Mezz Mezzrow, Gibson consciously abandoned his ethnicity to adopt black music and culture. He grew up near Harlem in New York City, and his constant use of black jive talk was not an affectation; it was something he picked up from his fellow musicians. His song "I Stay Brown All Year Round" is based on this. In his autobiography, he claimed he coined the term hipster between 1939 and 1945 when he was performing on Swing Street, and he started using "Harry the Hipster" as his stage name.

Classical music work

Gibson's wild-man theatrics belied the fact that he was also a highly trained classical musician. While working on "Swing Street" at night, he was a fellow at the Juilliard Graduate School during the day.

Gibson was invited to perform at Carnegie Hall, for a jazz concert held on December 2, 1944. Hosted by Eddie Condon, the program featured many celebrities from the jazz world. Gibson performed a serious rendition of Bix Beiderbecke's piano piece "In a Mist". "The acoustics are so big in Carnegie Hall that when I hit that piano, I thought I was playing 40 pianos," said Gibson. "After I did the Carnegie Hall concert, I got a write-up in Downbeat and he said the best thing in the whole program was Harry Gibson, the guy that went up and played Bix Beiderbecke solos. Musicraft [Records] saw the writeup, came down to the Deuces to listen to me. Billie Holiday was late for her show, and Irving Alexander always stuck me on when she was late for her show to keep the people there... And I'm doing my Harry the Hipster act... and I go out with 'Barrelhouse Boogie.'
"Musicraft signed Gibson on the spot, and he recruited drummer Big Sid Catlett and bassist John Simmons for a recording session the next morning, resulting in the hit album Boogie Woogie in Blue. "Eight songs, and not a clinker in 'em," said Gibson proudly. "Right straight out, eight takes, eight songs. Perfect."

"Harry the Hipster" headlining at the Onyx on 52nd Street, May 1948. The photo also shows two of Gibson's other haunts, The Three Deuces and Leon and Eddie's.

Notoriety

He recorded "Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?", released in January 1946. "I was with Musicraft at the time," recalled Gibson in a radio interview with Dr. Demento. "We got in there, man, we knocked the tune off and bam! I get splashes [press coverage] for a month. One month later, benzedrine becomes illegal. You dig, it was legal when I made it. They put the kibosh on the record and they stamped it subversive." Radio stations across America refused to play it, and Gibson was blacklisted in the music industry. Although his mainstream movie appearance in Junior Prom was released that year, it could not overcome the notoriety of the "Benzedrine" record.

Sidelined from a recording career, Gibson pursued live appearances. In 1946 he was hired by impresario J. J. Shubert for Mae West's touring stage show. He spent time in Miami during the 1950s, and appeared at the Ball & Chain nightclub in Miami on the same bill with Billie Holiday during the Christmas season of 1956. With the rising popularity of young rock-and-roll musicians among teenagers in the 1950s, older musicians were not in demand, and Gibson's own drug use led to his decline.

Career change and comeback

In the 1960s, when Gibson saw the success of the Beatles, he switched to rock and roll. By the 1970s, he was playing hard rock, blues, bop, novelty songs, and a few songs that mixed ragtime with rock and roll. His hipster act became a hippie act. His old records were revived on Dr. Demento's national radio show, particularly "Benzedrine", which was included on the 1975 compilation album Dr. Demento's Delights.

His comeback resulted in three new albums: Harry the Hipster Digs Christmas, Everybody's Crazy but Me, (its title taken from the lyrics of "Stop That Dancin' Up There") (Progressive, 1986), and Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine (Delmark, 1989). The latter two feature jazz, blues, ragtime, and rock and roll songs about reefer, nude bathing, hippie communes, strip clubs, male chauvinists, "rocking the 88s", and Shirley MacLaine.

Gibson may have been the only jazz pianist of the 1930s and 1940s to go on to play in rock bands in the 1970s and 1980s. The only constants were his tendency to play hard-rocking boogie woogie and his tongue-in-cheek references to drug use. In 1991, shortly before his death, his family filmed a biographical featurette on his life and music, Boogie in Blue, published as a VHS video that year.

Gibson died from a self-inflicted gunshot on May 3, 1991, after suffering from congestive heart failure. He was 75.

Discography

Boogie Woogie in Blue (Musicraft, 1984; reissue of 1944 album)
Harry the Hipster Digs Christmas (Totem, 1976; amateur recordings)
Everybody's Crazy but Me (Progressive, 1986; new recordings)
Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine? (Delmark, 1996; recorded in 1989)
Rockin' Rhythm (Sutton; piano album includes three Harry Gibson 78s from the 1940s)

Scalawags: “The Hipster” Harry

Hep to the jive.
Writer Jim Christy
NUVO Magazine: Harry the Hipster


It was my good fortune to have known some of the last of the old breed of swinging jazz musicians. This was before jazz put on shorts and a ball cap and made nice. Many of these individuals are now legendary, as opposed to merely famous, and one of them, whom, alas, I did not meet, seems more legendary than the rest.

Information about him is ambiguous; his activities were so strange that even conservative, just-the-facts jazz reference books feel compelled to mention them. According to Jazz: The Rough Guide, for instance, he conducted the female choir in a prison where he was serving time, wrote a hymn accepted by the Vatican for the Marian year, lived on an Indian reserve and married the chief’s daughter, and more.

There was a Count, a Duke, and a King; a Bags, a Bird, and a Hawk; but no one knew what to call this cat, so he invented his own term: hipster.

The kind of hipster he was is not to be confused with the hipster of today. He wasn’t following a script; he wrote the script and then improvised on it. Before there was “hip”, there was “hep”, as in, “He’s hep to the jive they’re laying down.” Jive talk was lingo particular to the world of jazz, but so many outsiders were coming on hep that it annoyed musicians. Musicians, therefore, replaced “hep” with “hip”. And the first person known to have been called a hipster was Harry Gibson. But he wasn’t born a Gibson.

He was born a Raab in 1915 to a musical family in the Bronx. Harry was picking out tunes on the piano when he was three years old and could play the contemporary pop songs by the time he was eight. One day, while exploring the basement of the family music store, Harry chanced upon old music rolls from player pianos. He began to follow along with the music, playing everything he heard, not realizing that many of the notes in each tune had been added later. At 13, he got with a band playing Saturday night dances at Starlight Park, an amusement park on the Bronx River, which were broadcast on local radio. This led to a gig backing the singing waiters at a joint owned by gangster Dutch Schultz. Harry moved on to an otherwise all-black band called the Chocolate Bars. When he wasn’t playing, Harry hung around outside nightclubs in Harlem, listening and learning. He became known as the crazy white kid who played like a grown-up black man. He began to pick up on black jive and add to it.

He played at the Rhythm Club, a sort of nightspot and union hall for black musicians, and did takeoffs on Fats Waller, telling people that he was the star pupil of the man himself. One night, a large, jovial man started calling out requests, and Harry played them, all Fats Waller tunes. The man stuffed a five-dollar bill in the kitty after every one. Patrons thought this was real funny, but Harry didn’t know why they were laughing. Finally, the man said to Harry, “I just came around to hear what my star pupil sounds like.”

Fats Waller hired him to be his intermission piano player at a club on 52nd Street, known as Swing Street for its proliferation of jazz spots. The job lasted until Fats left town a year later, after which Harry’s style changed and he began to write songs. He played around the Street for another five years backing Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, and Dizzy Gillespie. He also had a steady job with the more conservative Eddie Condon’s band and studied at the classically oriented Juilliard School of Music.

During those days in the early forties, Harry, now Gibson (having taken his new surname from the label on a gin bottle), got together with another scalawag, Slim Gaillard, and, according to some sources, invented a new song form called vocalese. This is not, as often is the case, to be confused with scat singing. Scat singing substitutes non-verbal sounds for words, whereas vocalese uses syllables that make up ersatz words; for instance, Harry “the Hipster” Gibson’s immortal phrase, 10 years before Little Richard, “**** bop a boodlee a webop, a **** mop bam.” Gaillard recorded his famous war resister song, “The Flat Foot Floogie”, and Harry did the companion piece, “4F Ferdinand, the Frantic Freak”.

Shortly thereafter, Harry had his first big hit, Boogie Woogie in Blue, and recorded it on a Soundie. These were 1940s music videos, films played on projectors and later on screens mounted atop jukeboxes. You can watch these hipster videos on YouTube, and if you do, you will see an uncanny forerunner of Jerry Lee Lewis: a cat with long blond hair combed back, pumping the piano, standing up, fingers gone wild. The comparison to Jerry Lee is, however, primarily visual. Harry the Hipster was in another league as a piano player.

Harry was given to giving his piano a beating, so he devised what he called a “breakaway” piano. He’d pound the thing, kick it, smash, and at the end of a gig, it would fall completely apart, to be reassembled later.

The kind of hipster he was is not to be confused with the hipster of today. Harry Gibson wasn’t following a script; he wrote the script and then improvised on it.

In 1945, he was recruited to play at Billy Berg’s Rendezvous club in Hollywood for $1,000 a week. He stayed for more than a year. Berg asked him what this bebop was that he had been hearing about. Harry explained it and advised him to start booking acts like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, which he did, and thus bebop came to the West Coast.

Harry had a couple of medium hits with a “Handsome Harry the Hipster” and “I Stay Brown All Year ’Round”, which, besides being a jive tune, also commented on race relations. It got him in trouble in certain quarters. The controversy it caused—a white man singing about the situation of black men—was nothing to his next song, which was his most popular but also, alas, led to his downfall: “Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine?”

The number sold a ton of copies and got Harry the Hipster plenty of jobs in clubs, at dances, and on radio, along with a part in a movie, Junior Prom, playing a guy who interrupts a music class and teaches the students about “the beat” so that pretty soon they’re dancing between their desks. But the song also brought the heat down on him, primarily from the vice squad, and he was sued by Ovaltine. Club owners were reluctant to hire him for fear the cops would bust the joint.

He was rescued by Mae West, who wanted him to play a hip sailor in her stage show Come On Up (Ring Twice). The show toured for a year, and Mae and Harry had an affair.

After that, Harry still found work, but, not as much of it. He played with Benny Carter and Earl “Fatha” Hines band. One night at the Savoy Ballroom when Cab Calloway was playing, Harry walked onstage carrying a large water pipe filled with marijuana. He lit the pipe and handed it to Cab Calloway, who took a couple of deep tokes and jumped up to go into his strutting, jiving act. Naturally, the patrons loved it.

But the jobs were diminishing rapidly as rock and roll began to tighten its grip on the entertainment business. Ironically, Harry, who could be said to have been playing rock and roll for years, couldn’t cash in on it. Another person more or less put out of work by all this was the hip comedian Lord Buckley. The two hipsters had to open their own nightclub, in Miami, to get gigs, and their own record label to turn out recordings. It didn’t last.

Harry the Hipster perfected the disappearing acts he’d been doing for decades, materializing infrequently, playing piano in Akron, Ohio, or driving a taxi in San Francisco. He was, in the language of the street, scuffling. The 1960s were a disaster for Harry, and he left few traces. The seventies, however, with hippies everywhere, saw the re-emergence of Harry “the Hipster” Gibson, whom bandleader Stan Kenton had dubbed a “hippie” 30 years earlier. He played in a band called Rock Boogie Blues Jammers fronted by Mike Cochrane. Harry wrote charts for the band, but its members had no idea what they meant. When Harry appeared onstage, he often tossed joints into the audience. Fearing busts, Cochrane convinced him to fill the papers with cigarette tobacco. Harry drank so much that Cochrane had to tell bartenders to water his drinks. Most of the time, Harry spoke black jive talk, which not even the 1970s hippies understood. Other times, he sounded like some Jewish gangster in a 1930s movie.

In 1989, age 74, Harry put out his most successful album ever. Although it was called Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine?, it consisted of new songs, including one about his little grass shack in Hawaii made of Maui Wowie, which could be smoked as well as lived in. There was also one about Shirley MacLaine and how cool she was.

Harry had always told people that if he got old and infirm, he’d kill himself rather than be a burden to others. The image of Harry “the Hipster” Gibson sitting in a wheelchair in an old folks’ home, dribbling oatmeal down his chin, is impossible to maintain. In 1991, wasting away with a bad heart, he put a gun to his head and ended it all.

One of those musicians whom I was fortunate enough to hang around with for a time was another piano player, Joe Albany. I asked him about Harry “the Hipster” Gibson. “He was crazy, man,” he said. “Last I heard of him, he had run away with some countess from Eastern Europe. Cat could play though.”

https://nuvomagazine.com/magazine/winter-2012/scalawags-the-hipster-harry

Documentary- BOOGIE IN BLUE

In 1991, Harry's daughter Arlena (Lena) and Lena's daughter Flavyn, made a short documentary of his life. Flavyn was going to film school at the time and chose a very worthy subject. Interviews, music videos, interviews with his friends and family. This is a Harry videography, the definitive biography for all fans of the Hipster. Harry Gibson was the original hippie. The original hipster. He lived from 1915 to 1991 and died shortly after this video was made.


FEATURE ARTICLE on Harry in UK's BLUES & RHYTHM!!

This is the manuscript of the article published in Blues and Rhythm magazine (UK) in March, 2009, issue #237. This is the manuscript as originally written by Morgan Wright in March, 2008 and submitted for publication.
The edited and published article appears here. They did not change it very much.

Harry "The Hipster" Gibson --by Morgan Wright

Ten years before Little Richard sang, "**** bop a loo-****, a **** bam boom," Harry "The Hipster" Gibson was singing, "****, boodlee webop, a ****, mop." Fifteen years before Buddy Holly was hiccupping in falsetto, Harry had perfected the technique. Twenty years before Pete Townsend smashed his first guitar, The Hipster was smashing pianos (it was a gimmick, the club had a piano that broke apart and could be patched up between shows).

Harry Gibson was the wildest of the mid-1940’s boogie woogie piano players. There were a lot of boogie pianists in those days, but Harry had the whole rock and roll thing down, to a tee, before anybody knew it existed. He was playing boogie so ferociously and with such a heavy backbeat that, in retrospect, it gives an amazing resemblance to the 1950’s. But was it? If you define rock and roll as boogie woogie with a backbeat, frantic vocalizations in overdrive, wild unpredictable stage antics, crazy lyrics sung with a rebellious attitude, by an egomaniac with a desire to demolish the audience with rhythm rather than soothe it with a nice melody, then yes, it was, with an asterisk (*it was 1944).

When boogie woogie hit New York City officially in 1938 with the "From Spirituals To Swing" concert at Carnegie Hall, it was nothing new to the top Harlem piano players, many of whom were from the south. When Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, and Meade Lux Lewis moved to town after the concert, they had to peck their way up the order of the established greats of Harlem by engaging in cutting contests at a private after-hours club called Grant’s. The boogie woogie trio found themselves competing against people like Earl Hines, Teddy Wilson, Fats Waller, Art Tatum, Marlowe Morris, Count Basie, Harry "The Hipster" Gibson, Claude Hopkins, and Clarence Prophet, among others, playing stride piano and boogie. According to Harry, the winner of these battles was usually Art Tatum. Harry was probably one of the low men on the totem pole, as he was the only white guy at the contests. Yes, Harry Gibson was white, the only white man there, and probably the only one in Harlem. The fact that he was invited at all, in those racially charged times, speaks volumes, but the fact that Fats Waller usually introduced him to the contestants as being his star protégé, gives testimony to his immense talent. Harry said in his autobiography many years later, "It sure was scary playing with those cats, but somehow I got away with it."

Harry The Hipster was born Harry Raab in 1915 in the Bronx, near Harlem. His family operated a player piano repair shop, and his father was a violinist. His grandfather was a piano teacher who taught Harry the basics of traditional music, but he learned jazz songs by carefully watching the keys on player pianos, and copying them. He had no way of knowing the piano rolls had been overdubbed with extra notes, so when he copied the keys, he didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to be able to play all of them, but he did anyway. Later in life he claimed this to be the reason he played so many notes. "I’ve only got 10 fingers, but I play as many notes as I can with the ten I’ve got," he would say. By the time he was thirteen, he was playing jazz piano in an all-black band called The Chocolate Bars, in Harlem, and by 1930 he was making friends with pianists there and being tutored, notably by Marlowe Morris, who was Harry’s age, and filling in as a solo artist in the clubs that lined 7th Ave (now Lennox). He started getting jobs, and for the rest of the decade made a splash there, a large part of his repertoire coming from Fats Waller records. His reputation as a walking Fats Waller jukebox got back to the man himself, who walked into a club where Harry was playing one night in 1939, pretending to be a regular customer. One after another, he requested his own songs, which Harry played so well that Waller introduced himself to the surprised youngster, and hired him on the spot to play with him downtown in the bustling new jazz district known as "The Street," also called "Swing Street," "The Apple," "Swing Alley," or, for those who still need Mapquest, 52nd St. between 5th and 7th Avenues in midtown Manhattan. For the next year, Harry was Fats Waller’s intermission pianist.

Tempting as it may be to think Harry was a white copyist of Waller, by the early 40’s he had developed his own unique style quite different from Fat’s. Like the young Bobby Zimmerman mentoring himself on Woodie Guthrie records until he started writing his own songs, developed his own style, and changed his name to Bob Dylan, the young Harry Raab grew away from the whole Fats Waller thing when Fats left town in 1940, and Harry suddenly morphed into Harry "the Hipster" Gibson. There was a brief transition period where Harry was singing Don Raye boogies, such as Pig Foot Pete, Down The Road A Piece, and Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, but by 1943 and 1944, Harry was primarily singing his own songs and making a name for himself along The Street. The name Gibson came from a gin bottle, a popular brand at the time, and the nickname Hipster was a word he either coined or adopted as soon as it had been, because his usage of the term is the earliest on record. Before hipsters, there were hepcats. Before hip, there was hep, and Harry informs us of the difference between the two in his song, "It Ain’t Hep," where he tells us, "The jive is hip, don’t say hep, that’s a slip of the lip, let me give you a tip, don’t you ever say hep, it ain’t hip."

For the next five years Harry played almost every night on The Street, in almost every club. He played with Billie Holliday, Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Pearl Bailey, Coleman Hawkins, Tiny Grimes, Stuff Smith, Thelonious Monk, the list is endless as this was the center of jazz at the time. His placards outside the front door at these clubs usually billed him as being a musical genius. He played in clubs around town as a regular with Eddie Condon. He also continued to play in Harlem, jamming at the Cotton Club with Cab Calloway, Erskine Hawkins, Chick Webb, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, and Earl Hines, to name a few. At the same time, he was attending Juilliard, the most prestigious classical music school in America, on a scholarship, and was teaching there briefly.

His singing was a combination of vocalese and scat, with just enough actual lyrics to separate him from Slim Gaillard’s style. In fact, Harry and Slim are often mentioned together in the literature as being the two main proponents and inventors of the vocalese singing style. Harry said they played together so often they could do each others acts, and they even recorded together in 1946. Vocalese is defined as a form of scat singing where instead of using non-verbal utterances, the singers would use actual syllables that sounded like words, but had no meaning. "Flat foot floogie with a floy floy, floydoy, floydoy" was Gaillard’s vocalese tip-of-the-hat to the WWII army designation of 4F. Nonsense words all starting with the letter F. Harry used something closer to English when he sang "4F Ferdinand, The Frantic Freak," although the lyrics are more comical than meaningful. Another thing unusual about Harry’s singing is that he usually ignored the melody and sang as if he were talking, letting the piano carry the melody. This is jive singing. Harry’s own songs have minimal melody, if any, as Harry talks and jives his way through the lyrics. Songs which have distinct melody lines when others sing them, such as "Pig Foot Pete," as sung by Don Raye or Ella Mae Morse, become speaking parts in the hands of the Hipster, loaded with extra verses of ad lib jive and funny commentary. Harry could take a worn out chestnut that you never want to hear again, like Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, and make it as entertaining as can be with these verses of funny jive.

Harry’s first release was a four-record album on the Musicraft label in 1944. In those days, an album was a book of 78’s, usually 3 or 4 records in the album. Harry’s was called "Boogie Woogie In Blue," and sold briskly. Overnight, Harry was a star, and he became a popular guest on radio shows. He rode the boogie woogie train through the war, releasing V-Disc boogies for the soldiers overseas, and pre-recorded radio shows for the networks. Although not notable at the time, but of extreme importance to us now, he recorded some Soundies for a video jukebox company by that name, all in 1944. In the 1940’s, you could insert a nickel into a Soundies machine and watch a 3-minute film of a popular musician, and Harry made three of these that year. Luckily, in this modern age, we can watch two of them by simply logging onto youtube.com and searching for Harry Gibson on the engine. If you do, you will see the perfect embodiment of a 1950’s rock and roll star. The only clue that it wasn’t the 1950’s, is that he’s wearing a zoot suit instead of blue jeans and white tee shirt.

In 1945, a big Hollywood nightclub called Billy Berg’s Rendezvous imported Harry to the left coast, where he played on Vine Street, the jazz Mecca of LA at the time, and paid Harry $1000 a week, a huge sum in those days. Many of these shows are preserved, at least in the audio portion, as this had been recorded by RCA and distributed on 16-inch records for radio replay on their network. Harry’s records and radio shows were usually marketed to the black audience, and most people who heard him on the radio thought he was black, because of the music he played, and the jive accent he spoke with that he’d picked up during his many years of working in Harlem. While in LA, when he wasn’t playing at Berg’s, Harry gravitated to clubs on Central Avenue, the only black section of LA at the time, when Los Angeles few black residents. That neighborhood later increased in size and became known as South Central. Harry frequented these clubs and jammed there in after-hours joints whenever he could.

Also while in LA, he played at some vaudeville houses, one of them called Cab Calloway’s. He played many times with Calloway, the noted jive lexicographer and author of 1944’s "Cab Calloway’s Unabridged Hepster’s Dictionary." Calloway later was quoted as saying that Harry spoke with jive that even he had never heard before. Harry even wrote a short glossary of jive terms that was included in the 1944 album, which included the term "hipster," a word that Cab had overlooked in his "Hepster’s."

Another thing Harry is notable for at Billy Berg’s is the importation to the west coast of a new form of music called bebop. When Harry arrived in LA, Billy Berg asked him about the whole New York scene, inquiring about this new bebop thing he’d been hearing about, and asked him for advice on who the greatest acts were in New York. Harry recommended a still-unknown friend of his, Dizzy Gillespie, as having the best band in New York, with his sax player Charlie Parker. They were immediately booked at Billy Bergs, the first time bebop was ever played on the coast.

The crowds that Harry drew to Billy Bergs were huge, and it was apparent that he was bound to become a superstar. However, things were suddenly to turn sour for Harry. In 1946, he released a few more records on Musicraft, this time recorded in LA. One song, "I Stay Brown All Year ‘Round" is especially brilliant, as it gives us insight into his relationship with the black musicians who surrounded him. His downfall, however, was the flip side, "Who Put The Benzedrine In Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine." Whether it was Harry’s reputation as a drug addict, the Hays Code, fears of a lawsuit from the makers of Ovaltine, or the hammer of the federal drug enforcement agencies coming down on radio stations, Harry was suddenly blacklisted from the record business at the end of 1947, as well as the radio industry. In spite of his sudden popularity, no record company would touch him.

This did not stop Harry from working in clubs that would have him, or working for the bawdy Mae West, who took Harry with her on a stage tour starting in 1947, traveling around the country in a play she had created called, "Come On Up, Ring Twice." Harry toured with her for a year playing a sailor, and naturally sang and played piano. He also had a brief affair with West. At the end of the 40’s, he was resident in a club in Philadelphia and actually shared top billing with Louis Armstrong.

In the early 50’s, Harry operated a nightclub in Miami with another noted hipster, Lord Buckley. They even owned a record label together, Hip Records. After that fizzled out, he moved to San Francisco where he worked with Big Jay McNeely in a club called "Say When." McNeely was still doing the act of walking out of the club and down the street while playing sax, and Harry’s part in the act was to grab another sax and honk with him out the door, into a taxi, back on a bus, and back into the club with the band still keeping a beat for them.

Harry worked with Sammy Davis Junior at one point, and the two noticed that they were exactly the same size, and could borrow each others suits for gigs. After Sammy became rich and famous, every time he had a suit made up, he would have the tailor make two, and send one to Harry. After a while, Harry’s closet was full of brand new expensive suits with the name Sammy Davis Jr. on the inside pockets. Harry said, in the 1970’s, "As long as I stay the same size as Sammy, I’ll keep getting new suits."

By 1960, Harry was still doing his old songs to a diminishing audience, driving a taxi for pocket money, and surviving only on the returns of a few wise investments he had made. He knew he had to come up with a new act, but was floundering, and according to some who saw him, he was burned out. His many years of drug abuse had taken their toll. With the British Invasion of 1964, it became clear that rock and roll was not about to go away, and for Harry it must have been a no-brainer--he had to start playing rock and roll, even though he basically had been playing something very akin to it all his life. This turned out to be a sticky wicket, as for every other 1940’s musician who tried to enter the rock and roll market, and Harry was met with sound rejection by the younger crowd. He recorded nothing in the 1960’s.

By the 1970’s, however, hippies were everywhere, and Harry, the original hippie, together with his comical new songs about hippie culture that he’d been writing, were met with enthusiasm by the stoners. Harry decided to change his entire act and tap into this audience, which meant playing in modern rock bands. He wrote songs about nude beaches, male chauvinistic pigs, homegrown pot, hippie communes, and how to solve the air pollution problem by holding the smoke in your lungs longer. He wrote a song about living in a "grass" shack in Hawaii, which could be smoked if needed, and rebuilt from the stems and leaves. He recorded some of these amusing songs for the Mile label in 1974, which released them as singles. They were re-released in 1986 as an album and CD called "Everybody’s Crazy But Me," along with Harry’s autobiography, which was printed in the liner notes. Baritone sax player Vinny Golia remembers these sessions as having been extremely enjoyable. He says Harry was a lot of fun to play with, and that when Harry walked into a room, he charged it up with his vitality. The songs were recorded in a studio in Venice Beach, hippie central of southern California at the time. Also in the 70’s was an LP, Harry The Hipster Digs Christmas, a home recording which is not recommended.

In 1975 Harry met rock guitarist Mike Cochrane during a chance encounter in a music shop, and they began jamming. Right away Harry named him Mike the Spike, and asked him to put together a rock band to play these songs in clubs. Mike put together the Rock Boogie Blues Jammers, which was to be Harry’s regular backing band for the next year or two. Mike says Harry was playing chords that weren’t found in chord books, and making chord changes that are simply never found in rock music. Harry was combining rock with ragtime, classical, Dixieland, bebop, and anything else he wanted to, when his fingers got carried away from him. Harry was living up to his much earlier reputation as being a musical genius, and none of the other musicians had ever heard or seen anything like him before. He had all his songs written out in complex charts, having been a classical music scholar at Juilliard years before, even though most of the members of the band could not read music. Mike remembers Harry as being a completely unique individual, who did not talk like anybody else, always sticking to 1930’s black jive, even in the 1970’s, whenever he was around other musicians. He was also capable of course, as all speakers of the black dialect are, of speaking white at other times. When Harry spoke white, he spoke with a 1920’s New York Jewish accent.

Mike tells of the wild antics that Harry, then in his 60’s, would do to entertain the crowd. For example, before each show the band was expected to buy rolling papers and a case of Marlboro cigarettes, and spend an hour or two unrolling the cigarettes and rolling up hundreds of what appeared to be joints. During the show, Harry would get up and throw them out to the audience like BB King tossing out guitar picks. Harry wanted to use real joints, but the band insisted he didn’t. Harry drank so much during his shows that the band often told the bartenders to water down his drinks for his own sake, as much as for the sake of the third set. Harry was no longer using heroin, which explains how he’d lasted as long as he did, considering his past, and the fact that most of his contemporaries had died of substance abuse in the 40’s or 50’s. Harry was using only the softer stuff now, always with a drink in his hand, or a bottle of Beck’s.

Harry never liked the typical electronic keyboards of the 70’s, and refused to play them, being a great believer in real pianos, and a greater believer in having all 88 keys, but he was quite happy with his cumbersome Helpinstill semi-portable electric piano that he always used for live gigs in those days. It was a small, upright acoustic piano with all 88 keys and normal mechanical hammers and regular strings, but it had electronic pickups so it didn’t have to be miked. The first Helpinstill ever made was sold in 1972 to Elton John...Harry was one of the next in line to get one.

In the 1980’s Harry continued playing rocking jazz with young musicians, sometimes including his son Jeff from his first marriage on sax, or his son Jimmy from a second marriage on bass. This is another side of Harry--apart from the wild, crazy hipster act he did on stage, he also was a family man, and he has many children and grandchildren, most of whom adore him. Harry continued to play in clubs in the LA area throughout the 80’s, and in 1989 he recorded an album equal to anything he had ever done before. "Who Put The Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine," is full of top-notch jazz, bebop, blues, rock, and boogie, simply brilliant songs, which is saying something, as Harry was 74 years old at the time. It also included six songs that had been recorded in 1976 with the Rock Boogie Blues Jammers. These last-mentioned tracks contain some excellent ragtime piano played in a rock and roll fashion. Harry’s version of "Maple Leaf Rag" is one of the smoothest ever, and halfway into it you realize...these great lyrics...did Scott Joplin write these? No other version of this song has lyrics. Must be Harry jiving again. Fantastic. His "Ragtime Raggedy Ann" also contains some top-flight piano solos, showing that he’d lost nothing with age.

In 1989, Harry’s oldest daughter Lena, and Lena’s daughter Flavyn, who was a student in film school at the time, did a video biography of Harry. The video is 40 minutes long, and includes interviews with Harry and his friends, home movies, and all three of his Soundies. This video was published in small numbers and has become a collector’s item, so it may be expensive if you find a copy, but it is worth seeking out for the Hipster fan, as it is very well done. The title of the film is Boogie In Blue.

In 1991, at the age of 76, Harry had been suffering from congestive heart failure for a long time. He’d earlier decided that if he were ever to develop failing health as he aged, he would end his life his own way. Rather than sitting in wheelchairs, lying in hospital beds, and withering away, Harry took a handgun and put it to his head. Among his effects were found his computer, which had a long but uncompleted autobiography on file, much longer than the one published in 1986. So far, nobody has published this version, although small bits of it have appeared in odd magazines over the years. How interesting it would be, for us to be able to read Harry’s eyewitness account, and his own hip interpretation, of the talented and amazing people at the leading edge of popular American music for most of the Twentieth Century.

https://www.hyzercreek.com/blues_and_rhythm.htm


Harry "The Hipster" Gibson, 1915-1991. Autobiography. www.hyzercreek.com/harry.htm

Written by The Hipster himself.

THE HIPSTER STORY

My parents told me I could pick out melodies, one finger style, by the time I was three years old. When I got to be five my grandfather, who was a piano teacher, began to give me lessons. The whole family was in the music business; my father played the violin, his brother played the piano and they all repaired player pianos down in the cellar. I kept on playing by ear and by the time I was eight I could play all the popular songs of the day. I learned from Victrola records and the old player pianos in the basement. After the sixth grade in grammar school, P.S. 12 in the Bronx, I became the accompanist of the principal who played violin by ear. He taught me all the Irish ballads, jigs and reels. His name was J.F. Condon, the famous Jafsie, who got himself involved in the Lindberg kidnapping case during the Thirties.

When I was thirteen I joined a band called the Westchester Ramblers. We played the Saturday night dances at Starlight Park which were broadcast over the local radio station, WBNX. A couple of years later, I picked up a job in a speakeasy owned by big time mobster Dutch Schultz, beer baron of the Bronx, playing for the singing waiters on a rollout 77-key piano. For dancing, the club featured a six-piece black Dixieland band called the Chocolate Bars. When their piano player split I joined the band. They brought me over to the Rhythm Club in Harlem which was the black musicians' hangout and union hall combined, the place where the cats could hook a job. There was an old upright piano and we all took turns playing. I learned to play a lot of jazz from those guys.

I used to walk around Harlem, stand outside the speakeasies and listen to the black piano players. I rapped with these cats when they came out and they told me who to listen to and whose records to buy. After repeal, I ran across the best piano player I had ever heard in person, a cat called Marlowe. When I got to know him he would let me sit next to the piano and watch his hands. One night he asked me to play. I had been digging Fats Waller's records and, when I sat down, did a pretty good imitation of his singing and piano style. Marlowe thought it was pretty funny for a skinny blond kid to come on like the great Fats and told everyone around the bar that I was studying with Waller and was his star protege. After that, Marlowe let me play the gig whenever he wanted to take time off.

One night a big guy came over, put five dollars in the kitty and asked for "Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter." I could almost play that tune, note for note, like the Waller recording. The big man laughed and asked how I learned to play that way. I went into the high jive about how I was Fats' star pupil. The guy just about broke up, stuck out his hand and said, "Sonny, say hello to your old professor, Thomas Waller." What a gas! He got me to play all his original songs and filled the kitty with five dollar bills. At the end of the night he asked if I wanted to work downtown in a 52nd Street club he was playing called the Yacht Club.

He got me the gig as intermission piano player in between shows and had me play a rollout piano right at his table. Fats would be sitting around with a gang of chicks and guys, drinking straight shots one after another, calling out his original records and songs, filling the kitty with five dollar bills every set. It wasn't till quite a few years later that I ever made that kind of bread again. By that time I was a jazz headliner myself and had my own records on the market. I went down to Greenwich Village to listen to Ronnie Graham, who later became Mr. Clean in the TV ads, do his imitations of me. He made an album, TAKE FIVE, with a hit number in it called "Harry the Hipster.''' I also got a kick out of the pantomime acts who would put my records on a phonograph backstage and then, dressed in wild zoot suits, would lip sync and act out the part of a guy who stood up to play the piano and did some far out dancing at the same time.

While we were still at the Yacht Club, after finishing his last show, Fats would sometimes invite me to go out to Harlem to listen to the famous jazz piano players of the era. The "Piano Battles" were held in an after-hours joint called Grant's and only the best piano players, and their guests, were allowed in - cats like Earl Hines, Teddy Wilson, Count Basie, Claude Hopkins, Pete Johnson, Clarence Prophet (the originator of the style Erroll Garner used), Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis, Marlowe, Art Tatum and Fats Waller, to name only some of the greats. Everybody sat around, drinking gin out of coffee cups and digging the music played on an old beat-up upright. Pete Johnson would play and, on finishing, would introduce Fats as his protege; then Fats would do a stint and introduce Tatum as the greatest. After Tatum, nobody wanted to play.

To get things going again, Fats would get up and introduce me as his pupil. In those days solo piano meant playing stride style; just like it says, you stride that left hand over the bottom of the keyboard from the bass to the chord change. My hands were a little too small to hit all the tenths hard; instead I substituted fifths, sixths, sevenths and octaves and rolled the tenths I couldn't reach. I also played a trombone line of the single notes with my left hand which gave me a sound difference from most piano players. Whenever I played with a rhythm section I used chords and runs on a four beat, like a guitar or banjo. Sure was scary playing with those cats but somehow I got away with it.

After his season at the Yacht Club, Fats went on the road and I got a gig, with a girl singer, playing the afternoon cocktail session from three to nine at Leon and Eddie's across the street. When we told owner Eddie Davis that our names were Ruth Gruner and Harry Raab he yelled, "What are you - a meat market or a show biz act?" and booked us as The Gibsons, a popular gin at the time. We stayed for five years. Fats Waller who worked with the bigtime Dixieland musicians in New York, told them I was playing Leon and Eddie's and sent them down to hear me. I was studying at Julliard and could now read music. One afternoon, Eddie Condon with Pee Wee Russell, Max Kaminsky and Bobby Hackett, came into the club with some music charts. Bobby Hackett knew me a few years back when me and my partner, Billy Bauer, who later played with Woody Herman and was rated #1 guitarist by DOWNBEAT, were a duo in a midtown club called the Naughty Naught. At that time Bobby was still playing the violin and he always dropped by to jam with us. Eddie Condon handed me the music to the three-part Bix Beiderbecke piano suite and asked me to read it. After I played "In a Mist," "Candlelight" and "In the Dark," Eddie booked me to blow solo in the Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Concert at Carnegie Hall the next week. I think that this concert set up by Condon and Ernie Anderson was the first jazz concert presented in a legit hall.

After that I played a lot of gigs with Condon and his band. Those guys played in a club down in Greenwich Village called Nick's. Every once in a while they would pick me up at whatever joint I was working on 52nd Street and we'd all go up to Harlem to jam at the Cotton Club. All the best black bands played the Cotton Club - Fletcher Henderson, Cab Calloway, Don Redman, Erskine Hawkins, Chick Webb, Count Basie, Earl Hines, Jimmie Lunceford and of course, Ellington. After the floor show the leader would introduce us white cats and then we'd get up on the bandstand and jam with the great black jazz musicians.

When I first got to 52nd Street, around 1939, it was called Swing Street; by the time I left in 1945 the two blocks between Fifth and Seventh Avenues were known as The Apple. All the clubs were located in the basements of the narrow brownstones that lined the streets. The customers, dressed in tuxedos or shiny gowns, had to walk down a hall flight to the entrance. The four floors upstairs were divided into single rooms and small apartments. A lot of us rented a room to crash in so we wouldn't have to take that long subway ride to the Bronx or Brooklyn every night.

When I booked into a club on The Street I would stay a year or more. I played intermission piano alongside many of the great small bands: Kelly's Stable with Coleman Hawkins; The Hickory House with Joe Marsala; The Famous Door with Count Basie; The Onyx Club with Stuff Smith; The Spotlight Club with vocalists Pearl Bailey and Billy Daniels; The Three Deuces, for a couple of years, with Billie Holiday, the Art Tatum Trio - Tiny Grimes on guitar and Slam Stewart on bass - in addition to lots of the finest musicians who stayed down at the Apple but kept switching bands including: Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet, Charlie Parker on alto sax, Sid Catlett on drums, Thelonious Monk on piano, Ben Webster on tenor sax, John Simmons on bass and many more.

During intermissions at the clubs all the musicians and entertainers congregated at the White Rose Tavern, a funky bar just around the corner on Sixth Avenue. You could get a shot of whiskey with a beer chaser for a quarter and that included all the free lunch you wanted - roast beef, ham, pastrami, liverwurst and and the delicious cold cuts, pickled herring, coleslaw, good heavy breads. We would rush out of our clubs, everybody from the top stars to the intermission musicians, bareheaded, tuxedos soaked with sweat, even in the coldest weather, to get away from the joints. This was our hangout where musicians, black, white or whatever, could relax, high jive, talk business, talk music. Sometimes squares would come in by accident - especially out-of-towners from all over the country, looking for that wild New York nightlife. Every once in a while some would jump salty at the idea of black and white mixing socially. If they got nasty about it they soon found out that musicians could play plenty rough. Every now and then there'd be a real brannigan at the White Rose.

By the time I got to the Deuces I was writing my own material and songs; during the lulls, when there were no customers around, I would do my own stuff to amuse the help who were sitting at the bar, drinking on the house. I would sing and scat in the new jazz style they were beginning to call "bebop." A bar full of jazz stars would call out their favorite songs on which I would ad lib crazy lyrics, jive parodies and scat riffs. They also called for my originals like "Get Your Juices at the Deuces," "Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?" or "I Stay Brown All Year Round." Billie's favorite was a blues called, "She Knifed Her Old Man." [editor's note: this song was recorded in 1944 as "Hipster's Blues Opus 6 7/8"]. At that time musicians used jive talk among themselves and many customers were picking up on it. One of these words was hep which described someone in the know. When lots of people started using hep, musicians changed to hip. I started calling people hipsters and greeted customers who dug the kind of jazz we were playing as "all you hipsters." Musicians at the club began calling me Harry the Hipster; so I wrote a new tune called "Handsome Harry the Hipster."

One Saturday night, when the house was packed and Billie Holiday didn't show for the gig, the owner of the joint, Irving Alexander, asked me to fill in with some of that wild jive I used to lay down for the musicians. After the show, when I got back to the dressing room, three executives from Musicraft Records, a classical outfit, came In. Musicraft had decided to add some jazz to its list and these guys had come down to the club with a union contract already made up for a trio that would back up Billie. When Ben Webster's band finished their set I asked Sid Catlett and John Simmons if they wanted to play drums and bass on the record date the next morning. They said, "Sure, let's blow it, man," and we signed the contract.

My first record date for eight original songs -- that's what the contract said -- I only had seven tunes but I didn't tell them that. Irving Alexander offered us the use of the club for rehearsing the rest of the night. We went over the seven tunes I had and, while the drummer and bassman went out to the all night eatery, I came up with "Stop That Dancing Up There." I had it finished by the time John and Sid came back from breakfast; it turned out to be the hit of the album. We ran it over a couple of times and cut out for our nine o'clock appointment at the recording studio. Back in the Forties, when they recorded the master on some sort of gold plated metal, you had to get it right the first time or you blew the whole thing. We recorded the album in a couple of hours. Although I played only a few boogies, Musicraft called it BOOGIE WOOGIE IN BLUE.

The album jumped off right away. About a month later I got a call from a jazz club owner named Billy Berg out in Hollywood. He told me they had all my records on the club's jukebox and would I consider two weeks at five hundred with a thousand a week option. At the time I was making fifty-six dollars a week, union scale, as intermission piano player at the Deuces. Irving Alexander said he would let me go if I came back after the gig was over. I stayed at Billy Berg's for more than a year and when I did get back to the Apple, I was a headliner working at the Onyx Club, across the street from the Deuces.

I worked with a lot of the best musicians out on the Coast. Many of the times I played at Billy Berg's I was billed with Slim Gaillard whose song, "Cement Mixer," was a big hit. Slim was doing a guitar-bass duo with Tiny Brown and I had the great Zutty Singleton behind me on drums. Slim and I played the same club so many times, doubling on lots of numbers, we could do each other's act. Dizzy Gillespie, with Charlie Parker in his band, came out to Hollywood. Bird and I were both small skinny cats who used to hang out together. One night when we were bopping along Vine Street two narco cops picked on us. I don't know what Charlie was holding but I had a couple of sticks on me. We caught on right away and both of us took turns kicking **** with the fuzz to give the other guy a chance to dump. We were clean when we got down to the station house and called Billy Berg. He came right down and laced into the whole police department for busting his main attractions. So they let us go and never hassled us after that. Another cat who gigged a lot at Billy Berg's was the vocalist Frankie Laine who sang between sets. I first met Erroll Garner when his trio played the club. The two of us made the after-hour joints down on Central Avenue every night.

Red Nichols and his Five Pennies worked in a joint about a block away from Billy Berg's called the Hangover Club. In between my shows I used to go over there and sit in with those guys. Red was always asking me the old Dixieland question about reading charts. I said reading the notes was okay for the first chorus but after that you better have it in your hand. Another band I would sit in with was the Kid Ory group who were playing on Melrose Avenue, a few blocks from Billy Berg's. They were really old cats and I always enjoyed having a drink with them and listening to their stories about New Orleans. When Kid Ory invited me to join them in a set I would jump up, get over to the piano and sit down. Then I'd look over and they'd just be getting out of their chairs, moving in slow motion toward the bandstand. When they got all settled, which probably took at least five minutes, Kid Ory would kick off the beat; and those guys would play some of the hottest Dixieland jazz I ever heard.

While I was doing the Billy Berg's gig in Hollywood I was also booked into the vaudeville theatres downtown. I played the Orpheum Theatre with Benny Carter's band and the Million Dollar Theatre with Cab Calloway's; when