Biography

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Little Brother Montgomery's State Street Swingers
GOODBYE MISTER BLUES
featuring Preston Jackson & Ikey Robinson


1 Goodbye Mr. Blues 5:58
2 South Rampart St. Parade 4:37
3 Tishomingo Blues 6:20
4 I Must Get Mine In Front 2:45
5 Struttin' With Some Barbecue 4:14
6 Boy In The Boat 4:37
7 Riverside Blues 3:51
8 Old Maid Blues 4:08
9 Saturday Night Function 7:38
10 Glitsy's Blues 2:53
11 Wailing Blues 2:19
12 Goodbye Mr. Blues (Alternate) 6:18
13 Panama Rag 4:34

Little Brother Montgomery - piano, vocals (3, 4, 8)
Preston Jackson - vocals (1, 12)
Banjo – Ikey Robinson
Bass – Truck Parham (all except 7), Ed Wilkinson (7)
Clarinet – Franz Jackson (1-3, 5-7, 9, 13), Oliver Alcorn (4, 8, 10-12)
Drums – Red Saunders
Guitar [4-String] – Ikey Robinson
Soprano Saxophone – Franz Jackson (1-3, 5-7, 9, 13), Oliver Alcorn (4, 8, 10-12)
Tenor Saxophone – Franz Jackson (1-3, 5-7, 9, 13), Oliver Alcorn (4, 8, 10-12)
Trombone – Preston Jackson
Trumpet – Leroi Nabors (1-3, 5-7, 9, 13), Leon Scott (4, 8, 10-12)

Delmark Records ‎– DE-663

Recorded at Sound Studios, Chicago by Stu Black
September 5, 1973, April 16, 1975, January 7, 1976


Liner Notes by Delmark's BOB KOESTER

Eurreal "Little Brother" Montgomery was not your run-of-the-mill blues pianist - and he'd let you know it word and deed. He was intimately acquainted with the bluesmen of his native Mississippi but also worked regularly with New Orleans and Chicago jazzmen as well as Chicago bluesmen, and knew how to extract the tips in a cocktail lounge or a piano bar.

He was a child prodigy, playing startlingly well before the age of nine according to Gus Perryman (Singleton Palmer's pianist) who heard him in Vicksburg while working with the Sam Morgan band out of New Orleans. Brother's first recordings for Paramount in 1929 included the classic "Vicksburg Blues". He led a swing band in Mississippi during the mid-thirties when he recorded his classic solos for Bluebird. A wide range of recordmen including Lester Melrose, Joe Brown (JOB), and J. Mayo Williams used him as an accompanist on sessions with Memphis Minnie, Washboard Sam, Big Joe Williams and others. Bob Stendahl produced him on two sessions in 1943 solos (heard on Delmark's "Blues Piano Orgy" #626) and in '49 in a band format with the great New Orleans trumpeter Lee Collins. The marvelous band that opened Chicago's famed Plugged Nickel jazz club was led by Brother, and recorded for Riverside (currently on Fantasy's OBC series).

I first heard him with the Otis Rush band that made his (best) Cobra sessions (currently on Paula) one Saturday night. The next afternoon he played cocktail piano at the Hollywood Show Lounge on Randolph Street. Late that night he was at the Red Arrow with Franz Jackson's Original Jass All Stars with Bob Schoffner on trumpet. People called it Dixieland but it was really jazz. For years after that he alternated blues and Irish tunes at McPartlan's on North Broadway near Foster. When we recorded Edith Wilson's album ("He May Be Your Man..."#637), he strenuously objected to my naming the group the State Street Ramblers; Brother felt the name denigrated musicians whom he set apart from the hobo life intimated by that group name.

Brother used to chide me for recording musicians who would not stay with 12 or 16 bar forms. "Bob Koester don't want to record me. He wants to record those cut-time musicians like Big Joe Williams and Roosevelt Sykes," but whenever Sykes was in town, Brother would be in the front row, usually with Sunnyland Slim (another "cut-timer"). The Quiet Knight's owner was smart enough to encourage this kind of piano summit. So Brother was more musically broad-minded than he liked to admit.

Herewith some evidence of his versatility:

To give Edith Wilson a breather, we decided to do tracks featuring the all-star band that accompanied her on her sessions.

Trumpeter Leon Scott had recorded with Jimmie Noone and others but was not as well known as he ought to have been. He was not in perfect health and died before the Edith Wilson project was completed, replaced by LeRoi Nabors whose ramrod style served up a contrast.

Preston Jackson's trombone graced some of Louis Armstrong's Okeh records (as well as a Betty Boop cartoon and Paramount short in 1932). He had already recorded for Paramount with the elusive legend Freddy Keppard on trumpet. Other sessions with Richard M. Jones, Jimmie Noone, etc. are familiar to collectors of '20s and '30's jazz. Blues 78 collectors may have his late '40's sessions with RCA with St. Louis Jimmy. Herewith are his first vocals.

Franz Jackson's reed work on the sessions is impeccable. His chops are always up after a lifetime spent with top-caliber musicians like Alex Hill, Earl Hines, and Roy Eldridge, but his compositional talent (chunks of the Hines book) and his arranging with Georgie Auld and Raymond Scott are less known. Franz has albums on Delmark (#223 and more to come) as well as Riverside (OBC), his own Pinnacle label and, (hopefully temporarily) out-of-print on Philips.

When Franz was unavailable, Brother used Oliver Alcorn whose other recordings have or will be reissued by Delmark: the LBM/Lee Collins Century date, the Sunnyland Slim sides on Delmark #655. Oliver's New Orleans heritage is pretty obvious in his playing (his brother Alvin is better known due to his own records with Kid Ory and others).

Truck Parham, a bandmate with Franz in the Earl Hines Grand Terrace band, also worked with Jimmie Lunceford, Fletcher Henderson, Roy Eldridge, Mugsy Spanier, Art Hodes, etc. When he was unable to make one session, we relied on Ed Wilkinson of the Dixie Stompers and "The Legend of Sleepy John Estes" (Delmark #603). I hope Ed hasn't really retired to his unique hubcap store.

Yes, it's a band of leaders in which Red Saunders' drums speak out loud. He held down the house band at the Club DeLisa and introduced us to vocalist Joe Williams. When the DeLisa closed, he kept busy with a jobbing group, record dates, etc. Of course at the DeLisa he'd backed everybody from Dinah Washington on back through Lil' Green and beyond (including Billie Holiday), so he was perfect for Edith.

The album has some rough edges. Preston moved to New Orleans where he worked at Preservation Hall for several years. His passing illness, death among the musicians, and Delmark financial problems are to blame for any shortcomings, but there's some very different music on this album whether you're a blues fan able to do without high energy guitar or a jazz fan capable of appreciating pre-bop. A few "dixieland" standards are present, but the spirit of the blues that pervades all great jazz is ever-present.

- Bob Koester, Delmark Records




ALLMUSIC Goodbye Mister Blues Review by Ron Wynn

While Eurreal "Little Brother" Montgomery was among blues' greatest barrelhouse and boogie pianists, he was also well versed in traditional jazz. This disc's 13 cuts feature him working with The State Street Swingers, an early jazz unit, doing faithful recreations of such chestnuts as "South Rampart St. Parade," "Riverside Blues" and "Panama Rag." Montgomery's vocals were stately, yet exuberant, while his piano solos were loose and firmly in the spirit, showing the link between early jazz and blues. While the emphasis is more on interaction and ensemble playing than individual voices, players expertly maximized their solo time. This is a fine example of a vintage style.

Little Brother Montgomery
Little Brother Montgomery was a sophisticated musician who played and sang a style that resembled jazz, based on piano blues. It was influenced by jazz’s finesse and harmonic complexity. Little Brother Montgomery, a pianist and a notable influence on Otis Spann and Sunnyland Slim, had a long career that spanned the early years of blues history as well as the vibrant Chicago scene in the 1950s. Montgomery, at the age of 11, had abandoned school to play in Louisiana juke joint. He arrived in Chicago in 1926. His first 78s were made in 1930 by Paramount. These 78s included two iconic Paramount recordings, “Vicksburg Blues” (recorded in Grafton, WI) and “No Special Rider”. Bluebird recorded Montgomery in New Orleans more often in 1935-1936. Little Brother Montgomery began a steady life in Chicago clubs in 1942. His repertoire alternated between blues and traditional Jazz (he performed Carnegie Hall in 1949 with Kid Ory’s Dixieland band). Otis Rush enjoyed his gentle accompaniment on many of his 1957-1958 Cobra dates. Buddy Guy also recruited him to perform similar duties in 1960 when he performed Montgomery’s “First Time I Met the Blues” for Chess. Montgomery recorded a great album with Lafayette Thomas, guitarist. It remains one of his best albums. Montgomery, along with Janet Floberg (his second wife), formed FM in 1969. The logo’s first 45 featured a reprise from “Vicksburg Blues” with a vocal performance by Jeanne Carroll, a Chicago chanteuse. Karen, her daughter, followed her lead around the Windy City.


Eurreal Wilford "Little Brother" Montgomery (April 18, 1906 – September 6, 1985) was an American jazz, boogie-woogie and blues pianist and singer.

Largely self-taught, Montgomery was an important blues pianist with an original style. He was also versatile, working in jazz bands, including larger ensembles that used written arrangements. He did not read music but learned band routines by ear.

Career
Montgomery was born in Kentwood, Louisiana, United States, a sawmill town near the Mississippi border, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, where he spent much of his childhood. Both his parents were of African-American and Creek Indian ancestry. As a child he looked like his father, Harper Montgomery, and was called Little Brother Harper. The name evolved into Little Brother Montgomery, and the nickname stuck. He started playing piano at the age of four, and by age 11 he left home for four years and played at barrelhouses in Louisiana. His main musical influence was Jelly Roll Morton, who used to visit the Montgomery household.

Early in his career he performed at African-American lumber and turpentine camps in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. He then played with the bands of Clarence Desdunes and Buddy Petit. He lived in Chicago from 1928 to 1931, regularly playing at rent parties, and Chicago was where he made his first recordings. From 1931 through 1938, he led a jazz ensemble, the Southland Troubadours, in Jackson, Mississippi.

In 1941, Montgomery moved back to Chicago, which would be his home for the rest of his life, and went on tours to other cities in the United States and Europe. He toured briefly with Otis Rush in 1956. In the late 1950s he was discovered by a wider white audience. His fame grew in the 1960s, and he continued to make many recordings, some of them on his own record label, FM Records, which he formed in 1969 (FM stood for Floberg Montgomery, Floberg being the maiden name of his wife).

Montgomery toured Europe several times in the 1960s and recorded some of his albums there. He appeared at many blues and folk festivals during the following decade and was considered a living legend, a link to the early days of blues in New Orleans.

Among his original compositions are "Shreveport Farewell", "Farrish Street Jive", and "Vicksburg Blues". His instrumental "Crescent City Blues" served as the basis for a song of the same name by Gordon Jenkins, which in turn was adapted by Johnny Cash as "Folsom Prison Blues."

In 1968, Montgomery contributed to two albums by Spanky and Our Gang, Like to Get to Know You and Anything You Choose b/w Without Rhyme or Reason.

Montgomery died on September 6, 1985, in Champaign, Illinois, and was interred in the Oak Woods Cemetery.

In 2013, Montgomery was posthumously inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.

The R&B musician and producer Paul Gayten was Montgomery's nephew.

LITTLE BROTHER MONTGOMERY


Little Brother Montgomery was a little known but hugely influential Blues pianist from Louisiana. He learned to play piano just after he learned to walk and talk, and his endless stories of his long life on the road and on the club scene made him an invaluable source in the oral history of the Blues. Little Brother had a wide range of styles, from slow, drag-out Blues to ragtime ditties and boogie dance tunes as well as a distinctive vibrato voice, and he also worked with many jazz artists and orchestras, where his good ear for music and his superb memory overcame his inability to read a score.

Eurreal Wilford Montgomery was born in 1906 at Kentwood LA, and he practically grew up in the barrelhouse his father ran next to a lumber camp across the Lake from New Orleans. His resemblance to his Dad, Harper Montgomery, meant the kid picked up the tag ‘Little Brother Harper’ at an early age along with his skill for picking out a tune on the piano. Inspired by his father’s friend Jelly Roll Morton, Little Brother was playing around work-camps and juke-joints before he was even a teenager. Absorbing a host of piano styles on his travels, he was in Chicago in the late 20s, where he recorded for the Paramount label. His much-covered songs ‘First Time I Met the Blues’, ‘Vicksburg Blues’ and ‘ No Special Rider’ became important Blues standards, if not exactly hits at the time, but as the Depression began to bite, Little Brother returned south, where he spent several years leading his own band in Jackson MS. In 1935-36, he recorded regularly for the Bluebird label in New Orleans, producing more than 20 tracks.
Superb barrelhouse-style piano on ‘Vicksburg Blues’;

By 1942, Little Brother had returned to Chicago, where he would live for the rest of his life. Work was plentiful on the club scene, and his inventive style was a big influence on Sunnyland Slim, the young Otis Spann and many other Chicago pianists. Little Brother’s wide repertoire also gave him the option of playing, recording and sometimes touring with jazz bands: he played Carnegie Hall with Kid Ory‘s Dixieland Band in 1949. In the late 50s, Little Brother backed Otis Rush on his dates on the West side and as the decade turned, he was often heard at the gigs and recording sessions of Buddy Guy. Little Brother’s solo albums from this period,’Tasty Blues’ and ‘Chicago Living Legends’ showed him to be a class act in his own right. In 1969 he set up his own FM label with his wife Jan Floberg (+ Montgomery = FM), and they recorded several albums together.

He also began to build a reputation in Europe on the Festival and club scene, touring abroad many times. In 1975, Folkways issued an album of Little Brother’s ‘Church Songs’, which enhanced his reputation for turning his hand, and voice, to many styles and brought his output of albums to over 30. Little Brother gave many interviews about his life in the Blues and his endless stream of stories made him a one-man-repository of Blues history, as his remarkable memory gave us insights into the story of the Blues from it’s origins before WWI almost into the digital age. Little Brother passed away in 1985.

Little Brother Montgomery was one of the most versatile pianists to emerge from the blues. Although he never achieved the fame of musicians like Roosevelt Sykes, Sunnyland Slim, or Otis Spann—all of whose playing was shaped early on by contact with Montgomery—he was as comfortable playing New Orleans jazz or boogie-woogie as straight blues. His career in music stretched from the earliest years of recorded blues in the 1920s until the mid-1980s. But his playing, in particular his unaccompanied piano work, possesses a timeless-ness, a virtuosity, a serenity rare in any music. Little Brother Montgomery performances, right up until his death in 1985, were much more than mere blues shows. They transported the listener back to the New Orleans of the 1920s and made that old music sound as fresh as when it was first invented.

Eurreal Montgomery was the fifth of ten children—five girls and five boys—born to Harper and Dicy Montgomery. The family home in Kentwood Louisiana was located in the middle of timber country, and Harper ran a honky-tonk where logging workers gathered on weekends to drink, dance, gamble and listen to music. Most all of the Montgomerys were musical. Harper played clarinet, and Dicy played accordion and organ. Eurreal’s brothers and sisters all learned to play piano to one degree or another. His brother Tollie made a record with him in the 1960s and brother Joe followed Eurreal to Chicago and performed regularly there in clubs and on record in the 1950s and 1960s. Little Brother—Eurreal was called by that name almost from birth—taught himself to play simple “three finger blues, as he called them, on a piano his father bought the family. “From then on,” he told his biographer Karl Gert zur Heide, “I just created simple things on my own until later I got large enough and went to hear older people play.… like Rip Top, Loomis Gibson, Papa Lord God.”

Montgomery had plenty of opportunity to hear older musicians. Most of them passed regularly through Kentwood and played at his father’s honky-tonk. He decided at a young age that he wanted to be a piano player like them and he was an eager pupil. He would stand with them as they played rags, early blues and popular songs of the time, watch what they did with their fingers, and then imitate it himself. He was especially fond of the blues pieces they played; he copied them and modified them into pieces that would later become regular parts of his repertoire. A common feature of most of these proto-blues was a rollicking walking bass carried on by the left hand. Not much later the style would be called boogie-woogie; in the 1910s, however, it went by another name. “They used to call boogie piano Dudlow Joes,” bassist Willie Dixon told Gert zur Heide, “I didn’t hear it called boogie till long after. If a guy played boogie piano they’d say he was a Dudlow player.”

Montgomery must have been a fast learner. He claimed that he quit seventh grade, left home at the age of eleven and began playing piano for a living wherever he could. His first job was in a juke joint in Holton, Louisiana where he was paid $8 a week plus room and board. He worked there for six months, playing and singing from seven until ten thirty on weekday evenings, and the whole night through on weekends. Feeling more confident, he left Holton and worked for six months at a “cabaret” in Plasquemine, Louisiana, where he earned $10 a night plus room and board. After that, he then moved on to Ferriday, Louisiana where he was paid $15 a night plus room and board. Within a year, the pre-teen had doubled his earning power. More importantly, in Ferriday he made the acquaintance of two older piano players, Long Tall Friday and Dehlco Robert.

Friday, Robert, and Montgomery began working together perfecting a new blues that involved interplay of the left and right hand, that could produce either simple or complex music. What began as music that could be performed by a player without a great deal of technical skill, changed into “the hardest barrelhouse blues of any blues in history,” as Montgomery described them to Gert zur Heide, “because you have to keep two different times

For the Record…
Born Eurreal Montgomery, April 18, 1906, Kent-wood, LA; (died September 6, 1985, Champaign, IL); second wife, Janet Floberg.

Made first 78s in Grafton, WI for Paramount Records 1930; recorded for Bluebird label, 1933-36; settled in Chicago, IL, 1942; played Carnegie Hall concert with Kid Ory jazz band, 1949; recorded with Otis Rush, 1957-58; Buddy Guy recorded Montgomery’s “First Time I Met The Blues,” 1960; founded FM record label with Floberg, 1969.

going in each hand.” The three friends called the new form “the Forty Fours.” Later it would be transformed into one of Montgomery’s biggest hits, “Vicksburg Blues.”

Montgomery played in and around Ferriday until the flood of 1922 put parts of the city under eight feet of water. For the next year or so, probably in an automobile he purchased, he played his way through Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas. In 1923 he returned home to Kentwood for a time, then moved to New Orleans, where jazz was being born. The city was full of hundreds of piano players, all competing to be the best, at least in their wards. In the mid-1920s, Montgomery toured Louisiana with a variety of bands, his own and others, including the renowned Buddy Petit’s. He played with Sunnyland Slim and guitarist Skip James. In 1928, Montgomery was hired by Clarence Desdune’s Dixieland Revelers, a dance band. It was a challenging gig for him as Desdune’s band played entirely from sheet music. Montgomery had a reputation as a formidable pianist but he was a blues pianist and was not adept at sight-reading. But he was a quick study here, as well, and with help from another band member was soon able to fake all the tunes in Parker’s repertoire.

At the end of 1928, Montgomery quit the Revelers and moved up to Chicago. He made a name for himself playing rent parties—house parties put on in black neighborhoods to raise money to pay the rent. “I played house rent parties practically every night in the week for different people,” Montgomery told Gert zur Heide. Chicago was becoming as hot a jazz town as New Orleans, but all party-goers let Montgomery play at the rent parties was blues and boogie-woogie. While in Chicago he caught the attention of the Paramount record company. In late 1930, he accompanied Minnie Hicks on two songs and recorded about a half dozen sides of his own, including the greatly evolved version of the old Forty Fours, “Vicksburg Blues.” The song was one of the most popular blues of its day, widely imitated by bluesmen; in 1935, Montgomery released his own imitation, “Vicksburg Blues No. 2.” He recorded two records for Melotone in Chicago at the beginning of 1931, but as the Great Depression grew worse, he pulled up stakes and returned to New Orleans.

In New Orleans he formed his own band, the Southland Troubadors, which toured the South and parts of the Midwest including Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, and Iowa. Before long the group grew to ten pieces. They usually publicized their gigs with short radio concerts and earned such high pay touring that they turned down offers to record. Although the group existed until the late 1940s, Montgomery left in 1939. In summer 1935 he began recording for Bluebird Records, when he cut two records of his own and played on six others. The following summer he set a kind of record at the Bluebird studios, recording 23 sides in a single day, and those were part of 37 in all that he played on!

Around the time World War II started Montgomery paid a visit to his parents and then moved north to Chicago where he took off his travelling shoes—most of the time—and remained for the rest of his career. After the war, he began playing “old-time jazz” with musicians such as Baby Dodds and Lonnie Johnson. In 1948, he took part in a Carnegie Hall reunion concert by the Kid Ory Band. He played the Chicago club circuit regularly and was said to have some 1,000 songs committed to memory. As electric post-war blues took hold in Chicago, Montgomery was an active session musician. He appeared on some of the influential mid-fifties record made by Otis Rush, and played piano on one of Buddy Guy’s first big hits, his 1960 remake of Montgomery’s “First Time I Met The Blues.”

He continued making records his entire life, both blues and early jazz. In 1969, he and his second wife Janet Floberg, founded their own record label, FM. The first single the company released was a remake of “Vicksburg Blues,” sung by Jeanne Carroll. A biography, Gert zur Heide’s Deep South Piano: The Story of Little Brother Montgomery, based on interviews with Montgomery, was published in 1970. Later in life, he expanded briefly into theater with a role in a staged biography of Bessie Smith. He continued performing and recording practically right up to his death on September 6, 1985 of congestive heart failure.

Selected discography
Tasty Blues, Original Blues Classics, 1960.

Chicago: The Living Legends (South Side Blues), Original Blues Classics, 1962, reissued 1993 CD.

Goodbye Mister Blues, Delmark, 1973-76.

At Home, Earwig, 1990.

Complete Recorded Works (1930-1936), Document, 1991.

Sources
Books
Erlewene, Michael, Vladímir Bogdana, Chris Woodstra, and Cub Koda, All Music Guide to the Blues, San Francisco, Freeman Books, 1996.

Gert zur Heide, Karl, Deep South Piano: The Story of Little Brother Montgomery, Blues Paperbacks, 1970.

Palmer, Robert, Deep Blues, Viking Press, 1981.

Periodicals
Down Beat, December 1985.

—Gerald E. Brennan

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Jim Robinson, Economy Hall Breakdown
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