Post 371: A BEEF ABOUT COMPOSERS

Walter Coleman

Here's something that irritates me. I am not happy when someone puts up a video on YouTube and writes that the tune 'was composed by ....', naming the person who is performing it - rather than the real composer.

Similarly, I am annoyed by comments submitted beneath the videos when someone writes 'This was composed by....' and then names someone who perhaps made an impressive earlier recording of the song but certainly DID NOT compose it.

Adding to the problem, it sometimes happens that the titles of tunes get slightly changed with the passage of time, even though the tune remains exactly the same. So the person who recorded the song with the later title is sometimes wrongly thought to have composed it.

Composers deserve respect. It was the composer's imagination that created and shaped the tune. It was the composer who painstakingly worked on it, with pen, paper and piano. It was the composer who gave it that elusive and magical quality that makes us still want to hear it decades after the composer has died.

It takes remarkable skill and great talent to compose a tune that will catch the public's imagination and then endure. Even the best composers struggled and most of them had 'flops' from time to time. So let us recognize supreme creativity when it's there.

I am writing about this today is because three instances came to my notice in just one week.

The first concerns a tune Tuba Skinny frequently play. They also recorded it on their album 'Blue Chime Stomp'. It is called 'Oh Papa Blues'. Time and again, we find comments incorrectly telling us that this was 'composed by Gertrude 'Ma' Rainey'. Well, Ma Rainey certainly recorded it well in 1927. But she did not compose it. The truth is that it had been recorded six years earlier by Ethel Waters. Her version, composed by Ed Herbert and William Russell, was entitled 'Oh Daddy Blues'. Listen to it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trSnhFfjxHI

and you will immediately recognize that it is exactly the same song as the one called 'Oh Papa Blues', recorded by Ma Rainey and by Tuba Skinny.

Another example - also in the repertoire of Tuba Skinny - concerns 'Papa Let Me Lay It On You'. We are customarily told it was 'by' Blind Boy Fuller; and yet the composer was Walter Coleman. He composed it for male singers as 'Mama Let Me Lay It On You' in 1934. You can hear his own recording of it from 1934:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fce_gJv9rXQ

but Blind Boy Fuller did not record it until a couple of years later.

Then there's 'In The Wee Midnight Hours', so often attributed to Blind Willie McTell and Curley Weaver (who recorded it in 1950); yet the true composers (who recorded it eighteen years earlier) were Leroy Carr and his partner Scrapper Blackwell, possibly together with Scrapper's sister Mae:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4_b_3ddIL4

So let's try to get our facts right and show due respect to composers.