Louis Jordan: The Grandfather of Rock and Roll

Formally, this jump-blues pioneer presaged rock and roll, though he was decades older than Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, or Little Richard.

The first thing to remember about Louis Jordan is that he was born in 1908, which makes him three years older than rock and rolling blues hitmaker Big Joe Turner and decades older than Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, or Little Richard, nearly 40 when he began to hit it big in 1945 and 1946. The second is that not only was his father and chief music teacher James Jordan a touring professional musician, the kind of professional heritage only the Everly Brothers came near among ‘50s hitmakers, but he was a blackface minstrel, primarily in a famous troupe that was still mounting shows in 1959 called the Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels, where many major black entertainers including the seminal blueswoman Ma Rainey got their start. And it was in the Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels that Jordan broke into show business as a clarinetist and comedian when he was 17, in 1925. Whether that means he blacked up is unclear from the evidence I’ve found so far, but I’d say probably. For sure he had plenty of experience in minstrelsy-style humor, which by his time played mostly although by no means exclusively to black audiences in the South—Jordan himself was a dark-skinned man who grew up in rural Arkansas. You should also be aware that although Billboard ignored his death in 1975, in 1987 he became a charter member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as what was called an Early Influence. In short, the trademark humor of the Grandfather of Rock and Roll, as he’s been called, traced directly back to blackface minstrelsy.

According to the great discographer Joel Whitburn, Jordan had 19 charting pop hits going back to 1944 in the pre-rock era. This was nowhere near as many as Armstrong, Holiday, Fitzgerald, Fats Waller, Nat King Cole, the Mills Brothers, or the Ink Spots, but remakable for a black performer and supreme in the postwar style he pioneered called jump blues, because that style was created principally within and for the African-American market even though Jordan crossed over pop with many of his singles. It was rhythm-and-blues rather than pop or jazz.

Jordan could play clarinet and baritone sax, but alto sax was his instrument in addition to his relaxed, jocular vocals, not too convincing at anything serious but great for delivering a brand of entertainment that conveyed a good-humored vision of postwar African-American culture that satisfied both the Northern blacks who’d tasted some real prosperity during the war and then, like women, were squeezed out of the workforce by returning GIs and white Americans who were slowly becoming aware that this subject population was developing its own style of agency. Due in part to his father’s training, Jordan had been more set on success than most of his musical competition in the early years of the Depression. He made it a practice to watch every other act on the bills he played and every day roamed up and down the radio dial looking for songs he liked. Having grabbed a chance to hit the north with another traveling troupe in 1932, he landed a job in the Apollo Theater house band and then in late 1936 hooked on with one of the premier dance bands of the late ‘30s, led by the great drummer Chick Webb, where he was soon singing novelties for a change of pace. By mid-‘38 he was leading his own small band, which he modeled on other less successful units and always called the Tympany Five no matter how many members it had, and in early 1939 he began recording for Decca, then the most adventurous of the major labels.

Jordan’s first hit was “G.I. Jive,” which given the biracial but still segregated World War II army functioned as a cross-racial statement of grievances and went to number one in 1944. Although Jordan wrote some well-remembered songs, he was always on the lookout for material, and this one was a cover of what proved a lesser hit by the definitively hep white Georgia-born songwriter and singer Johnny Mercer. After the war ended, the Tympany Five had a string of pop successes that ended in 1949 with “Saturday Night Fish Fry,” and those hits certainly weren’t where his major songs ended. Some of his best material—“Five Guys Named Moe,” “Pettin and Pokin,” “Look Out (Sister, Look Out)”—charted only r&b or not at all. But in regard to racial factors it’s worth noting what leftwing sociologist George Lipsitz said about “Ain’t Nobody Here but Us Chickens”: “With the growth of bureaucratic regimentation in all aspects of social life, methods of carving away limited spheres of autonomy by outwitting those in power became increasingly relevant to more and more people. White Americans might have turned to black culture for guidance because black culture contains the most sophisticated strategies of signification and the richest grammar of opposition available to aggrieved populations.”

Louis Jordan recorded a lot, eight full-length CDs worth, and that oeuvre includes plenty of misfired novelties and quasi-lounge music that never gave him the respectability he wouldn’t have minded having in his kit. As a leader he was somewhere between a professional and a perfectionist—model of good cheer though his act always was, he had his martinet side and fired a lot of musicians for minor inefficiencies and dress code violations. And though sanely humorous love advice was one of his specialties, he was stabbed more or less in the heart by his third wife in Los Angeles in 1947. Nonetheless, you have to give Jordan credit for impressing the rather strait-laced Lipsitz with “Ain’t Nobody Here but Us Chickens,” a 1944 pop top 10 written by two Canadians in which a farmer hears trouble in the henhouse but is persuaded to put down his shotgun by the shouts of an intruder posing as one of his egg providers. As such, it was pretty much what today is called a novelty record. Formally its music clearly presaged rock and roll. But Jordan never played to the teen market whose conceptualization in the mid-‘50s was crucial to the conceptualization of rock and roll itself.

Nevertheless, Jordan was a genuine role model. Bill Haley of “Rock Around the Clock” fame, who in his early 20s led a country band and worked as a radio station librarian, was inspired to start mixing r&b songs into his set by Jordan. And here’s Chuck Berry, whose signature guitar riff had recognizable roots in Jordan guitarist Carl Hogan and whose core oeuvre is no bigger than Jordan’s although far more ambitious culturally and acute aesthetically: “I identify myself with Louis Jordan more than any other artist. If I had only one artist to listen to through eternity it would be Nat Cole. And if I had to work through eternity, it would be Louis Jordan.”