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Books / BY AARON COHEN
High Blood Pressure
Blues
In a city loaded with outstanding keyboardists,
New Orleans’ Huey “Piano” Smith always
knew how to make himself heard. He captured
and re-contextualized the city’s famous
syncopated beat and added his own sense of
humor for a series of hit records as r&b began
shaping rock ’n’ roll during the 1950s. Smith
also led a series of seemingly contradictory
lives—from leading a wild touring group, The
Clowns, to his decades as a devoted Jehovah’s
Witness. All of it presents a hefty task
for a biographer, and journalist John Wirt
delivers a thoroughly researched narrative
in Huey “Piano” Smith And The Rocking
Pneumonia Blues (Louisiana State University
Press). Smith participated in this biography
and Wirt interviewed him multiple
times for the book, along with several of the
musician’s colleagues. These conversations—
combined with a wealth of correspondences,
court documents as well as newspaper and
magazine archives—add up to an account
that’s as multidimensional as the musician.
Smith’s story began in New Orleans’ Uptown
neighborhood, where he was born in
1934 and where Mardi Gras parades offered spiritual
relief during the Depression. Postwar boogie-woogie
records filled the local jukeboxes and
Smith began playing blues piano at 8 years old.
As a young man, he accompanied Guitar Slim and
emphasized his left hand to compensate for the
group’s lack of a bassist—it was similar to what he
had heard from pianist Professor Longhair. Soon
enough, Smith became an in-demand session
player around the city. His trills were a big part of
Smiley Lewis’ 1955 r&b hit, “I Hear You Knocking.”
When Smith went into the studio with his
own band in 1957, he added all of those elements,
along with a beat that predated funk, and a comic
sensibility for “Rockin’ Pneumonia And The
Boogie Woogie Flu.” The song became a smash
and others followed: “Don’t You Just Know It” and
“High Blood Pressure.” Wirt details the scheming
that went on within New Orleans record labels
and studios, all of which would haunt Smith for
decades. But the book also shows how much fun
Smith had leading his music-comedy group, Huey
Smith and The Clowns.
Even with the raucous energy that The
Clowns must have brought to these performances,
Smith himself usually remained in the
background. And in telling his own story, the
bandleader sometimes takes a back seat to such
flamboyant characters as singer and female impersonator
Bobby Marchan. Even during the
conservative 1950s, The Clowns did not seem
bothered by the openly gay Marchan, even as
the bandleader remembers when the singer
would shout out to allegedly closeted policemen
in Nashville. But touring also presented its hardships,
especially as Wirt describes their gigs in
the segregated South. Still, Smith said the group
kept its spirits up and added that they received
especially warm responses performing at white
fraternities.
That era’s segregation contributed to the
indignity of Smith being robbed of his 1959 hit,
“Sea Cruise.” After Smith wrote and recorded the
track, Joe Caronna, a partner of unscrupulous
Ace label boss Johnny Vincent, had white singer
Frankie Ford record a new vocal and issued the
45 under his name. “Listen, it had to shatter a lot
of stuff in Huey, in anybody,” said one of Smith’s
champions, Dr. John.
While a nostalgia craze for early rock ’n‘ roll
and vintage r&b has thrived since the 1970s, this
book also makes it clear why Smith never profited
from the numerous reissues, cover versions
and commercial uses for his compositions. Wirt
investigates the ways record companies, lawyers,
publishers and agents robbed Smith of his copyrights,
and why the songwriter failed to achieve
justice in court. Perhaps most painful of all was
that bankruptcy left the creator of the song “High
Blood Pressure” unable to afford the medicine he
needed to treat that condition. After numerous
legal battles against the music industry, it’s no
wonder that Smith prefers to sing the Jehovah’s
Witnesses hymnal nowadays. Wirt writes: “The
man whose middle name is Piano finds peace
and comfort in the promise of a new life far greater
than anything mortal existence can give.” DB
Ordering info: lsupress.org
AUGUST 2014 DOWNBEAT 89