As rock’n’roll soared, the influential jump blues pioneer Louis Jordan needed a hit. Could he reverse his fortunes with a Quincy Jones-produced LP that reimagined his smashes in the raucous new style? Either way, the result was a last burst of brilliance. 
Words by Jordan Bassett

In 1987, when interviewed for the Hail! Hail! Rock’n’Roll documentary, Chuck Berry made the admission: “Louis Jordan’s guitarist, Carl Hogan, was the inspiration for most of my solos – Carol, Johnny B. Goode, Roll Over Beethoven.” The rock’n’roll laureate then imitated the famous guitar riff that graces many of his standout tracks, explaining: “He had something like this in the centre of the solo and I opened my songs with it.” You can picture the sly grin as Berry added: “A little difference in the figure, but with the same principles.”

It’s typical for Louis Jordan, his legacy and those who helped him to become one of the most influential musicians of the 20th Century, that this section of Berry’s interview didn’t make the film’s final cut. Despite his unparalleled impact on rock’n’roll, Jordan has been all but written out of music history. Those looking to write him back in, though, would do well to revisit Somebody Up There Digs Me, the glorious album recorded in the autumn of 1956, with which he reimagined his jump blues classics in the rockin’ style that was causing America’s teenagers to flip out.

Let The Good Times Roll

Jordan was approaching 50 when he made the record and, in the eyes of many, belonged to the previous decade. During his creative and commercial peak, between 1942 and 1951, the Arkansas-born saxophonist scored an astonishing 54 Top 10 hits – including 18 No.1 singles. Assisted by the ever-changing members of his band the Tympany Five (there were often more than five of them), he topped the R&B charts for 113 weeks in total. According to one analysis of the Billboard charts, Jordan is stillthe fifth most successful artist in history on the US R&B listing.

No wonder: check out the ecstatic Caldonia (1945) and the electrifying Saturday Night Fish Fry (1949) and you’re listening to the birth of rock’n’roll… just a few years ahead of schedule. Everyone from Little Richard to Bo Diddley has cited Jordan as an inspiration, with the latter once revealing: “[He] was the cat I tried to be most like.” Quincy Jones, who conducted four of the sessions that produced the Somebody Up There Digs Me LP, considered Louis Jordan a childhood hero.

Yet only two books – John Chilton’s Let The Good Times Roll: The Story Of Louis Jordan And His Music and Stephen Koch’s Louis Jordan: Son of Arkansas, Father of R&B – have ever been written about the man dubbed the ‘Grandfather Of Rock’n’Roll’.

Musical Renaissance 

There was a brief resurgence of interest in Jordan in 1987, when he was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, whose website describes his song Saturday Night Fish Fry as “an early example of rap and possibly the first rock’n’roll recording”. In 1990 came the hit musical Five Guys Named Moe, built around his music. Since then, he’s faded back into obscurity.

Jordan’s lack of recognition is, admittedly, partly self-inflicted (more on which later). It’s also arguable, though, that he was simply eclipsed by the sheer genius that Vintage Rock favourites Berry, Elvis, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis harnessed in the 50s. Rock’n’roll burned so brightly in the middle of the decade that it effectively razed all predecessors. And didn’t Jordan know it: having signed to Decca in 1936, he was dropped in late 1953, with Bill Haley swiftly replacing him on the roster.

The move made good commercial sense, at least. Haley, a rock’n’roll guitarist, was the sound of the future. Jordan’s jazz-influenced jump blues was the sound of formal ballroom dances, which were themselves being disrupted by young people’s increasing taste for semi-improvised moves ushered in by rock’n’roll. In a cruel sign of the times, Jordan’s ballroom bookings started to dry up around the time he was dropped by Decca.

He remained a household name and soon signed with Aladdin, but it was a brief dalliance that couldn’t produce the huge sales figures of his pomp. Tellingly, in Let The Good Times Roll, John Chilton noted: “Most of the new material was well-performed, but little of it was catchy – nor was it enticingly rugged.”

Let’s Have A Ball!

And “rugged” was what the kids wanted. It’s definitely what a certain Hillbilly Cat gave them with his hip-swivelling cover of Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup’s That’s All Right, Mama in July 1954. As the seismic single raced up the charts, Jordan performed to 2,300 fans in Oakland, which would be impressive if it weren’t half the size of the audience he’d pulled at the venue previously. Meanwhile, his smooth Aladdin recordings were being ignored by influential radio DJs whose support could help to drive sales.

So, when Louis jumped ship to RCA’s new X label, he wasted no time in producing some rockin’ wax. Cut during sessions held between March 1955 and April 1956, the sprightly Rock ’n’ Roll Call was his most brazen offering to the style that was shaking the nation. “Let’s rock’n’roll and have a ball!” he exclaims amid handclaps,barrelhouse piano and skronking sax. Well, now that he shared a label with Elvis Presley, why not?

The answer is that despite having such a hand in the formation of rock’n’roll, Louis was sadly dismissive of the genre. In 1960, ridiculously, he gave the sound “just about one year more,” adding: “The music is bad if the words are good. We started it, but it’s been changed.”

An old-school jazz purist, he loathed any kind of musical improvisation. When he performed Caldonia on The Steve Allen Show in August 1956 and two revellers rose up and began to jitterbug onstage, Jordan sought intervention from a police officer.

All of which is to say that Louis Jordan’s rock’n’roll credentials, with deep irony, were dubious at best. He later revealed of Decca: “[They] asked me to get on that rock thing, you know, with a big beat – they wanted me to honk on a tenor. I was a little too old for that.”

A Man Out Of Time

If he had been less stuck in the 1940s, Jordan might have enjoyed greater longevity. When he finally became so desperate for a hit that he recorded Somebody Up There Digs Me after signing to Mercury in 1956, it was too little, too late.

That’s a shame, because on its own terms this is an improbably excellent album. Louis headed to the studio in New York City in October 1956, accompanied by a Tympany Five line-up that consisted of guitarist Mickey Baker, saxophonists Sam ‘The Man’ Taylor and Albert ‘Budd’ Johnson, trombone player Jimmy Cleveland,trumpeter Ernie Royal, pianist Ernie Hayes, drummer Charlie Persip and bass player Wendell Marshall. The official brief was to utilise modern recording techniques on previous hits such as Is You Is Or Is Your Ain’t Ma Baby and Choo Choo Ch’Boogie, which had sold many millions in their day but were now commercially unavailable.

The unofficial brief, though, was obvious. Baker’s zinging guitar is placed high in the mix: the record sparks from the first moment, with a lightning bolt of a riff kicking open a raucous rendition of Caldonia. With the tempo vastly accelerated, this is the sound of 1956 incarnate, with the breakneck sax like something that could have squalled out of New Orleans’ wildly influential J&M Recording Studio.

Beware Brother Beware, a 1946 spoken-word belter that anticipated rap by over three decades, is newly adorned with a jagged guitar. Choo Choo Ch’Boogie barrels along with a chucka-chucka rhythm that, like Little Richard’s Lucille, evokes the image of a runaway steam train. Salt Pork West Virginia, first released a decade earlier, is here interrupted by a wailing Baker solo so feral and free that you have to wonder if The Rolling Stones were listening.

Feral & Free

By the time, on that last track, Louis begins to bawl like an overzealous conductor (“Jack-son-ville! Tampa! Your-ami! Aw, lady! I didn’t say, ‘Miami,’ I said, ‘Your-ami!’”), it’s clear he is in unchartered territory. He sounds totally reinvigorated, having imbibed the spirit of rock’n’roll and, for once, letting himself get a little loose. Even 1948 calypso number Run Joe is toughened up and ebbs with new energy, though his affected Jamaican accent would probably prompt an apology nowadays.

The record’s promo materials saw Mercury boast that Louis Jordan was the “Original Rock and Roller”. In an advert for rockin’ new track Big Bess, which was cut during the New York sessions but didn’t appear on the album, he exclaimed: “Man, I’m swinging again!”

Alas, the album didn’t achieve the chart success it deserved, disappearing without a trace. America’s teens, it seems, were too excited about music’s future to focus on a figure from the past. In his autobiography, Quincy Jones expressed sadness at being unable to produce a hit for his hero. Jordan soon retreated into the familiar comforts of the big band style, which came with predictable results in the rock’n’roll era.

Yet Somebody Up There Digs Me, Jordan’s paean to the sound he helped to create, stands as a testament to a complex figure who should be so much more than a footnote. As James Brown once said of Louis Jordan: “He was everything.”

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