In the 1940’s, there were two black singers who crossed over from Race Records (as Billboard called its bluegum charts until 1949, when the phrase Rhythm & Blues was adopted) to the white Pop charts. Nat King Cole, the more successful of the two singers, was eventually swallowed by the tamer, white music. One of the most inventive West Coast R&B singers of the early 40’s, by the year of his death, 1965, Cole had been reduced to singing “Tne Ballad of Cat Ballou” with Stubby Kaye. The other singer was a man named Louis Jordan. Although he is largely forgotten today, Jordan did more to define Hep and to prepare white folks for the coming of rock ’n’ roll than any other man of that era.

Louis Jordan was born July 8, 1908, in Brinkley, Arkansas, a small town halfway between Little Rock and Memphis. At the age of twelve, he ran away frorri home and joined Ma and Pa Rainey’s Rabbit Foot Minstrels. He toured with the legendary troupe for two seasons, then returned to Arkansas. Jordan’s family moved to Philadelphia in 1930, and it ,was there that he joined thd band of trumpet-player Charlie Gaines. He made the move to New York, playing with Leroy Smith, then Kaiser Marshall. In 1936 he began playing alto saxophone in Chick Webb’s band, and on October 29 of that year he cut his first record, blowing almost jndiscernibly behind Webb’s vocalist Ella Fitzgerald. On January 15,1937, Webb allowed Jordan to sing on record for the first time, on a song called “Gee, But You’re Swell.”

In 1938, Jordan left Webb’s band and formed his own, six-piece group. They played at the Elk’s Rendezvous Lounge, a small joint in Harlem, and soon became known as Louis Jordan’s Elk’s Rendezvous Band. This group cut their first records, for Decca, on December 20, 1938.

By the time Jordan next recorded, in early 1939, he, had changed the name of his band to Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five, a name he would continue to use, regardless of the number of men in his bands, until 195$.

Louis Jordan’s first hit was “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town,” a song written and first recorded five years before by bluesman Casey Bill Weldon. In 1944, Jordan crossed over to the pop charts with “G.I. Jive,” and his records continued to cross over until 1949.

Louis Jordan never sang sad songs. He made party music, pure and simple, in which every aspect of the expanding universe was seen in terms of fried fish, sloppy kisses, gin, and the saxophone whose message transcends knowing. In songs like “Caldonia (What Makes Your Head So Hard?),” “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,” "“Beware,” “Boogie Woogie Blue Plate,” and" “Blue Light Boogie,” Jordan proved himself to be the crowning glory of post-war Hep. 1

In his most impressive performance, “Let the Good Times Roll” (written by the mysterious Sam Theard, also known as Lovin’ Sam and Spo-Dee-O-Dee), Jordan advised:

Don’t sit there mumblin’ dnd talkin’ trash:

If you wanna have a ballya gotta go out and spend some cash,

And let the good times roll.

As early as 1949, Jordan’s own lyrics were imbued not only with .the spirit /of what would come to be known as rock ’n’ roll, but also with direct references to rock, as in “Saturday Night Fish Fry”: ,

It was rockin’, it was rockin’; You never seen such scufflin’ and shufflin’ till the break of dawn.

“Saturday Night Fish Fry” was Louis Jordan’t last pop hit. He had six more R&B hits; then, in 1951, he fell from fame. In 1954, Jordan left Decca and signed with Aladdin, a smaller, West Coast label. After Aladdin, he cut a handful of singles for two RCA subsidiaries, Vik and X. In 1956, he came to Mercury, for whom he made his last worthwhile recordings (mostly reworkings of his old Decca hits). After leaving Mercury in 1958, Jordan became less and less active. He recorded periodically, and with no success, throughout the 60’s: (or Lou-Wa and Warwick in 1960, for the British label Melodise in 1962, for Ray Charles’s Tangerine label in 1963, for Paul Gayten’s short-lived Pzazz label in 1968, and for the French label Black & Blue. In 1974, he cut an album for Johnny Otis’s Blues Spectrum label. It was his last record.

In September, 1974, Louis Jordan had a heart attack in Nevada. He recovered and announced his plans to tour Europe. A few months later, however, a further attack proved fatal, and he died at his home in Los Angeles on February 4, 1975. He was sixty-six years old. Billboard barely mentioned it.

Louis Jordan was criticized by some for catering to his white audiences. In an interview published in the English magazine Blues Unlimited a few years ago, Jordan admitted that he had at times made a conscious effort to fender his performances acceptable to “the white crackers.” His spirit of whorish compromise was ahead of his time, too, in a way. Looking back now, it’s easy to see that real rock ’n’ roll has always been anti-purity, and that Louis Jordan was no more an Uncle Tom than Jimi Hendrix. (He was a snazzier dresser than Hendrix, to boot.)

In 1946, Astor Pictures released a musical Western with a black cast. It was called Beware, and was centered on tfye Louis Jordan hit of the same name and year. The purported star of the film was Milton Woods (described as “the colored Basil Rathbone”), but the picture belonged to Louis Jordan and his band, who, in one wild and eerie scene, emerge galloping on horseback over the r^nge—with glistening saxophones slung over their sharkskin shoulders.-What finer way to be remembered? Huh? 1&i->