Episode 10: “Double Crossin’ Blues”, by Johnny Otis, Little Esther, and the Robins

A History of Folk Music and 500 Songs

by Andrew Hickswell Episode 10

Double Crossing Blues

by Johnny Otis, Little Lester and The Robins

We talked last week about playing an instrument with missing or damaged fingers.

Today we're going to talk about how a great musician losing the use of a couple of fingers led directly to several of the biggest careers in rhythm and blues.

When we think of the blues now, we mostly think of guitar-based music, people like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, rather than piano-based musicians and the more vaudeville style of what's called classic blues, people like Ma Rainey or Bessie Smith.

And that tends to give a rather a historical perspective on the development of rock and roll.

Rock and roll when it started, the music of the mid-50s, is not really a guitar-based music.

It's dominated by the piano and the saxophone, and that domination it takes from jump band rhythm and blues.

We've already heard how blues shouters and jump bands were massively influential for the style, but of course the blues, along with the jump bands, fed into what was becoming known as rhythm and blues, and that in turn fed into rock and roll.

There were were two real links in the chain between blues and rock and roll, and we'll definitely talk about the chess label soon, but to the extent there was any influence at all from what we now think of as the blues, it was mostly down to one man, Johnny Otis.

It's probably safe to say that if Johnny Otis had never lived, the whole of 1950s music would be totally different.

We're going to be talking about Johnny Otis a hell of a lot in this podcast, because to put it as simply as possible, Johnny Otis was responsible for basically every good record that came from the west coast of the US between about 1947 and 1956.

I have three more Johnny Otis-related records lined up between now and the middle of February, and no doubt there'll be several more after that.

Johnny Otis had his first hit in 1945 with Harlem Nocturne, which featured his friend Bill Doggett on piano.

After Hall of Nocturne became a hit, and partly through the connection with Doggett, he got the opportunity to tour Backing the Ink Spots, which exposed him to a wider audience.

He was on his way to being a big star.

At that time, he was a drummer and vibraphone player, and he was one of the great drummers of the period.

He played, for example, on Illinois Jacquette's version of Flying Home and on Jamming with Lester by Lester Young.

He was leading a big band and had been trying to sound like Count Basie, as you can hear if you listen to the records he made at that time.

But that soon changed when the jump bands came in.

Instead, Otis slimmed down his band to a much smaller one and started playing this new RB music.

But he still wanted to give the people a show.

And so he started the Johnny Otis Show, and rather than devote the show to his own performances, he would tour with a variety of singers and groups, who would all play with his band, as well as perform in different combinations.

These singers and groups would be backed by the Johnny Otis band, but would be able to put out their own records and put on their own shows.

He was going to use his fame to boost others, while also giving himself more stars for his show, which meant more people coming to the shows.

One thing that's very important to note here is that Otis was a white man who chose to live and work only with black people.

We'll be talking more about his relationship with race as we go forward, but Johnny Otis was not the typical white man in the music industry, in that he actually respected his black colleagues as friends and equals, rather than just exploiting them financially.

He also lived in the Watts area of LA, the black area, and did all sorts of things in the community, from having his own radio show, which was listened to by a lot of the white kids in the LA area, as well as by its intended black audience.

Both Frank Zappa and Brian Wilson talked about listening to Johnny Otis' show as children, to running a pigeon breeding club for the local children.

One of the kids who went along to learn how to breed pigeons with Johnny Otis was Arthur Lee, who later went on to be the leader of the band Love.

Otis was always a bit of an entrepreneur, and someone who was doing 20 different things at the same time.

For example, he kept chickens in coops outside his house in Watts, running the Progressive Poultry Company with a friend of his, Mario Delagarde, who was a bass player who worked with Johnny Guitar Watson.

and who died fighting in Cuba with Castro against Batista.

Apparently, the chickens they sold were too popular, as Otis lost the use of a couple of fingers on his right hand in a chainsaw accident while trying to build more chicken coops, though as he said later, he was still able to play piano and vibraphone with only eight fingers.

After a doctor botched an operation on his hand though, he couldn't play drums easily, but it was because of his damaged hand that he eventually discovered Little Esther.

Otis prided himself on his ability at discovering discovering artists, and in this case, it was more or less by accident.

One night, he couldn't sleep from the pain in his hand, and he was scared of taking painkillers and becoming addicted, so he went for a walk.

He walked past a club and saw that Big Jay McNeely was playing.

McNeely, who died in September this year, was one of the great saxophone honkers and scrunkers of rhythm and blues, and was a friend of Otis who'd played on several records with him.

Otis went inside, and before the show started, there was a talent show.

These talent shows were often major parts of the show in Black Entertainment at this time, and were sometimes hugely impressive.

Otis would later talk about one show he saw in Detroit, where he discovered Hank Ballard, Little Woolly John, and Jackie Wilson all in the same night.

and none of them were even the winner.

On this night, one girl was impressive but didn't win, win, and went and cried in the back of the theatre.

Johnny Otis went over to comfort her and offered her a job with his band.

That girl was only 14 when she became a professional blues singer after Otis discovered her.

He had a knack for discovering teenage girls with exceptional vocal abilities.

We'll be looking at another one in a few weeks.

She was born Esther May Washington, but later took the surname of her stepfather and became Esther May Jones.

A few years from the time we're talking about, she took the name of a petrol station company, and became Esther Phillips.

At first, Otis had trouble getting her a record deal, because of the similarity of her sound to that of Dinah Washington, who was Esther's biggest inspiration, and was the biggest female R and B star of the period.

Anyone listening to her was instantly struck by the similarity, and so she was dismissed as a soundalike.

But Otis had a little more success with a vocal group he knew, called The Robins.

We haven't talked much about doo-wop yet, but we're at the point where it starts to be a major factor.

Doo-wop is a genre that came mostly from the east coast of the US.

Like many of the genres we've discussed so far, it was a primarily black genre, but it would soon also be taken up by Italian American singers living in the same areas as black people.

This was a time when Italian Americans weren't considered fully white according to the racial standards then prevalent in the US.

As an example, in the early 1960s, the great jazz bass player Charles Mingus was asked why, if he was so angry at white people, he played with Charlie Mariano.

Mingus looked surprised and said, Charlie's not white, he's Italian.

But at this point, doo-wop was very much on the fringes of the music business.

It was music that was made by people who were too poor even to afford instruments, standing around on street corners and singing with each other.

Usually, the lead singer would try to sound like Bill Kenney of the Inkspots, though increasingly, as the genre matured, the lead vocalists would take on more and more aspects of gospel singing as well.

The backing vocalists usually three or four of them, would do the same kind of thing as the Mills brothers had, and imitate instrumental parts.

And in the tradition of the Inkspot's top and bottom, these bands would also feature a very prominent bass vocal, though the bass singer wouldn't speak the words like Hoppy Jones, but would instead sing wordless nonsense syllables.

This is where the name doo-wop, which was only applied later, comes from, from the singer singing things like this.

Cut every star

in the midnight sky

Cut every rose,

every firefly

for them That's the Ravens, one of the first and most successful of the new vocal groups that came along.

We're not doing a whole episode on them, but they caused a huge explosion of black vocal groups in the late 40s and 50s, and you can tell how influential they were just by looking at the names of many of those bands, which included the Orioles, the Penguins, the Flamingos, and more.

And the Robins were another of these bird groups.

They started out as a vocal group called the A-Sharp Trio, who entered a talent contest at a nightclub owned by Johnny Otis and came second.

And the performer who came first, the guitarist Pete Lewis, Otis got into his band straight away.

Otis gave the A-Sharp Trio a regular gig at his club, and soon decided to pair them with another singer who sang their solo, turning them into a quartet.

They were originally called the Four Blue Birds, and under that name they recorded a single with Otis, My Baby Done Told Me.

Tell her the way you been acting.

Oh boy, one

word no more.

Cause my baby done to me.

Told me that she loved me.

She'd be true.

To have the moon above, like the stars shine that she'll treat me right.

Oh, thank God, changing.

Won't need you no more.

No,

However, they didn't like the name and soon settled on The Robins.

The Robins recorded with Otis on various labels.

Their first single, Around About Midnight, was a remake of Roy Brown's earlier Long About Midnight, and it's really rather good.

Yes, long about midnight when you feel the world has turned you down

When you haven't got a friend and you run

wrong from town to town

A quick note there.

That's noted as their first single on some discographies I've seen.

Others, however, say that these original tracks weren't released until a few months after they were recorded.

It's definitely from their first session under the name The Robins, though.

It was recorded on the Aladdin label, a record label that also had recordings by Illinois Jacquette, Louis Jordan, Winoni Harris, and many, many more early R ⁇ B people who we've touched upon in this podcast, and will touch upon again, I'm sure.

but soon after this Otis and the Robins and Estime Washington would all go on to another label, Savoy.

Ralph Bass, the A ⁇ R man who signed Johnny Otis to Savoy, is another one of those white backroom people who devoted their life to black music, who keep showing up at this stage of the story, and he is another one we'll be seeing a lot of for the next few episodes.

Born Ralph Basso, he'd been an amateur musician and had also worked for Shell.

When he was working for Shell, one of his jobs had been to organise corporate events, and because of the war, there was a lack of musicians to play them, and he'd taken to playing records through an amplifier, becoming one of the very first live DJs.

He'd always had a love of music.

He used to sneak into the Savoy Ballroom to watch Chick Webb as a teenager, and when he was playing these records, he realised that many of them sounded awful.

He was convinced he could make records that sounded better than the ones he was playing, and so he decided to write to every record company he could find, offering his services.

Only one record company answered, Black and White Records in Los Angeles.

They weren't certain that they could use him, but they'd give him an interview in a few weeks if he flew to LA.

Bass flew to LA two weeks before his interview and started preparing.

He asked the musicians unions for a list of who they thought their most talented local musicians were, and went to see them all live and chat to some of them.

Then, when he went into the actual interview and was asked who he would record, he had an answer.

He was going to record Sammy Franklin and his atomics doing The Honey Dripper.

But he still didn't know anything at all about how to make a record.

He had a solution to that, too.

He booked the band and the studio, then got to the studio early, and told the engineers that he didn't have a clue about how to record sound, but that his boss would be expecting him to, and to just go along with everything he said when the boss got there, and that the engineers would really be in charge.

The boss of Black and White Records did get there, shortly afterward, and Bass spent the next half hour tweaking settings on the board, changing mic placement, and a thousand other tiny technical differences.

The boss decided he knew what he was doing and left him to it.

The engineers then put everything back the way it was originally.

The record came out, and it didn't do wonderfully, for reasons we'll discuss next week, but it was enough to get Bass firmly in place in black and white records.

Over the next few years, he produced dozens of classics of jazz and blues, including Stormy Monday by Tebone Walker and Open the Door, Richard by Jack McVeigh.

Richard, why don't you open that door?

Richard, open up the door, man.

It's cold out here in this air.

Now look, there's that woman across the street, looking out the window.

Every time I'm late.

Want to find where she's been?

Where is he bed?

Trying to find out what's happening.

Yeah.

Yes, it's me and I'm Little Girl.

Did you hear what the lady said, Jack?

Or what she said, Reborn?

That record was based on an old routine by the black comedian Dusty Fletcher, and it was Bass who suggested that the old routine be set to music by McVae, who had previously been a saxophone player with Lionel Hampton's band.

It became a massive hit, and was covered by Count Basie and Louis Jordan, among others.

Six different versions of the song made the R ⁇ B Top Ten more or less simultaneously in the first few months of 1947.

But the problem with Open the Door, Richard, was that it was actually too successful.

The record label just assumed that any of its records would sell that well.

And when they didn't, Bass had to find another label to work with.

Bass had proved his ability enough that he ended up working for Savoy.

For most of its time, Savoy was a jazz label, but while Ralph Bass was in charge of A ⁇ R, It was, instead, an RB label, and one that put out some of the greatest RB of its time.

He had an eye for talent and a real love for good rhythm and blues music.

And so, when Ralph Bass saw the Johnny Otis review performing live, he decided that Savoy needed to sign all of them.

Otis and his band, Esther, the Robins, everyone.

He got in touch with Herman Lubinsky, who was the owner of Savoy Records, and got Lubinsky to come down to see Otis's band.

During intermission, Lubinsky met up with Otis and got him to sign a record contract.

The contract only specified a 1% royalty, but Lubinsky promised he'd triple the royalty rate after Otis' first hit with Savoy.

Like many of Lubinsky's promises, this proved to be false.

When the Otis band, Esther and the Robins, went into the studio together, Esther was so intimidated by the studio that she started giggling, and while they did manage to cut a few songs, they didn't get as much done as they wanted to in the session.

But at almost literally the last minute, 20 minutes before the end of the session, Otis came up with a song that was, like Open the Door, Richard, based around a comedy routine from a well-known black comedy act.

In this case, a double act called Apus and Estrelita.

Esther and Bobby Nunn of the Robins engaged in some good-spirited comedy back-and-forth copied from their routines.

fighting a big old grizzly bear.

How come you ain't out in the forest?

I'm a lady.

Big eye lady bears out there.

Oh,

baby.

I can't use you anymore.

Well, if you can't use me, mama,

don't let nobody come out that back door.

Bye-bye, Daddy.

Bye-bye.

Those lines, how come you ain't in the forest?

I'm a lady.

They got lady bears out there, take on a bit of a different colour when you realise that lady bear was, at the time, slang for an ugly, sexually aggressive woman.

Herman Lubinsky, the head of Savoy Records, was not impressed with the record record, or with Esther Phillips, and according to Bass, I sent the record to Lubinsky and asked for five dollars to pay for the kids' expenses, lunch and all that, coming to Hollywood from Watts.

He shouted, What do you mean five books?

For what?

He wouldn't give me the five books.

Lubinsky put the recording aside until the DJ in Newark asked him if he could look through the new recordings he had.

to see if there was anything that might be a hit.

The DJ loved the record, and even ran a competition on his radio station to pick the song's name, which is where the title Double Crossing Blues comes from.

Although as Bass said it was an appropriate name, everybody who was involved with the record got double-crossed.

The songwriter, Johnny and I, the Robins, everybody connected with it.

Lubinsky was suddenly so sure that the record was going to be a success that he phoned Bass at five in the morning, Bass's time, waking him up and getting Bass to go and wake Johnny Otis up, so they could both go and track down Esther and her mother, and get them to sign a contract immediately.

It was around this point that Esther's stage name was decided upon.

Lubinsky said to Otis, You need a stage name for that girl, to which Otis replied, Which girl?

Little Esther, and Lubinsky said, That's perfect.

And so, for the next few years, Esther Washington, who would later be Esther Phillips, was Little Esther, and that was the name under which she became a phenomenon.

The record went to number one on the R and B charts and was the biggest thing in the genre in years.

In July 1950, Billboard published its annual listing of best-selling R ⁇ B acts.

Johnny Otis came first, Little Esther second, and the Robins came fourth.

But the record's success caused friction between Otis and the Robins, who he later described as the people who hummed behind Little Esther.

They decided that they were the big stars, not Little Esther, and that they were going to go on tour on their own.

Otis had to find another male singer to sing the parts that Bobby Nunn had sung, and so he found his new singer, Mel Walker, who would be the main lead vocalist on Otis's future records, and would duet with Little Esther on more than a few of them.

The Robins offered Otis a job as a musical director for twenty dollars a night, but Otis refused.

The Robins would go on to have many, many successes themselves, some of which we'll talk about later.

But Otis, Mel Walker, and Little Esther went on to have a string of hits in various combinations as well: Mistrustin' Blues, Deceiving Blues, Dreamin' Blues, Wedding Boogie, Rockin' Blues.

Otis also had a 1951 hit with All Night Long, which would later be referenced in records by both Frank Zappa and Talking Heads.

hey, Mr.

Landlord, you can lock that door.

Pull the lights down low and pull the rug off the floor.

Don't nobody answer if you hear a knock.

Just grab your baby and rock all night long,

all night long,

all night long,

rocking all night long.

You can bring your buddy in.

Come on in, we got a lot of fun.

We'll be seeing much more of Johnny Otis and of the Robins as the story goes on, but this is the only time we'll be talking about Little Esther.

In her first year, she had an amazing seven records make the RB top ten, three of them, including Double Crossing Blues, going to number one.

She was regarded as one of the finest RB vocalists of her generation, and had a promising future.

She decided, after a year on Savoy with Johnny Otis, to go go solo and to move with Alf Bass to Federal Records, a new label Bass had joined after falling out with Herman Lubinsky.

According to Bass, Lubinsky often blackmailed his employees in order to get leverage over them, but he was unable to find any dirty secrets about Bass.

Not that Bass didn't have them, and not necessarily that he did either, I don't know, but he didn't mix his business and personal lives.

He didn't hang out with the musicians he worked with or with his colleagues, and so there was no vector for Lubinsky to get any kind of leverage over him.

So Lubinsky sent Bass to a party for a distributor at the last minute, which ran until 3 or 4 am.

And then, when Bass's wife phoned up to ask where he was, Lubinsky claimed not to know, causing Bass and his wife to have a row.

Bass instantly realised Lubinsky was trying to mess with his marriage marriage in order to get some leverage over him and decided he was simply not going to go back to work the next day.

Instead, he went to King Records, who set up a subsidiary, Federal Records, for Bass to run.

Bass took Little Esther with him, but Johnny Otis and the Robins were both still on Savoy.

Over the next few years, Bass would produce a lot of records which would change the course of rhythm and blues and rock and roll music, but sadly, his further collaborations with Little Esther simply weren't as successful as the work they'd done together with Johnny Otis.

She stopped having hits and started doing heroin.

She moved back in with her family in Houston and played odd gigs around the area, including one with Otis, Big Mama Thornton and Johnny Ace, which we'll talk about in a future episode, but which must have traumatised her further.

Eventually her career got a second wind and she had a few minor hits in the 1960s and 70s under her new name, Esther Phillips.

Most impressive of these was Home Is Where the Hatred Is, a song by Gil Scott Heron that she recorded in 1972.

I left three days ago,

but no one seems to know I'm gone.

Home is where the hatred is.

Home is filled with pain.

And it may not be such a bad idea if another one.

That song clearly meant a lot to her, given her own history with drugs, and the album it came from, From a Whisper to a Scream, was nominated for a Grammy for Best RB Vocal Performance Female.

Aretha Franklin won the award, as she did every year from 1968 through 1975 inclusive.

And to be fair, that's one of the few examples of the Grammys actually recognising talent when they heard it.

Because if it's possible to give Aretha Franklin an award between 1968 and 1975, you give Aretha Franklin that award.

But this time, Aretha said publicly that she didn't deserve the award and gave it to Phillips.

Sadly, Esther Phillips never won the award in her own right.

She was nominated four times, but all during that period of Aretha dominance.

She continued having minor hits into the 1980s, but she never recaptured that brief period when she was the biggest female star in R ⁇ B back in 1950.

She died in 1984.

aged only 48.

Johnny Otis, who by that time was ordained as a minister, performed her funeral.

A history of rock music in 500 songs is written, produced and performed by Andrew Hickey.

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