Harry Gibson

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Harry "The Hipster" Gibson (June 27, 1915 – May 3, 1991) was a jazz pianist, singer, and songwriter. ^[1]

Harry Gibson played boogie woogie and smooth jive piano while singing in an unrestrained, wild style. His musical career began in the late 1920s, playing stride piano in Dixieland jazz bands in Harlem. He remained there throughout the 1930s, adding the barrelhouse boogie of the time to his repertoire, and was discovered by Fats Waller in 1939. ^[2] Between 1939 and 1945, he played at various Manhattan jazz clubs on 52nd Street, "Swing Street," notably the Deuces, run by Leon Enkin and Eddie Davis.

1 Recordings
2 Films
3 Notes
4 Audio samples
5 External links

[edit] Recordings

He recorded such songs as "Handsome Harry, the Hipster," "I Stay Brown All Year 'Round," "Get Your Juices at the Deuces," and "Stop That Dancin' Up There." Harry was also known for his wild piano which was insane for the year 1944, take a listen to his songs "Riot in Boogie" and "Barrelhouse Boogie" and for an example of his strange singing style "The Baby and The Pup." He wrote all his own songs, which were quite unusual and ahead of their time.

He was known in the 1940s for his unusual songs and his unique, wild singing style, as well as his intricate mixture of a hardcore boogie rhythm with ragtime, stride and jazz piano. During this same time period, while working on Swing Street at night, he was a fellow at the Juilliard Graduate School during the day. ^[3] The peak of his career was from 1939 to 1947.

[edit] Films

Harry recorded a great deal, but there are very few visual examples of his act. In 1944 he filmed three songs for the Soundies film jukeboxes, and he even went to Hollywood in 1946, to guest star in the feature-length movie musical, Junior Prom.

Part of Harry's act was to sing comical songs praising drug use. His career came to a sudden end in 1947 when his song "Who Put The Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine" put him on the industry blacklist. ^[4] His own drug use led to his decline, and with the rising popularity of rock and roll among teenagers in the 1950s, older musicians were not in high demand. But in the 1960s, when Harry saw the huge success of the Beatles, he decided to switch over to rock and roll himself (not a great departure for a hard-rocking boogie pianist). In 1986 he made a comeback album that resulted in another album in 1989, both of which reveal his considerable musical gift. In this later period, he played hard rock, blues, bop, and novelty songs, and a few tracks where he mixed ragtime with rock and roll. See below for the link to the lyrics to his wild songs.

In his autobiography, he says he coined the term hipster during his 1939 - 1945 gig on Swing Street, when he started using "Harry the Hipster" as his stage name.^[5] Since there is no evidence of earlier usage of the term in written form, we might tentatively believe this until otherwise proven. See link to his autobiography below.

He may have been the only pianist of the 1930s and 1940s to go on to play in full-scale rocking blues bands in the 1970s and 1980s. Unlike his 1940s contemporaries, who continued to play the same music for decades (if they survived), Harry had a total metamorphosis between the 1940s and the 1980s, where the only things that remained were his tendency to play hard-rocking boogie woogie and ragtime, and his tongue-in-cheek references to drug use (like his 1989 song about a little grass shack in Hawaii made of Maui Wowie, that can be smoked as needed, replanted from the seeds, and rebuilt from the stems and leaves).

Unlike Mezz Mezzrow, who grew up white but consciously abandoned it to adopt the black music and culture as a white negro, Harry grew up in the South Bronx section of New York City. His constant use of black jive talk was not an affectation, it was simply his uptown New York dialect. His song, "I Stay Brown All Year Round" demonstrates his confusion about the pigmentation of his own skin.

The most common reaction people make these days when seeing Gibson's Soundies for the first time is that Harry Gibson was playing rock and roll, and they usually guess that he was a contemporary of Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard. People are usually quite surprised when they are told that Harry made these films in 1944.

Harry took the boogie woogie beat of his predecessors, but he made it frantic and wild, like a rock and roller would do in the 1950s. In retrospect, it seems that Harry Gibson was the first white rock and roller, preceding others by a decade. The Soundies (short musical films) he recorded in 1944 give evidence of this.

[edit] Notes

^ "Boogie In Blue" biographical video produced by Harry's granddaughter Flavin Feller, 1991, Rhapsody Films
^ Harry's autobiography included in the liner notes of the CD album "Everybody's Crazy But Me," 1986 Progressive Records, USA
^ Liner notes from the 1944 album "Boogie Woogie In Blue" by Musicraft
^ Statement made by drummer Tom McGee in movie Boogie In Blue
^ Harry's autobiography included in the liner notes of the CD album "Everybody's Crazy But Me," 1986 Progressive Records, USA