One of Ray Charles’s first hits was “Mess Around,” released on Atlantic Records back in 1953, but actually in this case, Brother Ray was a little late to the party.
Many of the ideas for that song can been heard in a whole mess of New Orleans boogie piano riffs, starting as early as, say, Cow Cow Davenport’s playing in the late 1920s.
But if you want to go back even further — and, well, we generally do — there are references to dances called a “mess around” as far back the earliest days of jazz.
For instance, in his wonderful autobiography called Trumpet on the Wing, the great New Orleans jazzman Wingy Manone talked about watching people dance the mess-around at the fish fries of his youth in the Crescent City at the beginning of the 20th century.
“The mess-around,” said Wingy, “was a kind of dance where you just messed around with your feet in one place, letting your body do most of the work, while keeping time by snapping fingers with one hand and holding a slab of fish in the other!” Now, that’s an image.
Our Take on the Tune
As reported here earlier, the good-time hokum tunes of the 1920s and ‘30s have been part of The Flood’s oeuvre since its earliest days, and here — from a recent rehearsal — is testimony to the fact that that tradition is alive and rocking.
Our mess around — “4th Street Mess Around” — is the tune we learned from a spring 1930 recording by long-time Flood heroes, the remarkable Memphis Jug Band.
4th Street Mess Around