The story goes that a century or so ago there was a strange annual ball in Chicago. A model of irony, it was a fancy affair in the city’s sordid South Side, financed by wealthy society folk but reserved for the community’s prostitutes and their sugar daddies.
Some believe that songwriter Shelton Brooks so loved those tales that he celebrated this modern equivalent of the medieval carnivals of misrule with his most famous composition.
“As far as I can find, this event was not called ‘the Darktown Strutters’ Ball,’” writes our favorite song sleuth Elijah Wald, “but I guess that seemed like a more marketable title than ‘Pimps and Hookers Ball.’”
Shelton Recalls
In 1972 British singer/music historian Ian Whitcomb located and interviewed Brooks just three years before the venerable composer’s death.
During their visit, Brooks told Whitcomb that he wrote the song after hearing a story about an ordinary working stiff who got “an invitation to an affair to be given by the local pimps. A big ball. All a mistake and he should never have been asked.”
(Incidentally, some sources suggest Brooks’s song referred instead to a ball at the 1915 San Francisco Pacific-Panama Exposition. )
Shelton’s Biggest Hit
In either case, it was a real-life party that inspired the song that became one of the first monster hits of the early recording age.
Brooks, his composing cred already established with hits like “I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone,” brought “Darktown Strutters’ Ball” to vaudeville in 1917 where it was introduced by stars like Sophie Tucker. After that “Darktown Strutters’ Ball” sold more than three million copies as sheet music.
The first recording of the song was made by Canadian vaudeville band Six Brown Brothers in May 1917 for Victor Records in New York City. This was followed a few weeks later by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s instrumental version for Columbia. The latter is one of the earliest commercial jazz records and was the No. 3 song of 1917, later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
The song quickly became a staple of dozens of pop and jazz artists including Count Basie, Dave Brubeck, Fats Domino, Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Al Jolson, Django Reinhardt, the Savoy Quartet, Wilbur Sweatman’s Original Jazz Band, and Lieutenant James Europe’s 369th Infantry Jazz Band. Ted Lewis and His Band had a hit with it in 1927.
The Flood’s Take on the Tune
We had our old buddy Jim Rumbaugh in the band room last week. As we’ve reported, Jim will be sitting in with us next week when The Flood plays at the latest Diamond Teeth Mary blues festival.
After we’d worked on the blues tunes we’ll do for the show, we switched this rocking old Roaring Twenties number for a happy change of pace.
It all went well until we tried to tag the tune with a classic ending that our late Chuck Romine always favored. Hey, who knew there’d be spelling?!
More Tunes from the Teens and the ‘20s?
Meanwhile, if this week’s podcast has you in the mood for more of the tunes that rocked Grandpa and Grandma at the start of the last century, man, do we have you covered! A lot of The Flood’s favorite songs come from the Roarin’ Twenties and we have an easy way for you to find them.
Just click this link to reach the “Tunes on a Timeline” section of our archives, then on the resulting page, just scroll down to find a time period you’re looking for.
When you see a tune you want to hear (such as “(I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My) Sister Kate” in the above example), click a title to hear the guys doing that song along with a bit of the song’s back story.
… Or Floodango It!
Or if you’d rather just randomize it, you might turn on Radio Floodango’s free Holum Channel, where all the tunes in the rotation are from the ‘20s and ‘30s.
And as we’ve said, we’ve now got ways to mobilize the ol’ Floodanago. Click here to find out how to put the Flood radio on your computer desktop and on an iPhone to make your Flood fix always just a click away.
