Jimmie Gordon Vol. 3 (1939-1946)

The third and last volume in Document's complete recordings of Chicago bluesman Jimmie Gordon covers the years 1939-1946, beginning with the last of the "Vip Vop Band" sides. Tracks one-six were recorded at the third and final session he would ever lead in New York, which took place on April 28, 1939. On that day the "voppers" included trumpeter Frankie Newton, alto saxophonist Pete Brown, pianist Sam Price, and drummer Zutty Singleton, adding up to what feels like the toughest, jazziest band that Jimmie Gordon ever had a chance to lead. Richard M. Jones, who wrote "Trouble in Mind," "Canal Street Blues," "Jazzin' Babies Blues," and the "New Orleans Hop Scop Blues" is credited as the composer of the "St. Peter Blues," a hedonistic meditation that Gordon savors to the last drop. In keeping with this singer's periodic choice of naughty material, "Get Your Mind Out of the Gutter" was written by old-time vaudevillian Wesley "Kid" (or "Sox") Wilson, as was "If the Walls Could Talk" and "Do That Thing," originally recorded in 1925 by Fletcher Henderson with young Louis Armstrong and Wilson's longtime cohort Leola B. "Coot" Grant under the title "Come On Coot, Do That Thing." Back in Chicago six months later for tracks seven-ten, Gordon was accompanied by alto saxophonist Buster Bennett, pianist Sammy Price, guitarist Ike Perkins, and drummer Big Sid Catlett. Tracks 11-13 feature what would be the last Vip Vop Band per se, with Bennett and Price, and on tracks 14-19 the act is whittled back down to just Gordon singing with piano accompaniment. "Beer Drinking Woman" will perhaps be familiar as a barroom favorite by Memphis Slim. Central to Southwestern, Midwestern, and especially the Chicago blues tradition, the boogie woogie element surfaces here as the singalong "Boogie Man," the slower "Boogie Woogie Blues," and a modern-sounding "Rock That Boogie," which was the first of Gordon's last four recordings which were cut in Chicago at some point in 1946 and issued on the King and Queen record labels. On these vintage R&B sides (some of them sounding beat to hell like many old records that have survived countless house parties), Gordon was back at the piano and singing as loud as he could so as to be heard over a trumpet, tenor sax, bass, and drum combo billed as the Bip Bop Band, an appropriate revision of the earlier name as the prevailing currents of bebop are audibly present in much of what is today tagged more or less exclusively as early R&B. "Jumpin' at the Club Blue Flame" refers to a bar located at 5127 Wentworth Avenue where Gordon and his Combo performed. Even as these records prove that Gordon was in the process of adapting to postwar preferences in African-American music, he seems to have quit the music industry altogether for it is here that the trail of records dwindles to nothing, leaving the rest of his story untold.