Charleston

Lyrics, Cecil Mack (1873–1944); music, James P. Johnson (1894–1955) 

Again, and embarrassingly back-to-back, I got the date of this 1923 song wrong, again, the result of wrong information. Blame the messenger! However, many believe that James Johnson had composed the music––inspired by Carolina dock workers––a few years earlier, so I might be, for the melody at least, on the money. Although the great words––Buck dance! Wing dance! May be a back number! But the Charleston! The new Charleston! That dance is surely a comer!––are much less well-known than the melody, the melody has been a sonic icon of the 1920s since the 1930s.

Cecil Mack, composer, lyricist and publisher (Gotham-Attucks), was possibly the first African-American music publisher. His wife, Dr. Gertrude Curtis, was a pioneering African-American dentist.

Johnson was not only a pioneer in stride piano, which bridged ragtime piano and jazz piano, but was he one of the very few stride pianists that could improvise in that style. Fats Waller was one of his students, and Duke Ellington learned many of his compositions note for note. Johnson was said to be at his best when he approached the piano as a drum, pre-dating James Brown by decades. Although he was championed by John Hammond of Columbia Records in the 1930s, he is less well known than contemporaries Fats Waller and Eubie Blake. Upon Johnson’s death, Hammond wrote an obituary for him that appeared in Downbeat, lamenting the degree that his musical legacy had been forgotten.