Meade Lux Lewis - Biography
By Stuart Kremsky
Meade Lux Lewis, along with Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson, was one of the most influential and successful boogie-woogie piano players. Primarily a fast, piano-based music made for dancing; boogie woogie is described by Smithsonian music historian Martin Williams as “…a percussive blues piano style—no one knows how old—in which an ostinato bass figure, usually (but not always) played eight beats to the bar, is juxtaposed with a succession of right hand figures.” When Lewis appeared with Ammons and Johnson at the first Spirituals to Swing show at Carnegie Hall, it sparked a boogie-woogie craze that would sweep America. His hard driving style and powerful rhythms made him a particularly fine blues player in a more traditional vein as well.
Meade Anderson “Lux” Lewis was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1905, on dates variously reported as September 3, 4 and 13. His father played guitar and wrote songs, at least one of which (“The Brown Skinned Boys Are Coming”) was published, according to an interview Lewis did with researcher Don Hill in the late fifties. As a schoolchild, young Lewis became friends with Albert Ammons. In the Hill interview, Lewis describes Ammons and himself as “eager beavers” who used to “sit at the player piano...and watch the keys as they went up and down.” They absorbed as much as they could from going to parties and watching the pianists, then trying to recreate that sound at home. Both made rapid progress, although Lewis notes that Ammons “happened to pick it up faster than I did.” At Chicago’s Vendome Theater, they got to hear musicians like Erskine Tate and Fats Waller. Blues pianist Jimmy Yancey and Waller were lasting influences on Lewis.
Lewis and Ammons worked as cab drivers for the Silver Taxicab Company in the early to mid twenties. The story goes that they were gone so much playing at parties that Silver Taxicab set up a clubroom of its own, complete with a piano, so that the musically inclined cabbies could easily be found when someone needed a ride. Lewis picked up his nickname, “Lux,” around that time. As he explains it, he was called the “Duke of Luxembourg” for the way he would imitate a French cartoon character. He told Hill that “The kids couldn’t pronounce ‘Luxembourg” so the just cut it short and said ‘There’s Lux,’ and it stuck ever since.”
Lewis was working in bars, clubs and for private parties around the Midwest in the mid twenties. He made his first recording in 1927, playing his own composition, “Honky Tonk Train Blues,” described by jazz writer Henry Martin as “…one of the most exciting depictions of the train motif commonly heard in blues and jazz.” The record was not issued by Paramount until nearly two years later. Lewis moved from job to job and town to town. He was in Muskegon, Michigan for a couple of years, then went back to Chicago in 1932. He worked as a driver for a traveling salesman for a while and then found himself in Chicago again. Ammons got him a job playing in a trio in a club, which led to more club dates in town, and Lewis worked fairly steadily for a few years.
In late 1935, recording impresario and jazz enthusiast John Hammond asked Ammons if he knew where Lewis might be. Of course Ammons did. Later that week, Hammond was in the audience for Lewis’s regular club gig. He didn’t introduce himself at first, but asked to hear “Honky Tonk Train Blues.” He “clapped up a breeze,” Lewis later said. When Hammond returned to the club, he had clarinetist Benny Goodman and his pianist, Teddy Wilson, in tow. Hammond induced Goodman and Wilson to sit in with Lewis. Word spread like wildfire around Chicago and the place was soon packed. Hammond later spread the story that he’d found Lewis washing cars, “…just to add a little color,” says Lewis. The tale had a germ of truth since Lewis had worked briefly as a car washer around 1930.
Hammond arranged for Lewis to re-record “Honky Tonk Train Blues” twice, the first time for Decca in November, 1935, and then for Victor the following May. Lewis continued to work in area clubs until Hammond brought him to New York for a concert appearance in the winter of 1938. From Spirituals to Swing was the title of an influential concert in Carnegie Hall on December 23, 1938. Hammond’s concept was to present a history of African-American music, beginning with spirituals and ending with big swing bands. The evening included performances by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Jimmy Rushing, Helen Humes, Sidney Bechet with James P. Johnson, and Count Basie, both with his orchestra and in small groups with Lester Young. The last section before the intermission was “A Cutting Session” with pianists Lewis and Ammons, and from Kansas City, Pete Johnson. This was by far the biggest venue that Lewis had played. Lewis remembered for Hill that although he drank some whiskey to calm his nerves, “Once we got out there and started playing we forgot about everybody. We were just like we were going on for ourselves.” This concert, and its successor from the following year were recorded, with much of the performances released as From Spirituals to Swing (1999 Vanguard Records).
The boogie-woogie portion of the program was received with great acclaim. Lewis and Ammons immediately began an open-ended engagement at Café Society in New York’s Greenwich Village, the first integrated nightclub in a white neighborhood. Soon Hammond prevailed upon proprietor Barney Josephson to hire Pete Johnson as well. As Josephson later recalled for The New York Times, “I told John Hammond that I already had two boogie-woogie pianists but John insisted that I hire Pete. ‘Why not have them all?’” When Josephson relented, he learned that it was a package deal, since blues shouter Big Joe Turner, Johnson’s partner and another Spirituals to Swing performer, would also be on the bill. With all four men working the crowd, the engagement ran for several years, igniting a boogie-woogie craze in America that lasted into the early forties. Before the fad petered out in the early fifties, the style was popularized by such performers as the Andrews Sisters, who had a massive hit with “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra, who scored with “T.D.’s Boogie Woogie,” and The Delmore Brothers, whose “Hillbilly Boogie” was only the first of many sides they recorded in the genre.
Lewis recorded frequently in the late thirties and early forties. Some of his work for the Vocalion and Victor labels has been collected in the three CD set Boogie Woogie and Blues Piano (2008 Mosaic Select). He and Ammons had the honor of inaugurating the storied Blue Note label with solos by each man and duets recorded at the beginning of 1939. Lewis appears on Bechet’s famous recording of “Summertime,” also on Blue Note. Lewis, who liked to experiment with other keyboards, played celeste in a quartet led by clarinetist Edmond Hall for Blue Note in 1941 with Charlie Christian on guitar, and two months later, recorded four harpsichord solos for the label. He also became friends with the great pianist Art Tatum and the two often made the rounds of nightspots when Tatum was in town.
By 1943, Lewis had relocated to the West Coast where he continued to play clubs. He started to get a little movie work, appearing uncredited in the 1946 Frank Capra classic, It’s a Wonderful Life. The following year he was in New Orleans, a feature film that also starred Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Woody Herman. He was later in the low-budget thriller, Nightmare, a 1956 film starring Edward G. Robinson and Kevin McCarthy. He also made a number of television appearances.
Lewis worked steadily in the fifties, though he recorded infrequently. Unhappy at being typecast as a one-dimensional boogie-woogie player, he made some attempts to redefine his image during the decade with limited success. Yancey’s Last Ride (Clef 1954) was a duet album with drummer Louie Bellson. A trio date with bassist Red Callender and drummer Jo Jones recorded in early 1955 came out as Cat House Piano on Verve. Originally on the tiny Tops label, Barrel House Piano, dates from early 1956 in Los Angeles. Another trio date, this time with Callender and Earl Palmer on guitar, the complete session was reissued on the British Jasmine label in 2002. Later in 1956, Lewis was in New York to record Out of the Roaring Twenties (ABC-Paramount), a concept album of period songs with Leonard Gaskin on bass and Osie Johnson on drums. Lewis didn’t visit a studio again until 1961, when he recorded The Blues Piano Artistry of Meade Lux Lewis (Riverside), a solo album that also featured his celeste playing. The whole session reportedly took just two hours from start to finish. Lewis’s final recording session was Boogie Woogie House Party (1962 Philips), a small group date with arrangements by Bumps Blackwell.
Lewis had just concluded a three week engagement at a club outside Minneapolis when he was killed in a car accident on June 7, 1964. Aside from his much-covered “Honky Tonk Train Blues,” Lewis’s best-known composition is “Yancey Special.” Lewis wrote several of the more sophisticated compositions of the boogie era including “Café Society Rag” and “Solitude” from 1939, and “Bear Cat Crawl” and “Six Wheel Chaser” from 1940. He was inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame in 1993.
