Kansas City Jazz - A Little Evil Will Do You Good - Con Chapman
Shouters and Singers
Kansas City Jazz - A Little Evil Will Do You Good - Con Chapman
Con Chapman [+]
Music writer
Con Chapman is the author of Rabbit’s Blues: The Life and Music of Jonny Hodges (Oxford University Press, 2019), winner of the 2019 Book of the Year Award by Hot Club de France, and a 2020 Certificate of Merit for Best Historical Research from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. His writing on jazz has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, Syncopated Times, and Brilliant Corners, among other publications.
Description
Just as there was a contrast between the rougher, Coleman Hawkins imitators and the followers of Lester Young, Kansas City vocalists used two approaches; shouting and singing. The shouting style was a form of sung speech, as practiced by Joe Turner who learned by imitating blind street singers whom he assisted in his youth; these singers typically accompanied themselves on blues guitar. Singers such as Jimmy Rushing, by contrast, were more polished and came out of middle-class backgrounds where the themes and lyrics of blues were looked down upon while the rhythmic core of the music was retained. The heirs of these two traditions down to the recent past are profiled.