Gosh. That’s a great and informative article.
I wonder how long he’s been writing it :-)
Wonderful Read! I remember the Ragtime Revival and seeing the elderly Eubie Blake on TV. He could still tickle those ivories! :-)
Thanks for posting this.
That was an amazing and wonderful link.
So much rich heritage.i admit the 2 Harrys singing Wild about Harry was my fave
Thank you for posting
Great, thanks a million for posting this. I just shared on FB! Amazing stuff in there.
How awful that Eubie Blake had 20 siblings who died? Life has certainly gotten easy, that’s what it made me think.
We live on velvet tuffets now and yet we still complain!
How can one man know so much?
Great stuff! I was playing in Reno in about ‘79 and we heard that Hubie Blake was playing down the street in some club just off the strip. We ran down there and heard about 30 minutes, just him on a piano. Fabulous.
That Lindy Hop--Sid Phillips & His Melodians (1930)
Steyn’s attempt to describe the syncopation of Eubie Blake’s “I’m Just Wild About Harry” is a mess.
The song is written in 4/4 time—which means it has four quarter notes in each measure, with the fastest notes being quarter notes.
The normal accentuation for such a piece would be
ONE two three four/ONE two three four/
But Blake’s “I’m Just Wild About Harry” has
ONE two three FOUR/one two THREE four/
instead for two bar groups
with occasional four bar groups returning to the normal accentuation.
In performance, it actually sounds as
ONE two three/ONE two three/ONE two/
[as does some Latin music, such as the bossa nova]
I knew Eubie Blake, and spent hours with him—both in interviewing him about Joe Gans, the great lightweight champion from Baltimore who Blake knew for years—and also going through Blake’s music with him.
He was a tough guy, as I have found most people who live past 90 are.
He was very competetive, as most top level musicians are.
He and his wife Marian would put music on the piano rack in front of me and he would say, “I bet you can’t play this one” or sometimes, “No, two slow” as he indicated the proper tempo.
Since he was an improviser, writing down his pieces was difficult, as he never played a piece exactly the same each new time.
We always had a great time together. After a certain amount of time, he would excuse himself for a bit, saying as he left the room, “My kidneys...”
It was actually his wife Marion (his 2nd wife, who had been a dancer in one of his shows) who engineered his reapearance in his 90’s on the Johnny Carson type shows.
Both he and his wife complained to me the TV shows only wanted him to play his ragtime pieces, which he had written in the 1890’s, when he had written many other types of music since then.
I had originally gone to interview him about Joe Gans, whom he had known for years, even though Gans died of TB in 1910 (a year after his last fight).
From knowing Gans, Blake actually knew a huge amount more about boxing than most people would.
Can you imagine getting to interview Blake for hours about Joe Gans SEVENTY ONE YEARS after Gans had died in 1910. My visits to Blake were in 1981.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21SMdsr-i78
85 years old.
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