Setting a Tone: Chapter Seven–Sammy Price's Lecture at the University of Massachusetts, Part Two

Lessons with Sammy Price, King of Boogie-Woogie

In the video at the end of Chapter Six, Sammy arrives at Bezanson Recital Hall at the University of Massachusetts. We see him take the crowd in hand immediately. He talks about his life, answers a few questions, then takes to the stage and plays a brief, medium tempo blues boogie.

This chapter continues his lecture, in four segments. In this first video, a student asks Sammy for the first song he ever learned. He takes us back to Mrs. Lizzie Bailey’s player piano in Dallas, where as a boy, Sammy exchanged yard work for time at her piano. He slowed the rolls down and learned to play tunes by studying the pressed keys. The first tune he learned, “Isle of Golden Dreams,” was also Mrs. Bailey’s favorite. Sammy would write in his autobiography that when Mrs. Bailey heard him play, she said, “Brother, you are doing just fine,” words he would never forget.

Another student follows up with the question, “What is your most requested song?”

When he finishes “Honeysuckle Rose” and turns to the audience, Sammy notices me standing on the stairway. He offers an apology for arriving late, after driving 250 miles from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where he spoke at a college the day before. I say simply that I’m glad he’s there, that I’d been praying he’d make it, and he says he knew I was praying. I say he once told me there are two kinds of boogie-woogie, and I ask him to explain. The room breaks into laughter. I ask him to repeat the story he told me about getting into a piano cutting contest with the young prodigy Hersal Thomas, in Houston, after Sammy had begun touring with the TOBA on the Black theater circuit.

A student asks Sammy if he can play “The Entertainer,” the ragtime tune from 1902 that became popular once again after becoming a theme song in the 1974 movie “The Sting.” Sammy doesn’t know the tune, but he has heard it, and gives it a try.

Another student has a question about Fats Waller, who Sammy knew as a friend, and who was the composer of “Honeysuckle Rose.”

Then someone asks Sammy if he sings. We don’t see his expression but we do see the laughter that followed. As Sammy begins to play and sing “In the Evening,” you can see the skepticism on some of the faces among the group, but that expression soon vanishes. “In the Evening” was the first blues I heard Sammy play, on my first night at the Copley Plaza. It was the tune that blew me away.

Sammy follows “In the Evening” with “Shakin’ That Thing.” It’s a comic song he often plays to lighten the mood, a tune based on the insult song, “The Dirty Dozens,” and has a touch of Blind Lemon Jefferson rolled in with the lyrics, “Going down to the river, take a rocking chair….”

He makes a turn to more serious music, and plays a gorgeous tune. He doesn’t name the tune, but it seems to me to be “Serenade in Blue.” Sammy follows with a brief treatment of Ellington’s “Satin Doll.”

I ask Sammy to repeat the story he told me about when he played music before Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke in Harlem. Sammy tells about the event, and the gratitude King expressed. A student wants to know what he played then. The answer and his remarks that follow conclude the video sequence of this chapter, and this part of his lecture.

I will add some context to Sammy’s story about providing music before Martin Luther King’s speech in Harlem, based partly on a follow-up interview with Sammy about that night.

Because of Sammy’s work as a campaign aide and his association with Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, and in parallel, Sammy’s years of work among the highest echelon of jazz musicians in New York, he was the person in Harlem that political operatives called upon when they wanted to provide jazz at political events. By the time Martin Luther King arrived in New York in 1958 to promote his first book, Strive to Freedom, Sammy had approximately two decades of experience assembling bands for this purpose, playing in halls, on platforms on the streets, or even on flatbed trucks traveling the streets of New York City. Among the musicians he called upon were Don Stovall, J.C. Higginbotham, Ben Webster, and others.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was 29 years old when Strive to Freedom was published. The book is a memoir about his leadership role during the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, following the arrest of Rosa Parks after she refused to give her seat to a white passenger on a city bus. Though King had been the pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church for only a year, he was elected to lead the bus boycott by fellow religious leaders and other involved citizens.

Strive to Freedom is a stirring account. One of the book’s most poignant moments comes when King gives his first political speech on the night before the boycott was set to begin. The church where he spoke had been filled to capacity hours before his arrival. Thousands had gathered outside to hear the speech through loudspeakers. King walked through the crowd in fear of failing them. He worried that the boycott would fail.

But that was not to be. The next morning King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, watched from their home as the buses began to roll by. All were nearly empty. There would be violence, and King’s home was bombed though no one was injured. Citizens formed carpools, and the boycott lasted nearly thirteen months. In the end, the Supreme Court upheld a decision that bus segregation was unconstitutional.

On King’s first day in New York to launch his book, on September 17, he met with his publisher downtown and appeared for an interview with Dave Garroway on NBC’s “Today” show. Later that day he spoke to a group of church leaders at a church on the Upper East Side of the City.

That night, Sammy received a call from John Young, a publicist who worked for Adam Clayton Powell. Sammy was told that King would speak at a church on Seventh Avenue in Harlem, as part of a fundraiser for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Young wanted to know if Sammy could assemble a band to play before King spoke, to help attract a crowd. King was still a relative newcomer, still someone who might need help attracting a crowd.

Sammy got on the phone. Before the night was done, fifteen musicians had agreed to play for King. Most had jobs downtown that night, but the event would finish early enough for them to get there on time.

When Sammy arrived at the church, he saw that a stage had been arranged and a sound system put in place, but there was no piano.

“Right away I saw there was an emergency,” he would later say. “I couldn’t play if we didn’t have a piano. We had a problem and nobody knew how to resolve it. So I called Eugene Callender, who was a preacher and had a church five blocks away.” Callender was also a civil rights activist.

“So what I did, I went down to Eugene Callender’s church, took his piano out the front door, put it on a dolly, and rolled it up Seventh Avenue against the traffic. We put it on a platform and had our program. We played red-hot numbers to get a lot of people in there, no point in playing any slow-drag stuff. When we finished, we pushed the piano back home. John Young asked if we could play some more, but I said, ‘Man, this is a freebie, I’m going to my job.’ I was working at the Metropole.”