Setting a Tone: Chapter Six–Bringing the Music to the Young People

Lessons with Sammy Price, the King of Boogie-Woogie

Within three years of his arrival in Harlem in 1938, Sammy Price had become a “Star Pianist.” A story about him written by Dan Burley appeared in the Amsterdam News in January, 1941, with the headline:

“Better Watch Sam Price, Folks, He’s A Coming Piano Sensation.”

In part the story read:

“Better keep an eye on Sam Price. He’s a youngster who’s going places this year. You see, Sam is a Texas boy and those Longhorns can’t be bulldogged so easily, especially if they have something on the ball.

“For your edification, Sam Price is a piano player, and a doggone good ‘un, whose rhythms come from Deep Elm street of his native Dallas; the jive joints of Chicago’s South Side; the swing parlors in St. Louis and Kansas City, and in other perfectly solid parts of this good old U.S.A. You’ll remember Sam Price for his tune, “Fetch it to Me,” now the current jukebox rage.

“Sam has no formal education except the few notes and bars he got from Mrs. Portia Pittman, daughter of the late Booker T. Washington, at B.T. Washington high in Dallas. Sam learned how to really play. He left Dallas in 1927 to go with the “Get Happy Company” with Leonard Reed. Sam could play only one song, “My Isle of Golden Dreams,” but the show was on the T.O.B.A. Sam toured with the show, learned seven or eight piano numbers, didn’t make any money, before going back to Dallas on a ticket sent him by his mother.

“By then, Sam had a healthy background of blues and a nice ragcutting style. . . During the swing era, he was in Kansas City with Count Basie, Hot Lips Page, Benny Moten, Harry Smith, etc. He batted around in Chicago in 1932-33 during the crash when he got down to his last nickel. . . He used the nickel to call long distance to borrow enough to get to Detroit where he had a job. From there he came to New York, met J. Mayo Williams of Decca, got on recording dates.

“Now Price’s name is magic in downtown swing circles. He’s invited everywhere. He has plenty of work; money is coming in and he’s in demand all over.”

Sammy played at Cafe Society, as I’ve described in Chapter Two. He played in many of the finest clubs in New York. In 1948 he made his first trip to Paris with the Mezz Mezzrow band and played at the Nice Jazz Festival.

In the mid-1950s, Sammy Price and His All-Stars toured France on a contract for 60 concerts, but that was extended and the band toured other countries for more than 100 concerts. His group was the first jazz band to tour under the auspices of a French national program meant to bring music to French Youth, Les Jeunesses Musicales. Sammy believed he and his band were representatives of the United States. When his wife, Nancy, and daughter, Sharon, joined him for a part of that tour, Sharon walked the bandstand during intermissions, waving an American flag.

The Amsterdam News ran a story about those tours in June, 1956:

“Unofficial Ambassadors Back to U.S.”

“Sammy Price’s All-Star jazz band, back from a tour in Europe and North Africa lasting nearly ten months, report that critics, fans, and officials continually referred to them as “ambassadors of goodwill.”

“Not only without portfolio, but without written music in the tradition of their art, these masters improvised on their program–a panorama of American jazz–all the way through France, North Africa, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and Holland.”

In the late-1950s he joined a band led by the New Orleans musician Henry Red Allen. They played at a club called the Metropole, located near Times Square. Sammy played with Henry Red Allen for eight years, with occasional breaks. For example, he toured with a production of a play by Langston Hughes, “Tambourines to Glory,” alternating time at the piano with Hazel Scott, who had played on the bills with Sammy at Cafe Society.

But in 1965 as the musical culture underwent a major transformation, when rock and roll music began to replace jazz as the most dominant and popular music in America, Sammy Price’s time with the Allen band came to an end. The Metropole hired rock bands and go-go dancers for entertainment, a kind of event happening in clubs throughout New York City. Soon, much of an entire generation of jazz musicians would be relatively unemployed.

Because Sammy had been a political campaign aide and street speaker for Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., he had the opportunity to become an aide in the antipoverty programs that Congressman Powell brought to New York and cities throughout the country. Sammy retired from the professional music scene, but gradually began to play again when opportunities arose. He became very active in the 1970s, and fully joined the professional ranks in 1978. Four years later he began working in Boston as a resident pianist at the Copley Plaza Hotel.

During his first two years at the Copley, Sammy traveled between New York and Boston on public transportation. In 1984 after playing in Aspen during a break from the Copley, he bought an Oldsmobile and began commuting. He would leave Boston after his last set on Saturday night, setting out on the three and a half hour ride to Harlem. He placed his pistol on the passenger seat to let people know he could protect himself. Sammy spent Sundays at home, and often cooked Sunday dinner for family and friends. In the evening during the school year he often drove his daughter back to her college an hour north of the City. He left for Boston on Monday, arriving before his nine o’clock set.

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Archives Division, Sammy Price Papers

We talked frequently in the weeks leading up to his residency at UMass in February. Sammy usually wanted me to repeat the amount he would be paid, and I usually apologized for the lean figure–$2,300 for four days of concerts, interviews and events, with a band. (The figure would be equivalent to $6,500 in 2025.) I told him he could come and play solo and keep all the money, but he wanted to give the students the experience of a jazz band playing his style of music.

He would say, “I want to bring the music to the young people.” Sammy worried that people were forgetting about jazz. Though that wasn’t quite the situation at the University, with its robust Afro-Am Department with tenured professors and a jazz program organized by Max Roach.

During our talks Sammy told stories, and I’ll say they were stories that often blew my mind. He told me that when he was a teenager he played at after-hours clubs, that he would be driven to a club in the wee hours, dangerous places, where he played stomp piano, a dance style in the roots of boogie-woogie. He said, “When I got to stomping and those people were clapping their hands, then you really had something.”

I felt that in a way he was providing a primer about himself, giving me information I needed to promote him, and for asking questions at interviews. And I suppose, given the letters I sent, he was giving me material to write about him.

He told me that while in Oklahoma, during a phase in his migration to the North, he had gotten a job to play in a town that didn’t allow blacks. He brought a band and they were met at the town line, where they boarded a cattle truck and were taken to the hotel where they performed. The owner of the hotel was a blind man, who when the band played sat in a chair on the dance floor with his cane across his knees. At the end of the night, they got back in the cattle truck and were dropped back at the town line. Sammy ended the story with a sentence common to some stories I had heard or read about segregation efforts, but with a little irony: “And that’s how we broke that town open,” he said.

When he told this story to students in an auditorium on the first night of his residency, he left out the irony, and the laughter.

Sammy wanted to bring the music to the young people–so much so that on the Tuesday before his Wednesday arrival in Amherst, he drove to Wilkes College in Pennsylvania, 125 miles from New York, to join the clarinet player Bob Wilbur for a talk about jazz and an evening performance.

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Archives Division, Sammy Price Papers

The next day after lunch he left for Amherst, a 250-mile drive. He didn’t call that day, and he hadn’t arrived at the auditorium when his talk was supposed to begin. I waited at home for his call, receiving periodic worrisome calls from the arts administrator at the auditorium who organized the residency. A half-hour into the scheduled time he called and said he would hold the students for another ten minutes, followed by another call a few minutes later, saying Sammy had arrived, with a “Get down here now.”

Because of that I missed seeing him enter the hall, and missed seeing him bring laughter to the room, several times as he descended the stairs to the stage. I missed seeing him control the room.

Below is a thirteen-minute piece of rough video footage, taken by a student from the Union Video Center at the University. Some of this footage was used in a final video titled “Sammy Price and Friends,” which I will include in another chapter. The beginning of this footage didn’t appear in the final cut, but I place it here to show Sammy’s entrance into the hall. Though you won’t be able to hear exactly what he says in the beginning because the camera operator was on the stage, you will be able to see his effect on the audience. The video concludes with the first piece he played that night.

Note: When Sammy says he learned how to play the piano without “playing by music,” he means written notation, sheet music.

An image of the poster that Sammy Price picked up and folded: