Setting a Tone: Chapter Two–The Last Cafe Society Boogie-Woogie Pianist

Lessons with Sammy Price, the King of Boogie-Woogie

(For Art Steele 1950-2017)

(Photo of Sammy Price from his Leeds Folio, 1943.)

My first piano tuning was a mess. A friend who I had taken to swim with the dolphins got me the job, at a nursing home in Hyannis. Ellen worked in the office there. She told me I would be tuning the piano before a pianist and drummer arrived to play for the residents. She asked how much time I would need. I told her about three hours, which was how long it was taking me then, while I practiced day by day at the beach cottage, five months into my piano studies there.

After I set up with my little box of tools in the sun room, and began to work, a janitor began vacuuming the carpet. The sound of the motor blended with the sound of the piano strings, or rather the sound of two strings, the reference tone and the tone I was manipulating, pulling back and forth with the wrench I used, called a tuning hammer. I didn’t have it in me to ask him to stop and lost needed time. On top of that, a woman sitting a few feet away, waiting for the singalong, kept singing along with me, interfering with the tones I was producing.

When the musicians arrived I was only half done. I could have said I had finished, and they could have played, and no one would have known the difference. But I kept on, wanting to get every note right. I asked the piano player if he could work with the four octaves I had completed. He said, “No, I play them all, kid.” He stood nearby for about twenty minutes, maybe more, before they left. The owner glared at me from the office doorway. When I finished he said, “Play something. You have to play something.” All I knew that would work was the first section of the “Maple Leaf Rag,” which I had painstakingly learned one note at a time over the past weeks. Ragtime had seen a recent revival, and I had selected the most popular tune to learn as my first number.

I played the first chorus for the folks gathered near the piano, then played it a second, and third time. There was a light applause, though the woman who had sung along with my tuning thrust up her arms above her head and yelled “Hooray!” I could tell the owner didn’t want to pay me, but Ellen was in the office so he wrote a check. I thought I was done as a tuner, but someone stopped me at the door, told me she wanted to have her father’s piano tuned for his birthday. God bless her. I did the tuning that night, and he played some boogie-woogie when I finished.

My piano-playing uncle told me that piano tuning was a lost art, an intriguing term, which proved true, in a way. After we moved to a place near Amherst, and when I placed an ad in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, I soon had all the work I could handle. It seemed that the piano tuning profession had skipped a generation. My adventure as a piano tuner commenced. I tuned two pianos a day, ten pianos per week, about 300 per year. My time to complete a tuning slimmed down to slightly more than an hour. I joined the Guild, and learned all sorts of useful things, like how to re-string a piano, and how to stretch a tuning so that the upper registers didn’t sound flat.

I ventured into homes I would never have seen otherwise, our meeting point the instruments loved by their owners. The two academics with two grand pianos nose to nose, where the couple played duets. The avant-garde jazz musician, a well-known saxophonist, who composed at the piano in the night, played with such passion he wore the varnish off the name board and the sharps down to eroded hills. Those many parents who supported their kids’ lessons, and caused me to develop a theory that kids who played the piano got better grades in school. Those many with admirable careers who maintained their love for the piano–such as the retired journalist who was nearly deaf, which I learned when she put on water for tea and didn’t hear the kettle whistling. At the end when I asked how she knew when the piano was out of tune she said, “I can feel it in my bones.” I knew what she meant; I began every tuning by placing a vibrating tuning fork between my teeth, the vibrations radiating to my skull.

When I got the job as the concert tuner at the Fine Arts Center at the University, I was stepping into a rarified realm. I had two Steinway Concert grands under my care. I tuned for the Boston Pops concert on opening night. For the London Symphony led by Andre Previn. For Van Cliburn with the Springfield Symphony, and for the Moscow Philharmonic. On the list went. The Count Basie Orchestra, the Ray Charles Orchestra, Oscar Peterson, (who toured with a Bosendorfer Imperial Grand). For George Winston, who placed a small rug under the piano bench and pedal lyre, removed his shoes, and performed in the same plaid shirt he wore to the sound check.

I tuned for a “Jazz Giants” concert produced by Max Roach, who was teaching at the University, and assembled a band with Mary Lou Williams at the piano, Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet, Jo Jones at the drums, Ron Carter on bass, and James Moody playing tenor sax. I stayed at the Fine Arts Center most of the day to be near Mary Lou Williams, the greatest female jazz pianist, especially when it came to the blues. I heard her tell Dizzy Gillespie to “Play it with love.” I had to wonder, just how do you play with love?

One of my first customers was a young man, Dick Moulding, who was the manager of the public radio station at the University, WFCR. Dick was originally from Chicago. He owned a fine Baldwin grand, and an extensive record collection unlike any I had seen. Dick played ragtime. He offered to coach me through the last two choruses of “Maple Leaf Rag.” Those two sessions were my first piano lessons.

Dick also owned a collection of sheet music called the Leeds Boogie-Woogie Series, published in the early 1940s. The Leeds Series consisted of separate folios, each devoted to a supreme pianist in the genre of blues and boogie-woogie. Dick’s folio covered five tunes by Jimmy Yancey, a blues pianist based in Chicago, one of the most popular pianists in the highly competitive rent party scene in the Black community during the 1930s. I made a copy of the Yancey folio, and Dick again coached me through Yancey’s masterpiece, “State St. Special.” Dick learned it too.

I placed an ad in Living Blues magazine, seeking other folios in the Leeds Series. I received one reply, from Worcester, an hour away. This kind man met me in Amherst and gave me photocopies of Leeds folios devoted to Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis, Pete Johnson, and Mary Lou Williams, each with five transcriptions, a brief bio, and a short analysis called “Pianotations,” written by Frank Paparelli.

I knew the music of those musicians well. Aside from Yancey, three had as a trio opened John Hammond’s “Spirituals to Swing” concert in 1938. All but Yancey had played at Barney Josephson’s Cafe Society pair of nightclubs, the first integrated clubs in New York. John Hammond (later to become a vice-president at Columbia Records) was the music director at Cafe Society, and convinced Josephson to hire the boogie-woogie trio–Ammons, Lewis, and Johnson. Josephson didn’t think he needed three boogie-pianists at his club, but Hammond convinced him with the argument that he would have sole rights to the three best boogie-woogie players in the country.

I received a Leeds folio covering another pianist I had not heard of before. His name was Sammy Price. I couldn’t find much about him at first, beyond what was in his Leeds folio.

Below is a recording of “Sweepin’ the Blues Away,” a slow blues that appears in the Sammy Price Leeds Folio. Recorded on April 4, 1940 at Decca Records with Sam Price and his Texas Blusicians. Joe Brown, trumpet; Ed Mullens, trumpet; Don Stovall, alto sax; Ray Hill, tenor sax; Sammy Price, piano; Duke Jones, double bass; Wilbert Kirk, drums.

The excitement in Harlem about the scene at Cafe Society could be communicated through this item that appeared in the Amsterdam News in 1941. The piece, titled “My Tenth Day in the Wide World,” was written by Clinton Brewer, who had served 19 years in prison on a manslaughter charge. During that time he became a talented arranger and been hired by Count Basie. The author Richard Wright, John Hammond, and Basie advocated for his release. He describes his first day of freedom, when John Hammond took him to Cafe Society, and when he went to meet Count Basie.

“With each passing day my gratitude to those who aided in effecting my release increases severalfold. They cannot realize how happy I am–really a happiness that no human has a right to enjoy. Richard Wright, John Hammond, and my brilliant boss, Count Basie. I shall always remain profoundly indebted to them, for without their assistance, I might still be in the institution where I spent so many, many years.

“Mr. Hammond gave me my first thrilling experience–a visit to Cafe Society where I met a lot of celebrities I read a lot about–Helena Horne, Henry “Red” Allen, Sammy Price, Art Tatum. What an evening! But I know that the supreme thrill was the one I enjoyed Saturday night when I was driven down by Jim McCarthy, Count Basie’s public relations agent, to meet Count Basie and to hear his superlative jump band–the greatest jump band in the world…I knew him instantly. There he came sauntering across the floor in a beautiful blue suit and white shoes. I rushed to meet him–grasped his hand in both of mine and tried to explain how profoundly grateful I was. But he would have none of it. Cameras flashed in our faces and I found myself posing for the press.”

Far removed from that scene and time, four decades later, I was playing a regular Tuesday night gig with a blues band at a rundown hotel in a town near Amherst. I played on a funky old upright with lots of burn scars, and chipped ivories on the keys that made my fingers bleed, until I replaced them. The band, called Evening Pro Blusica, was led by a guitarist named Art Steele. I met Art on the stage of the Fine Arts Center when I was tuning a harpsichord for the accompanist to the French flautist, Jean-Pierre Rampal. Art was carrying a piece of equipment across the stage when I broke into a line of boogie-woogie, inspired by the recordings Meade Lux Lewis made on that instrument. Art halted, turned and looked at me like we were brothers.

Art loved the blues as much as I did, maybe more. My interest was centered on the piano, but Art’s interest covered the entire genre. He provided the band members with mix tapes of tunes gathered from radio shows, and those tunes formed our set lists. Before long I was playing “Wee Baby Blues,” by Joe Turner, “Baby What You Want Me To Do,” by Jimmy Reed, attempting Amos Milburn’s “Chicken Shack Boogie,” and others.

I liked to say that with Blusica, nothing was going right but everything was perfect. Art would go into a tune expecting us to pick up on it immediately, and he rarely told us what key he was playing in. I’d search for the key, and sometimes I’d call over the noise for him to tell me. But on those times such as when we got a shuffle going, and the band was grooving, and the dancers were moving all as one, (like the way seagrass moves under the waves), that was perfection.

Art played loud, and he had all the gear to do it. Sometimes people left the dance floor, or left the room. Art didn’t seem to notice, or didn’t care. He was looking off above their heads into the distance, playing to the beat of whatever celestial pulse produced the music he loved, playing to the blues gods.

Art would go on to lead other bands, and become the sound technician for the Black female vocal group, “Sweet Honey in the Rock,” touring the world. He engineered recordings of blues musicians at the Smithsonian. He was a beautiful, kind and generous man who would always make room for me, in that band and in others, or at the blues festivals he fronted.

One night during a break as I sat at the bar, I opened the Boston Globe to the entertainment listings. I saw a listing that sent a charge through me.

Sammy Price, the King of Boogie-Woogie, at the Copley Plaza Hotel, Monday through Saturday, 9:00-1:00. Proper Attire Required.”

I wondered, could that be the Sammy Price? I thought he might have passed away. All the others, those in the Leeds Series who played blues and boogie-woogie at Cafe Society, they were gone. Albert Ammons (1949), Meade Lux Lewis (1964), Pete Johnson (1967), and Mary Lou Williams, just a year ago in 1981.

That left Sammy Price as the last living Cafe Society boogie-woogie pianist.

I talked with Tom Reney, the host of the jazz program at WFCR, Jazz ala Mode. Tom told me that yes indeed, the real Sammy Price was playing in Boston at the Copley Plaza. “You can see him tomorrow,” he said.

(Mary Lou Williams, from her Leeds Folio. “Play it with love.”)