Meade Lux Lewis
Encyclopedia
Meade Lux Lewis was a American
pianist
and composer
, noted for his work in the boogie-woogie
style. His best known work, "Honky Tonk Train Blues", has been recorded
in various contexts, often in a big band
arrangement. Early recordings of the piece by artists other than Lewis include performances by Adrian Rollini
, Frankie Trumbauer
, classical harpsichordist Sylvia Marlowe
, theater organist George Wright
(with drummer Cozy Cole
, under the title "Organ Boogie"), and Bob Zurke
with Bob Crosby
's orchestra
. Keith Emerson
of Emerson, Lake & Palmer
often included it in his repertoire and recorded it in 1972.
, Illinois
, United States
, in September 1905 (September 3, 4 and 13 have all been cited as his date of birth in various sources). In his youth
he was influenced by the pianist Jimmy Yancey
.
A 1927 rendition of "Honky Tonk Train Blues" on the Paramount Records
label
marked his recording debut. He remade it for Parlophone
in 1935 and for Victor
in 1937 and a recording exists of a Camel Caravan
broadcast, including "Honky Tonk Train Blues" from New York City in 1939. His performance at John Hammond
's historic From Spirituals to Swing
concert at Carnegie Hall
in 1938 brought Lewis to public attention. Following the event, Lewis and two other performers from that concert, Albert Ammons
and Pete Johnson
often appeared as a trio and became the leading boogie-woogie pianists of the day.
They performed an extended engagement at Café Society
, toured as a trio, and inspired the formation of Blue Note Records
in 1939. Their success led to a decade long boogie-woogie craze. with big band swing treatments by Tommy Dorsey
, Will Bradley, and others; and numerous country boogie and early rock and roll
songs.
He became the first jazz
pianist to double on celeste
(starting in 1936) and was featured on that instrument
on a Blue Note
quartet date with Edmond Hall
and Charlie Christian
. Lewis also played harpsichord
on a few records
in 1941. After the boogie-woogie craze ended, Lewis continued working in Chicago and California
.
Lewis appeared in the movies
New Orleans (1947) and Nightmare
(1956). Uncomfortable typecast as a boogie-woogie and blues pianist, Lewis spent his later years playing rags
and old-time pop
songs. He also appeared, uncredited, in the movie It's a Wonderful Life
, playing piano in the scene where George Bailey gets thrown out of Nick's Bar.
Lewis died in a car accident in Minneapolis, Minnesota
on June 7, 1964, aged 58.
's novel Cat's Cradle
.
Lewis is also mentioned in Ross Macdonald
's novel The Moving Target
.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
pianist
Pianist
A pianist is a musician who plays the piano. A professional pianist can perform solo pieces, play with an ensemble or orchestra, or accompany one or more singers, solo instrumentalists, or other performers.-Choice of genres:...
and composer
Composer
A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...
, noted for his work in the boogie-woogie
Boogie-woogie
Boogie-woogie has the following meanings:*Boogie-woogie, a piano-based music style*Boogie-woogie , a swing dance or a dance that imitates the rock-n-roll dance of the 1950s*"Boogie Woogie" , a song by EuroGroove and Dannii Minogue...
style. His best known work, "Honky Tonk Train Blues", has been recorded
Sound recording and reproduction
Sound recording and reproduction is an electrical or mechanical inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, singing, instrumental music, or sound effects. The two main classes of sound recording technology are analog recording and digital recording...
in various contexts, often in a big band
Big band
A big band is a type of musical ensemble associated with jazz and the Swing Era typically consisting of rhythm, brass, and woodwind instruments totaling approximately twelve to twenty-five musicians...
arrangement. Early recordings of the piece by artists other than Lewis include performances by Adrian Rollini
Adrian Rollini
Adrian Francis Rollini was a multi-instrumentalist best known for his jazz music. He played the bass saxophone, piano, xylophone, and many other instruments. Rollini is also known for introducing the goofus in jazz music...
, Frankie Trumbauer
Frankie Trumbauer
Orie Frank Trumbauer was one of the leading jazz saxophonists of the 1920s and 1930s. He played the C-melody saxophone which, in size, is between an alto and tenor saxophone...
, classical harpsichordist Sylvia Marlowe
Sylvia Marlowe
Sylvia Marlowe was an American harpsichordist. She performed both the Baroque repertoire as well as contemporary compositions by composers such as Alan Hovhaness....
, theater organist George Wright
George Wright (organist)
George Wright was an American musician, possibly the most famous virtuoso of the theatre organ of the modern era....
(with drummer Cozy Cole
Cozy Cole
Cozy Cole was an American jazz drummer who scored a #1 Cashbox magazine hit with the record "Topsy Part 2". "Topsy" peaked at number three on Billboard Hot 100, and at number one on the R&B chart. It sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc. The track peaked at #29 in the UK...
, under the title "Organ Boogie"), and Bob Zurke
Bob Zurke
Bob Zurke was a significant American jazz pianist, arranger, composer and briefly a bandleader during the Swing Era.-Biography:...
with Bob Crosby
Bob Crosby
George Robert "Bob" Crosby was an American dixieland bandleader and vocalist, best known for his group the Bob-Cats.-Family:...
's orchestra
Orchestra
An orchestra is a sizable instrumental ensemble that contains sections of string, brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments. The term orchestra derives from the Greek ορχήστρα, the name for the area in front of an ancient Greek stage reserved for the Greek chorus...
. Keith Emerson
Keith Emerson
Keith Noel Emerson is an English keyboard player and composer. Formerly a member of the Keith Emerson Trio, John Brown's Bodies, The T-Bones, V.I.P.s, P.P. Arnold's backing band, and The Nice , he was a founder of Emerson, Lake & Palmer , one of the early supergroups, in 1970...
of Emerson, Lake & Palmer
Emerson, Lake & Palmer
Emerson, Lake & Palmer, also known as ELP, are an English progressive rock supergroup. They found success in the 1970s and sold over forty million albums and headlined large stadium concerts. The band consists of Keith Emerson , Greg Lake and Carl Palmer...
often included it in his repertoire and recorded it in 1972.
Biography
Lewis was born Meade Anderson Lewis in ChicagoChicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, Illinois
Illinois
Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...
, United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, in September 1905 (September 3, 4 and 13 have all been cited as his date of birth in various sources). In his youth
Adolescence
Adolescence is a transitional stage of physical and mental human development generally occurring between puberty and legal adulthood , but largely characterized as beginning and ending with the teenage stage...
he was influenced by the pianist Jimmy Yancey
Jimmy Yancey
James Edwards "Jimmy" Yancey was an African American boogie-woogie pianist, composer, and lyricist. One reviewer noted him as "one of the pioneers of this raucous, rapid-fire, eight-to-the-bar piano style"....
.
A 1927 rendition of "Honky Tonk Train Blues" on the Paramount Records
Paramount Records
Paramount Records was an American record label, best known for its recordings of African-American jazz and blues in the 1920s and early 1930s, including such artists as Ma Rainey and Blind Lemon Jefferson.-Early years:...
label
Record label
In the music industry, a record label is a brand and a trademark associated with the marketing of music recordings and music videos. Most commonly, a record label is the company that manages such brands and trademarks, coordinates the production, manufacture, distribution, marketing and promotion,...
marked his recording debut. He remade it for Parlophone
Parlophone
Parlophone is a record label that was founded in Germany in 1896 by the Carl Lindström Company as Parlophon. The British branch was formed in 1923 as "Parlophone" which developed a reputation in the 1920s as a leading jazz label. It was acquired in 1927 by the Columbia Graphophone Company which...
in 1935 and for Victor
RCA Records
RCA Records is one of the flagship labels of Sony Music Entertainment. The RCA initials stand for Radio Corporation of America , which was the parent corporation from 1929 to 1985 and a partner from 1985 to 1986.RCA's Canadian unit is Sony's oldest label...
in 1937 and a recording exists of a Camel Caravan
Camel Caravan
Camel Caravan was a musical variety radio program, sponsored by Camel cigarettes, that aired on NBC Radio and CBS Radio from 1933 to 1954...
broadcast, including "Honky Tonk Train Blues" from New York City in 1939. His performance at John Hammond
John H. Hammond
John Henry Hammond II was an American record producer, musician and music critic from the 1930s to the early 1980s...
's historic From Spirituals to Swing
From Spirituals to Swing
From Spirituals to Swing was the title of two concerts presented by John Hammond in Carnegie Hall on 23 December 1938 and 24 December 1939. The concerts included performances by Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Big Joe Turner and Pete Johnson, Helen Humes, Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, Mitchell's...
concert at Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park....
in 1938 brought Lewis to public attention. Following the event, Lewis and two other performers from that concert, Albert Ammons
Albert Ammons
Albert Ammons was an American pianist. Ammons was a player of boogie-woogie, a bluesy jazz style popular from the late 1930s into the mid 1940s.-Life and career:...
and Pete Johnson
Pete Johnson
Pete Johnson was an American boogie-woogie and jazz pianist.Journalist Tony Russell stated in his book The Blues - From Robert Johnson to Robert Cray, that "Johnson shared with the other members of the 'Boogie Woogie Trio' the technical virtuosity and melodic fertility that can make this the most...
often appeared as a trio and became the leading boogie-woogie pianists of the day.
They performed an extended engagement at Café Society
Café Society
Café society was the collective description for the so-called "Beautiful People" and "Bright Young Things" who gathered in fashionable cafes and restaurants in New York, Paris, and London beginning in the late 19th century...
, toured as a trio, and inspired the formation of Blue Note Records
Blue Note Records
Blue Note Records is a jazz record label, established in 1939 by Alfred Lion and Max Margulis. Francis Wolff became involved shortly afterwards. It derives its name from the characteristic "blue notes" of jazz and the blues. At the end of the 1950s, and in the early 1960s, Blue Note headquarters...
in 1939. Their success led to a decade long boogie-woogie craze. with big band swing treatments by Tommy Dorsey
Tommy Dorsey
Thomas Francis "Tommy" Dorsey, Jr. was an American jazz trombonist, trumpeter, composer, and bandleader of the Big Band era. He was known as "The Sentimental Gentleman of Swing", due to his smooth-toned trombone playing. He was the younger brother of bandleader Jimmy Dorsey...
, Will Bradley, and others; and numerous country boogie and early rock and roll
Rock and roll
Rock and roll is a genre of popular music that originated and evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily from a combination of African American blues, country, jazz, and gospel music...
songs.
He became the first jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
pianist to double on celeste
Celesta
The celesta or celeste is a struck idiophone operated by a keyboard. Its appearance is similar to that of an upright piano or of a large wooden music box . The keys are connected to hammers which strike a graduated set of metal plates suspended over wooden resonators...
(starting in 1936) and was featured on that instrument
Musical instrument
A musical instrument is a device created or adapted for the purpose of making musical sounds. In principle, any object that produces sound can serve as a musical instrument—it is through purpose that the object becomes a musical instrument. The history of musical instruments dates back to the...
on a Blue Note
Blue note
In jazz and blues, a blue note is a note sung or played at a slightly lower pitch than that of the major scale for expressive purposes. Typically the alteration is a semitone or less, but this varies among performers and genres. Country blues, in particular, features wide variations from the...
quartet date with Edmond Hall
Edmond Hall
Edmond Hall was an American jazz clarinetist and bandleader. His father Edward Blainey Hall and mother Caroline Duhe had eight children, Priscilla , Moretta , Viola , Robert , Edmond , Clarence , Edward and Herbert .-Early life:Born in Reserve, Louisiana, about...
and Charlie Christian
Charlie Christian
Charles Henry "Charlie" Christian was an American swing and jazz guitarist.Christian was an important early performer on the electric guitar, and is cited as a key figure in the development of bebop and cool jazz. He gained national exposure as a member of the Benny Goodman Sextet and Orchestra...
. Lewis also played harpsichord
Harpsichord
A harpsichord is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It produces sound by plucking a string when a key is pressed.In the narrow sense, "harpsichord" designates only the large wing-shaped instruments in which the strings are perpendicular to the keyboard...
on a few records
Gramophone record
A gramophone record, commonly known as a phonograph record , vinyl record , or colloquially, a record, is an analog sound storage medium consisting of a flat disc with an inscribed, modulated spiral groove...
in 1941. After the boogie-woogie craze ended, Lewis continued working in Chicago and California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
.
Lewis appeared in the movies
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
New Orleans (1947) and Nightmare
Nightmare (1956 film)
Nightmare is a 1956 psychological thriller starring Edward G. Robinson. The story is based on a novel by William Irish . The novel was also made into a film in 1947 titled Fear in the Night. The film was directed by long-time movie writer Maxwell Shane, later the producer of the classic horror...
(1956). Uncomfortable typecast as a boogie-woogie and blues pianist, Lewis spent his later years playing rags
Ragtime
Ragtime is an original musical genre which enjoyed its peak popularity between 1897 and 1918. Its main characteristic trait is its syncopated, or "ragged," rhythm. It began as dance music in the red-light districts of American cities such as St. Louis and New Orleans years before being published...
and old-time pop
Popular music
Popular music belongs to any of a number of musical genres "having wide appeal" and is typically distributed to large audiences through the music industry. It stands in contrast to both art music and traditional music, which are typically disseminated academically or orally to smaller, local...
songs. He also appeared, uncredited, in the movie It's a Wonderful Life
It's a Wonderful Life
It's a Wonderful Life is a 1946 American Christmas drama film produced and directed by Frank Capra and based on the short story "The Greatest Gift" written by Philip Van Doren Stern....
, playing piano in the scene where George Bailey gets thrown out of Nick's Bar.
Lewis died in a car accident in Minneapolis, Minnesota
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Minneapolis , nicknamed "City of Lakes" and the "Mill City," is the county seat of Hennepin County, the largest city in the U.S. state of Minnesota, and the 48th largest in the United States...
on June 7, 1964, aged 58.
Legacy
Lewis was mentioned in Chapter 81 of author Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a 20th century American writer. His works such as Cat's Cradle , Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions blend satire, gallows humor and science fiction. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.-Early...
's novel Cat's Cradle
Cat's Cradle
Cat's Cradle is the fourth novel by American writer Kurt Vonnegut, first published in 1963. It explores issues of science, technology, and religion, satirizing the arms race and many other targets along the way...
.
Lewis is also mentioned in Ross Macdonald
Ross Macdonald
Not to be confused with John D. MacDonaldRoss Macdonald is the pseudonym of the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar...
's novel The Moving Target
The Moving Target
The Moving Target is a 1949 mystery novel, written by Ross Macdonald.This is the first Ross Macdonald novel to feature the character of Lew Archer, who would define the author's career. Lew Archer is hired by the dispassionate wife of an eccentric oil tycoon who has gone missing...
.