“Country Boy.” “Ain’t That a Shame.” “Witchcraft.” “Shrimp and Gumbo.” “Blue Monday.” “My Ding-a-Ling.” “The Monkey.” “I’m Walkin’.” “Who Drank My Beer While I Was in the Rear.” ave Bartholomew’s compositions are an indeli- ble part of New Orleans’s rock-and-roll history. Yet the man himself—due to turn eighty-eight years old this Christmas Eve—remains one of the most enigmatic figures behind name- brand performers like Fats Domino, Smiley Lewis, Chris Kenner, and Shirley & Lee. On the streets of New Orleans, Bartholomew was—and is—re- vered as a Creole god. Beyond the city limits, however, he’s regarded as a mere footnote in pop music history. His creations are so in- grained in the American psyche that, today, they’re taken for grant- ed—as is his seemingly effortless ability to pair lyrics and melodies, match songs to singing talent, and lay down precise orchestrations. To watch Bartholomew lead his band at the Ponderosa Stomp in 2002 and 2007 was to witness a genius at work. The man was all business, wielding his trumpet as if it were a military baton, Allen Toussaint and Wardell Quezergue revolving around him like minor planets circling the sun. But when it comes to publicity, the gate crashes down. Bartho- lomew, in exile in Balch Springs, Texas, after Hurricane Katrina dev- astated his Pontchartrain Park home, is currently in the process of moving back to New Orleans and therefore tough to reach on the phone. Luckily, his son Ron Bartholomew, a national sales manager for CBS, steps in to help, and between the two of them, the details of Mr. B’s life story are sketched out. Born in sugarcane country—rural Edgard, Louisiana—in 1920, Dave Bartholomew was raised by his mother, Marie, in a single- parent home in New Orleans. “My daddy never lived with us,” he tells me. “My parents were separated. I was so small, I didn’t have an impression about what was going on. Only thing I can tell you about my dad—he had a barbershop on Galvez Street in a neighbor- hood called Silver City. Don’t ask me why, because I never saw any silver there,” Bartholomew quips. “The man who taught Louis Armstrong, Mr. Peter Davis of the Municipal Boys’ Home, used to come in and get his hair cut. He was instrumental in getting all the boys off the street, and he told my daddy, ‘I’m gonna take that boy.’ I said, well, okay—I’d heard Louis Armstrong, and that’s all I needed. I started out on xylophone, and got so good they gave me a trumpet.” By fifteen, Bartholomew already had stints with legendary New Orleanians like Papa Celestin and Joe Robichaux under his belt. He toured with Jimmie Lunceford’s Orchestra, then played with the best band in town, the Tuxedo Big Band, at the Rhythm Club on Jackson Avenue. He earned two dollars a night, carrying it home to his mother as dawn broke over the Crescent City. At sixteen, he got a job aboard a riverboat, playing trumpet for Fats Pichon’s group. “They were on a steamer going up to St. Paul, Minnesota, and I said, I’ve got to see that,” Bartholomew recalls. “I went to Chicago, St. Louis. It was just like being in school—I got an education in learning how to read music.” Drafted into the Army, Bartholomew was stationed with the all-
Black Ninety-second Division at Arizona’s segregated Fort Huachu- ca. “It was nothing but Black soldiers with White officers,” he says. “There were musicians in there from the Carolina Cotton Pickers and the Sunset Travelers, and we had one hell of a band.” In 1947, Bartholomew returned to New Orleans to discover that the big-band scene was finished and jump blues was on the rise. He quickly adapted to the new sound. “When I left, I had nothing, and when I came back, I still didn’t have nothing,” Bartholomew says. “But there was good music and no crime, and quite a few clubs, in- cluding the Dew Drop Inn, had opened up. My first weekend back in town, I went to the Dew Drop to see Mr. [Clarence] Hall, one of the musicians I’d played with when I was younger. I was telling him I’d like to put a band together, when a man [Sam Simoneaux] came in and said, ‘I like the way you play.’ I thought he was full of shit, excuse my French, but we put the band together, and the rest is history.” Bartholomew’s early rock-and-roll songs like “She’s Got Great Big Eyes (and Great Big Thighs)” were birthed at Simoneaux’s new club, the Graystone, along with nascent talents like singer Smiley Lewis and drummer Earl Palmer. “That song didn’t go nowhere—it was just one of those things, a crowd-pleaser,” Bartholomew says. “I wasn’t supposed to be the entertainer—I had another guy, a crooner. But I was hungry, and I had to do something. Music was my wealth, so that was it.” Before the end of the 1940s, Bartholomew had achieved local fame as a DJ on radio station WJMR, recorded “Country Boy,” his first 100,000-selling hit single (for the New Jersey–based De- Luxe Records), and inked a talent scout/production deal with Lew Chudd of Imperial Records for an astonishing $125 a week. “I didn’t hook up with Lew Chudd—he hooked up with me,” Bartholomew insists some sixty years later. “I was in a club waiting to meet Don Robey, and he walked in. The rest is history—I worked out of 6425 Hollywood Avenue [Imperial’s Los Angeles address] for thirty-five years.” Technically, that is—though he worked for a West Coast la- bel, Bartholomew insisted on cutting in New Orleans, at Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Studios, the petri dish for New Orleans’s evolving music scene. “New Orleans is my home,” Bartholomew says matter-of-factly. “And once you’ve been in New Orleans, you don’t want to be any- where else.” During the last days of 1949, as he prepared to walk into J&M, which occupied 838–840 Rampart Street in the Vieux Carré, Bar- tholomew realized that he stood at a metaphysical crossroads. Until now, his music was still largely based on the sounds that Peter Davis, Papa Celestin, and Fats Pichon had taught him. But those influences were slowly being superseded by blues shouters like Roy Brown and Louis Jordan. Then on December 10, Bartholomew was paired with a heretofore-unknown Ninth Ward piano player—armed with the unlikely moniker of Fats Domino—for a marathon six-hour ses- sion for Imperial that would ultimately change the course of New Orleans music. “The Fat Man,” Domino’s propulsive theme song, hastily penned by Bartholomew from the ruins of a blues song called “The Junker Blues,” would be their first of many hits, selling, an ad in Billboard reported, a record ten thousand copies in ten days in New
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Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.
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