have a pot to piss in—they were scuffling all the time. Earl King came the closest to having a hit with Dave Bartholomew when he cut ‘Trick Bag,’ but the shit went bad anyways. Dave was a business- man, though, and he didn’t waste a second.” “My dad is a shrewd businessman, a self-made man,” Ron asserts. “He dropped out of school in ninth grade to take care of his mother and three sisters, but if you’d go to a meeting and use a word he didn’t know, he’d go find a dictionary afterwards.” In 1957, Bartholomew set to wax a satirically brilliant single that he called, simply, “The Monkey.” He delivered the vocals himself, creating a new genre of music that, say some, served as the first ex- ample of hip-hop or a link to Jamaican ska. “Here is another thing a monkey won’t do,” Bartholomew sagely states on the song’s last verse. “Go out at night and get on a stew / Or use a gun, a club, or a knife / To take another monkey’s life / Yes, man descended the worthless bum / But, brothers, from us he did not come / Yeah, the monkey speaks his mind.” “That’s the kind of song I love best from Dave,” says Rebennack. “He has a lot of these songs that came from old funny poems that used to be on ballroom napkins, and I’m pretty sure that’s where this one came from. Down in New Orleans, the Second Line organiza- tions, the Zulus and the Mardi Gras Indians, were saying some very in-your-face shit. It took a lot of balls for Dave to do ‘The Mon- key,’ because people were living under the miscegenation laws. You couldn’t mix races, because one of those races wasn’t respected. You can figure which one I’m referring to—it’s not the White race!” Domino defected from Imperial in 1963, and Lew Chudd sub- sequently sold out to Liberty Records. Undeterred, Bartholomew continued to churn out New Orleans hits on his own Broadmoor label well into the 1980s. Today, sorting through the detritus of Imperial’s ledgers to es- tablish Dave Bartholomew’s legacy is a frustrating task, notes Ron, his son. “My daddy never got a gold record,” Ron says. “He was one of the biggest, if not the biggest, producer of his time, but the singer got all the glory. If he wasn’t smart enough to have his name on the copyrights and his name on the records, he wouldn’t have a dollar today. “Even though he was making a good living, he got buried. My dad wrote the song ‘One Night’ for Smiley Lewis, but Anita Stein- man, who was actually a secretary in Imperial’s office, got her name on it when they made a deal for Elvis to record it.” Presley, Gale Storm, Pat Boone, and even Cheap Trick and Elvis Costello are just a handful of White artists who have repackaged Bartholomew’s songs for audiences who can sing every lyric yet have never heard his name. “In the 1950s, producers and writers weren’t noticed as much as they are today,” says Ron. “Whenever you see Michael Jackson’s Thriller , you’re gonna think Quincy Jones, but it wasn’t the same way with my dad, who was Lew Chudd’s workhorse, just making him millions and millions of dollars.” What hurts more than anything, Ron says, is that despite recog- nition from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and organizations like the Ponderosa Stomp, the city of New Orleans has never honored his father. “Name the three most pivotal figures in New Orleans music, and you’re gonna say Louis Armstrong, Fats Domino, and Dave
“Well, Dave was a great A&R man in the days that you were only as good as your last record—no matter who you were in this racket, your shit could be out the window in a Georgia second. Take ‘Blue Monday’—Smiley Lewis’s original was a motherfucker. The song was great, and it was gonna be a hit again, no question, although for me, Antoine’s version could never hold up to Smiley’s record.” After a few more hits, Bartholomew had to fend off Lew Chudd’s offers to relocate him to L.A. “Dad had a satellite office in New Orleans at Orleans and Claiborne,” says Ron, “and he had Cosimo’s studio right there, so he was able to ship songs right to L.A., and then a few days later, Lew would call him and say they got a hit.” One of Fats’ biggest hits, a cover of the standard “Blueberry Hill” arranged by Bartholomew, was cut at Master Recorders in Holly- wood while the band was on tour. “Lew called my daddy about a week later,” Ron recalls, “and said, ‘Dave, how do you feel about ‘Blueberry Hill?’ My dad said, ‘That song is a piece of shit,’ and Lew replied, ‘I just shipped out 100,000 copies—can you keep on making shit?’ “My dad didn’t have large goals,” Ron continues. “He just want- ed to take care of his family, but it became bigger than that. And as it got bigger, he grew too. It worked for both him and Fats—they’ve enhanced each other’s lives greatly. “You also have to give credit to musicians like [saxophonist] Herb Hardesty, [drummer] Earl Palmer, [pianist] Salvador Doucette, and [guitarist] Ernest McLean—the band with the true New Orleans sound,” he says. Exactly a year after “The Fat Man” session, Bartholomew abrupt- ly quit Imperial Records over a disagreement with Lew Chudd. He applied his talent to other artists, cutting a teenaged Lloyd Price singing “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”—with Fats on piano—for Art Rupe’s Specialty label, which was in direct rivalry with Imperial. Furious, Chudd somehow managed to woo him back, and, by spring 1952, Bartholomew was back in the saddle at Imperial. Two years later, Domino was eclipsing the competition, thanks in large part to Bartholomew’s endlessly creative songwriting, which drew on Latin rhythms, Dixieland melodies, and dazzling lyrical hooks. White pop fans became quick converts to the New Orleans sound, via Fats’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and caravan tours like “The Biggest Show of Stars,” where he unveiled several new Bartholomew-Domino compositions, including “So Long,” “I’m Walkin’,” and “Valley of Tears.” Bartholomew didn’t rest on his laurels, however. Aside from his work with Domino, Lewis, and Price, he penned and produced sides for Pee Wee Crayton, Sugar Boy Crawford, Bobby Charles, the Spiders, Snooks Eaglin, Tommy Ridgeley, and Bobby Marchan. Like an inexhaustible musical obstetrician, he birthed Earl King’s “Trick Bag,” Chris Kenner’s “Sick and Tired,” Bobby Mitchell’s “I’m Gonna Be a Wheel Someday,” Jewel King’s “3 x 7 = 21,” and Shirley & Lee’s “I’m Gone.” “New Orleans was so fucking bad back then,” Rebennack recalls. “We were working night and day in the studio, but nobody made up contracts for recording sessions, and the local unions didn’t even make sure we got paid when sessions went overtime. We’d work a job, then half the musicians had to go to work driving a cab or pimping on the side. Acts like the Spiders and Bobby Mitchell didn’t
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