Fats Waller: Baby Elephant Patter
Was Fats Waller put on this earth to send up inane pop songs, or did Tin Pan Alley busy itself churning out an endless supply of vapid tunes just to feed his enormous appetite for ridicule? Either way, it wasn’t a bad deal: while he was irrepressible in his vocal shenanigans and merciless in his mockery of cornball lyrics, Waller also bestowed on assembly-line songs unwarranted beauty. His touch on the piano was like a hummingbird’s wings, like sunlight scattering on moving water. The great clown of jazz, Thomas “Fats” Waller belongs, with Oliver Hardy and Roscoe Arbuckle, to that brotherhood of fat men whose girth serves to counterpoint their buoyant grace and delicacy. His music is at once thundering, voluminous, and dainty, like the “baby elephant patter,” he invokes in “Your Feets Too Big,” or like one of Disney’s hippo ballerinas twirling on pointe.
Waller’s own compositions are subtle and elegant, never hard-selling their melodies, but floating with insouciant ease and lingering like a complex perfume. His best songs were written with lyricist Andy Razaf, whose full—indeed overflowing—name was Andreamenentania Paul Razafinkerierfo, and whose great-aunt was the queen of Madagascar. Razaf’s lyrics for “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Honeysuckle Rose” fit the tunes so well that the words and music seem to be born from a single thought. He also wrote the bitter lyrics for “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue?” which started as the complaint of a dark-skinned woman over men’s preference for lighter complexions (“All the race fellows crave high yellows”), but which Louis Armstrong stripped down and turned into an angry lament about being judged by one’s skin color. This transformation wouldn’t have worked so well if Waller’s melody hadn’t had the depth and authority of the blues.
Fats Waller is often accused of having wasted his vast composing talents, and he never earned a full place in the Great American Songbook despite the popularity of his two best-known songs. But he turned out a lot more delightful if too little known songs, from catchy toe-tappers like “Crazy ‘Bout My Baby” and “Aintcha Glad?” to lovely, softer tunes with a pensive touch, like “Blue Turning Grey Over You” and “I’ve Got a Feeling I’m Falling.” It is proper to lament that he didn’t record more instrumentals displaying his full musical talents, and that he was forced by the commercial demands of his record label to be instead an entertainer and comedian—but his comic performances are so marvelous that I can’t put my heart into such a complaint. After all, great musical comedians are rarer than great pianists.
The triteness and sentimentality that plagued popular song of the jazz age was Waller’s unfailing spring of humor. (The glories of Porter, the Gershwins, Rodgers & Hart et al. rose above this morass, but Waller rarely got to sing any great songs besides his own.) Once you’ve heard him make light of a shopworn lyric, you will never again be able to hear a straight rendition without snickering. Above all, he gleefully skewers the melodramatic hyperbole larded into love songs: if you break my heart I’ll die. In “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie,” Fats updates this to, “If you break my heart I’ll break your jaw and then I’ll die,” and in “Stay,” a duet with a female singer, when she sighs lugubriously, “And please believe me / Without you I would die,” he interjects, “’Course, I ain’t gonna let her die—no, I might kill her lightly…” He salvages (and savages) “The Curse of an Aching Heart,” a self-pitying bit of rubbish, with a spoken introduction: “Yeah, this is me—look at me, look at me! I look like something the cats had in the alley last night…” Then he sings the rest of the song like a drunken Pagliacci. Listen to a lot of Waller’s recordings, and the whole enterprise of the love song teeters on its throne, raising the question of whether passion can coexist with a lively sense of the absurd. (Irving Berlin wrote a song on this subject, lamenting, “I want to be romantic, but I haven’t a chance, / You’ve got a sense of humor, and humor is death to romance.”)
Alfred Appel, Jr. justly titled Waller the “King of Razz.”
All this clowning can’t conceal the iridescent brilliance of his playing, with its springy stride rhythm and gossamer arpeggios. No other pianist gave a more accurate demonstration of “tickling the ivories.” Occasionally, as though giving voice to his piano, he would cry, “Aw, the ticklin’ is so terrific!” He punctuates instrumental sections with exhortations to the band, a six-piece ensemble dubbed His Rhythm: conversing with the soloists (“Boy, would you plunk them strings? Plunk ‘em, plunk ‘em!”), and the instruments, as when he demands of a disgruntled-sounding muted trombone: “Who is you growlin’ at, woman?” He knowingly and sarcastically uses this kind of fractured grammar, so offensively imitated by white lyricists like Berlin (“It’s just the bestest band what am, honey lamb”), then turns it on its head by translating “your feets too big” into the peerlessly pompous, “Your pedal extremities are colossal.”
All the interjections, wordplay and verbal slapstick were ad-libbed, as he plowed through piles of mostly mediocre or worse songs he’d never seen before in marathon recording sessions for RCA Victor, fueled by sandwiches and gin. He veers into a prissy, whining falsetto or a goofy operatic basso profundo; scats, baby talks, reacts with surprise to the lyrics he’s singing, and enacts little spoken dramas in the background. But for all his hamming and volcanic spirit of ridicule, his teasing is never mean-spirited, and now and then he gives a straightforward, tender rendition that elevates a potentially cloying song like, “My Very Good Friend, the Milkman,” or reveals an unexpected gem like the charming tribute to a liberated woman, “A Little Bit Independent.” Despite his comic bent, Waller’s singing has far more heart and warmth than reptilian crooners like Rudy Vallee put into their high-pitched drone of seduction.
He made far fewer film appearances than one would wish, since his facial expressions are as finely calibrated for comedy as his voice. In Stormy Weather (1943) he does a duet with Ada Brown, accompanying her as she belts out a low-down blues and slipping in hilarious asides in response to her allegations of mistreatment (“Suffer, excess baggage, suffer!”), while his chubby features rearrange themselves into a mask of supercilious disdain or flinch in fastidious dismay.
Even his eyebrows had rhythm. Thick, black and extravagantly arched, they had the springy calligraphy of Hirschfeld’s pen-strokes, and when he sang they waggled up and down, saucy as chorus girls’ hips. His face was moon-shaped and, in black-and-white film, almost moon-pale, a striking backdrop for the eyebrows, the huge mouth daintily outlined with a mustache, and the round black eyes, which rolled dramatically or narrowed to sleepy, mischievous slits. A derby tilted over one eye completed this cartoon-like, yet minutely expressive face.
Alas, he died in 1943, not yet 40, at the height of his popularity. The cause was pneumonia, but his system was worn down from too much touring, too much eating, too much drinking, and the stress of legal wrangling over alimony payments. He was the son of respectable, strait-laced parents, his father a Baptist minister; young Thomas used to accompany his services on the organ, which remained his favorite instrument. As a teenager he played in movie theaters, and his recordings on the pipe organ use its vast palette to surprisingly light and graceful effect, creating watercolor-like washes of sound that still swing. His vocal mannerisms often show the influence of preaching, with call-and-response patterns and shouts of soul-fired joy. Predictably, his parents were opposed to his becoming a musician, no doubt predicting he would fall into evil company—as he did if the story can be believed that he was once kidnapped at gun-point and made to give a command performance at a birthday party for Al Capone. If true, this speaks well of Capone’s taste. It’s something to imagine, this meeting of two men who were both, in their very different ways, experts at misbehaving.
by Imogen Sara Smith