Pianoman
Champion Jack Dupree (1910 -- 1991) led an eventful and varied life as a bluesman, professional boxer, cook, and late in life, painter. This CD, part of Columbia's "roots & blues series" includes Champion Jack's earliest recordings, cut in Chicago and dating from 1940 --1941. The compilation includes 25 tracks, including 11 not previously released. Dupree sings and plays the piano and is accompanied on most tracks by bass and guitar.
Dupree grew up in New Orleans. From infancy, when his parents died, until the age of 14 he was raised in that city's "Colored Waif's Home for Boys" where Louis Armstrong, ten years older, also spent his early years. Dupree learned the piano from barrelhouse performers in New Orleans and ultimately headed north to Indianapolis. He gave up music for a period and became a boxer in the lightweight division, fighting on the Joe Louis- Max Schmelling undercards. He resumed his musical career in 1940, when he made the recordings on this CD. Following two years as a Japanese prisoner of war in WW II, Dupree returned to music. In 1958, he became an expatriate and moved to London and ultimately to Hanover, Germany where he lived until his death in 1991. In the last two years of his life, he returned on triumphal tours of a United States he found had greatly changed.
Jack Dupree had a driving, energetic, and two-fisted piano style much in evidence on these early recordings. His playing features big, aggressive chords, frequently in both hands. But often the right hand plays trills or tremelo figures in the upper part of the instrument accompanying a heavy bass line. As a singer, Dupree, was definitely a "shouter" rather than a "crooner" with a gravely, gritty voice. (On a few tracks on this CD he briefly jumps into falsetto passages.) He wrote most of his own lyrics, and the songs on this CD reflect his wandering, unsettled life. The songs are tough and describe a world of mistreating women and men, wandering, poverty, prison, and alcohol and substance abuse. (Champion Jack did not himself generally drink to excess or use substances.)
The tracks on this CD I most enjoyed were the companion tunes, "New Low Down Dog" and "Black Woman Swing", the double-sided "Cabbage Greens", which Dupree performed many times, the "Dupree Shake Dance" with its long piano opening, and his famous "Junker Blues", about the life of addiction. Many of the tracks on this CD, including "Big Time Mama" and the blues standard (not by Dupree) "Oh Red" have been recorded by many blues artists. The song "Hurry Down Sunshine" shows Dupree performing in an earlier style of blues that reminded me of Delta bluesmen, while the song "All Alone Blues" shows a pensive Dupree performing at a slower and more reflective tempo that the other cuts on this CD.
As his career progressed, Dupree became regarded more as an entertainer than as a blues artist. But these early recordings show his barrelhouse pianism at its best. Other recordings by Champion Jack Dupree that reward hearing include an LP "The Women Blues of Champion Jack Dupree" that he made for Moe Asch and Folkways Records following WW II, his famous 1957 LP "Blues from the Gutter" on Atlantic, and his final, eloquent testament, "Forever and Ever", recorded shortly before his death.
Robin Friedman
