When Piano Red died in 1985, it wasn’t just his music that went away. A rare piece of Americana
went with him.
He was one of the masters whose roots reached back to a time when players like James P.
Johnson and Fats Waller pulled stride out of ragtime. He traveled blues highways with the likes of
Blind Willie McTell. Later, he was there to usher in rock-and-roll. Near the end of his road,
musical titans bowed down to him.
It was a remarkable career that spanned a half-century
and ten thousand nights of music. During those years, he
had been treated like dirt and toasted by royalty. God and
a rocking rhythm carried him along and he went down in
the big books as a bona fide legend. But for all this, he passed
too little noticed by a wider world.
I used to live the blues and that’s where I learned to play them.
The family hailed from Louisiana and they carried something
of that state’s musical DNA to the rural Georgia village of Hampton.
The oldest and youngest sons both took up the piano. Rufus, the senior by seventeen years, later
came to fame as Speckled Red. William Lee - “Willie” - was born in 1911. His father was a
sharecropper who tired of the imprecations of tenant labor and in 1917, moved his wife and nine
children thirty miles north to Atlanta, where he found work in a machine shop and rented a house
on Oliver Street.
Red told author Murray Silver that he couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t entranced by
music, first in church and then by the records on their old Victrola. But his mother wanted more
music in the house and paid “a dollar down and a dollar a week” for an old Gainsborough upright.
Rufus learned enough to make his own dollars and promptly vacated the household. Like his
brother, Willie displayed the albino gene and weak eyesight so what he picked up came strictly by
ear. He told Silver he learned to play like his idol Waller by “ping-pongin’ around, just bangin’.”
The music he heard bridged straight-ahead blues and stride, both rooted in a rock steady
bottom required for dancing. He also caught the “troubadour guitarists” like Bob and Charlie
Hicks, Curley Weaver, and the king of them all, Blind Willie McTell, playing on the streets. The
gospel that rocked his Sunday mornings stayed with him throughout his life. By his teens, he was
good enough to play at rent parties and fish fries, at resorts, campgrounds, and any other place he
could find ivories to bang.
And bang them he did. His driving style and shouter vocals were
born of a need to be heard over shrieks of laughter, drunken
curses, the crack of bottles, and trains blasting through the night,
not a stone’s throw from the back doors of juke joints and
barrelhouses from New Orleans to Norfolk. He developed what
Eubie Blake called “a left hand like God,” the unshakable
firmament from which rock-and-roll would one day burst forth.
When the hard days of the Depression settled in, he took to the road, on his own, other times in
the company of guitarists like McTell. Along with his piano mastery, his curious looks and stage
presence won him fans. He grew into a superb entertainer who could play any style, from the dirty
blues to the giddy pop standards that got him in front of white audiences, beginning with a
Peachtree Street club called Danceland.
Having missed the busy first decade of the record business, he didn’t get into a studio until
1933, when McTell brought him to a session in Augusta where they laid down a dozen tracks, as a
duet and taking solo turns. The wax masters disappeared and though Willie claimed they had
melted in the August heat, no one knows for sure, and there remains a tantalizing chance that they
might reappear, along with Robert Johnson’s one lost song. It would be seventeen years before he
recorded again.
As the Depression clamped a heavier hand on the South, gigs became harder to find. He
relocated from Atlanta to North Carolina to play for new white audiences at mountain resorts and
there married a woman named Flora and begat two daughters. His wandering shoes brought him
back to Atlanta with regularity and when his marriage to Flora ended in 1936, he resettled there. It
was about the same time that he picked up the moniker “Piano Red.”
That name was getting around and he might have broken out once the economy recovered, but
then the war came and depleted audiences. Unable to earn a decent living with his piano, he took
a job in an upholstery shop, knocking nails into wood with the same muscle he brought to the
keyboard. While he hammered, music changed, moving toward a brash big band sound and leaving
many solo artists behind. At this point, he might well have followed others into obscurity. He was,
after all, a lone journeyman drifting toward his middle years.
Fate had something else in mind. A new sound was rising from the ooze, driven by pianos played in
a boogie vein and electric guitars pushing an accelerated shuffle beat, reeking with passion and
made for dancing. Piano Red had been working this modified jump blues - first called “rock-and-
roll” in 1946 – for a decade.
It was one crazy time. The music was derelict and proper folk predicted it would be gone before it
arrived, but more young talents came bursting out of the cities and the swamps and the backwoods
with their guitars and pianos, their electric suits and their blades of pomaded hair, barbarians on
the horizon, mounting an assault on Good Taste. The earthquake that came rolling across the land
swept Piano Red along with it.
Long before RCA scout Steve Sholes found Elvis Presley, he caught word of a gentleman down in
Atlanta who played a mad piano and could sing over a Georgia tornado. He signed Piano Red to the
label and on May 5th, 1950, “Rockin’ with Red,” one of
those handful of waxes that still vie for the title of first
true rock-and-roll record, was laid on acetate. It was
RCA Victor’s first hit on the R&B charts. “Red’s Boogie”
and the earliest recording of what would become his
signature tune, “The Right String (But the Wrong Yo Yo)”
followed for a hat trick at the top of the Billboard charts.
Piano Red was elevated to rock-and-roll’s royal court.
He said good-bye to the furniture business.
It was no game for weak sisters. He rode the race record rails and suffered the indignities of that
hard trail. But there he was, a forty-year-old, near-blind albino, rocking black and white teenagers
out of their chairs. What he didn’t do was crack the white charts, but so few managed that.
Not content to rest on his laurels, he went on the air in 1953 with an afternoon show on Atlanta
station WAOK. As he explained to writer Tony Paris, “I’d tell the people I’m going to make them
feel young and good, the old folks feel young and young folks feel good. I got so much mail from
people telling me how good I made them feel, I started calling myself ‘Doctor Feelgood.’” He kept
the show going for fourteen years and the nickname for the rest of his life.
But he wasn’t young; he had a nice home life, and didn’t want to go chasing rainbows. With Elvis in
the Army, Jerry Lee in sinner’s exile, Little Richard into his Bible, and Eddie Cochran, Ritchie
Valens, and Buddy Holly all dead, rock-and-roll was coming undone anyway. The war for
acceptance had been fought and won and music was solid business, which meant it became whiter
and prettier by the day. What records Piano Red made lingered mostly on the race side of the
street.
That lasted until 1961, when he cut an album under the name Dr.
Feelgood and put together a band called the Interns. Dressed in
matching fines, they went on tour, playing clubs and college
campuses around the South. Then the British Invasion blew
through, the garage band era came and went, and music shifted
toward “art,” which didn’t suit him at all. His radio gig had
sustained his local fame and in 1969, he was offered a gig at
Muhlenbrink’s Saloon in Underground Atlanta, the new
complex of bars and retail shops situated in a former aqueduct
beneath the city streets.
Now the piano-pounding bluesman and original rocker found himself performing for drunken
tourists who yakked through his best numbers. But it was a show, and Piano Red was nothing if not
a showman. It was also a regular paycheck, no small concern for a working musician. His second
wife Carrie liked having him home at their tidy house east of the city. They had their own kids to
care for and adopted and took in others. He never boasted on this humanity. He just did it.
Okay, now it was time for him to become a relic; except for a curious twist, another chapter in an
already familiar tale of British musicians salvaging music that most Americans had put on a shelf, if
they knew about it at all.
So Keith Richards and Bill Wyman and Eric Clapton would finish their monster shows at the Omni
or the Fox, they would head to Underground to bow to the master. Clapton sat across a table from
Murray Silver and said, “Piano Red is the real deal,” as if reminding an Atlanta and an America that
had forgotten. When the late Pete Ham of Badfinger wrote a song about “Red” in the
“underground” playing the “eighty-eights,” he wasn’t singing about a busker at Marylebone
Station. Richards, among his most fervent fans, once demanded a grand piano be delivered to a
hotel suite for Red’s use, a task that required the instrument be dismantled and reassembled.
It wasn’t just talk. Red opened for major acts in Atlanta and
was invited to tour Europe, once and then again. They loved
his music and his electric persona and he made the festival
circuit - as a headliner. He was the opening act at the Berlin
Jazz Festival and performed for German Chancellor Helmut
Schmidt’s inauguration. It’s fair to say that he had more fans
across the Atlantic than he did in his own country. Though
it’s also true there were plenty of American devotees who
got Red and his blues cohorts – just not enough of them.
Through all this, he kept his bread-and-butter Underground gig. That he fixed himself in the
memory banks of thousands in that joint is beyond dispute. That a major blues talent who also
helped invent rock-and-roll was on window display five nights a week in what had become a
rather seedy venue struck some as a damned crime.
If Red felt this way, he never complained. God and talent were with him and he kept his sunny
side up. Even when Muhlenbrink’s closed their doors and his decade-long gig went away.
Restaurant and music club entrepreneurs Rocky and Michael Reeves had taken over The
Excelsior Mill, a hundred-year-old factory, and turned it into an intown entertainment hall.
“Right from the beginning, he called me ‘Roxy.’” Rocky Reeves says. “I didn’t mind. It was an
honor to have a legend call me ‘Roxy.’”
They hired Red to play four nights a week in the upstairs room. It was a kinder and happier
situation. The brothers leased him a red Thunderbird with a white interior. “He loved that car,”
Michael Reeves says. Not long after, Red buttonholed Reeves and told him he wanted to cut a live
album. The arrangements were made and the recording happened on a random night. “As always,
he put on a show,” Reeves says.
Eric King, who founded Blind Willie’s and managed local blues acts, worked to find Piano Red
other work in and outside Atlanta. He recalls a very special 1982 trip to the Festival of American
Folklife in Washington, DC. “Red really enjoyed seeing all his old friends and playing for those
audiences,” he says. “But the best part was the recognition from his own country that he was a
national treasure.”
Except for the Excelsior Mill, work remained scarce and in late 1984, Red asked King to set up
another tour. Though he was now in his seventies and in declining health, the trip into the
Northeast and New England in the dead of winter was a joy.
“They loved him up there,” King recalls. “And Red loved playing those shows.” He realized only
later how poorly the pianist was faring. “He must have been in a lot of pain. But I had no idea. He
was such a professional.” They would be the last long miles Piano Red would travel.
Michael Reeves remembers the final months at the Excelsior Mill. “Sometimes he would have
trouble getting up the steps to the stage,” he says. “He would have to stop for a minute. But he
always made it. And he’d rock the place.”
Then came the day Reeves received a call from a family member who explained that Red was not
feeling well enough to play that night. He’d be back, though. He knew he had an audience to
entertain. “The next I heard, he was gone.”
His memorial service drew an overflow crowd that no one had expected. Family, friends, and fans.
Politicians from the city and the state. They played the gospel that had never left his soul. When it
was over, he was carried off to Dawn Memorial Cemetery east of Atlanta and to his rest. A small
piano adorned his grave marker.
"You've been a wonderful audience."
Reflecting back long after his passing, those who knew him agreed on the wealth and the worth of
the music and the man. “Everybody who met Red loved him,” Rocky Reeves says. “And Red loved
everybody.”
Landslide Records’ Michael Rothschild says he can prove this. “My father was a classical musician
and growing up, I heard nothing but classical music – until he played a Piano Red song for me.”
“All the time I knew him, he never had a bad word to say about anyone,” Eric King remembers.
“He was always a such a professional and such a gentleman.”
Finally, Murray Silver says, “Red wanted you to know that he had triumphed. He found the love of
a good woman and a legion of fans. But there was one thing he wanted you to know most: his love of
God.”
And Red had to know God loves a piano man, too.
| Piano Red – A Not So Quiet Legend by David Fulmer |
| The Lost Atlanta Tapes Return |
| Photo Courtesy Georgia Music Hall of Fame |
| Photo Courtesy the Tony Paris Archives |
| Photo Courtesy Georgia Music Hall of Fame |
| Courtesy the Auburn Avenue Research Library |
| Cover Art by Al Wilson |