Fats Waller Quotes

One never knows, do one...

I liked old time music but what i meant by that was the period from the 1930s through the 60s, nothing before and little after.  Performers like fats waller, Sinatra, billie holiday, louis armstrong, rosemary clooney, ella, sammy Davis Jr, dean martin... If the lyrics weren't stupid. Words were important.

The marketing people are always talking about something called 'consumers'. I have this image of a fat little man in baggy Bermuda shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and a straw hat with beer-can openers dangling from it, clutching fistfuls of dollars.

I learned that the day "The Viper's Drag" slipped from between my fingers. But whatever might be lost or broken or forgotten is nothing compared to the miraculous rebirth that occurs every time the needle hits the groove. Here is Fats Waller Himself, not dead but present, so present that he overwhelms the well-ordered precincts of the living room. The sound sprawls. What vibrates here has more life than any room.

HARLEM STRIDE: RECOMMENDED LISTENING Duke Ellington, “Black Beauty,” October 1, 1928 James P. Johnson, “Carolina Shout,” October 18, 1921 Luckey Roberts, “Ripples of the Nile,” May 21, 1946 Willie “The Lion” Smith, “Sneakaway,” January 10, 1939 Art Tatum, “I Know That You Know,” April 2, 1949 Art Tatum, “Sweet Georgia Brown,” September 16, 1941 Art Tatum, “Tea for Two,” March 21, 1933 Fats Waller, “Alligator Crawl,” November 16, 1934 Fats Waller, “Dinah,” June 6, 1935 Fats Waller, “Viper’s Drag,” November 16, 1934

Richard Durham was a black writer whose credits in radio would run a gamut from Irna Phillips serials to prestige plays for such as The CBS Radio Workshop. But in Destination Freedom Durham wrote from the heart. Anger simmers at the foundation of these shows, rising occasionally to a wail of agony and torment. On no other show was the term “Jim Crow” used as an adjective, if at all: nowhere else could be heard the actual voices of black actors giving life to a real black environment. There were no buffoons or toadies in Durham’s plays: there were heroes and villains, girlfriends and lovers, mothers, fathers, brutes; there were kids named Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson, who bucked the tide and became kings in places named Madison Square Garden and Ebbets Field. The early historical dramas soon gave way to a more contemporary theme: the black man’s struggle in a modern racist society. Shows on Denmark Vesey, Frederick Douglass, and George Washington Carver gave way to Richard Wright’s Black Boy and the lives of Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, and Nat King Cole. The Tiger Hunt was a war story, of a black tank battalion; Last Letter Home told of black pilots in World War II. The stories pulled no punches in their execution of the common theme, making Destination Freedom not only the most powerful but the only show of its kind.

Who’s Fats Waller?” “Oh, you child! A large, brilliant pianist, songwriter, and singer of the 1920s and ’30s.

Yeah, I’m fine. I just don’t like photos. I’m not exactly photogenic.” Amy shrugs. “So? None of us are, not really. I take photos to remember things. Don’t you want to be able to look back years from now and see how things were?” It’s my time to shrug, as if that’s enough to explain that no, I don’t want to look back and see just how fat and pathetic I really am. If anything, I want to forget it—no photographic evidence means it didn’t really happen, and once I figure out how to con a doctor into giving me a gastric bypass, I can pretend most of Beth: The Fat Years never happened.