Dave “Fat Man” Williams

I Ate Up the Apple Tree 

(JHB Records BCD-511)

IN JUNE 1968 I was on my way to the huge Washington DC rally of the Poor People’s Campaign, one of the last mass events of the civil rights movement. Passing through New Orleans I found a dowdy, dimly lit hall on Bourbon Street where a superb band of Crescent City veterans were playing, led by the prime clarinettist Louis Cottrell, the growling tailgate trombone of Waldron “Frog” Joseph and the rattling snares of drummer Louis Barbarin.

On piano was a stout, rampaging blues player called Dave “Fat Man” Williams, whose playing was a keen amalgam of rhythm and blues and more stolid New Orleans jazz.

So what a delight, some 46 years later, to find an album to review on my doormat by said “Fat Man.” Williams was born in Touro Street in New Orleans’s French Quarter in 1920, where his mother was organist of the First Free Will Baptist Church. He began on the piano at five, as a boy played at fish fries and in his cousins’ bands, and by 1940 had his own outfit playing at local venues. 

After wartime army service he enrolled in music school and played in one of the city’s most popular bands, that of Freddy Kohlman. He also was on the edges of the profitable rhythm and blues scene of Imperial Records, and his nickname came from what many locals saw as his likeness, both physically and musically, to the highly successful Fats Domino.

But Fat Man never made such heights of renown and his album combines the only three recording sessions he ever led in his home city, taking place in 1963, 1974 and 1975.

The 1974 session starts off with the title song, released as a single and an “almost hit.” Englishman Clive Wilson is on trumpet (he’d gone to live in New Orleans), Clarence Ford on clarinet and tenor, James Prevost on bass and Chester Jones on drums. It’s a happy piece of nonsense, but with some fine spiky clarinet from Ford, a jaunty chorus in the Domino mode and a very hummable tune. Here I Stand With My Heart in My Hand and Don’t You Hear Me Calling You are affable love lyrics which Williams sings appealingly with rolling piano accompaniment.

“I been having the blues all day long, you can tell from the colour of my skin,” sings Fat Man on Way Back O’Town Blues, referring to life in newer New Orleans suburbs like Boscoville, Paillet Lane and Girt Town. It’s a powerful group performance echoing the blues of the real world.

The 1963 session features Williams’s pounding notes in The Same Old Love and Ernest Poree’s plaintive alto on I Would if I Could, which Williams sings with a doleful earnestness. It was said that he couldn’t sing the hymnal It’s Me, O Lord without crying and tears don’t seem so far away on this version, but they certainly dry up for the very danceable She’s My Desire, with the quartet full of Latin verve and humour and Poree taking a bouncing chorus.

The very New Orleans heartsblood of Fat Man is expressed in the 1975 session, recorded as a celebration of trumpeter Alvin Alcorn’s 50th year as a professional musician in New Orleans. 

Williams’s piano accompanies fine solos by Alcorn and clarinettist Ford in the touching Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans? and in At Sundown there are solos from each of the front line including trombonist Preston Jackson, before Williams takes a stomping chorus and drummer Louis Barbarin, from a renowned drumming family, takes a pummelling break.

There is strict New Orleans fare in staples like Liza, where a buoyant Ford rings out his notes, Alcorn sings through his horn and the whole band seems to be on a cloud, and the street-marching rhythms of Panama with Alcorn’s forthright lead and the horn ensemble in proud and stirring fettle.

But the most precious moments of the session are in a moving performance of WC Handy’s classic Aunt Hagar’s Blues. 

Fat Man strikes out mournful chimes behind Jackson’s slides before his own aching blues chorus, then the horns take the grieving theme home.

The morning after the gig I climbed onto the Greyhound to Washington to join tens of thousands before the Lincoln Memorial, where I heard the solidarity voices of Aretha Franklin, Pete Seeger, Mahalia Jackson, Peter, Paul and Mary, Eartha Kitt and Coretta King. But the cherished ancestral sounds of Fat Man Williams and his New Orleans men carried me all the way.