caldonia! caldonia!
What makes your big head so hard?
CaldoniaLouis Jordan (1945)
Before there was rock and roll, there was rock and roll that wasn’t called that. For that you had to go to Louis Jordan and his jump blues cracker in the forties Caldonia about his love for a woman with big feet and a hard head.
In the prehistory of rock ‘n’ roll, it grew everywhere, in the Americas North and South, in black and white communities, in country, blues, jazz and gospel. In 1954, everything came together in a former truck driver, Elvis Presley.
About ‘The Wild Years for Elvis’ appeared in 1984 Unsung Heroes of Rock and Roll by Nick Tosches. In this book he put the spotlight on musical heroes of yesteryear, those who paved the way for The King. One of them was Louis Jordan (1908-1975), saxophonist and singer. Of him, Tosches wrote, “While he is now largely forgotten, Jordan did more to define hipness and prepare white people for the advent of rock and roll than any other man of the era.”
The music Jordan made in the 1940s was louder and wilder than anyone else’s. He threw a party, Tosches said, “in which every aspect of the expanding universe was seen in terms of fried fish, sloppy kisses, gin and the saxophone whose message transcends knowledge.”
Jordan played Caldonia for the first time in 1944 in anniversary, a US military radio show for black soldiers. When the song was officially released by record company Decca one year later, two more versions appeared, and all three became a big hit. What made the song extremely appealing was the screaming chorus: Caldonia-YAH, Caldonia-YAH.
With the success also came the question marks about the originality of Caldonia. It was known that his then missus, Fleecie Moore, had made a significant contribution. Blues singer Sippie Wallace was sure the song was inspired by hair Caldonia Bluestwenty years earlier.
No, said Jordan. If he had ‘borrowed’ something, it was from a song by trumpeter and singer Oran ‘Hot Lips’ Page. From Old Man Beno Jordan had almost copied the entire chorus: Caldonia, caldonia, what makes your head so hard. Only the ‘big’ head was new.
After its unprecedented hegemony in the 1940s, success simmered down a bit in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1975 he died of a heart attack, a faint voice from the past. The greatness of Caldonia was subsequently endorsed when the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame (2008) and The National Record Registry (2013).
What also distinguished Jordan was that he had hits in both the black and white charts. Writer Nick Tosches thought it was nonsense that he would have adapted to ‘white crackers’: real rock ‘n’ roll is never completely pure. In that sense, Louis Jordan was no more an Uncle Tom than Jimi Hendrix or Michael Jackson. At least he was better dressed than those two.’
John & Paul