When Thomas A. Dorsey (a.k.a. “Georgia Tom”) walked out of a New York City recording studio in the winter of 1932, he ended a highly successful music partnership with Tampa Red (a.k.a. Hudson Whittaker).
Over four years, Red and Tom garnered a happy following for their infectious, highly danceable brand of blues tunes.
In 1928, the two young men had teamed up and recorded for the Paramount label the hit “Tight Like That.” The success of that number — based on Blind Blake’s “Too Tight” and on Papa Charlie Jackson’s “Shake That Thing” — inspired imitators and launched the blues genre known as “hokum,” as reported here earlier,
Whittaker and Dorsey recorded more than 60 sides together, often under the name “The Famous Hokum Boy.” Some of these rollicking tunes have been covered by The Flood over the years, songs like “Somebody’s Been Using That Thing,” “Yas Yas Duck” and “You Can’t Get That Stuff No More.”
And add to that list the last tune that Tom and Red ever recorded together. The composition they called “No Matter How She Done” was waxed on Feb. 3, 1932, and released that spring on Brunswick’s Vocalion label.
Nothing in Red’s sassy lyrics hinted at an end to this lucrative collaboration:
The copper brought her in, she didn’t need no bail She shook it for the judge, they put the cop in jail!
As we noted in an earlier Flood Watch report, when Dorsey left the blues field in 1932 to take up a career as gospel songwriter and choir director, Whittaker continued as a solo blues artist well into the 1940s.
Floodifying It
Flash forward seven decades. When The Flood started doing this song in the early 2000s, we committed what some folk purists consider a sacrilege: We altered both its title and its hook, removing one entire syllable. Instead of Tampa Red’s original “No matter how she done it” lyric, The Flood opted to sing “Any way she done it.”
We’re still doing it that way, in fact, as you hear in this track from a recent rehearsal. And, no, we have no excuse, not really, except an aesthetic one. We felt the revision simply allowed the line to flow more easily off the tongue. (Call your neighborhood linguist and ask about the joys of removing “alveolar taps.”)
One thing for sure: now, as then, the new phrasing does facilitate group singing, as you can hear on the band’s lively original rendering 20 years ago on our Plays Up a Storm album. Click the button below to hear it:
That track, recorded on the evening of Nov. 16, 2002, featured Sam St. Clair, Joe Dobbs, Doug Chaffin, Chuck Romine, David Peyton and Charlie Bowen.
The Bob Wills Connection
While the tune (any way we sing it) has always had a happy hokum vibe, “No Matter How She Done” took a curious turn four years after Tampa Red and Georgia Tom’s inaugural recording.
In September 1936 in Chicago, the song got a cool country treatment by no less a luminary than Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.
This was just three years after Wills organized the band in Waco, Texas, and set about defining the style of music that’s come to be known as “Texas swing.”
Released as a single in May 1937, “No Matter How She Done It (She’s Just a Dirty Dame)” was recorded in Wills and the Playboys’ second major recording sessions for the American Record Corporation.
The session is particularly important for Wills collectors, because it features the lineup that would define the Texas Playboys sound for years to come, including vocalist Tommy Duncan, pianist Al Stricklin, steel guitarist Leon McAuliffe and drummer Smoky Dacus.
More Hokum, You Say?
Meanwhile, if more hokum music is what you need to make your Flood Friday complete, remember that we’ve got a whole channel waiting for you on the free Radio Floodango music steaming service.
Just drop in and click the “Hokum” button or, better yet, just use this link to jump to it directly.
