Notes

The following originally appeared in the GRAND JUNCTION FREE PRESS:

Buddy, pull yourself together.

You think you got it bad?  Listen — you don’t know even know what B-A-D really spells.  I hear you moaning about your mortgage… whining about the wife… grousing over the cost of gas.  What’s that sound I hear?  That’s the world’s smallest violin.

You want to talk about a big fiddle?  A heapin’ helpin’ of genu-wine BA-A-A-A-AD?  You want to talk about a life so filled with hurt and sorrow and broken promises that it’s mean, cussed irony to even call it a life?

Then let’s talk Andy Razaf.

Razaf.  Pronounced “rat-saf.”  You think that’s a funny name?  What if I told you the cat was born Andreamentania Paul Razafkeriefo?  Yeah, try playin’ the name game with that one.  Just one verse of “banana-fana fo-fazaferiefo” and it’s a room with rubber walls for you, pal.

1895.  That was the year Andy popped out with that tongue twister for a moniker.  Back then, you mighta thought Andy was gonna have a good life indeed — because he was born of royal blood, my friend.  Andy was the grand-nephew of the queen of Madagascar.  That coulda meant something… if he had been born in Madagascar.  But Andy was born to a 15-year-old girl in Washington, D.C. — a girl whose husband — Andy’s dad — had just died trying to defend his country against French invaders.  What’s more, Andy had the grievous misfortune of being born black in Jim Crow’s America.  Andy’s mom was a hard-working girl who desperately wanted her son to get an education.  But life was nursin’ a grudge for Andy even back then, and his family’s poverty forced him to drop out of school at the age of 16.

Still, he was bright, ambitious and a hard worker.  After scoring a job as an elevator boy for a building on Tin Pan Alley, Andy talked publisher James Kendis into buying one of his songs in 1913.  Over the next several years, he worked as a telephone operator, a semi-professional baseball pitcher, a butler and a dry cleaner… all the while, peddling his lyrics to any publisher who would listen.

Andy’s big break came in 1921, when he met a pianist nearly ten years his junior and suggested they write songs together.  That 17-year-old box beater was born Thomas Wright Waller… but everyone called him “Fats.”

Over the next ten years, with Waller, Andy wrote some of the greatest songs of the 20th century.  “Ain’t Misbehavin’”… “Honeysuckle Rose”… and especially “Black and Blue”… those are all Razaf lyrics.  Huge hits, in their day and ever since.  They shoulda made Andy a millionaire.

Instead, he and Waller sold those songs and 17 others for a measly $500.  That’s it.  No royalties.  No mechanicals.  Nothin’ but five benjamins.

That was just one bad deal in a life filled with them.  Over the next decades, Andy battled unscrupulous publishers, racist producers and syphilis — the latter eventually stealing his ability to walk.  He died in 1973, the living embodiment of the lyrics he wrote for “Black and Blue” 44 years earlier:

“How would it end?
Ain’t got a friend.
My only sin is in my skin.
What did I do
to be so black and blue?”