Willie "The Lion" Smith - Relaxin' 1961 (Classic Jazz / Stride Piano Synthesia)

Relaxin' by Willie "The Lion" Smith

Podcast: https://www.npr.org/2008/06/11/913651...

Watch the Willie "The Lion" Smith documentary:    • Willie "The Lion" (2004) [Rare Ragtime / E...  

Wikipedia:
William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Bertholf Smith, also known as "The Lion", was an American jazz pianist and one of the masters of the stride style, usually grouped with James P. Johnson and Thomas "Fats" Waller as the three greatest practitioners of the genre in its golden age, from about 1920 to 1943.

William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Bertholf was born in Goshen, New York. His mother and grandmother chose the names to reflect the different parts of his heritage: Joseph after Saint Joseph (Bible), Bonaparte (French), Bertholf (biological father's last name), Smith (added when he was three, his stepfather's name), and William and Henry which were added for "spiritual balance".

In his memoir he reports that his father, Frank Bertholf (incorrectly spelled Bertholoff in many sources), was Jewish. Smith's New York birth record shows him as William H. Bertholf, and his father, Frank Bertholf, was a white electrician from nearby Monroe, New York. Willie was at least somewhat conversant in Yiddish, as he demonstrated in a television interview late in his life. Willie's mother, Ida Oliver, had "Spanish, Negro, and Mohawk Indian blood". Her mother, Ann Oliver, was a banjo player and had been in Primrose and West minstrel shows (Smith also had two cousins who were dancers in the shows, Etta and John Bloom). According to Ida, "Frank Bertholoff [sic] was a light-skinned playboy who loved his liquor, girls, and gambling." His mother threw Frank out of the house when "The Lion" was two years old. When his father died in 1901, his mother married John Smith, a master mechanic from Paterson, New Jersey. The surname Smith was added to that of "The Lion" at age three. He grew up living at 76 Academy Street in Newark, New Jersey.

John Smith worked for C.M. Bailey, Pork Packers, and he would leave the house around midnight to pick up the freshly killed pigs and bring them to the packing house. He was supposed to be home by 4 am, but would usually go to bars. Eventually, Willie's mother wanted him to accompany his stepfather to work to hopefully ensure that John Smith would come straight home and not go drinking. Willie said he actually enjoyed his job, but most of the time he would have to drive the horses home. He also could only work on Fridays and Saturdays, as his mother did not want him to miss school. He wrote about the experience of being at the slaughterhouse with his stepfather:

I couldn't stand to see what I saw at the slaughterhouse. I would watch wide-eyed as the squealing pigs slid down the iron rails to the cutter where they were slashed through the middle, with the two halves falling into a tank of hot water. The kill sometimes went to as many as four hundred pigs a night. It was a sickening sight to watch. But the cries from the pigs brought forth an emotional excitement. It was another weird but musical sound that I can still hear in my head. The squeaks, the squeals, the dipping them in hot water, they put them on a hook, take off the head, the legs, going down an aisle—I hear it on an oboe. That's what you hear in a symphony: destruction, war, peace, beauty, all mixed.

This video quote:
"Jazz comes from anywhere the human being has a soul and has a heart." - Willie "The Lion" Smith
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