With her movie-star face above and her fan-dance moves behind the washboard, Norah Spades decorates the air around the stalwart figure of the bearded Jitterbug James as he sings and plays his resonator guitar, bringing songs from the deep past into an uncertain present. With his ragtime riffs and Norah’s deft accompaniment on washboard and spoons, the music rattles along just fine. Norah throws in her salty Betty Boop-style asides between his lines.
The Vaudevillian call themselves a ragtime blues duo. They play music from the 1920s and 30s. Blues and ragtime mingled freely during this time, and it shows in their playing. Their music is like a breath of fresh air, free of pretense or posed hipness. Their love of the music, and the playfulness of their stage act, both grow out of their genuine personalities.
Their newest record is called Sellin’ Jelly. It’s a phrase found in hokum blues since at least the 20s. It’s also the first song on the album. It was written by James and Norah and, like them, it’s a throwback to the old hokum songs, and a modern expression of their feelings. They sure love that jelly.
The album is a collection of hokum songs. Hokum music got started when Hudson Whittaker, known as Tampa Red (slide guitar), and Thomas Dorsey, known as Georgia Tom (piano), recorded a song in 1929 called Tight Like That, under the name of the Hokum Boys. It had suggestive lyrics and a tight, bouncy rhythm. It became a huge hit record, selling 7 million copies. Suddenly, hokum was all the rage. Over the next couple of years, the song was covered widely by other artists. Musical groups and teams began calling themselves the Hokum Boys, or some variation. Hokum exploded into a genre of music of suggestive double entendre, upbeat rhythms, and saucy storytelling. This period of the music was an important forerunner of the blues. These songs from the 20s and 30s were already old when they were recorded back then. The phrases and characters in the songs go back, often to the 1800s.
The Vaudevillian’s album contains classics of the Hokum genre, including Your Biscuits Are Plenty Big Enough For Me, Caught Us Doin’ It, All Around Man, and more. It’s an impressive collection of standards of the hokum genre.
If you like old-time music with sexy, suggestive lyrics, you’ll love Sellin’ Jelly. You’ll also get James’ hot ragtime/blues guitar stylings and Norah Spades’ impeccable precision washboard playing (she started as a drummer) and sassy Betty Boop-like asides.
You can find Sellin’ Jelly on The Vaudevillian’s Bandcamp page or at any of their live performances. They are also on Instagram. They’re playing a lot of festivals this year, to celebrate their tenth anniversary of performing together as The Vaudevillian. Track them down and see how the big kids swing!