Freddie “Daddy” Slack and Ella Mae Morse – two very cool white folk

When Sammy Davis Jnr met Texan singer Ella Mae Morse for the first time, he was astonished: “I thought you were one of us!”, to which she replied, “I am one of you!”  I must say I’d find it hard to believe that anyone could tell Ms Morse was white from listening to the original 1946 version of “House of Blue Lights”. The pianist, leader of the band, and  the song’s co-author (he gives himself a name-check near the start), is Wisconsin-born Freddie Slack. He, too, sounds loose and cool enough to be black, instrumentally speaking.

Freddie Slack didn’t write the 1940 hit “Beat Me Daddy Eight to the Bar”, but he certainly played terrific piano on the record by the Will Bradley Band, which is credited with kicking off the whole Boogie Woogie boom of the early 1940s.



This terrific musician also gets a name-check on the band’s seminal 1941 hit, “Down the Road Apiece”:

If you wanna' hear some boogie then I know the place
It's just an old piano and a knocked-out bass.
The drummer-man's a guy they call 8-beat Mack
You remember Doc and old "Beat Me Daddy" Slack.
Man it's better than chicken fried in bacon grease
Come along with me boys, it's just down the road a piece.



I have no idea if Slack is doing the whistling – but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Slack died at the age of just 55 in 1965, after several abortive attempts to relaunch a career which reached its zenith with Ella Mae Morse in the mid forties – they can both be seen here performing Columbia Records’ first No. 1 hit, “Cow Cow Boogie”, a song about a cowboy with a “knocked out Western accent with a Harlem touch” (which just about described the band leader and his singer), recorded in 1942, when Ms Morse was seventeen years old – she claimed to be 17 when Jimmy Dorsey hired her to sing with his band, but he fired her when he found out she was actually fourteen.

Before anyone writes off Slack as a mere exploiter of an essentially black musical form, the great R&B guitarist T-Bone Walker was a member of his band from 1942-44, and he accompanied many black artists on record, including Big Joe Turner.

Apart from giving birth to six children, Ella Mae Morse went on to enjoy several major hits for Columbia in the 1950s, and kept on performing until she died at the age of 75.

Interesting people.