Thomas “Fats” Waller is easily one of the most well know jazz pianists and equally famous as a singer and comedic personality. You’ve definitely heard his music on the dance floor – All that Meat and No Potatoes, Your Feets to Big, Twenty-Four Robbers, the list goes on…
Waller came from a very musical family—his grandfather was an accomplished violinist and his mother was a church organist. He began learning to play the piano at 6 and just a few years later started playing organ for his father’s church. Waller was trained by his mother and then a piano tutor. He taught himself stride piano by slowing down player piano rolls of some of James P Johnson’s famous tunes and putting his fingers over the keys as they went down.
At age of 15 he became the house organist at the Lincoln Theatre accompanying silent films and vaudeville shows at the first theatre in Harlem to cater exclusively to a black clientele. Some claim that Waller was the first musician to perform jazz music on a full size church organ. Years later after launching a successful career as a stride pianist he commented that he still preferred the organ to the piano “I can get so much more colour from it than the piano that it really sends me.” Count Basie famously took organ lessons from Fats Waller.
Waller’s mother passed away when he was just 16 and his father kicked him out of the house. He moved in with the family of his piano tutor, Russell Brooks. Either through Brooks or through his work at Lincoln Theatre, Waller eventually fell in with two legendary artists who defined the genre of stride piano, James P. Johnson and Willie “The Lion” Smith. He became their protégé eventually replacing Smith, at Leroy’s nightclub and later replacing James P. Johnson as a house pianist for the QRS (Quality Reigns Supreme) company, recording rolls for player pianos.
Throughout the 1920s and 30s Waller was a prolific recording artist and a sought after performer appearing in stage shows as well as films. He toured the UK and Ireland in the 1930s, appearing on one of the first BBC television broadcasts in 1938. In addition to being a popular performer, Waller was a prolific songwriter. He wrote hundreds of songs some of which were never credited to him. He was famous for selling his songs cheap for quick cash or even giving them away to needy friends. He’s reputed to have written several melodies that became hits credited to others, among them “On the Sunny Side of the Street” and “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.”
In 1943 Waller became the first African-American songwriter to compose a hit Broadway musical made for a white audience – Early to Bed. Sadly there were no recordings made of the show and the score has been lost to history. Some speculate that this might have launched his career in a whole new direction and could have paved the way for more Black artists on Broadway during a time when it was nearly impossible to get a foot in the door. Unfortunately Waller died of pneumonia the same year at only 39.
Fats Waller: This Joint Is Jumping’ | Documentary (c. 1985)
Fats Waller by Maurice Waller and Anthony Calabrese
Swing Dance Leeds 