Stories of Standards: Jitterbug Waltz

Tune in to Jazz with Victor Cooper – weekdays from 6-9 a.m. MT – for Stories of Standards to hear our favorite versions of this song all week long starting Monday, August 27!

Stories of Standards is sponsored by ListenUp - If you love music, you’ll love ListenUp.

Thomas “Fats” Waller wrote “Jitterbug Waltz” (the first jazz music written in 3/4 time) in 1942, inspired by piano exercises his son Maurice had been playing. While primarily associated with the piano, Waller was a virtuoso organ player who in the 1920s made many solo records for Victor Records, and would play Bach whenever an instrument was available. While usually recorded as an instrumental, Dinah Washington made a version of the song in 1957 which used lyrics by Charles Grean and Maxine Manners. In the 1978 Broadway tribute musical “Ain’t Misbehavin’” director Richard Maltby, Jr. added an introductory verse to those lyrics and the musical won a Tony for Best Musical.

As a child Fats Waller (1904-1943) studied classical music before taking lessons from James P. Johnson, and became the greatest stride piano master of his time. With his enormous hands (George Shearing once said that shaking hands with Waller was “like grabbing a bunch of bananas”.) Waller could stretch the interval of a twelfth on the keyboard, a great advantage for a pianist. He gave precedence to the music over the method and once said that “the thing that makes a tune click is the melody , and give the public four bars of that to dig their teeth into, and you have a killer-diller…It’s melody that gives variety to the ear.” While he is generally credited with over 400 songs, an unknown number of his compositions were sold for quick cash to musicians who failed to acknowledge his contributions. Waller’s jazz organ recordings were made with several of his groups, despite the technical difficulties of balancing the sound volume (pre-electronic microphones), given that the organ was so much louder than the other instruments that they had to be placed at opposite ends of a large space. Renowned for his inventiveness, humor, skill and dedication to music, Fats Waller was travelling on board the Santa Fe Chief train from Hollywood to New York, when he unexpectedly died of pneumonia near Kansas City on December 15, 1943.