Allen Brothers Biographies
The Allen Brothers, Lee and Austin, were the first of the brothers groups that cut popular Country records in the late 1920s and 30s. The were followed by other blues-based brother acts like the Callahans, Sheltons and Delmores. The Allen Brothers created a unique sound based on fast-paced, upbeat blues and ragtime influenced songs. Their bawdy, humorous good-time lyrics, mixed with up-tempo renditions and Lee Allen's delightful kazoo leads are reminiscent of the early jug bands. They were one of the first Country groups to base their sound on the blues and ragtime styles found in African-American groups. In fact the Allens’ second recording for Columbia was mistaken for an African-American group and release on Columbia’s “race” label, used only for African-American groups!
Later that year Country Music's star Jimmie Rodgers recorded his first blues for Victor. Rodgers would write and arrange traditional 12 bar blues songs with his trademark yodel as a tag. The Allens music, though blues based, does not predominately use the 12 bar blues progression but rather uses rag chord progressions on the cycle of fifths like Salty Dog.
On April 7, 1927 they recorded their first single for Columbia Records and Frank Walker in Atlanta featuring the first Country recording of “Salty Dog Blues” backed by “Bow Wow Blues” (not the popular 1921 jazz song by Cliff Friend and Nat Osborne.entitled, "Bow Wow Blues-My Mamma Treats Me Like a Dog)." The brother act became known as "Chattanooga Boys" since they hailed from nearby Chattanooga and named two of their songs “Chattanooga Blues” and “Chattanooga Mama.”
Early Years
Austin Ambrose Allen was born Feb. 7, 1901 in Sewanee, TN (Franklin County) on Monteagle Mountain, which his 50 miles north of Chattanooga. His brother Lee William Allen was born five years later on June 1, 1906. Their father was a sawyer (employed in sawmill) and their mother a trained violinist. Interested in music literally from infancy – Austin began toying with his mother’s fiddle as soon as he was old enough to clutch a bow, while Lee was taking piano lessons by age three. In childhood they were exposed to a variety of contemporary and traditional music.
Eventually they settled on the instruments they would play professionally: Austin Allen played tenor banjo and harmonica while Lee Allen played guitar and kazoo. Both brothers sang (Austin usually sang lead) sometimes trading lead vocals in the same song. The brothers hit the local music circuit around 1923, becoming particularly popular in coal-mining camps. While traveling, the Allens began collecting all sorts of local, traditional tunes. Soon they began writing their own songs, many of which contain references to their mountain home and the Chattanooga area, and they absorbed the blues, often of the sort containing sexual double meanings, perhaps more thoroughly than any subsequent brother duet.
Hokum in Early Country Music
The Allen Brothers became the first country band to perform mostly hokum songs. Hokum is a humorous song with comic or sexual innuendoes found in American blues and jazz music. It originated with the blackface and other elements of the Minstrel Show. Hokum also encompassed dances like the cakewalk and the buzzard lope in skits that unfolded through spoken narrative and song. W.C. Handy, himself a veteran of a minstrel troupe, remarked that, "Our hokum hooked 'em," meaning that the low comedy snared an audience that stuck around to hear the music.
Early practitioners surfaced among the Memphis, Tennessee jug bands heard in Beale Street's saloons and bordellos. The light-hearted and humorous jug bands like Will Shade's Memphis Jug Band and Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers played good time, upbeat music on assorted instruments such as spoons, washboards, fiddles, triangles, harmonicas, and banjos, all anchored by bass notes blown across the mouth of an empty jug. Their blues was based on popular influences of jazz and ragtime and not the gritty 12 bar forms of the Delta blues.
The hokem songs crossed over to the early Country musicians and comedians and were popular in the radio "barn dances" broadcasts of the 1920s and 1930s. The first blackface comedians at the WSM Grand Old Opry were Lee Roy "Lasses" White and his partner Lee Davis "Honey" Wilds, starring in the Friday night shows. Uncle Dave Macon, Bill Monroe, Eddy Arnold, Stringbean and Roy Acuff toured with the Wilds' tent shows from April through Labor Day. Music was a part of their act, but they were comedians. They would sing comedic songs, a la Homer and Jethro. They would do odd lyrics to existing songs, or write songs that were intended to be comedic. They were out there to come onstage, do five minutes of jokes, sing a song, do five minutes of jokes, sing another song and say "Thank you, good night," as their segment of the Grand Ole Opry. Almost every country band during that time had some guy who dressed funny, wore a goofy hat, and typically played slide guitar.
Hokem songs were embraced by a wide variety of country stars from Tom Ashley’s “Farm Girl Blues” to The Allen Brothers “Salty Dog.” Later in the 1930s the hokem songs would be standard repertoire of the great Western Swing bands like Milton Brown’s Musical Brownies and Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys.
First Recording- Columbia Records
In the spring of 1927, four months before Peer arrived in Bristol for his famous sessions, Frank Walker and a team from Columbia Records began recording on location in Atlanta. They had already booked time with some proven local acts like Gid Tanner and His Skillet-Lickers and Smith’s Sacred Singers, whose first records, made in Atlanta a year before, were racking up sales in the hundreds of thousands. But in their two-week stay they also recorded musicians from all over the Southeast. The singer and jew’s-harp player Obed Pickard and the African-American harmonica-player DeFord Bailey were Opry cast-members from Nashville. The ‘talking blues man’ Chris Bouchillon ambled in from South Carolina. The banjo and fiddle duet of Dick Burnett and Leonard Rutherford arrived from southern Kentucky, and from further upstate came Earl McDonald’s Louisville Jug Band. From Chattanooga, in east Tennessee, came the Allen Brothers, a white duet who specialized in blues accompanied by guitar, tenor banjo and kazoo.
On April 7, 1927 they recorded their first single “Salty Dog Blues” backed by “Bow Wow Blues.”
According to Tony Russell (OTM 44, 1987/88), the "Bow Wow"/"Salty Dog" combo (Co 15175-D) sold 18,426 copies which was well above average for records by unknown groups. The success of their first single prompted Columbia to bring them back to the Atlanta studio in November.
On November 4, 1927 They cut “Laughin’ and Cryin’ Blues” backed by “Chattanooga Blues” which was promptly released on 14266D, Columbia’s “Race (African-American) label rather than its 15000 "hillbilly" series. The two white boys from Tennessee were naturally offended and demanded the record be reissued. After Columbia refused the Allens filed a $250,000 lawsuit against Columbia that was dropped before it went to court.
Apparently Columbia agreed to record The Allen Brothers again to make up for the mistake (Columbia called it “a clerical error”) they made when released the Allens second single on the “race” series. On 4-20-28 they recorded “Cheat Em,” an instrumental usually know as “Bill Cheatem,” and “Ain’t That Skippin’ and A-Flyin’ ” in Columbia’s Atlanta studio.
Kazoo
The Allens were one of the few country bands to feature the kazoo, a simple musical instrument that adds a "buzzing" quality to a player's voice when sung into it. The kazoo modifies the sound of a person's voice by way of a vibrating membrane. The Original Dixieland Jass Band on January 28, 1921 cut "Crazy Blues" as an instrumental (18729) featuring a kazoo solo by drummer Tony Sbarbaro. Perhaps the Allens patterned themselves after the The Mound City Blue Blowers who made a dozen novelty recordings during 1924 and 1925 for Brunswick. The trio featured Red McKenzie's comb, Dick Slevin's kazoo, and banjoist Jack Bland. On 2-23-24 they recorded their big single with "Arkansas Blues" and "Blue Blues". Reportedly it sold over a million copies.
Victor Records
Not happy with Columbia, the Allens quickly signed with Victor Records and Ralph Peer- who was reaping the fruits of his discovery of Jimmie Rodgers and was keen to mine the white blues vein further. In his notes to Allen Brothers Volume I, Document DOCD-8023, Russell comments: “But Peer and the Allens interpreted "blues" liberally. Some of the numbers so titled were like "Salty Dog Blues", rag songs. Conventional 12-bar pieces with AAB rhyme scheme don't account for a larger proportion of their repertoire. Here, as so often in the hillbilly music of the 20s and 30s, "blues" seems to be inserted into a song title not to denote a structure but to imply informality, spontaneity and sometimes topicality.”
They recorded their first session for Victor on Oct. 15-1928 in Atlanta. In concerts the Allens sang a combination of up-tempo and slower tunes, and became frustrated when Peer wanted only fast songs. In addition the Allen Brothers, who rarely recorded or performed with other musicians, had two other sidemen to fill out their hillbilly tunes in the studio. Bob Douglas played fiddle and Jimmie Medley guitar on “Free A Little Bird” backed by “Skipping and Flying.”
Born in 1900, Tennessee's Fiddlin' Bob Douglas had been a childhood companion to Curly Fox; he recorded for the Victor Company with the Allen Brothers in 1928; he toured with Clayton McMitchen and Carl Cotner through the Midwest; he fiddled against Natchee the Indian, A. A. Gray, and Lowe Stokes and beat them all; he gave the Louvin Brothers their first paying job in country music; Jess Young was his father's close friend; Arthur Smith, Jimmy McCarroll, and Earl Johnson all crossed his path.
He also has sales figures on other Allen recordings, including some titles on the MW label. "New Salty" is reported to have sold 6552 copies (not clear whether this refers only to the original Victor 23500 series release or includes later sales of the Bluebird and Victor reissues), plus 7603 (c/w "Browns Ferry Blues" by the Delmore Bros) on Montgomery Ward. The Allens' biggest hit was "Jake Walk Blues," with sales of over 20,000 copies.
At the session the brothers showed their versatility by also waxing two of their better blues; “Frisco Blues” and “Tipple Blues” and well as two ballads; “Prisoner’s Dream” and “I’ll Be All Smiles Tonight.”
Salty Dog Blues
The Allens made the first Country recording of "Salty Dog Blues" on April 7, 1927, in Atlanta. The song which thye recorded three times became a number for which they are best remembered. The Allen’s “New Salty Dog" was recorded for Victor, November 22, 1930. Later they waxed "Salty Dog Hey Hey Hey" for ARC, October 5, 1934. Their versions are slightly different than the traditional bluegrass version, which uses a refrain, “Let me be your Salty Dog…”
According to Tony Russell (OTM 44, 1987/88), the "Bow Wow"/"Salty Dog" combo (Co 15175-D) sold 18,426 copies. He also has sales figures on other Allen recordings, including some titles on the MW label. "New Salty" is reported to have sold 6552 copies (not clear whether this refers only to the original Victor 23500 series release or includes later sales of the Bluebird and Victor reissues), plus 7603 (c/w "Browns Ferry Blues" by the Delmore Bros) on Montgomery Ward.
“What does the term ‘salty dog’ mean?” Charles Wolfe asked Lee Allen almost 50 years later. “Somebody that was just a little low-down, not too much,” Lee responded. “They just wanted to have a good time, maybe at the expense of someone else, but all the same they didn't do any harm that I know of. They were drinking people and that's about all they had on their mind.”
Papa Charlie Jackson did "Salty Dog" for Paramount in 1924, Clara Smith for Columbia in 1926. Cryin' Sam Collins (unlike any other I've ever heard) and Kokomo Arnold also had issued 78s of the song, as did Sam and Kirk McGee on the hillbilly side. Byrd Moore's 1928 "Bedbugs Makin' Their Last Go-Round" is a medley containing the title song (a recomposition of "Gulf Coast Blues") and "Salty Dog." The Morris Brothers arrangement is closer to bluegrass song Flatt & Scruggs popularized in the 50s.
Jake Walk Blues
“Jake Walk Blues” was one the Allen Brothers' most popular records, but not as popular as their “New Salty Dog.” It was released on Victor and later on Victor's budget Bluebird label which alone sold more than 20, 000 copies.
The first documented case of jake poisoning was Feb. 27, 1930 in Oklahoma. Jake, a Jamaica ginger extract with a 75% alcohol content had been available since the Civil War. A bottle costing 35 cents could be bought at drug stores pharmacies and even dime stores. With Prohibition, only a government-approved extract was legally available - it had such a concentration of the ginger that it was unpalatable as a beverage. However, many illicit brands of the extract became available. These had small amounts of ginger, dissolved in 75% alcohol and mixed with various adulterants and, at 35 cents a 2-ounce bottle, provided more alcohol than 2 pre-Prohibition mixed drinks. John P. Morgan MD, the compiler of the collection of 1930s jake leg songs referred to below, writes:
In February of 1930, Harry Gross of the Hub Products Corporation in Boston adulterated a batch of jake with triorthocresyl phosphate - an ingredient of paint and lacquers. It seemed an ideal ingredient. It was cheap, tasteless and odorless, miscible with ginger and soluble in alcohol. He shipped most of the jake in bulk to rebottlers in larger cities. This single batch of TOCP-contaminated jake paralyzed fifty thousand thirsty Americans. Gross served less than 2 years in jail, charged only with breaking the pure food and drug law. Those poisoned were permanently paralyzed and most never walked again without canes, crutches or walkers. They dragged their feet, rocking from one side to the other to swing their weakened legs forward, slapping their shoes to the pavement. This peculiar gait became known as the 'jake walk' and the illness as the 'jake leg'.
In the early 1930s, about 13 songs, directly related to the jake walk and the jake leg, were recorded by both black and white musicians. This song by the Allen Brothers was one of the most popular. Thomas C. Tulloss wrote in 1978: 'Some jake leg victims in East Tennessee, who are still alive, clearly remembered the Allen Brothers' song, once owned the record, and could still quote lyrics freely and without prompting' [Old Time Music # 28, Spring 1978, p 20]. The song is far from sympathetic. Tony Russell has summed it up well as 'an uncompromising and blackly humorous piece which more or less says: if you live hard, you get hard breaks'.
Here are the lyrics to the first verse: I can't eat, I can't talk/Been drinkin' mean jake, Lord, now I can't walk/
Ain't got nothin' now to lose/'Cos I'm a jake walkin' papa, with the jake walk blues
Last Recording for Vocalion; Later Years
After the Great Depression the Allens records were no longer in great demand and only the most popular groups like Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family continued recording and selling records for Victor. Despite their popularity they had difficulty earning enough to support their families. In 1934 Austin became a radio announcer and singing waiter in NYC.
He arranged sessions for Vocalion, a discount label of ARC, on Oct. 5-6, 1934 where the Allens recorded their last singles: “Salty Dog, Hey, Hey, Hey” backed by “Hey Buddy Won’t You Roll Down The Line;” “Long Gone From Bowling Green” backed by “Red Pajama Sal;” “Baby When You Coming Back Home” with “Daddy Park Your Car;” “Mercy Mercy Blues” with “Prisoner’s Dream;” “New Deal Blues” with “Can I Get You Now (Hesitation Blues); “Tipple Blues” with “Mary’s Breakdown” and Allen Brother’s Rag with Skipping and Flying.”
Also in 1934 several of the Allens earlier Victor recordings were released on Montgomery Ward including “I’m Always Whistlin’ The Blues” backed by “Tipple Blues” and Maybe Next Week Sometime with Shake It Ida.”
Bluebird, Victors discount label, also began releasing some of the Allens recordings including “Frisco Blues (K.C. Railoroad)” with “Reckless Night Blues” and one of my favorites “The Old Black Crow in The Hickory Nut Tree.”
They also appeared together in a play, Bushwhacker, and their final stab at the music business (8 singles for Vocalion in 1934) still didn't make enough impact to justify a return to full-time music-making. Austin later became a construction worker and engineer. He died in Williamston, SC, in 1959.
Lee remained in Tennessee and became an electrician. In the late '60s, The Allen Brothers were rediscovered by a new generation. Lee was discovered by Donald Lee Nelson in the 1960s folk revival and did another interview with Charles Wolfe. Lee died in the 1980s. Several LP reissues of their 78 rpm recordings appeared, and Lee Allen was coaxed into performing again. He appeared occasionally at local events near his home in Lebanon, TN, before his death in 1981.
The 1990s saw the release of the brothers' complete recordings on three compact discs by Austria's Document label.
Alphabetical Recordings by the Allen Brothers: Ain't That Skippin' and Flying (Skipping and Flying); Allen Brothers' Rag; Allen's Lying Blues; Baby When You Coming Back Home; Can I Get You Now (Hesitation Blues); Chattanooga Blues; Chattanooga Mama; Cheat ‘Em (Bill Cheatem); Coal Tipple Blues (Tipple/Tiple Blues); Crossfiring Blues; Daddy Park Your Car; Drunk and Nutty Blues; Enforcement Blues; Free Little Bird (Free A Little Bird [as I Can Be]); Frisco Blues; Fruit Jar Blues; Glorious Night Blues; Hey Buddy, Won't You Roll Down The Line; I'll Be All Smiles Tonight; I'll Be Here a Long, Long Time; I’m A Diamond From The Rough (unissued); I’m Always Whistling the Blues; I’ve Got The Chain Store Blues; Inspiration; It Can't Be Done; It's Too Bad For You; Jake Walk Blues; Laughin' And Cryin'; Lightning Bug Blues; Logan County Jail (Prisoner's Dream); Long Gone From Bowling Green; Mary’s Breakdown; Maybe Next week Sometime; Mama Don’t ‘Low No Low Down Hangin Round Here; Mary’s Breakdown; Maybe Next Week Sometime No. 2; Mercy, Mercy Blues; Midnight Mama; Misbehavin' Mama; Moonshine Bill; Monkey Blues; Mother-In-Law Blues; New Chattanooga Blues; New Deal Blues; New Salty Dog; No Low Down Hanging Around; Old Black Crow in The Hickory-Nut Tree; Padlock Key Blues; Pile Drivin' Papa; Please Pay In Advance; Preacher Blues; Price of Cotton Blues; Prisoner’s Dream; Reckless Night Blues; Red Hot Rambling Dan; Red Pajama Sal; Reckless Night blues; Rough Neck Blues; Roll Down the Line; Roll It Down; Rough Neck Blues; Salty Dog Blues; Salty Dog, Hey Hey Hey; Shake It, Ida, Shake It; Shanghai Rooster Blues; Skipping And Flying; Slide Daddy, Slide; Slipping Clutch Blues; Tipple Blues; Unlucky Man; You've Been Fooling Me, Baby; Warm Knees Blues; When A Man's Got A Woman; When You Leave, You'll Leave Me Sad; Windowshade Blues