Big Maceo

For a mere five years, the rollicking, hard-driving piano playing of Major "Big Maceo" Merriweather dominated the Chicago blues scene. Maceo was left handed, and no one before or since has been able to create the drive and beat that propelled the recordings he made with Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Boy Williamson I, and under his own name. 
Sadly, a stroke in 1946 deprived him of the use of his right hand. 

Transcript

There are guitar players in blues who tell you who they are in just a few notes. The index finger trills of BB King, the long, string bend pulls of Albert King, or the icy slide-ups of Albert Collins mark these guitarists by both technique and tone. Add to that the trebly standard tuned slide of Muddy Waters or the “Dust” riff of Elmore James and you know almost instantly who you’re listening to. Fans of more modern blues can quickly pick out Stevie Ray, or even Mike Bloomfield within just a few bars. Sometimes it’s the tone, sometimes the instrument, sometimes the technique; these are the factors that give guitarists their personality and uniqueness. 

 But what about piano players? What makes a piano player so distinctive that you can identify him in just a few notes? After all, everyone pretty much plays the same instrument, at least when we’re talking about the acoustic piano. True, jazz buffs can pick out a Thelonious Monk,  McCoy Tyner or Bill Evans by style alone. Some classical music authorities can listen to a few bars of a sonata and proclaim “Rudolph Serkin” or “Vladimir Ashkenazy” and be right. Whatever the genre there is no question that two piano players can play the same notes and sound completely different. While curious, this is one of the things that make music so interesting. 

 Big Maceo Merriweather is one of those piano players you can spot a mile down the pike. Whether on recordings done under his own name, or his backup work with Tampa Red, Big Bill, Sonny Boy Williamson or others, there is absolutely no mistaking Big Maceo for anyone else. With his powerful left hand, usually described by biographers as “thunderous”, and his deliberate, almost march-like timing, Maceo’s playing  proclaims itself the moment you hear it. Like many great pianists, Vladamir Horowitz included, Maceo was left handed, and while he was certainly no slouch with his right hand, his left-handedness undoubtedly helped to give him the power to play the left-handed boogie patterns with such authority. He was also a big man, somewhere between six foot and six foot four and in a later interview his brother guessed him to be about 260 pounds. 

 Major Merriweather was born in 1905, one of eleven children, on a small farm about 40 miles outside of Atlanta, GA.  Out in the country, there would have been few opportunities for a poor, black child to learn to play piano. Pianos were a luxury item out of reach for most rural families black or white. A few churches might have a pump organ, but they certainly wouldn’t allow a fledgling player to try out his blues licks on it. His brother noted that while he was a member of the church, he never played in church.

 In 1920 the family moved to College Park, a mostly African-American suburb located just South of Atlanta, where Maceo’s father, Kit, took a job at a bank. The streets of College Park were named for Ivy League colleges and Harvard Avenue was the main drag. There were plenty of bars and restaurants on Harvard Avenue, along with after-hours joints, “cheat spots” and brothels on the adjoining side streets, and it’s likely that most of them had pianos. It was there that, somehow, with little or no formal training, the teen-aged Major managed learned to play piano, most likely by watching the piano players then trying out what he had just seen when they got up for a break. Many blues pianists learned this way.  

 In 1924 Major moved to Detroit, where several of his older siblings were already settled, and soon began making a name for himself playing house parties and rent parties throughout the black community. At one of these house parties he met the proprietor, an enterprising young woman named Hattie Spruel, whom he eventually married, and with whom he fathered his only child, a girl they named, interestingly, Majorette. 

 For the next fifteen years or so, Major, who by now had picked up the nickname “Maceo”, worked steadily around Detroit with the help and support of Hattie, who acted as his manager and booking agent. For a while, he supplemented his income working for the WPA and later, for Ford Motor. In 1941, Hattie decided that he was ready for bigger things and arranged for him to go to Chicago. Hattie undoubtedly had music business contacts through her promotions of blues events, and was able to hook him up first with Tampa Red, then, through Tampa, with Lester Melrose, the producer/promoter who pretty much controlled the Chicago blues scene at that time. 

 Both Tampa and Lester were immediately taken with Maceo and June 24, 1941, the two, along with bassist Ransom Knowling, recorded fourteen tracks for Bluebird Records, one of Melrose’s clients. The first six they recorded would be under Maceo’s name, the remainder, would be under Tampa’s. Included in that session was the song for which Maceo would be best known, Worried Life Blues. Worried Life, which in some ways was a reworking of Sleepy John Estes’ Someday Baby, has gone on to be one of the most often recorded blues songs of all time. It was also among the first batch of songs inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in 1983, and was placed in the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2006. More recently, it was included on Eric Clapton’s multi-platinum Unplugged album.

 Tampa Red had been one of the biggest selling, most popular blues performers since 1928, when he recorded the hugely popular song It’s Tight Like That with his then piano partner Georgia Tom Dorsey. It’s Tight Like That sold 7 million copies, making it the biggest selling blues record to date. Shortly after, following an automobile accident and the death of his wife, Dorsey had a religious conversion and left the blues completely. He went on to become the founder of modern gospel music and was the composer of Precious Lord, Take My Hand, Peace in the Valley, and dozens of other songs that make up the foundation of modern gospel music. 

 Tampa, who’s real name was either Hudson Woodbridge or Hudson Whittaker, continued with the blues, using a succession of excellent piano players including Joshua Altheimer, Black Bob Hudson and Blind John Davis. In the late 1930’s he abandoned the blues for a while, focusing on recording the pop and swing-type songs that he wrote. 

 Big Maceo was the perfect piano partner to bring Tampa back to the blues. The rapport between them was evident immediately. Perhaps it was the fact that Tampa, despite his name, was actually from Georgia himself, giving the two something in common amongst the mostly Mississippi born musicians who made up the Chicago blues scene at the time. For a few years, Tampa and Maceo, along with a bassist and drummer, were among the most popular acts in and around Chicago, personifying what was to be known as the “Bluebird Beat”, the jaunty swing-influenced sound made popular by recordings on the Bluebird label. 

 There was still another factor contributed to the success of the Tampa/Maceo combination. On Tampa Red’s earlier recordings, he played an acoustic guitar, specifically a National Tri-cone resonator guitar with a gold colored finish. Early advertising promotes Tampa as “The Man With The Golden Guitar”. Tampa was a good, but not particularly full-sounding player. He played melodies and back-up with a short, glass bottleneck, mostly on the highest two strings. Consequently, pianists had to hold back in order for Tampa’s guitar to be heard, the piano being a much louder instrument than the guitar. By the time he hooked up with Maceo, though, Tampa had switched to the electric guitar, an archtop fitted with a DeArmond pickup. This meant that Maceo could play full-out, using all his power and strength, his left-hand bass rolls propelling and driving the music along. 

 In 1942, however, wartime rationing, and a strike by the American Federation of Musicians known as the Petrillo Ban, ended recording for three years. As a result, bookings for the group became scarce, and Maceo was forced to take a job as a railroad porter, working the trip from Chicago to San Francisco. Letters home to Hattie in Detroit show him asking her for ten or twenty dollars to buy a coat or for medicine, as his hard living and hard drinking were starting to take a toll on his health. 

 1945 brought an end to the war as well as an end to the Petrillo ban, and Maceo was once again in demand. For a while he teamed up with Big Bill Broonzy, recording and touring extensively. He also backed Sonny Boy Williamson, Jazz Gillum, and made more records with Tampa Red. Once again, Maceo was “the guy” on piano in Chicago.

 Then, in the summer of 1946, the hard touring and hard drinking caught up with him. Maceo suffered a severe stroke that paralyzed his right side. He would never play the same again. A heartbreaking letter home to Hattie has him describing his attempts at rehabilitating himself, “so that I can be Big Maceo again.”

 Curiously, his stroke did not end his recording career. Apparently the success of his records owed as much to his wistful, smoky, yet expressive voice as for his piano playing. He made more records with Tampa Red, playing only the left hand part. On some records he would play the left hand part while Eddie Boyd would play the right. In 1949 he had his protégé, Little Johnny Jones, play piano while he just sang. Jones actually did a pretty good impression, though it wasn’t quite the same. 

 Eventually, with his records doing more poorly, and along with his health declining, Melrose dropped him and, with the exception of a few tracks cut in 1950 with the John Brim trio, Maceo playing left handed only, Big Maceo’s career came to an end. When Maceo died in Chicago of a heart attack in February of 1953, Hattie brought his body back to Detroit to be buried. 

 Maceo’s recording career lasted only five years with half of that leaving him idle due to the recording bans. Yet, what we have of his legacy has been long lasting. The next generation of Chicago blues pianists, Otis Spann, Sunnyland Slim, Henry Gray, Little Johnny Jones and others owed him a great debt and most were quick to acknowledge it. 

 Much of what we know of Maceo’s early life comes from interviews with Maceo’s older brother Roy Merriweather, who was a prominent pastor and community leader in Dayton, OH for over fifty years. Perhaps fittingly, Roy Merriweather’s son, Roy Merriweather, Jr. is a notable and successful jazz pianist who has recorded for Columbia, Capital and other labels. Merriweather, Jr, now in his seventies, looks nothing like his famous uncle, he’s slight of build and shorter, but in researching him for this article, one common factor appears in most writing about him; nearly every writer comments on the power of his left hand.