I just bought a CD…yeah, with money . Crazy, huh?
but that’s not the point.
The album is of an amazing songstress, Marie MacGillis and her band, The Model Millionaires. Anyways, there isn’t much in the way of samples of her music so I thought I’d at least check youtube to see if there were any videos of her performances. Well there were just a few but in the related videos was an old, old, Jazz trumpeteer named Bunk Johnson. The video was of a song of his called “Sister Kate” and I thought, “wait… Sister Kate? That’s a song by the equally amazing Ditty Bops. I wonder if they’re the same.”
Turns out they are. The Ditty Bops drew their inspiration for this tune from Bunk Johnson.
Here’s the Ditty Bops’ “Sister Kate” from their first album, The Ditty Bops
And here is Bunk Johnson’s version from way back in the 40′s
Love it when that happens!
*edit
Turns out this thing goes even deeper than that. The song was originally titled “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate” and was an old New Orleans tune written by Clarence Williams and Armand Piron in the early 1920s. Even deeper than that, the song was believed to be inspired by an even older tune by Louis Armstrong about Kate Townsend, a murdered brothel madam. Either that or transcribed from a version performed by Anna Jones and Fats Waller.
The song has since been recorded dozens of times by a bunch of different people including The Beatles and Shel Silverstein (I didn’t even know he was a songwriter!)
I LOVE Wikipedia.
