Dave Bartholomew. Recognize, yo!

In 1949 Lew Chudd, the head of Imperial Records, signed Dave Bartholomew to a recording and production contract. Little did they know that they were setting in motion one of the most crucial developments in the history of rock and roll.\nUnfortunately, little does anyone else know. That's because Dave Bartholomew is one of the most overlooked, underappreciated geniuses of American popular music. As a bandleader and producer, Bartholomew was the architect of the New Orleans sound of the 1950s, a sound that was a key ingredient of the heady stew that was early rock and roll. \nBartholomew and his band; Frank Fields on bass, Alvin "Red" Taylor on baritone sax, Lee Allen on tenor sax, Ernest McLean on guitar, Bartholomew himself on trumpet and the legendary Earl Palmer on drums formed one of the great studio crews in history. Few backing groups -- maybe the Motown house band, maybe Booker T. and the MGs -- had as big an impact on the course of music. They inherited R&B tradition established by Louis Jordan and extended it into the modern rock era.\nBartholomew and the band slipped easily from laidback boogie woogie into uptempo jump blues. They provided support on now-classic rock and roll cuts like Fats Domino's "Ain't It a Shame," Shirley and Lee's "Let the Good Times Roll" and Smiley Lewis' "I Hear You Knocking." They could also step out on their own and commit some of their own rollicking jump blues to wax.\nFinding Bartholomew's stuff on CD is fairly easy -- just pick up a Fats Domino or Smiley Lewis best-of or any decent collection of New Orleans rock and roll classics (I recommend "Highlights from Crescent City Soul: The Sound of New Orleans, 1947-1974," a collection culled by EMI for the 1996 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival).\nBut to really get a flavor for what Bartholomew was capable of, hunt down The Genius of Dave Bartholomew, a two-CD collection of vintage Imperial sides compiled for EMI's "Legends of Rock 'n' Roll" series. I was lucky enough to come across it while browsing the Tower Records outlet in "N'Awlins" about 10 years ago. It's a diamond in the rough and definitely worth the time, effort and money it takes to find it.\nIn addition to standout tracks by Fats, Shirley and Lee and Smiley, the two-disc collection contains classic cuts by such R&B pioneers as Joe Turner, T-Bone Walker, Chris Kenner and Roy Brown. The discs are crammed with vibrant songs by solo singers (Tommy Ridgley's "Shrewsbury Blues," Jewel King's "3 x 7 = 21," Earl King's "Come On" and Berna-Dean's "I Walk in My Sleep") and vocal groups (the Hawks' sweet "Can't See for Lookin'," the Bees' lewd "Toy Bell" and the Spiders' perfectly-crafted classic "Withcraft").\nBut for me, the collection's ultimate highlight is the first song on the second disc, "Jump Children" by Bartholomew himself. Over a frenetic jump-blues beat, Bartholomew issues rapid-fire exhortations to boogie: "Well I'm goin' to a party across the tracks/ It's a hole in the wall, people call it a crack/ Do you want to jump children?" The song, co-written by Bartholomew and Domino, manages, in less than two and a half minutes, to embody the spirit and soul of New Orleans R&B. Unfortunately, the two-disc set does not contain another one of my favorite Bartholomew solo shots, "The Monkey," in which a monkey, citing all injustice, violence, waste, crime and cruelty perpetrated by the humans, tells his peers that humans could never have evolved from their noble species. "Here's another thing a monkey won't do/ Go out at night and get on a stew/ Or use a gun, a club or a knife/ To take another monkey's life/ Yes, man, he descended, the worthless bum/ But my brothers, from us he did not come/ The monkey speaks his mind." Underpinned by a throbbing bass track and biting, repetitive guitar chords, the song is one of the first -- and best -- examples of social commentary in rock and roll.\nAnd that's crucial, because the heart and soul of New Orleans is, in many ways, the heart and soul of rock music. And without Dave Bartholomew, we wouldn't have had New Orleans R&B and therefore, we wouldn't have rock and roll as we know it today.