Harry Gibson

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Harry "The Hipster" Gibson (June 27, 1915 – May 3, 1991) was a jazz pianist, singer, and songwriter.

Harry Gibson played boogie woogie and smooth jive piano while singing in an unrestrained, wild style. His musical career began in the late 1920's, playing stride piano in Dixieland jazz bands in Harlem, NYC. He remained there throughout the 30's, adding the barrelhouse boogie of the time to his repertoire, and was discovered by Fats Waller in 1939. Between 1939 and 1945, he played at various jazz clubs on 52nd Street, New York City notably the Deuces, run by Leon Enkin and Eddie Davis. He recorded such songs as "Handsome Harry, the Hipster," "I Stay Brown All Year 'Round," "Get Your Juices At The Deuces," "Stop That Dancin' Up There," and "Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine". Harry was also known for his wild piano which was insane for the year 1944, take a listen to his songs "Riot in Boogie" and "Barrelhouse Boogie" and for an example of his strange singing style "The Baby and The Pup." He wrote all his own songs, which were quite unusual and ahead of their time.

He was known in the 1940's for his unusual songs and his unique, wild singing style, as well as his intricate mixture of a hardcore boogie rhythm with ragtime, stride, and jazz piano. During this same time period, while working on Swing Street at night, he was a fellow at the prestigious Juilliard Graduate School during the day. The peak of his career was from 1939 to 1947, after which drug use led to his decline, and with the rising popularity of rock and roll among teenagers in the 1950's, older musicians were not in high demand. But in the 1960's, when Harry saw the huge success of the Beatles, he decided to switch over to rock and roll himself (not a great departure for a hard-rocking boogie pianist). He did not record from 1947 until 1986, when he made a comeback album that resulted in another album in 1989, both of which reveal his considerable musical gift. In this later period, he played hard rock, blues, bop, and novelty songs, and a few tracks where he mixed ragtime with rock and roll. See below for the link to the lyrics to his wild songs.

In his autobiography he claims to have coined the term hipster around 1940, when he started using "Harry The Hipster" as his stage name, and since there is no earlier usage of the term in written form, we might tentatively believe his claim until otherwise proven. See link to his autobiography below.

Also of note, is that he may have been the only pianist of his era, the 30's and 40's, who went on to play in full-scale rocking blues bands in the 70's and 80's. Unlike his 1940's contemporaries, who continued to play the same music for decades, (if they survived), Harry had a total metamorphosis between the 40's and the 80's, where the only thing that remained was his tendency to play hard rocking boogie woogie and ragtime, and his shtick was to sing comical songs praising drug use, almost as if he were the musical Cheech and Chong. For example, a song in 1989 about a little grass shack in Hawaii made of Maui Wowie that can be smoked as needed, replanted from the seeds, and rebuilt from the stems and leaves.

Unlike Mezz Mezzrow, who grew up white but consciously abandoned it to adopt the black music and culture as a White Negro, Harry grew up near Harlem in the South Bronx. His constant use of black jive talk was not an affectation, it was simply his uptown New York dialect. His song, "I Stay Brown All Year Round" demonstrates his confusion about the pigmentation of his own skin.

The most common reaction people make these days when seeing Gibson's 1944 soundies for the first time is that Harry Gibson was playing rock and roll, and they usually guess that he was a contemporary of Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard. People are usually quite surprised when they are told that these soundies were filmed in 1944. Gibson took the boogie woogie beat of his predecessors, but he made it frantic and wild, like a rock and roller would do in the 1950's. In retrospect, it is quite possible that Harry Gibson was the first true rock and roll pianist, preceding others by a decade. The video samples below give evidence of this.