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“The Boogie Woogie Waltz Man”—Remembering Herschel Dwellingham

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Herschel Dwellingham, whose drumming provided the funky underpinnings for Weather Report’s third album, Sweetnighter, passed away on April 16. He was 77 years old.

I got to know Herschel while researching my book Elegant People: A History of the Band Weather Report. I interviewed him twice, and over the years we talked by telephone many times, usually initiated by Herschel calling me out of the blue. It was always fun hearing from him. One time he called to tell me about a new project he was working on. He called the band the Sweetnighters, an obvious nod to Weather Report’s album. When Herschel needed a write-up for it, I was happy to do it for him.

Write-up in Cashbox, Oct. 20, 1962.
Herschel had a long and varied career with an extensive list of credits not just for his drumming, but for songwriting, arranging, and producing as well. In fact, producing his own songs was his true passion. He got his first songwriting credit when he was sixteen years old and continued writing and producing to the end of his life. Many of his songs found an afterlife in television shows and motion pictures (e.g., “(Gonna Ride This) Whirlwind” as performed by the Escorts, which appeared in the 2020 film Don’t Look Up starring Leonardo DiCaprio).

Herschel got his start as a musician when he was just a toddler. As he told it, “My mother told me that to keep me from crying, she used to give me two wooden spoons and a pot for me to beat on just to keep me busy so she could cook.” A little later, his parents, who were school teachers, took him to a high school prom they were working at. In the band was Earl Palmer, a drummer who has been credited with helping to invent rock and roll, and who later gained fame as a member of the Wrecking Crew, a loose collection of studio musicians who played on hundreds of top 40 hits in the 1960s and 1970s.

As Herschel remembered, “Earl Palmer was playing with the Rhythm Aces [a popular band based in Herschel’s hometown of Bogalusa, Louisiana] and I watched Earl all night, standing near the stage, just watching him. When the night was over he handed me a pair of drum sticks and that started me off. To this day, I keep four or five pairs of new sticks in my bag and I given them to kids who come up to me asking about the drums.”

In addition to the drums, Hershel learned the piano and played organ in his church. His high school bandleader taught Herschel how to write and arrange music, and he began arranging for the marching band. “I did that to keep from marching,” Herschel said. “I made a deal that I would orchestrate and arrange the half time shows to keep from marching because I hated it.” Herschel also took over the drum chair in the Rhythm Aces and starting writing his own songs. At the age of sixteen he took thirty songs he had written to Joe Ruffino, who ran two New Orleans–based labels, Ric Records and Ron Records (named after his sons). A month later, Herschel heard one of his songs on the radio, “Come On and Tell Her,” sung by Benny Freeman. All told, Ruffino released ten of Dwellingham’s songs as singles.

Upon graduating from high school, Herschel moved to Boston to attend the Berklee School of Music. At Berklee, he came under the tutelage of legendary drummer and teacher Alan Dawson. Years later, Herschel said his drumming style was a combination of his Louisiana roots and the rudiments that Dawson taught. He and Dawson would often trade licks in a Berklee practice room, and Herschel would pick up gigs substituting for Dawson at local jazz gigs. He was also part of a band that included guitarist John Abercrombie, Mark Levine on trombone, and Carl Schroeder on piano. They played a mixture of dance jazz, R&B, and funk.

Herschel leading the house band at the Sugar Shack.
While Herschel was studying with Dawson, the Sugar Shack opened in downtown Boston. It quickly became Boston’s one and only place to hear the top R&B, soul and funk acts of the day. After completing his studies at Berklee, Dwellingham took over the house band at the Sugar Shack, leading a 13-piece orchestra and backing many of the name acts that came through, including Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and Smokey Robinson, just to name a few. Herschel also did sessions for local R&B acts. There’s no question he was an important part of Boston’s Black music scene in the late-sixties and early-seventies. According to Herschel, he became known as “Boston’s Number One Soul Man.”

Meanwhile, his real goal was to write and produce his own songs with the goal of achieving a national hit that could put him over the top. He did his own arranging, hired the musicians, and foot the bill for his own sessions, then either shopped the tapes to the record companies or put them out himself on My Record, a label he and his wife Alva started with Skippy White, a Boston disc jockey who also owned several record stores in the area. The first 45 he released on My Record was “Young Girl,” featuring vocalist Frank Lynch, who came under Dwellingham’s mentorship and sang in his band. Tragically, Lynch’s life was cut short when he was shot and killed by a police officer. That story was remembered in a recent Boston magazine piece which you can read here.

In 1971 Herschel took a song to Black Rock, CBS’s corporate headquarters in Manhattan. There he met Bob Devere, who was on Columbia Record’s Artists & Repertoire staff as manager of independent projects. In this role, Devere purchased the masters of regional hits that he thought could go national, which Columbia then put out on a subsidiary label, Date Records.

As Herschel remembered it, Devere didn’t really want to give him any time. “He said he didn’t have time to hear it. I said, ‘Well, take it in back, listen to it, and come back. We don’t have to go in.’” So Devere took Herschel’s tape back to his office while Dwellingham and his wife Alva waited in the lobby. When Devere returned, it was with a different attitude. He offered Herschel $15,000 for the master tapes, the only catch being that he wanted to re-record the vocal part using O.C. Smith, who a few years earlier had had a gold record with “Little Green Apples.” But Herschel wasn’t interested in giving the song to another vocalist and he wound up selling it to RCA instead.

A year and a half later, Devere was managing Weather Report and Joe Zawinul tasked him with finding a funky drummer for their upcoming recording session, and he thought of some R&B 45s that had come through his distributorship with the name “H. Dwellingham” on the center label. By then, Devere had forgotten all about Dwellingham’s visit, and even his name. After checking around for “H. Dwellingham,” he found Herschel in Boston and asked about the drummer on those tracks. Surprised to learn that Herschel played the drums in addition to writing the songs, Devere invited him to the Sweetnighter session. My book goes into great detail regarding the making of the album, so I won’t repeat it here. However, one thing I didn’t include in the book was Herschel’s reaction to Joe’s claim that he spent hours teaching the drummers the beat to “Boogie Woogie Waltz” and “125h Street Congress.”

“He’s full of shit,” Herschel said, laughing. “Everybody who knows me knows I was playing those beats even in my Boston days. It’s like a New Orleans drum style mixed with Alan Dawson’s jazz sensibility. If you hear the records I played on in Boston before Zawinul, you’d hear the same thing. Those beats are a combination of my Louisiana roots and George Stone’s Stick Control book as Alan Dawson taught it. I started incorporating his teaching in my playing way before Zawinul was ever in sight. That’s where that came from. Joe Zawinul didn’t teach none of us anything, especially me. I didn’t play the song more than two or three times, anyway. There wasn’t a live rehearsal—everything was done in the studio. So I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

With Eric Gravatt also in the studio for the Sweetnighter sessions, there’s been some confusion as to who played drums on what. According to Herschel, he was the sole drummer on “Boogie Woogie Waltz” and “125th Street Congress,” and he and Gravatt both played on “Manolete” (“Eric’s on the beginning of that with me”) and “Non-Stop Home.” “Non-Stop Home” was his favorite. “I liked that round jazz groove,” he told me. “That’s my ringtone for my phone. That’s what I use for my alarm.” (laughs)

“And then Zawinul wanted the tempo to speed up and that was a good finish—faster and faster and faster, intentionally.” As a session player, this wasn’t what you would normally do. “No, it wasn’t,” Hershel agreed. “I’ll tell you, bass players or keyboard players that push the tempo, I don’t play with them anymore. I don’t get high. I don’t smoke, I don’t drink. I don’t do none of that because I don’t want to mess with my built-in metronome. That’s what made me a great session player. I’ve never done anything with a click track unless it was a movie score I was playing. But all the records I played never had a click track.”

Shortly after the Sweetnighter sessions in February 1973, Herschel moved to New York City where he became an in-demand session drummer working with the likes of REO Speedwagon and Peter Nero. He also worked in the Broadway pit bands of many high-profile musicals. Aside from Sweetnighter, his best-known session work is probably Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s In the Cradle,” a gig he got from Paul Leka, who co-owned Connecticut Recording Studio where Sweetnighter was recorded several months earlier. After spending a couple of decades in New York, Herschel returned to Bogalosa where he set up his own recording studio and production company.

Through it all, Sweetnighter seems to be the thing Herschel is best known for, and people mentioned it to him for years to come. “That one little album must have put me on the map,” he told me. “Even in Europe. I was in Frankfort and I did master classes and private teaching—it was just unbelievable. My wife and my friends say I really don’t realize what I did and how important to drumming my playing was. I’m just a country boy who doesn’t think nothing about that. To me, I was just trying to make money to feed a wife and three little kids. That’s what I was doing. I didn’t think I was making history or fame or anything. Just trying to keep money in the house.”

At one point, Herschel was in New York and noticed that Zawinul was there, too. “He was in town at the Blue Note and I was playing the same night he was playing, so I couldn’t get there. So I called the club and asked for Zawinul. They said he’s on stage; call back in ten minutes. I called back and said, ‘Tell Joe Zawinul that Herschel Dwellingham is on the phone.’ I thought, this guy isn’t going to remember who the hell I am, but he came to the phone and said, ‘The Boogie Woogie Waltz man!’ I said, ‘You remember me?’ He said, ‘Man, are you kidding?! There wouldn’t be no Weather Report if it wasn’t for you.’ That’s what he called me, ‘The Boogie Woogie Waltz Man.'”

I will miss Herschel. He was a good man. Rest in peace.

Elegant People Excerpt at Wax Poetics

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The good folks at Wax Poetics have an excerpt of my book Elegant People: A History of the Band Weather Report up on their website right now. You can view it here. The excerpt I chose deals with the making of Weather Report’s third album Sweetnighter. It was the beginning of the transition to Weather Report’s mature style, exemplified by the album’s two dominant tracks, “Boogie Woogie Waltz” and “125th Street Congress.” (The book chapter on Sweetnighter delves into many other aspects of that album as well as the changes that happened to the live band in the aftermath.)

It is appropriate that Wax Poetics host this excerpt. The editor Brian Digenti gave me my first opportunity to interview Joe Zawinul at his home in Malibu in 2003. That led to the publication of my article about Joe in Wax Poetics issue 9. This in turn planted the seeds for what eventually became my book many years later. If it hadn’t been for Brian, I don’t know that I would have pursued a book at all.

At its core, Wax Poetics is rooted in hip-hop, a music whose antecedents are the soul, jazz, funk, and disco of the sixties and seventies; hence, the nexus to Joe Zawinul and Weather Report. At least initially, hip-hop was constructed by sampling bits and pieces of old records—a horn stab, a drum beat, or a bassline—a measure here, a measure there. Once sampled, these fragments could then be looped and repeated, tempo- or pitch-shifted, and layered with other sounds likewise captured to build up an entirely new musical work.

Since records were the raw materials in this process, it was important to find the ones that contained the best material. This gave rise to the evocative term cratedigger, which describes someone who searches for rare vinyl in musty used record stores, garage sales, and flea markets. The true experts at the game develope an encyclopedic knowledge of the producers, labels, and musicians of yore, and when they find a good one, they collect anything he or she has done. As one prominent hip-hop producer noted, “If someone is great, I’ll follow everything they do. There’s no way they can hit something great one time and not do it again.” Weather Report, it turns out, was something great. Its records are documented to have shown up in 165 hip-hop titles as of this writing.

Joe had mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, he was all for making music this way. Regarding sampling, he told me, “Why not? Let people express themselves. These kinds of things are like an instrument. It’s like a language.” But he was opposed to the appropriation of his work without compensation. A 1992 Down Beat interview described Joe as “raging” as he complained about rappers “borrowing” portions of Weather Report tunes without permission. “If you steal something, steal it, and play it yourself. In the case of sampling, some type of money should be paid depending on what is being used,” he said.

Earlier that same year, he also addressed the topic in Music Technology magazine. “People do this [extract samples] on my music a lot. You know what I think about it? I think it’s good, but it’s only good if the original people (a) get credit for it, and (b) get paid for it. That’s only fair.” He cited one use of “125th Street Congress” in which the group’s management contacted him for permission, and the end result was that Joe and the group shared publishing, and he got credited on the record. “This is okay with me, it’s fine,” he said.

But in another example—a track by MC 900ft Jesus called “Truth Is Out of Style” that uses sixteen bars of “Cucumber Slumber” throughout—he complained, “They never contacted me. See, this to me is illegal. Herbie Hancock got me with this guy who is one of the greatest detectives of things like that. He got Herbie back $175,000 for one song. I mean, this is serious money being made. Some of these groups are getting No. 1 hit records using your ideas as a fundament.” (Listening to the track, you can see why Joe would be upset, as “Cucumber Slumber” provides the basis of the rhythm for the entire tune.)

Among the 165 samples of Weather Report tunes listed at whosampled.com are eight uses of “125th Street Congress.” This led Joe to boldly claim that he had invented the first hip-hop beat in 1973. An exaggeration? Of course! But that didn’t stop Joe from repeating the claim, including to me. You can read more about that in my book.

Andrew Nathaniel White III, 1942–2020

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Andrew White

Andrew White—saxophonist, oboist, bassist, educator and scholar—passed away on Wednesday, November 11. He was 78 years old. White is best known to Weather Report fans for playing electric bass on Weather Report’s third album, Sweetnighter. He also played English horn on the band’s previous LP, I Sing the Body Electric.

When I think of Andrew White, the first phrase that comes to mind is “one of a kind.” There truly was no one quite like him in the jazz world, if not the world at large.

For nearly fifty years he ran Andrew’s Music from the same unassuming house in Washington, D.C. He never entered the computer age, never had an email address, and didn’t use a cell phone. If you wanted to contact him, you either had to call his home (which invariably resulted in getting his answer machine, one of his few nods to the modern age), or you had to write him a letter and send it via postal mail.

Whenever I wrote him, I addressed him as:

Mr. Andrew White
President, executive producer, producer, editor, collaborator, transcriber, copyist, recording supervisor, arranger, accountant, publicist, typist, engineer, composer, performer, author, manager, booking agent, package handler, mail boy and janitor

I got these titles from his books. It’s how he described the various roles he undertook while running the one-man shop that he used to produce and sell his own records and publications. He billed himself as “the most voluminously self-published artist in the history of the music business (so I’ve been told),” and his catalog listed thousands of items for sale from Andrew’s Music.

White was recruited by Joe and Wayne to play electric bass on Sweetnighter because Joe had seen him with the Fifth Dimension on television. Zawinul thought White could provide the funky underpinnings that he wanted for Weather Report’s new music. Before the Fifth Dimension, White played bass in Stevie Wonder’s band. These gigs paid well, and they bankrolled his other activities, including making his own records and faithfully transcribing hundreds of John Coltrane solos.

He also sold a transcription of his bass part on “125th Street Congress.” “That’s one of my biggest bass transcriptions in terms of sales,” he told me in 2017. “And every time Columbia puts that record out, people look on there to see who the bass player is, and it’s me. And then they start calling me. And I say, well, if you want to play like me, you buy that transcription. I’ve been selling that transcription for thirty years.”

White was a music scholar, graduating cum laude from Howard University in 1964 with a major in music theory and a minor in the oboe. He continued his academic career at the Paris Conservatory of Music, Dartmouth College, and the State University of New York, and became the principal oboist for the American Ballet Theatre Orchestra in 1968. But he also had a bawdy sense of humor that was unfiltered by the norms of polite society. One of the forty-odd LPs he self-produced was Far Out Flatulence: A Concerto for Flatulaphone, which consists of 56 minutes of White farting into a microphone.

While jazz was White’s primary love, he was never fully accepted as a jazz artist of stature. In a 2019 Jazz Times profile, White said, “My whole career started out, even in 1960 when I came to Washington, with a severe handicap, which is, I was told very early on that I had no commercial viability,” he says. “My saxophone sound has too much resonance in it, and I was told it would not register well on recording tape, so I couldn’t make good records-and they wouldn’t even know what to do with the records anyway. So I’ve been off in the corner ever since. But nobody ever said I couldn’t play.

“Nobody was knockin’ on my door, so I knocked on my own door, because I had the resources from [professionally performing] rock ‘n’ roll. There are other fellas in my ilk like Coltrane and Eric Dolphy and Ornette [Coleman], they probably didn’t have the resources to do it themselves, and if they did who knows what we could have had from those cats, because they were working under what they call professional supervision. I’ve done all this myself, so I’ve never had anyone tell me what won’t sell,” he laughs in his deep, distinctive guffaw. “I put it all out myself and it’s done well for me, but then I’m not ambitious either. I’m happy with the sales I get, which wouldn’t impress somebody else who would tell me what won’t sell and who probably wouldn’t put it on the record. And who knows how much music that Coltrane had, and all those cats, who never got to even play it in the studio because somebody told them, ‘Well, we don’t need this.’

“I was considered an oddball just like they were. I think Coltrane and Eric and Ornette, to a lesser degree, they didn’t have so much resonance in their sound that it wouldn’t register well on tape.”

If that lack of acceptance hurt Andrew, you wouldn’t know it by talking to him. He was a cheerful man with a big, hearty laugh. He conducted himself with the satisfaction of having done things on his own terms. I will miss him.

Herschel Dwellingham’s Soul Bass

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Soul Bass Album Cover
Fans of Weather Report’s Sweetnighter album know the name Herschel Dwellingham. He’s the drummer that brought the funk. A few years ago I wrote a post updating readers about Herschel’s current activities. Now he has produced a new album called Soul Bass, utilizing his Sweetnighters Band. As the band’s name suggests, the inspiration comes from his experience playing on Sweetnighter. But Soul Bass is a very different kind of album, one that highlights Herschel’s love of R&B and his own writing and arranging. In addition to Zawinul classics such as “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” and “Boogie Woogie Waltz,” as well as Wayne’s tune, “Palladiium,” you’ll find a bunch of Herschel’s original material on Soul Bass, some of it dating back to his days before Sweetnighter when he was a fixture in Boston’s R&B scene.

The Sweetnighters BandThe Sweetnighters band on the last day of recording at Studio In The Country, Bogalusa, Louisiana.

Herschel asked me to write the liner notes for Soul Bass, which I was happy to do. I have reproduced them below. You can find the album itself on Apple iTunes. You can also find the tunes on YouTube, and I believe a CD is in the works.

In February 1973, Herschel Dwellingham got a call from Bob Devere, a producer at Columbia Records, inviting him to a recording session. This wasn’t unusual–Herschel was doing a lot of sessions in those days–but when he arrived at Connecticut Recording Studio a few days later, he realized that this one would be different. For in the studio were legendary jazz musicians Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter, along with the rest of their band, Weather Report.
Upon seeing them, Herschel’s first thought was, “These guys want to play with me?” At the time, Weather Report was an avant-garde jazz band, whereas Dwellingham was known for his R&B grooves. It seemed like an odd pairing.

But unbeknownst to Herschel, his sound was exactly what Zawinul was looking for and together they spent several days recording Weather Report’s third record, Sweetnighter. With Dwellingham providing the funky underpinnings the album sold over 300,000 copies and proved to be the turning point in Weather Report’s fortunes. Years later, Joe would greet his old friend as “the Boogie Woogie Waltz man,” a reference to the album’s best known track. “There wouldn’t be Weather Report if it wasn’t for you,” Zawinul would say.

Forty some odd years later, Herschel had a dream in which Zawinul, who died in 2007, urged him to start a new group dedicated to performing some of Joe’s old tunes, as well as showcasing his own writing. In the past, such dreams had led to some of Dwellingham’s most successful projects, so this was something to take seriously. In response, he assembled a topnotch thirteen-piece band populated by many of his favorite musicians, some of whom he’s known for decades, and augmented them with a full string section and guest vocalists. Together they recorded Soul Bass, an album consisting of two of Zawinul’s best-known pieces, one of Wayne Shorter’s, and a clutch of Dwellingham originals, all dressed in luxurious string and horn arrangements and tasty grooves.

The leadoff track is “Big Girl,” the first of two Dwellingham-penned instrumentals. Listeners who know Herschel only from his drumming would be unaware that his real passion is writing and arranging his own music—something he’s done since high school. This tune dates back to Herschel’s college days and features a fine tenor sax solo by multi-instrumentalist Ed Pazant and the trumpet work of Cullen Knight. Both are among Herschel’s oldest musical associates. Pazant died not long after this recording, and Herschel has dedicated this album to him and Zawinul.

“Boogie Woogie Waltz” was the centerpiece of Weather Report’s Sweetnighter album–a thirteen-minute groove with a lot of improvising around a handful of melodic themes. Dwellingham’s version is more to the point, expanding the orchestration behind the melodies and providing another platform for Pazant, this time on soprano sax. As with the Weather Report version, Herschel grounds the tune by rapping out every beat on his snare drum, while his bass drum never deviates from emphasizing the and-one.

The soulful ballad, “Cold Spot,” features vocalist Marlena Lady Black Lace, formerly known as Molly Holt of the Rascals. Her musical association with Dwellingham goes back many years and this tune has long been among their favorites. The lyrics explore the heartache of unrequited love, and Marlena delivers an emotive performance worthy of the tune’s message, emphasized by the sustained tones of Tony “Strat” Thomas’ electric guitar.

“Flex-a-ble” is Dwellingham’s take on soul-meets-rap. With its chromatic melodies and deliberate rhythm, it sounds as if it could be at home in a 1960s secret agent movie. But just as listeners get comfortable with that vibe, into the mix comes the rapping of Kenyell Brown. The point, Dwellingham says, is that you can’t be rigid in life and in love. Sometimes you have to compromise and learn to be flexible.

Joe Zawinul’s tune, “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” was a surprise instrumental hit for Cannonball Adderley in 1967. It quickly rose to number eleven on the Billboard pop chart and within weeks two vocal versions, each with different lyrics, were also released. At one point, all three of them occupied spots on the R&B singles chart. Here Dwellingham fashions it as an R&B powerhouse, with full-throated horns and a vocal chorus, and after Michael Lemmler’s Hammond B-3 intro, the band hits a toe-tapping groove behind Beverly Crosby’s stirring vocal. An added bonus is the baritone sax solo played by Roger Lewis, a founding member of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band.

“Palladium” is Dwellingham’s nod to Zawinul’s musical partner, Wayne Shorter. It originally appeared on Weather Report’s 1977 album, Heavy Weather, which also includes “Birdland,” Joe’s well-known ode to the famous New York City jazz club of the same name. “Palladium” is its counterpart, named after the Palladium Ballroom, which was located just down the street from Birdland. In the 1950s it was the epicenter of the mambo craze that took the country by storm, and Wayne spent many evenings there as a young man, dancing to the likes of Tito Puente, Tito Rodríguez, and Machito. Dwellingham’s arrangement lends the tune an easy going Latin feel. Dig the conga work of Kahlil Kwame Bell.

“Soul Bass” is another Dwellingham instrumental, with fine solos by Ed Pazant on flute and Cullen Knight on trumpet. The tune is based on a catchy drum-and-bass groove that Herschel improvised in his home studio. He wrote the melody and chart the day before the rest of the musicians arrived for the recording session. As with all of these tunes, Dave Ellis is rock solid holding down the bottom on electric bass.

Closing out this collection is the ultra funky “What I Got, I Got,” a throwback to Herschel’s Boston days when he led the house band at the Sugar Shack, then the city’s biggest and best soul venue. Dwellingham originally recorded this tune in 1971, with lyrics written and sung by Maurice Rice. Here Eli “Paperboy” Reed delivers a vocal straight out of that era, while “Strat” Thomas wraps a searing guitar solo around the melody. This is Boston soul, Dwellingham style.

Decades after its release, Sweetnighter continues to have a lasting impact on Dwellingham. Numerous hip-hop artists have sampled it, and Joe Zawinul went so far as to say it contains the first hip-hop beat.

“That one album put me on the map,” Herschel says. “My wife and my friends say I really don’t realize what I did and how important to drumming my playing was. I’m just a country boy who doesn’t think nothin’ about that. To me, I was just trying to make money to feed a wife and three little kids. That’s what I was doing. I didn’t think I was making history or anything. I was just trying to keep money in the house.”

It’s safe to say that Herschel did more than that. And now Soul Bass gives us a broader taste of his musical range—his love of soul and R&B, and his affinity for arranging for large ensembles. Let’s hope there’s a sequel.