Listening for Henry Crowder ― A Monograph on His Almost Lost Music With the Poems and Music of Henry-music

Henry Woodfin Grady Crowder (1890-1955) was born Gainesville, Georgia. He established himself as a pianist and orchestra leader in Washington, D.C in the 1910s, working alongside Russell Wooding and Duke Ellington. Drafted in 1917 while leading an orchestra at Harvey's Restaurant he was briefly chauffeur to General March. He moved to Chicago in the early 1920s, making piano rolls in 1926, later touring with Jelly Roll Morton. He recorded with violinist Eddie South's Alabamians 1927-1928. They travelled to Europe where, in Venice, Crowder and Nancy Cunard, daughter of the steamship magnate, met. They embarked on a tumultuous seven year relationship, which culminated in the production of Cunard's monumental 1934 Negro: An Anthology dedicated to Crowder. In 1930 Cunard published a folio of Crowder's piano settings to six poems by her, Samuel Beckett - who wrote specially for Crowder - and others. The music and poems of Henry-Music are reprinted here. All the songs were supposed to have been recorded but only one disc, with Cunard's "Memory Blues" aka "Boeuf sur le toit", is thought to have been released. It is included on the CD here with other Crowder recordings. In 1942 Crowder was arrested in Belgium as a civilian alien and interned in Tittmoning Castle in Germany. He returned to his once-estranged wife and son in Washington following a prisoner-of-war exchange in 1944. He visited Ezra Pound, a friend from Paris, at St. Elizabeths. Commentators have tended to regard Crowder as an adjunct to Cunard and such was probably reinforced by the posthumous publication in 1987 of his 1935 memoir As Wonderful As All That? But, as much as Cunard and Crowder helped each other, Crowder was also his own man, who made a largely hidden, thus overlooked, yet uniquely fascinating contribution to the jazz age. Listening far Henry Crowder pieces together facts, rather than conjecture, about his career in music.