Doin’ the Hambone

Last night captivated by a 1954 record by “Little Booker” called “Doing the Hambone.”
“Doin’ the Hambone” is kin to another bizarre record, Boo Zoo Chavis’ 1955 single “Paper in My Shoe.” I’ve read that Paper sold over 100,000 copies, which in 1955 meant huge regional hit. This amazes me, because nothing is right about Paper in My Shoe. The instruments are all out of tune, out of time, off the beat. The record careens through the Lake Charles night for a few minutes, starting and stopping, propelled by Boo’s push-button accordion, and then it’s gone. Except that everything about Paper in My Shoe is right. It’s a full catastrophe, raw and real. One hundred thousand Cajuns could certainly be wrong, but not about this.

Hambone is cut from the same cloth. The technical playing of the instruments is better – after all, at the piano is a boy who would later teach Dr. John to play piano – but the performance is no better than solid but sloppy. Booker doesn’t even sound all of his 14 years on the vocal. The actual recording is murky and poor.

But the beat… The liner notes of my re-issue of the Imperial Records LP Various New Orleans Rarities say this beat was produced by some unknown musician slapping an empty case of Dixie beer. I’ve got no way to verify this. No reason to doubt it either and it makes for a great image. That beat is not Earl Palmer’s beat. That beat, if you can even call it a beat, is all over the place. It sounds like hollow bones and is completely entrancing and it ties the whole damn record together.

See, you can hear a place in this record. That place is New Orleans, 1954; and it’s the space between the notes and the instruments and the dudes playing them and the box beater, between the walls of the studio, between the New Orleans inside the studio and the New Orleans outside the studio. It’s real and it’s authentic and it rolls and tumbles down the low side of the road into the heart of the weird and wild American night.