Huey Long, Guitarist for Ink Spots

Published on Tuesday 16 June 2009 20:41

Born: 25 April, 1904, in Sealy, Texas. Died: 10 June, 2009, in Houston, Texas, aged 105

FRANK Davis and his Louisiana Jazz Band were booked to play at the Rice Hotel in Houston in 1925. The banjo player never showed. For Huey Long, who shined shoes outside the hotel and occasionally got onstage to announce the bands, this was the unmistakable sound of opportunity knocking. Putting down his ukulele, he ran out to a music store, got a banjo on credit and stepped into the breach.

And so began an 80-year career in jazz and popular music. For the rest of the century Long, who took up the guitar in 1933, performed with an extensive list of greats in a journey that began with Dixieland, moved into swing and jumped forward to bebop. Along the way, he spent nine months in 1945 as a guitarist and singer with the Ink Spots, the enormously popular and influential vocal quartet that paved the way for rhythm and blues and rock 'n' roll.

He was the last surviving Ink Spot from the days when the group still had some of its original members. On the extended timeline of Long's career, his tenure with the Ink Spots takes up no more than a couple of inches, but he joined the group in its heyday. In early 1945, while playing with his own trio at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street in Manhattan, he was approached by Bill Kenny, one of the earliest Ink Spots and the group's signature voice. Kenny wanted him to replace guitarist Bernie Mackey, who was filling in for Charlie Fuqua, an original member who was doing military service.

In late March Long, providing guitar accompaniment and vocal support, appeared as an Ink Spot at Detroit's Paradise Theatre. He also recorded several songs with the group, including I'm Gonna Turn Off the Teardrops, I'll Lose a Friend Tomorrow, The Sweetest Dream and Just for Me.

When Fuqua reappeared unexpectedly in October, Long was suddenly an ex-Ink Spot. But his career rolled on.

Long was born in Sealy, Texas, a farm town about 20 miles west of Houston. His brother Sam played ragtime piano, and Huey picked up the chords on his ukulele. After he finished his adventure with the Louisiana Jazz Band, a visiting aunt took him back to Chicago, intent on getting him some music lessons and starting him out in nightclubs.

In 1933 he switched to guitar to perform with Texas Guinan's Cuban Orchestra at the World's Fair in Chicago. The city was a hotbed of jazz, and Long, who developed a deft hand at constructing chordal solos, was in demand as a studio musician.

In 1935 and 1936 he recorded sessions for Decca Records with the pianist Richard M Jones's Jazz Wizards and the pianist Lil Armstrong and Her Swing Orchestra, including her signature tune, Just for a Thrill. He went on to perform and do arrangements for trumpeter Zilner Randolph's WPA Concert and Swing Band.

It was a colourful period. "If you were an entertainer in Chicago, you worked for the gangsters," he said in 2006. "After midnight they would close a club to the public for a party. Generous and friendly, they threw large bills on the stage as some sort of status symbol. When they left, you counted it, and it was always more than enough."

Fletcher Henderson hired Long to play with his orchestra at the Grand Terrace Cafe and later took him to New York, where the simmering bebop movement propelled Long into a new phase. He joined the pianist Earl Hines's orchestra and performed with emerging stars such as Billy Eckstine, Sarah Vaughan, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie before forming his own trio and then taking a detour with the Ink Spots.

After playing with the saxophonist Eddie (Lockjaw) Davis's Be-Boppers, he formed a new trio of his own and entertained American troops in Korea and Japan as part of a USO tour.

Long briefly attended Los Angeles City College in pursuit of a teaching certificate but grew homesick and returned to New York. The Ink Spots, in the meantime, had broken up, spawning a host of groups using the name, some with no connection to the original group. In the early 1960s Long formed his own version of the Ink Spots and performed with them in California for two years before returning to New York, where he set up a teaching studio in an apartment in the CBS Building. The studio developed into a small school, which he moved to Broadway and 52nd Street.

In 1996 Long returned to Houston, where in 2007 his daughter, Anita, started the Ink Spots Museum across the street from his apartment. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by two sons and seven grandchildren.

At his death Long was compiling what his daughter described as a musical dictionary, a compilation of the chord melodies he developed over the years. It helped tune out unwelcome developments in popular music.

"Music is defined as sound vibrations that are picked up by the ear," he said diplomatically in the 2006 interview. "The music of today has sound and vibrations – heavy on the rhythm."