Follow That Byrd
How Professor Longhair got his second chance at stardom
On a summer afternoon in New Orleans, in the last house where her father lived, Pat Byrd shared memories of Henry Roeland Byrd, aka Professor Longhair (or simply “Fess”). She calls the photo-filled front room in the house on Terpsichore Street the Room of Memories.
Pat remembers skipping rope on the sidewalk when talent scouts Quint Davis and Allison Miner showed up to sign Professor Longhair up for his New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival debut. Pat, about 12 then, thought that Davis and Miner were lost hippies. “Quint was like, ‘Hey, little girl. Where can I find Henry Roeland Byrd?’” Her father was inside, afflicted by chills and fever. Nonetheless, he quickly left his sickbed when his daughter told him who’d come to see him. Byrd himself recounts his earlier, first meeting with Davis in the newly released two-DVD box, Fess Up. “[I] wasn’t going to play no more until I met Quints,” he says.
Before New Orleans piano stars Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint, Dr. John, and Huey Smith released their hits in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, Professor Longhair set the template for them and many others. From 1949 through 1964, Byrd recorded such influential classics as “Mardi Gras in New Orleans,” “Tipitina,” and “Big Chief,” but he disliked being away from home and wouldn’t promote his records through touring. Professor Longhair released only one national hit, 1950’s “Bald Head.”
“Well, I got a lot of rock in what I do,” Byrd says in Fess Up. “You notice I never play nothing straight? Anything I do, I put a little pep in it, a little bounce.”
Despite the impact Byrd’s calypso-rumba-mambo-boogie-blues-barrelhouse piano made on New Orleans music, he struggled to make a living and even stopped performing in the 1960s. But in his final decade, Professor Longhair emerged from obscurity. He became a fixture at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in the 1970s, made new recordings, toured internationally, and inspired Tiptina’s, the music venue founded by his fans. Stars such as Paul McCartney and Led Zeppelin flocked to him. This past August, Me Got Fiyo: The Professor Longhair Centennial, opened its eleven-month run at the New Orleans Jazz Museum.
Pat Byrd hopes New Orleans will erect a statue of her father and place a historical marker at the Central City address where she met Davis and Miner and her father’s career reignited.
As Byrd’s friend and fan, artist Hudson Marquez, tells it, one of his non-musical jobs, gambling, got him in serious trouble in the early ’60s. Even as Byrd’s “Mardi Gras in New Orleans” was becoming a Carnival anthem, his gigs disappeared. In 1968, Dick Allen, founder of the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane, encouraged Marquez to find Professor Longhair. Locating Byrd proved difficult. “When I asked people,” remembered Marquez, “if they knew where Henry Byrd was, where Professor Longhair was, they’d say, ‘I never seen him. I never heard of him.’” Joe Assunto, the owner of the One Stop Record Shop and Watch Records (the last label Byrd had recorded for at that point), insisted Byrd was dead, recalled Marquez.
In 1969, Marquez tracked Byrd to a Dryades Street barroom where he was dealing cards for a backroom gambling operation. Marquez overcame Byrd’s suspicion and restored him to good standing in the New Orleans Musicians Union by paying $800 in back dues and fees. Marquez also arranged for rehearsal space at the Musicians Union. One of his West Coast musician friends, Hot Tuna pianist Nick Buck, rented an electric piano for Byrd.
Others wanted to find Byrd, too. In April 1970, British music journalists Mike Leadbitter and John Broven and Flyright Records principal Robin Gosden met the pre-resurrected Professor Longhair. James LaRocca—son of Connie LaRocca, co-owner of the New Orleans label Frisco Records —drove them to Byrd’s residence on South Rampart Street. “It was a rather forbidding area in 1970,” Broven recalled. The interview was a sobering experience for Professor Longhair’s English fans. “He was down and out and very sad,” Leadbitter reported. “Neglect, frustration, and poor health had taken their toll.”
Meanwhile, Marquez, a New Orleans native who’d moved to the West Coast, hoped to get Byrd back in the studio, but he didn’t want to be Byrd’s manager. Quint Davis assumed the latter role in the early ’70s, after Jazz Fest founder George Wein had sent him in search of Professor Longhair. When Davis approached Byrd about performing again, Byrd was working at the One Stop Record Shop. He earned $1 an hour sweeping the floor, mopping the vestibule, packing, shipping, and delivering. As for performing again, Byrd says in Fess Up: “I didn’t care whether I pleased nobody or not. All I told him [Davis], I wanted my money. He said, ‘You gonna get it.’ So, he’s the one who inspired me more.”
After Byrd signed paperwork for his 1971 Jazz Fest appearance, Pat Byrd saw a change in her father. “He smiled more,” she recalled. “Nothing interfered with that joy.” During her childhood, she’d known little of her father’s music career. “Holidays he would force himself to just keep in touch with his piano,” she said. “But looking back, I can see something was missing. The stage. His audience.”
In 1971, father and daughter walked together from their house to Byrd’s Jazz Fest appearance in Congo Square. Byrd wore a suit and shoes he’d rented for $20 from a pawnshop, Marquez remembered. As Pat Byrd stood near the stage, she heard people in the swelling crowd shouting “Fess is back!” “They were flocking like ants,” she remembered. “I turned around and I looked at my daddy on the stage. He’s playing and smiling at me, as if to say, ‘You didn’t know this.’”
Marquez was on stage filming the performance. “When Fess started to play, it was like pied piper time,” he said. “Everybody at that festival came to the stage. His reception was over the top. He was really happy.”
After his show, Byrd refused offers for a ride home. He and his daughter could walk the few blocks, he said. When they stopped in a small restaurant on the way, autograph seekers came to their table. “I’m still dumbfounded,” Pat Byrd said of that day. “My dad had never explained his past years in the music culture to me.” Performing soon meant more than money to Byrd. “After I got out there and started playing then, the people started to inspire me,” he said.
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During the 1975 Carnival season, former Beatle Paul McCartney recorded his album Venus and Mars in New Orleans. He also went to see Professor Longhair perform. “He’s the greatest,” McCartney said later. “I love him.” “Somebody steered him [McCartney] up to wherever we were working and he came and listened and he enjoyed it,” Byrd said. “So, he said, ‘Now that I’ve come listen to you, why don’t you come listen to me?’ And I said, ‘Well, where are you?’ And he was making a recording down by Sea-Saint [Studios]. And the next thing I know he was sending for us to come out and play the gig for him on the Queen Mary.” McCartney booked Byrd to perform for the Venus and Mars wrap party in Long Beach, California. His MPL Communications recorded the performance and released it in 1978.
In November 1979, Byrd made his final album, Crawfish Fiesta. The sessions at Sea-Saint featured his band plus Mac Rebennack, aka Dr. John, playing guitar and providing “invaluable production assistance.” A Professor Longhair album had been a dream project for Bruce Igauler, owner of Chicago’s Alligator Records. He first heard Byrd via a 1972 compilation of his Atlantic Records singles, New Orleans Piano. “I couldn’t believe that somebody could do all that with just two hands,” Igauler said recently. “I’ve heard many people attempt to play like Fess, but even if they play all the right notes and syncopate them like Fess, it doesn’t feel like Fess.”
“Well, I got a lot of rock in what I do,” Byrd says in Fess Up. “You notice I never play nothing straight? Anything I do, I put a little pep in it, a little bounce.” Modest words from the artist whom Allen Toussaint, one of Byrd’s most accomplished followers, dubbed “our Bach of Rock.” Byrd’s daughter knows the admiration Toussaint and others have expressed for her father is genuine. “There’ll never be another Professor Longhair,” she said.
The Fess Up box set contains Stevenson Palfi’s documentary, Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together, plus 95 minutes of interview footage with Byrd, most of it previously unreleased. Fess Up is available from the Louisiana Music Factory, the New Orleans Jazz Museum, and the New Orleans Museum of Art.