"As Long As They Want Me"

The boys in Doc Evans' jazz band blew a final chord and then drifted from the stand for an intermission smoke. As the jump fans settled down to their beers, a stooped and droopy-eyed old Negro clambered up to the piano behind the chromium bar. He began a rolling boogie bass --not fast and tinny like most boogie, but low and underneath the deep, dark blues his right hand played. He played softly, staring out into the blue smoke as if he didn't care whether anyone listened. Not everyone did. But the oldtimers around Chicago's South Side knew that Jimmy Yancey was back.

Though Jimmy was playing boogie 30 years ago and could make a fair claim to being its inventor, he and his compositions had been almost forgotten, even by the jazzophiles. Jimmy had never tried to remind them. He had hit the big time before he was 15, playing the Orpheum circuit, and even a command performance before Britain's King & Queen. Then he got interested in baseball, spent his days playing with the Chicago Ail-Americans and his nights playing piano in the city's brass-spittooned bars, sometimes for drinks, sometimes for money. Gradually, he evolved his rolling bass, and taught what he knew to two young friends. Soon fans were flocking to hear Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons play. But while they made boogie famous, Jimmy remained behind in his two-room flat which shuddered when the trains went by.

By 1936, when Bob Crosby's band began playing a piece called the Yancey Special, no one knew who Yancey was. But the piece caught on, and the disc jockeys and record companies began hunting for Jimmy. They found him at the White Sox ballpark, cutting grass. He said he didn't even own a piano. Jimmy made a few records and had a brief burst of popularity, then had a stroke. His left hand stiffened up, and for a while he couldn't play at all.

Last week, with his first steady piano-playing job in 30 years, Jimmy Yancey, a month shy of 50 and all but seven teeth gone, was happy among the pink lights and mirrors. His salary is the union wage --$87.50 a week; but sometimes customers send up a free drink to him, and he thanks them kindly for it. Jimmy hopes to keep right on playing "as long as they want me." He doesn't mind what he has missed. "I'm doin' fine," says he in his slow, lazy way. "At the old bear trap they used to give me fifty a week for playin'. In 30 years I come ahead 37 bucks."

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