MY SEARCH FOR TIPITINA, Part 2

Patricia Walton is Professor Longhair’s daughter, and a genuinely sweet person. We’re involved in some tee shirt business so when we met recently to restock, I asked her the question:

“What is the meaning of Tipitina? What is this song all about?”

She didn’t have an immediate answer, but said she’d find out. I implored her to NOT go on some wild goose chase; I don’t want to burden her. She ignored that, started making phone calls,even hauled herself down to the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University.

She also got in touch with New Orleans writer/broadcaster Grant Morris. According to Morris “Byrd himself has said many times and to many different people that it's named after a volcano.” Morris pointed to a 1977 Figaro interview by Bunny Matthews:

MATTHEWS: “Can you clear up the mystery of Tipitina – Where does it come from? It’s not somebody’s name, is it?"

LONGHAIR: “Oh no…that comes from way back. I was reading in the paper about this volcano exploding – I don’t know where it was…I think maybe in Hawaii – I liked it and wrote my song.”

Matthews continues: I thought he probably meant Krakatoa, so I suggested that to him as the possible source: "No," he insisted, "It was called Tipitina."

Quint Davis corroborates the volcano thing in a Gambit cover story:

“Fess told me that Tipitina was the name of an African volcano that he found in a book. I don't know if that's definitive, but it's what he told me. "

In that same Gambit story, Bunny Matthews offers another alleged source of inspiration:

“Professor Longhair had all these apocryphal stories about where the name 'Tipitina" came from. One was that his neighborhood pot dealer was Tipitina. She had no feet, just two stumps. And she would hobble out to the car to bring the weed out, tipping over. Her name was Tina, so she was Tippy Tina."

Now THAT’S an evocative mental image! And it clicks – little mama wants a dollar. If you’ll pardon the pun, this explanation has legs…The previous installment of this blog elicited this variant from reader Big D Schaibly:

“According to Billy Delle, noted New Orleans Music Historian and WWOZ show host, Fess told him directly that the song came while Fess was working at a music store in the Quarter, after his day job as a janitor for the school board. Tip-a-Tina was a young girl who was afflicted by "folidimide" and born with a birth defect that caused her to walk on tip toes. She was a street person in the Quarter and Fess would see her, and play the tune as she came by the music store to panhandle each day.”

(The drug Thalidomide was marketed from 1957 to 1961; the song "Tipitina" was composed and recorded in 1953. If indeed there was a birth defect, it could not have been from "folidimide.")

Further Internet trawling dredged up this nugget, from a commenter named “Turk” on music fan Paul Colyer’s blog:

"I lived in New Orleans, in the building that once housed that "dusty record shop" where Fess was "discovered" sweeping up. J&M Records, with the back room set up as the original (and therefore only) recording studio in New Orleans. Where Fess and the rest of the New Orleans scene invented first R&B and then Rock 'N Roll 1948-1953…One night I got Earl King up in there. He told me that "Tipitina" was really about a woman named Tina who sold reefer out of her house. People would drive up, and Tina, who'd had her feet amputated after some typically New Orleans misfortune, would "tippy-toe" up on her pegged leg points with the product. Other products and services were available to those who knew to ask. Fess alludes to each and all of them in the "nonsense" lyrics he put out in those different recordings.”

While this is all third- and fourth-hand information, there seems to be a consensus forming. The volcano story, a charming bit of apparent creative confusion, is simpler and much more palatable than the amputee pot dealer (or street person) explanation.

Picture Roy Byrd doing an interview for a magazine. He doesn’t know who’ll read it, or where it’ll end up. New Orleans is a conservative, reactionary place. He’s a cautious man, whose encounters with the law over marijuana interfered with his career in the 1950s. Twenty years later, his career resurgent, he might be reluctant to pull out that Tippy Tina story. Pressed for an explanation, he might improvise some chestnut about a volcano, on the spur of the moment.

Picture Roy Byrd, a musical and lyrical genius, whose hit song (purportedly) contains heavily-coded drug references. When young white acolytes start pestering him for an explanation, he might decide to pull their legs, throw them off the trail. He might choose to cover his tracks, and deliberately confuse the issue, a clever and timeless artistic strategy.

Maybe there really was a neighborhood character named Tina. And maybe there really was a volcano. Maybe he got the name confused, and the club could have been called Krakatoa’s. Maybe both stories are true, or neither of them. And where the hell is Loberta in all this? Is Loberta Tippy Tina? Is Tipitina, the imaginary African-or-Hawaiian volcano, a metaphor for a dynamic, alluring woman?

Still no closer to an answer, but the digging continues. The next chapter of this investigation looks at the 1953 Atlantic recording session.