Just Kids
Posting a video of ten-year-old Gabriella Wilson on the Today Show the other day got me thinking about child prodigies. Not so much preternaturally gifted children like Frank “Sugar Chile” Robinson, or the narrator of Percival Everett’s Glyph, but preternaturally gifted children who grew up to be artists but had also been captured doing incredible (or, at least, pretty cool things) at incredible ages. Here’s Billy Preston, for instance, performing (with Nat “King” Cole) at the age of eleven; seven-year-old Sammy Davis, Jr., in the 1933 film “Rufus Jones for President”; and Brenda Lee (b. 1944) performing in 1957 as Little Miss Dynamite:
Here’s “Rufus Jones for President” in its 22-minute entirety:
Here’s Buddy Rich, performing at the age of twelve in 1929, in a lost Vitaphone film, as “Traps, the Drum Wonder.” (For better or worse, that’s Mel Torme talking over his drumming,)
And here’s Olu Dara, talking about his son Nas:
"I started him on trumpet at 3 or 4. He was a little phenom, playing on stoops in the neighborhood. I never gave him lessons—he had a natural knack for musical instruments—but his lip swelled up, and I told him to chill out until he got to be 7 or 8. He cried, hard, but by the time he was 7 and we'd moved to Queensbridge, he'd lost interest.”
Here are the Bee Gees in 1960, Jimmy Page in 1957, Ricky Scaggs in 1961, and Michael Jackson’s audition video for Motown:
Switching to color now: Janet Jackson’s TV debut; Miley Cyrus auditioning for Hannah Montana;one more by H.E.R.; and fourteen-year-old Marty Stuart with Lester Flatt’s band, on The Porter Wagoner sho:.
NB: Marty Stuart was one of the bright lights of Ken Burns’s Country film. I had no idea—never took the guy seriously—but this, this, this, this, this, and this give a sense of his mastery of many things. Who knows, Stuart might have ended up playing with Cowboy Charlie—a prodigy who started performing at two, on his family’s radio program in Shanandoah, Iowa:
But then, Charlie took left turn and ended up playing bass in Ornette Coleman’s Quartet.
Sticking with Country for a moment, here’s Dolly Parton, who wrote “Puppy Love” at the age of 11 but didn’t record it ‘till she was 13:
A year earlier, in 1958, Scott Walker (née Engel) had recorded a song written by Rod McKuen and Henry Mancini:
In 1960, Steve Marriott played the Artful Dodger in the original production of Oliver!
Back to 1958: “All Night Long” may or may not be the first recording Lou Reed (b. 1942) ever made.
Personally, I don’t hear it. But this is definitely Lou Reed’s band, the Jades. (Although, "the Jades wasn't a band,” Reed explained. “It was just one guitar and two other guys singing. I was in the background. I wrote the stuff, I didn't sing it. We would play shopping malls and some really bad violent places. I was always, like, tremendously underage, which was pretty cool.")
Here’s Reed singing and sounding very much like Lou Reed, in 1962 (aging out of our age range right now, but it’s beautiful, so here it is):
And Reed two years later, as the Beechnuts—one of those fake Pickwick bands he was “in” just before the Velvets formed:
Now that we’re really outside of our age range, might as well mention Alex Chilton, who was sixteen when he sung “The Letter”:
Aretha Franklin was a bit younger—fourteen or fifteen—when she made her first recordings for J-V-B records (billed as “Aretha Franklin, daughter of C.L. Franklin, Pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church, Detroit, Mich.”) But she’d been performing with her dad in Detroit and out on the road since she was ten or twelve, or just a bit older or younger (accounts vary). Here she is in 1956:
Here’s Sly Stone, in 1952, singing with the first of his family groups:
Finally, Swamp Dogg’s first record, “HTD Blues,” from 1954:
‘Now, I know I take my whiskey/and sometimes get carried away / I’m over 21 years old/so you ain’t got a darned thing to say.’
Actually, he was 12. Here’s he is 65 years down the line:
Swamp Dogg’s new album, Sorry You Couldn’t Make It, came out in March; he was scheduled play the Apollo with his old friend John Prine earlier his month. Out of all the concerts I had tickets for, that might be the one I was looking forward to most.
NB: Thanks to Ted Barron to thank for the Brenda Lee h/t, and Chris O’Leary and David Brendel (who looks a bit like me from behind) for Scott Walker, Brenda Lee, and Charlie Haden. —Alex A.
