Fats Waller’s 1941 recording of “Honeysuckle Rose” was billed on the RCA Bluebird label as “à la Bach, à la Beethoven, à la Brahms, à la Waller.” Only Fats could bring off such a tour de force of keyboard lineage in 3:23. It leads off this YouTube pairing of Waller and a 1951 version by Art Tatum, who’s pictured in the frame. Waller’s is virtuosic, languid, and tantalizing, and even without the song’s risque lyric by Andy Razaf, the “honey fairly drips” from the ivories.
The Count Basie Orchestra’s premiere recording session in 1937 began with “Honeysuckle Rose,” and it made for an auspicious mdebut. Though he and Waller were both born in 1904, Basie “sat at the feet” of the keyboard master when Waller played the pipe organ at the Lincoln Theater in NYC in the early ’20s, Unlike Tatum, Basie went on to create a minimalist art of the virtuoso stride piano style that Waller exemplified. Here’s a 1975 rendition by Basie and tenor legend Zoot Sims.
To borrow a famous Basieism, I’ll add a “one more once” for “Honeysuckle Rose” courtesy of Anita O’Day. In the singer’s autobiography, High Times, Hard Times, she said that her 1955 recording elicited a note from lyricist Andy Razaf. “He wrote to tell me it was his favorite recording of the number. He was especially high on my phrasing, elongating the first syllable of ‘Honnnnnnn—eee’,” She added that she dug Joe Mondragon’s bass accompaniment on the original ANITA album, while here in Sweden the pressure’s on Roman Dylag. Listen for Anita mimicking a Swedish accent as she sings, “Don’t buy sugar, You just have to touch my cup.”
Roosevelt Sykes, who called himself “The Honeydripper,” recorded “Honeysuckle Rose” in 1945, and it was still in his book for this performance at Webster College in St. Louis in 1974. Sykes says he had to play a little of everything, blues, boogie woogie, jazz, waltzes, and not just his own material, in order to keep the crowds coming back through the six decades of his career.