In 1936 Chick Webb, whose very popular band featured a young Ella Fitzgerald as vocalist, hired a young musician from Brinkley, Arkansas to play lead alto in his saxophone section. His name was Louis Jordan. It wasn’t long before he was singing duets with Ella and had his own featured numbers as well. In 1938, Jordan was fired by Webb for trying to recruit Fitzgerald into his own band. He immediately formed a band with the unique gimmick of a pair of timpani. Originally only four members, it soon expanded to five and the band was billed as Louis Jordan and the Tympany Five (the misspelling of timpani was intentional). Even though the band eventually dropped the timpani and expanded to more members, through the years it was always billed as the Tympany Five.

By 1942, Jordan had melded the sound of boogie woogie piano, which had achieved a significant level of popularity, with swing music and pioneered a style we now call jump blues. The combination of humorous lyrics and an infectious shuffle beat, along with his searing sax paved the way for the eventual evolution into rock ‘n’ roll and spawned a multitude of imitators. The big sound he got on record presaged the end of the big band era when artists realized that they didn’t need the expense of a large band to create a big sound.

Over the next decade he was indisputably the most popular and influential black musical artist. Jordan had eighteen number one hits on the R&B charts that spent a total of 113 weeks at the top of the charts – more than any artist in chart history. Fifty-four records made the top ten including four duets with Ella Fitzgerald. He also had nine hits that made it into the top ten on the white pop charts, which was unprecedented for the time. Hits such as “Caldonia,” “Five Guys Named Moe,” “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby,” “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens” and “Saturday Night Fish Fry” to name just a few, are firmly entrenched in the canon of American music.

By the mid-1950s the heavier back beat of rock ‘n’ roll had made Jordan’s boogie swing seem outdated and he slipped into obscurity. Jordan passed away at the age of 66 in 1975. His legacy, however, endures. He was posthumously inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, named an American Music Master, honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and in 2008 the US Postal Service released a Louis Jordan stamp. Louis Jordan – a pioneer of American music.