Fats Waller

Fats Waller (born May 21, 1904, New York City, New York, U.S.—died December 15, 1943, Kansas City, Missouri, U.S.) was an American pianist and composer who was one of the few outstanding jazz musicians to win wide commercial fame, though this was achieved at a cost of obscuring his purely musical ability under a cloak of broad comedy. He contributed several timeless songs, including “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Honeysuckle Rose,” to the Great American Songbook, the canon of American popular songs and jazz standards written mainly during the early 20th century.

Early life and career

Waller was raised in Harlem and learned to play piano when he was six, first performing at a Baptist church where his father was a preacher. Overcoming his father’s opposition, Waller became a professional pianist at 15, working in cabarets and theaters, and soon became deeply influenced by James P. Johnson, the founder of the stride school of jazz piano. (A development of ragtime, stride piano uses two-beat left-hand rhythms to accompany right-hand melodies, allowing for dazzling improvisation and blistering tempos.) By the late 1920s Waller was also an established songwriter whose work often appeared in Broadway revues. With Harry Brooks, he composed the music for the all-Black production Hot Chocolates (1929), which featured trumpeter Louis Armstrong in the original ensemble. From 1934 on Waller made hundreds of recordings with his own small band, in which excellent jazz was mixed with slapstick in a unique blend.

Classic songs and influence

Along with “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Honeysuckle Rose,” his best-known songs include “This Joint Is Jumpin’” and his first success, “Squeeze Me” (1925), written with Clarence Williams. Waller was the first jazz musician to master the organ, and he appeared in several films, including Stormy Weather (1943). Usually remembered as a genial clown, he is of lasting importance as one of the greatest of all jazz pianists and as a gifted songwriter, whose work in both fields was rhythmically contagious.

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Death and legacy

Renowned for his larger-than-life personality and his overindulgence in food and alcohol, Waller died on the road at age 39. A few months after his musical Early to Bed (book and lyrics by George Marion, Jr.) debuted on Broadway, he contracted influenza on the heels of finishing a two-week gig in Hollywood. While traveling to New York by train, he died of pneumonia in Kansas City, Missouri.

Waller was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970, and he received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993. In 2004 the U.S. Library of Congress added “Ain’t Misbehavin’” to the National Recording Registry, a list of audio recordings deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

The libretto and score for his final work, Early to Bed, were long thought to be lost; no cast recording or singles were made in 1943, when it was produced. In 2025, however, two performances of the musical were scheduled at a venue in Manhattan, after researchers painstakingly pieced the book and score together using recently discovered drafts and the memories of dancer Harold Cromer, one of the original cast members.