Your Feets Too Big by Fats Waller.
We
celebrated the 114th birthday of
legendary composer, stride piano master, singer, and outsized personality Fats
Waller on a blog
post this morning. I’m not sure
how I can shoehorn this into a Coronavirus confinement theme except to
say that if Your Feets Too Big doesn’t bring you joy, you are probably already dead.
Waller
made the theatrical film short Your
Feets Too Big in 1941 for the short-lived Minico Productions and was
intended for release on bills at movie houses for Black
audiences. Chances are that few whites saw it in theaters then although they may have caught it when it was packaged
two years later for distribution with MGM’s
Stormy Weather.
It
was not a Waller original. It was composed
in 1936 by Fred Fisher with lyrics
by Ada Benson and was recorded by
both Waller and The Ink Spots in 1939. The
song became most closely associated with Waller who ad-libbed his own lyrics such as “Your pedal extremities are
colossal, to me you look just like a fossil” and his catchphrase, “You know,
your pedal extremities really are obnoxious. One never knows, do one?”
The
film featured a snappy young man in a zoot
suit and large white shoes and eight attractive dancers. The song is actually an extended double entendre correlating the size of
a man’s feet to the length of a certain other appendage.
Fats Waller hitting the keys at home. Note the portrait of the Black World War I officer on the wall--maybe the pilot who flew his ashes? |
When
Waller died two years after making the short Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. who delivered the eulogy at a Harlem funeral
that attracted more the 4000 mourners
said that Waller “always played to a packed house.” Afterwards, he was cremated and his ashes were scattered
over Harlem from an airplane piloted
by an African American World War I
aviator flyer.
Fats
Waller wanted to go out with style.
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