Crazy About My Baby
Roosevelt Graves (1929). Excerpt from "The 50 Songs that Gave Birth to Rock and Roll"
Roosevelt Graves was born sightless in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1909. Partnering with his brother Uaroy, also half-blind, Roosevelt cut 15 sides of secular and spiritual music for Paramount in 1929. With country blues records suddenly proving commercially viable, Paramount paired the Graves brothers with a crack team of studio musicians. The assembly of guitar, tambourine, piano, and cornet paints “Crazy About My Baby” with a touch of the boogie woogie.
Borrowing heavily from Jim Jackson’s template-setting “Jim Jackson’s Kansas City Blues” (which would itself evolve into Wilbert Harrison’s standard-bearing “Kansas City”), “Crazy About My Baby” backs Roosevelt’s bucolic porch-swing performance with a contemporary arrangement.
The result, recorded in a makeshift studio in the Hotel Hattiesburg, is an intersection where the backwoods meet the downtown. In many ways, the relatively obscure Graves would be among the first—even if unconsciously so—to merge country and city, creating a hybrid that would one day help define rock and roll.
After recording a few more sides in the 30s—increasingly prototypical rock and roll songs in their own right—the brothers departed the music biz. Roosevelt died in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1962.
See the full list of 50 Songs that Gave Birth to Rock and Roll