Sammy Price

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Sammy Price, in full Samuel Blythe Price, was an American jazz, boogie-woogie and jump blues pianist and bandleader, born in 1908 in Honey Grove, Texas. He received formal piano lessons from Portia Marshall Washington, the daughter of Booker T. Washington. In the mid-1920s he worked in a music shop in Dallas and wrote to Paramount Records to recommend Blind Lemon Jefferson. He played and sang in clubs around Dallas and later lived and worked in Kansas City, Chicago and Detroit.

Music and breakthrough

In 1938 Decca Records hired him as a session pianist. He accompanied, among others, Trixie Smith and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and his trio played with Tharpe and Marie Knight on gospel recordings such as Up Above My Head. With his own group, the Texas Bluesicians, he also recorded for Decca. His playing is dark, mellow and relaxed, not rhythmically hard, and on blues recordings he knew exactly how to strike the right mood and swing. He recorded with Lester Young, toured Europe with Jimmy Rushing and played in a Broadway play with Tallulah Bankhead. From 1943 he played at the Café Society Uptown in New York, sometimes on the same bill as Art Tatum.

Influence

Price was one of the pianists behind the female singers of the 1940s. In School of Rock he appears in the chapter on women in popular music as the pianist who recorded Strange Things Happening Every Day with Rosetta Tharpe in 1944.

Listening

Discography

Studio albums

• 1975Copenhagen Boogie
• 1981I Giganti Del Jazz Vol. 63
• 1981I Giganti Del Jazz, Vol. 59
• 1990European All Stars
• 1992King of Boogie Woogie
• 2000Jazz in Paris: Paris Blues

In School of Rock

The chapters, maps and magazine stories of School of Rock are currently available in Dutch only.

• Mixtape 10: Women in Pop Music^NL Reader