I first became aware of vocalist/banjoist/guitarist extraordinaire Clancy Hayes through my obsession with the Original Salty Dog Jazz Band. When I purchased a copy of the LP recording Oh! By Jingo the band made with Mr. Hayes in 1964, I just about wore it out within a month’s time. What a voice, what timing and phrasing, what tune selections, what a band backing him! It remains one of my top five traditional jazz LPs. Further investigation yielded Clancy Hayes’s work with Lu Watters’s and Bob Scobey’s jazz outfits. And that’s about all I ever knew regarding this marvelous musician and singer.
That is, until a work came across my desk that I sincerely say is one of the finest jazz biographies I’ve ever read. Clancy Hayes: The Swinging Minstrel has finally ended the egregious absence of a full-length biography devoted to this quintessential troubadour. This book, lovingly penned by British jazz fan Chris Reid, who first came under Hayes’s spell in 1958, is overflowing with historical facts and anecdotes not only concerning the man himself, but also the era and musical surroundings in which he lived. Insights and comments about Hayes from peers and friends both well known and long forgotten leap off the pages.
Born into a large family in 1908, Clancy Leonard Hayes spent his youth in Iola, Kansas. He was drumming, singing, and running his own group by the time he was a teen. His extensive travels in the mid-1920s found him performing in everything from medicine shows to a band including Wingy Manone and Jack Teagarden! He’d soon thereafter choose California as his “forever” home, with of course many excursions eastward.
Only true Hayes buffs will be aware of Clancy Hayes’s background in radio. When he moved to CA in 1926, within two years he had joined the NBC staff orchestra. He started singing on the air for WKGO in San Francisco that same year, and was a featured vocalist in many programs for NBC by the end of 1929. Among great stories about this period in Hayes’s life, Mr. Reid includes a terrific encounter between the Boswell Sisters and the man who would take on many personas such as “The Radio Riot of Rhythm,” “The Voice of the South,” “The Morning Chanticleer,” and—no doubt not his favorite—“Pancake Boy.” Mr. Reid also shares a generous number of fan letters from this period, with several asking for Hayes’s signed photograph. In one, three girls wrote “We’ve decided you have ‘Jazz It.’ Bing, Russ, Rudy croon, but you sing jazz.” A highlight of Hayes’s radio career was a 30-minute program that reached 24 states called “Dancing With Clancy.”
Mr. Reid turns to more familiar territory for jazz fans when he chronicles Hayes playing with future household names of revivalist jazz in the late 1930s at the Big Bear Roadhouse and his inclusion in trumpeter Lu Watters’s 12-piece Sweets Ballroom Orchestra as well as its eight-piece breakout group that would eventually become the Yerba Buena Jazz Band. He also describes how Hayes led a “double life” in the 1940s, continuing his radio broadcast career while being among those who pioneered the Great San Francisco Jazz Revival. At this time, Hayes also began composing songs and advertising jingles.
![JazzAffair](https://syncopatedtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/ffair2026-SQ.jpg" "JazzAffair")
One gobsmacking revelation was that Hayes was the vocalist on four sides recorded by Les Paul for Mercury Records!
Mr. Reid’s tribute to this outstanding musician and entertainer chronicles Hayes’s conflicted relocation east to Chicago when trumpeter Bob Scobey and Co. found better prospects there. Always a Californian at heart, Hayes would get back to the Golden State, but continue to travel throughout the 1950s and 1960s, including a memorable visit to New Orleans in 1962 as part of a nine-week tour performing at the Playboy Clubs of Chicago, Miami, and New Orleans. The local NOLA musicians greeted him as a true hero of jazz and his appearance for the New Orleans Jazz Club was a highlight for all concerned, not the least one being Clancy! He wrote to his wife Ann that he couldn’t “even get through the lobby without pictures, autographs, and stares.”
Hayes involvement with the Nine (then Ten) Greats of Jazz, which eventually became the World’s Greatest Jazz Band (although no-one in the band ever liked that name) is also extensively covered. The author muses that Clancy never became as well-known as other musicians in those groups such as Bob Wilber, Ralph Sutton, and Bob Haggart, and is clear in his hopes that this exhaustive (but never exhausting) biography will help right that situation.
Mr. Reid’s writing style is personal and never pedantic. His affection for his subject, his times, and his brand of jazz bubble over on each page. He proudly reveals that Clancy Hayes was Bing Crosby’s favorite traditional jazz singer, but also provides astute observations about the man himself, averring “Fans and friends would comment that a conversation with Clancy ‘the artist’ was like a personal performance. Whether over the airwaves, on record, in the concert hall, night club, coming for dinner or even on a train, he entertained throughout his life.” Among the many things I took from this fascinating book is a renewal of my belief that the job of a performer is to bring people out of their own thoughts and concerns and into their worlds. Chris Reid’s opulently mounted and illustrated book does a nonpareil job of bringing one such performer who felt the same to glorious life.
At the bare minimum, a biography must be a collection of facts and anecdotes from various sources that illuminates the life, times, and accomplishments of its subject. This book on Clancy Hayes ticks those boxes. The next step is to write in a fashion that invites the reader into the story, providing information while also surprising and entertaining. Chris Reid, with acknowledged major historical contributions, writing, and insights by Hal Smith (significant enough to have his name included on the front cover) as well as stylistic improvement to the text by Anne and Trevor Bannister, hits a homer fulfilling this criteria.
The final element that makes for a superior biography is the author(s) love for the biographee being made evident in the writing. Mr. Reid’s, Mr. Smith’s, contributors Thomas “Spats” Langham’s, John Gill’s, and others’ adoration is more than perceptible: it’s contagious! Through this excellent piece of scholarship, research, and storytelling, we gain new insight into Clancy Hayes’ contributions not just to jazz, but in putting smiles on people’s faces and uplifting their hearts. No greater gift could be granted a human being, and Clancy Hayes made the most of the opportunities given him. In a 1965 interview, Hayes sums up his career: “I was just interested in music, I loved to play and I loved to study it. I think it’s a very fascinating vocation. I just like to play.”
The tidbits I reveal in this review don’t begin to scratch the surface of the treasures contained within this handsome release. The main text is enhanced by reprints of letters to and from Hayes, generous footnotes that share even more background (including an amusing anecdote from the author about his visit to America and discovering “the regionality of music in the United States”), a comprehensive discography packed with additional information, and 248 illustrations. Hardinge Simpole offers both a beautifully bound hardcover version and a trade paperback one. I’d advise splurging an additional $20 for the hardcover, as more than two-thirds of the illustrations are in color.
Not only is Clancy Hayes: The Swinging Minstrel highly recommended, it will be essential reading in the future for anyone wishing to understand the West Coast Classic Jazz Revival of the late 1930s-1950s and beyond.
Clancy Hayes: The Swinging Minstrel
By Chris Reid with Hal Smith
Hardinge Simpole
www.hardingesimpole.co.uk
Hardcover: 480 pages, 248 illus. (138 in color); $55.00
ISBN: 9781843822363
Paperback: 480 pages, 248 b&w ills.; $35.00
ISBN: 9781843822370
Jeff Barnhart is an internationally renowned pianist, vocalist, arranger, bandleader, recording artist, ASCAP composer, educator and entertainer. Visit him online atwww.jeffbarnhart.com. Email: Mysticrag@aol.com
