This book’s cover features a black-and-white snapshot of the author and four siblings climbing a tree as kids. Below the tree, ten twisted gloved fingers galvanize a spiraling keyboard, an image culled from the artwork adorning Harry Gibson’s earliest album, Boogie Woogie in Blue.
In her foreword, Lorraine Gibson Cohen delightfully recalls when she and her brothers and sisters participated in a Harry the Hipster recording session in 1947.
She fails to report the tune’s title, simply referring to it as “the mother-in-law song.” But she vividly remembers Harry’s boisterous arrangement calling for the kids to make background racket while he pounded the 88s and warbled mean-spirited lyrics about an interfering in-law who ruins every holiday.
A quick search of Harry’s discography reveals that the song’s title was “I Hope My Mother-in-Law Doesn’t Come Home for Christmas,” recorded at MacGregor Records in downtown Los Angeles.
A few weeks later, the noisy kids accompanied the unpredictable pianist on Hollywood on Television, an afternoon variety show on KLAC-TV where they performed the mother-in-law song and met a 30-year-old actress named Betty White.
Such shenanigans with Harry are few and far between in Lorraine’s bittersweet family memoir. Instead, some of his kids referred to him as “our long-lost father.”
Lorraine’s pretty sister Arlene once complained loudly: “Some father he turned out to be! It was all because of him that we had no money and got stuck in that cow town Riverside.”
When he was born in 1915 in New York City, he was named Harry Raab. He was classically trained at Juilliard but gained fame playing jazz accompanied by talented black cats in his Harlem hometown.
During his college days, he frequented 52nd Street by night before headlining at clubs such as Three Deuces, Hickory House and Spotlight. Just before World War 2, he was discovered by his mentor, Fats Waller, at The Rhythm Club on 132nd St. in Harlem. And in 1944 he developed his persona as Harry the Hipster, the jive-talkin’ piano pounding high priest of boogie woogie. Harry’s unreserved singing style complemented his brash keyboard mix of ragtime and stride as he waxed original tunes like “4-F Ferdinand the Frantic Freak” and “Stop That Dancin’ Up There.”
But his best-known recording was released in January 1946, “Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine?” That song proved both a blessing and a curse. Initially, the song received rare press attention and radio airplay, but in February Benzedrine was deemed illegal, and Harry found himself blacklisted.
Undaunted, Harry relocated his family to Hollywood in 1946 when he appeared in the film Junior Prom, singing a tune called “Keep the Beat” accompanied by Abe Lyman’s Orchestra. Harry got top billing at Billy Berg’s Rendezvous jazz club on North Vine Street where he played checkers with Charlie Parker between sets.
Like Parker, Harry nurtured a lifelong drug habit. In 1952 he was busted for marijuana and spent nine months in a California prison where he supplied music for a jailhouse priest and organized both male and female inmate choirs.
He spent time in Miami, toured with Mae West and appeared on a bill with Billie Holiday, but his career was spiraling downward. He switched to rock ’n’ roll in the 1960s with little success although “Ovaltine” was revived by offbeat radio broadcaster Dr. Demento in 1975.
In 1991 at age 75, Harry the Hipster Gibson died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Brawley, Calif.
Teenaged brunette Florence fell in love with Harry Raab at first sight. She was still in high school when she happened to see him rush through a turnstile at the Parkchester Square Subway Station in the Bronx. He exuded an irresistible kind of cockiness decked out in a striking green zoot suit with a watch chain. His suspenders were fire-engine red and his shoes bright canary yellow.
“For Mom, love was forever,” Lorraine writes. “For Harry, he was to say later, Mom was his first girlfriend who wasn’t a fast and loose, easy chick. He was and always remained a wild child, never faithful, a love-em-and-leave-em type Yet he always Ccame back to his Florence.”
In fact, he had a pet name for his blushing bride. He called her “Flossie.”
While the coupling was clearly harmonious, child-rearing became a chore. Harry and Flossie agreed on a laissez faire approach to the kids’ upbringing.
“They are not going to be squares and sissies or highfalutin’ snobs,” Harry declared. “I want them to be free, not hampered with a lot of rules like the way you and I grew up, Flossie…I’m going to be a fun father and their friend. They can call me Harry. No Daddy, Papa for me, and I want them to go out and do what they want—to have adventures, create and play in the mud if they want to.”
Encouraged by their parents’ hand-off attitudes, the siblings did create artwork, took to the stage, made music and wrote memoirs.
Lorraine’s 15 ink drawings which illustrate this book run the gamut from messy to marvelous. A hyper-voluptuous dancing Vera an example of the former while the portrait of sister Arlene smoking a cigarette seated in an Indonesian wicker chair an example of the latter. Although a talented visual artist, Lorraine also emerged as a writer.
“When I was 22 years old, I started writing in an old gray loose-leaf notebook while I was living temporarily with my older sister, her three little children and my younger brother in a small beach town in Southern California,” Cohen recalled. “I wrote down things as they happened. All the funny things and the not-so-funny. There were short stories, character studies of people and things, even a song or two. Sixty years later, I found the notebook and started writing again. Before I knew it, I was writing a book.”
And what a book it is! The Hipster’s Legacy is a whopping 573 pages long as she recalls her years in a funky, red-shingled cottage next to a landfill near Hermosa Beach where her life was rife with eccentric characters and absurd situations.
But if any of his kids inherited Harry’s musical gifts, it was his son, Jeff, who doubled on saxophone and flute. He performed with several California-based free jazz combos, and later busked across Europe.
He may have bonded with Harry musically, but—as characterized in this book—Jeff bemoaned his family’s dysfunction. Musing over the discovery of Harry’s birth date of June 27, 1915, Jeff reflected, “That’s funny. I never knew the year my own father was born or his actual birthday either. I guess he was not ever home on that day. At least, I don’t remember celebrating it, but then I don’t remember his ever being there for our birthdays, either.” Or Christmases, either.
Lorraine’s book confirms a sad fact of the lives of most touring musicians. They live on the road and in the studio, not at home. Their families struggle for sustenance as well as for human connection. In the end, the hipster’s legacy may be one of neglect.
For readers who may want to get a real feel for Harry the Hipster and his music a better book choice would be The Wild and Wiggy Times of Harry the Hipster Gibson by Don McGlynn with Kirk Silsbee, Dr. Demento (Barret Hansen), and Mark Cantor, independently published in November 2024.
The Hipster’s Legacy:
A Memoir of Dreams, Jazz, and Family in 1960s California
by Lorraine Gibson Cohen
573 pages; paperback; $12.97
plumtreetales.com
ISBN: 979-8990845602
Russ Tarby is based in Syracuse NY and has written about jazz for The Syncopated Times, The Syracuse New Times, The Jazz Appreciation Society of Syracuse (JASS) JazzFax Newsletter, and several other publications.
