1920s In 1921 Waller was invited to accompany the vaudeville group Liza and Her Shufflin' Six on a tour of the northeast of the U.S., having impressed Liza with his organ playing at the Lincoln Theatre. While in Boston he met
Count Basie, who asked for organ lessonsthese took place back in New York, in the Lincoln. After his return Waller played his first rent party, having improved dramatically from practice and his lessons with James P. Johnson, and he continued to perform at these, as well as undertake short-term contracts at nightclubs and cabarets. Waller's steady job at the Lincoln Theatre transferred to the
Lafayette Theatre after a change of management. Via his friend
Clarence Williams, a
Tin Pan Alley music publisher, Waller became involved with the new recording label
Okeh Records. He was originally slated to accompany
Sara Martin in "
Sugar Blues", but failed to attend the recording session; Williams played instead, which launched his performing career. Williams convinced Fred Hager, the head of
artists and repertoire for Okeh, to try Waller again, and his first recordings were "Muscle Shoals Blues" and "Birmingham Blues" in late 1922. In December he accompanied Martin in "Mama's Got the Blues" and "Last Go Round Blues". James P. Johnson got Waller work recording
piano rolls for
QRS, the first of which was "Got to Cool My Doggies Now", recorded in March 1923. In the summer of that year Waller began composing original pieces, his first being "Wildcat Blues", with lyrics by Williams. The pair collaborated on over 70 songs during the subsequent five years, including "
Squeeze Me". Waller continued to accompany blues singers in recordings, play rent parties, and perform at nightclubs, gaining exposure. During this period he met
Andy Razaf, a lyricist with whom he collaborated extensively, and who encouraged him to sing as well as play the piano. He met
J. C. Johnson in 1923, and began collaborating with him as well. Waller became known for his prolific output of catchy songs, although did not copyright any of them, instead selling them outright to publishers or performing them without getting them published. In 1926, Waller began his association with the
Victor Talking Machine Company (later
RCA Victor) after being contacted by
Ralph Peer. On November 17, 1926, he recorded "
St. Louis Blues" and his composition "Lenox Avenue Blues", his first solo recordings, and on December 1, 1927, he recorded "Red Hot Dan" with
Thomas Morris, the first recording of Waller singing. 1929 saw the composition of some of Waller's most highly regarded songs, such as "
Ain't Misbehavin', "
I've Got a Feeling I'm Falling", "
Honeysuckle Rose", and "
Black and Blue". To avoid having to pay more in child support to Edith, whom he had divorced in 1923, Waller sold the rights for twenty of his songs (including "Ain't Misbehavin') to
Irving Mills for $500. This was a small fraction of their value. As a consequence he earned only the musician's share of the royalties from the subsequent recordings. The latter half of the 1920s saw Waller's only involvement in musical theater until he started working on the musical
Early to Bed shortly before his death in 1943. In 1926 he composed for two
revues with
Spencer Williams:
Tan Town Topics and
Junior Blackbirds, both performed at the Lafayette. The same year Waller performed in productions named
Creole Follies (at the Lafayette) and ''Signor Fats Waller's Lincolnians'' (at the Lincoln Theatre). Waller's first highly successful stage endeavor was the revue
Keep Shufflin', which featured the comedians
Flournoy Miller and
Aubrey Lyles as a follow-on from their 1921 show
Shuffle Along. About half of the songs were composed by Waller and Razaf, with the others by
Henry Creamer, Clarence Todd and James P. Johnson. The show opened in February 1928 at the
Standard Theatre in Philadelphia, before transferring after a two-week run to
Daly's 63rd Street Theatre on Broadway, and subsequently the more prestigious
Eltinge 42nd Street Theatre in April. After its run there, Waller accompanied the rest of the band on tour until June 1928, at which point he traveled to Philadelphia to take a short-term position as organist at the
Royal Grand Theater. 1929 saw the premieres of two further revues:
Load of Coal, which featured "Honeysuckle Rose", and
Hot Chocolates, which featured "Ain't Misbehavin'", both among Waller's best-known songs. Both were performed at
Connie's Inn, a nightclub next to the Lafayette where Waller had occasionally performed both as a soloist and with the house band.
Hot Chocolates was a success, and moved to the
Windsor Theater and then the
Hudson Theatre on Broadway, where it ran for 219 performances and received glowing reviews, with "Ain't Misbehavin'" receiving particular praise.
1930s Waller's radio career began in December 1930, when he featured on a new show for
CBS playing the piano and, unusually until this point, singing.
Joe Davis, who had become Waller's publisher and manager after the sale of his material to Irving Mills, began to market Waller as a singer as well as a pianist, and he recorded the solo songs "I'm Crazy about My Baby" and "Draggin' My Heart Around" on March 31, 1931. Waller began to play regularly at the
Hot Feet Club, where he developed his storytelling asides and style as a raconteur: "the cocked eye brow, the finger punctuating the air for emphasis, and eyes rolling heavenward whenever he said something blue". In the summer of 1931 he visited Paris with Spencer Williams, playing in the city's nightclubs and enjoying the much lower levels of racial discrimination and absence of prohibition. Davis appointed Marty Bloom as Waller's manager after Waller's return, but Bloom resigned the position shortly thereafter and it was taken by Phil Ponce, who was experienced in showbusiness and had established and managed the
Ponce Sisters. Ponce decided to focus on Waller's radio career, and secured a two-year contract with
WLW in Cincinnati, where he was given his own program, "Fats Waller's Rhythm Club". Waller also played for their show "
Moon River", but was not credited due to his own show's "raucous and comedic reputation". After the contract ended in late 1933, Waller moved back to New York. A sequence of CBS radio performances in March and April 1934 provided extensive publicity, and led to his own regular show, "The Rhythm Club", as well as regular appearances on other CBS programs. This radio success led to RCA Victor offering a recording contract, assuming that the records would at least sell well in the black community, but they unexpectedly proved to have wide appeal, and became bestsellers. Victor arranged for tours for Waller and a group of musicians as the Fats Waller Band in 1935, and while back in New York during breaks between fixtures the group recorded a number of songs, the most popular of which was "
I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter". Part of the tour involved promoting the release of the film
Hooray for Love, in which Waller had appeared earlier that year, and the success of this publicity activity led to him featuring in
King of Burlesque. The band continued to tour and record over the next few years, but Waller's drinking became heavier and his behavior more erratic, and interest from promoters declined after a racially-motivated boycott led to poorly-attended events in South Carolina and Florida in 1937.
Ed Kirkeby had taken over as manager in 1935 due to Ponce's ill health, and he attempted to revive domestic interest in Waller by arranging a tour of Britain and Scandinavia in 1938, where jazz was increasing in popularity. The tour was a great success, with Waller recording for
HMV and appearing on the new medium of television in addition to his live performances, but it was curtailed due to the threat of invasion from
Nazi Germany. Waller had been developing his interest in composition and classical music, inspired by
George Gershwin's
Rhapsody in Blue and
Concerto in F. He began to incorporate more classical themes into his music, and took up the violin. While in London he composed the
impressionist London Suite, representing different areas of the city he had visited, and this was recorded by HMV.
1940s '' (1943) The tour in Europe revived Waller's career in the US. He was in high demand as an accompanist on recordings, but the Victor contract was exclusive, so he was credited as "Maurice Waller", his son's name. Victor marketed Waller as a comic performer, with songs such as "You Run Your Mouth, I'll Run My Business". In 1941 he recorded four
Soundiesshort musical films of "Ain't Misbehavin', "Honeysuckle Rose", "Your Feet's Too Big", and "The Joint Is Jumpin'. He toured the US, often staging surprise concerts to entertain the troops at the local military post. Waller's interest in more "serious" music continued, and on January 14, 1942, he staged a concert in Carnegie Hall in an attempt to make audiences take jazz more seriously. The concert was received well by the audience, although at least one critic gave it a mixed review, possibly because Waller had become drunk during the interval. Irving Mills had become a film producer, and in early 1943 engaged Waller to perform songs including "Ain't Misbehavin' (which he owned the rights to) in
Stormy Weather. Upon returning to New York, he began to compose for the musical
Early to Bed, which premiered in Boston on May 24, 1943. It received positive reviews, and was staged at the
Broadhurst Theatre on
Broadway on June 17. Waller was the first black composer to write a Broadway show for a white cast.
Compositions Waller is believed to have composed many songs in the 1920s and 1930s and sold them for small sums, attributed to another composer and lyricist. Standards attributed to Waller, sometimes controversially, include "
I Can't Give You Anything but Love, Baby". The song was made famous by
Adelaide Hall in the Broadway show
Blackbirds of 1928. Biographer Barry Singer offered circumstantial evidence that this song was written by Waller and lyricist Andy Razaf and provided a description of the sale given by Waller to the
New York Post in 1929he sold the song for $500 to a white songwriter for use in a financially successful show (consistent with
Jimmy McHugh's contributions to ''Harry Delmar's Revels
, 1927, and then to Blackbirds of 1928''). Jazz historian Paul S. Machlin commented that the Singer conjecture has "considerable [historical] justification". According to a biography by Waller's son Maurice, Waller told his son never to play the song within earshot because he had to sell it when he needed money. Maurice Waller wrote that his father objected to hearing "
On the Sunny Side of the Street" on the radio. ==Personal life==