updated 30.8.15
This is the song that put the founder of Hip Records on the blacklist in 1947.
This is the song that put the founder of Hip Records on the blacklist in 1947.
He also coined the word "hipster".
Harry "The Hipster" Gibson (27 June 1915 – 3 May 1991)
was a jazz pianist, singer and songwriter.
Gibson played New York style Stride piano and boogie woogie while singing in a wild, unrestrained style. His music career began in the late 1920s, when as the young Harry Raab (his birth name) he played stride piano in Dixieland jazz bands in Harlem. He continued to perform there throughout the 1930s, adding the barrelhouse boogie of the time to his repertoire, and was discovered by Fats Waller in 1939 and brought down to mid-town Manhattan, where he made a splash and changed his surname to Gibson. Between 1939 and 1945, he played at various Manhattan jazz clubs on 52nd Street ("Swing Street"), most notably the Three Deuces, run by Irving Alexander, and Leon and Eddies, run by Leon Enkin and Eddie Davis.
In the 1940s, Gibson was known for writing unusual songs, which are considered ahead of their time . He was also known for his unique, wild singing style, his energetic and unorthodox piano styles, and for his intricate mixture of hardcore, gutbucket boogie rhythms with ragtime, stride and jazz piano styles. Gibson took the boogie woogie beat of his predecessors, but he made it frantic , similar to the rock and roll music of the 1950s Examples of his wild style are found in the songs "Riot in Boogie" and "Barrelhouse Boogie". An example of his strange singing style is in the song "The Baby and the Pup." Other songs that Gibson recorded were "Handsome Harry, the Hipster", "I Stay Brown All Year 'Round", "Get Your Juices at the Deuces", and "Stop That Dancin' Up There." Gibson recorded a great deal, but there are very few visual examples of his act. However, in New York in 1944, he filmed three songs for the Soundies film jukeboxes, and he went to Hollywood in 1946 to guest star in the feature-length film musical Junior Prom. Gibson preceded the first white rock and rollers by a decade, but the Soundies he recorded show significant similarities to rock and roll.
While working on "Swing Street" at night, Gibson was a fellow at the Juilliard Graduate School during the day. At the time, Juilliard was strictly a classical music academy, and Gibson excelled there, which partly explains the richness of the music he brought to the jazz world. ( If anything he brought a richness to classical music, with his boogie woogie training). The other part of the explanation is, his own inventiveness, and Gibson was almost always billed and promoted as a musical genius.
Unlike Mezz Mezzrow, who was white but consciously abandoned his ethnicity to adopt the black music and culture as a "white negro," Gibson grew up near Harlem, New York City. Gibson's constant use of black jive talk was not an affectation; it was simply his uptown New York dialect. His song, "I Stay Brown All Year Round" is based on this issue. In his autobiography, Gibson claims he coined the term hipster some time between 1939 and 1945, when he was performing on Swing Street and he started using "Harry the Hipster" as his stage name.
His career went into a tailspin in 1947, when his song "Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine" put him on the music industry blacklist. His own drug use led to his decline, and with the rising popularity of young rock-and-roll musicians among teenagers in the 1950s, older musicians were not in demand. He spent time in and around Miami during the 1950s, and just before Christmas 1956 he appeared at the Ball & Chain on the same bill with Billie Holiday. In the 1960s, when Gibson saw the huge success of The Beatles, he decided to switch over to rock-and-roll. By the 1970s, he was playing hard rock, blues, bop, novelty songs and a few songs that mixed ragtime with rock-and-roll, and his hipster act became a hippie act. His old records were revived by Dr. Demento, particularly "Benzedrine" which was included in his 1975 compilation album Dr. Demento's Delights.
His comeback resulted in three more albums. Harry the Hipster Digs Christmas, made of new recordings in 1974, is a home recording and is not noteworthy. Two professionally produced albums were released after this, which were Everybody's Crazy but Me, (its title taken from the lyrics of "Stop That Dancin' Up There"), by Progressive Records in 1986, and Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine released in 1989 by Delmark Records. Those two albums include some jazz, blues, ragtime, and rock and roll songs about reefer, nude bathing, hippie communes, strip clubs, male chauvinists, "rocking the 88s", and even about how hip Shirley MacLaine is.
Harry Gibson may have been the only pianist of the 1930s and 1940s to go on to play in full-scale rocking blues bands in the 1970s and 1980s. Unlike his 1940s contemporaries, most of whom continued to play the same music for decades, Gibson gradually shifted gears between the 1940s and the 1970s, switching from jazz to rock. The only elements that remained constant were his tendency to play hard-rocking boogie woogie, and his tongue-in-cheek references to drug use.
Harry's family did a biographical movie short on Harry's life and music in 1991, shortly before his death. The movie is called "Boogie In Blue" and was published as a VHS video that year.
Suffering from congestive heart failure, Harry had long ago decided that he would end life on his own terms if he ever became chronically ill. Harry Gibson took his own life by putting a handgun to his head on 3 May 1991.
C F C G# F
C
Mrs. Murphy couldn't sleep,
F C Bm C Gm
Her nerves were slightly off the beat,
F C
Until she solved her problem,
Bm F
With a can of Ovaltine.
Em Bb
She drank a cupful most every night
C F
And ooh, how she would dream!
C Dm C
Until something rough got in the stuff,
F# Em C
And made her neighbours scream. Ow!
F Bb
Who put the benzedrine
Em F Bb C
In Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine
F
Sure is a shame, don't know who's to blame
Bm F C
Cause the old lady didn't even get his name.
F C
Where did she get that stuff?
G# Gm C
Now she just can't get enough.
G# F F#
It might have been the man who wasn't there.
C
Nah, Jack, that guy's a square.
G# C
She never ever wants to go to sleep.
D# Bm Gm
She said that everything is solid alreet.
Bm C Em
Now Mr. Murphy don't know what it's all about
Gm F# C
'Cause she went and threw the old man out. Klout!
F Bb
Who put the Benzedrine
F Dm C
In Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?
G# C
Now she wants to swing the Highland Fling
F# C G#
Says the benzedrine's the thing that makes her spring.
Gm F Bb Em F Dm Gm
[Ah, Spring it now, Gibson. Mmhm.]
F
[(ad-lib) It's the second chorus you know,
F Gm F Dm Bb
Name of this chorus is called who put the nembutals
Em Gm C F Bb
in Mr Murphy's overalls.
Bm F Bb F C
I don't know.]
Dm C F C Gm Em
C Bm F
She bought a can of Ovaltine
Em F C
Most every week or so
D# F Em
And she always kept an extra can on hand
Bm F
Just in case that she'd run low.
Em C F# Dm
She's never never been so happy,
Em D# Gm C
Since she left old Ireland
Dm C
'Til someone prowled her pantry
G# C
Sure and tampered with her can. Wham!
F Dm Em
Who put the benzedrine
Em C Dm
In Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?
C G# Gm Em
Sure was a shame, don't know who's to blame
C
Cause the old lady didn't even get his name.
Gm Dm C
Where did she get that stuff?
F Bb Gm C
Now she just can't get enough.
G# Gm
It might have been the man who wasn't there.
Em C F
Nah, Jack, that guy's a square.
Gm F#
She stays up nights makin' all the rounds
Bm Bb Dm
They say she lost about 69 pounds
F# Em F#
Now Mr. Murphy claims she's getting awful thin
Bm C Bm C
And all she says is, "Gimme some skin!" Mop!
Dm Bb
Who put the Benzedrine
Em Bb C
In Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?
F Bm
Now she wants to swing the Highland Fling
Em F# F
She says the benzedrine's the thing that makes her
spring.
Bb Bm C
(Ah, Spring it now, Gibby.)
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