https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3tpnH6mtww

Slim Gaillard was born on January 9, 1911. His birthplace, like most aspects of his biography, is a source of debate. Most people think he was born in Detroit. He claimed to have been born in Cuba, but researchers have concluded that Gaillard was probably born in June 1918 in Claiborne, Alabama (Eagle & LeBlanc, 2013). His early life seems to be straight out of a novel: At age twelve, Slim Gaillard accompanied his father on a world voyage and was accidentally left behind on the island of Crete. He stayed there for a few years and tried to make his way back to the US by working in various places including Lebanon and Syria. Finally when Gaillard was about fifteen, he re-crossed the Atlantic, hoping the ship would take him home to Cuba, but it was bound for the U.S. and he ended up in Detroit. Because he did not speak a word of English, the only job he could find was to work in a store owned by an Armenian family. Whether we believe this story to be true or not, he did speak five languages (Spanish, German, Greek, Arabic, and Armenian) in addition to English with varying degrees of fluency.

Determined to become a musical entertainer, he moved to New York City and entered the world of show business as a "professional amateur". He was a multi-instrumentalist who sang and played piano, guitar, vibraphone, and tenor saxophone. His big break came when he formed the duo Slim & Slam with bassist Slam Stewart and they recorded their hit song: "Flat Foot Floogie" in 1938. In 1942 Gaillard was drafted and served in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II. In 1944, he resumed his music career and formed a successful duo with bassist Bam Brown. In the late 1940s he performed with bebop musicians including Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. In the 1960s and 1970s, while living in San Diego, he acted in various movies and TV shows, including Charlie's Angels and Mission: Impossible. He still performed and recorded under various aliases such as Slim Delgado but never had the same fame that he had in the 1940s and 1950s. Later in his life he moved to London and continued to perform in Europe. He died on February 26, 1991 of cancer. 

The song "Flat Foot Floogie" is an early example of a composition based on rhythm changes. This 32-bar chord progression is derived from George Gershwin's 1930 composition "I Got Rhythm" from the musical "Girl Crazy". This form later became one of the most common harmonic progressions in bebop. It has an AABA structure where the A section follows an I–vi–ii–V progression. The B section is usually a series of dominant chords but is usually more open and often mostly improvised. This simple and fixed structure allowed composers to add more elaborate melodies in their compositions. It was the case with Duke Ellington in "Cotton Tail" and Charlie Parker in "Anthropology". The predictable structure and harmonies provide a foundation for his unconventional vocal improvisations, humorous interruptions, and the solos.

The musicians on the original 1938 recordings are Slim Gaillard (voice, guitar, vibraphone), Slam Stewart (bass), Pompey Dobson (drums), Sam Allen (piano). The song has a very strong quarter note swing feel with the bass laying beats one and three and the guitar and drums emphasizing the downbeats. The strong conventional groove provides an interesting contrast with the very free and innovative improvisations that come later in the song. The song has two major instrumental solos, but before they start, Slim & Slam perform a shout chorus on the A section. This would have been quite unusual, as such choruses are usually played by horn players and mostly at the end of solos. The first solo is performed by Slam Stewart on bass over the remaining ABA sections. He had a distinctive style in which he played arco (with the bow) while humming the same melody an octave higher. In the 1930s, the bass was just starting to become more prominent as a solo instrument. Until then it was mainly a rhythmic instrument, mostly used as a tuba playing the root and fifth of the chords. So to have such a solo in a song would have been a very fresh sound. The second solo is by Slim Gaillard on vibraphone (he stops playing the guitar at that point). Despite his later connection with bebop artists, his solo is very rooted in blues and swing. Vocal improvisation is very prominent in the entire song. You can argue that it starts with the intro (and same with the outro) where Slim Gaillard talks in rhythm to introduce the song. The same happens after the solos and at the end of the song. He scats during the bridge of the theme as well. During the entire song, and especially during the solos, there are funny comments added by both Slim Gaillard and Slam Stewart. Humor is definitely an important aspect of this performance.   

The musical landscape in 1938 was still dominated by big bands led by musicians such as Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and Count Basie. Those bands were large ensembles mainly playing commercial swing repertoire, featuring conventional song structures, carefully arranged music, and an emphasis on dancing. It was unusual for a song like "Flat Foot Floogie" to achieve commercial success with a small ensemble of four musicians emphasizing instrumental and vocal improvisation, as well as humor. The Radio Act was adopted in 1927 and the FCC had just been established in 1934 when this song became popular. One of the benefits of Slim Gaillard often singing in a made-up language is that it allowed him to avoid censorship. It's not entirely clear whether this was the intended purpose of his nonsensical lyrics but in this case it worked. The original lyric used the word "floozie", which refers to a prostitute. The word was flagged by the record company Vocalion and later changed to "floogie". But the term "floy floy" comes later in the song and is now often added to the title in parentheses. It actually refers to a venereal disease but didn't raise any concern because it was a very obscure slang term. 

This song came out at a time when bebop was about to emerge. While Slim Gaillard was not himself a bop player, we can argue that he was one of the links between the swing era and the bebop era. He was close to the bop players such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and often opened for them at Birdland in the late 40s and 50s. In December 1945, Slim Gaillard recorded a session with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in which they also played "Flat Foot Floogie". This session is notable for being one of the first recordings of Charlie Parker's voice on the track Slim's Jam. He mentioned in an interview that he used to jam with Charlie Christian at Minton's playhouse and learned a lot from him (Tomkins, 1982). I wouldn't consider Slim Gaillard a bebop player, but there is clearly a desire to expand the boundaries of improvisation and explore new musical territories. His vocal improvisations were probably more creative than anything else at the time. 

Slim Gaillard played many instruments and often switched between them during the same performance, as it is the case in the original recording of "Flat Foot Floogie". But he was also famous for singing in several languages (Spanish, Greek, Arabic). He also incorporated Yiddish  expressions in songs such as "Dunkin' Bagel" and "Matzo Balls". But, as if that weren't enough, he went further and invented words and even an entire vocabulary that he published in a book: the Vout-O-Reenee Dictionary (Gaillard, 1946). He also improvised using animal sounds in later recordings. Slim Gaillard was undoubtedly influenced by jive, the slang of jazz musicians, popularized by Cab Calloway in his "Hipster's" Dictionary (Calloway, 1938).

"Flat Foot Floogie" was immediately popular and that same year, many other artists recorded it including Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Woody Herman and Count Basie. As a result the song was a real commercial success. It reached number two on the U.S. charts in 1938. By that point Slim Gaillard had sold his rights to the Green Brothers and Knight for $250 and never really benefited financially from the success of his song. Later it was recorded by other jazz musicians including Fats Waller and Django Reinhart. Music historians have identified Slim Gaillard as an important precursor to rock and roll, particularly through his humor, unconventional vocal performances, and use of the electric guitar (Brennan, 2017, p. 55). The instrumentation of his band was similar to rock and roll bands (guitar, piano, drums, bass, sometimes saxophone), and songs like "Flat Foot Floogie" were meant to entertain audiences, to be funny and to be listened to and encourage audiences to sing along (Slim Gaillard invites the audience to sing with him at the end of the song). It's not a coincidence that rock and roll star Chuck Berry mentioned Slim Gaillard as one of his main influences. There is another live recording of Flat Foot Floogie from 1951 in which you can hear a clear distorted electric guitar that sounds very much like rock and roll. 

Slim Gaillard and the freedom of his music inspired artists like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and he became an emblem of the beat generation. One of his performances was immortalized in "On the Road" (Kerouac, 1957). In this scene, Kerouac describes Gaillard sitting down at the piano to play "C-Jam Blues," shifting to guitar, and eventually going wild on the bongo drums while chanting rapid-fire phrases in multiple languages, Spanish, and his own invented "Vout" slang. Because this book is one of the most important books in American literature, Slim Gaillard and his hit song "Flat Foot Floogie" will always have an outsized importance in popular culture. It is how I came to know about Slim Gaillard myself.

Works Cited

[Slim Gaillard - Topic]. (Feb 3, 2022). Slim's jam (1945) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFh_xw-XQoQ

[Slim Gaillard - Topic]. (Aug 9, 2023). Flat foot floogie, no. 1 (1951) [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/VV4cTWbInd8

Eagle, B. L., & LeBlanc, E. S. (2013). Blues: A regional experience. Praeger. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/blues-9780313344237/

Gaillard, S. (1946). Slim Gaillard's Vout-O-Reenee dictionary [Partial reproduction]. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/SlimGaillardsVoutOReeneeDictionary

Tomkins, L. (1982). Slim Gaillard [Interview]. Jazz Professional. National Jazz Archive. https://nationaljazzarchive.org.uk/explore/interviews/1634236-slim-gaillard

Calloway, C. (1938). Cab Calloway's Cat-ologue: A "Hepster's" dictionary. Self-published.

Brennan, M. (2017). When genres collide: Down Beat, Rolling Stone, and the struggle between jazz and rock. Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501319051

Kerouac, J. (1957). On the road. Viking Press.