Sea Cruise

7:36 AM my juke box brain kicked in once again. This time it was Huey Piano Smith’s “Won’t you let me take you on a Sea Cruise.”
If we were to take a time machine back to the Crescent City in the early 1960’s we might see a skinny teen sitting on the stone window sill of the Preservation Hall Jazz Museum working on his plate of red beans and rice while listening to the last generation of genius jazz musicians playing tunes like “St. James Infirmary”. That could have been me.
Now “Sea Cruise” would not be categorized as a jazz tune, it had a huge sound effect of an ocean liner fog horn blaring in the middle of the tune, but it carries a lot of the jazz traditions. The drummer might have been Earl Palmer, or maybe even Zigaboo Modalisque, records were not organized too much. But the feel of the track survives. It swings like a house on fire. The swinging groove, which is a hold over from traditional jazz mixed with the urgency of straight up and down rock n roll made this song a gigantic feel good classic.
Since the culture of America was coming out of the segregation era, Sea Cruise was escaping the anonymity of being a “Race Record” Which was a dirty trick the record labels pulled by not putting the artist’s face on the record sleeve if they were of color. The white kids up north would buy it unknowing that they were condoning the exploitation. Only when Papa Ray Charles and other artists came north to perform did the white kids participate with integration to see their favorite recording artists.
The song might have been produced by the great Alain Tussaint. A lot of gold records came from that era. The money never made it into the pockets of the artists, but the music saved America anyway. We learned how to swing and share a good time.
The musical hook in the track is a baritone saxophone grabbing a descending melody line with a growling tone that every sax player since then refers to.
“Got the Boogie Woogie like a knife in the back.” is still a pretty good description of the effect of this music.