Before trading punches in the ring for a pounding attack on the keyboard, Champion Jack Dupree laced his songs with boisterous rural wit. Yet his rolling boogie carried an unshakable authority; when he hollered “Shake Baby Shake,” the whole room was forced to comply.
Dupree remained deliberately evasive about his early years, sometimes telling interviewers that the Ku Klux Klan had burned his parents to death and at other times describing the blaze as an accident. In any case, the tragedy left him in New Orleans’ Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys—the same institution that had sheltered a young Louis Armstrong. After absorbing the barrelhouse piano style of Willie “Drive ’em Down” Hall, Dupree departed the Crescent City in 1930, first for Chicago and then Detroit. By 1935 he was fighting professionally in Indianapolis and amassed roughly 107 bouts.
His recording career began in 1940 when Chicago A&R chief Lester Melrose placed him with OKeh Records. Despite the urban setting, the sides Dupree cut for the Columbia subsidiary in 1940 and 1941 retained a pronounced New Orleans flavor; his forceful “Junker’s Blues” later supplied the basis for Fats Domino’s cleaned-up 1949 debut, “The Fat Man.” Following naval service in World War II, during which he spent two years as a Japanese prisoner of war, Dupree abandoned boxing for the piano. Settling mainly in New York, he recorded prolifically for Continental, Joe Davis, Alert, Apollo, and Red Robin, where he laid down the explosive “Shim Sham Shimmy” in 1953, frequently accompanied by Brownie McGhee. Because contracts held little weight, he also appeared under the names Brother Blues on Abbey, Lightnin’ Jr. on Empire, and the fanciful Meat Head Johnson for Gotham and Apex.
King Records signed him in 1953 and retained him through 1955, the year he scored his sole R&B chart entry with the easygoing “Walking the Blues.” Many of his King recordings rank among his strongest, including the buoyant “Mail Order Woman,” “Let the Doorbell Ring,” and “Big Leg Emma’s,” which stand in contrast to the country-flavored “Me and My Mule,” on which Dupree exaggerated a harelip for deliberately unpolished comic effect.
After one year on RCA’s Groove and Vik imprints, Dupree delivered a landmark album for Atlantic. The 1958 release Blues From the Gutter stands as a powerful document of his barrelhouse roots, featuring striking versions of “Stack-O-Lee,” “Junker’s Blues,” and “Frankie & Johnny” alongside the bawdy “Nasty Boogie.” In 1959 he became one of the earliest blues artists to relocate permanently to Europe in search of a less racially charged environment. He lived in several countries abroad and continued to record extensively for Storyville and British Decca, the latter yielding a 1966 session that enlisted John Mayall and Eric Clapton.
Aware of his advancing age, Dupree revisited New Orleans in 1990 after an absence of thirty-six years. While there he performed at the Jazz & Heritage Festival and taped the lively album Back Home in New Orleans for Bullseye Blues. The label captured two further collections of fresh material the following year, shortly before the pianist’s death in January 1992. Jack Dupree remained a champion until the very end.
