Biography
Charles Luckeyth "Luckey" Roberts emerged as an extraordinarily accomplished pianist within the "San Juan Hill" ragtime tradition while also writing works that spanned popular songs and classical forms. Philadelphia was his birthplace, and he remained a Quaker who abstained from alcohol throughout his life. Around 1908 he started appearing at rent parties across Harlem, where he routinely prevailed in cutting contests, and the remarkable technical command evident in his 1908 composition "Nothin'" indicates that few San Juan Hill pianists would have expected to surpass him. Publication of his rags began in 1909 when "The African 400 (An Educated Rag)" appeared, a piece Arthur Pryor recorded the same year; his best-known rag, "Pork and Beans," followed in 1913. Columbia captured Roberts on disc for the first time in 1916 with selections that included the blues-inflected rag "Railroad Man," though none of those sides reached the public. During the 1920s he directed the orchestra behind comedian Charles Hunter and supplied accompaniment for the radio duo Moran and Mack, known as "The Two Black Crows," while also serving as their pianist on network broadcasts; a motif he devised for vaudeville around 1923 called "Complainin'" surfaced on several of these discs. In all, Roberts supplied material to roughly 23 stage musicals across the 1910s and 1920s and cut numerous piano rolls, primarily for Ampico. Early in the 1930s he moved to Washington, D.C., established a restaurant, and fronted a society orchestra that enjoyed steady success at a relatively refined level; concurrently he turned toward classical composition, completing a piano concerto performed at New York's Town Hall by 1941. That year "Moonlight Cocktail," fashioned from his 1916 piece "Ripples of the Nile" with added lyrics by Kim Gannon, became a hit recording for Glenn Miller. Roberts produced a set of solo performances for Solo Art in 1946, marking the first of his solo work to appear commercially, and he continued to record intermittently until 1959. The strongest of these later efforts came in 1958 for Lester Koenig's Good Time Jazz label on the album Luckey and the Lion, which paired him with fellow San Juan Hill veteran Willie "The Lion" Smith. In contrast to Eubie Blake and James P. Johnson, Roberts never shifted fully into jazz performance and rejected the label of jazz pianist, instead regarding himself as one of the final practitioners of ragtime and as a writer of both popular tunes and concert music. His last date, for Everest Records in 1959, yielded a routine collection of commercial, honky-tonk-styled piano pieces with clarinetist Garvin Bushell. Even in advanced age Roberts retained astonishing manual agility; Luckey and the Lion was captured when he was 70 and had already endured three automobile collisions, one of which fractured his large hands, yet nothing in his execution betrayed those injuries.
Albums
