Rabon Tarrant

A drummer and bandleader whose first name sometimes appears without its trailing “y” in credits, Rabon Tarrant supplied an indelible backbeat to numerous Jack McVea recordings. He also composed, remaining so committed to jump blues that even his song titles seem steeped in the idiom—“Lonesome Blues,” “Naggin’ Woman Blues,” and the unadorned “Slowly Going Crazy Blues” among them.

Tarrant first sat behind the kit for an uncle who led a brass band in Wichita Falls, Kansas. His paid career opened in the mid-1920s alongside banjoist Otis Stafford; by 1927 he had moved to Roy McCloud’s sometimes turbulent, sometimes buoyant outfit. In the late twenties and early thirties he worked both Colorado and Texas with Lafayette Thompson’s Golden Dragon Orchestra. Throughout the rest of that decade he surfaced in scattered locales, joining San Diego’s Edith Turnham Orchestra in 1936 after roaming the Rockies with Bert Johnson’s Sharps and Flats. By 1940 he occupied the drum chair in Hollywood’s Cee Pee Johnson Orchestra.

A lengthy association with the stylish McVea followed, concluding only when Tarrant formed his own group in the early fifties—an ensemble that stayed on the road for nearly twenty years. Most of Tarrant’s recorded legacy documents his McVea years, during which his role exceeded that of timekeeper: he contributed original material and delivered the vocals, an unmistakable hallmark of the band’s sound. Of the roughly one hundred sides McVea committed to tape, Tarrant sings on about a third.