The 4th Street Mess Around

 One of Ray Charles’s first hits was “Mess Around,” released on Atlantic Records back in 1953, but actually Brother Ray was a little late to the party with that tune. Many of the ideas for that song can been heard in a whole mess of New Orleans boogie piano riffs, starting as early as, say, Cow Cow Davenport’s playing the late 1920s. But if you want to go have even further — and, well, we generally do — there are references to dances called a “mess around” as far back the earliest days of jazz. For instance, in his wonderful autobiography called “Trumpet on the Wing,” the great New Orleans jazzman Wingy Manone talked about watching people dance the mess-around at the fish fries of his youth in the Crescent City. Said Wingy, “The mess-around was a kind of dance where you just messed around with your feet in one place, letting your body do most of the work, while keeping time by snapping fingers with one hand and holding a slab of fish in the other!” Now, that’s a picture. Here’s a mess-around we learned from a Memphis Jug Band piece that was actually recorded 91 years this week.