Lemuel Fowler may not have figured heavily on MMD, but I'm glad to say
that there have been two articles in the Player Piano Group bulletin
about his rolls!  I wrote one in 1993 in response to Rob DeLand's
reissuing of the majority of Fowler's rolls in 1992, and this prompted
a rather better article from jazz-fan PPG member, Mick Hamer.

Fowler managed to vanish quite successfully from the written record
after the early 1930s, although J. Lawrence Cook recalled meeting him
in New York in 1961.

The Fowler piano rolls are intriguing as well as wonderful.  Cook may
well have been their editor, but I simply don't think it's musically
credible that Cook was originator of the roll arrangements himself.
The style on the rolls labelled as played by Fowler is quite distinctive,
whether it be the earlier rolls from 1923 or the extraordinary QRS
issues from the end of the 1920s.  There are simply none of Cook's
musical tell-tales in these rolls, and a whole lot of things that he
just didn't do such as sustained single-note melody lines, plus a quite
distinct harmonic style that can be heard right though the Fowler rolls.

This is somewhat unexpected, because by the end of the 1920s QRS had
ditched their roster of recording artists and Cook was producing pretty
well the whole output.  You can tell this from the rolls -- the "Fats"
Waller rolls that Cook created are obviously Cook with Waller-esque
decorations, for instance.  The Fowler rolls aren't like that at all.

The best we can do is speculate that, for whatever reasons you care to
name, Cook created these Fowler rolls sticking pretty closely to notes
laid down by Fowler himself.  Mick Hamer speculated that the reason was
financial, to give Fowler some cash when his disk-recording career had
ceased.  Why just Fowler, who knows.

Anyhow, don't take my word for it!  Buy some rolls from Rob DeLand.
"Fowler's Hot Strut" and "Percolatin' Blues" are some of the hottest
music ever committed to roll, and some of the most-played items in my
collection.  All the more extraordinary is that they achieve this by
playing whole choruses with a single-note melody line (often in the bass)
and simple chords to mark the beat.  It's fascinating how effective
this is, in comparison to much "busier" rolls that make much less
overall impact.

To precis a rather interesting part of the Hamer article: Fowler was
a "one hit wonder" composer, the writer of 1922's hit song, "He May
Be Your Man (But He Comes to See Me Sometimes)".  He sold the copyright
of the song to Perry Bradford -- but he had already sold it to the
Ted Browne Music Company!

This behaviour was common enough, and only caused problems when a song
was a hit.  In this case there were royalties of $10,000 at stake (and
that's 1922 dollars).  Browne sued Bradford, and Fowler (along with
Spencer Williams) testified on Bradford's behalf.  The Clipper newspaper
reported on 31 January 1923 that "Williams and Fowler admitted that they
had committed perjury and made false affidavits at the instigation of
Bradford."  Bradford was sentenced to four months' jail.  Fowler, on the
other hand, made many records and rolls that year so it didn't appear
to have hurt him.

Read the whole article!  It'll shortly appear on the PPG web site,
http://www.playerpiano.org.uk/ 

Julian Dyer - Editor, PPG Bulletin