Razaf’s grandfather, John Waller (no relation to Fats), was an ex-slave from Missouri who became a lawyer, Republican politician and American consul to Madagascar. There his daughter married the queen’s nephew Henri Razafkeriefo. In 1895, the French, who had imperial designs on the island, imprisoned Waller; Henri was probably murdered by French invaders. The family escaped, and Andreamentania Paul Razafkeriefo was born later that year in Washington, D.C. He was a promising student-he’d wanted to be a poet-but his mother, now a stenographer, made him drop out of school at 16. He got a job running an elevator in a Tin Pan Alley office building in New York; a year later, he’d sold his first song.
Like Mitchell Parrish, who wrote the lyrics to Hoagy Carmichael’s “Star Dust,” Razaf was overshadowed by having as his most famous collaborator an irrepressibly hammy piano man: in Razaf’s case, Thomas (Fats) Waller. (Eubie Blake was another Razaf partner.) Waller’s name alone has clung to “Honeysuckle Rose,” “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and, most unfairly, “Black and Blue,” a landmark song of racial protest. As Razaf told the story, gangster Dutch Schultz, financial angel for the 1929 Waller-Razaf revue “Hot Chocolates,” insisted-at gunpoint-they include a dark-skinned ingenue’s comic lament about intraracial prejudice. Razaf obliged; but the introduction, now seldom sung, about losing “fellers” to “yellers,” duplicitously framed an anthem with such edgy lines as “Just ‘cause you’re black, folks think you lack./They laugh at you and scorn you too.” Razaf claimed the opening-night ovation literally saved his life.
As that revue’s title suggests, the black musical stage in Razaf’s day still wasn’t far from the minstrel show; reviewers griped when black performers wore evening dress instead of plantation garb. He was denied his proper recognition less by Fats Waller’s charisma than by simple racism: in the 1940 film “Tin Pan Alley,” for example, white actors were shown writing “Honeysuckle Rose.” (And, worse, doing it in prison.) Lyricists-even such spectacular showoffs as “The Wizard of Oz”’s E. Y. (Yip) Harburg-have seldom been as celebrated as melodists; but as Singer shrewdly points out, a black lyricist was especially hard for whites to accept at a time when blacks were valued only as primitives. Writing lyrics implies the sort of “cogitated, idea-based creativity that was antithetical to any white conception of black music.” Even after his bankable hits, Razaf never got the opportunities that came to white songwriters with comparable gifts. What he could have become is anybody’s guess. At least now we know who he was.
