Award-winning documentarian turns to the story of Billy Stewart
- T. Watts
- Posted On
Emmy Award-winning documentarian Beverly Lindsay-Johnson is the director/producer of the new film on Soul/Rhythm & Blues legend Billy Stewart.
Stewart, to the uninitiated, was the ebullient, rotund, piano-playing crooner from Washington, D.C., whose highly original style of singing has not been replicated before or since. One writer described Stewart’s vocal stylings as the R&B equivalent of scat singing.
His take on two songs in particular; Gershwin’s “Summertime,” and “Secret Love,” made famous by Doris Day, altered the auditory receptors of American musical taste. William Larry Stewart rose to prominence through his association with Rock & Roll Daddy Bo Diddley. When Diddley rolled through D.C., the young Stewart’s piano playing amazed him so much, he hired him on the spot, spirited him away to Chicago, where Stewart signed a recording contract with Chess Records. It was 1956. Billy Stewart was still a teenager. Daddy Diddley played guitar on one of Billy’s first recordings, “Billy’s Blues.”
Six years would elapse before the hits began piling up. In 1962, the self-penned composition, “Reap What You Sow,” cracked the top 20 R&B chart. A second original piece, “Strange Feeling,” settled at No. 25 on the R&B chart. By 1965, Stewart was stretching into full flow with the two Top R&B 10 hits, “I Do Love You,” and “Sitting In The Park.” Those two songs both crossed over to the Top 40 Pop charts.
The biggest hit of his career was a retooling of the classic tune by George Gershwin, “Summertime.” It was released in 1966 on an album recorded in the wake of his 1965 hits and titled Unbelievable. “Summertime reached #10 on the Pop charts and No. 7 R&B.
His cover of “Secret Love” also fared well, landing at No. 11 on the R&B charts and No. 29 Pop. As a niche performer Billy Stewart is also a favored music component of Latinx Lowrider culture to this day.
Fat Boy screenings have been few in number and limited to the Washington, D.C. market, the hometown of Billy Stewart. It is slated for its (Bay Area) West Coast premiere on PBS affiliate KQED on Thursday, Feb. 18, at 11 p.m. It repeats on Friday, Feb. 19, at 5 a.m. and again on Wednesday, Feb. 24, at 3 p.m.
The filmmaker Beverly Lindsay-Johnson, in the wake of her success of Fat Boy, has been named director of the African American Music Association and took office on Jan. 4.
Hard work and dedication were the earmarks of her arduous climb. Lake County News asked about her dual proclivity for music and film.
“I’ve always been a music person as well as a TV and movie watcher,” she said. “I watched all the black and white stuff as a little girl. At 8, 9 and 10 years old, I was watching movies I knew I shouldn’t have been watching and asking myself, why is it this way?
“There were also books that I tried to read although I wasn’t supposed to be reading them. Then, when I found the movie that came from the book, I would try to see if the questions I had when I was reading the book, were answered. “
Lindsay-Johnson grew up in the Bronx, New York. Her father was an up-and-coming Doo-Wop singer, Bill Lindsay who sang with the popular Doo-Wop groups, the Cadillacs, and the Crickets. The young Beverly attended rehearsals and heard whispered conversations about Billie Holiday. She saw her dad cry when he learned of the death of Frankie Lymon of the group, The Teenagers.
Upon graduation from high school in New York, Lindsay-Johnson pursued a degree in legal secretary science and worked in that field until she decided that she didn’t like lawyers. She launched into television production classes at Hunter College in New York.
By a seeming stroke of divine appointment, the soon-to-be aspiring filmmaker landed a job at the Howard University Dental School which enabled her to start taking classes at the School of Communication.
She eventually secured a job at WHUT, Howard University Television, as a secretary. For six years she absorbed all she could about television production.
Though she told her employer her heart was in production and pitched him the same idea three times before he finally told her, “OK, you can do it.” The resulting documentary was entitled, “Swing, Bop, and Hand Dance.”
Lindsay-Johnson says the film “is a study of the phenomenon of urban partner dancing across the U.S. and its importance to African-American culture through its descendant, the Lindy Hop. People who do these urban partner dances don’t look at Lindy Hop, Jitterbug and Swing as descendants of their dance, but it is.”
“Swing, Bop, and Hand Dance” was made while Lindsay-Johnson worked as a secretary during the day. Consequently, all the shooting was done at night.
“When I produced that documentary, I was told that I needed to find something in it that would interest someone in say, Boise, Idaho. That was the whole connection with the Lindy Hop because though everybody might not know DC Hand Dancing, or Chicago Step or Philly Bop, or Norfolk Swing. But they know the Lindy Hop. The Lindy Hop dance craze gripped the whole nation from the 1930s to the 1950s,” she said.
“It was my first documentary, and nobody was saying no to me. Everyone was saying, ‘Yes, we’ll help you.’ When I finished it, my peers at the TV station didn’t believe I did it. They were like, You mean to tell me she did this? As it turned out, it was my first Emmy nomination.
“What challenged me to do my second documentary was the fact that I realized I had no ownership in the first documentary. I had the title of producer/director but no ownership at all. I vowed that it would never happen again,” she said.
Lindsay-Johnson’s next documentary was about the D.C. teen dance show known as “Teenarama.” It was the first African-American TV dance show, preceding Soul Train by a good eight years, running from 1963 to 1970, which was the year Soul Train started.
Unfortunately, no original footage of the show remained. Resourcefully, Lindsay-Johnson’s production team auditioned and trained teenaged dancers from today to execute the Boogaloo, Monkey, Twist, Jerk, Cha Cha, Bop and Hand Dance. The film’s effective historical reach garnered an Emmy for Lindsay-Johnson in 2006.
While researching “Teenarama,” Lindsay-Johnson was invited to work on a project that involved two popular Washington, D.C. entertainers: Billy Stewart and Van McCoy. A few years later the filmmaker sought out a grant program with assistance from the African-American Music Association.
Lindsay-Johnson’s resourcefulness again surfaced when she recognized that the known video archives for Billy Stewart were painfully thin.
“Through one of his cousins, I found out that his father had shot a lot of family footage on a 16 mm Kodak camera back in the 60s,” reflected Lindsay-Johnson. The family archive became the backbone of the documentary.
Skillfully woven in are interviews with many stars of R&B and Doo-Wop who witnessed the artistry of Stewart; Anthony Gourdine of Little Anthony and The Imperials, Herb Fame, of Peaches & Herb, Mitty Collier (“I Had A Talk With My Man Last Night”), The Bay Area’s Own – Queen of the West Coast Blues Sugar Pie DeSanto, (DeSanto wrote a song for Billy Stewart during her seven-year tenure with Chess), Grace Ruffin of the Jewells, Music Journalist Mike Boone, and Emanuel Raheim of the Disco/R&B group GQ.
The resulting marriage of the filmmaker’s vision of the preservation of yet another epoch of Black expression is richly deserving of the international acclaim PBS is affording this documentary.
Check it out. You should be home when it airs.
Editor’s note: In a previous version of this story, Beverly Lindsay-Johnson’s father’s name was incorrect. It is Bill Lindsay. We regret the error.
T. Watts is a music journalist who lives in Lake County, California.