Aged seventeen, I commenced a four-year degree course at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music in my hometown of Brisbane, studying piano under one of the most enchanting, if redoubtable, figures in my life—Nancy Weir, a child prodigy from country Victoria, who found herself, through a surprising series of events, studying under the great Artur Schnabel as a young teenager in early 1930s Berlin, and later at the Royal Academy of Music in London. As an adult, she had extraordinary musical profundity, but at the same time, as the child of an Irish publican, a love from infancy of sometimes rather risqué bar tunes and all sorts of popular ditties and novelty piano pieces. On a board in her studio was a photo of her with Una Winifred Atwell (the ‘Queen of the Ivories’ and, like Nancy, a student of the Royal Academy who recorded Grieg’s A minor concerto and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in blue alongside all her boogie-woogie hits), the pair of them smiling widely and quite obviously delighted to be playing duets together. I never met the Trinidadian Atwell, though from the early 1970s until her death in 1983 she lived in Sydney. With fifteen major-hit singles and over twenty million record sales, she was the most popular female entertainer in the UK and Australasia in the 1950s. Her repertoire of ragtime, boogie-woogie and other popular light classics hit the spot: she topped the charts with Let’s have another party (a first for a black person and the only female instrumentalist to attain that position) and was the first UK-based artist to sell four million singles. One of the most successful of these was the Black and white rag, published by George Botsford in 1908, first recorded by the Victor Orchestra the following year, and only the third ragtime piece to sell over a million copies of sheet music. In 1941 a recording by pianist Wally Rose revived interest in the piece, and then in 1952 Atwell’s recording went gold with a million sales; her honky-tonk playing, often on a dodgy upright piano (‘my other piano’) bought by her husband and manager Lew Levisohn from a Battersea junk shop for fifty shillings, became the stuff of legend and household fame. The music was later used as the theme tune for the BBC’s snooker show Pot Black and in 1985 for the computer game Repton. Atwell’s version extends the original to the upper reaches of the instrument.

from notes by Piers Lane © 2023