Live at the Belly Up: Sue Palmer and her Motel Swing Orchestra (Belly Up Productions, Peaks and Valleys Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS-TV, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later last night (Friday, October 17) my husband Charles and I watched an entertaining Live at the Belly Up episode featuring local musician Sue Palmer and her Motel Swing Orchestra: Sue Palmer on a Korg electric keyboard; Liz Ajuzie, lead vocals; April West, trombone and second vocals; Jonny Viau, tenor and baritone saxophones; Steve Wilcox, electric guitar; Pete Harrison, upright acoustic bass (he was previously a bass guitarist and he learned the stand-up bass specifically for this band); and Sharon Shufelt, drums, who also suggested the band’s name. They played 11 songs during the course of the one-hour set, and while I was a bit disappointed that only the opener, Lou Donaldson’s “Blues Walk,” was an instrumental, Ajuzie is an excellent blues shouter and a far subtler singer than Kim Wilson of The Fabulous Thunderbirds, who’d played the show two weeks ago. She’s also a Black woman who dyes her hair blonde, and while I usually don’t like that look (the only Black women who I thought looked attractive as blondes were Beyoncé and my sister-in-law Taun), she pulled it off well enough and her looks certainly didn’t take away from the legitimate power of her singing. Palmer’s repertoire was an appealing mix of old blues covers and originals in the jump-blues style. After “Blues Walk” she did “Roll ’Em,” which didn’t sound like Mary Lou Williams’s famous 1937 song of that title but was an appealing boogie blues with a strong vocal by Ajuzie. Then they did “I Don’t Hurt Anymore,” a song with an unusual history; it was originally a country lament by Dale Robertson and Jack Rollins that was recorded by Hank Snow in 1954 and became the number one country song of that year. Then Dinah Washington got hold of it and turned it into hard-core blues, and not surprisingly that was the version on which Palmer and her band based their cover.

After that they did a song called “Reelin’ and Rockin’” by late 1940’s singer, songwriter, bandleader, and drummer Roy Milton. Milton was one of the pioneers in the transition of Black music in the late 1940’s from rhythm-and-blues into rock ‘n’ roll, and Palmer announced she was doing it as a tribute not only to Milton but his piano player, Camille Howard (a woman who had a hit on her own with a 1948 instrumental called “X-Temporaneous Boogie”). Her next song was “I Put a Hex on You,” an original by Palmer’s former musical associate, the late Candye Kane. While it was hardly in the same league as the song that was clearly its inspiration, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s “I Put a Spell on You,” it was a fun number and a nice tribute to Kane. Then we got some Palmer originals, including “Swango” (which Palmer explained was a combination of “swing” and “tango” and therefore would not be easy to dance to), “Looking for a Parking Place” (an ironic number that ends with the punchline that the Belly Up Tavern in San Marcos is actually an easy place to find a parking space), “Have Yourself a Ball,” “Do I Move You?,” and the closer, “Ooh Wee Sweet Daddy.” Between “Swango” and “Looking for a Parking Place” they played a song which Palmer announced as a medley of George Gershwin and Thomas “Fats” Waller. The Gershwin song turned out to be “I Got Rhythm” and the Waller piece was neither “Ain’t Misbehavin’” nor “Honeysuckle Rose,” his biggest hits, but “The Joint Is Jumpin’,” a great ditty about a house party being raided by the police. Palmer said in her interstitial interviews that the purpose of a Motel Swing Orchestra show is to give the audience a fun time and a chance to dance. She recalled that during the swing-music revival of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s she drew a lot of so-called “swing kids” to her audiences because she played the kind of music they could dance to – though what the “swing kids” were listening to had little to do with the music of Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, or Les Brown, as Brown himself complained about in an interview in his later years. It actually sounded more like the “jump blues” style popularized by Louis Jordan in the mid-1940’s and an important benchmark in the transition of Black popular music from jazz to rhythm-and-blues and the forerunners of rock ‘n’ roll (which Jordan bitterly denounced as “just rhythm-and-blues played by white people”).