Appalachian Figures
When you drop the needle on Big Joe Turner’s “Chains of Love” or Ruth Brown’s “5-10-15 Hours,” it is easy to imagine New York bandstands, neon bar signs, and late night subway rides. It is harder to imagine Bell County, Kentucky or a Harlan County rooming house. Yet the pianist who helped shape those records grew up between Middlesboro, the coal town of Lynch, and the Black church and street corners of Charleston, West Virginia.
Harry Eugene Vann – the man the world would come to know as Vann “Piano Man” Walls – spent the peak of his career in big city studios and on the road with Doc Starkes and His Nite Riders. By the time a documentary crew caught up with him in Montreal during the 1990s, he was an elderly man in a white suit, grinning behind the keys while Canadian blues fans cheered. But the paper trail, the records, and his own stories all point back to an Appalachian childhood that quietly threaded the hills into the sound of postwar rhythm and blues.
Middlesboro, Lynch, And A Rooming House Piano
Even the question of when Vann was born reads like a genealogist’s puzzle. Researcher Marv Goldberg, drawing on the Kentucky Birth Index and multiple federal records, found a “Harry E. Vann” born 24 August in Bell County, Kentucky, with the year variously given as 1916, 1918, or 1920. The World War II draft card and 1930 census lean toward 1918. Social Security and some later paperwork say 1916. The Kentucky index abstract says 1920, almost certainly a misreading of a handwritten register.
Goldberg’s reconstruction places Harry as the son of Martin Vann and Elma Elizabeth Ealy of Middlesboro. In the 1910 census Elma appears in Bell County as “Eliza E. Ealy,” age eight, daughter of Charley and Maggie Ealy. Later Social Security records list her birth as 1907. In the 1930 census she turns up as “Elmer” Walls, twenty five years old, running a rooming house in Harlan, Kentucky, and teaching piano. Living with her is “Harry Wall,” about twelve, already planted in the coalfield world that would send so many people north.
Walls later told interviewers that his mother had been in her early teens when he was born, that she married a man named Walls not long afterward, and that he simply kept both names. He grew up as Harry Vann Walls, or just Vann, and learned his first chords at his mother’s piano.
That piano in a Harlan County rooming house hints at the mix of movement and stability in his early years. The family’s link to Bell County is anchored by the birth index and Elma’s own statements. Their presence in Harlan by 1930 shows the pull of coal town work. From there his trail bends northeast, following the pattern of many Black Appalachian families who rode rail lines and roadways between company towns and border cities.
Charleston’s Holy Sanctified Church
By 1940 the paper record catches Harry in Charleston, West Virginia. Goldberg notes that the city directory lists Margaret Washington and a “Harry Walls” at the same address, and that a somewhat garbled census entry for “Harry Ward” at that address gives his occupation as shoeshine boy. Soon afterward he registered for the draft from Lexington, Kentucky, giving his birth date as 24 August and listing the Lafayette Hotel as his workplace.
The official forms say nothing about the sound he was already chasing. Later biographical sketches based on interviews have him playing in the sanctified churches of Charleston and developing a style that depended as much on his feet as on his fingers. In one oft cited recollection he said he learned to play while “stand up dancing” at the Holy Sanctified Church, working out a way to stomp, sway, and keep the bass pattern rolling all at once.
West Virginia Music Hall of Fame biographers describe his Charleston years as a time of shoeshine work by day and music by night. He played on local radio, fronted a small group, and joined saxophonist Cal Greer, whose band toured coal mining camps across the region. That circuit – Black bands in coal camps, union halls, and dance pavilions – linked Appalachian extraction country to the broader R&B world that was about to explode.
From Club Trocaveria To Atlantic Records
By the late 1940s Walls was leading his own band, the Rhythm Notes, out of Ohio. Goldberg traces an ad that places “Van Walls” at Club Trocaveria in Cleveland in early 1949, fronting a combo that would soon attract the attention of saxophonist Frank “Floorshow” Culley. Culley heard him in Columbus and urged him to come east to New York as a studio pianist for a still young Atlantic Records.
The film site for Vann “Piano Man” Walls: The Spirit of R&B sums up what happened next with characteristic understatement. Harry Vann, it notes, became “the East Coast’s finest rhythm and blues pianist,” a composer and arranger at Atlantic from 1949 through 1955.
All the standard reference sources agree that he arrived at Atlantic in the autumn of 1949 and quickly became part of the label’s house band. Ahmet Ertegun would later call him “by far the finest blues pianist to be found anywhere on the East Coast.” Ruth Brown credited him with much of her success. The West Virginia Music Hall of Fame calls him “the architect of R&B blues piano.”
His piano is all over the early Atlantic catalog. Discographies and the film site’s session listings place him on Big Joe Turner sides like “Chains of Love,” “Boogie Woogie Country Girl,” and “Sweet Sixteen,” on Ruth Brown hits like “5-10-15 Hours,” on the Clovers’ “One Mint Julep,” on LaVern Baker’s “Tomorrow Night,” and on Joe Morris and Laurie Tate’s “Any Time, Any Place, Anywhere.”
“Chains of Love” in particular sparks debate. Early pressings credited both Walls and Ertegun as writers before later issues dropped his name. Ruth Brown consistently insisted it was his song, an arrangement shaped at the piano long before royalty forms were signed.
“Tee Nah Nah” And The After Hour Session Boys
Although he was most often a sideman, Walls did cut a handful of sides under his own name at the turn of the 1950s. Those records are some of the clearest primary documents we have for what his playing sounded like when he was the star rather than the accompanist.
In 1950 Atlantic released “Tee Nah Nah” backed with “Ain’t Gonna Scold You,” credited to Harry Van Walls with vocals by “Spider Sam” – a pseudonym for Brownie McGhee – and a studio pickup group billed as the After Hour Session Boys. The record is a runaway party: rolling left hand, bright right hand trills, and a shouted lyric about dancing that feels like a New Orleans tune even though it came from an Appalachian born pianist in a New York studio.
That same year he recorded “Easter Parade” and “Air Mail Boogie” for the Derby label, instrumentals that show off his hybrid of swing, boogie, and church-inflected riffing, and “Chocolate Candy Blues” for Columbia. Later European collectors pulled those sides together with a few 1980s tracks for the LP They Call Me Piano Man, and the Swedish fanzine Whiskey, Women, And… devoted a 1987 feature to his story, built around interviews by George Moonoogian.
To listen through those discs is to hear an Appalachian migrant fully at home in early postwar R&B. The right hand carries some of the bounce of Kansas City players like Jay McShann. The left hand, shaped by years of playing while standing in sanctified services, walks and stomps as if the church floor were still beneath him.
The Nite Riders And A Road To Montreal
If the Atlantic years made Walls a quiet giant in the studio, the mid 1950s put his name on marquees. Around 1954 he joined singer and bandleader Doc Starkes in what would become Doc Starkes and His Nite Riders. Goldberg’s long article on the group charts a storm of records for labels such as Apollo, Teen, Sound, Capitol, MGM, Swan, Sue, Chime, Cherry, and Courtesy. Some of those sides – “Women and Cadillacs,” “Say Hey! (A Tribute to Willie Mays),” “Doctor Velvet” – have the feel of a band determined to ride every new fad while keeping the piano at the center.
The Nite Riders toured relentlessly through the Northeast and eastern Canada. In 1955 they held down a nineteen week stint at Montreal’s Esquire Show Bar, one of the city’s major R&B rooms. That booking planted the seed that would eventually pull Walls north of the border for good.
By the early 1960s, sources like the WBSS Media biography and the film site agree, the band was working out of Hartford and then breaking apart. During a Montreal engagement Walls met Ruth Palevsky, who ran the kitchen at the Black Bottom, an after hours club. They married in 1963. When the Nite Riders folded, he stayed in the city.
“Musique Haïtienne” In Quebec Taverns
The decades that followed are easy to miss if you only look at hit records. In Montreal he worked small rooms, taverns, and Royal Canadian Legion halls. Posters and reminiscences from the period have him billed as playing “Musique Haïtienne,” a marketing flourish that said more about club owners’ ideas of exoticism than about his Kentucky and West Virginia roots.
Yet even this quiet period links back to Appalachia. Like many Black musicians from the coal belt and upper South, he found steadier work in Canada than the United States offered older R&B players in the 1970s. His route from Bell County to Montreal ran through coal camps, Charleston nightspots, and union halls. The papers that document his life – draft cards, census schedules, Social Security applications – are the same forms that track miners, railroaders, and textile workers who made parallel journeys.
Rediscovery: Brooklyn Heights And The Montreal Jazz Festival
The curtain lifted again in May 1990. After a decade off record, Walls appeared at a Brooklyn Heights concert with his former piano student Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John. New York Times critic Jon Pareles filed a rave review under the headline “Making the Piano Jump and Wail,” praising the way his playing lit up the room.
That concert led to invitations back to Montreal, including a set at the Montreal International Jazz Festival where he shared the stage with Dr. John. The festival performance caught the attention of Montreal based music historian Craig Morrison, who tracked Walls down and began interviewing him in depth. Morrison, in turn, introduced him to filmmaker Steven Morris.
Morris started filming Walls in the early 1990s, gathering hours of footage in clubs, rehearsal spaces, and studios. Those sessions would eventually become the documentary Vann “Piano Man” Walls: The Spirit of R&B, released after long delays in 2013. The film follows him through festival dates, an emotional return to Atlantic era material, and conversations with figures such as Ahmet Ertegun, Jerry Wexler, Dr. John, Ruth Brown, Ry Cooder, and Smokey Robinson.
One crucial piece of that story is a small compact disc recorded in a Montreal studio.
In The Evening
While Morris and Morrison were filming and interviewing, Walls told them he wanted one more album under his own name. In 1997 Morris and producer René Moisan booked studio time with the Stephen Barry Band, a veteran Montreal blues outfit. Over two days they cut the album In the Evening for Les Disques Bros.
The record returned him to some of the songs he had helped shape in the 1950s and set them alongside new material. It also put his name in front of a new generation of listeners. In the Evening was nominated for a Juno Award in the Best Blues Album category and became the narrative spine of Morris’s later film.
When Toronto Blues Society writers previewed the release in 1997 they pointed out that Montreal’s Les Disques Bros was launching the album just months after he received a Pioneer Award from the Rhythm & Blues Foundation. They listed “Chains of Love,” “Drinking Wine,” and “Supermarket Baby” among the songs he was revisiting in concert.
Pioneer Awards, Hospital Pianos, And A Hall Of Fame
In February 1997, at the Rhythm & Blues Foundation’s gala, Vann “Piano Man” Walls walked onstage in New York to receive a Pioneer Award alongside artists like Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Four Tops, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, and Gary U. S. Bonds. The film site’s notes on In the Evening point out that he was introduced not by some anonymous presenter but by Aretha Franklin and Ruth Brown, a symbolic gesture that acknowledged his role behind their generation’s sound. He went straight to the piano, played, drew a standing ovation, and then crossed the stage to accept the award.
In interviews from that period, including an eight minute JAZZ.FM91 segment now available on YouTube, his speaking voice sounds relaxed, amused, and a little surprised by the late attention. He talks about the old Atlantic sessions, about McRebennack’s lessons, and about life in Montreal.
He did not have long to enjoy his new visibility. Walls died of cancer in Montreal on February 24, 1999. Obituaries and later biographies often note that he played for other patients in the cancer ward almost until the end.
In 2015 West Virginia inducted him into its Music Hall of Fame, tying his name publicly to Charleston and the state where his church trained left hand learned to shout over a congregation. The Hall’s profile stresses his Atlantic years and calls him the architect of R&B piano.
Reading The Paper Trail
Much of this story comes not from one tidy autobiography but from overlapping scraps. We have immigration style movement in domestic form: a Kentucky birth entry that misreports his year, a Harlan County census line that compresses his mother into “Elmer,” a Charleston listing that turns “Walls” into “Ward,” a Lexington draft card with yet another birth date. We have payroll ledgers for union locals that document his shift from shoeshine boy to club musician. We have label scans, session sheets, and tiny type on Atlantic singles that recast him as Harry Van Walls, Piano Van, Captain Van, or simply Van Walls.
Then there are the primary sources you can hear and watch. “Tee Nah Nah” captures the bounce and humor of his early solo work. The Atlantic masters for “One Mint Julep” or “Boogie Woogie Country Girl” reveal what happens when his left hand digs in under a singer with lungs of iron. The In the Evening sessions show an old Appalachian born pianist still delighted by the way a simple riff can set a room moving. And the documentary footage of him dancing beside the piano in a suit – a man whose childhood church forbade worldly entertainment, now cheered in film festivals – may be the clearest primary record of all.
An Appalachian Legacy In Rhythm And Blues
Vann “Piano Man” Walls does not fit most of the standard Appalachian narratives. He was a Black musician from Bell and Harlan counties whose work is more often mentioned in histories of Atlantic Records than in histories of the Cumberland Plateau. He spent most of his adult life in cities rather than in hollers. His classic sides talk about romance, drinking, and dance floors, not coal strikes or mountain ballads.
Yet his life story sits squarely inside the larger Appalachian experience. It begins in a company town region where coal and timber created a boom, threads through the Black sanctified churches that were social anchors in places like Charleston, rides touring circuits through coal camps alongside bandleader Cal Greer, and ends with an aging musician in Montreal who still keeps his family’s Kentucky name alive on stage.
When we reframe him as an Appalachian figure, several things come into focus. First, the East Coast sound that shaped postwar rhythm and blues had roots in the mountains as well as in big cities and coastal ports. Second, the Great Migration out of southern Appalachia carried not only miners, textile workers, and white ballad singers but also Black musicians whose training came in coal camps and store front churches. Third, the documents that historians of mining and labor already use – censuses, draft cards, Social Security files, city directories – can also anchor the biographies of musicians who passed through the same spaces.
If you listen closely to “Chains of Love” or “One Mint Julep” after tracing that paper trail, you can almost hear the Harlan rooming house piano behind the Atlantic grand. The hands are the same. The journey from Middlesboro and Lynch to New York studios and Montreal festival stages did not erase his Appalachian beginnings. It simply carried them into the grooves of records that still move dance floors around the world.
Sources & Further Reading
“Tee Nah Nah” / “Ain’t Gonna Scold You,” Harry Van Walls with Spider Sam and the After Hour Session Boys, Atlantic 904 (1950). Wikipedia+1
“Easter Parade” / “Air Mail Boogie,” Harry Van Walls with Freddie Mitchell, Derby 733 (1950); “Chocolate Candy Blues,” Columbia 30220 (c. 1950). Wikipedia+1
Selected session work with Big Joe Turner, Ruth Brown, the Clovers, LaVern Baker, and Laurie Tate / Joe Morris, as documented in Atlantic and related discographies and summarized on the Vann “Piano Man” Walls film site and standard reference entries. Wikipedia+2Vann”Piano Man” Walls+2
In the Evening, Vann “Piano Man” Walls with the Stephen Barry Band, Les Disques Bros, Montreal (1997), Juno nominated in the Best Blues Album category; see also Toronto Blues Society coverage and discographic notes. Wikipedia+3Amazon+3Discogs+3
Vann “Piano Man” Walls: The Spirit of R&B, dir. Steven Morris (Mate & Orchard Productions, completed 2013), along with English language media kit and related festival materials. YouTube+3Vann”Piano Man” Walls+3Vann”Piano Man” Walls+3
Vann “Piano Man” Walls – JAZZ.FM91 Interview (radio segment, c. 1990s, available via YouTube). YouTube
Marv Goldberg, “The Nite Riders,” Marv Goldberg’s R&B Notebooks (2012), especially the Van Walls section which collates Kentucky Birth Index data, census entries, Social Security records, and musician union files. Unca Marvy’s R&B Page
Craig Morrison, liner notes to Vann “Piano Man” Walls: In the Evening (Les Disques Bros, 1997), and related interview material used in the documentary (not all online but cited in Wikipedia and film publicity). Wikipedia+1
Eric Siblin, “Showman in the Shadows: R&B hitmaker Vann ‘Piano Man’ Walls re-discovered half a century after making his mark,” Montreal Gazette, reprinted on EricSiblin.com (profile and interview during the Montreal years). Eric Siblin+1
Harry Vann Walls profile and photo notes at Hazeltones.com, “Harry ‘Piano Man’ Van Walls,” which summarize his birth in Middlesboro, Charleston upbringing, Atlantic years, and later touring. hazeltones.com
“Vann ‘Piano Man’ Walls,” entries in the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame and related social media posts, emphasizing his Charleston connections and calling him the architect of R&B blues piano. West Virginia Music Hall of Fame+2Facebook+2
“Vann ‘Piano Man’ Walls,” Wikipedia and derivative summaries such as WBSS Media, Rock My World Canada, and other R&B history sites, which synthesize data from Morrison, Siblin, Goldberg, and the film. Wikipedia+1
SortedByName and related genealogical index entries for Elma Ealy and Harry E. Vann in Bell County, Kentucky, which reflect Kentucky Birth Index information and provide a starting point for local archival work in Bell and Harlan counties. Sorted By Name