A couple years ago, I started Boogie Fever, a blog in which I intended to review and number-grade (from 1-10) every number-one R&B single from 1942 (when Billboard began keeping the Harlem Hit Parade chart) to the present. This project has mostly fallen by the wayside thanks to a lethal combination of overwork and laziness, not to mention a sense of creeping guilt brought on by not updating the thing in forever. But instead of keeping Boogie Fever around to grow moss, I'm going to import what I've written so far onto this site, and hopefully get more reviews in motion, surrounding activity being an excellent way to jumpstart your own. Here, then, is what I wrote about the very first R&B number-one:

Andy Kirk & His Clouds of Joy: "Take It and Git" [October 24, 1942]
An excellent kickoff for both the charts and this project. According to AMG, Andy Kirk was a successful journeyman--not notably proficient on any single instrument, but a pretty terrific bandleader. This is the only song I know by him (if you want to call listening to it as part of a compilation without noticing it too much and then repeating it in isolation a few times for this blog "knowing"), but it fits that description as well as I can imagine it doing. Kirk leads it off by calling out the title; then over a fairly typical swing horn fanfare he shouts it a couple more. The chorus is a neat, musicianly device: each iteration introduces a solo by another instrumentalist (guitar, piano, sax, clarinet, then full-band fanfare again), each of whom follows the "Take it and git!"s with "OK, I've got it." Actually, the chants generally come in the middle of their solo time, but usually they're just marking time till the chorus is finished. The solos aren't particularly memorable, but they serve the whole, a concept that, looking over the 1035 songs I have so far (up till 1999, still need to get my hands on the no. 1s for 2000-present), remains a constant. 7