The first time I saw the comedian Redd Foxx was at a club at the foot of the Las Vegas Strip at a time when the strip ended. He was smoking his trademark cigarette and telling his raunchy jokes.
Compared to what comes out of the mouths of rappers these days, Foxx was pretty tame. Back then, his jokes were full of innuendos – not the real thing – and he was oh-so-funny.
I came across a 1956 recording of Foxx at auction a few weeks ago while waiting for an item I wanted to come up for bids. I started flipping through some old 45s, most of which were in their original cardboard jackets and paper sleeves. Some were singers I had never heard of before and others were surprises:
The Gene Krupa Trio
The Three Suns present your Christmas favorites
Ziggy Elman and his Orchestra
Frank Sinatra sings songs from his Warner Bros. picture “Young at Heart”
Jackie Gleason plays Romantic Jazz (a surprise)
The Alto Sax of Jay White
The Ray Charles Chorus
Harry James and his Orchestra
Louis Armstrong, “Hello Dolly!”
Stan Kenton “Sketches on Standards”
Redd Foxx “Laff of the Party”
The last one stopped me. I picked it up from the stack, pulled out the record and read the titles. On the B side was “Women Over Forty,” which got my attention because that’s the demographics for We Are Black Women. I was curious about what he had to say.
Believing the entire B side was about this subject, I decided to bid on the stack of 45s, all 70 of them inside a black plastic milk crate. I figured that I’d get them for about 5 bucks – who wants a carton of old records, especially since they weren’t albums? Someone else did, and I ended up paying $11 for them.
Fortunately, I still have a record player at home with the small disc for playing 45s. So I listened to the record (it had a lot of scratchy background noise) and found that the joke about “Women Over 40” was one of several on the B side. “Laff of the Party” was a series of recordings of a vintage Foxx on stage before a live audience. These were party recordings for people to get together with drink and fun, and listen to him riff on everything from sex, women, men, infidelity, honeymooners, donkeys, strippers, stagecoaches, and more.
When I examined the record and sleeve closely, I realized that the record was Volume 3 (1956) and the sleeve was Volume 8, Part 1 (1959). Looking further among the stack, I found two others in paper sleeves – Volume 8, Part 1, and “The Honeymooners/The Sneezes” from Volume 1 (1956). Foxx was in his 30s when he made these recordings.
Two of the 45s bore the label Authentic Records, a subsidiary of Dooto Records, which signed Foxx to a long-term contract in the 1950s. The series – along with his other recordings (the website for his estate says more than 50) – sold 15 million to 20 million copies (depending on which story you read).
Foxx sued Dooto in 1961 to try to cancel the contract, accusing owner Dootsie Williams of holding out on royalties. He was tied to Dooto until Frank Sinatra bought out his contract and brought Foxx over to his Loma Records label in 1967. (Williams’ label Dootone was the first to release the song “Earth Angel (Will You Be Mine)”, performed by the Penguins in 1954).
The world knows Redd Foxx as the crusty but loveable old junk dealer in TV’s “Sanford and Son,” where he cleaned up his language but not his comedic craziness. He was known among black club-goers and record-buyers way before then.
He was born in St. Louis in 1922, raised by a single mother after the father left the family when he was 4. His mother moved to Chicago to find work, leaving her two boys with her mother. When he was an adolescent, Foxx joined her in Chicago before running away to New York. He got the name Chicago Red because of his hair color and light complexion, and met Detroit Red – who would later become Malcolm X – in a dishwashing job at the Chicken Shack in Harlem. He worked a club in Baltimore for a while – a tough town for a comedian, he said – and ended up on the chitlin’ circuit back in New York. He teamed with Slappy White for a couple years before heading to Los Angeles to work with Dinah Washington. There, he was signed by Dooto.
Take a look at a Dooto ad for Foxx in Ebony in 1959 (and a 1967 Ebony interview ) and an ad in Billboard in 1961. Foxx died in 1991 owing the IRS more than $3.6 million.
When I listened to “Women Over 40,” I chuckled, but I also thought about how far we over-40 Baby Boomers have come. Many of us are able to take care of ourselves and our families, work jobs that had once been closed to us, retired because we wanted to follow our passions, travel the country and the world, and do just about anything we want to do. In other words, we are fearless.
What a truly different over-40 woman Foxx would find now. Wonder what his new jokes would be like.
