Introduction

Bernard “Pretty” Purdie is one of the few who arguably can claim to be, as his Web site calls him, “the world’s most recorded drummer.” Although the accuracy of his assertion has never been proved, the drummer’s presence on dozens of iconic and genre-defining 20th-century songs and albums—works of jazz, soul, pop, rock, and acid jazz—and the myriad studio sessions he took part in during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s certainly place him in the running for that distinction; his Web site notes performances on more than 3,000 albums, among them works by James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Steely Dan, and Louis Armstrong.

Early Life

The 11th of 15 children, Bernard Purdie was born on June 11, 1939 in the town of Elkton, Maryland, near the Delaware border. At the age of six, he took up drumming, banging out rhythms on an improvised drum set comprised of his mother’s kitchenware. “I knew right away that’s what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” he told Segal. “No matter what happened, I wanted to play the drums.” When he was 11 his mother died, and at 13 he lost his father as well; afterward Purdie’s grandparents and “people all over town” raised him, as he told Bradley Bambarger for Newhouse News Service (June 8, 2006). Purdie was given music lessons early on by a drummer named Leonard Hayward (spelled “Heywood” in some sources), who played in a local orchestra. Hayward started Purdie out on trumpet and flute—not the drums—and while that teaching method initially confused the young musician, it paid off. As quoted in the transcript of a 2004 interview for the traveling Red Bull Music Academy, Purdie said that Hayward “wouldn’t let me play the drums and I didn’t understand this. Then one day [another musician] said: ‘He wants you to learn music, dummy.’ I’m like: ‘Yeah, I knew that. [Of] course I knew that, this is the way you do it.’ Boy, I was really dumb, but it worked. I learnt how to play the notes and when you hear notes you play the rhythms, patterns, all horn players play patterns. . . . Also what happened for me, instead of trying to give me a drum chart . . . I would take the horn chart and use that to follow where the music was going and it was the easiest thing in the world for me, ’cause I’m an ex-trumpet player.” Purdie’s early idols were such big-band jazz drummers as Sid Catlett, Louie Bellson, Gene Krupa, Cozy Cole, Papa Jo Jones, and Chris Columbus. He would eventually adopt the swinging high-hat technique used by those drummers. “Those swing drummers were timekeepers, and keeping time was what I was taught as my job,” he told Bambarger. “To this day, that’s what it’s all about for me—keeping that beat happening and everybody’s feet moving.” When Purdie was 14 or 15, he used money he made by distributing advertising circulars to purchase his first drum set.

In addition to teaching Purdie music, Hayward let the young musician accompany his band to shows. One of Purdie’s jobs was to keep alcohol away from Hayward, a heavy drinker. Purdie took advantage of that situation in order to sit in on the drums. He said in the Red Bull Music Academy interview, “Everyone was always watching [Hayward] to make sure that he never got hold of any alcohol when the gig was going. So he’d bring me along to make sure he didn’t drink anything, stuff like that, and I’d have to walk around with this big tall glass of water—‘I got your water Mr. Hayward, I got it!’ Only the big tall glass of water was filled with either vodka or gin. So every time after one or two songs, he’d need a drink of water, and I’d be standing there. . . . So by the time of the first break. . . . Mr. Hayward would have to go out to the station wagon and fall right to sleep. And I’d go inside and sit at the drums and I’d have to finish the gig, big band with 14-piece orchestra.” In his teens Purdie also played with a host of local country and bar bands, including one called Jackie Lee & the Angels. According to Purdie’s Web site, he became his family’s biggest breadwinner through his frequent gigs, which also allowed him to “feel my way into nearly every kind of music, ’cause I had to know all styles and was never afraid to try something new.”

Purdie attended George Washington Carver High School until the 12th grade, when community efforts to integrate public schools led him to enroll voluntarily in a previously all-white school. After graduating he attended Morgan State University (then Morgan State College), in Baltimore, Maryland. In the early 1960s, after two years at Morgan State, Purdie moved to New York City with a band, which played its first show at a club where the uncle of one of the group’s members worked. Mickey Baker and Sylvia Robinson, who performed as the R&B duo Mickey and Sylvia, were in attendance—and were impressed by Purdie’s drumming. After the show they asked him to play on a re-recording of their 1957 hit song “Love Is Strange.” He was paid $80 for four hours of work. (He told Bambarger that the song “ended up making millions, but I felt rich with that 80 bucks, even though it was all gone by Tuesday, what with me buying drinks for everybody.”) Purdie then found work at a laundry and spent the hours after work outside the nearby Turf Club, asking the musicians for a chance to play. That led to further session work, and soon Purdie was working up to four sessions a day, six days a week. He became known in the New York recording industry as a “fixer,” a drummer on call to play session drums and add needed over-dubs. He established himself as an eager and available musician, and the professionally made signs he set up while working, which read “You done hired the hit maker” and “If you need me, call me, the little old hit maker,” added to his reputation as something of an eccentric. (He stopped displaying the signs toward the end of the 1960s, after a friend lectured him about his ego. “When she was done with me, I felt about an inch high and my behavior changed 180 degrees,” the drummer told Bambarger.)

Life’s Work

In the late 1960s Purdie became the house drummer for the jazz record label CTI (Creed Taylor International), owned by the producer Creed Taylor. He also played drums on numerous recordings for artists on Atlantic Records during that period. The first hit among the songs on which Purdie played during those years was the 1967 instrumental song “Memphis Soul Stew,” by the saxophonist King Curtis (born Curtis Ousley). Purdie has credited Curtis with helping him find much of his recording work in the 1960s and early 1970s and with introducing him to Aretha Franklin. He told the Red Bull Music Academy interviewer that meeting Curtis in 1962 was “a highlight” in his life. “I didn’t realize how big King Curtis was,” he said. “All I knew was that he had the best band in the land. He had a 10-piece orchestra that was a funk band, a pop band, a classical band—whatever it took, the band smoked. . . . Meeting him elevated me automatically, ’cause he was the one who called me for 90% of the records that were done for Atlantic Records. He brought me in, he liked what I was doing.”

The late 1960s were some of Purdie’s most prolific years: he played drums on one or more tracks on James Brown’s Ain’t That a Groove (1965), Gabor Szabo’s Jazz Raga (1966), Nina Simone’s Nina Simone Sings the Blues (1967), Jimmy Smith’s Respect (1967), David Newman’s Bigger and Better (1968), and Gary McFarland’s America the Beautiful (1969). He also played on two songs on the iconic soul singer Brown’s groundbreaking album Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud (1969), “I Guess I’ll Have to Cry, Cry, Cry,” and “Let Them Talk.” That year Purdie also released his own album, Soul Drums, as “Pretty Purdie.” Reviewing a reissue of that record, Chris Ziegler wrote for the OC Weekly (June 10, 2005), “Soul Drums’ monstrous production and Purdie’s ferocious style make for a widely recognized but rarely available classic.”

In 1970 Purdie played drums on the song “Soul Kiss” on the Dizzy Gillespie album The Real Thing. The next year he played on Gil Scott-Heron’s Pieces of a Man and Galt MacDermot’s The Nucleus. He also released the album Stand by Me (Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get) on the Flying Dutchman label. That album, recorded with his band, Pretty Purdie and the Playboys, featured guest performances by a host of well-known musicians, among whom were Gil Scott-Heron, Harold Wheeler, and Chuck Rainey. Several of the tracks were instrumental versions of soul songs; some had vocals provided by Purdie, Norman Matlock, and Scott-Heron. Purdie also released Purdie Good! & Shaft, an album of covers he recorded with other musicians that featured a version of “Theme from Shaft,” the popular Isaac Hayes song from the cult “blaxploitation” film Shaft. According to a review on the Web site MustHear.com, “Far from groundbreaking, Purdie Good! & Shaft simply crackle with a raw uncluttered funk that is seldom heard in the age of technocratic music producers and $10,000 a day studios.”

Purdie’s profile was also given a major boost in the early 1970s when he was asked by Curtis to join his band, King Curtis and the Kingpins, who were to perform as Aretha Franklin’s backing band for a series of shows. Purdie accepted the offer and later took over Curtis’s spot as Franklin’s music director, a position he held until 1975. (Curtis was murdered by a drug addict in the summer of 1971.) Among the band’s members were Cornell Dupree on guitar and Billy Preston on organ. The concerts were recorded and preserved on the album Live at Fillmore West (1971). Purdie also played Curtis’s original material as part of the Kingpins; a recording of the performance was released in 1971, also as Live at Fillmore West.

In 1972 Franklin’s album Young, Gifted, and Black was released to popular and critical acclaim. It contained the song “Rock Steady,” which includes one of Purdie’s best-known drum performances, complete with his signature 16th-note high-hat beat. In 1972 another album of Purdie’s work, Soul Is . . . Pretty Purdie, was released on the Flying Dutchman label. The album found Purdie and numerous studio musicians playing covers as well as originals, such as Purdie’s “Song for Aretha.” A description of the album on the Dusty Groove America Web site reads, “Purdie breaks out here in a compelling album of soul jazz tracks done in a number of styles. The approach is sort of big studio funk—with some cuts that have a harder sound, and others that open up in a groove that’s gotten a lot more complicated than the early days.”

In 1970 Purdie had played on Louis Armstrong’s Louis Armstrong and His Friends (1970), which featured the popular song “What a Wonderful World” and was re-released in 1988 with that title. Later in the decade Purdie played on the soundtrack of the animated film Fritz the Cat (1972) and the albums Abandoned Luncheonette (1973), by Hall & Oates; Bolivia (1973), by Gato Barbieri; and Foreigner (1973), by Cat Stevens. Among the noteworthy songs from that period featuring Purdie’s work are B.B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone” and Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman.” Purdie is also known as one of the session drummers for the 1977 album Aja, by the jazz-rock band Steely Dan. The album was a critical success and reached number three on the U.S. album charts. Purdie played on the songs “Deacon Blues” and “Home at Last,” the latter famously showcasing the Purdie Shuffle. Other Steely Dan albums with Purdie’s work include The Royal Scam (1976) and Gaucho (1980).

In 1980 Purdie recorded with Dizzy Gillespie at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, which resulted in the album Digital at Montreux (1980). In 1983 Purdie toured with Gillespie. He played on B.B. King’s There Must Be a Better World Somewhere (1981) and recorded frequently during the 1980s with the jazz and funk saxophonist Hank Crawford, performing on Indigo Blue (1983) and Mr. Chips (1987). He played on two songs on Dizzy Gillespie’s Rhythmstick (1990) and teamed up with Chuck Rainey and the percussionist Pancho Morales, among others, for the 1993 release Coolin’ Groovin’ (A Night at On-Air), which was recorded live in Japan. Also in 1993 he also played on three songs each for Al Green’s Don’t Look Back and The Fugs Second Album, by the garage-rock band the Fugs. In 1995 he contributed drums to the critically acclaimed Pushing Against the Flow, by the acid­ jazz group Raw Stylus; that album, the only one by the group, brought together a large number of contributing musicians and merged soul, jazz, and hip-hop. Purdie also recorded drums for the electronic group Coldcult’s 1997 album, Let Us Play.

The year 1996 saw the release of Soul to Jazz, the first recording in the U.S. in more than 20 years to be released under Purdie’s name. The album, which included several soul and jazz covers, was followed by Soul to Jazz II (1998). For the follow­up recording Purdie enlisted guests from his past, Hank Crawford and Cornell Dupree. Douglas Payne wrote for the All About Jazz Web site (July 1, 1998), “Soul to Jazz II isn’t as earth-shattering or hip-shaking as the premise promises. But the ultimate joy is hearing three soul sax giants (Hank Crawford especially) waxing eloquently in their own mighty soulful way.”

Purdie has generated criticism and controversy for his claim, made at least as long ago as the late 1970s, that he was paid to provide, dub over, or “fix”—without credit—the percussion work on roughly 20 tracks by the Beatles. (He has said that he will make the case for that claim in a forthcoming autobiography.) His claim is still brought up in interviews, and he has stood by it. He told the Red Bull Music Academy interviewer, “People don’t understand that fixing records was a way of life in the ’60s and the ’70s. 98% of self-contained groups are not on their own albums and I was one of the few drummers that could go in, join the group and make the records. . . . It was just a job to me, and the Beatles’ music was just another job for me. . . . Half of the songs that I played on, I played on 21 of the Beatles tracks—half of them had no drums.” He added that the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, “spent an amount of money to promote the Beatles that was unheard of in the ’60s. [The Beatles’ drummer, Ringo Starr,] had his place in the Beatles ’cause that’s who they wanted and that’s who they could control. . . . He looked the part and he’s the one they chose, but when it came to those records and the fixing of those records, 98% of them were first recorded early in England and brought to the USA to be fixed. . . . There are four drummers on the Beatles music, and Ringo’s not one of them.” Purdie’s assertion has brought him death threats.

While most of the recordings for which Purdie played in the late 1990s and 2000s were reissues and compilations, he has performed recently on a few original releases. He played on the song “Modern Jive” on Sugarman & Co’s Pure Cane Sugar (2002), released by Daptone Records, and on Steel Reelin’, a 2006 record by the Steely Dan collaborator Elliot Randall. In 2007 Purdie released Purdie Good Cookin’, a live album that featured several musicians from Portland, Oregon. Since the early 1990s Purdie has also played occasional shows with the New Jersey-based R&B band the Hudson River Rats, fronted by Rob Paparazzi, who has since become a friend and business partner of Purdie’s. Paparazzi played harmonica and provided vocals for Purdie Good Cookin’ and has also served as Purdie’s music director on tours of Europe and Japan. Purdie contributed to the Hudson River Rats’ albums Get It While You Can (2003) and First Take (2007). In March 2009 Purdie began playing drums in the Broadway revival of Hair and is credited on the musical’s cast recording. Purdie also appeared as Uncle Bill in the independent 2008 crime film Priceless.

The Purdie Shuffle, according to Purdie, was influenced by the rhythmic sounds of the train that regularly passed his childhood home. He told Segal, “When I first started working this out, I was 8 years old, and I called it the locomotion because that’s what I was trying to capture: whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.” The beat began as a standard drum shuffle, but as Purdie developed it he added lightly brushed “ghost notes,” and instead of tapping the high-hat, he used a pattern in which he moved his right hand up and down to strike the side of the high-hat and then the top in repetition, creating what Segal described as a “tock-tick tock­tick sound.” Purdie described his shuffle to the Red Bull Music Academy interviewer as “quarter notes, eighth notes, 16th notes, 32nd notes, dotted notes, triplets, half notes, whole notes, everything except 64th notes. A combination of high-hats and kick drums, putting it all together with the dotted feel, the loping feel, and allowing it to breathe in a two bar phrase. Not one bar, ’cause the worst thing you can do is trying to put all this into one bar, it’s a two bar phrase, and if you put it into half time, you automatically fall into what is necessary for the shuffle.” He noted that the reason the shuffle challenges drummers is that most, instinctively, want to play it faster than it should be played. “The best part of it is, the slower you do it, the better it is. Which is why it’s so hard for people to do, ’cause a lot of people don’t want to play slow,” he said. Segal wrote about the Purdie Shuffle, “If you can listen without shaking your hips, you should probably see a doctor.” The shuffle is a versatile beat; the Steely Dan member Donald Fagen told Segal that the beat unexpectedly fit the song “Babylon Sisters,” from Gaucho. “I guess we expected more of a regular shuffle, and he started playing something very complex,” Fagen said. “We were amazed, because it was perfect for the tune. ‘Babylon Sisters’ has this dark mood to it, and the beat seemed to accentuate the floating dark mood that the song required.”

Personal Life

Purdie has seven children, including three with his second and current wife, Barbara. He also has 12 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. He has shown no sign of retiring soon from live performances. Paparazzi told Bambarger, “Bernard just loves playing music for people; it doesn’t matter what it is—a giant concert, a serious recording session, a drum clinic or someone’s wedding. He’s played with some heavy cats, and he’s got great stories to tell. But he’s never intimidating; he’s good at just being one of the guys.”

Further Reading