"Now Sister Fullbosom and Brother Lowdown" sings boogie-woogie pianist Romeo Nelson at the beginning of his song "Getting Dirty Just Shaking That Thing," setting the stage for a barrelhouse blues so raunchy that it might still raise eyebrows in the age of rap music. The song is one of a handful this artist recorded, a small supply of titles to be sure, but material so well liked, and so obviously accessible to copyright claim jumpers, that it has appeared on more than a dozen different piano anthologies. Born Iromeio Nelson, the pianist stayed put in Chicago from the age of six, except for an interlude of about five years in East St. Louis beginning in 1915. Ironically, it was during this period that he learned the piano skills that he would use the rest of his life on the Chicago music scene. He got busy playing rent parties and clubs until the early '40s, but otherwise supported himself by gambling. In 1929, he recorded four titles for Vocalion, among them "Head Rag Hop," one of his most often anthologized numbers and even the subject of a three-minute color short created in 1970 by director Peter Turner. Blues piano fanatics tend to pick Nelson's recordings as some of the finest boogie-woogie showpieces on record. The music is multi-dimensional, involving great amounts of keyboard technique, an interesting harmonic imagination, and an obvious sense of humor. He often takes the works of his competitors on the piano, such as Pinetop Perkins, and plays them at greatly enhanced speed, an effect as overwhelming as it is comical. An interview conducted the '60s by the Jazz Institute of Chicago indicated that Nelson had retired from music, yet they might not have been talking to the right guy, since an alternate theory of the man's biography has him checking out for boogie-woogie heaven as early as 1940. ~ Eugene Chadbourne