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Clarence ‘Frogman’ Henry, r’n’b singer and pianist who toured with The Beatles – obituary

Clarence “Frogman” Henry, who has died aged 87, was a singer and pianist who in the 1950s and 1960s had a string of rhythm and blues hits on both sides of the Atlantic, notably Ain’t Got No Home, (I Don’t Know Why) But I Do and You Always Hurt the One You Love; he supported The Beatles on their 1964 summer tour of the US and Canada, but thereafter largely confined himself to his native New Orleans, where he was a local hero.

He had already met The Beatles when he got the call to join them: “I met them through a promoter in England,” recalled Henry, who was on tour at the time. “He took me to an upstairs club in Piccadilly Circus where they were playing and introduced me to them.” 

The band were huge fans of American r’n’b and were thrilled to meet one of their heroes. As luck would have it, Henry was managed by Bob Astor, who also did work for NEMS Enterprises, an offshoot of Brian Epstein’s company, which was handling the Beatles’ North American tour, and he was engaged for 18 dates at $750 a week. After expenses, he said, “I wasn’t making but $500 a week, but I enjoyed that $500! A lot of entertainers wanted to do it for nothing.”

Life in the eye of the Beatles storm was a new experience for Henry: “I saw things with the Beatles that I had never seen before on tour,” he told an interviewer in 2004. “Doctors and nurses and ambulances all around at every show.”

He became particularly close to the Beatles’ bassist, he recalled. “Paul, he was my main Beatle that was real friendly, he’d ask me about different New Orleans musicians... He and I and one of the guys with the Bill Black Combo, we bummed together. We played dice, but Paul was winning all the money.” 

 

He acquired his nickname through a vocal technique with which he used to tease girls at his high school - Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy© Provided by The Telegraph

Clarence Henry was born in New Orleans on March 19 1937, the son of a railway porter who was also a keen amateur musician; when the boy was 11 the family moved to the city’s Algiers neighbourhood, where he would spend the rest of his life. He began learning the piano aged eight, and was soon influenced by Fats Domino and Professor Longhair.

He played trombone at high school and joined a band, the Toppers, backing the singer Bobby Mitchell; young Henry would sometimes take on vocal duties, too.

During an all-night concert Henry, by then 18, found himself wishing that the audience would all go home, and began improvising on the piano, singing, “Ain’t got no home, no place to roam.” He worked it up into a song, which he would deliver in his singular way, breaking mid-song into falsetto, and into a croak that he had used to tease girls at school.

He went on to record the song, which in 1956 became the flip-side to his debut single Troubles, Troubles – until a local DJ, Poppa Stoppa, favoured it over the A-side. When listeners asked for “the frog song” Stoppa began calling Henry “the Frogman”, and the name stuck.

Promoted to the A-side, Ain’t Got No Home reached the US Top 20, and though his next few singles bombed, in 1961 he had Top 10 hits with (I Don’t Know Why) But I Do and You Always Hurt the One You Love.

One date on his tour with The Beatles stood out, and not just because it was in his home town. As the Fab Four began their set, hundreds of girls tried to storm the stage, he recalled: “It really was like a football game – they were running from the policemen and the policemen were tackling them. I really enjoyed it because it was so comical. And those policemen, man, they were laughing the whole time.”

But the Moptop revolution meant the end of the golden age of Henry’s brand of music. “After the Beatles tour I went back to playing on Bourbon Street, and suddenly everything was guitars,” he said. “The Beatles put a hurt on us. It lasted a few years but we got it back. But I really enjoyed the Beatles’ music, it was something new and something different.” 

He continued to tour and record, and visited the UK again in 1982, recording a live album, The Legendary Clarence “Frogman” Henry. “People want to see the Frogman,” he said in 2001, “but you know, the Frogman wants to see the people, too.”

Clarence Henry was married and divorced seven times – twice to and from the same woman – and had 10 children.