If the Gershwin brothers brought to the songs of the musical theater the clashing and blending of post-War American culture in New York in the 1920s and 1930s, and if Cole Porter, born in Indiana and living high in many places throughout the world during the Depression, articulated the rhythms of desire in his songs, then the music of Thomas Wright Waller – Fats Waller – combined the musical energies of the Gershwins and of Porter in his notable performances of popular music. Yet he did so in a manner very different from his white contemporaries. First of all, unlike the Gershwins and Porter, he performed his music, both as a remarkably talented musician – an important developer of the “stride” piano – and as a singer and entertainer of some note. (He was the first black performer to be broadcast nationwide on mainstream white radio in the 1930s.) Second, like the Gershwins, he was from New York – he grew up in Harlem – yet his New York was so different from the Lower East Side and Tin Pan Alley of George and Ira Gershwin that we could reasonably assume that his situation in relation to the musical establishment in New York City was closer to that of the outsider Porter than that of the Gershwins. Finally, the combination of lyrics and music in his songs, like the Gershwins', borrowed from and participated in the colloquialisms and argot of his day in music which, like theirs, was a public discourse.