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1. Original Jelly Roll Blues

NEW ORLEANS HAS A JUSTIFIABLE CLAIM to being the birthplace of the music known as jazz. The African roots of Black New Orleans reach deeply into Senegal and Guinea, regions with rich and extensive musical traditions,¹ particularly with regard to stringed instruments and percussion, the heart of rhythm sections that distinguished the new music. However, this music was often played with instruments of European origin, for example, the horn devised by Belgium’s Adolphe Sax in the early 1840s, and the European influence was strong at the mouth of the Mississippi River.

Nevertheless, the wider point is that these European instruments (and those of African derivation, too, for example the banjo and drums) were infused with the unique culture that arose in New Orleans’ Congo Square, one that reflected a potpourri of West African and North American influences.² Interviewed by the pacesetting Jazz Studies initiative of Tulane University in 1958, Alice Zeno—the mother of clarinetist George Lewis and born in 1864—spoke of her grandmother, born in 1810 and passing away in 1910. This elder spoke to her granddaughter in Wolof; the younger also spoke French, the language she spoke more than English in the first years of her life—before learning German and Spanish. Zeno in some ways resembles the new music that arose in the late nineteenth century, a mélange of African, European, and North American influences.³

Still, Africa was at the root: U.S. Negro missionaries in the Congo in the late nineteenth century were stunned to hear melodies reminiscent of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” then a musical staple back home.⁴ The bassist Gene Ramey, born in Austin, Texas, in 1913, said that his grandmother “remembers coming from Madagascar, yeah, at the age of four or five….”⁵ Yet another bassist, George “Red” Callender, has spoken of his “Ashanti,” a West African ethnic group, ancestry.⁶

New Orleans may have been the opera capital of the United States during the antebellum era.⁷ Reportedly, New Orleans was the only U.S. city to maintain an opera company continuously in the nineteenth century, the Civil War years (1861–1865) excepted. It also has a rich history of Free Negro culture, which included a militia with drum companies. Some Free Negro musicians were educated abroad, circumventing the U.S. preoccupation: depriving Negroes of education of all sorts.⁸ After the Civil War, a number of musicians in bands with the vanquished so-called Confederate States of America dumped their instruments in pawnshops in New Orleans, and Negroes happily bought some of these battered instruments, tools that jump-started the creation of a new musical art form.⁹ Moreover, the banjoist known as Creole George Guesnon, born in New Orleans in 1907, argued passionately that “I don’t believe there is any other city on the face of the earth as rich in Negro folklore and unwritten legends as New Orleans,” a phenomenon that fed imagination and creativity, contributing to the blossoming of a new music.¹⁰

There were other peculiar tendencies shaping the emerging new music. John Wiggs, a bandleader born in 1899 in New Orleans, spoke movingly of those he called “bottlemen,” who collected glass vessels and accompanied their task by blowing on horns—often three feet long—rendering beautiful blues songs that could be heard blocks away. Later he noticed the same trills and flourishes of these men replicated by trumpeters, particularly the “bending of notes.” They also used cowbells. Children were drawn to these men as they exchanged dolls for bottles.¹¹ Some of the earliest performances of the new music that took place were heard along Franklin Street inside such places as the Twenty-Eight Club and the Pig Ankle Cabaret; these “spasm bands” used homemade instruments and often honed their art on street corners. Some white and “Creole-of-color” residents dismissed it as “bawdyhouse music.”¹²

Invention and innovation were the watchwords of this new music and were represented by the father of Joseph Thomas. The younger was a clarinetist and vocalist born in 1902; the elder played a broom, drawn across the thumb, that sounded like a violin.¹³ Mary Lucy Hamill O’Kelly, born in Vicksburg in 1876, recalled in 1958, “I can’t remember when I first knew jazz as being jazz. I just thought it was sort of embroidery that the Negroes put on tunes that they played.” She observed, “They’d add little extra notes and quivers and trills and runs and syncopation and make the thing sound entirely different,” a fair estimate of the new music.¹⁴ There were other influences on the music. The talented trumpeter Clark Terry, born in St. Louis in 1920, attributed his distinctive style to emulating “mariachi [Mexican] players who are forced to master their mouthpieces before they’re given the horns.”¹⁵

The opera brought by European migrants also delivered a panoply of musical influences surrounding Negroes. By 1910, New Orleans also happened to have more Italian Americans than any other U.S. city, which further contributed to the rich stew of musical influences.¹⁶

THE MUSICIAN PAUL BARBARIN SAYS that growing up he could hear bands playing even if they were almost two miles away. Fewer buildings, he says, meant sound traveled with more facility, allowing exposure to diverse forms of music. Singers with booming voices could also be heard, even if they were speaking in a language other than English. He grew up with the sound of French since his mother spoke the language—she “speaks good French … she always talk in French … we understood it..”¹⁷ One witness claims that the scintillating cornet playing of the legendary Buddy Bolden “was so powerful they could dance to his music 10 miles away.”¹⁸

Charles Elgar, born in 1879 in New Orleans, studied violin with a French teacher, who was an assistant conductor with the French Opera.¹⁹ The first trumpet teacher of Johnny De Droit, born in 1892, was from the Republican Guard in France and was also first trumpet in their band.²⁰ His parents spoke French.²¹ The mother of Albert Burbank, born in 1902, spoke to him in French (he would answer in English); this clarinetist often sang in French.²² According to Buddie Burton, trumpeter Natty Dominique also spoke French.²³ Bassist George “Pops” Foster was born in 1892 to a father who spoke French.²⁴ His mother was said to speak about seven languages.²⁵ Paul Beaulieu, born in 1888 in New Orleans, studied cello with a French artist who was in the city working with a local opera company. He recalled that Alphonse and Ulysses Picou spoke as much or more “Creole French” as they did English.²⁶ Bella Cornish, once known as Isabella Davenport, was wed to Buddy Bolden’s sideman, William “Willie” Cornish. Born in Biloxi, her father was “a Frenchman,” she said.²⁷ Danny Barker, born in New Orleans in 1909, was a guitarist who also was part of this lineage. “My grandmother spoke French. My grandfather spoke French. They also spoke Creole, that is, a broken French.”²⁸ Ferrand Clementin, born in 1894 and perhaps best known as a comrade of the trombonist Kid Ory, recalled that French was spoken in his family and French songs were sung.²⁹ The trumpeter known as Don Albert, born in New Orleans in 1908, spoke French, too.³⁰

Then there were those like Israel Gorman, a clarinetist born in 1895, who served in France for a year or so during the First World War, a venture in which he was not alone in participating.³¹ Thus Joseph “Fan” Borgeau, born in 1891 and best known as a banjoist, served in Germany during the war, though he was a French interpreter in France.³²

A role model for many of these musicians was Victor Eugene Macarty, with roots in nineteenth century New Orleans, who received a music education in Paris, then became active in the Republican Party. In the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War, he launched a boycott that shuttered the local opera house because of its Jim Crow seating policies.³³

As Macarty’s example illustrated, the Gallic influence further impelled the movement of musicians to France where they could at once escape penurious Jim Crow and—by their very presence—influence the Old Continent against their homeland. The knowledge of French also opened musicians to diverse influences, musically and otherwise. New Orleans was remarkable in another respect. So many of the Negro musicians coming to maturity as this new music was emerging were familiar with other languages besides English, which exposed them to various musical genres and opened doors to pursuing their artistic visions abroad.

There was also the German population of New Orleans, which displayed a fondness for music and song, including its own choruses, string quartets, a conservatory, and orchestra. By the 1890s, as the new music was taking flight, this group was enthusiastic about their singing societies and preserving German songs. German bands often offered entertainment to the masses as they paraded on many festive occasions and gave concerts in numerous places throughout the city.³⁴

African Americans extended their experience when some wound up in Cuba and the Philippines after the United States declared war on Spain in 1898. Noah Cook, born in 1879 in Livingston Parish, Louisiana, trained as a jockey before decamping to the Philippines by 1900. It was there that he familiarized himself with a song often sung in Cuba by the troops that became a standard: “There’ll Be Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”³⁵ William “Willie” Cornish, born in 1875, also fought in this transoceanic conflict.³⁶

Another influence came from Mexico. Charles Elgar studied clarinet with Luis Tio, who hailed from there. A number of famed clarinetists, including Barney Bigard and Jimmy Noone, did so too. In 1885 a contingent of Mexican musicians arrived in New Orleans for the Cotton Exposition, familiarizing themselves with a city where several of these sojourners chose to reside. Tio and his brother Lorenzo spoke Spanish, of course, but, said Elgar, “developed the English and French … You’d never know that they weren’t original New Orleans fellows.” Elgar too was struck by the presence of opera companies featuring “fifty men in the pit,” a real “monster thing.” Speaking of this orchestra, he said, “You could go in the gallery for thirty-five cents.” Both of his parents were opera devotees and a couple of times a week took him to the opera: “The more I heard it, the more I fell in love with it,” he said. It was a constant presence in the city until it burned down in 1919.³⁷

But it was not just high-minded opera that shaped the cultural consciousness of some musicians: bordellos arose in New Orleans simultaneous with the arrival of the new music. As early as 1850, New Orleans was deemed to be the “red light capital” of the Republic.³⁸ Minimally, these sites provided a venue for musicians to play and contributed to a nightlife. One analyst claims that in fin-de-siècle New Orleans, prostitution “has never before or since had in America a heyday such as it had in ragtime New Orleans … In 1899 the New Orleans police admitted to the existence of 230 bordellos, 30 houses of assignations, and about 2,000 prostitutes.” Assuredly, a color bar then existed, but by 1899 the press was reporting a proliferation of assignations between Negro men and women defined as “white” (the press was not as concerned about Negro women and men of differing ancestry).³⁹ Piano playing with various trills was a component of these sites, and musicians improvised, setting the stage for the new music. Bolstering the “candelabra” thesis about the multiple origins of the new music is the report that the pianist Eubie Blake, born in Baltimore in 1887, began playing at a local bordello at the tender age of fifteen.

It would be an error to imagine that the origins of the new music were separate and apart from the wider U.S. society or even how African Americans were maltreated. The following pages will suggest a brand of male supremacy that was hardly unique to practitioners of the new music but certainly characterized some of them. Purportedly, Blake’s father, who was enslaved on a large Virginia plantation, was used as a “stud,” fathering twenty-seven children “of which he knew.” After the Civil War, he married and fathered ten more offspring, one of whom was the renowned pianist.⁴⁰ Even the precursor music known as “ragtime,” which catapulted Eubie Blake into prominence, was similarly linked to sexuality, brothels, and dens of vice.⁴¹

“Every whorehouse had piano players,” said “Pops” Foster, but “Lulu White’s had the most,”⁴² a reference to the most notorious Negro proprietor. A turning point arrived during the First World War era when the authorities moved to circumscribe her busy business.⁴³ There is some question as to whether the crackdown on brothels ignited a scattering of musicians that had made a living in Storyville, the redlight district of New Orleans.⁴⁴ The percussionist Paul Barbarin, born in 1899, recalled that “Jelly Roll” Morton, one of the early giants of the new music, toiled on “Basin Street, at Lulu White’s house” and had to find other options when her business was hampered. As for Barbarin, he moved to Chicago in 1917 and wound up working in the stockyards.⁴⁵

“Fan” Borgeau was also familiar with this bordello, recalling that a pianist there—Ed Mercier—also worked as a pimp. As for Borgeau, he claims to have visited the red-light district at the age of nine, since his uncle lived there. He also recalls that Manuel Manetta, the multi-instrumentalist born in New Orleans in 1889 and an early influence on the city’s musicians, played at White’s. This entrepreneurial madame, he says, employed blondes, brunettes—all kinds of women—in her twenty-six-room house.⁴⁶ She was a “great big sort of dark-skinned woman,” he said, unlike those she employed (though others described her as being a “mulatta”). He says that he knew her sufficiently well to once hold her blonde wig.⁴⁷ White’s presence notwithstanding, Negro men generally were barred from brothels in Storyville—“Even the black crib prostitutes were available to whites only,” according to one historian.⁴⁸ One analyst observes that during the second decade of the twentieth century New Orleans was “densely crowded with music … not just in the brothels but also in the many cabarets, honky tonks and dance halls,” meaning “two dozen bands played … every night” in the town.⁴⁹

Of the giants of New Orleans music, Kid Ory, the trombonist born in Louisiana in 1896, also was said to play at Lulu White’s bordello—along with playing at sex shows.⁵⁰ The versatile instrumentalist Manuel Manetta, born in New Orleans in 1889, knew White, recalling that she hailed from White Castle, Louisiana. At her place of business, champagne was sold for $25 per bottle. Hours for musicians were nine till three in the morning without exception.⁵¹ Johnny Sala, of Sicilian ancestry and born in New Orleans in 1894, called White an “octoroon” and said she “didn’t have no white woman in there,” speaking of her brothel. “But she had Negroes but you couldn’t tell they were colored all right. All [were] beautiful … and nothin’ but white men went in there.”⁵²

“Yes,” concurred clarinetist Barney Bigard, born in 1906 in New Orleans; Morton worked for White and besides, “was a gambler, a pimp and everything.”⁵³ Agreeing was Eubie Blake, who said that Morton “knew all the pimps.”⁵⁴ Actually, said Johnny St. Cyr, the banjoist and guitarist born in New Orleans in 1890, analysts have not properly accessed the chain of causation, in that instead of pianists being influenced by playing in brothels, these musicians all happened to be “halfway pimps anyway,” with Morton being an example.⁵⁵ Manuel Manetta recalled that Morton’s lover ran a brothel—“She had a lot of stalls in there; in fact, they had white and colored stalls”—and Morton performed there.⁵⁶

The presence of Morton returns us to the complicated question about the new music’s origins. Hayes Alvis, bassist and tubist, born in Chicago in 1907, felt “there was something to that claim on his [Morton’s] business card that he created jazz,” though he did not connect this to the point that he “had tendencies toward voodoo..”⁵⁷ Morton’s sister, Frances Mouton Oliver, sees her brother as emblematic of New Orleans in that he spoke French as a child—their grandmother could not speak English—and the language of Voltaire was the language of their home, too: “He created jazz in 1901,” she concluded modestly.⁵⁸ Ferdinand Joseph LaMenthe (or LaMothe), born in 1890 and known widely as Jelly Roll Morton, apparently worked as a pimp, making further complex the origins of the new music.⁵⁹

Morton’s accompanist, Volly de Faut, concedes that the pianist “was one of the first to have a real jazz style,” an indication that Morton’s creation bravado was not altogether misplaced.⁶⁰ Whether the creative Morton could claim parentage for the music has been questioned but it is evident that, like Charlie “Bird” Parker years later, he exhibited traits that did not necessarily enhance his longevity, cultivated in his early performance venues. Paul Barbarin said that Morton was “mostly a gambler … He’d lose maybe four or five hundred dollars” and that proved to be his “downfall—easy come, easy go.”⁶¹ Danny Barker said that Morton “took on the lifestyle of the notorious night people of the underworld,” including being an expert marksman with a pistol.⁶² Earl “Fatha” Hines, the pianist born in Duquesne, a town near Pittsburgh, in 1903, arrived in Chicago in the 1920s where he found “you had to act bad whether you were bad or not,” meaning aggressively tough. “Jelly Roll Morton had found that out long before I did,” he conceded, “and that’s why he carried a gun and talked loud.”⁶³

Moreover, the crassly exploitative nature of the music business often left artists in a foul mood. Morton claimed that he had been “robbed of three million dollars” during his career by agents, club owners, and other vultures, not to mention those he accused of copying his music and style.⁶⁴ Actually, said Creole George Guesnon, Morton “always carried him a big old ivory pistol” and “always talked [about] shooting somebody.”⁶⁵

Jim Crow notwithstanding, as early as 1889 press reports were referring contemptuously to “this thing of white girls becoming enamored of Negroes becoming rather too common,” a trend that obligatorily inflamed ire—not leaving those like Morton unaffected—and was destined to foment a crackdown.⁶⁶

Of course, these questionable performance venues bred traits that would bedevil Morton and musicians for generations to come, helping to spur an attempt by many of these same musicians to gain more control over their places of work.

But it was not simply the unique environs of the brothel that led Morton down this road of pistol packing. According to the reedman Volly de Faut, born in Little Rock in 1904, Morton was also a “pool shark,” which was another reason for him to “carry a .38 pistol right in his belt,” but this decision was driven by the reality that these “were hoodlum times, I mean bootleggin’ times” with men of ill temper presiding. There was, besides, a “tendency in those days … for white managers to exploit Negro talent” and given the absence or weakness of unions, self-help was often the only option available—a phrase and a trait that was to blossom decades later with the simultaneous rise of the Nation of Islam and the decline of worker organization. De Faut lamented the all too typical fate of the performers “Buck and Bubbles,” brilliant dancers both: “A manager signed them to a ten year contract when they were little kids and paid them just chicken feed..” Back then, he lamented, a “colored man … had a pretty rough time making a buck,” and Morton was no exception. He adapted to his environment, that is, “he put on a big front,” including carrying a flashy pistol.⁶⁷

Morton also happened to be of a lighter hue, which was not a minor quality in a color-obsessed society. In 1938, the researcher William Russell sought to find Bill Johnson, billed then as the “oldest living jazz musician” (he was older than Buddy Bolden and had worked with Lil Armstrong in Milwaukee and Chicago). Years later, he returned to the Midwest in search of Johnson and found that he had moved to San Antonio and that he had crossed the color line, had chosen to “pass,” an option open to him because of his lighter skin color.⁶⁸

The climate in which this music was forged at times was unhealthy, making the beautiful art created therein all the more remarkable. The trumpeter Clark Terry said of bandleader Fate Marable that he “never was able to settle down until he primed himself with a couple of slugs of whiskey. It used to be so strange” in that he would “wake up … get up and hurriedly before he brushed his teeth … sometimes in his pajamas, run around the bar and get a drink, and then he would start his day.” That musicians often performed in venues where imbibing alcohol was encouraged—if not being the raison d’être of the venue—hardly discouraged alcoholism,⁶⁹ which could allow unscrupulous proprietors to cloud the thinking of musicians by plying them with various brews. (Club owners were not the only employers who sought to manipulate workers by dispensing intoxicants; apparently there were those who felt that Negro servants worked harder under the influence of cocaine.)⁷⁰

There was a “long association of jazz with alcohol,” according to one scholar, meaning “many musicians suffered from alcoholism.” Musicians often ran up a tab as they grabbed drinks from the bar—or were plied with same—that could consume their paycheck. The unusual late-night working hours sapped energy, disrupting circadian rhythms, and often led to unusual musical rhythms. Unscrupulous club owners were not averse to “paying” musicians with alcohol. They were also not above closing their establishment every thirty days, issuing a new lease to a dummy lessee, and reopening under a new name, thereby cheating the artists and, perhaps, driving them to drown their sorrows in drink.⁷¹

Louis Armstrong once told Buck Clayton “how many people he knew had been killed in little clubs while listening to jazz by somebody that was either jealous or drunk. Louie once told me that even he had once been cut.”⁷² In some ways, this renowned trumpeter and vocalist can be viewed as the shining embodiment of the new music. After all, the erudite scholar, Dr. Allison Davis, was said to have remarked that this musician’s rendition of “‘West End Blues’ may be the greatest thing American civilization has ever produced,” a statement that is hardly exaggerated and thus casts into bold relief his own hardscrabble existence in Louisiana.⁷³ For Armstrong’s own experience in New Orleans provides a glimpse of the atmosphere in which the new music was incubated. As a youngster, he was playing in the streets “when all of a sudden a guy on the opposite side of the street pulled out a little old six shooter pistol and fired it..” Without hesitating, the budding trumpeter “pulled out my stepfather’s revolver from my bosom and raised my arm into the air and let her go..” In a transformative episode, he was arrested and jailed. “I was scared,” he confessed, “more scared than I was the day Jack Johnson knocked out Jim Jeffries,” a reference to the tumultuous day when the ebony heavyweight champion defeated his white challenger, leading to racist pogroms nationally. Armstrong was sent to the “Colored Waifs’ Home” for boys, which fortunately did not derail his career.⁷⁴

Alcohol at times loosened the tongues of those in the audience, often not in a good way. Danny Barker has said that “in the Negro joints we played relaxed, at home; but in the white joints were all eyes and ears, and anything could happen … there were descriptive slurs,” he said, including “niggers, darkies, Zulus, piccaninnies … monkeys, gorillas, Ubangis … tar babies, ink spots.” At times, these musicians crossed an actual—and metaphorical—border: “Mississippi. Just the mention of the word … amongst a group of New Orleans people would cause complete silence and attention. The word was so very powerful that it carried the impact of catastrophes, destruction, hell, earthquakes, cyclones, murder, hangings, lynchings, all sorts of slaughter….” But it was not just the Magnolia State since tales of “Alabama, Florida, Texas and Georgia were equally fearsome.”⁷⁵

The climate in which this music was forged was also unhealthy in terms of the violence often inflicted upon denizens. African Americans were a frequent target but indicative of the hostile climate that spilled over to ensnare others, Italian Americans, too, were targeted at times. It was in 1891 that this latter group was subjected to what has been described as the “largest lynching in American history,” referring to almost a dozen men who were murdered in one fell swoop in response to allegations concerning their presumed attack on local law enforcement. As noted, these Italian Americans were primarily of Sicilian origin, “some 70 percent” of the total according to one estimate, and, it was said, they were “unconsciously … tolerant” of Negroes, “even friendly with them,” displaying an “indifference to American racism,” a blatant violation of dominant norms that was bound to spark retaliation. The “White League,” known to torment African Americans, was also accused of “waging war against Italians.” Reputedly “50 percent of the major American papers in every section of the country … approved” of the lynching. Theodore Roosevelt called it “a rather good thing.” Opinions began to shift when it was reported that a substantial Italian fleet was making its way across the Atlantic with the aim of attacking U.S. coastal cities. The fact that African Americans had no such patron to intervene on their behalf helped to spur a “Pan African” Congress to cure this defect with the aim of strengthening the ancestral continent. Also, Negro musicians began at this juncture to migrate abroad where they were in a position to lobby on behalf of those left behind.⁷⁶

Retrospectively, the attack on Sicilians and Sicilian Americans and Italians and Italian Americans seems to have been designed to drive a wedge between them and their African-American neighbors and co-workers, at a time when one contemporary scholar has spoken of a “General Strike” in the Crescent City in 1892, “the first inter-racial strike in the country.”⁷⁷

As noted, anti-Italian pogroms were an extension of what was befalling Africans. New Orleans had one of the largest concentrations of Negroes in North America, which impelled the rowdiest of their antagonists to seek to bludgeon them.⁷⁸ At the time of the most significant anti-Negro explosions of this era, in New Orleans in 1900, “Big Eye” Louis Nelson Delisle, a multi-instrumentalist, was playing bass at a club, accompanying Buddy Bolden, when his father was killed and himself nearly so. He was prompted to make the strategic decision to give up on the cumbersome bass and focus on the clarinet; as one analyst put it, this smaller instrument “would be easier to run with if another mob was chasing him”—yet another example of how racism and the political economy shaped the music. Whatever the case, Bolden’s cornet was smashed during the riot, sending a contrary message. Likewise, a staggered Lorenzo Tio left the city altogether.⁷⁹

The crucible in which this new music emerged was often rife with dangers of various sorts—cheating employers not least—which in turn shaped the art form. Taking risks and improvisation nestled near the heart of the music.

Ineluctably, an increasingly popular music identified with African American men was designed to incur wrath in a racist society. At the same time, the perhaps not coincidental arrival of jazz with the rise of U.S. imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century contributed to seeing this new music, as one astringent critic put it, as the “natural accompaniment to the death march of Western civilization as a whole.”⁸⁰ It was an unwelcome trend in the United States, exacerbating the preexisting Negrophobia.

On the other hand, there was the proliferation of electricity, feeding the popularity of the phonograph and recorded music. Thomas Edison’s device marked the onset of the modern music industry and allowed musicians to reach into the most obscure corners of the planet.⁸¹ The critic Leonard Feather argued that Kid Ory’s “Sunshine Blues” and his “Creole Trombone” were the first genuine recordings of “black jazz,” recorded, interestingly enough, in Los Angeles rather than New Orleans.⁸² Ironically, recorded music simultaneously opened an income stream and yet another opportunity for exploitation. Electricity also facilitated the popularity of certain musical instruments—for example, the electric guitar—which transformed the music. The rise of electricity also dovetailed with the rise of radio, yet another device that propelled the new music.⁸³ But these technological advances also buoyed the increasingly strident critics alarmed by the popularity of music produced mostly by Negro men.

The critic identified as Mrs. Marx E. Oberndofer of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs asked plaintively, “Does jazz put the sin in syncopation?” The answer was an emphatic yes. This music, it was said accusingly, was that “expression of protest against law and order, that Bolshevik element of license, striving for expression in music.” Concurring, Fenton T. Bott found that “jazz is the very foundation and essence of salacious dancing.” This alarmism grew as the sales of phonographs surged to 158 million by 1919, allowing for further dissemination of the music. One poster blared ominously, “STOP HELP SAVE THE YOUTH OF AMERICA DON’T BUY NEGRO RECORDS.” “If you don’t want to serve Negroes in your place of business,” it was advised, then “do not have Negro records on your juke box or listen to Negro records on the radio.” A radio station in Chicago was scorned for playing this music by Negroes.⁸⁴

This new music was compelled to assume an “outlaw” mantle, forcing musicians to constantly peer over their shoulders for angry antagonists. An improvisatory spirit stuck with the music even as it migrated northward to Chicago and New York and Kansas City.

At any rate, in southern Louisiana, there was the difficulty of dealing with a police force that seemed to prey on Negro men; it was rare for a jazzman not to have spent at least one night sitting in a precinct lockup after a gig that somehow had gotten out of hand. One night in 1915 Sidney Bechet and “King” Oliver were enjoying a drink in a local tavern when a customer was shot dead right in front of their eyes, a riveting experience not designed to inspire confidence. Another time, an Oliver-Ory band was raided by the police, and band members who could not come up with what today seems like a pittance in bail money had to spend a night in jail. A disenthralled Oliver fled to Chicago, which created an opening for Louis Armstrong, who soon joined him there, this after working as a bellboy, carpenter, coal cart driver, and stevedore.⁸⁵

One hypothesis suggests that as Storyville began to close during the late stages of the First World War (1914-1918), a “Jazz Diaspora” was incited, though there is evidence to suggest that musicians were departing the Crescent City even earlier. (Edmond “Doc” Souchon, guitarist and writer, born in 1897, claims that less than 5 to 10 percent of the musicians played in Storyville.)⁸⁶ Then there came the impact of the Great War. This titanic conflict that saw numerous Africans in arms, often led to many being compelled to fight in Europe. Willie “The Lion” Smith earned his nickname in France during the war after manning what were called “Big French 75 guns” for forty-nine days straight.⁸⁷

St. Louis, just up the river and already a capital of sorts of ragtime, benefited from this scattering from New Orleans. Trumpeter Clark Terry, an early influence on Miles Davis, recalled the showboats plying the Mississippi River, while pointing out that “a lot of the cats got off there,” meaning the Missouri city, especially since this town “was always known for beautiful, fine ladies.” Besides, not unlike New Orleans, in St. Louis “any days of the month, you’d have three or four parades” in which musicians could display their talents.⁸⁸

There were other disincentives that argued against Negro musicians remaining in New Orleans. By 1902, Local 174 of the American Federation of Musicians was chartered and was strictly reserved for musicians defined as “white.”⁸⁹ Dancing to this beat, bandleader “Papa Jack” Laine, born in New Orleans in 1873, said of one musician, “When I found out he was a nigger, that’s when I stopped hiring him…. I saw his daddy and that was enough.” As for the trombonist Dave Perkins, he did not realize he was a Negro since he was “fair as a lily” with blue eyes, the implication being that he too would be passed over for a job. Laine was not poor; his father was a contractor, undermining the argument that bigotry was purely a product of the Euro-American dispossessed, frightened by labor competition from across the color line.⁹⁰

Perforce, union protections in Dixie—meaning New Orleans—were weak, where they needed to be strong, given the prevailing atmosphere. Pianist and guitarist, Frank Amacker, born in the Crescent City in 1890, recalled that often club owners would not notify bands they were fired, and band members would only ascertain this upon arriving to play and finding a new band in their place.⁹¹

Despite the wealth they created for club owners, recording companies, and the like, these musicians often performed in adverse conditions, one factor among many in creating or worsening health problems.⁹² Cornetist and bandleader Joseph “King” Oliver also developed dental problems, “pyorrhea of the gums,” according to his spouse, and was blind in one eye. He felt compelled to grant loans to his sidemen, who often did not repay him. Oliver became depressed, though unlike others similarly situated, he steered clear of alcohol, but that only harmed relations with his bandmates, who were not so inclined.⁹³ Evidently, the pyorrhea was an impediment to Oliver’s horn playing, making it difficult for him to play certain notes.⁹⁴ Saxophonist George “Big Nick” Nicholas, born in 1922, asserted, “Saxophone player, trumpet player, they always have this problem with their teeth so I had some work done on my lower mouth and it cost me twelve hundred,” followed by a “partial bridge put up in my upper part of my mouth. That cost thirty-one hundred…. Through the years your mouth, your gums and your bone structure” are affected by the stress of playing with a device attached to your lips: “All that pressure through the years, you know, it wears away and the bone structure wears away and then your gums recede. So I had six caps put in in 1950 and my gums started receding.” Fellow horn man Maynard Ferguson “has all of his teeth capped … Sonny Rollins has got a lot of work … Coltrane had a lot of work done in his mouth.”⁹⁵ The contemporary of Louis Armstrong, Norman Brownlee, recalled that the trumpeter roughened his mouthpiece by rubbing it on the curb and this roughness apparently combined with a lot of pressure, causing his lips to deteriorate.⁹⁶ Reputedly, Sidney Bechet played a saxophone since the mouthpiece was easier on his teeth, compared to a clarinet.⁹⁷ Such was the occupational hazard of the horn man, following in the footsteps of Oliver.

Sadly enough, it was not just teeth. Trumpeter Herman Autrey, born in 1904, said late in life, “I have glaucoma and cataracts and all that junk.” This meant a “cornea transplant,” adding, “I was blind once upon a time … two or three months, I guess.” He seemed to connect this malady to “bad whiskey” and did not mention the occupational hazard of playing often in smoky cellars. His spouse had a job, keeping them both afloat. There was no pension or support otherwise from the union. “From the union,” he spat out, “they wish you would drop dead soon, because they don’t want to pay that thousand,” speaking metaphorically. “That’s the worst union in the world,” he maintained furiously. “I told them that, too, and they know it … they don’t give a damn about nobody or help nobody,” certainly not this Alabaman. “They’re the worst bunch of bastards—I told them! They know me!” With gathering outrage, he proclaimed that if you “go in there 10:00, 11:00 o’clock [even] 2:30 they go home. The place is closed at 3:00.” With gathering outrage, he insisted, “I’ll starve to death before I go in there.”⁹⁸

Pianist Oscar Peterson, born in 1925, was afflicted by the malady that often beset those who pounded the ivory keys for a living: arthritis in his hands. “It just hurts to play,” he said, just as it hurt his many fans to be deprived of his consummate artistry.⁹⁹ Fellow keyboardist Horace Silver struggled with scoliosis: is it possible that the problem he suffered from, the curvature of his spine, emanated from—or was worsened by—long nights bending over the piano while playing?¹⁰⁰

The cornetist Harrison Barnes, born in 1889, had dental problems too, an occupational hazard for those in his field (he played trombone, too). The seedy environments he performed in may shed light on why he contracted syphilis and how he was afflicted with a tumor—“big as a baseball,” he said. And yet, despite his skill as a musician, he was forced to work almost two decades as a flue welder, simply to pay the bills.¹⁰¹ Born in 1891, Joseph “Fan” Borgeau, whose nickname stemmed from his Chinese appearance, worked as a lottery vendor for thirty-six years, despite his ability as a pianist; one job was typical: the piano keys were so sharp that his hands could be left bloodied.¹⁰²

Suggestive of the discomfiting reality that horrendous conditions endured by skilled musicians have yet to disappear is that Herbie Hancock, one of today’s leading keyboardists and now an elder statesman, recalled his early days when he was “playing music into the wee hours every night and then trying to deliver mail all day….” He was a “complete wreck,” he confessed, and “actually fell asleep standing up….” Unsurprisingly, he “got sick too.”¹⁰³

There was also the occupational hazard of getting from one gig to another. Saxophonist Arnett Cobb, born in 1918, suffered from pleurisy and tuberculosis, but in 1956 he endured “a nearly fatal car accident [that] necessitated spinal surgeries and the use of crutches he’d require” until he died in 1989.¹⁰⁴

Drummer Freddie Moore, born in 1900, endured an experience that was hardly atypical. He was playing in Duncan, Oklahoma, for a group of Euro-American customers, when one among this group—a “cracker,” in his words—pulled a blackjack and began to club him in the head. “King” Oliver grabbed the assaulter’s wrist while shouting “Don’t do that, don’t kill my drummer. That’s the only drummer I’ve got here.” The police were summoned but more than a dozen of the assaulter’s comrades declared they intended to lynch Moore. The shaken percussionist abandoned his drum set, clambered down a fire escape, and caught a freight train to Tulsa, the band’s next stop. He dared not register at the hotel where the band was slated to stay for fear of being found. Instead, he resided with an unnamed “landlady,” Three weeks later, he returned to Duncan with his face blackened and his hair longer, which foiled detection. But this adventure was not the end of his travails, for Oliver called him “skunk foot” since his feet perspired so much when drumming , which contributed to sore feet, at times hampering the removal of his shoes (not to mention generating a striking aroma).¹⁰⁵ The superb drummer Max Roach once observed that “most of the good drummers have bad feet. Because you do a lot of exercising. You work. Sometimes I see somebody … walking strangely. I say, it’s got to be a drummer.”¹⁰⁶ It was not just drummers. Reportedly, saxophonist Zoot Sims, born in 1925, had trouble with his feet because of having to stand and play on so many different engagements.¹⁰⁷

It was not simply the arduousness of performing, it was also that artists often had to perform when they might have been better off in a hospital bed, quarantined. Pianist Horace Silver confessed, “I once played in San Francisco with a 104-degree temperature,”¹⁰⁸ a product of “the show must go on” mentality, as well as the inadequate bargaining power by artists that was a by-product of this mantra.

Scholar Frederick J. Spencer is not far wrong in concluding recently that “it has become an accepted fact that jazz musicians tend to be more liable than other professionals to die early deaths … from drink, drugs, women [sic] or overwork.” The venues for their performance—speakeasies, clubs—encouraged drinking and often were controlled by unsavory characters not opposed to using violence to attain goals. According to Spencer, a few jazz businessmen even preferred to hire addicts: “Some record companies and club owners would only hire junkies. With them they could be sure they wouldn’t insist on their rights.”¹⁰⁹ In addition, according to scholar Ronald L. Morris, “Most leading jazz entertainers after 1880 were closely allied with racketeers,” and the impresario and producer John Hammond “believed no fewer than three in every four jazz clubs and cabarets of this distant period were either fronted, backed or in some way managed by Jewish and Sicilian mobsters,” though those of Irish origin were also prominent.¹¹⁰

The new music, in short, got off to a rocky start, navigating—and influenced by—war, pogroms, racism, and adverse working conditions. Yet these formidable barriers could not restrain the rise of a music that proved to be sufficiently potent to overcome.