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2. What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?

“PROHIBITION,” THE ERA LASTING ROUGHLY from 1920 to 1933, sought to restrict the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages. It happened to coincide with the proliferation of electricity, the advent of radios as a virtual home appliance, and the rise of phonograph records. All had a dynamic impact upon the enhanced popularity of the new music. As is now well-known, the attempt to ban alcoholic beverages provided a boost for illicit sales, thereby empowering mobsters, who, in any case, already had a toehold in the nation’s political economy. The music migrated into the emerging “speakeasies” and as much as the supposed clampdown on New Orleans’ Storyville, which was said to disperse musicians to Kansas City (hundreds of miles west, by the way, of the serpentine Mississippi River highway northward), the new trends delivered a jolt of adrenalin, contributing mightily to the enhanced popularity of the new music. Though Prohibition and its demise has been seen as being transformative of the music, musician Milt Hinton thought it was the decline of silent movies that was critical, meaning a decline of pit orchestras, meaning fewer jobs—particularly for violinists—just as the Great Depression crept closer.¹ Lionel Hampton, bandleader and conservative, agreed with Hinton, and he mentioned in passing that it caused Hinton to switch from violin to a more supportive bass, since the opportunities for the former for a man like himself were not frequent.²

Saxophonist Russell Procope, born in New York City in 1908, was stunned by the discordance delivered by Prohibition. It meant frequent raids—“Even the Musicians’ club they used to raid,” he said, “on any trumped-up excuse because they used to have gambling in the back room and all that,” that is, poker tables and blackjack tables. The “standing joke,” he said, “was you could [go] in almost any apartment house and knock on almost any door and get something to drink,” meaning more opportunities for raids.³

Prohibition may have contributed to a preexisting climate of repression. It was not the proximate cause of what Eddie Barefield endured in the 1920s. “Some rich man” hired him and his fellow musicians to play but “the cops caught them and beat them up and beat the guy that was giving the party. Some of the guys were crippled for the rest of their life and some of them died from it and [the cops] broke up all their instruments..” Another time he was in Benny Moten’s band in Beaumont, Texas, and “Jimmy Rushing was sitting on the bandstand with white socks on a guy walked up there and pulled out his gun and said, ‘Nigger, take those white socks off.’”⁴

The musical genius Art Tatum had similar experiences in his native Toledo, where he was born in 1909. Pool halls and gambling joints were owned mostly by a Detroit mobster who had ties to the criminal “Purple Gang,” which terrorized northern Ohio from the earliest days of Prohibition. Tatum honed his marvelous piano skills at Charlie’s Chicken Shack, a nightspot in a Negro neighborhood owned by Johnnie Crocket, a place where mobsters were often found. Tatum at times played other gigs out of fear as a result of the pervasive influence of racketeers. Prohibition meant that these newer speakeasies were desperate for performers, a vacuum filled by the likes of Tatum.⁵

As in Toledo, so it was in Harlem, in that Prohibition brought more nightspots to the neighborhood. One estimate details that there were an astounding “twenty-two thousand speakeasies … in Manhattan alone” then, with a goodly number found uptown.⁶ Beginning in 1923 and continuing for a decade, Harlem was characterized as the Port Said of the eastern seaboard of North America. Shortly after this fateful decade commenced, Owney Madden, the British-born jackanapes and racketeer, had compelled many African American club owners to sell their enterprises.⁷ In further empowering mobsters, Prohibition brought more fear to musicians. Singled out in New York City were pianist Teddy Wilson and trumpeter Roy Eldridge. These two men were picked out to be examples in dissuading other musicians from moving downtown for a wage bonanza. Hyman “Feets” Edson was a manager of the film star George Raft, and both were in turn close friends of Owney Madden. Later, Edson managed Erskine Hawkins’s band. This unsavory character began threatening to shoot off these musicians’ fingers if they moved downtown. Unsurprisingly, Eldridge carried a weapon; as bandleader Artie Shaw put it, “he saw himself as traveling through a hostile land and he was right.”⁸

Neither Toledo nor Harlem were sui generis. In St. Louis in the 1920s, as the popularity of the new music continued to spread, members of the segregated local of the American Federation of Musicians began a campaign to stop “white” establishments from hiring Negro musicians. This campaign took the form of picket lines in front of these enterprises. The problem for the picketers was that often these clubs were owned by racketeers who were hardly about to be intimidated by nonviolent protest.⁹ In a sense, this protest boomeranged and provided an incentive for gangsters to solidify ties with Negro artists.

In some ways, what unfolded in the Mound City was a battle between the influential and virulently anti-Negro Ku Klux Klan and mobsters, embodied in the so-called Charlie Birger gang, named after the man born as Shachna Itzak Birger, of Lithuanian Jewish origin. Wielding their machine guns expertly, the Birger gang battled the KKK, and by the end of 1926 these terrorists, who also harbored anti-Semitism, were functionally inactive.¹⁰ This did not happen through friendly persuasion. A typical incident occurred in September 1925 as a modest crowd was listening to a band, when without warning three men barged inside and opened fire with automatic weapons.¹¹ Before then a fracas erupted at a popular cabaret called Jazzland located at Grand and Easton not far from the Mississippi River. On one side was the Russo gang, composed of Italian American bootleggers. Their opponents included Klansmen known for holding mass rallies featuring thousands; at one gathering 1,000 men and 700 women were sworn in underneath two huge flaming crosses while Klan-friendly lawmen stood guard. Nonplussed after one confrontation, the gangsters sought to use dynamite against the KKK, also known to harbor anti-Catholic and anti-Italian forces.¹²

Miles Davis was born in this region and he well knew of the “bad gangs”—“real bad ones,” he stressed that proliferated in his homeland. Davis also knew of the infamous massacre of Negroes in East St. Louis in 1917 that featured organized criminal efforts by Euro-Americans. “Black people there who survived used to talk about it. When I was coming up,” said the trumpeter, “black people I knew never forgot what sick white people had done to them back in 1917.”¹³

Roughly, Prohibition provided Negro artists with a difficult choice, symptomatic of the harsh options encountered by Africans since their arrival on these shores: ally with racketeers to foil Klansmen.

“What Prohibition did,” says bandleader, Cab Calloway, “was place liquor under the control of the underworld gangs. And as long as the underworld controlled liquor, they controlled a number of clubs in Harlem as well,” not to mention nationally, speaking of the sites where the new music was performed. “There was booze all over the country in those days,” he said knowingly, “but there was more of it in Harlem.” The profits were so handsome that bloody competition ensued, gang wars, with musicians often caught in the crossfire. Calloway recalled an attack in the 1920s on the aptly named Plantation Club in Harlem: “All the windows of the club had been broken and pieces of half the tables and chairs were on the sidewalk and in the street,” leaving this performance venue in a “shambles,” and the “mirrors on the walls … smashed to smithereens. Somebody had taken an axe to the tables and chairs. The hanging chandeliers had been pulled down and smashed,” apparently at the behest of a competitor, the owners of the Cotton Club. In response, a few weeks later, Harry Block, a comrade of Owney Madden, suspected of sponsoring the assault, was found dead, his lifeless body riddled with bullets in the elevator of his apartment building. This violent atmosphere did not leave musicians unaffected, inexorably influencing their performances. Calloway recalled playing at the Crazy Cat at 48th and Broadway in Manhattan. “Four guys were sitting there with their coats and hats … from the mob. Wide-brimmed hats, long cloth coats, one of them had on shades. They were all white guys. I tried to be cool but inside I was scared to death.” These men were exemplars of “pure muscle,” for “’the mob didn’t play games. They were for real.” The performance setting was meant to transmit a not so subtle message. Thus, at the Cotton Club, said Calloway, “the bandstand was a replica of a southern mansion” from the slavery era; “even the name Cotton Club was supposed to convey the southern feeling. I suppose,” he mused. “The idea was to make whites who came to the club feel like they were being catered to and entertained by black slaves.” But it was not just Harlem that was unsettling; Calloway recalled a performance in St. Petersburg, Florida, where a racist patron tossed a bottle that bounced off the head of his drummer, Lester Maxey, leaving the dazed man, “bleeding like a stuck pig.” Then in Texas he found a white man could hit a Negro in the mouth if he wanted to but had to pay a $300 fine as a token; his bandmate Benny Payne was thus assaulted but fought back, with a riot ensuing at the club.¹⁴

Interviewed by pianist Dr. Billy Taylor the bassist Milt Hinton corroborated the story about racists paying $300 for the opportunity to punch a Negro in the face. “They hit Cab Calloway … This is the God’s honest truth,” he added to calm the doubters. “We had to get off the bandstand and go down underneath … and that began Cab Calloway not wanting to do a lotta travelin’ down there,” meaning Dixie. “For a black group to come down with all this sophistication, they didn’t like it too very much” there. As Calloway himself put it, “You comin’ down here all sharp” like “New York slickers” and you had to “watch yourself” as a result. Since, said Hinton, “they didn’t like us comin’ down with all those beautiful shows….”¹⁵ Hinton added that seeking succor in Negro neighborhoods brought no necessary surcease. Usually traveling musicians “got overcharged by the local hotel owners and the people who ran the rooming houses. All of them were black,” he said, “but that didn’t matter. They knew we couldn’t stay in the bigger places.” Ruefully, Hinton observed, “We all resented this kind of treatment.” Hinton thought that in turn “whites in these towns would try to turn local blacks against us,” contributing to a circle of distrust.¹⁶

The Cotton Club, while barring Negroes as customers, hired Negro women as dancers and the like, though they had to be of lighter skin, worsening a rift among African Americans, making them more susceptible to exploitation.¹⁷ The influence of racketeers also facilitated horrendous conditions for labor. Lena Horne recalls that when she tried to quit working there, bosses “made it clear” this was unacceptable, instructing that “nobody had any right to quit a Cotton Club job,” a kind of neo-slavery apparently. They punctuated their objection when “they got nasty. They beat him up,” speaking of her agent—they “dunked his head in the toilet bowl and threw him out.”¹⁸ The former Cotton Club dancer Howard Johnson recalled that Horne’s stepfather was “beaten unmercifully” by thugs because he “once took issue when the mobsters refused to raise Lena’s pay.”¹⁹

Organized crime was not a force for racial equality, in other words; mobsters enforced a system that undergirded Jim Crow, rudely imposing noxious effects on Negroes. Black people visited Smalls Paradise in Harlem, though musician Danny Barker suggests there was a trickle-down aspect of Jim Crow in that “black Cubans” visited yet another club, while Barbadians went to another, and “people from Virginia” to another and so on.²⁰

Dempsey J. Travis, the Chicago-based writer, also spoke disparagingly of this conflicted era—the 1920s—when Owney Madden controlled the East Coast’s booze and beer distribution; Al Capone reigned over Chicago and its environs; Johnny Lazia controlled the police, liquor, and gambling in Kansas City, Missouri, and the Purple Gang dominated Detroit’s subculture—all sites where the new music began to flourish. “These cities,” says Travis, “were controlled by the ‘Jazz Slave Masters’ and some of the very best Black musicians were their serfs. Talented jazz musicians were chained to bands and specific nightclubs and saloons in the same manner as the antebellum Negroes were shackled to plantations.” They were “inmates behind the ‘Cotton Curtain’,” an apt metaphor since control from the top was so pervasive that many musicians found it difficult to perform at a site not of a boss’s choosing. This was all racially and ethnically coded, he said, since “the keepers of the cash box were usually Jewish or Italian and occasionally, they were mob-connected Blacks.”²¹

His recollection was substantiated by the jazz singer Ada “Bricktop” Smith, born in West Virginia in 1894, who ultimately chose voluntary exile in Mexico after a lengthy stay as a club owner in France: “No one in the saloon business can avoid gangsters, hoods, petty crooks and other types of criminals,” she conceded; this was a “built in nuisance.” In 1924 she opened her Parisian nightspot and, she confessed, by then “the French underworld was beginning to take some cues from American gangsters. They got them from American gangster movies,” pointing to these cinematic tributes as a primer in that it led these Parisians into “organizing protection rackets,” indicating the global reach of U.S. piratical tactics. For these men could quickly “get nasty” and “those who protested found themselves at the wrong end of a bullet or a switchblade.” As in the United States, these Gallic imitators also pushed prostitution—and “each time they were more threatening”—and then various illegal drugs. She began to arm herself as a result, mimicking those back home, the difference being that a Black woman in North America most likely would have had difficulty opening a club in the first instance.²²

Horn man Benny Carter, born in 1907, in the early 1930s became acquainted with George Rich—“he was a great fan of mine,” he conceded—who was a “sporting gentleman,” a euphemism for gangster. When the Club Harlem was being liquidated, then in a losing rivalry with the Cotton Club, Rich intervened. When Carter visited him, “he started raising cushions … getting up cash from this chair, upholstered chair and from this sofa, and I never saw so much money, just being dug up right in front of me … and the next day he became the owner of the Club Harlem.” His motivation? “You’ve got to have a place for your band,” he told Carter, who, staggered, pointed out, “His only purpose for buying the club was to keep my band together.” After a messy split with his spouse, Carter was “pretty broke and George loaned me $150 … to pay my fare back to Paris.” Thus arose Benny Carter and “The Club Harlem Orchestra.”²³ Not coincidentally, this beau geste also obligated the composer, arranger, and bandleader to this questionable patron.

This is no trifling matter since, according to critic Leonard Feather, Carter was a trailblazer because as a bandleader he was “the first genuine full-scale integrator,” even though Benny Goodman is often given credit for this feat. But, says Feather, the bespectacled clarinetist hesitated to hire Coleman Hawkins at the behest of John Hammond, the producer. The emphasis on Goodman’s purported trailblazing has hindered the necessity of focusing on others. For example, Feather stresses the pathbreaking efforts of Rex Stewart, perhaps the music’s reigning intellectual, who was crossing the color line in hiring as early as 1934 in Harlem.²⁴

As ever, those at the top of the pyramid of capitalism were the beneficiaries in the first instance. This list included Arnold Rothstein, termed by his biographer as “King of the Jews,” who helped to fund the groundbreaking Negro musical Shuffle Along, which propelled the career of pianist Eubie Blake. Rothstein’s personal aide, Thomas A. Farley, born in Virginia in 1875, was a “gentleman of color” who had his tuition to Columbia University paid by his benefactor. Rothstein was also accused of being one of the earliest of the drug dealers, reportedly importing 1,250 pounds of heroin and allying with opium dealers.²⁵ Pianist Fats Waller was friendly with Rothstein, though understandably wary of him.²⁶ Rothstein was not singular, for New York City also featured the presence of mobster Casper A. Holstein, whose roots were in the former Danish West Indies, recently purloined by Washington from Copenhagen.²⁷ By the 1920s he was running the Saratoga Club in Harlem.²⁸

One of Holstein’s comrades was another personality of Caribbean heritage, Stephanie St. Clair, born in Guadeloupe. Like others, she was concerned when he was kidnapped at gunpoint shortly after betting more than $30, 000 at Belmont Park; at the time he was sporting jewelry worth a like amount and thus a $50,000 ransom was demanded. Ultimately, he was released at 140th Street and Amsterdam in Harlem after frenetic negotiations. Shortly thereafter, Rothstein was shot in a New York hotel; this attack on the man viewed as the “kingpin” of Jewish organized crime was also viewed with grave concern by his comrades, as a small fortune tied up in gambling and speakeasies was at stake. But the problem for his Negro competitors was their lack of influence at City Hall, which meant they were to suffer greatly from police harassment, which proved to be undermining.²⁹

The pervasiveness of Jim Crow continued to hamper the ability of Negroes to gain a foothold in the nightclub business and other venues where the new music was beginning to flourish. On the other hand, the “Great Migration,” or the mass movement north from Dixie and the Caribbean to urban centers, also delivered the right to vote from those fleeing the Deep South and enhanced political power that could be leveraged for economic gain. Chicago was an example of this trend. What was called “policy” or “playing the numbers” was an ostensibly illegal lottery of sorts that was termed “the biggest black-owned business in the world with combined annual sales, sometimes reaching the $100 million mark and employing tens of thousands.” Negroes profiting from this enterprise at times dabbled in the arts, bringing opportunities for musicians. These entrepreneurs underwrote a thriving urban culture of theaters, dance halls, and the like. Those profiting included Jesse Binga, Eudora Johnson Binga, Fenton Johnson, and John “Mushmouth” Johnson. But as so often happened, the authorities viewed Negro wealth, particularly if produced by questionable means, with a more jaundiced eye than that generated by others similarly situated, particularly since their Euro-American competitors were often connected politically and able to wield such power on behalf of their cronies. Mr. Binga, banker, was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned and eventually became a janitor. Still, it was undeniable that a dazzling excitement emerged from this combination of Negro gambling syndicates, Negro entertainment, and the related desire to forge Black Politics in order to elude the crushing of the two.³⁰

Near the center of these trends was the famed pugilist Jack Johnson, a bass fiddler of note in his own right, who opened a popular club in Chicago as early as 1912.³¹ Despite the problems faced by Negro musicians in places like Chicago, it was undeniable that compared to Dixie, including New Orleans,³² migration northward had a liberating impact. This liberation was enjoyed noticeably by the pimps, card sharks, pool hustlers, and drug dealers who came to populate “Bronzeville” and the clubs there too.³³ Musician Milt Hinton found it unsurprising that Chicago emerged as a polestar of the new music, particularly compared to New York City, since the Illinois town had “three times as many blacks” as the eastern city, meaning “three times as many theaters and nightclubs as New York.”³⁴

Chicago was an unpropitious site for the ascension of this music. Prior to the influx of Negroes during the First World War era, Chicago already was known as a place where mobsters had deep influence over politics and judges. Labor racketeering was detected there as early as the 1890s, and criminally inclined comrades virtually controlled nearby Cicero, Stone Park, Calumet, and Chicago Heights.³⁵

It took a while for Black political power to bloom in Chicago, and in the interregnum a gang war erupted in the 1920s with Al Capone emerging triumphant. The firebombing of clubs was not uncommon, with musicians caught in the crossfire. Similar warfare was detonated in Harlem with a Negro-owned club falling victim, contributing to the rise in this Manhattan neighborhood of Capone’s colleagues and imitators. This led to violent attacks on musicians, giving rise to a desire for protection which took the form of self-help, that is, carrying of weapons and banding together in unions, or allying with one gangster faction to foil another. This latter factor influenced certain musicians to tout the wares of their protectors, which could mean more references to controlled substances in their music and lyrics.³⁶ The Italian mobster was viewed as one of the most important impresarios of the new music, hiring musicians to entertain at his enterprises.³⁷ Indeed, Capone has been called the “patron saint” of the new music; it was in Chicago that the saxophone was popularized and rapidly became the paradigmatic instrument of jazz.³⁸ The blaring of these horns could hardly drown out the cacophony of gunshots, for in 1926–27 most notably, there was an unbelievable skein of violence and carnage.³⁹

Louis Armstrong arrived in Chicago during this tense moment, and mobsters helped him to get his first job in New York City after he arrived there from the Midwest in 1924.⁴⁰ Armstrong was subjected to extortion by plug-uglies early on. His life was threatened unless he forked over a sizeable portion of the money he received from performing. Still, it was whispered that these threats were propelled by musical competitors—defined as “white”—who resented his popularity.⁴¹

The ties Armstrong forged in Chicago shaped his career trajectory. Joe Glaser, who helped to shape his career as a manager and agent, was seen as a front for Capone via running one of the mobster’s brothels; his venality was exposed when he was indicted for rape. In a sense, Armstrong chose one set of thugs to protect him against another; such was the sorry plight of musicians then. Glaser’s mob connections meant that Armstrong was at times slated to appear in mob-tied joints, such as Ciro’s in Philadelphia. These shark-infested waters also contributed to Armstrong accusing his then spouse—the protean pianist, composer and arranger Lil Hardin, who helped to shape his repertoire and early popularity—of “running around with one of the Chicago pimps while I was at work.” Thus, a rift developed between the trumpeter and the woman who masterminded his early career.⁴²

Andy Kirk, the bandleader, tubist, and saxophonist born in 1898, said that Glaser “acted like a crook.” The fact that he almost did hard time in prison based on credible accusations of raping teenage girls added credence to this perception. “Nobody likes a little nigger pussy better than Joe Glaser” was his profane response. By 1928, he had received a ten-year sentence for attacking a fourteen-year-old girl. Still, a grateful Satchmo argued that Glaser “saved me from the gangsters.” Besides music and boxing, the well-connected Glaser introduced the future movie mogul Jules Stein to mob mouthpiece Sidney Korshak: “Everyone knew that Stein worked for Al Capone in Chicago,” remarked actor Robert Mitchum, indicating the reach of organized racketeering.⁴³ Like Kirk, bassist Milt Hinton was no fan of Glaser either. He was “the guy we all disliked because he was a terror … I knew him, I knew his … mother” he said of a man he dismissed as a mere “pimp.”⁴⁴

Glaser was born in 1897 and raised in Chicago and admits to running a “booking agency” at 127 North Dearborn by the early 1920s as musicians began descending upon the town.⁴⁵ He also owned and operated the Sunset Café, which later became the Grand Terrace, both hotspots for the new music. He claims that he boosted Armstrong’s career when he hired him for “Carroll Dickenson’s band,” where he played “1st trumpet.”⁴⁶ Glaser, the son of a physician, intended on following in his father’s footsteps before he discovered an aversion to the sight of blood. He then left medical school. Often accused of running a “plantation,” he also managed boxers, including such titans as Sugar Ray Robinson, Sonny Liston, and the man then known as Cassius Clay; he also dabbled in dog breeding and baseball. The wealth accrued allowed him to tool around town in a Rolls-Royce.⁴⁷ Prohibition’s end, in other words, did not end opportunities for corrupt profiteering; it simply allowed exploiters to move their ill-gotten gains into other businesses or deepen their penetration of the music business.⁴⁸ The blustering Glaser, backed up by mobsters, had a grating voice and a low boiling point that terrified those forced to endure his unbridled wrath.⁴⁹ Profane curses and brutal imprecations were directed at those who displeased him, including clients responsible for his wealth, not to mention those seeking to hire his clients.⁵⁰ The tough voice and evil temperament terrified anyone confronted for the first time by his wrath.

The Chicago Defender, a lodestar of the Negro press, reported in 1928 that Glaser was a “firm member of the Al Capone organization”⁵¹ and was said to have administered an “opium pad.” The mob connected lawyer Sidney Korshak was Glaser’s attorney, helping to make sure he did not wind up behind bars. The comedian and actor Bob Hope, who was to become fabulously wealthy, was also a Glaser client. Still, Armstrong was a prized client, as suggested by Glaser’s impecuniousness when he first met the trumpeter. Soon he was raking in tens of thousands of dollars per week, with Armstrong a major reason why. In return, Glaser gifted a Star of David with rubies on a gold chain that adorned Armstrong’s neck for the rest of his life. The cynicism of this arrangement was exposed when Glaser purportedly said of those like Armstrong, “these shines are all alike. They’re so lazy.” But the artist had few options. In the early 1930s he was confronted by cutthroats who demanded money and offered to “protect” him for a fee, inducing Armstrong to flee to Europe,⁵² where he spent a year nursing a lip worn by overwork.⁵³

This was a wise exit on his part since these mobsters had demanded $6,000 and threatened to murder him if he did not comply.⁵⁴ Safely abroad, Armstrong then unburdened himself, telling a journalist about the anxiety he felt when these miscreants invaded his dressing room in Chicago. “I stood up to them,” he said from the safety of Europe, though quickly he “called for help. Thereafter I had a bodyguard of six men and one night the gangsters shot at me through the window of my motor car…. That really was the start of the campaign,” he said with anger, adding boldly, “I had the opportunity to defy them.”⁵⁵

Glaser made no secret of his ties to Capone, apparently feeling that it could be intimidating. “Shine” was not the only disparaging term he heaped on his Negro clients; he added “schwarzes,” a like insult. The critic Nat Hentoff once saw a painting of the antebellum South on the wall of his office, featuring “happy darkies playing banjo and singing.”⁵⁶ Glaser was asked once how he became involved in show business. “On account of the whorehouses,” was his prompt reply, implying that enterprise’s tie to the performing arts. Digging into the bottom drawer of his desk, he extracted a photo of two old brown-stones. The picture revealed two men standing by a used car lot with a large sign reading “Joe Glaser’s Used Car Symposium”: one man was Glaser, the other was Roger Touhy, one of his salesmen, an apprenticeship before he became a leading racketeer and a supplier for Glaser’s brothels.⁵⁷

Jimmy McPartland, a former spouse of the more celebrated Marian, a pianist, confirms that “everybody worked for the mob in Chicago. Al Capone used to come into one place where I was … he’d send one of his torpedoes over with a fifty or a hundred. One night one of ’em shot a hole in Jim Lanigan’s bass and then asked him how much a new one would cost,” a maneuver that doubtlessly was attention grabbing.⁵⁸

Earl “Fatha” Hines the pianist, born in 1903, knew well the racketeer-influenced Grand Terrace in Chicago where he often performed. “They always had four or five men there—floating [near] me” and “pistol play” was recurrent. “I was heading for the kitchen one night and this guy went pounding past and another guy came up behind me and told me to stand still and rested a pistol on my shoulder and aimed at the first guy and would have fired if the kitchen door hadn’t swung shut in time. Some of the waiters even had pistols.” Unabashedly, he confessed, “Racketeers owned me too,” but fortunately, as the progressive movement gained momentum, Hines said he “bought my way out of the Grand Terrace in 1940 after I finally learned about all the money I was making and wasn’t seeing.”⁵⁹ Hines worked routinely from 10:30 in the evening until 4:30 in the morning, seven nights per week. Despite the violent madness swirling all around, he and his bandmates were “like three monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Otherwise you might be found dead in Jackson Park someplace.”⁶⁰ The critic Stanley Dance commented about the pianist, “There is scarcely anything he hates more than writing letters”⁶¹—unsurprisingly, and to the detriment of history, but perhaps a reflection of nervousness about committing innermost thoughts to paper for fear of where they might end up.

Seeking to protect the value of this performer, Capone provided Hines with a bodyguard. Unlike other artists, Hines said he did not pack a pistol though he had an astonishing “40 or 50 bodyguards” alongside him. He may have needed every one when he arrived in Valdosta, Georgia: “Some hecklers in the crowd turned off the light and exploded a bomb under the bandstand. Sometimes when we came into a town, the driver of our chartered bus would tell us to move to the back of the bus to make it look all right and not get anyone riled up.” The problem? Those soaked in the brine of Jim Crow “never expected to see the Negroes dressed like we were, have the intelligence and self-assurance that we had.” “We were the first freedom riders,” said a weary Hines later, speaking of his travails then: “It was brutal in those days.” As for mobsters, he said, “I knew Al Capone like I’m talking to you … he used to come to the Grand Terrace two or three times a week and he would say, ‘I don’t like your handkerchief. And fix the handkerchief and there was a fifty dollar [bill] in it.’”⁶²

“Pittsburgh was no heaven,” said Hines, speaking of his former city of residence, “but when I got to Chicago, I thought it was the worst town in the world. I found some of the most dangerous people in the country on 35th Street when I started working there. I knew how to duck and dodge but somebody was always getting hurt. Everybody carried a gun and you had to act as though you were at least a bit bad.”⁶³

Hines was a stern critic of the evolving economic underpinning of the music business. A “good part of the blame for the doldrums that has many top-rate musicians toting bags in railroad stations belongs with the handful of booking agents who are strangling jazz with their monopoly hold,” he said. This was a “hangover from the days when gangsters muscled in on the entertainment world and used nightclubs as a front for their rackets. I know because I indirectly worked for the mob…. There’s not a single big name of the show world … Duke Ellington … Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong—who haven’t at one time or another had contact with the syndicates,” meaning mobsters.⁶⁴

The aforementioned pianist, composer, and bandleader Duke Ellington, born in 1899 in Washington, D.C., had a similar experience near the same time. While performing in Chicago, mobsters sought to extort him. They presented their demand to Sam Fleischnick, who was then the Washingtonian’s road manager. “All our boys carry guns,” he replied, adding with gusto, “If you want to shoot it out, we’ll shoot it out.” The suave Ellington considered fleeing when he heard of this contretemps, but then he telephoned the influential owner of a Manhattan club and this man arranged for the Ellington band to survive without overt molestation in Chicago.⁶⁵ But mimicking Armstrong, he forged an alliance with Irving Mills, born in Russia in 1894, who somehow became the publisher of some of the pianist’s most famous compositions, including “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing,” “Sophisticated Lady,” and “Mood Indigo,” which enriched this manipulator and his descendants.⁶⁶ Mills also was an agent for Cab Calloway. Mills succeeded Moe Gale after, said the bandleader, “the mob and Herman Stark” intervened.⁶⁷

John Hammond, who worked for Mills, was moved to remark “how tremendously Duke was being exploited” by Mills. A consensus has emerged that Mills’s lengthy and fabulously successful career was underwritten by his lion’s share of Ellington’s copyrighted tunes.⁶⁸ It was not just Ellington, however. Evidently, Fats Waller, on July 17, 1929, for a pittance, assigned all rights, title, and interest in such iconic tunes as “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and, ironically, “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue” and other leading compositions to Mills.⁶⁹ Thus, by December 1944, Waller’s widow was advised solemnly that she visit the “collector of Internal Revenue and advise him that you have received no income from your husband’s estate.”⁷⁰

The restrained Leonard Feather termed “questionable” the practice of Mills of putting his name on Ellington’s compositions: “I don’t think he wrote a note of music in his life,” he said of Mills. Mills, said Feather, even placed his name on a composition, “Mighty Like the Blues,” that the critic wrote. In response to Mills, Ellington formed Tempo Music, one of the first Negro-owned publishing companies, a move soon emulated by Jimmy Lunceford. W. C. Handy was among the very first Negro composers to become a publisher, said Feather, while adding accurately that it remained “very difficult for anybody black to make much headway because of the tremendous amount of racism that was prevalent” in the United States.⁷¹

Ellington well knew that the modus operandi of these unscrupulous thugs included dropping in on targeted clubs, shutting the doors, and ordering the entire staff—band, chorus “girls,” and singing and dancing waiters—to put on a show, with failure to comply inviting brutal retaliation. Ellington probably knew of likewise situated nightspots in his own town of Washington, while in Chicago he spoke directly of the unfortunate tuba player Mack Shaw: “The police, gangsters, or somebody had caught Mack out in Chicago, beaten his face in and broken up all the bones. This cat would be blowing his tuba and blow out a loose bone. He had a whole lot of loose bones in his face and he’d just put them together again and continue blowing.” Ellington was an habitué of the Cotton Club in Manhattan and knew that this enterprise was connected in turn to mobsters both in the Empire State and Philadelphia; little “Brotherly Love” was exuded when gangsters in the latter town were seeking to induce a club owner there to allow Ellington to escape a gig there so that his band could perform in Manhattan. A few well-chosen words proved to be convincing, and Ellington and his band headed hurriedly northward.⁷² Ellington, who was the subject of a 1931 kidnapping plot, came to carry a pistol, along with his “entire band,” he confided.⁷³

Sited at 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem, the Cotton Club generally barred Negroes from entering, even when they arrived alongside others not so designated. As was the case generally, the local police sternly warned that racially mixed couples should be barred. It had been owned by Bernard Levy, well known as a bootlegger and numbers banker,⁷⁴ before the notorious racketeer Owney Madden seized control.⁷⁵

Madden was quite the character, according to Ellington drummer Sonny Greer. “He was over Dutch Schulz, Al Capone and all of them.” Madden was a “little, tiny guy. Talked like a girl” with an accent that betrayed his British origins, but he also owned a casino in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and thus was familiar with the worst Jim Crow had to offer. Yet, said Greer, he “loved Duke because him and Duke used to sit up and play ‘Grits’ and all that, ‘Coon Can’ all night long…. He loved Duke and he loved me.” Mercer Ellington, the bandleader’s son, realized that Madden appreciated the profit generated by these artists, allowing for money laundering so that cash from his illicit enterprises could be sanitized: “It was a way to turn over a good front.” Barney Bigard, another bandmate, sensed a split between Madden and Capone, leaving Ellington to lean toward the former: “This guy was Duke’s bodyguard. He’d go get Duke from the theatre with his machine gun between his legs, and they had bullet-proof glass. You see there were two factions…. They had to protect their men from each other.”⁷⁶ Like many mobsters, Madden had varied political ties, including to the still potent Tammany Hall in New York City.⁷⁷

Ellington was not the only musician who had to confront the malignant influence of organized crime. “My Uncle Richard and Al Capone had a good business relationship,” said vibraphonist Lionel Hampton. “Capone called my uncle every day.” Hampton, who became a key fundraiser for the Republican Party, saw the mobster as a kind of latter-day Medici, responsible for the rise of the new music. “History has proved that Al Capone was the savior of the black musicians in those days. His nightclubs alone employed hundreds.”⁷⁸ Hampton, born in 1908, received his first vibraphone from a wealthy uncle who had been the leading bootlegger on Chicago’s South Side and also served as manager for songstress Bessie Smith.⁷⁹

Musician Mezz Mezzrow, born in 1899, who “learned to play the sax in Pontiac Reformatory,” knew that Capone “owned a piece of the Arrowhead,” a favorite haunt of clubbers, “as well as the whole town, including the suburbs.” The club was sited in neighboring Indiana. As a result of this ownership tie, the music itself was downgraded, termed contemptuously “’nigger music’” and “’whorehouse music,’” with those plying their trade in this musical form “looked down on.” As for Burnham, Indiana, the site of these escapades, it was basically a Capone subsidiary, ensuring degradation. “There never was a town sewed up as tight as Burnham,” said Mezzrow of a town that “was under the syndicate. The chief of police was our bartender and all the waiters were aldermen.”⁸⁰ Agreeing, trumpeter and bandleader Max Kaminsky argued that during the 1920s “almost everyone in Chicago in those days was sooner or later, in one way or another—mostly another—involved with racketeers and gangsters.”⁸¹

Playing before often drunken audiences, replete with racists with pistols, Armstrong and other artists were vulnerable, as they focused on their performances and not necessarily the dangers that lurked. Then there was the basic issue: would one be paid after working? Danny Barker saluted Bert Hall, a trombonist, politician, and gambler who left Chicago for New York City and attracted adherents when he helped to introduce reforms into the musicians’ union local that were welcomed by Negro members who had been victimized more than most by employers who refused to pay performers, serving further to explain Armstrong’s tie-up with Glaser. Barker also recalled that “Jelly Roll” Morton was among the artists who was “forever beefing” about being cheated by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and the mangling of his copyright protection and how he was induced to sign “his songs over to some publishers and they became wealthy but Jelly received no royalties as the composer.” Then those like Morton were cheated further when “a whole lot of black music … wasn’t played on radio stations, theaters and Hollywood movies. This was done purposely through racism.” In a metaphorical ending for the man who was said to have invented the new music, Barker recalled that “an old underworld acquaintance of Jelly’s, a dope fiend and a notorious thief, sneaked into the undertaking parlor during the night and with a chisel and a hammer, removed the four-carat diamond from Jelly’s front tooth”⁸² and then departed.

Being cheated was part of the job of being a Negro musician then. “We were stranded all over the United States,” said saxophonist, Eddie Barefield, born in 1909. Why? At times, the promoter would not pay them or “sometimes the guys would run off with the money after the intermission and leave us.”⁸³ One could not necessarily trust the bandleader or his favored mates. Once he told a band he was with that he was departing for Cab Calloway’s group, and a “free-for-all on the bandstand” ensued and “everybody jumped on me but … Roy Eldridge” and one other. “I was just throwing guys all over the bandstand. We fought all the way down to the hotel” for “ten or fifteen blocks,” followed by “fighting in the cars.” Yet “they didn’t pay me anyway and I ended up with a black eye.”⁸⁴

CLUBS THAT FEATURED PERFORMANCES of the new music had appeared in Manhattan in the 1920s. The Village Vanguard, which became the premier venue for star artists, started as an all-purpose entertainment joint in 1934 but quickly turned to jazz. It is likely that it is the oldest club where this music is played in the world, or outside of New Orleans, at least. By 1936, Nick Rongetti, a lawyer and aficionado of the music, opened an eponymous club, Nick’s, at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 10th Street, which highlighted so-called traditional jazz. By 1945, as the music reached a critical turning point, Eddie Condon opened a club carrying his surname, with gangster backing, indicating that this force remained resonant.⁸⁵

This “traditional” form of the music was exemplified by the appropriately named Paul Whiteman, who somehow gained the moniker “King of Jazz.” Like LaRocca, his being surrounded by African American musicians did not seem to impact him positively but instead seemed to engender the opposite reaction, as when he bet on the size of the penis of Negro musician Wilbur Daniels. Of course, this was during a time when these descendants of the enslaved were routinely and insultingly referred to as “jigaboos.”⁸⁶ This was during a time, says pianist Dr. Billy Taylor, “when white artists took most of the credit for jazz.”⁸⁷

This was also during a time when the music was seen as a vector of degradation—propelled by the degraded—particularly in the degradation of women defined as “white.”⁸⁸ What this hysterical reaction reflected was that African American artists were talented and, at times, had celebrity and income, making them attractive to some Euro-American women, a confluence of circumstances that at times had generated violence and lynching. The clubs where the music was performed were often the site of what was termed euphemistically as “race mixing,” seen as a foretaste of the collapse of the color line generally, meaning stiffer competition for resources (and sex).⁸⁹

This injurious influence had an impact on artists. At a time when much music degraded Negroes as “prancing, dancing and fighting,” the eminent composer and violinist Will Marion Cook, born in 1869, was said to carry a weapon, but worse, he took his anti–New Deal propaganda to outspoken heights.⁹⁰ It was Cook who controversially demanded a boycott of Louis Armstrong given his management ties since “the Jews of Hollywood, the stage [etc.] exploit only the worst and basest of my race. Let’s stop it now.” This would have been bad enough if he had chosen to stop there but, instead, he punctuated his inflamed remarks with “Heil Hitler!” He had studied music in Berlin⁹¹ and was an example of Negroes whose outlook had been so warped by the United States that they turned to outright fascism.

As Prohibition was lurching to a close, coincidentally the Great Depression began to bite, inducing a further outflow of musicians from New Orleans. The mostly Euro-American musicians who came to characterize the music known as Dixieland also included musicians who reflected the dominant culture of Jim Crow, hampering the ability of interracial combos, further limiting opportunities for Black musicians.⁹² Danny Barker was among the artists forced to flee northward, in his case, to New York City. Pushing them out was the prospect of “more money. Make more money. [Being] treated better” than in Dixie, though some “stayed there,” meaning Louisiana, “because their wives didn’t want them to go.” Yet, Barker continued, “the Depression set and there was no work” since this wave of misery “hit the South earlier than it hit other parts of the country.” After arriving in New York he found more suffering musicians, “dying of grief,” including those with “great talent. They became alcoholics. They became dope addicts … bums on the street begging for nickels … they’d be downtown with their hands out, begging …” Taking pity, his spouse “fed more musicians than the Salvation Army” to the point where Barker “had to put iron bars by the doors to keep them from [kicking down]] my kitchen” door. As for New York, he said with bitter experience, “It’ll make a man out of you or kill you … all that goes with the music.”⁹³