the legend of BUddy Bolden did not Begin with the PUBlicA- tion of Jazzmen.

In
1933, African American journalist E. Belfield Spriggins first described the role
that Bolden played in the early years of jazz. Donald Marquis in 1971 discovered
back copies of these articles in the Louisiana Weekly. A search of the telephone
directories established that Spriggins was still alive. Unfortunately, in 1965
Hurricane Betsy had destroyed Spriggins’s personal archive, and the experience of
losing his life’s work had rendered him speechless. He never did recover and died
in 1973.1
In 1933, Spriggins wrote: “For quite some years now there has been an unusual
amount of discussion concerning the popular form of music popu- larly called
‘jazz.’ The name followed the old name ‘rag time’ which was a more or less modified
form of jazz. Seemingly, New Orleans has been either too modest to enter the
discussion or entirely disinterested in the matter.”2 Today we assume that New
Orleans had a particular and significant role in the early years of jazz. However,
when jazz became a national craze the New Orleans Times-Picayune of June 20, 1918,
stated the position of the paper. Since it had been suggested, “this particular
form of musical vice had its birth in this city, . . . we do not recognize the
honor of parenthood, but with such a story in circulation, it behooves us to be the
last to accept the atrocity in polite society.”3 Spriggins’s articles made clear
that, more than a decade later, New Orleans polite society had little interest in
exploring the question further.
These articles contain the first known reference to Buddy Bolden as an important
figure in the early years of jazz. Spriggins interviewed Willy Cor- nish, Bolden’s
trombone player, who told him about Bolden.

When six years later the Jazzmen authors began their work, Charles Ed- ward Smith
also located Cornish living at 2024 Perdido Street. Cornish gave his date of birth
as August 1, 1874. He told Smith that he was the only mem- ber of Bolden’s
“original” band still alive.5
Cornish had a photograph of Bolden and his band that included Cor- nish in the
lineup. For nearly seventy years the photograph that he loaned to Charles Edward
Smith (it was not returned, and the whereabouts of the original is unknown) has
intrigued jazz scholars. Which way around should it be? As printed in Jazzmen it
appeared with Jimmy Johnson (the bass play- er) on the left.6 This did not appear
to be correct; in a New Orleans band, the bass player is traditionally on the
right. Al Rose and Edmond Souchon in New Orleans Jazz: A Family Album decided to
reverse the image to cor- rect this apparent mistake.7 The paradox now was that
Johnson, on bass, and the guitarist, Brock Mumford, were playing left-handed. That
did not seem correct either; they were not left-handed players. Alden Ashford
cleared up some of the mystery through reasoning that clarinets are not made
symmetrically. Looked at from the front, the keys depressed by the player’s little
fingers appear on different sides and at different heights. This is not reversible.
Despite the poor quality of the image, the photograph, as it first appeared in
Jazzmen, was a reversed image. Rose and Souchon were correct and Johnson on bass
should have been on the right. It therefore fol- lowed that Johnson and Mumford
were posing left-handed for some inex- plicable reason.8 Charles Edward Smith’s
interview notes from his interview with Willy Cornish suggest a reason for this.
Cornish had shown Smith the photograph and identified the members of the band: “The
photo line-up: left to right. Jimmy Johnson, bass; Bubby Bolden [sic], cornet; Jeff
Mumford, guitar (sitting); Willy Cornish, key trombone; Frank Lewis, b clarinet,
sit- ting; Willy Warner, C clarinet, standing.”9
Evidently, the photograph, as it first appeared in Jazzmen, was as it was when
Cornish first showed it to Charles Edward Smith, with Johnson on the left. It
follows that since this was a reverse image, the photographic process itself was
responsible for the reversal. The most likely explanation is that the Bolden band
photograph was a “tintype”:10 a photograph made directly onto a plate of metal (not
actually tin), coated with a layer of light sensitive chemicals. In this process,
there is no negative and the image appears re- versed. An example of this process
is a well-known tintype of Billy the Kid.11 For some years, historians questioned
whether Billy the Kid was left-handed because a photograph showed him with his gun
on his left side. The picture, we now know, was a tintype.
It seems everybody was correct. The photograph, as it appeared in Jazzmen, was as
Willy Cornish had shown it to Smith; this was a reverse image produced by the
tintype process. Rose and Souchon were therefore right, from the perspective of
what the photographer saw, to reverse the im- age and put Jimmy Johnson on the
right; this corrected the anomalies that Ashforth had noticed with regard to the
clarinets. What this does not ex- plain is why Johnson and Mumford posed left-
handed. A likely explanation is that this was a trick of the trade. An experienced
tintype photographer would know that the image would be reversed. There is strong
evidence to show that to “correct” this reversal of image, a practice had developed
to pose string players left-handed. Figure 1 is a tintype of a guitarist taken
sometime in the 1890s.12 The thicker bass strings (that should be on the top) are
on the bottom. This is because the guitarist flipped the guitar over and posed
left-handed; the “tintype” would therefore show him as a right-hand- ed guitar
player.
Because Willy Cornish was the only surviving member of Bolden’s origi- nal band, he
was the only informant that the Jazzmen authors could depend upon for accurate
information about Bolden. Charles Edward Smith pro- duced a report of their
interview that ran to little more than three pages of typewritten notes. Smith had
planned to do a follow-up interview to find out more. When he called for a second
interview Cornish was not home; he was not in good health and died in January 1942.
This was the only op- portunity that the Jazzmen authors would get to hear
firsthand information about Bolden’s original band from someone who had definitely
played with Bolden. Consequently, the Jazzmen authors were required to get further
corroboration from sources that were perhaps less reliable.
Jazzmen claims that Bolden had been a barber. Many New Orleans mu- sicians were
barbers, and barber shops were meeting places for musicians looking for work. In an
age when there were few telephones, the barber shop provided a way for musicians
and promoters to keep in contact. What Jazzmen did not make clear was that the
story that Bolden was a barber came from Preston Jackson. According to Jackson,
Bolden “had a barber shop on Franklin and Perdido St; played at Tintype Hall,
Liberty and Frank- lin. Tintype Hall is a place where all the ‘hustlers’ would be
laid out when they were killed, gamblers, hard working musicians, etc.”13 There is
noth- ing to substantiate either that Bolden was a barber, or that there was ever a
venue called Tintype Hall. This is not surprising given that Jackson was born
around 1903, and had no firsthand knowledge of Buddy Bolden and his band.