The New Negro of Jazz: New Orleans, Chicago, New York,

the First Great Migration, & the Harlem Renaissance, 1890-1930

A Dissertation submitted to the

Graduate School

of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the Department of History

of the College of Arts and Sciences

2012

By

Charlie Lester

M.A., University of Cincinnati, 2008

B.A., Northern Kentucky University, 2004

Committee Chair: Professor David Stradling

 UMI Number: 3518095

All rights reserved

INFORMATION TO ALL USERS

The quality of this reproduction is dependent on the quality of the copy submitted.

In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript
and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed,
a note will indicate the deletion.

UMI 3518095
Copyright 2012 by ProQuest LLC.
All rights reserved. This edition of the work is protected against
unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

ProQuest LLC.
789 East Eisenhower Parkway
P.O. Box 1346
Ann Arbor, MI 48106 - 1346
 Abstract

The New Negro of Jazz: New Orleans, Chicago, New York,

the First Great Migration, & the Harlem Renaissance, 1890-1930

By Charlie Lester

The Harlem Renaissance is often remembered for its cultural achievements, but scholars

often place too much attention on literary and visual artists with little regard for the musicians of

the period. When scholars do make the connection between jazz and the Harlem Renaissance, the

work of jazz artists in cities outside of Harlem play second fiddle. In fact, New Orleans and

Chicago could just as easily stake the claim as the nation’s jazz capital in this period, and so

many early jazz innovators emigrated to Chicago’s South Side from New Orleans that the Windy

City could arguably boast a more vibrant music scene than Harlem. Thanks in no small part to

the First Great Migration, when over one million African Americans left the South to stake their

claim on the American Dream in the urban North, jazz transitioned from a regional to the

national music in the 1910s and 1920s. A number of scholars of the Great Migration have shed

light on the grass roots leadership that facilitated northern emigration. In the first few decades of

the 20th century, African Americans in scores of cities across the country were busy forging a

new collective identity, known as the “New Negro”, as expressed in the visual and performing

arts, political protest, and economic enterprise culminating in the Harlem Renaissance. Thanks to

several historians the political activism of the literary component of the Harlem Renaissance is

well known. Unfortunately, few have made the same connections in regard to the musicians of

the period. Jazz made its own Great Migration on the backs of a cadre of grass roots musician

leaders whose political awareness has yet to be fully appreciated. These considerations suggest

that a deeper analysis of jazz, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, and the political

iii
activism of musicians beyond 135th Street and Lenox Avenue is necessary to uncover the “New

Negro” of black music.

This dissertation examines the Great Migration through the lens of jazz to explore why

New Orleans musicians left the Crescent City at the turn of the twentieth century, why Chicago

and New York were such attractive places to ply their crafts, and what relationship New Orleans,

Chicago, the Great Migration, and jazz have to the Harlem Renaissance. As a result, this work

synthesizes the scholarly traditions of Urban, African American, and Jazz histories, and

challenges the traditional interpretations of the Harlem Renaissance. While jazz was a central

cultural component of life in Harlem, it was also crucial to scores of cities across the country as

African Americans journeyed north during the Great Migration. Jazz musicians were also just as

active politically as other migrants. Despite a common stereotype that characterizes musicians as

apolitical, my work seeks to demonstrate that the musicians of the period were no different than

their counterparts in the literary arts by shedding new light on the grass roots activism that

emerged alongside the music.

iv
 Acknowledgements

Over the course of my academic career, I have been very fortunate for the high level of

support and assistance received along the way from a cadre of family, friends, mentors,

professors, colleagues, and archivists, and granting institutions. Though the work of writing a

dissertation is often a solitary experience, the work of becoming a professional historian is very

much a communal effort. I am pleased to have a number of “all-stars” on my team, and I would

like to recognize them for their advice, encouragement, support, and companionship throughout

this long and rewarding endeavor.

First let me thank the many professors and advisors I have been fortunate to work with

along the way. David Stradling has been a model mentor and friend. His advice, editorial skills,

and passion have strengthened this project every step of the way. Most importantly, I always

sensed he stood in my corner, and that assumption proved correct time and again. He provided

the proverbial pat on the back when I needed it and a kick in the ass when necessary. I am

equally grateful for both. Davarian Baldwin has been a welcome outside addition to this project.

His interest in my work from an early stage has been nothing short of phenomenal. Dr. Baldwin

pushed me to think about the subject of this dissertation in new and rewarding ways. Thank you

for reaching out to a young scholar with similar interests. Thanks also to Tracy Teslow and

Wendy Kline for serving on this committee and for all the advice and letters of recommendation

in my time at UC.

Outside this committee, I have been privileged to work both directly and indirectly with a

number of dedicated and gifted scholars at the University of Cincinnati and as an undergrad.

Nikki Taylor advised me on this project while it was still in its infancy and helped mold me as a

v
scholar. John Alexander and John Brackett taught the first classes I took as a graduate student

and placed my academic career on firm ground to conquer anything grad school could throw my

way. I should also recognize the influence of Fritz Casey-Leininger, Christopher Phillips, Wayne

Durrill, Mark Lause, Maura O’Connor, Martin Francis, Willard Sunderland, James Ramage,

Michael Washington, Jeffrey Williams, Michael Ryan, and Al Pinelo. Zane Miller, though

retired from UC for several years, has taken an interest in my project and offered advice and

encouragement. I also need to thank Hope Earls for putting out many academic fires for me.

I received much needed assistance at several archives and libraries while researching the

project. Bruce Boyd Raeburn and Lynn Abbott were gracious hosts at the Hogan Jazz Archive in

New Orleans. Ed Berger, Vincent Pelote and the staff at The Institute of Jazz Studies in Newark,

New Jersey were always attentive to my many requests and made me feel at home in Newark.

Leslie and all the staff members at the Louis Armstrong House Museum Archive at Queens

College were tremendously helpful in pinpointing specific items of research. I would also like to

thank all the staff members at New York University’s Tamiment Library, The Schomburg Center

for Research in Black Culture, The University of Chicago’s Chicago Jazz Archive, The Carter G.

Woodson Regional Branch of the Chicago Public Library, and The Harold Washington Branch

of the Chicago Public Library. I also received funding from a number of sources that made these

research trips possible. Thanks first to the Department of History and to Roger Daniels and Zane

Miller for supporting graduate research. Thanks also to the Graduate Student Governance

Association for several travel reimbursement payments. Thanks also to the University Research

Council and the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center for major financial contributions and for

the fellowships that afforded me the time to research and write major portions of the dissertation.

vi
 I would be remiss to leave out the many family members and friends who have helped me

along the way. First I would like to thank my parents, Charlie and Kate Lester, for instilling in

me a love of history, a strong work ethic, and a commitment to social justice. These values have

served me well, and without your assistance over the years, I would not be here today. My

grandparents on my mother’s side, Robert and Madeline Rodger, have also provided support

(including financial assistance as an undergraduate, when in a moment of panic, I realized I

miscalculated my academic bill one semester). Thanks also to the Rodger and West clans for

encouragement. My paternal grandparents have been a particular source of inspiration. One

Christmas, the two of them bought me Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue album, and it set me on the

path of jazz addict ever since. My grandfather, a jazz pianist and one-time bandleader, and I have

had many conversations about jazz over the years (including a story about how Cab Calloway

and his drummer showed up at my grandfather’s boyhood home one afternoon in Newark, New

Jersey during the Great Depression). I would also like to thank the extended Lester family for the

many great meals and over-the-top laughter over the years⎯ the food and foolishness have

provided both emotional and physical sustenance on far too many occasions to recount here.

Thanks also to my sister and brother-in-law, Fran and Chris Edwards and all my nieces and

nephews, for the many good times and for buying my first laptop as an undergrad. My in-laws

have made me feel a part of the family since day one. Thanks to Cecil, Nancy, Cheryl, Todd,

Becky, Jeremy, Mike, and Marissa for making me feel at home, always.

I forged a number of academic relationships in my time at UC. These friends made life

as a graduate student much more enjoyable. Thanks to Evan Hart, Matt Stanley, Zach Garrison,

Adam Rathge, Rob Gioielli, Feay Coleman, Jessica Biddlestone, Maribeth Mincey, Michelle

Semancik, Katy Cornell, Lance Lubelski, and Nate McGee for the camaraderie and fellowship. I

vii
would also like to thank Matt Brandt, my best friend of twenty-five years and partner in crime.

Thanks for always being there, brother. Along with Matt, I would like to thank Smitty, Blake,

Pete, Frank and all the fellas at the City Club. You have no idea how much you helped this

project.

Most importantly, I must thank my family. Susan and Nathan have inspired, motivated,

and encouraged me at every turn. I appreciate and am thankful for all the sacrifices you had to

make on my behalf. Without your love and support, I am not sure how I would have made it this

far. Thank you for everything; I am forever grateful.

viii
 The New Negro of Jazz: New Orleans, Chicago, New York,
the First Great Migration, & the Harlem Renaissance, 1890-1930

Bound No’th Blues

Goin’ down the road, Lawd,

Goin’ down the road.
Down the road, Lawd,
Way, way down the road.
Got to find somebody
To help me carry this load.

Road’s in front o’ me,

Nothin’ to do but walk.
Road’s in front o’ me,
Walk … an’ walk … an’ walk.
I’d like to meet a good friend
To come along an’ talk.

Hates to be lonely,
Lawd, I hates to be sad.
Says I hates to be lonely,
Hates to be lonely an’ sad,
But ever friend you finds seems
Like they try to do you so bad.

Road, road, road, O!

Road, road … road … road, road!
Road, road, road, O!
On the no’thern road.
These Mississippi towns ain’t
Fit fer a hoppin’ toad.

- Langston Hughes (1926)

ix
 Table of Contents

Abstract iii

Acknowledgements v

Introduction Just Like Some Kind of a God: 1

Jazz, the Great Migration, & the Harlem
Renaissance Reconsidered

Chapter One Jazz Demanded Cooperation: 19

The Americanization of the Gens De
Couleur Libres & the Evolution of Jazz in
New Orleans

Chapter Two I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say: 47

The Culture and Activism of New Orleans Jazz

Chapter Three You Just Can’t Keep the Music 88

Unless You Move With It:
Jazz & The First Great Migration

Chapter Four I Made It My Business to Go Out for a Daily 120

Stroll and Look This ‘Heaven’ Over:
Chicago and the New Negro of Jazz

Chapter Five An Attempt to Make the American Dream 159

Work, If It Were Going To:
New York, The Harlem Renaissance, and Jazz

Conclusion This New Thing of Racial Mixing on an Equal Basis: 197

The End of the Great Migration, the Start of the
Great Depression, and the Dawn of the Swing Era

Bibliography 205

x
Introduction:

Just Like Some Kind of a God: Jazz, the Great Migration,

& The Harlem Renaissance Reconsidered

Later in life Louis Armstrong wrote about his first journey to Chicago in 1922, reflecting

on his motivations for the trip. “Hillare and the rest of us kids who turned out to be good

musicians, migrated from New Orleans⎯ to Chicago, when times were real good. There were

plenty of work, lots of Dough flying around, all kinds of beautiful women at your service. A

musician in Chicago in the early twenties were treated and respected just like⎯ some kind of a

God.”1 Louis Armstrong’s brief recollection of post-World War I Chicago reflects the dream of

the Windy City as a land of hope and opportunity for African Americans during the Great

Migration. For jazz musicians in particular, South Side Chicago offered unique avenues to

openly ply their trade, advance careers, organize collectively, and achieve a social standing and

respectability unattainable in the South. However, the black elite would find little if anything

respectable about jazz north or south. The cabarets and theaters of Chicago’s black entertainment

district, known as “The Stroll,” acted as incubators that nurtured jazz from its infancy to

adolescence. Here, the music matured into a distinct Chicago style that blended southern and

northern influences, cultures, and personalities to create a national, and uniquely American,

musical art form.

The New Orleans of Armstrong’s youth, however, was a dangerous place. This was

especially so for the city’s African American and Creole populations. The advancements made

by these two groups during the Reconstruction Era were all but rolled back as violent waves of

repression swept across the South and the Crescent City in particular. But New Orleans was

1
Louis Armstrong, “The Armstrong Story,” in Thomas Brothers, ed., Louis Armstrong In His Own Words: Selected
Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 74. The epigraph is from Langston Hughes, “Bound No’th
Blues,” in Arnold Rampersad, ed., The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 76.

1
Armstrong’s home. Despite the hostile climate of the Big Easy and the allure of Chicago,

Armstrong was reluctant to leave behind his family, friends, and the only life he had ever known.

Joe “King” Oliver, Armstrong’s mentor, left New Orleans in 1918, and he later

encouraged Armstrong to follow him to Chicago. Oliver was a respected and successful

bandleader in Chicago, and he assisted many musicians, including Armstrong, in leaving New

Orleans for good. As Armstrong explained, “He kept sending me letters and telegrams telling me

to come up to Chicago and play second cornet for him. That, I knew, would be real heaven for

me. I had made up my mind that I would not leave New Orleans unless the King sent for me. I

would not risk leaving for anyone else.”2 Cleary Armstrong thought long and hard about his

decision to leave New Orleans based on a variety of factors. Ultimately, he was swayed by the

advice of a close confidant. Though this particular element of Armstrong’s story is telling, it is

far from unique.

By 1924, Armstrong would bring the Chicago style to New York City, intent on leaving

his own mark on the brand of jazz that was beginning to take Harlem by storm. For Armstrong

and fellow musicians, the migration experience opened new avenues for political activism

unavailable in the South. In the 1920s and 1930s, the young trumpet impresario became a dues

paying member in both the Chicago and New York musicians locals. Though he projected an

apolitical persona to the general public, he quietly channeled funds to civil rights organizations

like the NAACP, as his income grew more secure.3 Armstrong was not alone in his political

activities. Musicians in the north engaged in a number of organizing and political pursuits as a

product of the activism of the Great Migration period. Because of their experiences as both labor

2
Louis Armstrong, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (New York: Prentice Hall, 1954), 226.
3
Louis Cottrell, interview transcript, March 14, 1978, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.

2
activists and performing artists, jazz musicians remain a crucial yet underappreciated strain

within the larger narrative of the New Negro experience.

Armstrong’s migration story challenges popular narratives about jazz that center on

Harlem as the nodal point of black cultural production in the first decades of the twentieth

century. Louis Armstrong’s story also indicates that jazz musicians were a central but distinct

component of the Great Migration. Among possessions that Armstrong brought north was the

cultural baggage of New Orleans jazz. He checked that baggage and augmented it in Chicago

before making his way to Harlem. Once in New York, he was less than impressed with the city’s

music scene. After joining Fletcher Henderson’s band (one of the biggest and most sought after

acts in New York City), he found the group lacking the discipline and dynamism of its Chicago

counterparts. “I stayed and tolerated them cutting up on the bandstand instead of playing the

music right…. The fellows in Fletcher’s band had such big heads… such big heads until— even

if they miss a note ‘So what.’” Furthermore, he believed Henderson cared little for his innovative

style. Armstrong returned to Chicago within the year. 4

Between 1915 and 1930, well over one million African Americans left the South for the

urban North.5 The motivations for such a journey are myriad and complex. Such factors include,

but are not limited to, economic opportunities and the desire for full rights as citizens.

Furthermore, many migrants consciously decided to move north based on the advice of family

and friends through what amounted to a grass-roots network of communication. The net effect of

this Great Migration resulted in an explosion of African American culture and entrepreneurship

concentrated in places like Chicago’s South Side and New York City’s Harlem and in industrial

4
Louis Armstrong, Armstrong Tapes, CD 426, Disc 1, Track 7, Louis Armstrong Collection, Louis Armstrong
House Museum Archives, Queens College, New York.
5
Eric Arnesen, ed., Black Protest and the Great Migration: A Brief History With Documents (New York:
Bedford/St. Martins Press, 2003), 1.

3
cities throughout the Midwest, Mid Atlantic Region, and New England. Jazz music stood at the

vanguard of this cultural explosion. This study sheds new light on jazz, the First Great Migration,

and the Harlem Renaissance by examining the political activism of musicians in New Orleans,

Chicago, and New York City. In studying the work of black musicians during the Jazz Age it is

clear that these men and women were supremely talented, dedicated, and influential. Their

mobility spread jazz across the country and eventually forced American society to recognize the

power and genus of African American artists.

In terms of African American cultural achievement during the first few decades of the

twentieth century, the lion’s share of attention has been directed at the artists and literary figures

of what is commonly known as the Harlem Renaissance. Furthermore, historians have limited

their discussions of the Harlem Renaissance to the visual or literary arts, with the music of the

period, particularly jazz, thrown in as an afterthought. Additionally, when the connection is made

between music and the Harlem Renaissance, Harlem jazz is the beginning and end of the

conversation. By 1930 Harlem was emerging as one of the nation’s jazz capitals, but it was not

unrivaled or wholly unique in that regard. Indeed, jazz stood at the forefront of cultural

innovation in scores of cities from coast to coast by 1930. Furthermore, New Orleans, Chicago,

Kansas City and other jazz destinations could just as easily stake the claim as the nation’s jazz

capital in this period. In fact, so many early jazz innovators emigrated to Chicago’s South Side

from New Orleans that the Windy City could arguably boast a more vibrant music scene than

Harlem.

Thanks in no small part to the Great Migration, jazz transitioned from a regional to the

national music in the 1910s and 1920s. A number of scholars of the Great Migration have

examined the grass roots leadership that facilitated northern emigration. Additionally, thanks to

4
historians like David Levering Lewis, the political activism of the literary arm of the Harlem

Renaissance is well known. Unfortunately, few have made the same connections in regard to the

musicians of the period. Indeed, jazz made its own Great Migration on the backs of a cadre of

grass-roots musician leaders whose political awareness has yet to be fully appreciated. As

clarinetist Sidney Bechet explained in 1960, “You know, there’s this mood about the music, a

kind of need to be moving…. You just can’t keep the music unless you move with it.”6 This

movement of the music and musicians mirrored the exodus of millions of African Americans out

of the South, and it set the stage for the Jazz Age that followed. Consequently, by casting a wider

net on the political and artistic achievements of the period, the New Negro of jazz broadens our

understanding of New Negro activism so closely associated with the visual and literary artists of

the Harlem Renaissance. All too often, the accomplishments of the musicians of the period are

relegated to a supporting role in the cultural and political activism of the New Negro movement.

These considerations suggest that a deeper analysis of jazz, the Great Migration, the Harlem

Renaissance, and the political activism of musicians beyond 135th Street and Lenox Avenue will

uncover the “New Negro” of black music.

This work is an examination of the role jazz and jazz musicians played in forging cultural

and civic institutions in New Orleans, Chicago, and New York City in the first decades of the

twentieth century. To be certain, jazz was not a phenomenon exclusive to these three cities.

Actually, innovations in the music were made in places like Kansas City, St. Louis, Detroit, Los

Angeles, and in cities across the country. But the work of musicians and activists in New

Orleans, Chicago’s South Side, and Harlem are particularly enlightening of New Negro activism

in relation to jazz artists. Furthermore, because jazz musicians were only one component of the

6
Sidney Bechet, Treat It Gentle: An Autobiography (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1960), 95.

5
migration northward, it is crucial to understand the larger narrative of the Great Migration. By

placing the musicians within the larger framework of the Great Migration, it becomes evident

that elements of the jazz musicians’ experiences were representative of the out-migration from

New Orleans. The migrating musicians share certain characteristics, such as their motivations to

journey north, which echo the stories of other migrants. A number of characteristics set them

apart from the typical African American who left the South during the Great Migration; jazz

musicians had an additional incentive to migrate north. They were hard pressed to find public

outlets to ply their craft. This dynamic pushed them from the region and on to places that were

receptive to the new musical form and the culture it fostered. In addition, the existence of black

benevolent societies coupled with the long history of Creole and African American activism in

New Orleans, conditioned musicians to political activism, which they continued in the North.

Once in Chicago, the African American musicians union protected jazz artists and fostered

greater political participation. Additionally, due to cultural innovations in language, styles of

dress, and demeanor, New Orleans musicians developed a consciousness that separated them

from other migrants. These developments created an environment of political activism that

sought to combat the repressive mechanisms that dictated the status of African Americans be that

of second-class citizens in American society.

The central argument of this study is that jazz musicians were not passive historical

participants either during or following migration. In his study of black working class culture and

politics, Race Rebels (1994), Robin D. G. Kelley argues that, all too often, conventional

scholarship only views “legitimate” forms of protest and resistance as those that take place

within the parameters of civil rights organizations or trade unions. Kelley asserts that by doing

so, scholars diminish disparate viewpoints within these groups and downplay resistance that

6
takes place outside of these institutions. Instead, he advocates redrawing the map of political

discourse by questioning common notions of what constitutes “legitimate” protest and resistance.

To do so, Kelley rejects “the tendency to dichotomize people’s lives, to assume that clear-cut

‘political’ motivations exist separately from issues of economic well-being, safety, pleasure,

cultural expression, sexuality, freedom of mobility, and other facets of daily life. Politics is not

separate from lived experience or the imaginary world of what is possible; to the contrary,

politics is about these things.” He further explains, “Politics comprises the many battles to roll

back constraints and exercise some power over, or create some space within, the institutions and

social relationships that dominate our lives.”7 Viewed in this light, the story of the development

of jazz in New Orleans, and the subsequent migration of black musicians out of the Crescent

City to northern locales, is one ripe with political overtones. Jazz musicians bolstered political

discourse in New Orleans, Chicago, and New York. Both before they left New Orleans and once

they arrived elsewhere, musicians attempted a number of mobilizing and organizing activities to

better their conditions and adjust to living in a new environment.8 Additionally, jazz music acted

as a vehicle for social change both in New Orleans and elsewhere. Finally, the distinct and

recognizable brand of jazz that developed in New Orleans became the national music as a result

of the cultural forces set loose by the Great Migration.

Given the extent of repression African Americans faced across the South and the lack of

respect and full equality they were accorded in the North, the fact that jazz, as a byproduct of

black culture, claimed a central place in American popular culture is no small feat. We often take

7
Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press,
1994), 4, 9-10.
8
Here, I am borrowing the concepts of mobilizing and organizing as outlined by noted civil rights activist Bob
Moses in the 1960s. Moses argues that mobilizing efforts relied on relatively short-term, large-scale public events,
while organizing efforts focused on the long-term development of leaders comprised of ordinary individuals. For
more information on this distinction see: Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing
Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 3-4.

7
for granted that the 1920s was known as the Jazz Age, without fully considering the implications

that had on American society. Though jazz did not tear down all racial barriers during the Jazz

Age, the 1920s saw black and white customers interacting on American dance floors, the first

nationally recognized and positively portrayed black celebrities, and white jazz artists clamoring

to emulate the latest innovations from men like Joe Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and Duke

Ellington. Black musicians developed a distinct brand of language that remains to this day⎯

terms like “gigs,” “chicks,” and “squares.” Today, in music conservatories across the country,

students study the work of classical composers like Beethoven and Bach and the work of

Armstrong and Ellington. Black musicians shared their artistic achievements with the nation

during the Great Migration, and it forever altered American society. Few could have envisioned

such a transformation at the turn of the twentieth century.

In 1925 Alain Locke, one of the leading proponents of the Harlem Renaissance, edited a

collections of essays and literary works on the cultural contributions of African Americans

associated with the New Negro movement. In the foreword to The New Negro, Locke declared,

“There is ample evidence of a New Negro in the latest phases of social change and progress, but

still more in the internal world of the Negro mind and spirit.” Locke argued that through African

American cultural contributions American society discovers, “in the artistic self-expression of

the Negro today a new figure on the national canvas and a new force in the foreground of

affairs.”9 Jazz musicians were an important, though underappreciated, component of New Negro

activism “on the national canvas.” To fully demonstrate the connection between the activism of

the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, and jazz a number of historical questions must be

answered. From what social and political environments did jazz emerge? In what specific ways

9
Alain Locke ed., The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1925),
xxv.

8
did early jazz music add to the political discourse in New Orleans, Chicago, and New York?

What factors motivated jazz musicians to leave the Big Easy and journey to places like the

Windy City and the Big Apple? Who filled the leadership roles that fostered the out-migration?

How does music relate to the Harlem Renaissance? Finally, how and why did this seemingly

regional blend of musical influences emerge on the national stage as a potent cultural force in the

1920s and 1930s? Ultimately, this is a story of the evolution of a new musical style, the activism

that fostered new forms of individual expression and resistance to repression, the artistic

community that nurtured innovation, the migration of musicians and the music, and the cities and

individuals that made it all possible.

Historiography

The work of several scholars loom large in this study, and without these existing

secondary sources this work on the political activism of jazz musicians over a broad geographic

region simply would not be possible. First, a firm understanding of the political and social

conditions in New Orleans just before the Great Migration picked up full steam is essential to

this study. In the last few decades a number of scholars have emphasized the complicated

dynamics of post-Reconstruction Louisiana politics. Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet

(2003) and Adam Fairclough’s Race and Democracy (1995) both frame, in part, the local

struggle for self-determination within the national story of civil rights activism.10 Together, Hahn

and Fairclough offer a wide lens view of social protest in the region. Hahn, in particular,

advocates reexamining the traditional definition of political activity. He clearly makes the case

that because African Americans were disenfranchised and politically marginalized following the

collapse of Reconstruction, they began asserting political independence in ways that were not

10
Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great
Migration (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003); Adam Fairclough, Race and Democracy:
The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972 (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1995).

9
officially recognized by white society. Jazz musicians, therefore, fit the profile of clandestine

political activity in post-bellum New Orleans.

Additionally, the social, cultural, and artistic evolution of jazz was a crucial component

of New Orleans’s role in the Great Migration. A number of scholars have correctly described the

origins of jazz as more of an evolution rather than a genesis, most notably Burton Peretti and

Charles Hersch.11 In The Creation of Jazz (1992), Peretti places “the creation of jazz within the

great contexts of American culture- urbanization, race relations, individual development,

professionalization, and capitalism.”12 While Peretti describes the conditions out of which jazz

emerged, in Subversive Sounds (2007), Hersch argues that jazz music and the cultural institutions

from which it emerged fostered integration and acted as an agent for social change. These

authors have painted a more complex picture of the development of jazz than the standard

account allows. Unfortunately, few authors have taken the same care to describe the complexity

of the Great Migration and its impact on spreading jazz across the country.

The historiography of the Great Migration has grown in recent years, and the causes of

the movement have been the subject of much debate among historians both then and now.

Thanks, in part, to the seminal work of James R. Grossman, our understanding of the Great

Migration and the urban experience has evolved quite dramatically in the past few decades. In

Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (1989), Grossman points to

the tradition within African American communities of mobility as an assertion of agency.

Following emancipation, Grossman contends, blacks found spatial mobility to be of the utmost

significance. Furthermore, Grossman asserts that a grass-roots network of information and

11
Burton W. Peretti, The Creation of Jazz: Music, Race, and Culture in Urban America (Urbana, Illinois:
University of Illinois Press, 1992); Charles Hersch, Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
12
Peretti, The Creation of Jazz, 1.

10
leadership emerged that was essential to the movement.13 In his recent book, Chicago’s New

Negroes: Modernity, The Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (2007), Davarian L. Baldwin

argues that a “black intelligentsia” developed in Chicago not unlike the Harlem Renaissance of

the same period. Baldwin’s intellectual perspective reveals that a Garveyite, economic nationalist

agenda emerged in Chicago. The author argues that the rhetoric of the “New Negro” stood as an

assertion of the agency of new migrants.14 William Howland Kenney employs a cultural

perspective to discuss the evolution of jazz in Chicago. Kenney focuses primarily on the

development of the music and jazz culture. He pays particular attention to the South Side

community. The author also discusses, at length, the interactions between black and white

musicians and their patrons.15 Kenney’s work is essential to understand the confluence of music,

race, and culture in Chicago during, and immediately following, the Great Migration.

In addition to the aforementioned work of David Levering Lewis, there are a number of

books on Harlem and the Harlem Renaissance that were useful to the project. Any discussion of

the Harlem Renaissance would be incomplete without some analysis of the landmark collection

of essays, The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (1925), edited by Alain Locke.16

James Weldon Johnson’s Black Manhattan (1930) is another critical primary source on the

identity and culture of Harlem in the 1910s, ‘20s and ‘30s.17 Gilbert Osofsky’s Harlem: The

Making of a Ghetto (1963) studies the residential restrictions in New York that afforded African

13
James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1989).
14
Davarian L. Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration and Black Urban Life (Chapel
Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 2-19.
15
William Howland Kenney, Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1993).
16
Alain Locke ed., The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1925).
17
James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930).

11
Americans little choice in where they could reside within the city.18 This dynamic restricted

residential mobility for African Americans, but ironically, it also concentrated artistic

achievement and innovation in Harlem. Finally, Nathan Irvin Huggins’s Harlem Renaissance

(1971) illuminates the myriad personalities that called Harlem home in the 1920s and ‘30s

including, W.E.B. DuBois, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, and James Weldon Johnson.19

Huggins clearly demonstrates the connection between politics and artistic expression as

embodied in the Harlem Renaissance.

There are a number of works on early jazz that offer a musicological perspective on the

development and dissemination of the music. Most notably, Gunther Schuller’s first volume on

the history of jazz, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (1968), traces the music to its

origins and bridges the gap between its evolution and the Swing Era that followed.20 Other

important musicological studies include Frank Tirro’s Jazz: A History (1977) and Ted Gioia’s

The History of Jazz (1997).21 These works offer critical assessments of jazz and its status as the

American art form. They also effectively demonstrate how location and particular moments in

history affected the style and variety of jazz played in a given locale. Therefore, these books are

crucial in understanding how New Orleans jazz morphed into Chicago jazz and the differences

between Chicago and New York styles. Finally, they foreshadow the emerging Swing Era that

catapulted Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington onto the national stage.

Despite the excellent work of these scholars, the story of black jazz musicians as both

activists and artists remains unfinished. My own work attempts to synthesize the above

approaches and challenge the traditional interpretations of the development of jazz, the Great
18
Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).
19
Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).
20
Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).
21
Frank Tirro, Jazz: A History (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1977); Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997).

12
Migration, and the Harlem Renaissance. While jazz was a central cultural component of life in

Harlem, it was also crucial to scores of cities across the country as African Americans journeyed

north during the Great Migration. Jazz musicians were also just as active politically as other

migrants. Despite a common stereotype that characterizes musicians as apolitical, my work, then,

seeks to demonstrate that the musicians of the period were no different than their counterparts in

the literary arts.

Methodology

In addition to the work of scholars in the field, I also relied heavily on a number of

primary source material. The New Orleans and Chicago stories are largely the result of archival

research conducted at the University of Chicago’s Archive of Chicago Jazz and Tulane

University’s William Ransom Hogan Archive of New Orleans Jazz. These institutions contain a

number of oral histories recorded by early jazz innovators, like Louis Armstrong, that discuss the

development of jazz from New Orleans to Chicago and New York City. The Hogan Archive is,

perhaps, the largest single repository of primary source materials on the development and culture

of early jazz. Of particular interest to my project is the collection of oral histories. These include

interviews with Joe “King” Oliver, Sidney Bechet, and Jelly Roll Morton, just to name a few. In

these accounts, musicians often reflected on their motivations for leaving New Orleans for

Chicago and other northern and western locales during the time period.

The Chicago Jazz Archive also contains a number of oral histories of musicians who

came to Chicago during the period including Natty Dominique, Bill Davison, and George Dixon.

In addition, the archive houses microfilm collections of the most influential African American

newspaper of the period, the Chicago Defender. The Chicago Public Library’s Vivian G. Harsh

Research Collection of African American History and Literature is also of great interest to my

13
project as it contains a number of materials on both the Great Migration and the development of

Chicago jazz and blues. Lastly, the Harold Washington Branch of the Chicago Public Library

houses the remaining records of the black musicians union, Local 208.

I also conducted extensive research in New York City. Rutgers University’s Institute of

Jazz Studies in Newark, New Jersey houses an oral history collection that contains interviews

with jazz greats Milt Hinton, Barney Bigard, and Zutty Singleton to name a few. There are also

the personal papers of the Harlem jazz piano impresario James P. Johnson. Additionally, the

Louis Armstrong House Museum Archives located on the campus of Queens College in New

York City, houses thousands of documents related to the life and career of the jazz great. Louis

Armstrong is a central character of the project. He not only represents an era of early jazz

innovation, but more importantly, he is the physical embodiment of jazz and the Great

Migration. Having grown up in New Orleans, Armstrong then moved to Chicago in the peak

years of migration before ultimately settling in New York. The Armstrong House Museum

Archive is a crucial repository of material that enabled me to contextualize Armstrong and his

work in this light.

In addition, New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

holds the remaining records for the New Amsterdam Musical Association (NAMA). NAMA was

an early attempt by African American musicians in New York to unionize and protect the

economic interests of its members. Finally, New York University’s Tamiment Library and

Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive houses the remaining records of the biracial musicians union in

New York City, Local 802. These materials reveal much about the political acumen of the Big

Apple’s musicians during the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance.

14
 In addition to the archival materials and oral histories, I utilized a number of

autobiographical accounts of those closely associated with New Orleans, Chicago, and Harlem

jazz. Louis Armstrong wrote three such memoirs. The first of which, Louis Armstrong: Swing

That Music, was published in 1936.22 He also wrote two other accounts in subsequent years:

Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (1954) and Louis Armstrong- A Self Portrait (1966).23 Bassist

Pops Foster, clarinetist Barney Bigard, drummer Warren “Baby” Dodds, and the banjo player

Danny Barker also left their recollections of the early days of jazz.24 Finally, two early jazz

innovators discussed the centrality of New Orleans to jazz music in their own accounts.

Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton published Mister Jelly Roll in 1950, and Sidney Bechet published

Treat it Gentle a decade later.25 Like Armstrong, these two men were instrumental in codifying

the form jazz would follow for decades to come. Lastly, Duke Ellington’s autobiography, Music

Is My Mistress (1976), proved invaluable in discussing the Harlem scene.26

While it is reassuring to have so many first person accounts to rely on, I am well aware of

the potential risks of using oral histories. Memories change over time, unpleasant experiences

may get glossed over, and there is a definite tendency to paint one’s self in a positive light in

many accounts. Not withstanding these pitfalls, there is also much useful information to be

mined from these memoirs. Furthermore, because few people took jazz very seriously until after

the Great Migration elevated the music onto the national stage, no one thought to record the
22
Louis Armstrong, Louis Armstrong: Swing That Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1936).
23
Louis Armstrong, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (New York: Da Capo Press, 1954); Louis Armstrong with
Richard Meryman, Louis Armstrong- A Self Portrait (New York: The Eakins Press, 1966).
24
Pops Foster with Tom Stoddard, The Autobiography of Pops Foster: New Orleans Jazzman (San Francisco:
Backbeat Books, 1971); Barney Bigard with Barry Martyn, With Louis and the Duke (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1980); Warren “Baby” Dodds with Larry Gara, The Baby Dodds Story (New York: Contemporary Press,
1959); Danny Barker with Alyn Shipton, Buddy Bolden and the Last Days of Storyville (New York: Continuum
Publishing Group, 1998).
25
Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton with Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New
Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz” (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1950); Sidney Bechet,
Treat it Gentle: An Autobiography (New York: Da Capo Press, 1960).
26
Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (New York: Da Capo Press, 1976).

15
details of its early development. Therefore, these oral histories and autobiographies are among

the few sources available on the subject. Consequently, I made every effort to cross reference

such accounts whenever possible.

The first chapter details the political activism of the African American and Creole

communities in New Orleans. Chapter one picks up the story of the development of jazz in post-

Reconstruction New Orleans. Though African Americans and Creoles were often at odds in New

Orleans, the two groups found moments of both cooperation and competition. Out of one

moment of cooperation, jazz emerged in the Crescent City at the turn of the twentieth century.

The second chapter describes the formation of grass-roots networks in New Orleans that fostered

the out-migration of the musicians during the Great Migration. While jazz musicians were busy

codifying a new musical art form in the first decades of the twentieth century, they were also

engaged in a number of activities that pulled collective resources, created a semblance of job

security, and provided for the general welfare of the music community in the Crescent City. It

was the grass-roots networks that developed alongside the music that proved vital in launching

the jazz exodus from the nodal point of New Orleans.

The migration of musicians across the South is the subject of the third chapter. While the

jazz migration is often described in purely economic terms, the story of the jazz exodus was

much more complicated than that. Jazz musicians left the South for a variety of reasons, and they

all actively sought a better life for themselves and their fellow musicians. Furthermore, northern

migration was often not a one-way journey. Because of financial and artistic motivations,

musicians lived a life on the road for months at a time. This dynamic helped spread jazz to the

far corners of the country, and even the globe, in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. Consequently,

places like Memphis, Kansas City, Los Angeles, and even Paris, France became jazz destinations

16
in and of themselves. Furthermore, life on the road presented both perils and triumphs along the

way.

The fourth chapter discusses the Chicago scene. Chicago’s South Side rivaled anything

Harlem had to offer in every respect. Black musicians found a vibrant scene to ply their craft.

They also found new opportunities for political expression. Chicago’s musicians created the

largest black musicians union in the country. Finally, they worked alongside organizations like

the NAACP, the Urban League, and Chicago’s Republican Party in the South Side

neighborhood. Consequently, the Great Migration fostered greater political participation and a

new musical art form that launched the careers of national black celebrities like Louis

Armstrong.

The fifth chapter focuses on jazz in New York City. Because so many early jazz

innovators lived in Chicago, New York jazz had some catching up to do in the 1910s and early

1920s. Piano players like James P. Johnson and Willie “The Lion” Smith dominated the Harlem

scene. These men influenced Duke Ellington’s style, and he applied the techniques he learned in

Harlem to the big band format. Thanks to Ellington and other Harlem jazz artists, New York

became a focal jazz destination in the late 1920s and 1930s. While Harlem jazz played catch up

to Chicago, New York musicians were just as politically active as their counterparts in other

cities. New York was home to the largest biracial musicians union in the country. Due to the

insistence and activism of black musicians in Local 802, the union was forced to recognize and

address the concerns of black musicians. Though it was a long fight for justice within the union,

Harlem’s jazz artists soon turned Local 802 into an advocate for the city’s musicians, both black

and white.

17
 The Great Migration had profound effects on American cities and American culture at

large. Jazz was one of the byproducts of the Great Migration. As musicians voiced their disfavor

with the South by leaving it en masse, along with their physical effects they also brought the

cultural baggage of jazz in the journey north. Soon the new music spread across the country and

gained new converts wherever it went. First in New Orleans, then in Chicago, and other cities

across the country, jazz held the power to affect change and influence public opinion. Harlem

was one of many sites of artistic innovation; by decentralizing Harlem as the sole capitol of

African American artistic achievement, it is clear that the music “Renaissance” of the Jazz Age

was clearly national in scope. Indeed, the New Negro of jazz was simultaneously crafting a new

art form and carving out avenues for greater political participation as the result of the Great

Migration. Consequently, it was the New Negro of jazz that taught the American people how to

swing during the Jazz Age.

18
Chapter 1:

Jazz Demanded Cooperation: The Americanization of the Gens De Couleur Libres

& the Evolution of Jazz in New Orleans

In the 1940s John Lomax, and his son Alan, began documenting American folk music

through a series of extensive interviews with noted pioneering musicians such as Woody

Guthrie, Molly Jackson, and Leadbelly. As part of his effort to document the life of Ferdinand

“Jelly Roll” Morton, the early jazz piano impresario, Alan Lomax interviewed Dr. Leonard

Bechet (brother of famed New Orleans clarinetist Sidney Bechet) about the social conditions

from which jazz emerged in the Big Easy. Bechet remembered that, initially, Creoles like

himself looked down upon this new music. “When the settled Creole folks first heard this jazz,

they passed the opinion that it sounded like the rough Negro element…. But, after they heard it

so long, they began to creep right close to it and enjoy it.” Bechet believed that this change in

attitude facilitated the spread of jazz, not just in the Creole circles of New Orleans, but

throughout white America as well. “That’s why I think this jazz music helps to get this

misunderstanding between the races straightened out,” he claimed. “You creep in close to hear

the music and, automatically, you creep in close to the other people. You know?”1

Bechet’s observations demonstrate that New Orleans offered unique social and cultural

environments that nurtured jazz in its infancy. To be certain, around the turn of the twentieth

century when jazz emerged, there was a very real sense of antipathy between the “American”

blacks who lived in the uptown neighborhoods of New Orleans and the gens de couleur libres (or

free people of color) known simply as “Creoles” who lived downtown. The history of relations

between the two groups, like much of the history of New Orleans, is complicated and defies easy

1
Dr. Leonard Bechet, quoted in Jelly Roll Morton and Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll
Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz” (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1950),
98-99.

19
categorization. As Alice Dunbar-Nelson wrote in 1917, the history of Creoles “is like the Mardi

Gras of the city of New Orleans, beautiful and mysterious and wonderful, but with a serious

thought underlying it all.”2 It is in light of the complex and nuanced relationship between the two

groups that their conjoined pasts led to both moments of mutual cooperation and mutual

animosity. It is out of one particular moment of mutual cooperation that New Orleans jazz

emerged. Thus Alan Lomax observed, “There was fear and hate on both sides; but jazz

demanded cooperation.”3

To thoroughly understand the evolution of jazz, it is first necessary to contextualize that

moment of Creole/ Black collaboration within the larger framework of earlier periods of mutual

cooperation that were predicated on the changing political climates of Reconstruction Era

Louisiana. New Orleans jazz emerged as the byproduct of musical collaboration between Creoles

and African Americans. The two groups shared with one another their distinct musical traditions,

and the blending of the two styles made New Orleans jazz dynamic and appealing to a broader

range of listeners. It was not mere happenstance that jazz emerged in New Orleans around the

turn of the twentieth century out of dozens of cultural negotiations and compromises between

competing factions in the Crescent City. Unfortunately, jazz historiography often over-simplifies

the relationship between these two groups. A common mistake is to paint the relationship

between African Americans and Creoles as one centered on competition and mistrust, and only

after the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson the two groups began cooperating in earnest. The reality is far

more complicated than the above account suggests. Consequently, the story of the development

of New Orleans jazz begins not in a nightclub on Bourbon Street at the turn of the twentieth

century, but decades earlier in post-Reconstruction Louisiana.

2
Alice Dunbar-Nelson, “People of Color in Louisiana,” The Journal of Negro History (January, 1917), 78.
3
Morton and Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll, 80.

20
We Think it is More Noble and Dignified to Fight

Danny Barker grew up in the Creole section of New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth

century. He learned to play guitar and banjo in the Crescent City under the tutelage of Creole

relatives and friends. Eventually his talents took him to Chicago and New York City where he

played with some of the most successful black and Creole musicians of the 1920s and 1930s. But

the New Orleans of his youth was a divided community. He remembered, “The city was split by

Canal Street, with one part of the people uptown and the Creoles downtown. When people would

come into New Orleans, like gamblers and workers from Memphis, and they’d say ‘Let’s go

down to Frenchtown,’ that meant you went below Canal Street.” Despite the residential divide,

cultural differences were more easily bridged through music. As he explained, “The kids would

stand around and look at the great men like Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong and King Oliver.

You saw these people play, and they played to perfection…. And you had a model of perfection

to shoot at.”4 Jazz was first developed by the generation that preceded Armstrong and Bechet.

Yet, by the time these men made names for themselves as musicians in New Orleans, Creoles

and African Americans remained suspicious of one another. It is important to note that Sidney

Bechet (a Creole) and Armstrong and Oliver (both African Americans) were cited as influences

on Barker. Clearly, for Barker and musicians who came of age after jazz arrived on the New

Orleans music scene, cultural differences were less important than one’s ability to achieve

musical perfection. Barker’s recollections of his youth in New Orleans reveals that though

Creoles and African Americans were sometimes divided and at odds at the turn of the twentieth

century, moments of competition and mistrust were often punctuated with moments of

4
Danny Barker, interview transcript, 1988, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans; Danny Barker in
Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made It (New
York: Dover Publications, 1966), 4; Danny Barker, interview transcript, July 22, 1974, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane
University, New Orleans.

21
cooperation and understanding. In light of Barker’s youthful remembrances, it is necessary to

unpack the complex and nuanced relationship between African Americans and Creoles to reveal

earlier moments when the two groups worked together, and why suspicions were not so easily

cast aside.

The popular essayist George W. Cable famously asked in 1883, “Who Are the Creoles?”5

Cable’s account of Creole life in New Orleans painted an overly romantic picture of a unique

segment of American society whose history defied easy categorization. He declared that the term

“Creole” first applied to, “any native, of French or Spanish descent by either parent, whose non-

alliance with the slave race entitled him to social rank. Later, the term was adopted by- not

conceded to- the natives of mixed blood, and it is still so used among themselves…. Besides

French and Spanish, there are even, for convenience of speech, ‘colored’ Creoles.”6 Cable’s

assessment reduced Creole identity to one based solely on ancestry, when in fact, it was not a

homogenous community in terms of cultural identity. Initially, the term “Creole” applied to

anyone of French or Spanish descent. It was not in wide usage in the colonial period, however.

French and Spanish notions of racial hierarchy were less rigid than the American “one drop rule”

which held that any percentage of African ancestry (no matter how small) deemed an individual

“Black” and, therefore, of a second-class legal and social status. It was not until the Louisiana

Purchase and the clash of American and Creole cultures that the term “Creole” began denoting a

sense of “nativism” and, therefore, privileged status.7 As the historian Arthé Agnes Anthony

explains, “Creole also grew to be used by blacks in reference to those who saw themselves as

culturally more French and Spanish than Afro-American…. And as a result of the caste-like

5
George W. Cable, “Who Are the Creoles?,” Century Illustrated Magazine (January, 1883).
6
Ibid., 396.
7
Joseph G. Tregle, Jr., “Creoles and Americans,” in Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon eds., Creole New
Orleans: Race and Americanization (Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 133-134.

22
status of free people of color, Creole culture was further differentiated into white and colored.”8

Initially, in American society Creoles could be either white or black, but the term “Creole”

quickly changed. It was only after the turn of the twentieth century when Jim Crow increased its

grip on American society that white Creoles began identifying themselves as “white” (as

opposed to “Creole”). Consequently, in Jim Crow Louisiana the term “Creole” was reserved only

for African Americans with French or Spanish ancestry.9

In rudimentary form, the differences between “Creoles of color” and African Americans

in New Orleans was one not just of progeny but also one of culture. Essentially, Creoles were the

light-skinned descendents of French and Spanish settlers and enslaved Africans, who under

French and Spanish custom were accorded certain privileges in society. Once Louisiana became

an American possession following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, these traditions were

maintained by custom, though not always in law. They enjoyed property and inheritance rights in

the antebellum period and by and large were skilled tradesmen. They aligned themselves with

their European ancestry and culture; they received formal educations, spoke French, and

practiced Catholicism. They also lived downtown in the French Quarter in both the pre and post-

Civil War eras.

Creoles sometimes attributed a sense of status, both within Creole circles and in New

Orleans society in general, to the lightness of one’s skin. Light skin tones denoted a sense of

8
Arthé Agnes Anthony, “The Negro Creole Community in New Orleans, 1880-1920: An Oral History.” Ph.D.
dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 1978, 24.
9
It was not until the dawn of the twentieth century that the term “Creole” came to denote those with both African
and European ancestry. As Jim Crow laws in the South more strictly delineated lines of “black” and “white”, the
term came to mean only “black” at the turn of the century. Initially, as this transition unfolded, the term “Creoles of
color” was used to demarcate the differences. Eventually, in accordance with American notions of racial hierarchy,
the term “Creole” emphasized one’s “blackness” rather than one’s “whiteness”. For more information on this
dynamic see: Thomas Brothers, Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006),
171; Virginia R. Domínguez, White By Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick, New
Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 146-147. As a point of clarity, henceforth, when using the term “Creole” I
am specifically referring to those individuals with both African and European ancestry.

23
perceived privilege, because it meant one was more French or Spanish than African American.

For Creoles who looked down on all things African American, European features were

celebrated and meant to separate themselves from black New Orleans. Consequently, by clinging

to such beliefs regarding a privileged status, light-skinned Creoles antagonized and alienated

African Americans in New Orleans. Some Creoles who were light skinned enough rejected all

ancestral ties by “passing” for white and blending into white society, thus avoiding Jim Crow

altogether.10

Creoles also studied music from the classical European canon. Violinist Charles Elgar,

clarinetist Barney Bigard, and cornetist Natty Dominique, for example, all studied under

classically trained Creole music instructors.11 The French Opera and European dance music like

waltzes, schottisches, and polkas heavily influenced the style of music played in Creole circles.

Prominent Creole musicians and composers who wrote and performed in classic European

idioms included Eugéne Macarty, Edmond Dédé, and Basile Barrés.12 The tradition of emulating

“high culture” lent a refined character to Creole music that resembled European popular music of

the day. Creole music sensibilities also reflected notions of privilege and status. Therefore, jazz

and the blues were initially frowned upon in Creole circles because of the relationship these new

musical forms shared with African American culture.

The African American population by contrast, lived on the other side of Canal Street in

the uptown ghetto following the end of slavery. They were Protestant, spoke English, worked in
10
Anthony, “Negro Creole Community in New Orleans,” 33, 56-57; Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes, Our History and
Our People (Originally published in 1911 as Nos Hommes et Notre Histoire) translated and edited by Sister
Dorothea Olga McCants (Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 61-64.
11
Charles Elgar, interview transcript, May 27, 1958, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans; Barney
Bigard and Barry Martyn, With Louis and the Duke: The Autobiography of a Jazz Clarinetist (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1980), 14-17; Natty Dominique, interview transcript, May 31, 1958, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane
University, New Orleans.
12
Lawrence Gushee, “The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Jazz,” Black Music Research Journal (1994), 155, 172.
For more information on the Creole music tradition and its relationship with European classical forms see:
Desdunes, Our History and Our People, 82-89.

24
dangerous and labor-intensive jobs (often as dock workers or ditch diggers), and identified with

the African American music tradition of spirituals, work songs, and black folk songs that formed

the basis of what eventually became the blues. While Creole musicians were often formally

trained, African American musicians picked up knowledge wherever they could (sometimes

through a form of musical apprenticeship). This dynamic placed a high emphasis on individuality

and artistic expression. As Louis Armstrong remembered, “We were always looking for a new

piano player with something new on the ball like a rhythm that was all his own. These fellows

with real talent often came from levee camps. They’d sit on a piano stool and beat out some of

the damnedest blues you ever heard in your life.”13 Thus developed a three-tiered caste system

unique to New Orleans in America: one group free, one in a state of almost perpetual servitude,

and one straddling the precarious line between the two. In light of the erosion of the political

rights Creoles previously enjoyed, they sought to maintain their unique status in Louisiana

society by separating culturally from African Americans in the Big Easy.14 But as Jim Crow

came to dominate southern society and the Crescent City in particular, total separation became

more and more difficult.

Despite the social and cultural differences between African Americans and Creoles in

New Orleans, the two groups shared moments of mutual political cooperation dating to

Louisiana’s Reconstruction period. Though the two factions often stood at odds politically, they

succeeded in drafting, arguably, the most radical and progressive State Constitution during

Reconstruction. The two groups successfully protested and ended the practice of segregation on

the city’s streetcar system in 1867. New Orleans also had the largest population of any southern

13
Armstrong, Satchmo, 64.
14
Morton and Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll, 83-90; Brothers, Armstrong’s New Orleans, 170-176; Joseph Logsdon and
Caryn Cosse` Bell, “The Americanization of Black New Orleans, 1850- 1900,” in Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph
Logsdon eds., Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization (Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University
Press, 1992), 233-239; Anthony, “Negro Creole Community in New Orleans,” 44.

25
city, and the largest black population as well. As late as 1888, the number of black (including

Creole) registered voters slightly outnumbered white registered voters in the state, so it was

critical that Creoles and African Americans cooperate politically (though they did not always

agree as to the best course of action to take).15 This tradition of activism continued well into the

1890s as white supremacists sought to squelch any efforts of reform. Indeed, a radical faction of

Creole activists, led by men such as Rodolphe Desdunes, advocated for an agenda of social

equality for all men of African descent.16 Desdunes and his Creole allies had much to be

apprehensive about. As the progressive gains of the Reconstruction era were rolled back across

the South, “Jim Crow” laws were enacted at different times in different states depending on the

political conditions unique to each. It is clear that by the mid 1880s, the process was well under

way across the South. As the African American newspaper, The New York Freeman intoned in

March 1885, “I warn the people in the New South to stand aloof of this coming hydra.”17

Perhaps the best-known political mobilizing effort by Creole activists is the series of

cases known collectively as the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. This case proved pivotal to both

Creoles and African Americans, and it unintentionally impacted the development of jazz in New

Orleans. While the 1896 Supreme Court decision did not create the Jim Crow system in the

South, it did lend federal sanction to the “coming hydra” by proclaiming that “separate but

equal” accommodations were constitutionally permissible. In 1890, the Louisiana legislature

passed Act 111, which called for separate accommodations for blacks and whites on all
15
For more information on this legacy see: Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon eds., Creole New Orleans: Race
and Americanization (Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1992); Steven Hahn, A Nation
Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003); Anthony, “Negro Creole Community in New Orleans,” 43.
16
Desdunes, Our History and Our People, 130-148.
17
“St. John and the Color Line,” The New York Freeman (March 7, 1885), 1. For more information on Jim Crow
and segregation in American society in general see: C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow 2nd
Revised Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966). For more information in Jim Crow in Louisiana
specifically see: Adam Fairclough, Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972
(Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1995).

26
passenger trains in the state. In response, Rodolphe Desdunes launched the New Orleans

Crusader newspaper as a public platform to condemn the rising tide of Jim Crow in Louisiana

and across the South. In addition, a group of concerned Creoles, including Aristide Mary, Louis

Martinet, and Desdunes, formed the Comité de Citoyens, or Citizens’ Committee, to protest Act

111, boycott the Railroad Companies in compliance with the new law, and raise legal funds for

the campaign. However, it is clear that though the Committee opposed segregation in public

accommodations, official publications by the group were aimed strictly at Creole donors and

volunteers, and its membership was entirely composed of Creoles. African Americans need not

apply. The Committee was quick to distance itself from the larger African American community.

Arthé Anthony explains that “the committee’s initial appeal for support in September 1891 was

couched in terms that the Creole community could readily accept.” Creole activists were

particularly concerned with negative portrayals of black New Orleanians in the press so,

“Clearly, the Citizens’ Committee, its leadership, and its colored audience wanted to avoid

association with those types of Negroes.” Therefore, Creole objections to the segregation

appealed to the “cause of equal rights and American manhood,” rather than highlighting the

inherent injustice of the system for African Americans.18

The committee soon realized that their efforts were in vain, so they turned to the courts as

a last resort. It was quickly decided that test cases were needed to challenge the constitutionality

of two key provisions in the Act. One provision regulated accommodations on trains passing

through the state of Louisiana while another regulated trains traveling only within the border of

the state. Desdunes’s son Daniel volunteered to test the limits of the first provision in June 1892.

In accordance with the plans of the committee, Daniel was arrested for occupying the “whites

18
Desdunes, Our History and Our People, 140- 143; Anthony, “Negro Creole Community in New Orleans,” 51-53.

27
only” section of a train bound beyond state lines. At his trial, the district court ruled that the

provision was unconstitutional based on the commerce clause that granted Congress the right to

regulate commerce between the states.19

Homer Plessy, a man so light complexioned that he could have easily “passed for white,”

volunteered to serve as the test case for the second provision. As prearranged, Plessy was taken

into custody by New Orleans police in the whites only car of a train destined for a location

wholly within state lines. His arrest made the next day’s headlines in the Crescent City’s most

widely read newspaper. The heavily Democratic leaning Daily Picayune declared, “Another Jim

Crow Car Case” with the byline, “Arrest of a Negro Traveler Who Persisted in Riding With

White People.”20 When his case came to trial in the same district court as Desdunes’, Justice

John Howard Ferguson upheld the provision arguing that the state had every right to regulate

accommodations on intrastate passenger trains.21

Plessy’s legal team, funded by the Citizens Committee, appealed the decision all the way

to the Supreme Court. The opinion of the court ruled against Plessy in a seven to one decision on

May 18, 1896. The majority opinion, penned by Justice Henry Billings Brown, declared

“separate but equal” public accommodations were constitutional based on the logic that

“Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon

physical differences… If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United

States cannot put them on the same plane.”22 The irony of the court’s decision lies in the fact that

19
Desdunes, Our History and Our People, 143.
20
“Another Jim Crow Car Case,” Daily Picayune (June 9, 1892), 3.
21
Brook Thomas ed., Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s Press,
1997), 4-5; Desdunes, Our History Our People, 143-144.
22
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (May 18, 1896), in Brook Thomas ed., Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with
Documents (Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 51.

28
it upheld a law that mandated the separation of the races, yet Creoles like Plessy were visible

proof of the widespread mixture of races in the American past.

The Daily Picayune hailed the decision of the high court saying, “if all rights were

common as well as equal, there would be practically no such thing as private property, private

life, or social distinctions… This would be absolute socialism, in which the individual would be

extinguished in the vast mass of human beings, a condition repugnant to every principle of

democracy.”23 Writing to the Nation magazine just a few years later, New Orleans resident,

Harry Prentiss Sneed defended the practice of social separation in his city⎯ as espoused in the

Picayune editorial. “There is no door closed to the negro in the South,” Sneed declared, “except

the door to social equality.”24 Both Sneed and the Piacyune made it clear that in the eyes of

white supremacists, Creoles held no special privileges in southern society and all peoples of

African descent were bound to the edicts of Jim Crow.

The reaction of New Orleans Creole community was a dire one. The Citizens Committee

disbanded not long after the decision was handed down. A once proud group of financial backers

of the Crusader distanced themselves from the paper’s cause and capital needs. Desdunes wrote

that “Seeing that the friends of justice were either dead or indifferent, they believed that the

continuation of the Crusader would not only be fruitless but decidedly dangerous…. We do not

share this reasoning. We think it is more noble and dignified to fight, no matter what, than to

show a passive attitude of resignation.”25 Desdunes and his allies were clearly scarred by the

whole affair, but true to his radical spirit he vowed to fight on.

23
“Equality, But Not Socialism,” The Daily Picayune (May 19, 1896), 4.
24
Harry Prentiss Sneed, “The Negro in New Orleans,” The Nation (January 14, 1904), 30.
25
Desdunes, Our History Our People, 147.

29
 The Plessy decision had swift and dramatic consequences for African Americans and

Creoles across the South. With the backing of the Supreme Court, state after state began enacting

even more draconian Jim Crow laws that separated the races in every facet of social life. Two

years after the decision was handed down, Louisiana added a “grandfather clause” to the voting

requirements of the state that stripped nine tenths of eligible black voters of the franchise.26 For

Creoles, the development of a Jim Crow Louisiana meant that their once privileged status was

now entirely removed by legal edict. They had become entirely “Americanized” whether they

liked it or not. Their secure positions as skilled tradesmen became even more tenuous, and most

were pushed out of their traditional livelihoods altogether.

You Got to Work For That

One of the unintended consequences of the further codification of the Jim Crow system in

Louisiana was the development of New Orleans jazz around the turn of the twentieth century.

Much like the nuanced relationship between Creoles and African Americans in New Orleans, the

history of the development of jazz is complicated. Scholars like Charles Hersch and James

Lincoln Collier contend that New Orleans served as the birthplace of jazz before spreading to the

far reaches of the country in the first decades of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, musicologists

like Gunther Schuller and Frank Tirro argue that jazz and the related idioms of ragtime and the

blues found audiences in a variety of locales across the country at roughly the same time New

Orleans jazz coalesced into a codified musical genre. Without discounting the validity of these

arguments, what is absolutely clear is that the artists and innovators who emanated from New

Orleans dominated the genre from the start.27 For our purposes, whether or not New Orleans

26
Ibid., 144.
27
Charles Hersch, Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2007), 16-17; James Lincoln Collier, Louis Armstrong: An American Genius (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1983), 46-55; Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (New York: Oxford

30
served as the birthplace of jazz is not as important as examining the Big Easy as a site of black

cultural exchange that lent its character to the development of jazz and the making of a black

modernity in the post-Reconstruction and Great Migration periods.

With the tightening restrictions of Jim Crow in New Orleans, the city became

increasingly segregated at the turn of the twentieth century. The grip of Jim Crow was never all

encompassing, however. Indeed, the Crescent City had a long legacy of interracial mingling that

could not be undone by legislation and intimidation alone. For example, sometime in the middle

of the eighteenth century, enslaved Africans began meeting on Sundays just north of the French

Quarter in Tremé to congregate, socialize, and play music on their only day off.28 This public

space offered hundreds of bondsmen and women an opportunity to dance and sing to traditional

West African rhythms. Often practiced at these gatherings was the ring-shout, a traditional West

African dance that employed complex rhythms, blue tones, and call and response.29 These

Sunday performances attracted white audiences, and most disturbing to Creole elites, working-

class free people of color often joined the festivities.30 Since many different African and

European influences affected the rhythms played in Congo Square, many histroians believe it

was an important space serving as a precursor to the development of jazz, as evidenced by the

fundamental elements of the ring-shout also found in jazz.31

The music of Congo Square served as an early forerunner to New Orleans jazz in the

early nineteenth century. By the end of the century, the New Orleans style evolved out of dozens

University Press, 1968), 64-65; Frank Tirro, Jazz: A History (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1977), 96-97, 113;
Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 45.
28
LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow and
Company, 1963), 71-72.
29
Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History 3rd Edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997),
181-184.
30
Hersch, Subservise Sounds, 39.
31
For more information on the relationship of the ring-shout to jazz see: Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture:
Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 95-96.

31
of cultural negotiations between the African Americans and Creoles as they were forced into a

shared identity following the Plessy decision. While Creoles and African American remained at

odds, the two groups began to share musical tastes and expertise during gigs at city parks, dance

halls, nightclubs, and in street parades. As Creoles lost social prestige and the economic security

of the skilled trades, many with formal music training sought to ply their skills to supplement

lost income. Beginning in the 1890s Americans increasingly frequented dance halls as a form of

entertainment with the music furnished by society dance orchestras. Black and white bands

played these affairs for the middle class and wealthy. But, the consumer marketplace provided a

level of steady employment that made music a viable (though not always lucrative) career path,

and Creoles were more likely to make a full-time living as a musician than their African

American counterparts.32

Beginning in the 1870s scores of African American former slaves began flocking to New

Orleans in search of greater economic and social mobility. As the black Louisiana newspaper the

Concordia Eagle noted in 1879, “The negroes have caught the emigration fever, and only those

will stay behind who cannot possibly get away.”33 The families of noted early jazz innovators

Willie Hightower and George “Pops” Foster were among this wave of emigration.34 These

migrants brought with them the African American musical traditions of spirituals, work songs,

the rudimentary elements of the blues, and what was known as “ragging the tune” (essentially a

form of embellishing and taking musical liberties with traditional Euro-American song

structures) that formed the basis of ragtime. Stella Oliver, the wife of the famed bandleader Joe

32
Morton and Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll, 79; Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 257-259; Peretti, Creation of
Jazz, 29.
33
Concordia Eagle (March 27, 1879), 3.
34
Willie Hightower, interview transcript, June 3, 1958, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans;
George “Pops” Foster and Tom Stoddard, The Autobiography of Pops Foster: New Orleans Jazzman (San
Francisco: Backbeat Books, 1971), 4, 8.

32
Oliver, remembered her late husband incorporating elements of the songs sung by railroad

workers and dockworkers and blending it with religious hymns into his jazz repertoire.35 New

Orleans also had a long-standing tradition of brass marching bands that performed regularly on

the streets and in civic spaces like local parks, and groups like the Tuxedo Brass Band, the

Onward Brass Band, and the Excelsior Brass Band used to mix syncopated rhythms and

improvisation (both essential elements of jazz) into their street performances.36

By 1900, all of these divergent elements created a musical gumbo that retained their

distinct flavors while melding into a new music that became New Orleans jazz. Historian

Lawrence W. Levine concludes, “the secular forms of folk expression that arose and became

central after emancipation were the product of many years and diverse influences.”37 Ironically,

though, the term “jazz” was not widely used by New Orleans musicians until the mid-1910s at

the earliest. Crescent City musicians more often than not referred to their style of music as

“ragtime” or “hot music,” and the word “jazz” did not appear in print until 1913 in a San

Francisco newspaper. The origins of the word are unclear, but one explanation holds that it

derives from the French verb “jaser” which roughly translates “to chatter or have an animated

conversation among diverse people.”38 Sidney Bechet, the famed Creole clarinetist, offered a

different explanation: “There’s two kinds of music. There’s classic and there’s ragtime. When I

tell you ragtime, you can feel it, there’s a spirit right in the word…. But Jazz— Jazz could mean

35
Morton and Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll, 78; Mrs. Stella Oliver, interview digest, April 22, 1959, Hogan Jazz
Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.
36
Louis C. Elson, “Down in Dixie,” The Musical Visitor (March, 1890), 67; Peter Bocage, interview transcript,
January 29, 1959, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.
37
For more information on the divergent elements that coalesced to create jazz before the turn of the twentieth
century see: Lawrence Gushee, “The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Jazz,” Black Music Research Journal (1994);
Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought form Slavery to
Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 191.
38
Peretti, Creation of Jazz, 22; Tirro, Jazz,97.

33
any damn’ thing: high times, screwing, ballroom. It used to be spelled Jass, which was screwing.

But when you say ragtime, you’re saying the music.”39

Just one year after the Supreme Court decided the Plessy case, the City Council of New

Orleans enacted an ordinance that legalized prostitution within the confines of a regulated red-

light district not far from the black uptown ghetto.40 Named after New Orleans City Councilman

Sidney Story, who proposed the measure, the district offered some employment opportunities to

aspiring musicians. Historians and musicologists often overstate the significance of Storyville to

the development of jazz, however. African Americans and Creole musicians did find limited

employment in Storyville, but no more than a few dozen musicians at any one time made a living

in the district.41 At roughly the same time, an all black red-light district developed in the uptown

African American ghetto known as Back ‘O Town where musicians also found limited

employment. Early New Orleans jazz found audiences in city streets, public parks, and clubs in

Storyville and Back O’ Town, but it also could be heard in smaller working class venues called

“honky tonks,” on the riverboats, at resort spots along the shores of Lake Pontchartrain (places

like Bucktown, the West End, Spanish Fort, Milneburg), in many of the city’s dance halls, and at

semi-public social gatherings like fish fries and lawn parties. The more lucrative jobs were

playing for white audiences in dancehalls, on riverboats, and at resorts like Spanish Fort or

Milneburg. In black working class venues, the audience often “passed the hat” and musicians

split the tips between the members of the band. At other venues, like Pete Lala’s on the corner of

Iberville and Marais Streets in Storyville, the owner paid band member a nightly wage of a dollar

39
Sidney Bechet, Treat It Gentle: An Autobiography (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1960), 3.
40
Al Rose, Storyville, New Orleans: Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red-Light District
(Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1974), 1.
41
For more information on the extent of employment opportunities for musicians in Storyville and the relationship
between the red-light district and the development of jazz see: Gioia, History of Jazz, 31; Donald M. Marquis, In
Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man of Jazz (Baton Rogue, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 58-
59.

34
and a half. With the array of opportunities for musicians to find venues to hone their craft, the

unique environs of the city of New Orleans lent an urban and modern character to the emerging

genre.42

Some spaces in New Orleans where jazz was played saw black and white audiences

enjoying the music. Like public venues such as Congo Square, city parks, public markets, and

street parades, New Orleans had a long history of interracial interaction in working-class

nightclubs and honky tonks. This tradition stretched back to the days of slavery, but the dictates

of Jim Crow threatened to undermine this legacy.43 Political Scientist Charles Hersch has noted

that the story of jazz and interracial listenership at these clubs is a complex one. Some whites

genuinely appreciated the new music and went to interracial clubs to enjoy familiar tunes and

company. While “others frequented the clubs in a condescending manner steeped in racism and

class snobbery. How much of each existed is impossible to even guess. But in the emerging Jim

Crow era, such venues facilitated older, freer forms of social interaction for some.”44 While Jim

Crow was threatening to dismantle this tradition in New Orleans, jazz acted as a counterweight

to increased segregation, and its broad appeal won new converts. “Most saloons had two sides,

one for whites and one for colored,” remembered Pops Foster. “The colored had so much fun on

their side dancing, singing, and guitar playing, that you couldn’t get in for the whites. It was the

same way at Lincoln Park for the colored; you couldn’t tell who it was for, there were so many

whites there.”45 Though the reach of Jim Crow increased exponentially in this period, jazz and its

42
Louis Armstrong and Richard Meryman, Louis Armstrong- A Self Portrait (New York: Eakins Press, 1966), 12-
13; Peretti, Creation of Jazz, 22-38.
43
C. Van Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow,15. Charles Hersch also cites Woodward in his discussion of
interracial nightclubs.
44
Hersch, Subservise Sounds, 41.
45
Foster and Stoddard, Autobiography of Pops Foster, 71-72.

35
wide appeal undermined the separation of the races by reminding New Orleanians of their

cultural commonalties more than their differences.

In the post-Reconstruction moment, with African American migrants arriving in the city,

Creoles facing the loss of status, and given the opportunities for musicians to find employment,

the New Orleans style of jazz emerged. While it is apparent that Creole musicians tended to have

more formal musical training, they often had much to learn from African American musicians in

order to sound “authentic enough” to please the black audiences of the dance halls and juke

joints in the black uptown district. On this subject Leonard Bechet asserted, “You have to play

real hard when you play for Negroes… You got to come up to their mark…. See these hot

people they play like they killing themselves, you understand? That’s the kind of effort that

Louis Armstrong and Freddy Keppard put in there. If you want to hit the high notes those boys

hit, brother, you got to work for that.”46 Louis Armstrong recalled one episode where he and a

few band mates were called to fill in with some Creole musicians to play music at a funeral. The

Creoles looked down at the African American musicians until after they heard Armstrong and his

mates play: “They patted us on the back and just wouldn’t let us alone. They hired us several

times afterward. After all, we’d proved to them that any learned musician can read music, but

they can’t all swing. It was a good lesson for them.”47 As Armstrong noted, the popularity of jazz

rested not just with the notes on the page, but also with how those notes were played by

individual musicians.

Soon, the new “hotter” style of music prevalent in African American circles began to

dominate the emerging brand of jazz in the Crescent City. The Creole musician Louis Tio Jr.

remembered “when they started off with jazz there were a lot of musicians that didn’t know how

46
Morton and Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll, 98.
47
Armstrong, Satchmo, 143.

36
to read music, and those that did know how to read music. Course the guy that didn’t know how

to read music used his hearing, and by that he went in and he played what he heard…. And that’s

what made jazz. That sounded good to the public’s ears and what made it— it made it popular.

Everybody liked it.”48 In similar exchanges between African American and Creole musicians, the

two groups learned from one another. Based on the account of Armstrong, Creole musicians

learned to improvise and explore unconventional methodologies. Similarly, African Americans

learned classic techniques from Creole colleagues. Over time, each shared with one another their

melodic sensibilities that diversified their musical resumes for respective employment

opportunities.49 Soon jazz bands, like the one fronted by Kid Ory and Joe Oliver in the mid

1910s, prominently featured both Creole and African American soloists. Thus, the development

of jazz was nurtured by a semblance of mutual cooperation between African American and

Creole musicians in New Orleans.

It should also be noted that what we know about early jazz is based entirely on oral

histories from musicians of the period, because there were no records made of New Orleans

musicians in the 1910s. The first jazz record was not made until 1917 when the all-white

Original Dixieland Jazz Band released “Livery Stable Blues.” The first black groups to cut

records did not do so until the 1920s after the Great Migration was in full swing. Consequently,

it is difficult to concretely establish the precise formula of early New Orleans jazz. The new

music was changing rapidly in its infancy, and northern influences surely changed the dynamics

48
Gioia, History of Jazz, 34; Louis Tio, interview transcript [excerpt], October 26, 1960, Hogan Jazz Archive,
Tulane University, New Orleans.
49
The New Orleans tradition of brass bands marching through the city streets emerged in the period following the
Civil War. This dynamic developed when scores of musical instruments were left in the city by military marching
bands during the occupation of the Crescent City. The surplus of instruments meant that they were relatively
affordable. Black and Creole musicians often picked up instruments second-hand and learned the craft through
formal or informal apprenticeships. For more information on the prevalence and affordability of brass and wind
instruments in New Orleans in this period see: Richard Brent Turner, Jazz Religion, the Second Line, and Black New
Orleans (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2009) and, Mary Ellison, “African American Music and
Muskets in Civil War New Orleans,” Louisiana History (Summer, 1994), 285-319.

37
of jazz once musicians emerged in new locales. Furthermore, recording engineers were limited to

cutting songs approximately three minutes in duration to fit the tune on one side of a record. This

meant that songs originally intended to carry on for ten or more minutes in juke joints and dance

halls had to be entirely altered to fit the constraints of the technology of the day and the dictates

of the recording industry that demanded tightly packaged performances for mass market

audiences. As a result, the closest approximation modern listeners are left with⎯ early jazz

records⎯ are closely related to, yet distinctly unique from the style of jazz prevalent in pre-

migration New Orleans.50 Despite the difficulties in documenting the sound of early New

Orleans jazz, it is clear that jazz grew in popularity because it was accessible to a wide range of

audiences thanks to the influences of both African American and Creole musicians who blended

classical and folk idioms.

At the same time jazz began to enjoy a wider popularity, a younger generation of Creoles

grew to musical prominence who began to more fully embrace their African ancestry and

culture, while the older generation of Creoles turned increasingly inward to protect their eroding

sense of status. It was this younger generation that openly admired and started to emulate the

emerging hot style popular among African Americans and made their own mark on New Orleans

jazz. The members of the Creole Band (though not composed entirely of Creoles), for instance,

began playing in the hot style in the early 1910s, and they became so popular that they were the

first New Orleans group to take their brand of jazz on the road in 1914 playing in cities like St.

Louis, Cincinnati, Chicago, Detroit, and New York City.51 The famous piano player Ferdinand

La Menthe anglicized his name and went by the moniker Jelly Roll Morton. Morton, a Creole

50
Tirro, Jazz, 123-125; Schuller, Early Jazz, 70-73.
51
Lawrence Gushee, Pioneers of Jazz: The Story of the Creole Band (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005),
58-59, 272-276.

38
whose ancestors “were in the city of New Orleans long before the Louisiana Purchase,” declared

that he changed his name “for business reasons when I started traveling. I didn’t want to be

called Frenchy.”52 Albert Dominique, another Creole, changed his name to Don Albert. He also

explained that he was always conscious of being “what they call a Negro,” and he devoted his

later years in life to fighting for civil rights and social justice.53 Sidney Bechet, another Creole

musician, proudly wrote in his memoir of his African ancestry and the influence that legacy had

on his life. He also credited his mother with instilling in him a sense of pride for his heritage.54

While it may seem like small gestures to emulate music styles from an unfamiliar culture, change

one’s name, or speak proudly of one’s ancestry, these episodes speak to the willingness of

younger Creoles to embrace the African branches of their respective lineages. Given the

increased separation of older generations of Creoles55 from the African American community,

the actions of the above individuals speak volumes. Changing one’s name to an Anglican

spelling was unheard of in Creole society, and it signaled a professional, as well as symbolic

break with the mores of the past and a significant alteration of cultural identity. Since older

Creoles rejected African American music and ancestry as beneath them, the actions of the Creole

Band and Sidney Bechet strike a similar tone to the actions of Morton and Albert. Danny Barker,

another Creole, remembered, “And as kids, most kids in New Orleans, they had a great interest

in jazz music because it was all around. There were dozens of bands in dozens of halls, of all

levels of society…. And that inspired you to learn to play an instrument. And just about every

52
Morton and Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll, 3.
53
Don Albert, interview digest, September 18, 1972, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans. I would
like to thank Bruce Boyd Raeburn of the Hogan Jazz Archive who brought the issue of anglicized names and an
increasing identification with African ancestry among Creole musicians to my attention in a conversation we had in
mid-September 2009.
54
Bechet, Treat It Gentle, 6-44, 51.
55
For more information on the increased separation of older generations of Creoles from African American society
see: Anthony, “Negro Creole Community in New Orleans,” 26-61.

39
kid in New Orleans at one time or another in his young days tried to play an instrument.”56 New

Orleans jazz may well have developed without Creole participation, but the Creole influence

broadened the appeal for the music within the city. The blending of “high brow” and “low brow”

influences gave jazz a vibrancy that gained new converts as the music spread first within New

Orleans and later the country. At the turn of the twentieth century, it was the work of younger

Creoles, like the members of the Creole Band, that opened the door for further cooperation and

helped New Orleans jazz to flourish.

Despite the sense of mutual cooperation between Creole and African American

musicians, the old cultural rifts between the two groups persisted. For instance, drummer Warren

“Baby” Dodds remembered a sense of Creole superiority regarding African American musicians:

“The musicians mixed only if you were good enough. But at one time the Creole fellows thought

the uptown musicians weren’t good enough to play with them, because most of the uptown

musicians didn’t read music.”57 Furthermore, the Creole pianist Jelly Roll Morton often taunted

the dark skinned cornetist Joe “King” Oliver by referring to him as “Blondie.”58 Louis

Armstrong recalled that because of Morton’s light complexion, he was able to get jobs that the

darker skinned musicians were unable to obtain, and Morton often flaunted his perceived

privileged status. However, “No matter how much his Diamond Sparkled he still had to eat in the

Kitchen, the same as we Blacks,” Armstrong concluded.59

Additionally, New Orleans residents were reminded of a physical sense of the social

division as one crossed Canal Street, the traditional boundary between the uptown African

American ghetto and the downtown French District where Creoles lived. Morton himself
56
Danny Barker, interview transcript, July 22, 1974, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.
57
Warren “Baby” Dodds and Larry Gara, The Baby Dodds Story (Los Angeles: Contemporary Press, 1959), 13.
58
Albert Nicholas, interview digest, June, 26, 1972, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.
59
Louis Armstrong, “Home Sweet Home,” in Thomas Brothers ed., Louis Armstrong in His Own Words: Selected
Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 24.

40
remembered brass band processions as a child where the two factions fought over turf: “You see,

whenever a parade would get to another district the enemy would be waiting at the dividing

line.”60 Similar rivalries also occurred in northern locales during the Great Migration, as old

antagonisms once again came to the fore. As Dave Peyton, the Chicago Defender music

columnist, declared in 1927, “In Chicago and New York they [Creoles] met with opposition

from the brother and at times things were very disagreeable for them, but they stuck together and

attended to their own business and finally won out in the battle, until the brother locked arms and

worked harmoniously with them. Today Creoles and the brother work together and nothing is

thought of it. They are all one, and it is a wonderful thing, too.”61 The mutual cooperation of

Creole and African American musicians from which jazz emerged was tenuously held intact;

mutual cooperation could just as easily be disrupted by a decades old cultural rivalry.

In spite of the fragile nature of cooperation between New Orleans musicians, jazz

persisted and its popularity grew exponentially in both Creole and African American circles.

Given the greater affection than their African American counterparts that Creoles traditionally

enjoyed by white society, a few misconceptions have been perpetuated over the years about the

depth of the Creole contribution to the genre. The myth persists, both then and now, that Creoles

either invented or codified the form and substance that jazz would follow in subsequent years.

Part of the reason for this misconception stems from the period when many believed that the

African American “folk” music played in New Orleans was almost entirely the product of Creole

influence.62 Furthermore, many of the early jazz stars to emerge onto the national stage in this

and later periods were New Orleans Creoles. These stars included the likes of clarinetist Sidney

60
Morton and Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll, 12.
61
Dave Peyton, “The Musical Bunch,” Chicago Defender (November 19, 1927), 6.
62
Morton and Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll, xxi-xxii; Frances Robinson, “Folk-Music,” Current Literature (March,
1901), 350.

41
Bechet, trumpet player Freddie Keppard, and of course pianist Jelly Roll Morton. Morton

himself famously and vociferously claimed in the 1930s to have personally invented jazz as a

young adult in New Orleans.63

The truth of the matter is that no one individual invented jazz in any part of the country.

New Orleans jazz evolved slowly over decades of musical interactions among like-minded

musicians, and it picked up steam around the turn of the century due to competition and

cooperation. It is also evident that the greatest contributions to the early form and substance of

jazz came not from the classically trained Creoles, but from African Americans in New Orleans.

At first, Creole musicians looked down upon the rough and dissonant sounds formulated in the

uptown dance halls and juke joints. By the time Creoles came to the music, the rudimentary

formula of jazz was already established, and it was African American musicians (men like

Buddy Bolden, Bunk Johnson, and Louis Armstrong) who contributed the most stylistic

innovations to the early music. In fact, many credit Bolden as the first musician to play in the hot

style by blending the blues with ragtime and spirituals.64 While the depth of the contribution of

Creoles to early jazz is often overstated, it is safe to assert that Creole musicians offered a level

of technical proficiency and sophistication to the music that made it more attractive and

accessible to a wider audience, including fellow Creoles and white America.

Historians have all too often painted the story of jazz’s development in broad strokes that

distorts the reality and complexity of life in New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century. The

common pitfall is to treat the Plessy decision as the defining moment in early jazz that forced

63
Morton and Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll, 62.
64
Brothers, Armstrong’s New Orleans, 176-189. For more information on the contributions of Buddy Bolden to the
emerging genre of jazz see: Marquis, Buddy Bolden, 1-133. Peter Bocage and Louis Cottrell Jr., both Creole
musicians, believed Bolden deserves credit as the first to play what became jazz. Peter Bocage, interview transcript,
January 29, 1959, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans; Louis Cottrell Jr., interview transcript,
March 14, 1978, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.

42
opposing factions into cooperation for the first time, and that jazz was a natural byproduct of that

cooperation.65 The reality is that Creoles and African Americans had a long history of both

mutual cooperation and competition, as evidenced by the Reconstruction and post-

Reconstruction periods. Though political disputes remained between the two groups, in 1915

they worked together to form the New Orleans branch of the NAACP, and in 1927 the United

States Supreme Court agreed with the local branch that the city’s ordinance that mandated

segregated communities was unconstitutional.66 The political dynamic between Creoles and

African Americans did not occur in a historical vacuum, nor was the development of jazz a mere

happenstance or preordained by fate. One of the cultural byproducts of cooperation between

these two formerly adversarial groups was the development of jazz. Given the legacy of mutual

animosity, punctuated by moments of mutual respect and cooperation, it should come as no

surprise that New Orleans jazz emerged in the unique urban environs of the Crescent City in the

1900s out of both cooperation and competition.

Indeed, jazz was so pervasive in New Orleans by 1918, and it had caused such a

sensation that the Times-Picayune editorialized: “Why is this jass [sic] music, and therefore, the

jass band? ... All are manifestations of a low streak in man’s tastes that has not yet come out in

civilization’s wash…. Its musical value is nil, and its possibilities of harm are great.”67 The fact

that a paper like the Times-Picayune that was devoted to the principles of segregation and white

supremacy was so disturbed by the prominent position jazz assumed in New Orleans life, speaks

to the power of jazz as an instrument for societal change. It is what Dr. Leonard Bechet referred

65
Collier, Louis Armstrong, 14; Peretti, Creation of Jazz, 24-25. Both Collier and Peretti are quick to highlight
tensions between the Creole and African American communities, which was undoubtedly very real. However, by
doing so, these scholars oversimplify a rather complex legacy that defies easy categorization punctuated by both
moments of competition and cooperation.
66
Fairclough, Race and Democracy, 18-19.
67
“Jass and Jassism,” Times-Picayune (June 20, 1918), 4.

43
to as the power of folks creeping in to hear the music and, “automatically you creep in close to

the other people. You know?”68

The Death Knell of Reconstruction

Just before midnight on July 23, 1900, members of the New Orleans Police Department

assaulted two African American men, Leonard Pierce and Robert Charles. In a clear case of

police brutality, Charles was beaten with a nightstick while Pierce was rendered motionless at

the barrel of a gun. Charles fought back in self-defense until an Officer Mora unholstered his

revolver and fired a volley at the uncooperative “suspect.” Charles quickly ran for cover and

returned fire, wounding Mora, before absconding into the night. A mob soon formed, and a

manhunt ensued with the Police Department and Mayor Paul Capdevielle offering a reward of

$250 for the capture, dead or alive, of Robert Charles. The anti-lynching activist, Ida B. Wells,

wrote in the same year that the legal sanctioning of mob violence by the Mayor and the city’s

police force, “would have been no news to Charles, nor to any colored man in New Orleans, who

for any purpose whatever, even to save his life, raised his hand against a white man. It is now,

even as it was in the days of slavery, an unpardonable sin for a Negro to resist a white man, no

matter how unjust or unprovoked the white man’s attack may be. Charles knew this, and

knowing to be captured meant to be killed, he resolved to sell his life as dearly as possible.”69

Seeing the proverbial writing on the wall, Charles believed it was better to stand and fight, rather

than submit to the ruling of “Judge Lynch.”70

68
Bechet, in Morton and Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll, 99.
69
Ida B. Wells, “Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to the Death,” in Jacqueline Jones
Royster ed., Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900 (New
York, 1997), 160-166. Pierce, with a gun pointed at his head, was arrested and taken into police custody. Eventually
a lynch mob formed and demanded Pierce be turned over, but the police held their ground and refused to release
him.
70
Charles was a follower of Bishop Henry Turner and other black nationalists. He was politically active advocating
African Americans to emigrate to Africa. Based on his political consciousness, it is not a coincidence that he

44
 Just before dawn the police surrounded Charles’ home. In a matter of minutes, two police

officers lay dead and Charles escaped a second time. Within a twenty-four hour period, the all-

white mob of several thousand did not succeed in capturing Charles, but it had the city in its

hands. As Wells explained, “Unable to vent its vindictiveness and bloodthirsty vengeance upon

Charles, the mob turned its attention to other colored men who happened to get in the path of its

fury. Even colored women, as has happened many times before, were assaulted and beaten and

killed by the brutal hoodlums who thronged the streets.”71 For four days the mob attacked

African Americans and Creoles in the streets, destroying black property along the way.

The Creole guitar player, Louis Keppard, was a child at the time. He remembered having

to make his way to the restaurant his father worked at in the French Quarter while the riot was in

full swing: “They were shooting down— they were making humbugs in the streets. If they see a

colored man, they’d break him….”72 The father of clarinetist Sidney Bechet only found safe

passage home from work when his employer summoned a friend who owned a funeral parlor to

hide the elder Bechet in a hearse.73 The white throng made no distinction between African

Americans and Creoles who were not light-skinned enough to “pass for white.” Anyone with

even the slightest recognizable, African features was subject to the violent, and often deadly,

whim of the mob.

Finally on the fourth day, Charles’ whereabouts were discovered by the horde of twenty

thousand white New Orleanians. A friend living at 1210 Saratoga Street, where Charles built a

decided to fight rather than submit to authorities. For more information on Charles’ political activities see: Joel
Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1984), 201-209.
71
Wells, Mob Rule, 169.
72
Louis Keppard, interview digest, August 4, 1957, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans
73
Bechet, Treat It Gentle, 56.

45
small arsenal for his own defense, had given him sanctuary. During the ensuing standoff, Charles

shot twenty-seven would be assailants, and he killed seven whites in total over the course of the

week.74 By the time he was finally killed and the mob quenched its thirst for revenge, twelve

African Americans lay dead, dozens were wounded, and thousands of dollars of black-owned

property (including a school) were destroyed.75

The Supreme Court’s Plessy decision gave legal sanction to the American system of

apartheid known as Jim Crow. Just four years after the pivotal decision was handed down, the

Robert Charles riots sent a plain message to the African American and Creole communities in

New Orleans that anyone who challenged the Jim Crow status quo would be dealt with lethal

force. It also made clear that not only would individuals be held accountable for any perceived

threats against the system, but so would entire communities at large. In such a hostile

environment to African American independence, open and overt challenges of white power were

simply too dangerous. A new set of strategies for combating repression was needed. While no

overarching program replaced the activism of the Reconstruction Period, activism was

increasingly focused on the communal level centered on self-help organizations and small-scale

efforts that pooled collective resources. For African Americans and Creoles, the generation that

brought jazz to the forefront of black culture developed tactics that sought to protect the interests

of musicians and the jazz community in New Orleans.

74
Wells, Mob Rule in New Orleans, in Royster ed., Southern Horrors, 175.
75
Hersch, Subversive Sounds, 23.

46
Chapter 2:

I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say: The Culture and Activism of New Orleans Jazz

Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton recalled a version of the Charles riots often repeated in

African American circles that Charles did not die but, in fact, escaped a third time only to die

years later of an unspecified illness. Charles’s defiance of the white supremacist power structure

in the Crescent City vaulted him to almost mythic status in the city’s African American

community that was reflected in the culture of black New Orleans. Morton explained, “like many

other bad men, he had a song originated on him. This song was squashed very easily by the

[police] department, and not only by the department but by anyone else who heard it, due to the

fact that it was a trouble breeder…. I once knew the Robert Charles song, but I found out it was

best for me to forget it and that I did in order to go along with the world on the peaceful side.”1

As a result, there is no surviving transcription of the Robert Charles song. With the traditional

avenues for seeking judicial and political redress closed for blacks and Creoles in the Big Easy,

the communities began to instill and fortify a spirit of resistance through more subtle means.

Often, these new forms of resistance were manifested through cultural production. This is not to

suggest that cultural resistance simply filled the void of political participation, but rather a

culture of resistance hinted that a greater avenue of political participation was possible. African

American cultural forms in New Orleans bolstered and reflected the formal political aspirations

of the city’s black community.

New Orleans jazz enabled black musicians to navigate through a world dominated by

white cultural mores that viewed African American traditions and civilization in a negative light,

and the individuals who became some of jazz’s early stars represented a break from the

1
Morton and Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll, 57.

47
conventions of society. The cornet player Buddy Bolden, for example, defied musical convention

by employing improvisation and becoming an expert showman. As the trombonist Edward “Kid”

Ory remembered, “Bolden was very rough. You have to give him credit for starting the ball

rolling, you know. But he wasn’t really a musician… He didn’t study, I mean, he was gifted,

playing with effect, but no tone, you know. He played loud. Not high but loud. And people loved

it. They went for it.”2 Ory’s Creole background in music emphasized standard music theory, the

study of instrumentation, and a pitch perfect tone. Bolden was not interested in such conventions.

Clarinetist Sidney Bechet remembered that it was these rebellious qualities that made Bolden a

star: “everyone in New Orleans knew about him. He was a real walk-around man. He could play,

that was true; but, well, he was more a showman; he was a hell of a good showman.”3 Bolden is

considered by many to be the first musician to play in the “hot” style that was so essential to the

development of early jazz in New Orleans. “When you come right down to it, the man who

started the big noise in jazz was Buddy Bolden,” the trumpet player Mutt Carey argued. “Yes, he

was a powerful trumpet player and a good one too. I guess he deserves credit for starting it all.”4

By defying musical convention with the use of improvisation, showmanship, a loud and unusual

tone, and a rejection of standard music theory, Bolden took the emerging hot style of ragtime and

elevated it into jazz.

Bolden also lived a lifestyle and created music considered on the margins of the dominant

society. Bechet, who played with Bolden, recalled that, “Buddy used to drink awful heavy, and it

got to him in the end. He lived it fast Buddy did. And that’s another reason why he was so

popular, why you hear his name so much: it was the way he lived his life. The things he’d do,

2
Edward “Kid” Ory, interview transcript, April 20, 1957, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans
3
Bechet, Treat it Gentle, 83.
4
Mutt Carey in Shapiro and Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya, 35. For a larger discussion of the life and influence of
Buddy Bolden see: Marquis, In Search of Buddy Bolden, 1-133.

48
they got him a lot of attention.”5 Bolden’s own theme song, known as “Buddy Bolden’s Blues”

or “Funky Butt,” was a barrelhouse blues that often brought the proverbial house down with

alternating lyrics that were sometimes whimsical and humorous and sometimes raunchy.

Sometimes the lyrics also exhibited political undertones:

I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say,

You’re nasty, you’re dirty, take it away.
You’re terrible, you’re awful, take it away.
I thought I heard him say.
I thought I heard Buddy Bolden shout,
Open up that window and let that bad air out.
Open up that window and let that foul air out.
I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say.
Thought I heard Judge Fogarty say,
Thirty days in the market, take him away.
Give him a broom to sweep with, take him away.
I thought I heard him say.

In this version of the song, the Judge in question was J. J. Fogarty of the First Recorders Court of

New Orleans. Several of the men in Bolden’s band appeared before Fogarty’s court on minor

infractions like public intoxication or loitering, and a common penalty for such violations was a

fine and an obligation to clean in and around one of the city’s public markets. Other lyrics

replaced the protagonist, Bolden, with Abraham Lincoln- i.e. “I thought I heard Abe Lincoln

shout.”6 Much like the Robert Charles song, the political connotations of “Buddy Bolden’s

Blues” meant that the white establishment viewed the song as subversive and dangerous. Sidney

Bechet remembered playing the tune as a member of the Eagle Band. “When we started off

playing Buddy’s theme song, ‘I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say,’ the police put you in jail if

they heard you singing that song.” Bechet once saw Bolden’s band play on the streets of New

Orleans as a child: “Bolden started his theme song, people started singing, policemen began

5
Ibid., 84.
6
Marquis, In Search of Buddy Bolden, 109-111.

49
whipping heads.” Therefore, when Bechet’s band played the tune, they employed a different

approach: “The Eagle Band was good for the blues, they played every Saturday night. They

played Bolden’s theme song, but they did not sing any words to it.”7 Both the Robert Charles

song and Bolden’s theme song were manifestations of cultural resistance within African

American circles⎯ each made the white power structure in New Orleans very nervous.

By breaking with convention, and receiving adulation from working class African

Americans due to his refusal to “play by the rules,” Bolden embodied the mythical Staggerlee

character.8 Staggerlee (sometimes referred to as Stack O’ Lee, Stack-a-lee, Stacker-Lee, or

Stagolee) is a trickster character from African American folklore that cheats death and the

authorities and somehow always comes out on top. As Greil Marcus has noted, “Locked in the

images of a thousand versions of the tale is an archetype that speaks to fantasies of casual

violence and violent sex, lust and hatred, ease and mastery, a fantasy of style and steppin’ high.

At a deeper level it is a fantasy of no-limits for a people who live within a labyrinth of limits

every day of their lives, and who can transgress them only among themselves. It is both a portrait

of that tough and vital character that everyone would like to be, and just another pointless,

tawdry dance of death.” Robert Charles also embodied the role of Staggerlee as he was

remembered in an almost mythical fashion. Like Staggerlee and Robert Charles, Bolden was

someone who refused to submit to authority and was not to be messed with.9

The lack of overt political activism following the collapse of Reconstruction in

Louisiana, the injustice of the Plessy decision, and the violence and carnage of the Robert

Charles riots did not signal that black New Orleanians were uninterested in public protest or in

7
Sidney Bechet, quoted in Ibid., 111.
8
For a more detailed discussion of the legend see: Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America In Rock ‘N Roll
Music (New York: Penguin Books, 1975), 65-68.
9
Hersch, Subversive Sounds, 35.

50
challenging the oppressive mechanisms that dictated their status be that of second-class citizens.

Rather, it meant that acts of protest often manifested themselves in covert ways, much like the

cultural modes of resistance embodied in the “Robert Charles Song” and in “Buddy Bolden’s

Blues.” Certainly, black protest in New Orleans was not solely manifested through cultural

forms. But the work of jazz artists indicates that black culture in the Crescent City utilized the

new music to confront the injustices of Jim Crow in a manner that made sense to the jazz

community. Jazz culture rejected the values and tenets of the dominant white society⎯ one that

viewed the black community in negative terms, stressed white standards of beauty and success,

and above all else maintained a social hierarchy of white supremacy. In the aftermath of the

Charles Riots black New Orleans and the jazz community turned to an increased reliance on self-

help strategies and on economic nationalism. Ultimately, African Americans in the Crescent City

would utilize grass-roots networks of like-minded individuals to “uplift” the race from within.

These networks would become instrumental in challenging Jim Crow in New Orleans, launching

the Great Migration, and spreading jazz to the far reaches of the country in the 1910s, 20s, and

30s.

In his 1994 study of black working class culture and politics, Race Rebels, Robin D. G.

Kelley argues that all too often conventional scholarship only views “legitimate” forms of protest

and resistance as those that take place within the parameters of civil rights organizations or trade

unions. Kelley asserts that by doing so, scholars downplay disparate viewpoints within these

groups and downplay resistance that takes place outside of these institutions.10 Instead, the

author advocates redrawing the map of political discourse by questioning common notions of

what constitutes “legitimate” protest and resistance. To do so, Kelley rejects “the tendency to

10
Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press,
1994), 4.

51
dichotomize people’s lives, to assume that clear-cut ‘political’ motivations exist separately from

issues of economic well-being, safety, pleasure, cultural expression, sexuality, freedom of

mobility, and other facets of daily life. Politics is not separate from lived experience or the

imaginary world of what is possible; to the contrary, politics is about these things.”11 He further

explains that, “Politics comprises the many battles to roll back constraints and exercise some

power over, or create some space within, the institutions and social relationships that dominate

our lives.”12

When viewed in this light, the story of the development of jazz in New Orleans, and the

subsequent migration of black musicians out of the Crescent City to northern locales, is one ripe

with political overtones. This is not to say that every cultural manifestation is an overtly political

statement or that every jazz tune can be reduced to a core that tangibly reveals a political

underpinning, but given the social and economic repression African Americans faced at the dawn

of the twentieth century, it would be a mistake to assume that their collective political aspirations

were quashed altogether. In light of the activism of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction

periods, when traditional avenues for activism were closed by Jim Crow, new forms of political

expression emerged that maintained a commitment to political activism and pointed to a greater

sweep of political possibility. Culture was one avenue for raising black consciousness, and the

tradition of cultural resistance was one that stretched back to the days of slavery.13 As jazz

became a dominant force in black culture, it is no coincidence that the new music showed signs

of black resistance. Therefore, jazz developed, in part, as a reaction against the values and tastes

of the dominant culture that viewed African American cultural expression in negative terms. This

11
Ibid., 9.
12
Ibid., 9-10.
13
Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 239-240; Stuckey, Slave Culture, 3-97.

52
rejection of the aesthetics of the dominant culture manifested itself in the very manner in which

the music was played, the subculture of jazz that developed along with the music, and in the

locales from which jazz emerged.

A crucial component of early jazz was the use of syncopation. In the standard European

music canon the emphasis is on beats one and three (also known as the downbeat). Syncopation,

then, emphasizes the offbeat- beats two and four. In the case of a traditional march, for example,

beats one and three form a command to put one foot in front of the other on the specified beat.

As Charles Hersch has astutely recognized, “Syncopation draws the listener away from the

downbeat, pulling him or her away from the insistence of the everyday routine. This tension

between upbeat and downbeat helps create the distinctive sound of jazz, and by playing with this

tension, beginning and ending phrases at different points in the measure, musicians create a fluid

sense of time.”14 In the wake of emancipation, African Americans demanded the ability to

control their own schedules as an assertion of individual agency. This was a conscious reaction

to the desires of slaveholders to control nearly every minute of the day. Syncopation was also an

important element of traditional West African musical culture. Furthermore, on Sundays in

Congo Square at the beginning of the nineteenth century, syncopated rhythms were a prominent

component of the music created by first, second, and third generation bondsmen and women.

The use of syncopation by jazz artists harkened back to a collective African ancestral music

culture. Therefore, syncopation was already well established in New Orleans before the turn of

the twentieth century. The use of syncopated rhythms was not fully over determined by politics,

but came to be a musical reflection of a larger social desire for independence, the use of African

14
Hersch, Subversive Sounds, 47.

53
musical culture as a vehicle for artistic creation, and the ability to manipulate time as one saw

fit.15

Early jazz also employed dissonant notes to create distorted tones and timbres. This

technique ultimately formed the basis of what we know today as “the blues.” Musicians also

employed a variety of effects when playing that created new sounds. Often, these techniques

were described as “growling” noises. By playing blue notes and employing unusual techniques,

jazz musicians challenged standard music practices and violated the rules of the European

canon.16 The blues reflected the discordant nature of being unfree in a free land. As the drummer

Warren “Baby” Dodds explained, “The only way the colored people could express themselves

was through blues, that perhaps nobody understood but themselves…. The Negro had something

to be blue for. He could only go so far and then he was cut out, regardless of how good he

was…. It’s getting rid of your feelings within yourself. And it is expressed with a song…. I’ve

listened to Ma Rainey sing the blues time and time again. And she would sing blues with words

that coped with the situation.”17 The blues was, at times, a music of social pleasure whose roots

date to West African music forms. The blues song structure already existed in rudimentary form

at the turn of the twentieth century, so political expression was not the original intent of the

music. However, in the example cited by Dodds, the blues offered both an emotional refuge from

repression and a means of resistance.

The use of improvisation was another unconventional technique that dates to West

African traditions. It also brought vitality to the music by the likes of Buddy Bolden: “Well I

attribute it to Bolden,” remembered Peter Bocage. “They made their own music, and they played

15
Schuller, Early Jazz, 6-26; Hersch, Subversive Sounds, 47.
16
Hersch, Subversive Sounds, 43-44.
17
Dodds, The Baby Dodds Story, 30.

54
it their own way, you understand? So that’s the way jazz started you understand— just through

the feeling of the man, you understand? Just his, his improvisation, you see. And then the

surroundings… at that time was mostly people of— oh, you might say of a fast type, you

know— exciting, you understand? And those old blues and all that stuff, you know just came in

there, you see.”18 The use of complex rhythms, blue tones, improvisation, and other techniques

like call and response, and falsetto vocals evolved centuries earlier in West Africa.19 In this

manner, jazz embraced African traditions and applied those techniques to western instruments

and scales. Thus, jazz represented a simultaneous rejection of the musical values of the dominant

white culture and the embrace of a shared African past in New Orleans’s black community.

Jazz developed a subculture all its own in this period that also rejected white aesthetics

and accepted notions of respectability. Soon, new standards of respectability emerged within jazz

that centered on the collective values and a shared formula for artistic expression. In its initial

phase of growth, however, jazz musicians, dressing stylishly became a means of expressing

one’s individuality. Pianist Jelly Roll Morton was known to dress in fine suits and flaunt

expensive diamond jewelry.20 According to Manuel Manetta, Buddy Bolden “dressed in rich

white man’s clothes” and “always had a coat and tie on.”21 William “Baba” Ridgley was a

founding member in the Tuxedo Jazz Band in New Orleans. He explained that when the band

began dressing in lavish tuxedos the money started rolling in, because they projected an air of

sophistication that made them popular with audiences in the Crescent City. From then on, “our

band just went on like a blaze of fire,” he remembered.22 In an era when the reining imagery of

18
Peter Bocage, interview transcript, January 29, 1959, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.
19
Stuckey, Slave Culture, 95; Schuller, Early Jazz, 3-63.
20
Peretti, Creation of Jazz, 134-136; Morton and Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll, 104-105.
21
Manuel Manetta quoted in Hersch, Subversive Sounds, 98.
22
William “Baba” Ridgley, interview digest, June 2, 1959, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.

55
African Americans in popular culture was that of the minstrel show, black men dressing in this

manner challenged the role society designated for them. While it is clear that many musicians

dressed stylishly to keep up with the fashion trends of the day, the act of dressing lavishly should

not be taken lightly either. At roughly the same time black musicians in New Orleans began

dressing in ever increasing sophisticated attire, returning black veterans of World War I were

routinely subjected to harassment and violent intimidation across the southern United States for

the simple act of wearing their military uniforms in public. Therefore, it would be a mistake to

believe that dressing stylishly was only a matter of fashion. This is especially true given the fact

that in 1919, alone, eleven black veterans were lynched across the South. Military uniforms

exuded a sense of power and pride, and to white supremacists, seeing black men in uniform was

cause for violent reprisals. Expensive suits and tuxedos evoked similar notions of pride and

respect. Therefore, sophisticated fashion indicated the agency of self-expression and a

demonstration of racial pride. Well-tailored suits represented a clear break with the past as

represented in minstrelsy.23

A distinctive usage of language also became a critical marker of jazz subculture. These

musicians developed one of the most recognizable and integrative brands of speech in American

vernacular. Certain terminology was reserved for practical elements of playing music, like “riffs”

“breaks” and “swing.” The term “gig” denoted a type of employment, while “cats,” “chicks,” and

“squares” referred to the audience at their place of work. Historian Burton W. Peretti argues that,

“The greatest American alternative language, though, had grown up among the slaves and free

blacks, dialogues of deception, opposite meanings, protective exaggeration, and veiling slang.”24

Peretti traces the use of jazz slang directly to these African American traditions of breaking
23
Peretti, Creation of Jazz, 135; Chad L. Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the
World War I Era (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 232-246.
24
Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 131.

56
white conventions of speech. Louis Armstrong asserted, “there are more than four hundred

words used among swing musicians that no one else would understand.”25 Baby Dodds attributed

many of these expressions directly to Armstrong.26 African Americans also played with language

in what amounted to a playful war of words between colleagues and rivals. The “dozens” was a

battle of insults between two or more individuals with the audience deciding the winner. As

Barney Bigard recalled that the dozens was often centered on “nasty things about your family

such as, ‘Your mother’s so big, she has to have a tent for a Kotex.’”27 This back and forth

interaction and playful usage of language staked the musicians’ claim of ownership over the

English language.

While well-tailored suits broke conventions of white perceptions of black entertainers,

slang broke conventions of speech and signaled the agency of self-expression. It is interesting to

note that while each of these forms of expression represented a break with the standards of the

day, the paths of resistance moved in decidedly different directions. That is to say, slang was less

formal than conventional English, while styles of dress became more formal than societal

standards. Given the tradition of slang in African American circles, it can be surmised that

creative uses of language afforded musicians greater liberty of expression than in styles of dress.

Slang also served as a covert language to shield musicians from creative infringement. As Baby

Dodds recalled, “We used to call white musicians ‘alligators’. That was the way we’d describe

them when they’d come around and we were playing something that we didn’t want them to

25
Armstrong, Swing That Music, 77-78. Armstrong’s use of the term “swing” should not be confused with the use
of the term regarding the Swing Era of the 1930s. As noted in the first chapter, New Orleans jazz was referred to by
several names, including “rag music,” or “hot music,” and Louis Amrstrong referred to jazz as swing music and
himself as a swing musician in New Orleans. For more on Armstrong’s explanation see: Armstrong, Swing That
Music,71-78.
26
Dodds, The Baby Dodds Story, 25.
27
Bigard, With Louis and the Duke, 29.

57
catch on to. We’d say ‘watch out, there’s an alligator!’”28 While dressing up conveyed a sense of

sophistication and respectability, slang offered a more expressive means of communication that

sheltered musicians from outside infiltration and provided greater creative liberty.

Another element of the subculture was defined by its nocturnal activities. Because

musicians made their living at night, many were well versed in behaviors associated with

nighttime living. Gambling, for example, was a ritual of backstage downtime. Furthermore,

many establishments that employed musicians also housed gaming enterprises of one form or

another. Some establishments in both Storyville and Back O’ Town featured illegal gambling,

prostitutes, and bootleg liquor, and the musicians who played in these venues were well

acquainted with each. Smoking marijuana was another nocturnal New Orleans tradition.29 Louis

Armstrong was apparently one of the more notorious pot smokers in jazz history, and he made

no apologies for this particular habit: “That’s the one thing that I personally found out about

Gage, or Marijuana… Sometimes names— just the sounds can cause one, grief of somewhat…

Maybe someday— some big Authority on things— anything, just as long as he’s a big man and

has convincing words… Then he can probably someday have ‘Marijuana name changed to

‘Gage- ‘Muta- ‘Pot- or some of that good shit….” On another occasion Armstrong stated, “we

did call ourselves vipers, which could have been anybody from all walks of life that smoked and

respected gage…. That was our cute little name for marijuana…. We always looked at pot as a

kind of a medicine, you know? It wasn’t no enemy or drastic shit. Marijuana was a kind of

medicine and a cheap drunk. I had to put it down because of legal shit. But the respect for gage

28
Dodds, The Baby Dodds Story, 25.
29
Peretti, Creation of Jazz, 129, 138-139; For a more detailed analysis of marijuana usage among jazz musicians
see: Eric C. Schneider, Smack: Heroin and the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2008), 17-24.

58
will stay with me forever.”30 All of these illicit nocturnal activities signaled a rejection of the

values of “respectable” society as embodied in the “Protestant work ethic” and middle class

mores. That is not to suggest that black musicians did not work extremely hard. Competition for

jobs was fierce in New Orleans, and it took a high level of skill and dedication to play jazz. Jazz

proficiency required incredible dexterity, technical ability, and knowledge that could only be

achieved after years of refining one’s talent and a willingness to apply those skills in innovative

ways to be successful. But because of activities associated with nighttime living, early critics of

jazz decried the new music as lascivious, unwholesome, and dangerous.

While the subculture of jazz rejected standard notions of respectability, the physical

settings where early jazz developed became, in essence, “free spaces”31 where African

Americans were able to express themselves culturally. Aside from the houses of prostitution,

early jazz developed in working class saloons and dance halls known as “honky tonks.” To be

certain, these were often very dangerous settings, but they did represent a space where African

Americans could intermingle, dance, discuss the latest news of the day, drink, gamble, and of

course play and listen to jazz. These spaces were not always free from police surveillance,

however. Danny Barker recalled that in New Orleans, the police had cart blanche to arrest

30
Armstrong was a prolific writer. He often improvised with language on the typewriter not unlike his
improvisatory techniques on the trumpet. He inserted punctuation marks and utilized capitalization in an
unconventional manner as a means of emphasizing certain syllables or phrases. The above quote illustrates this
affinity. Armstrong, Louis Armstrong in His Own Words, Brothers ed., xii. For a more detailed discussion of
Armstrong’s writing style see: Thomas Brothers, “Swing a lot of Type Writing,” in Louis Armstrong, Louis
Armstrong in His Own Words, Thomas Brothers ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999),vii- xxiii; Louis
Armstrong, Armstrong Tapes, CD 426, Disc 1, Track 16, Louis Armstrong Collection, Louis Armstrong House
Museum Archives, Queens College, New York.
31
Francesca Polletta notes that the notion of “free spaces” has been used by a number of sociologists, political
scientists, and historians to describe “small-scale settings within a community or movement that are removed from
the direct control of dominant groups, are voluntarily participated in, and generate the cultural challenge that
precedes or accompanies political mobilization.” For more information on free spaces and political activism see:
Francesca Polletta, “’Free Spaces’ in Collective Action” Theory and Society (1999), 1-38. Hersch argues that honky
tonks resembled what Michel Foucault calls “heterotopias” where politically marginalized groups find sanctuary
from and modes to express resistance to the mechanisms of repression. For a more detailed analysis of Foucault’s
heterotopias see: Hersch, Subversive Sounds, 35.

59
anyone they deemed “dangerous and suspicious” and “Most arrests were Negroes who

frequented barrooms and gambling joints during working hours.”32 But it was in the honky tonks

that African Americans found alternative modes of expression and tested the boundaries of

covert political resistance.33 In addition, given the extensive reach of Jim Crow in this period,

these establishments represented some of the few places where New Orleans’ black residents

could spend their leisure dollars.

Most of the city’s honky tonks were located in the black and white sections of Storyville,

along the river levee, or in the Back O’ Town neighborhood where Louis Armstrong grew up.

Louis Armstrong explained, “Storyville was kind of divided⎯ I’d say⎯ about middle ways of

the City of New Orleans… Canal Street was the dividing line between the uptown and the

downtown section…. And right behind Canal Street was Storyville… And right off Canal Street

was the famous Basin Street which was also connected with Storyville.” Armstrong explained

that in his neighborhood outside of Storyville “Every corner… had a honky tonk.” According to

Armstrong, the first room in honky tonks like Spano’s, Kid Brown’s, or Mantranga’s was where

the bar was located followed by a room in the back for gambling. Another room “was for

dancing⎯ doing that slow drag, close together, humping up one shoulder⎯ maybe throw a little

wiggle into it. Had a little bandstand catty-cornered, benches around the walls. Drinks were

cheap⎯ and strong.” 34

Basin Street, on the edge of Storyville in the black section of the red-light district, housed

clubs that played early jazz. Spencer Williams remembered, “All along this street of pleasure

there were the dance halls, honky tonks, and cabarets, and each one had its music…. The largest

32
Danny Barker in, Shapiro and Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya, 5-6.
33
Hersch, Subversive Sounds, 35.
34
Louis Armstrong in, Shapiro and Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya, 4-5; Armstrong and Meryman, Louis
Armstrong, 19.

60
of the cabarets on Basin Street was Mahogany Hall, owned by my aunt, Miss Lulu White…. The

saloons in those days never had the doors closed, and the hinges were all rusty and dusty. Little

boys and grownups would walk along the avenues, swaying and whistling jazz tunes.”

Armstrong recalled, “Around the corner from Lulu White was the famous Cabaret of Tom

Anderson [on the corner of Basin and Iberville Streets]…. In those days a band who played for

those places didn’t need to worry about salaries…. Most of the places paid off the musicians

every night after the job was over instead of the weekly deal…. That was because those places

were threatened to be closed any minute.” The trumpet player Bunk Johnson boasted, “That was

the Crescent City in them days, full of bars, honky-tonks, and barrel houses. A barrelhouse was

just a piano in a hall. There was always a piano player working. When I was kid, I’d go into a

barrelhouse and play along with them piano players ‘til early in the morning. We used to lay

nothing but the blues.” At these establishments, jam sessions between musicians could last well

into the night. Danny Barker remembered all-night jam sessions at Pete Lala’s Cafe on the corner

of Basin and Marais Streets: “Why, you should have seen the sessions we had then…. Pete

Lala’s was the headquarters, the place where all the bands would come when they got off work,

and where the girls would come to meet their main man…. Well, at Pete Lala’s everybody would

gather every night and there’d be singing and playing all night long. The piano players from all

over the South would be there… and everybody would take a turn until daylight.”35

With clubs like Mahogany Hall, Tom Anderson’s Annex, and Pete Lala’s Café, Basin

Street was the center of New Orleans jazz in the evenings. In 1926, Spencer Williams penned a

song about the famous jazz promenade. In 1928, another New Orleans native, Louis Armstrong

35
Spencer Williams in, Shapiro and Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya, 7; Bunk Johnson in, Shapiro and Hentoff,
Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya, 7; Danny Barker in, Shapiro and Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya, 12-13.

61
recorded the first widely popular version of the tune. The lyrics reveal what the avenue meant to

jazz musicians:36

Won’t you come along with me

Down that Mississippi;
We’ll take a boat to the land of dreams,
Steam down the river down to New Orleans.

The band’s there to greet us,

Old friends will meet us,
Where all people like to meet
Heaven on earth, they call it Basin Street.

Basin Street is the street

Where the elite always meet⎯
In New Orleans, land of dreams
You’ll never know how nice it seems
Or just how much it really means.
Glad to be, yessiree,
Where welcomes free, dear to me,
Where I can lose my Basin Street Blues.

The cabarets, dance halls, and honky tonks on Basin Street offered employment for New Orleans

jazz musicians. They also provided space where musicians could develop interpersonal networks

and associations that allowed the to navigate in a Jim Crow world. Such associations later proved

critical in finding employment and launching the Great Migration of jazz.

While the honky tonks and dance halls represented free spaces where early jazz was

nurtured, the streets of New Orleans were contested spaces among the city’s residents, black,

white, and Creole. New Orleans has a long tradition of brass bands marching through the city

streets on Sundays, holidays, and when it just simply looked like a good day for a parade. This

dynamic developed following the Civil War when scores of musical instruments were left in the

36
Louis Armstrong, “Basin Street Blues,” (Williams, Spencer) [master W.402154-A] Okeh Records 8690
(December 4, 1928) Chicago, Illinois. This song can be found today in Louis Armstrong, Hot Fives & Sevens [Box
Set], JSP Records, 1999.

62
city by military marching bands during the occupation of the Crescent City.37 Thanks to a

particularly long Union occupation during the war (the city was captured by northern forces in

the spring of 1862) and a long tradition of music in public spaces, the surplus of instruments

created an environment that allowed brass bands to flourish like no other southern city. By the

turn of the twentieth century, this tradition was fully in place. By marching through city streets

with trumpets, drums, and trombones blaring, African Americans claimed a cultural stake in the

future of the city for themselves. Though disenfranchised and relegated to the status of second-

class citizenry, black musicians still maintained control of the aural foundations of city life. It

was one area where African Americans could assert their agency and dignity in a public setting.

City streets could also be dangerous at times. Fights often broke out between conflicting factions

in New Orleans. The drummer Paul Barbarin, Danny Barker’s uncle, refused to let his nephew

follow brass bands parading through the city, because they often led to fights amongst whites and

those following the parade over territorial claims within and between New Orleans

neighborhoods. At times, parading musicians used their instruments as weapons to defend

themselves from angry crowds.38

While parading musicians faced territorial struggles on city streets, brass bands were also

widely popular. In fact, these brass bands became such a point of civic pride that the decidedly

Democratic and conservative Daily Picayune boasted in 1889 before jazz was formally codified,

“The Onward Brass Band of this city, composed of young colored men, is making good

progress… It has a membership of fifteen, a set of new instruments and is imbued with the

37
For more information on the development of brass bands in New Orleans see: Richard Brent Turner, Jazz
Religion, the Second Line, and Black New Orleans (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2009) and,
Mary Ellison, “African American Music and Muskets in Civil War New Orleans,” Louisiana History (Summer,
1994), 285-319.
38
Hersch, Subversive Sounds, 53.

63
proper spirit to soon make it a good and useful organization. We wish them every success.”39

Peter Bocage remembered seeing the Onward Brass Band and the Excelsior Brass Band as a

young musician. He explained that when he was young brass bands played strictly traditional

marches. By the time he joined the Excelsior Brass Band the younger musicians began changing

the traditional format, “we played a lot of marches, too, and we used to mix up a little jazz in

there, see? ...everybody put a little improvisation in, you know— they played some kind of a

little ‘head’ piece, or a little song they knew, you know— something like that.”40 Early jazz was

influenced by the brass bands in the Crescent City. Once jazz rose to prominence, the new music

began to influence the city’s brass bands in turn.

With these brass bands in the lead, the parade following the music was known as the

“second line.” Simply put, if the band represented the “first line” of individuals in the parade,

members of the second line were average citizens following the parade. The second line was

comprised of New Orleanians who danced, sang, and played improvised rhythms to the beat of

the brass band. This grouping of the black working class was composed of neighborhood

children, drunks, prostitutes, day laborers, street vendors, music admirers, and anyone else with a

spare moment that could sometimes number in the hundreds. Louis Armstrong, for one, had fond

memories of second lining (parading) as a child through his neighborhood in “The Battlefield.”

Armstrong’s neighborhood was considered so dangerous that New Orleanians believed the

streets more closely resembled a war zone than a place of residence.41

Brass bands and the corresponding second line also helped launch fledgling music

careers. “It’s a funny thing,” recalled Lee Collins, “you played in a orchestra, people didn’t pay

39
Daily Picayune (October 29, 1889), 4.
40
Peter Bocage, interview transcript, January 29, 1959, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.
41
Louis Armstrong, Satchmo, 24.

64
no attention to you, but as soon as you hit that street, everybody had their eyes on you…”42

Together, with the marching brass band, the second line formed a popular front challenging Jim

Crow for the aural control of New Orleans’ city streets. As Sidney Bechet recalled the members

of the second line would “take off shouting, singing, following along the sidewalk, going off on

side streets when they was told they had no business being on the sidewalks or along the kerbs

[sic] like that, or maybe when the police would try to break them up. Then they’d go off one way

and join the parade away up and start all over again.”43 The police often broke up second lines

and brass band parades for fear that they would touch off violence between black and white

neighborhoods. But, second liners like Collins, Bechet, and Armstrong joined the parade in spite

of the risks. Thus the second line was both a celebration of cultural expression, and a means of

staking a claim to contested ground in the city.

The contested nature of the city’s streets can be seen in the prevalence of “cutting

contests” or “bucking contests.” Much like the dozens, cutting contests were music battles

between rival bands. As Sidney Bechet explained, “One band, it would come right up in front of

the other and play at it, and the first band it would play right back, until finally one band just had

to give in…. It was always the public who decided. You was always being judged.”44 Often

these contests pitted Creole and African American groups against one another as each was

parading through the streets. Jelly Roll Morton recalled an African American band literally

drawing a line across which a Creole band was not supposed to step. A fight soon ensued that

required an ambulance: “The fact of it is, there was no parade at no time you couldn’t find a knot

42
Lee Collins, interview transcript, June 2, 1958, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.
43
Bechet, Treat It Gentle, 62.
44
Bechet, Treat it Gentle, 63, 65.

65
on somebody’s head where somebody got hit with a stick or something.”45 Clarinetist Barney

Bigard remembered a cutting contest in which the rival bands traveled in horse drawn wagons.

When one group began besting the other, the crowd called for the wheels of the two wagons to

be tied together so the losing band could not escape the embarrassment of being cut: “They [the

audience] would dance in the streets you see. And then, like, the one who had the nastiest lyrics,

like Ory used to play, ‘If you don’t like the way I play, kiss my fuckin’ ass.’ And they’d get

around the whores and that business, and they’d go for it. And they had another guy named

Frankie Dusen. He was a foul-mouthed man… It was funny, he and Manuel Perez got in a fight

on the stage.”46 If the parades of brass bands and the corresponding second line represented the

desire of black New Orleanians to claim the airwaves as their own, cutting contests reflected the

persistence of an age-old rivalry within the black community of New Orleans. White Americans

may have been able to relegate Creoles to a second-class status following the Plessy decision, but

that did not mean that all Creoles would see African Americans as their equals on the streets.

Indeed, the Crescent City’s streets remained contested ground for all citizens— black, white, and

Creole. While New Orleans’s streets remained contested ground, jazz musicians formed a

community of its own in second lines, public parks, and in the honky tonks on Basin Street. It

was those networks forged within the jazz community that began to look out for the interests of

musicians and laid the groundwork for collective activism in New Orleans just before the start of

the Great Migration.

Different Social Clubs in the City Would Hire Our Band

45
Morton and Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll, 13.
46
Barney Bigard, interview transcript, in manuscript of Barney Bigard, With Louis and the Duke: The
Autobiography of a Jazz Clarinetist, Barry Martyn ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). Manuscript
from the William Ransom Hogan Archive of New Orleans Jazz, Tulane University, New Orleans Louisiana.

66
 At the turn of the twentieth century, African Americans and Creoles often chose to resist

repression in covert ways. However, they also turned to an increased reliance on self-help

strategies and on small-scale economic nationalist efforts. African Americans in the Big Easy

utilized communal networks of like-minded individuals to “uplift” the race from within. These

networks centered less on large-scale mobilization and more on grass-roots organization.

Instrumental in this organizing push was a focus on black-run enterprises and benevolent

societies.

Membership in benevolent societies and social and pleasure clubs was a traditional facet

of life in New Orleans for citizens of every stripe. The Big Easy boasted black-run benevolent

societies as early as the eighteenth century. In the Reconstruction era black membership in

mutual aid societies soared, and by the last few decades of the nineteenth century the only

voluntary organizations that saw greater black membership were local churches.47 These groups

served a number of organizing roles. Organizations provided members with health care,

insurance policies, burial services, and education when white run city institutions would not.

Musicians developed their own benevolent societies like the Inseparable Friends, Club Lyre, and

the Tammany Society Social Aid and Pleasure Club where they found employment opportunities

through fellow members. These organizations were for male musicians only, but other

organizations catered to female members. They also played dances for benevolent societies that

were not specifically designed for musicians. Social and pleasure clubs formed in a similar

manner in this period, but unlike benevolent societies, they were devoted to celebrating the joys

in life rather than planning for the unexpected. At the turn of the twentieth century, these

47
Claude F. Jacobs, “Benevolent Societies of New Orleans Blacks During the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth
Centuries,” Louisiana History (Winter, 1988), 22. Churches, neighborhoods, specific trades, or fraternal
organizations formed benevolent societies to provide insurance and health services for members by pooling
collective resources.

67
disparate organizations began to serve essentially the same functions.48 Like their counterparts in

the larger African American and Creole communities, jazz musicians enthusiastically created and

supported their own benevolent societies and social and pleasure clubs.

Health care was a fundamental service provided by these organizations. Often, societies

would employ a full time physician on either a quarterly or daily basis with the expenses drawn

from member dues. Louis Cottrell Jr. recalled, “you had so many doctors and the doctors, most

of them belong to these different benevolent associations, some of these associations, they had

three or four doctors, that you had a choice of going to either one you want, and I mean very

good doctors— beautiful doctors, doctors that trained, doctors that were trained even in

France.”49 Generally, the position was an elected one, and each society’s officer corps included a

doctor, pharmacist, and undertaker. Given the ever-tightening grip of Jim Crow in this period,

the value of these services cannot be underestimated. African Americans were simply denied

care in the city’s hospitals. While African American residents did succeed in opening a black

hospital in this period, benevolent societies remained the greatest providers of medical care at the

turn of the twentieth century.50 Furthermore, given the fact that New Orleans is surrounded by

water on all sides, much of it swampland, the city’s residents were more susceptible to diseases

than other metropolitan regions in this period. In fact, the cholera epidemic of 1917 hit the city

particularly hard. In such an environment, health care was of the utmost importance.51

Beyond the issue of being denied access to white health care institutions, cost was

another problem altogether. Black citizens in general faced extremely high rates of

48
Turner, Jazz Religion, 110.
49
Louis Cottrell Jr., interview transcript, March 14, 1978, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.
50
Jacobs, “Benevolent Societies of New Orleans Blacks,” Louisiana History, 27.
51
New Orleans has a long history of sanitation and health issues based on the unique geographical location of the
city. For a more detailed analysis of these issues see: Ari Kelman, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in
New Orleans (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003); Craig E. Colten, An Unnatural
Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans From Nature (Baton Rogue, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 2005).

68
unemployment and underemployment, and they often worked the most dangerous and low

paying jobs when they did find work. Closely tied to the need for affordable health care was the

ability to obtain a life insurance policy.52 Funerals were particularly expensive in the Crescent

City. New Orleans’ proximity to water poses difficulties for traditional burials. The water table is

so close to the surface that by digging just a few feet, one encounters water. Therefore, New

Orleans has developed “cities of the dead,” or cemeteries composed entirely of above ground

tombs, out of necessity. Due to this problem, land for separate black cemeteries and subsequent

funeral services were quite expensive and hit the African American community particularly hard.

Louis Armstrong knew all too well the difficulty of paying for funerals without the protection of

a mutual aid society; “I’ve seen that happen to many of ‘em don’t have no insurance or belong to

no club. While you laying out there in the wake, they put a saucer on your chest and everybody

who comes in drops a nickel or a dime or quarter to try and make up for the undertaker.”53

Benevolent societies offered a means to overcome these financial hardships by pulling resources

to get the maximum benefit and return for members on their mutual investment.

Jazz musicians played a unique role in funeral services in New Orleans for deceased

members of benevolent societies. The traditional New Orleans jazz funeral developed in this

period as a means of celebrating the life of the departed. The roots of these funerals can be traced

to West African traditions.54 Essentially, a jazz band would escort the casket from the funeral to

the cemetery, while playing a slow, somber dirge. Once the deceased was in the ground, the band

would strike up a joyful song celebrating the life of the departed, rather than mourning death.

Sidney Bechet remembered that “They would have a brass band… and they would go from the

52
Jacobs, “Benevolent Societies of New Orleans Blacks,” Louisiana History, 22, 30-31.
53
Armstrong, Armstrong- A Self Portrait, 31.
54
Turner, Jazz Religion, 89-90; Stuckey, Slave Culture, 95-96.

69
club to the house of the member which was dead, and would play not dance music but mortuary

music…. The members would all go see the corpse, and then they would take him out to the

cemetery with funeral marches. And they’d bury him, and as soon as he was buried they would

leave the cemetery with that piece Didn’t He Ramble.”55 While Baby Dodds recalled that “It

became a tradition to play jazzy numbers going back to make the relatives and friends cast off

their sadness. And the people along the streets used to dance to the music.”56 Thus, both

mourners and onlookers followed the band as it left the cemetery dancing in a second line

celebration.

Benevolent societies that catered to musicians also offered educational services. Creole

violinist Charles Elgar belonged to an organization known as Club Lyre that put on concerts to

raise money for educational endeavors: “We used to give two concerts a year, and whenever we

found a talented person, we would sponsor them…. I remember we sent one boy to Europe— a

pianist…. Then we sent a young violinist there, by the name of Edmond Dede, and he never

came back to America until he was an old man… it was through that organization I got my first

training as conducting under Luis Tio.”57 With limited finances, such assistance could prove

invaluable to prospective musicians. Louis Armstrong recalled that “Things were hard in New

Orleans in those days and we were lucky if we ate, let alone pay for lessons. In order to carry on

at all we had to have the love of music in our bones.”58 In this manner, education provided more

than just knowledge; it meant job security for musicians in stiff competition for employment, and

it was a fundamental organizing activity.

55
Bechet, Treat It Gentle, 63.
56
Dodds, The Baby Dodds Story, 17.
57
Charles Elgar, interview transcript, May 27, 1958, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.
58
Armstrong, Satchmo, 187.

70
 Though not officially under the auspices of a benevolent society, the other avenue for

music education was informal apprenticeships. Louis Armstrong owed his start in professional

music to Joe Oliver. The cornetist taught Armstrong both the latest techniques and how to

succeed in the business, while Roy Palmer learned to play a number of instruments under the

tutelage of his uncle, Charles Henderson.59 The tradition of learning an instrument while serving

in an informal apprenticeship was particularly important for cash-strapped members of the

African American community like Oliver, Armstrong, and Palmer. Though Creole musicians

were the most likely to receive formal training, some served apprenticeships as well. Trumpeter

Natty Dominique learned the craft from Manuel Perez; “He didn’t charge a dime. For it— never

did…. Didn’t charge Sidney Vigne, didn’t charge me, didn’t charge none of the boys never.

Manuel Perez see a kid that he liked in the street, he’d call him— “Hey. Come here.” He’d say

I’m gonna make a cornet player out of you.”60 Barney Bigard also studied under a similar

arrangement.61

Benevolent societies and social and pleasure clubs also served as an integral instrument

for collective action among the city’s black community at large. These organizations contained a

nucleus of socially conscious individuals whose collective efforts helped found the city’s chapter

of the NAACP in 1915. The local branch was critical for organized resistance, because it

provided a shared avenue for political mobilization for both Creoles and African Americans.62

Even after the formation of the local NAACP, benevolent societies continued the fight for social

justice. Clarinetist Louis Cottrell remembered that “an organization in 1932… a benevolent

association in New Orleans was the big reason and the big step forward what brought on in 1940,
59
Armstrong, “The Armstrong Story,” in Brothers, ed., Louis Armstrong in His Own Words, 53; Roy Palmer,
interview summary, September 22, 1955, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.
60
Natty Dominique, interview transcript, May 31, 1958, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.
61
Bigard, With Louis and the Duke, 10.
62
Fairclough, Race and Democracy, 18.

71
’41, Negroes registered to vote in the city of New Orleans through these organizations…. Not the

ones that had the money but these little organizations that contribute so much to carry it through.

Cause they were in the majority there… they had it planned…. Instead of passing the hat, they

got to organize.”63 Even after the successful unionization of black musicians with the

establishment of Local 496 of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) in 1926, the

prevalence, persistence, and activism of benevolent societies like the Inseparable Friends, Club

Lyre, and the Tammany Society Social Aid and Pleasure Club, speaks to their ability to address

the needs and aspirations of the city’s black community.

Benevolent societies also afforded musicians some semblance of job security. In many

respects, the benevolent societies of New Orleans’ black musicians mirrored early attempts to

unionize musicians nationally. Generally, these organizations more closely resembled labor

exchanges than modern unions. Musicians networked with fellow members to find employment,

and these organizations provided prospective employers with a mechanism for hiring bands.64

Often perspective employers were other social clubs. Baby Dodds remembered, “Different social

clubs in the city would hire our band. They would have bands to turn out with a parade or some

other function.”65 The banjo player Danny Barker concurred. He recalled a pleasure club known

as the “Money Wasters” that used to sponsor dances at Co-operative Hall: “As was the custom at

balls held at the Co-operative, Economy, Globe, Perseverance and Olympia halls, the promoter

would hire a pianist or small combo to play next to the bar to give the ball a cabaret

63
Louis Cottrell Jr., interview transcript, March 14, 1978, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.
64
James P. Kraft, “Artists as Workers: Musicians and Trade Unionism in America, 1880-1917,” The Musical
Quarterly (Autumn, 1995), 516.
65
Dodds, The Baby Dodds Story, 16.

72
atmosphere….”66 In this manner, benevolent societies and social clubs provided entertainment

for members, and employment for musicians who belonged to societies of their own.

The Guys Never Tried to Cut Each Other’s Throat

Though a lasting, formal union did not protect black musicians in the first decades of the

twentieth century, jazz artists did manage to assert themselves collectively through grass-roots

networks, benevolent societies, and social and pleasure clubs in a manner that very much

resembled union activity. Pops Foster explained that “The colored musicians in New Orleans

didn’t have no union, but man, we stuck together…. The guys never tried to cut each other’s

throat; it was better in those days without no union.”67 The city’s white musicians received union

protection beginning in 1902 (Local 174 of the American Federation of Musicians), but the local

refused to admit black members. In the 1880s the city’s black musicians tried in vain to form a

lasting union. The struggle was again renewed in 1902, but by 1905 the local collapsed.68 It is

unclear exactly why these attempts at unionization failed, but there are several likely

explanations. First, the long tradition of benevolent and pleasure societies meant that there was a

level of familiarity and existing framework for collective action. Louis Cottrell Jr. remembered

the Musicians’ Social and Pleasure Club that “was something like a fraternal organization, but it

wasn’t with the American Federation of Musicians.69 Second, it reflected a national trend of

reluctance on the part of musicians to be recognized as workers rather than as artists.70 Finally,

66
Danny Barker, Buddy Bolden and the Last Days of Storyville, Alyn Shipton, ed. (New York: Continuum, 1998),
71.
67
Foster and Stoddard, The Autobiography of Pops Foster, 69.
68
Sue Fischer, “American Federation of Musicians Locals 174 and 496 Records at the Hogan Jazz Archive,” The
Jazz Archivist, VOL. XIX (2005-2006), 2.
69
Louis Cottrell Jr. interview transcript, August 25, 1961, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.
70
In 1887 Samuel Gompers, of the American Federation of Labor, unsuccessfully sought to create a musicians arm
of the AFL, but the National League of Musicians rejected his overtures. The NLM was an early attempt at
unionizing musicians on a national scale, but it had little enforcement power and was decidedly segregated. The
NLM worried that by aligning with the AFL, musicians was suffer a loss of prestige by being associated with

73
organizing a union was a very dangerous proposition in New Orleans in this period, especially

for African Americans. In the depression years of the 1890s, labor strife turned particularly

violent, and a number of bloody riots erupted in the Crescent City over the issue of the

unionization and segregation of dockworkers and roustabouts.71 Given these considerations,

creating a formal union was not as viable an option as maintaining and strengthening the existing

organizations that protected the interests of musicians.

In June 1926, New Orleans’s black musicians finally succeeded in forming their own

Local (496) in the American Federation of Musicians (AFM). After being denied jobs in New

Orleans and on the riverboats that passed the city on daily and weekly excursions, black

musicians made a concerted effort to form their own union. Pops Foster remembered having to

travel to Paducah, Kentucky on a riverboat, apply to the musicians local there, before

transferring to the St. Louis local in order to be eligible for any number of jobs on the riverboats.

Louis Cottrell Jr. recalled that black musicians were tired of being denied employment: “And the

union began to get organized was because we were boycotted from playing some engagements

around here by not being union. And one of the reasons for the engagement on the Steamer

Capitol, Celestin was engaged to play the job, but by him not being union, he was boycotted

from it, and he was determined to organize a union then. And instead Sam Morgan played the

job because they had belonged to the union in Mobile.”72 In order to expedite the process, and

avoid trouble with the white local in New Orleans, Oscar Celestin registered Local 496 at the

workers rather than being recognized as artists. For more information on this dynamic see: Kraft, “Artists as
Workers,” Musical Quarterly, 524-526.
71
For more information on the labor turmoil of the 1890s see: Eric Arnesen, “Turning Points: Biracial Unions in the
Age of Segregation, 1893-1901,” in The Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana History Volume XI:
The African American Experience in Louisiana Part B: From the Civil War to Jim Crow, Charles Vincent, ed.
(Lafayette, Louisiana: University of Louisiana Press, 2000), 450-500.
72
George “Pops” Foster, interview digest, April 27, 1957, Tulane University, New Orleans; Louis Cottrell Jr.,
interview transcript, August 25, 1961, Tulane University, New Orleans.

74
address of his summer home in Mississippi. Once the application was approved by the national

AFM, Celestin simply filed a change of address, and 496 was established in New Orleans.73

Though 496 was not formed until after the Great Migration sent many of the city’s greatest talent

looking for greener pastures, the black local remained a reliable advocate for African American

musicians until the merger of Local 174-496 in November 1969.74

Given the tradition of collective action on the part of musicians in the Big Easy, it is not

surprising that the first successful attempt to unionize black musicians in Chicago was

spearheaded by New Orleans transplants. Charles Elgar joined Chicago’s Local 208 of the

American Federation of Musicians in 1902: “Ah, this local-208, had just been given a charter

that… the July of that year. And this picture you see up there is a picture of all the presidents [of

the union]. The man in the upper left hand corner was the first president; his name was

Alexander Armand, originally from New Orleans himself. And I became a member here under

his administration and have been ever since.”75 Barney Bigard was also active in Local 208 in

Chicago.76

Grass-roots networking77 was instrumental for musicians in finding and obtaining

employment. Similar networks also facilitated small-scale efforts at economic nationalism that

attempted to keep black leisure dollars in the black community. Jazz was an essential component

73
Lili LeGardeur, “Call to Save the Hall,” New Orleans Music Incorporating Footnote VOL. X No. 1 (March,
2002), 34.
74
Meeting of the Board of Directors, Local 174-496, November 4, 1969, Box 2, Folder 1, Hogan Jazz Archive,
Tulane University, New Orleans. For more information on the effectiveness and scope of Local 496’s activities see:
Jack V. Buerkle and Danny Barker, Bourbon Street Black: The New Orleans Black Jazzman (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1973), 78-101.
75
Charles Elgar, interview transcript, May 27, 1958, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.
76
Bigard, With Louis and the Duke, 32.
77
Charles M. Payne has pointed out that grass-roots organizing consisted of more than helping others find
employment or education. Often, efforts that provide an economic base within an oppressed community, or efforts
that offer food and shelter to those in need are overlooked. For more information on Payne’s analysis see: Payne,
I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 276. Below, the definition of grass-roots networks takes into account this deficiency.
These activities not only include economic and educational considerations, but also activities that feed and shelter
fellow musicians.

75
that attracted patrons to places like fish fries, lawn parties, and dance halls. The music was

nurtured in these settings, and the music, in turn, provided customers for these establishments

who were more than happy to spend their hard earned cash. While many of the honky tonks

catered to African American clientele, very few if any were black owned establishments. Pops

Foster explained, “In those days the Italians owned nearly all the grocery stores and saloons.

When I worked doing longshore work we used to hang out at Tony’s Saloon at Celeste and

Chapatula. It was strictly for colored.”78 Not only did African Americans have a finite number of

leisure options available to them under Jim Crow, but also there were few avenues to property

ownership. This meant that the odds against owning and controlling a leisure establishment were

very high. Consequently, would-be black entrepreneurs employed a number of creative strategies

to provide venues for entertainment and draw profits from these enterprises.

Two very similar enterprises, fish fries and lawn parties, were spaces of urban sociability.

They also provided labor for black musicians. These were closely related ventures, though

drummer Paul Barbarin noted that fish fries usually occurred on Saturday evenings while lawn

parties took place on Sundays..79 These social gatherings were semi-public affairs where guests

paid a small admission fee to listen and dance to music and eat home cooked food, drink

spirituous beverages, and socialize. The trombone player Edward “Kid” Ory began holding fish

fries as an entrée into professional music; “Well, I couldn’t get a job [playing music], so I started

to promoting fish fries.”80 Pops Foster explained, “All over New Orleans on Saturday night

there’d be fish fries…. To advertise, you’d get a carriage with the horses all dressed up, a bunch

of pretty girls, and then the musicians would get on, and you’d go all over advertising for that

78
Foster and Stoddard, The Autobiography of Pops Foster, 71.
79
Paul Barbarin, interview digest, December 23, 1959, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.
80
Edward “Kid” Ory, interview transcript, April 20, 1957, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.

76
night.” Foster further revealed, “The wife usually did the cooking in the morning. She’d fry

catfish, cook gumbo, make ham sandwiches, potato salad, and ice cream to sell. The man would

get the beer, wine, and whiskey. When it got toward dark, you’d hang a red lantern out on the

front door to let anybody going by to know there was a fish fry inside and anybody could go in.”

Foster concluded, “The fish fry that had the best band was the one that would have the best

crowd…. Some guys were big stars on the mandolin and would draw a crowd to a fish fry.”81

Louis Armstrong remembered a woman named Mrs. Cole who threw lawn parties two or three

nights a week. He believed she was successful, in part, because she employed Kid Ory’s band

that was one of the most popular in the city.82 These parties not only provided entertainment that

kept black dollars in the black community, they also helped the hosts pay the bills. This tradition

was also carried north during the Great Migration. In Chicago and New York City they were

referred to as “rent parties,” because the proceeds often meant the difference between having the

rent and being short for that month.83

Because the built environment in both Chicago and New York City was much more

heavily congested than New Orleans, the social dynamics and the music were also very different.

Rent parties were often crowded and more intimate affairs due to the lack of space.

Consequently, rent parties employed small combos, or sometimes simply a piano player. Fish

fries and lawn parties featured jazz ensembles and often large crowds. “Usually, we do a lot of

that work, lawn parties. Giving dances out in the open air,” recalled multi-instrumentalist and

arranger, Roy Palmer. “It’s a large space that you have surrounded with a large high fence…. A

nice lawn, and they’d give a party. They’d give it that way, and the dances would usually be

81
Foster and Stoddard, The Autobiography of Pops Foster, 16.
82
Armstrong, Satchmo, 30.
83
Foster and Stoddard, The Autobiography of Pops Foster, 16.

77
about 100 or 200 people dancing. It was very good.”84 In this way the relative spaciousness of

New Orleans allowed promoters to hire a large band to play for large crowds. Consequently,

early jazz ensembles in the Big Easy at fish fries and lawn parties often featured five or more

instrumentalists. Therefore, access to urban space meant that the brand of jazz played at social

engagements like fish fries and rent parties differed from one city to the next.

Another venture that operated along similar lines was hall rentals. There were a number

of dance halls that were available to the general public, both black and white, to rent. All that

was required was an open date and a deposit for the evening. Kid Ory applied the same business

acumen he acquired promoting fish fries to booking dance halls. He would hire band members to

play along with him and then promote that evening’s dance in the back of a horse drawn wagon

with the musicians playing in tow. He quickly built such a thriving business that he refused

offers to leave New Orleans for Chicago; “I had an offer to go to Chicago, you see. And that

time I had the two halls, you know [that he was operating]. They offered me $50 a week in

Chicago, I was making between $300 and $400 a night off my dances, and working all the rest of

those stands, so I said why go out of business and go work for somebody for nothing, go to

Chicago.”85 Louis Armstrong was a regular in Ory’s band at Economy Hall, and he was grateful

for the steady employment Ory’s dances provided.86 Fish fries, lawn parties, and hall rentals

provided African Americans with an opportunity to pass their hard earned wages around the

black community, rather than passing those dollars into white dominated New Orleans.

Musicians also utilized grass-roots networks to aid fellow musicians in need. When Louis

Armstrong’s first wife fell ill, Joe Oliver offered his assistance; “’You need money for a doctor?

84
Roy Palmer, interview summary, September 22, 1955, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.
85
Edward “Kid” Ory, interview transcript, April 20, 1957, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.
86
Armstrong, Satchmo, 145.

78
Is that it?’ he said immediately. ‘Go down and take my place at Pete Lala’s for two nights….’ In

two nights I would make enough money to engage a very good doctor and get Irene’s stomach

straightened out.” Armstrong made sure he returned the favor by feeding Oliver when he was

unemployed just weeks later.87 Pops Foster remembered, “If a guy was building a house, we’d

show up and play and help him build it. When we were playing we were having fun; the pay

sometimes just made it a little bit sweeter.”88 Baby Dodds recalled that once a new member

joined a band “Everybody took him in as a brother, and he was treated accordingly. If a fellow

came to work with anything, even a sandwich or an orange, the new man would be offered a

piece of it.”89 Though competition remained a very real part of a musicians’ life in New Orleans,

the above recollections attest to the strength of the grass-roots networks employed when a fellow

musician was in need. It was these networks that proved vital in facilitating the northern exodus

of musicians during the Great Migration.

Judge Don’t Allow No Mixed Playing Here

On the eve of the “Jazz Age”, in 1918 the New Orleans Times-Picayune ran an editorial

decrying a new brand of music it viewed as a threat to artistic sensibilities and American values.

The editorial, which would one day become famous among jazz historians and critics, declared

that jazz was a “manifestation of a low streak in man’s tastes.” The editor admitted, to his

chagrin, that jazz was born in New Orleans and in order to redeem the reputation of the city, “we

should make it a point of civic honor to suppress it.”90 Two days later, R. K. Armstrong wrote

the paper to second the position taken by the editors: “The jass [sic] band is slowly dying a noisy

death…. Such articles as yours should have an educative and deterring effect on any musical fad

87
Ibid., 102-104.
88
Foster and Stoddard, The Autobiography of Pops Foster, 65.
89
Dodds, The Baby Dodds Story, 15.
90
“Jass and Jassism,” Times-Picayune (June 20, 1918), 4.

79
which the near future may have in store for us…”91 Such comments were indicative of a vocal

phalanx of critics and reformers who believed jazz reflected the eroding of American cultural

values and mores. While jazz saw its fair share of criticism in the first decades of the twentieth

century, it also enjoyed immense national popularity beginning in the 1920s. Part of the

attraction of the new music was the blending of high and low brow influences that made it

appealing to both black and white audiences. In a number of ways, this appeal opened the door

for limited social change. In other arenas jazz culture only reinforced the social conventions of

the day. Nevertheless, the power of jazz as an instrument of social change was carried north

during the Great Migration, and it had profound effects on American society and culture.

The lack of dry land in New Orleans meant that the city developed a population density

that created a dynamic of close interaction between the races from the outset.92 In the days before

Jim Crow, strict residential segregation, though certainly preferred by the white power structure,

was easier said than done for this reason. Furthermore, it was not always easy to segregate social

affairs. Big Bill Thompson remembered bands playing for interracial audiences in the city’s

parks because, “there was no segregation in those days.”93 Even after the institution of Jim Crow

laws, social affairs were not always segregated. Some working-class neighborhoods, like the

Irish Channel for example, had a racially mixed population. In such an atmosphere, lawn parties

in places like the Irish Channel often became interracial affairs. Emile Barnes played several

lawn parties in the Irish Channel, and he recalled that, “You were treated first class. White and

black were at the same table. No policeman would go up there unless he went as a gentleman

91
R. K. Armstrong, “Jass and Jassism,” Times-Picayune (June 22, 1918), 8.
92
For a more detailed analysis of the lack of dry land in New Orleans and its effect on urban geography see:
Kelman, A River and Its City.
93
Big Bill Thompson, interview digest, March 1, 1961, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.

80
with his hat in his hand.”94 It is no coincidence that many of New Orleans’ prominent white

musicians grew up in the Channel like Nick La Rocca, Happy Schilling, and Tony Sbarbaro.95 In

fact, many white jazz musicians came from working-class backgrounds, including recent

immigrants. Irish, Jews, and Italians, in some respects, were viewed as somehow not quite white,

and they were treated as outcasts in New Orleans. Consequently, some musicians felt a greater

affinity for their working-class counterparts in the African American community, than they did

for middle and upper class whites.96

This dynamic of racial comingling and the white power structure turning a blind eye to

such relationships stood in stark contrast to the segregated New Orleans that emerged in the

ensuing decades. Ernest “Kid Punch” Miller recalled playing with white musicians at a gig in

New Orleans in the 1950s. The Police quickly showed up and arrested the members of the band.

The next morning, Judge Edwin Babylon lectured the musicians before dropping the charges. He

told Miller “he should know better.” The judge then turned to the white musicians (from

Wisconsin) and declared, “What you people are doing up there, you can’t do it here. They’re

trying to do it to us, but the only way they can do it, they got to ram it down our throats.” The

following night, Miller changed the lyrics of the tune “Mama Don’t Allow It” to fit the occasion

singing “Judge Don’t Allow No Mixed Playing Here.”97 In 1959, Louis Armstrong told Jet

Magazine that he would not play in his hometown because interracial bands were not welcome in

the Big Easy⎯ even for the city’s most famous native son. “I ain’t going back to New Orleans

and let them white folks in my hometown be whipping on my head and killing me for me

94
Emile Barnes, interview digest, July 29, 1960, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.
95
Hersch, Subservise Sounds, 83.
96
Ibid., 111.
97
Ernest “Kid Punch” Miller, interview digest, September 25, 1959, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New
Orleans.

81
hustle,” he exclaimed. “I don’t care if I never see New Orleans again.”98 Jim Crow’s grip on the

Crescent City increased exponentially in the decades following the development of jazz, as the

experiences of Miller and Armstrong became the rule, rather than the exception.

Segregation was not always the law of the land in New Orleans, as evidenced by the

experiences of Emile Barnes and Big Bill Thompson at interracial social affairs. To be certain,

prejudice remained, and some whites echoed racist sentiments toward black musicians. Nick La

Rocca, the trumpet player for the all-white Original Dixieland Jazz Band who recorded the first

jazz record in 1917, once famously claimed to have invented jazz. He declared, “Our music is

strictly white man’s music…. My contention is that the Negroes learned to play this rhythm and

music from the whites.”99 La Rocca, a self-described “die-hard segregationist,” also claimed

African Americans in New Orleans had little to no musical talent when jazz was emerging as a

new art form, saying, “Nobody else played music but the syndicates, the negroes⎯ nobody

played music in New Orleans. As far as I know about the music, and if you want to know the

truth about it, the negro did not play any kind of music equal to white men at any time. Even the

poorest band of white men played better than the negroes in my days….” LaRocca remained

adamant in the defense of his indefensible assertion that he alone invented jazz, and black

musicians like Louis Armstrong copied it from him. Later in life, LaRocca continually lashed out

at critics calling them alternately “pro-negro,” “communists,” “pro-integrationists,”

“carpetbaggers,” and “liberals,” and he once penned a letter to the segregationist Senator James

98
Louis Armstrong quoted in Collier, Louis Armstrong, 319.
99
Nick La Rocca quoted in Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, Jazz: A History of America’s Music (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 77.

82
Eastland of Mississippi in the hopes that Eastland would tell LaRocca’s story to the American

public.100

LaRocca’s prejudiced views followed the status quo regarding race relations in the Big

Easy at the turn of the twentieth century. Furthermore, the Irish Channel, where LaRocca grew

up, was far from an interracial utopia. Kid Punch Miller often played in the Channel but was not

always met with open arms. “They just didn’t want you walking through there,” he remembered.

After being threatened on one occasion, Miller found the man who hired his band for an

engagement in the neighborhood and asked the man for help with the hostile crowd outside the

establishment, “I said, ‘Well I’m trying to get home. The white boys want to whip me up, up

there.’ And he come on out of there, and said, ‘God damn, ya’ll leave that fellow alone; that

fellow plays music for me every year.’”101 Consequently, Miller made it home without harm, but

it was clear the Irish Channel was no sanctuary from racialized violence.

Despite La Rocca’s racist sentiments and the unjust treatment of Punch Miller, many

musicians of different backgrounds interacted and respected one another immensely. Louis

Armstrong, for example, befriended a young Jack Teagarden: “My last week in New Orleans

while we were getting to go up river to Saint Louis I met a fine young white boy named Jack

Teagarden,” he recalled. “The first time I heard Jack Teagarden on the trombone I had goose

pimples all over; in my experience I had never heard anything so fine…. We have been

musically jammed buddies ever since we met.”102 Punch Miller befriended several young white

musicians, including Joe Gondolfo who sat in with him on occasion to learn the trumpet.

100
Nick LaRocca, interview transcript, Jun 9, 1958, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.
101
Ernest “Kid Punch” Miller, interview transcript, August 20, 1959, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New
Orleans.
102
Armstrong, Satchmo, 188.

83
Gondolfo also often helped Miller draw crowds to listen to Miller’s band play.103 Though not a

panacea for racial prejudice, jazz offered musicians an avenue to make professional associations

across Jim Crow boundaries.

The power of jazz as an agent of limited social change also traveled north during this

period. Just before Louis Armstrong left New Orleans, he was hired by the bandleader Fate

Marable to play on the Streckfus Steamer for daily and weekly excursions up the Mississippi

River. “Fate Marable’s Band deserves credit for breaking down a few barriers on the

Mississippi— barriers set up by Jim Crow. We were the first colored band to play most of the

towns at which we stopped, particularly in the smaller ones,” Armstrong remembered. “At first

we ran into some ugly experiences while we were on the bandstand, and we had to listen to

plenty of nasty remarks…. We were used to that kind of jive, and we would just keep on

swinging as though nothing had happened. Before the evening was over they loved us. We

couldn’t turn for them singing our praises and begging us to hurry back.”104 As Armstrong

indicated, jazz had an appeal that brought groups from disparate backgrounds together on

common ground.

Both in New Orleans and in northern cities like Chicago, jazz served as a counterweight

to increased segregation. But, musicians were not blanket reformers attacking social inequality in

all its forms. This was especially true when one considers the role of women in early jazz. New

Orleans jazz was decidedly male dominated, with a few notable exceptions. Sweet Emma

Barrett, for instance, began playing piano in New Orleans dance halls as early as 1910. She

103
Ernest “Kid Punch” Miller, interview transcript, September 25, 1959, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University,
New Orleans.
104
Armstrong, Satchmo, 188-189. For more information on the importance of Marable as a band leader and social
activist see: William Howland Kenney, Jazz on the River, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 37-63.

84
would later lead the famous Preservation Hall Jazz Band in New Orleans during the 1960s.105

Baby Dodds played in Sonny Celestin’s band with Barrett. He recalled, “She was a very thin girl

but oh my God, she could play nice piano. She played like any man.”106 Dodds’ account reveals

that in order for Barrett to gain the respect of her colleagues, she had to “play like a man.” What

is interesting is Barrett got her start in music at a time when the piano was increasingly becoming

a featured instrument in jazz bands. Often viewed as an instrument played predominately by

women prior to its appearance in jazz bands, the public perception of piano players shifted in this

period. According to Charles Hersch, once more and more men began playing piano, the

instrument was “regendered” by male musicians. Adopting hyper-masculine personas and

playing risqué tunes served as a means to “regender” the piano. For example, Jelly Roll Morton

was famous for both the sometimes-vulgar songs he played and his mistreatment of women.107

Though there were some notable early women jazz pioneers once the Great Migration

spread the new music across the country, such as Lil Hardin and Cora “Lovie” Austin, the most

acceptable role for women in jazz was as a vocalist. In fact, the leading black vocalists of the day

were blues singers Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and Bessie Smith. The enormous appeal of these

women was groundbreaking given the rampant sexism and racism of the day.108 Furthermore, the

popularity of Rainey and Smith paved the way for later female vocalists, like Billie Holiday and

105
Liner notes to the album New Orleans’ Sweet Emma and her Preservation Hall Jazz Band (New Orleans, 2004).
Originally recorded October 18, 1964.
106
Dodds, The Baby Dodds Story, 19.
107
Hersch, Subversive Sounds, 49-50.
108
In this period the blues and jazz were almost interrelated. It wasn’t until the emergence of the big band that the
two music forms found entirely different musical paths. The relative similarities between blues and jazz in this
period allowed female vocalists like Rainey and Smith to cross back and forth between the two genres with ease.
Angela Davis examined the life and work of both women and argues that each displayed a level of feminist activism
through their lyrics and public personas. For more information on this dynamic see: Angela Y. Davis, Blues
Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1998).

85
Ella Fitzgerald, during the Swing Era.109 Other women asserted their talents as instrumentalists.

Louis Armstrong’s second wife, Lil Hardin, was a very gifted pianist who studied music at Fisk

University and played in Joe Oliver’s band in Chicago.110 Lovie Austin, an accomplished pianist

and songwriter transcribed songs written by Jelly Roll Morton onto paper for later publishing

because Morton could not read music. While Morton was happy to reap the benefits of having a

female friend who could read music and transcribe it for him, he never thought to extend

royalties or naming rights. As Austin explained, “Morton would come in when he needed work

done, and then tell me that he was going out of town… He thought I was the finest musician in

the world, and I felt that way about him. I remember taking down Wolverine Blues and two or

three other pieces for him.”111 Barrett, Hardin, and Austin notwithstanding, the general exclusion

of women instrumentalists only reinforced conventional gender stereotypes in early jazz.112

While jazz musicians were not zealous reformers seeking to tear down all barriers of

injustice, jazz retained some power to affect limited social change before, during, and after the

Great Migration. Many white musicians and bar patrons, no matter how altruistic their feelings,

admired the innovations of black musicians. Consequently, the working-class honky tonks of

New Orleans, the public parks of the Big Easy where black and white audiences listened to jazz,

and the interracial lawn parties in the Irish Channel acted as counterweights to the increasing

grip of Jim Crow at the turn of the twentieth century. These venues represented the only leisure

spaces where white and black audiences could test the boundaries of racial segregation in New

Orleans. Jazz musicians themselves, both black and white, often took advantage of this dynamic

and developed camaraderie where they shared advice and musical knowledge to further their
109
Sally Placksin, American Women in Jazz: 1900 to the Present Their Words, Lives, and Music (New York:
Wideview Books, 1982), 8-9.
110
Armstrong, Swing That Music, 71.
111
Cora “Lovie” Austin, interview digest, April 25, 1969, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.
112
Peretti, Creation of Jazz, 122.

86
individual careers. This development in the Crescent City should not be underestimated, because

it paved the way for similar racial intermingling in the North once the Great Migration was well

under way.

87
Chapter 3:

You Just Can’t Keep The Music Unless You Move With It: Jazz & The First Great Migration

Sidney Bechet, a talented nineteen-year-old clarinet player, left New Orleans for the first

time in 1916. Bechet travelled first across the South and Midwest before ending up in Chicago in

1917. Once in the Windy City, he began playing with fellow New Orleans transplants Freddie

Keppard, Joe Oliver, and Kid Ory. Chicago was an enticing draw for young musicians. Bechet

explained, “Back in New Orleans people were hearing a lot of excitement about what was

happening up North, and I had this idea in my head that I was to see other places. I wanted to go

North and see Chicago and I wanted to see New York. I guess I just wanted to see all there was.”

Chicago and New York were certainly attractive locations for aspiring musicians, but Bechet

also left because, “We’d heard all about how the North was freer, and we were wanting to go real

bad.” Bechet was not alone in his desire to seek greener pastures and to escape political

repression during the First Great Migration. However, Bechet revealed that there were also

artistic motivations behind his decision⎯ an essential element of jazz that kept musicians on the

go, constantly seeking new avenues for artistic expression, cultural innovation, and receptive

audiences willing to pay their hard earned dollars to see the latest trends in the music. “You

know, there’s this mood about the music, a kind of need to be moving,” he explained. “You just

can’t set it down and hold it…. You just can’t keep the music unless you move with it… the

music, it’s got this itch to be going in it⎯ when it loses that, there’s not much left. Those days I

was getting that itch pretty strong. I really wanted to be moving. And finally I saw my chance,

and I took it.”1

1
Bechet, Treat It Gentle, 115, 95-96.

88
 Millions of African Americans left their homes for the urban north in the 1910s, 1920s,

and 1930s. Migrants often cited motivations for leaving the South that included economic

opportunities and the desire for full rights as citizens. Bechet’s account indicates that musicians

left the South for similar reasons, and they actively sought a better life for themselves and fellow

jazz artists. However, Bechet left not for employment in a slaughterhouse on Chicago’s South

Side, or a job in an automobile assembly plant in Detroit, or a position in the steel mills of

Cleveland, but for the possibility of making a new life for himself through artistic skill and the

technical mastery of a musical instrument. Furthermore, northern migration was, at times, not a

one-way journey, as musicians often made several stops along the way. Because of financial and

artistic motivations, musicians lived a life on the road for months at a time. Consequently, places

like Memphis, Kansas City, Los Angeles, and even Paris, France became jazz destinations in and

of themselves. Furthermore, life on the road presented both perils and triumphs along the way.

But musicians carried jazz to the far corners of the country, and in each jazz destination, slightly

different and unique brands of jazz emerged. Furthermore, musicians learned new techniques and

jazz styles on the road that enabled them to grow as artists, and one of the best ways to learn new

styles was to witness innovation on the spot in jazz clubs across the country. This dynamic made

the story of the jazz musician during the Great Migration unique, and it paved the way for the

Jazz Age that swept the nation in the 1920s.

It Got So Hot It Had To Burst Out

The clarinet player Albert Nichols first left New Orleans for Chicago in 1923 after being

offered a job in Joe Oliver’s band. He returned to the Crescent City, but left again the following

year to join Kid Ory’s band. Both Oliver and Ory were instrumental in securing employment and

89
providing assistance to Nichols in his journeys north.2 Nichols also had an additional incentive to

leave. As he explained in 1970, after returning to his native city for the first time in decades,

“The city has changed in many ways, from its architecture to its spirit, and everything about its

spirit has changed for the better. First of all, there’s less discrimination now. It used to be brutal.

They’re human down there now.” He further revealed that, “I had my reasons for staying away

so long. After my previous visit [in 1937] I didn’t care if I never saw the place again.”3 For

Nichols, the combination of assistance from colleagues, economic opportunity in Chicago, and

racial discrimination in New Orleans meant that the decision to leave his hometown was an easy

one. It is no mere coincidence that Joe Oliver and Kid Ory were the ones encouraging Albert

Nichols to leave the South. Both men assumed crucial leadership roles that facilitated northern

migration at the dawn of the jazz age. Consequently, Nichols’s flight from the South was not a

singular experience.

Between 1915 and 1918 roughly a half million African Americans left the South,

followed by another 700,000 in the 1920s. Southern blacks living on the eastern seaboard most

likely ended up in northern cities on the East Coast like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and

Pittsburgh. Those from the westernmost states of the former Confederacy often chose to migrate

to Midwestern cities like Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee. So many black

Alabamans moved to Cleveland that the black community of the city was nicknamed “Alabama

North.” More than half of the total number of migrants settled in five cities: Cleveland, Chicago,

Detroit, New York, and Pittsburgh. Chicago was, in many respects, the capital city of black

migration; by 1935, 250,000 African American migrated to the Windy City alone.4

2
Albert Nichols, interview digest, June, 26, 1972, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.
3
“Jazz Scene: New Orleans- Then & Now (Albert Nicholas talks to Max Jones)” Melody Maker (5-16-1970) p.16.
4
Eric Arnesen, ed., Black Protest and the Great Migration: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford/
St. Martin’s Press, 2003), 1-37; Kimberley L. Phillips, Alabama North: African-American Migrants, Community,

90
 As recent scholarship suggests, the First Great Migration that witnessed the exodus of

more than one million African Americans out of the South before, during, and after World War I

was a crucial period of black activism. The causes of the movement have been the subject of

much debate among historians both then and now. Indeed, Carter G. Woodson famously asked,

in 1918, at the height of migration, “What then is the cause?”5 Woodson cautioned that the

migrants themselves offered the best explanations. Despite Woodson’s admonishment, early

studies of the migration, including Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s Black Metropolis, focused

primarily on economic factors.6 Certainly, economics played an important role in the Great

Migration, but it was far from the only factor. Given the lack of social justice and the legacy of

racialized violence in the South, it is clear African Americans were motivated to leave the South

on several fronts.7

A more complete analysis of the Great Migration appeared in the late 1980s. In Land of

Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration, James R. Grossman points to the

and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915-45 (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 5, 17;
Davarian L. Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill,
North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 14.
5
Carter G. Woodson, “The Exodus During the World War,” in Malaika Adero ed., Up South: Stories, Studies, and
Letters of This Century’s Black Migrations (New York: The New Press, 1993), 1.
6
What became known as the “Push-Pull Theory” argued that African Americans left the South to secure jobs in the
wartime industrial expansion of the North. Economic degradation in the South, coupled with foreign immigration
restrictions opened new opportunities for African Americans and forced them northward. Critics of the Push-Pull
Theory charge that by focusing too much on economic concerns it leaves the impression that African Americans
were passive historical actors. Consequently, Lawrence Levine argues that African Americans are, “seen once again
not as actors capable of affecting at least some part of their destinies, but primarily as beings who are acted upon-
southern leaves blown north by the winds of destitution.” Lawrence Levine quoted in Alan D. DeSantis, “Selling the
American Dream Myth to Black Southerners: The Chicago Defender and the Great Migration of 1915-1919,”
Western Journal of Communication, (Fall, 1998), 476.
7
A differing school of thought argues that social factors and kinship networks created a significant impetus for
migration. Advocates of the “Socio-Emotional Theory” believe that a lack of social justice in the South coupled with
a yearning to join friends and relatives already in the North compelled migrants northward. Both the Push-Pull
Theory and Socio-Emotional Theory have contributed a great deal to our understanding of the Great Migration.
However, neither of these theories offers a complete explanation for the causes and motivations of the Great
Migration. What is missing is a thorough discussion of the grass-roots organizational efforts and the leadership that
fostered the movement forward. For more information on the various theories of African American migration see:
Alan D. DeSantis, “Selling the American Dream Myth to Black Southerners: The Chicago Defender and the Great
Migration of 1915-1919,” Western Journal of Communication, (Fall, 1998).

91
tradition within African American communities of mobility as an assertion of agency. Following

emancipation, Grossman contends, blacks found spatial mobility to be of the utmost significance.

Furthermore, Grossman asserts that a grass-roots network of information and leadership emerged

that was essential to the movement.8 In addition, he contends that such a movement developed

despite the opposition of traditional middle-class black leaders.9 A key component of this grass-

roots network was the Chicago Defender. Chicago migrant, Robert S. Abbott, founded the

Defender in 1905. Abbott’s newspaper quickly developed a popular appeal to African Americans

of both middle and working-class backgrounds. By 1916, it was the largest selling black daily in

the country.10

Prospective migrants often organized collectively to ease the burden of individual travel.

Migration clubs formed to gather information about possible employment, pool economic

resources (migration clubs were particularly aware of the advantage of discounted group train

tickets), and find housing in Chicago and other northern cities. These clubs sometimes shared

affiliations with local and northern churches. Southern congregants of the African Methodist

Episcopal Church may appeal to fellow AME members in Chicago, for example, to aid in the

procurement of employment and housing.11 The Bethlehem Baptist Association, located in

Chicago, advertised in the Defender that it would help new migrants get settled in the South Side

community. In response to one such ad, Mrs. J. H. Adams, writing from Macon Georgia in 1918,

asks, “To the Bethlehem Baptist Association reading in the Chicago Defender of your help

securing positions I want to know if it is any way you can oblige me by helping me to get out

8
James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1989).
9
Ibid., 67. Grossman argues that the rank and file traditional African American leadership in the South, such as
educators, professionals, business and religious leaders, were opposed to migration because they stood to lose the
most from a mass exodus of constituents and customers.
10
DeSantis, “Selling the American Dream Myth to Black Southerners,” Western Journal of Communication.
11
Grossman, Land of Hope, 94-97.

92
there as I am anxious to leave here and everything so hard here…”12 In addition to the aid of

religious groups, migration clubs were often largely comprised of women. This is significant

considering the traditionally male dominated ranks of the recognized African American

leadership in the South.13 Cleary, migrants were motivated by a variety of factors, and they

actively utilized a number of strategies to find a new home, seek employment and housing, and

help loved ones escape the South.

The narrative of the jazz musician shares several characteristics with the larger Great

Migration story. Like their migratory counterparts, musicians left the South during this period

for a variety of reasons. However, the migration of jazz musicians is often explained primarily in

economic terms.14 To be certain, economic opportunities were a significant contributing factor to

musicians journeying north. However, just as is the case with broader interpretations of the Great

Migration, the primary focus on economic motives diminishes the agency of jazz musicians.

Indeed, jazz musicians have a history of grass-roots networking with colleagues to find work.

The link between southern musicians and their counterparts in the North during this period is no

exception.15 Furthermore, the wide circulation of the Chicago Defender across the South

indicates its availability to musicians as well. The trumpet player Adolphus “Doc” Cheatham

12
Letter from Mrs. J. H. Adams, Macon Georgia, to the Bethlehem Baptist Association in Chicago, Illinois, 1918
Holograph, Carter G. Woodson Papers, Manuscript Division (119), Library of Congress,
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african/images/adams.jpg
13
Grossman, Land of Hope, 97.
14
James Lincoln Collier argues that the simultaneous closing of the New Orleans vice district where early jazz was
played (known as Storyville) in 1917, coupled with the expanding vice and entertainment district in South Side
Chicago, forced black jazz musicians to migrate. James Lincoln Collier, Louis Armstrong: An American Genius
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 70-71, 86. Thomas Brothers, on the other hand, notes that recent
historians are divided about the effect of Storyville’s closing on migration. But, he does admit that the closing,
“must have caused more than a few musicians to search for greener pastures.” Thomas Brothers, Louis Armstrong’s
New Orleans (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2006), 256. William Howland Kenney disputes the interpretation
that the shutting down of Storyville forced musicians north. Instead, he focuses on the opportunity Chicago afforded
musicians: “Jazz musicians were not so much pushed from their many different homes throughout the country as
pulled to Chicago.”William Howland Kenney, Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-1930 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993), 3.
15
Grossman, Land of Hope, 95.

93
confirmed as much in a 1976 interview saying, “We thought that was a great paper…. Chicago

Defender really gave you all the news of the entertainment in Chicago at that time.” Cheatham

believed the city’s white papers had no interest in writing about the achievements of African

Americans. Therefore, he “only read the Chicago Defender.”16 In 1928 the cornetist Emmanuel

Perez wrote Dave Peyton, the Defender’s music columnist, to let Peyton know Perez looked

forward each week for the paper to arrive.17 In the pages of the daily, musicians could read about

the scores of cabarets and the burgeoning nightlife in the South Side. For instance, a 1914 article

in the Defender promoted the virtues of the South Side entertainment district known as the Stroll:

At night it changes to the sublime. The street is ablaze with light, the sidewalks are
crowded and there is music and laughter everywhere. Nearly every block has a theater or
two and together with the buffets, with their entertainment of singing and dancing, the
Midway is outdone…. Until the police curfew rings at 1 o’clock the pleasure bent
populace enjoys life to the extent of their pocketbooks.18

These considerations suggest that a deeper analysis is needed to fully understand why musicians

came north. Therefore, the advice of Carter G. Woodson is most apt. By examining the reasons

musicians gave for coming to Chicago we can best ascertain their motivations.

The jazz exodus became possible only after a number of individuals assumed a critical

leadership role by encouraging fellow musicians to leave the South altogether. For example,

trumpeter Natty Dominique left New Orleans a few years before the closing of Storyville in 1917

to work as a cigar maker. Dominique had a job lined up before he left, thanks to a friend named

Casino. “He said you want to come to Chicago?” Dominique recalled. “I said, all right, I’ll get

ready. I got ready too, had my clothes, had my trumpet, and I got to Chicago.” Dominique’s oral

history indicates that he left New Orleans because of economic considerations, but he made the

16
Adolphus “Doc” Cheatham, interview transcript, April, 1976, Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University,
Newark, New Jersey.
17
Dave Peyton, “The Musical Bunch,” Chicago Defender (October 27, 1928), 6.
18
“State Street; It’s Pains, Pleasures and Possibilities,” Chicago Defender (May 2, 1914), 7. For a detailed
discussion of the cultural geography of the Stroll see: Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 21- 52.

94
decision to leave based on the advice of a friend. Dominique utilized the same kind of grass-

roots support as dozens of other musicians in his journey to the Windy City.19 Like Jelly Roll

Morton, Sidney Bechet, Paul Barbarin, and the members of the members of the Creole Jazz

Band, Dominique left New Orleans before the closing of Storyville.20 The traditional

interpretation holds that musicians left New Orleans en masse after Storyville closed in 1917,

because there was no longer work for musicians in New Orleans. But, that interpretation does not

take into account the experiences of these important individuals. Therefore, economic

considerations, though important, were only one factor among many.

Chicago migrant and multi-instrumentalist, George Dixon made no mention of the kind

of grass-roots support enjoyed by Natty Dominique. Dixon did discuss the segregation of black

and white audiences listening to riverboat bands in Natchez, Mississippi, where he grew up.

Dixon revealed that African Americans in Natchez were not allowed on the riverboats. “I could

go down to the levee and try to hear from there,” he noted. “Once in a while, they’d have bands

and shows and ferries in Louisiana, but I couldn’t go over there.” Dixon cites purely economic

motives for his move to Chicago in 1926, but the effects of segregation, as noted above, cannot

be underestimated. Though he did not explicitly attribute his coming north to segregation, it is of

no small significance that he mentioned this episode while narrating his tale of migration.21

Drummer, Floyd Campbell left his home in Helena, Arkansas, in 1922, for more dire

reasons than either Dixon or Dominique. Campbell explained to Timuel D. Black Jr. that, “What

happened in Helena at that time is that they lynched a young boy. They caught him in the bushes

with some old white girl, and that broke up our band. That was more than we could stand, and so

19
Natty Dominique, interview transcript, October 24, 1981, Chicago Jazz Archive, University of Chicago, Chicago.
20
Morton and Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll, 45; Bechet, Treat It Gentle, 115; Paul Barbarin, interview digest,
December 23, 1959, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans; Gushee, Pioneers of Jazz, 133.
21
George Dixon, interview transcript, August 15, 1990, Chicago Jazz Archive, University of Chicago, Chicago.

95
we all left and went our separate directions.”22 Campbell moved to Memphis and then St. Louis,

“Then I heard that up in Chicago guys like Erskine Tate and Billy Eckstine had big bands and

were paying their musicians seventy-five dollars a week.” Clearly a number of factors went into

Campbell’s decision to come north. Racialized violence was a significant contributor for

Campbell to leave his home. Economic opportunity in Chicago was another factor. Furthermore,

the drummer heard through the musicians’ grass-roots network of communication about famous

and respected jazz musicians in Chicago. This reveals that for Campbell, Chicago was a place

not only to make money, but also a place to earn a degree of respect not available in St. Louis.

Campbell’s story also points to the fact that the Great Migration of jazz often involved multiple

stops along the way. In that respect, Campbell’s story is emblematic, for even after individuals

settled in a new community in the North, many still had to make a living on the road. Others

moved from city to city before finally establishing themselves in a particular community to their

liking.

While economic factors, a lack of social justice in the South, and a desire for greater

freedom both pushed and pulled African Americans northward, the emergence of a cadre of

leaders enabled dozens of musicians to join the northern migration. Both Joe Oliver and Kid Ory

assumed leadership roles that facilitated the jazz exodus. Ory actually turned down an offer to

move to Chicago in 1919, but he passed the opportunity to Oliver who gladly accepted. Oliver

had made up his mind to leave after a prohibition era police raid on a club the two were playing

in. The musicians were surprised to be taken in along with the customers. It was on that night

that Joe Oliver decided to leave for Chicago.23 After hearing that Ory turned down the offer,

22
Timuel D. Black Jr. Interview with Floyd Campbell in Timuel D. Black Jr. ed., Bridges of Memory: Chicago’s
Second Generation of Black Migration (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 155, 157.
23
Edward “Kid” Ory and Manuel “Fess” Manetta, interview digest, August 26, 1958, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane
University, New Orleans.

96
Oliver and another musician approached Ory; “They said, ‘We’d like to go to Chicago.’ I said,

‘You want the job? Here’s the telegram.’ They went.”24 Ory also gave Oliver a number to call

for assistance until he got settled in Chicago. Like Nichols, Oliver felt unable to openly ply his

craft, and he recognized the economic opportunity Chicago represented. He was also able to

make the journey with assistance from another musician.

Ory left New Orleans not long after Oliver, citing a concern for his health that

precipitated his move to Los Angeles.25 But, he also stated that the owner of Pete Lala’s in New

Orleans was jealous of the money Ory was making promoting dances at Economy and

Cooperative Halls. Pete Lala was mad at Ory for not cutting him in on the deal. Pete then got,

“about fifty cops” to go around to his dances and run all the customers away, “So I packed up

and left, came to Los Angeles.”26 After spending five years in Los Angeles, Ory received a call

from Oliver to join him in Chicago, thus returning the favor.27 Like Oliver, Ory utilized existing

networks to facilitate his move to Chicago. He left New Orleans in the first place both because of

his health and because he was being intimidated by the local power structure.

Ory and Oliver facilitated the migration of dozens of individuals collectively including

Albert Nichols, Baby Dodds, Pops Foster, and Barney Bigard.28 In this vein, the work of Ory and

Oliver mirrors the efforts of those in the larger migrant community that enabled others to leave

the South. Grossman points to the tradition within African American communities of mobility as

an assertion of agency. Following emancipation, Grossman contends, blacks found spatial

mobility to be of the utmost significance, and from here a grass-roots network of information and

24
Edward “Kid” Ory, interview transcript, April 20, 1957, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.
25
Ibid.
26
Edward “Kid” Ory and Manuel “Fess” Manetta, interview digest, August 26, 1958, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane
University, New Orleans.
27
Edward “Kid” Ory, interview transcript, April 20, 1957, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.
28
Dodds, The Baby Dodds Story, 33; Bigard, With Louis and the Duke, 26; Foster and Stoddard, Autobiography of
Pops Foster, 53.

97
leadership emerged that was essential to the movement.29 A key component of the musicians’

network was providing employment. This network also often provided musicians with train fare

to leave New Orleans, a place to stay upon arrival, and food to ease the transition to a new

home.30 The cost of travel was not cheap, so help in offsetting expenses was particularly

important. While most jazz migrants traveled a direct line from New Orleans aboard a car on the

Illinois Central Railroad to the Windy City, those most destitute could also make their way north

via riverboat to places like Davenport, Iowa before the final trek to Chicago.31 The most famous

musician to take advantage of this network was Louis Armstrong who, in August 1922, made his

own journey to Chicago. Oliver lured Armstrong north. “He kept sending me letters and

telegrams telling me to come up to Chicago and play second cornet for him. That, I knew, would

be real heaven for me.”32 Armstrong had the utmost confidence in Oliver’s advice, and he based

his decision to leave on his mentor’s recommendations. On August 8, 1922, Louis Armstrong

boarded the Illinois Central in New Orleans with his entire band at his side to see him off saying,

“they were all glad to see me get a chance to go out in the world and make good.” Armstrong’s

account reveals that as a result of economic considerations and the aid of grass-roots networks,

the cornet player decided Chicago was the right fit for his future. Furthermore, the comment that

Chicago “would be real heaven,” coupled with Armstrong’s belief that musicians in Chicago,

“were treated and respected just like⎯ some kind of a God,”33 indicates that economic motives

were only one part of the story. Armstrong believed that Chicago was a place where musicians

could openly ply their trade and achieve a level of respectability unthinkable in southern society.

29
Grossman, Land of Hope, 66-97.
30
Bigard, With Louis and the Duke, 26-30; Armstrong, Satchmo, 234.
31
For more information on the relationship between the Mississippi River and the development of jazz and the
proximity of Davenport to Chicago during this period see: Kenney, Jazz on the River, 119-128.
32
Armstrong, Satchmo, 226, 228.
33
Louis Armstrong, “The Armstrong Story,” in Thomas Brothers, ed., Louis Armstrong In His Own Words:
Selected Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 74.

98
 The first person accounts of Dominique, Dixon, Campbell, Nichols, Ory, and Armstrong

illustrate that a variety of considerations played a part in the decision to leave the South in search

of greener pastures. Musicians were not pushed out of the South due only to economic

considerations any more than the African American community at large was pushed north during

the Great Migration. Rather, musicians actively chose to improve their condition on their own

volition. To pursue that end, many utilized the kind of grass-roots networks employed by scores

of African Americans across the South during this period. Indeed, the same kinds of techniques

and grass-roots tactics employed in the journey northward would be summoned again once

migrants arrived in the Windy City. But, unlike their counterparts of the larger migration, these

musicians left their southern homes because of both the lack of creative outlets in the South, and

the opportunity for creative expression in the North. The added incentive of finding greater

avenues for creative expression set them apart from other migrants and made their story unique.

Thanks to the innovation of New Orleans jazz pioneers and the Great Migration, the

music seemingly burst onto the national stage in the 1920s. It soon became a cultural force to be

reckoned with. Consequently, in 1922 F. Scott Fitzgerald famously dubbed the decade the “Jazz

Age.”34 As Louis Armstrong put it, “The men I knew as a boy started it all. Whatever it’s good

for, and however long it will live, swing music was born in my country; it seeded there in New

Orleans and grew there, and there it got so hot it had to burst out and it did, and spread to the

world.”35 Jazz, therefore, made a Great Migration of its own on the backs of these musicians,

facilitated by a grass-roots network that was dedicated to mutual cooperation and crafting a new

art form.

34
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tales of the Jazz Age (New York: Scribners, 1922).
35
Armstrong, Swing That Music, 28.

99
Those Were Crazy Times

In 1978 Theodore “Red” Saunders reminisced about his experience as a jazz drummer in

the 1920s and 1930s. Saunders, who grew up in Memphis before migrating to Chicago with his

family as a teenager, spent many years playing in cities across the country. Life for black

musicians travelling on the road from town to town could be exciting to a young man like

Saunders. However, it was not always fun and games. Black musicians faced discrimination and

difficult conditions travelling America’s byways. Saunders remembered, “I was on the road in

the early 1930s. And conditions were pretty bad, you know, during those days. Segregation was

real hard, real thick. And food was hard to get on the road, and you had to go in the back door

and things like that for your food. And accommodations were very, very poor.” For Saunders, his

band mates, and scores of black musicians who made their living on the road, discrimination and

segregation were as much a part of their daily lives as the nightly encore at the end of shows.

“That’s the way conditions were,” Saunders recalled. “Those were crazy times. Because you

were at the mercy of the law and the laws were⎯ maybe the Ku Klux Klan and all of that, so it

was just a mixed up period in the history of this country… when you look back you wonder how

you made it.”36 While scores of musicians left the South during the Great Migration for greener

pastures in dozens of American cities, Saunders’s account reveals that life for jazz musicians was

rarely sedentary. In order to make a living as artists, musicians often dealt with the rigors of the

road and the subsequent discrimination that followed. However, the sacrifices made by

musicians like Saunders facilitated the spread of jazz across the country in the 1910s, 1920s, and

1930s, as travelling musicians showcased their artistic achievements in a number of emerging

jazz capitals across the country. As the musicians travelled from town to town, they encountered

36
Theodore “Red” Saunders, interview transcript, March 28, 1978, Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University,
Newark, New Jersey.

100
new techniques of playing that were unique to each setting. Consequently, new styles of jazz

emerged in cities across the country.

By the 1920s, thanks to the work of travelling musician like Saunders, scores of

American cities boasted vibrant jazz scenes. Several early jazz capitals emerged along riverboat

routes and rail lines. The crossroads city of Memphis has long enjoyed its reputation as the

“Home of the Blues.” The musical traditions of Beale Street (the city’s African American

cultural and economic center) influenced the sound of Memphis jazz from its earliest days.

Given the Bluff City’s location along the Mississippi River and with its close proximity to rail

lines, Memphis emerged as a critical commercial center in the late nineteenth and early twentieth

century. African American roustabouts who toiled in the city’s shipping industries imparted the

influence of the blues in Memphis culture. This meant that Bluff City jazz retained a blues

inflected quality in the music. In this period, jazz and the blues were closely related. The twelve

bar [AAB] song structure, so prevalent in the blues, worked its way into jazz forms, and by the

1920s it was a staple for jazz composers. The call and response AAB format allowed musicians

to improvise freely within the space of the song by offering a simple and adaptable harmonic

progression. It wasn’t until the emergence of the big band that the two music forms found

entirely different musical paths. The relative similarities between blues and jazz in the 1920s

allowed female vocalists like Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and Bessie Smith, the leading black singers

of the day, to cross back and forth between the two genres with ease.37

Memphis musicians, well acquainted with the blues structure, used it readily in jazz

compositions. “Memphis Blues” composed in 1909 by W.C. Handy was originally entitled “Mr.

Crump.” Handy wrote the tune as a campaign song for the mayoral election of Edward Hull

37
Schuller, Early Jazz, 37-38; Placksin, American Women in Jazz, 12-21.

101
Crump. Handy, a transplant from Alabama who was a classically trained musician, was heavily

influenced by the music of the city’s roustabouts who worked on the banks of the Mississippi.38

Handy recalled that, “The melody of ‘Mister Crump’ was mine throughout. On the other hand,

the twelve-bar, three-line form of the first and last strains, with its three-chord basic harmonic

structure (tonic, sub-dominant, dominant seventh) was that already used by Negro roustabouts,

honky-tonk piano players, wanderers and others of their underprivileged but undaunted class

from Missouri to the Gulf….” Handy later enjoyed the moniker “The Father of the Blues” after

penning several famous songs, including “Memphis Blues,” based on the music forms he

discovered in Memphis. Handy explained that, “My part in their history was to introduce this, the

‘blues’ form, to the general public, as the medium for my own feelings and my own musical

ideas.” Handy remained in the Bluff City as a bandleader, director of dance orchestras, and

music publisher until 1918 when he and Harry Pace, his business partner, moved their publishing

firm to New York City.39

While men who worked along the banks of the Mississippi heavily influenced Memphis

jazz, men who worked on the river itself largely influenced St. Louis jazz. By 1920, St. Louis

was one of the main stops for the riverboat excursions of the Streckfus Line. Bands like the ones

fronted by Fate Marable, Louis Armstrong, and Baby Dodds played in “The Gateway to the

West” in the first decades of the twentieth century. The Streckfus Steamers spent the winter

months in New Orleans before heading north in the spring each year. The drummer Zutty

Singleton remembered that, “There was a saying in New Orleans. When some musician would

get a job on the riverboats with Fate Marable, they’d say, ‘Well you’re going to the

conservatory.’ That’s because Fate was such a fine musician and the men who worked with him
38
Kenney, Jazz on the River, 88-91; Southern, Music of Black Americans, 338-340.
39
W.C. Handy quoted in, Dr. Leonard Goines, “Father of the Blues,” Allegro: Associated Musicians of Greater
New York, Vol. LXXV, No. 9 (October, 1975), 4; Southern, Music of Black Americans, 338.

102
had to be really good.” Singleton played on the steamer the Capitol with Marable and

Armstrong. “The boats would spend the winter in New Orleans and then, around April, go up to

St. Louis, stopping at Natchez and other places for a night or two,” recalled Singleton. “The way

it worked on the boats was Monday night the dances were for colored. Every night the boats

would travel up and down the river for a while and then come back.”40 Because of the influence

of riverboat musicians, St. Louis boasted a vibrant jazz scene that catered to dance enthusiasts

like those that travelled on the Streckfus Line.

St. Louis also had a long tradition of blending music styles associated with the theater

and concert hall with folk music. Consequently, St. Louis jazz lacked the blues-centric elements

found downriver in Memphis. However, St. Louis was also a center of ragtime in the 1890s, and

Scott Joplin, perhaps the most famous ragtime composer and musician, called the city home.

Ragtime evolved from traditional marching tunes in the Midwest often played in double time on

the piano. African American musicians, like Joplin, embellished marching tunes by adding

syncopated rhythms and thematic variations within the song structure. Ragtime was a more

structured format than the blues and played at a faster tempo, and as such, it lacked the sort of

improvisation so prevalent in the blues idiom. As a result, St. Louis jazz was up-tempo, piano

driven, and more structured in comparison to Memphis jazz.41

Like Kid Ory and Joe Oliver, Marable assumed a leadership role that fostered the exodus

of jazz from New Orleans and other southern cities during the Great Migration. As historian

William Howland Kenney notes Marable “used his position as leader of the best black dance

bands on the leading excursion boats on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers to personally recruit

ambitious musicians who were looking for a way to explore the more northerly reaches of the

40
Zutty Singleton quoted in, Shapiro and Hentoff, eds., Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya, 76.
41
Kenney, Jazz on the River, 92-93, 97; Schuller, Early Jazz, 32-38.

103
Mississippi valley as professional dance band musicians. Once Marable had them on board, he

insisted that they carefully prepare themselves for success in the modern music business.”

Marable also encouraged his band mates to join the American Federation of Musicians, learn to

sight-read music scores, and he recommended them to some of the most prominent bandleaders

in the country for jobs in groups fronted by Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington and Jimmie

Lunceford.42

On the western border of Missouri, along the Toledo, St. Louis, and Western Railroad

line, stood another emerging jazz capital. Kansas City was an influential center for black musical

development dating to the height of ragtime’s popularity in the late nineteenth century. The 18th

and Vine neighborhood was home to the city’s African American flourishing cultural and

economic institutions. Traveling blues and ragtime musicians often made their way through

Kansas City, and by the 1920s, the city boasted a number of promising bands that turned the city

into a destination for aspiring musicians in the years to come. The gifted vocalist Mary Lou

Williams remembered, “In those years around 1930, Kaycee was really jumping⎯ so many great

bands having sprung up there or moved in from over the river. I should explain that Kansas City,

Missouri wasn’t too prejudiced for a midwestern town. It was a ballin’ town, and it attracted

musicians from all over the South and Southwest, and especially from Kansas.” The vibrant

neighborhood of 18th and Vine attracted black business leaders and black artists. This dynamic

made the community a hotbed of black culture. “So I found Kansas City to be a heavenly city⎯

music everywhere in the Negro section of town, and fifty or more cabarets rocking on Twelfth

and Eighteenth Streets,” recalled Williams. “Yes, Kaycee was a place to be enjoyed, even if you

were without funds. People would make you a loan without you asking for it, would look at you

42
Ibid., 38.

104
and tell if you were hungry and put things right. There was the best food to be had⎯ the finest

barbecue, crawdads, and other seafood.”43 Dozens of noted jazz musicians, like Mary Lou

Williams, got their start in Kansas City in the 18th and Vine neighborhood.

Benny Moten grew up in the 18th and Vine neighborhood, studying piano under the

tutelage of a former student of Scott Joplin, the noted ragtime innovator. After playing piano in

several local groups, Moten formed his own band in 1918. By the mid 1920s Moten took his

increasingly popular band on the road playing and recording in Chicago and other northern

locales.44 Moten did his best to keep the band in the public eye by booking the group in clubs as

far north as Minneapolis, as far south as New Orleans, and as far west as Denver. Moten’s group

remained the most popular jazz band in Kansas City, but on the road they faced stiff competition

from other traveling “territory” bands like Walter Page’s Blue Devils. After suffering an

embarrassing defeat in a music battle between Moten’s group and the Blue Devils, the bested

bandleader tried to buy out Page. The plan did not succeed, but Moten eventually plucked some

the best musicians from the rival Blue Devils, including a young piano player from New Jersey,

named William “Count” Basie. The Count Basie Orchestra formed from a nucleus of former

Moten musicians, after a Basie led internal revolt relieved Moten from his position as bandleader

in 1933. The Basie Orchestra became one of the most popular big bands of the 1930s and 1940s

recording hits like “One O’clock Jump,” “Lester Leaps In,” and “Taxi War Dance.”45

Further west, the City of Angels grew into a jazz metropolis at an earlier stage than other

west coast cities. Part of the reason for this early introduction to the new music was due to the

work of the Creole Jazz Band in Los Angeles in 1914 (though they soon took their act on the

43
Mary Lou Williams in, Shapiro and Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya, 284-285, 287, 293.
44
Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddix, Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop⎯A History (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005), 25, 31, 43, 53-54.
45
Ibid., 63, 93-96, 123-124; Schuller, Early Jazz, 295-296, 317.

105
road), and particularly to Kid Ory’s trip to the city in 1919. Ory explained that he left New

Orleans for Los Angeles, “Because I wanted to do better, to have⎯ I felt like I was going to lose

my health down there. I had plenty of work; I was doing alright… I had close to $500 deposit on

different jobs I refunded on back to the promoters, told them I was sorry…. Told them I was

losing my health; that was the only way I could get out of the contract, which I wasn’t lying

about…. Just taking a vacation [in Los Angeles], looking around…. Soon as they found out I was

in town, then a guy opened up a nightclub⎯Near to the Union Station, on Central Avenue. I

wired Manuel Manetta. I sent for him.”46 Ory chose California over Chicago (where he was to

join Joe Oliver’s band) because he heard about the good climate in Los Angeles, and that sealed

the deal.

Ory left New Orleans on the Texas and Pacific Railroad line, and once in Los Angeles he

met up “with a dude they call Lee Locking from Galveston, Texas.” Together the two men

reopened a club called the Cadillac located near the train depot. Ory’s new group was an instant

sensation in the City of Angels. Manetta believed the reason for their immediate success was the

large number of New Orleans transplants in Los Angeles who were excited to see familiar faces

and to listen familiar tunes. “Kid Ory’s in town, gee⎯ and man,” recalled Manetta, “That was

enough advertisement.” Ory also used some old promotional tricks from New Orleans to

advertise the band on the west coast. He obtained two mules and a wagon and loaded the

instruments on the back. The band played on the truck, throughout town advertising for the

evening show at the Cadillac. According to Manetta people, “come out, busting the door down,”

to hear the music in the street. “We didn’t get to Hollywood,” recalled Manetta, “but the news

46
For more information on the time the Creole Jazz Band spent in Los Angeles see: Lawrence Gushee, “How the
Creole Band Came to Be,” Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1988), 88; Edward “Kid” Ory, interview
transcript, April 20, 1957, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.

106
got out there, you know.” The band played that night at the Cadillac. The venue was packed with

a lively audience so the group, “played and played,” late into the night.47

Ory’s stay in Los Angeles was fruitful. He found steady work in the city’s night clubs

and once made as much as six hundred dollars in one day working on a marathon recording

session with Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and Lil Hardin. Ory remained in the City of Angels until

1925 when he finally joined Oliver in Chicago. Ory left Los Angeles because he “wanted to see

the country. I had work there. Oliver was waiting for me and I disbanded.” Once in Chicago, Ory

got in touch with old friends from New Orleans: “Louis [Armstrong] wrote to me, told me he

was going to leave Fletcher [Henderson], he heard I was coming to Chicago, would I record with

them, you know. Then I worked at Dreamland with Louis after that. After Dutray got well, and

Oliver was waiting for me.”48 Oliver and Armstrong repaid an outstanding debt to Ory once he

arrived in Chicago, as he extended a helping hand to fellow musicians throughout the 1910s and

1920s. Like Floyd Campbell, Ory’s migration involved several stops along the way, before he

finally settled in Chicago. But for many musicians migration was a way of life. Many

experienced an initial phase of travel that involved leaving the South followed by itinerate

migrations across the country playing in jazz clubs in a travelling band. For these musicians, life

on the road presented moments of success and moments when their lives were literally in peril.

Because of their dedication and determination, they brought jazz to new places and made new

converts along the way.

47
Edward “Kid” Ory and Manuel “Fess” Manetta, interview digest, August 26, 1958, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane
University, New Orleans.
48
Edward “Kid” Ory and Manuel “Fess” Manetta, interview digest, August 26, 1958, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane
University, New Orleans; Edward “Kid” Ory, interview transcript, April 20, 1957, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane
University, New Orleans.

107
In Europe We Were Royalty; In Texas We Were Back In The Colored Section

Thanks to travelling musicians like Ory, Moten, and Marable, jazz soon found receptive

audiences in San Francisco, Seattle, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cincinnati, Louisville,

Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and dozens of other urban locations across the country. The new music

enjoyed such intense popularity that new frontiers for jazz emerged in Europe. In late 1918 Will

Marion Cook, the noted New York City bandleader, visited the Deluxe Café to hear a young

clarinet player from New Orleans. Cook persuaded the clarinet player, Sidney Bechet, to join the

Southern Syncopated Orchestra in the Big Apple. Shortly after arriving in New York, the group

set sail for London. Shortly after the grueling fifteen days at sea, the Southern Syncopated

Orchestra played an engagement at the Royal Philharmonic Hall in June 1919. At a music store

in London, Bechet discovered a straight soprano saxophone and fell in love with the instrument.

The unique tonal qualities of the soprano sax helped Bechet achieve his signature sound in

subsequent decades. The group’s stay in London was so successful that the Southern Syncopated

Orchestra was invited to play a private reception at Buckingham Palace for the royal family.49

In 1920, the group travelled to post-war Paris, and their European tour made a lasting

impression on Parisians and Londoners. Writing in the Revue Romande in 1919 Ernest-

Alexandre Ansermet, the noted French conductor, declared that, “Today, rag-time has conquered

Europe; we dance to rag-time under the name of jazz in all our cities….” Ansermet praised

Cook’s band declaring, “The first thing that strikes one about the Southern Syncopated Orchestra

is the astonishing perfection, the superb taste, and the fervor of its playing.” He also singled out

Bechet for his command of his instrument: “I wish to set down the name of this artist of genius;

49
Bechet, Treat It Gentle, 125-128.

108
as for myself, I shall never forget it⎯ it is Sidney Bechet.”50 Thanks to the work of artists like

Cook and Bechet, jazz conquered Europe, and it was a short campaign.

The successful tour ended abruptly for Bechet as he found himself in trouble with British

authorities and was deported back to the United States. Bechet enjoyed himself so much in

Europe that he lived off and on in Paris over the course of his long musical career. In an

interview with Bechet at his Paris apartment in 1957, Scoop Kennedy declared, “There is no

doubt, whatsoever, in the minds and hearts of most people of Western Europe that Sidney is one

of the great men of America. When he plays a concert, you have to buy tickets, weeks in advance.

When he was married recently, on the Riviera, admirers from all over Europe came down to wish

him good luck.”51 Bechet enjoyed life in France. However, the irony for artists like Bechet, Will

Marian Cook, James Reese Europe, Duke Ellington, and dozens of African American musicians

who travelled to Europe over the course of the twentieth century, was that they received a level

of praise that they could not get in their home country. In 1926 Dave Peyton, the Chicago

Defender music columnist intoned his readers, “Don’t become discouraged over the fact that in

this country our opportunities are limited by many avenues being closed against us by race

prejudice, and I further advise all to properly equip themselves, theoretically and practically, to

win this battle: and if we don’t get what we want right here, right to the south of us is South

America, and across the briney is the great continent of Europe, where everyone is given an

equal opportunity to display what he knows. Today these continents are standing with

outstretched arms to welcome whatever we have to offer intellectually.”52 The contrast to the

treatment black musicians received in the South could not be starker. In Paris and other European

50
Ernest-Alexandre Ansermet quoted in, Robert Gottlieb, ed., Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography,
Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 741- 742, 746.
51
Bechet, Treat It Gentle, 129-132; Scoop Kennedy quoted in, Sidney Bechet, interview transcript, 1957, Hogan
Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.
52
Dave Peyton, “The Musical Bunch: Our Musicians in Europe,” Chicago Defender (January 2, 1926), 7.

109
capitals, African Americans were respected as artists⎯ not just as performers.

Black musicians also enjoyed a freer lifestyle abroad than was possible in the United

States. In the late 1940s, Miles Davis made his first journey to Europe. Davis encountered a

similar dynamic his predecessors knew all too well: “This was my first trip out of the country

and it changed the way I looked at things forever. I loved being in Paris and loved the way I was

treated.” Davis explained that, “I had never felt that way in my life. It was freedom of being in

France and being treated like a human being, like someone important…. Anyway, everything

seemed to change for me while I was in Paris.” When Davis left France where he, “understood

that all white people weren’t prejudiced,” he returned to the world of Jim Crow America. That

rude awakening changed Davis’ social consciousness: “I had never been too political, but I knew

how white people treated black people and it was hard for me to come back to the bullshit white

people put a black person through in this country. To realize you don’t have any power to make

things different is a bitch.”53 Like earlier generations of jazz musicians, Davis experienced a

modicum of freedom in Europe not readily available in the United States.

While Davis did not experience European life until decades after the first wave of jazz

musicians left American shores, there is some indication that his experience and sentiments were

not vastly different from his predecessors. In fact, Benny Carter believed that in Europe there

“was a decided difference in the acceptance of you just on the basis of you as a human being,

rather than on the basis of the color of your skin… as far as the racial situation was concerned, I

knew what I was returning to, so there were no surprises, you know, and I’ve always been kind

of able to live within a situation that I know exists, and at the same time, do everything that I can

53
Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 125-129.

110
do to change it.”54 Carter was not the only musician who experienced an altogether different

world in Europe.

After a European tour in the early 1930s Duke Ellington’s band played an extended tour

of the American South. Harry Carney, a saxophone player in the band, remembered that, “Of

course all the places we played down there, they were happy to hear the band. The drag was

they’d be screaming and applauding and afterward you’d have to go back across the tracks…. In

Europe we were royalty; in Texas we were back in the colored section. It was some adjustment,

but we were young and could take it.”55 The indignity of being treated as second-class citizens

affected the way Ellington and his band travelled from then on. As a result, Ellington arranged

on subsequent trips across the South for the group to travel by train in a private Pullman car. Red

Saunders explained that Ellington’s band avoided Jim Crow because Ellington, “hired a whole

Pullman car, and they would pull off to the side and this was their place of sleeping and

everything.” Not only did the band travel and sleep on the car, they also took their meals there.

Barney Bigard remembered, “We had two Pullmans and a baggage car. They had sleepers and a

diner. A couple of us got together and bought a little hot-plate stove and from then on we did our

own cooking right on the train.” Sonny Greer, Ellington’s long-time drummer, reminisced about

how the Pullman cars made life on the road much easier for the band: “We never had to run to

get no rooms, we paid an extra fare to have our car parked in the station. We had our own

Pullman porter and conductor.” Given the extent of segregation, the Pullman car removed the

band from the daily indignities of Jim Crow. “Now we went south,” recalled Greer, “a lot of

them cats down south, you know, in order⎯ confliction, we had the colored over this side, like

54
Benny Carter, interview transcript, October 13, 1976, Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New
Jersey.
55
Harry Carney quoted in, Burns and Ward, Jazz, 202.

111
you know, segregation. We pull up, baggage car in the yard and pay extra to park it. We didn’t

have to go through that junk.” Cab Calloway’s band also used Pullman cars. The trumpet player

Adolphus “Doc” Cheatham spent many years on the road, “Sleeping in buses, eating cold cuts,

being run out of places, being run out of town and all this stuff. With Cab it was first class all the

way. Slept on Pullman’s sidetrack to sleep. Eat the best we could.”56 While the Pullman cars

gave Calloway’s and Ellington’s bands more flexibility in navigating segregated America, not all

black musicians were quite as fortunate.

For the vast majority of black musicians, life on the road was hazardous both north and

south. While scores of musicians moved north during the Great Migration, relocation was not

always a one-way journey. Many musicians viewed life on the road as less than ideal but

necessary in order to maintain a livelihood in jazz.57 African American jazz artists who travelled

for a living faced discrimination, segregated accommodations, police harassment, intimidation,

and dangerous conditions on the road. Don Albert, who grew up in New Orleans, spent many

years on the road and often had trouble finding a place to stay and restaurants that would serve

him and his band mates. Albert faced so many indignities on the road that he did not like to talk

about it because the “memories are nauseating.” The first time Albert crossed the Mason-Dixon

Line he thought, “Hell, man this is heaven.”58 But he soon found out discrimination respected no

geographical boundaries, as the North was no racial utopia. Navigating in a Jim Crow world

could be very daunting in every region of the country.

Milt Hinton and Benny Carter found alternative accommodations on the road. Hinton

56
Theodore “Red” Saunders, interview transcript, March 28, 1978, Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University,
Newark, New Jersey; Bigard, With Louis and the Duke, 68; Sonny Greer, interview transcript, January 15, 1979,
Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey; Adolphus “Doc” Cheatham, interview
transcript, April 1, 1976, Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey.
57
James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners
Transformed America (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 139.
58
Don Albert, interview digest, December 30,1969, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.

112
recalled, “Now all over America, every black musician in every band knew where to go to eat⎯

would have to eat in places like Uncle Henry’s in Cincinnati.” Wilson recalled that on the road

certain cities were, “loaded with little Negro restaurants, where we would risk getting refused in

white restaurants when we travelled, so the best bet was just to go to the ghetto district where we

knew the hotel situation, or rooming house or restaurant to eat and sleep.” In addition to eating at

Uncle Henry’s in Cincinnati, the two stayed at the riverfront Sterling Hotel that was, “like home

to us, and the first time I saw those giant rats, as big as cats and dogs,” recalled Wilson. On one

extended stay at the Sterling, Wilson and his band mates named one rat “Jerry.” “We would go

on the road and go out for a few weeks, and we’d come back and Jerry was still living in the

hotel, just like everyone else.”59 The experiences of Hinton and Wilson attest to the separate and

unequal accommodations black musicians faced on the road both north and south.

Segregated and unequal accommodations were demeaning and frustrating. Worse yet,

was the harassment and threats musicians faced in cities and towns across the country. Police

harassment, particularly in the South, was common. In one southern city Barney Bigard

remembered, “You couldn’t be downtown after ten or they would take you in and beat the hell

out of you. We didn’t know any better and we decided to walk back to the railroad station. There

was about five of us and these cops stopped us and looked us over. One big cop looked us up and

down and said, ‘Well. These niggers are different from the niggers down here.’ They just let us

go about our business.” In 1927 Roy Eldridge and his band mates stopped in Little Rock,

Arkansas to play an engagement. The week before they arrived a black man was lynched and his

burned body dragged through the streets of the city’s black neighborhood. When Eldridge

arrived in town, he approached a local police officer to ask how to get his equipment into town.

59
Teddy Wilson and Milt Hinton, interview transcript, October 2, 1979, Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers
University, Newark, New Jersey.

113
The policeman replied, “Oo-ooh. You’re up there from where the niggers cuss the white folks,

eh… If I catch you out after twelve o’clock, I’m gonna lock you up.” During an engagement in

Georgia, the local police arrested Don Albert’s band and threatened to shoot him. When the

group arrived at the station, the police seized the band’s pay for that evening. The officer

justified seizing the band’s pay, because he was setting a fine where he was sure the local judge

would level it. When Albert demanded a trial before a judge the officer called him a “smart

nigger from New York.” The policeman then told Albert and his band to get out of town

immediately. During another trip through Florida, Albert was travelling with his band. The driver

of his vehicle was caught speeding by a local law enforcement official. To avoid harassment,

Albert (a light-skinned Creole) jumped into the driver’s seat so the police officer would think he

was a white man. The gambit worked, and the band escaped further hassles.60 Unfortunately,

these were not isolated incidents.

At times, local police were called in to protect musicians from violent crowds. Doc

Cheatham recalled an incident in Memphis, Tennessee when a white girl asked for Cab

Calloway’s autograph and the singer obliged he request. That simple gesture touched off a brawl:

“Chairs, bottles, everything, the biggest fight you ever saw in your life in the ballroom⎯ free-

for-all, throwing at the band, fighting the band. Chairs⎯ I got behind a table…. Cops came and

hustled Cab out, took him out the back and put him in a car, and we didn’t see Cab anymore until

we got on the train.” During another incident a rowdy crowd at the end of a show, “just started

throwing things. They threw a bottle up there and it hit the drummer in the head, knocked a hole

in his head. That was in Miami, we had to be hustled out of there.” Barney Bigard stated that

even though Duke Ellington was a big star, his band was not immune to intimidation from local
60
Bigard, With Louis and the Duke, 69; Roy Eldridge, interview transcript, June 15, 1982, Institute for Jazz Studies,
Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey; Don Albert, interview digest, August 6, 1973, December 30, 1969, Hogan
Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.

114
crowds. “I mean Duke was a big name, even in the South, but they always had to have four cops

stationed at each corner of the place so that the local people wouldn’t get any ideas.”61 The irony

that local police, who by and large did not hold a favorable view of travelling black musicians,

were called in to protect jazz musicians is rich. This is particularly true given the harassment

faced by Bigard, Eldridge, and Albert.

Though local police were often reticent protectors of black musicians from violent

crowds, jazz artists also faced threats from groups with a history of violence and murder. In the

1920s violinist George Morrison (whose travels through Kansas City influenced Bennie Moten

and Count Basie) opened a club with an Irish Catholic in Golden Colorado. The nightclub did

very well during prohibition⎯ so well it attracted the attention of local white supremacists:

Well, in those days we had the Ku Klux Klan out here. They used to meet up on old
Table Mountain at Golden, Colorado. Every Tuesday night you’d see them in a line five
miles long⎯ cars one right behind the other going up Table Mountain. One night we had
the windows all open while we were playing and here comes a big tall rawboned guy and
a little guy⎯ they looked like Mutt and Jeff. They stood right there by that window
where we were playing. Suddenly I hear that tall guy say to the little fella, ‘This is the
first goddam place we gonna blow up.’ And I’m playing my fiddle and listening. The
little guy asked, ‘Why?’ ‘Because it’s run by a goddam nigger and a Catholic.’ I heard it!
I said to myself, ‘Anytime a man joins that organization there’s something wrong up in
the head. And if he’s fool enough to join that organization, he is fool enough to come in
here and set a bomb under this place. And I’m not worried about myself, but I don’t want
him to hurt my fiddle! I think it’s moving day for me.62

Morrison quickly left town making his livelihood on the road. Given the extensive reach of the

KKK in American society in the 1920s, it is hard to imagine Morrison was the only travelling

musician to face threats from white supremacists and terrorist organizations.63

Other dangers on the road revolved around grueling schedules, demanding booking

61
Adolphus “Doc” Cheatham, interview transcript, April 1, 1976, Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University,
Newark, New Jersey; Bigard, With Louis and the Duke, 69.
62
George Morrison quoted in, Schuller, Early Jazz, 370.
63
Gregory, Southern Diaspora, 290-302.

115
agents, and long hours travelling between destinations. Earl Hines remembered that by the 1920s,

white theater owners, promoters, and record companies, “began to realize the talent Negroes had,

and they began scheming how to commercialize it.” One avenue for the exploitation of black

artists was the Theatre Owners Booking Association. Black artists like Doc Cheatham and Red

Saunders remembered that the initials T.O.B.A. stood for alternately Tough On Black Artists,

Tough On Black Actors, Tough On Black Acts, or Tough On Black Asses. The T.O.B.A. booked

shows in white-owned theaters across the South, and it earned its nefarious reputation through

discriminatory policies, low wages, and grueling touring schedules.64 Cuba Austin believed that,

“There isn’t anything that can ruin a band quicker than a booker who keeps jumping it all over

the country for one-nighters.” He explained that, “You play nine to three, then hop in a bus and

ride. You pull into the next stop maybe around sunset the next day. No time to get a rest in a bed

or even to clean up and get the grime off of you. You get a hot meal someplace and then it’s back

on the stand. That goes on night after night.” The difficult circumstances of constant touring with

little to no down time took its toll on jazz artists. “You’ve seen boys on the stand making out

they were laughing and talking with each other during the numbers⎯ that’s all in the game,”

Austin revealed. “You never know when you see them up there that any of those men might be

in pain. No, I’m not fooling⎯ he might be sick or tired⎯ he might be worried about his family

or a lot of other things, but he has to smile and make the crowd think he is happy. That’s the way

with us. We had to pretend on the stand but instead we were sick inside with hate for Moore and

his booking us all over at whistle stops.”65 The account of Austin calls to mind a poem found in

Louis Armstrong’s personal scrapbooks that document his life on the road and early career as a

64
Earl Hines quoted in, Peretti, Creation of Jazz, 148; Adolphus “Doc” Cheatham, interview transcript, April 1,
1976, Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey; Theodore “Red” Saunders, interview
transcript, March 28, 1978, Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey; Southern, The Music
of Black Americans, 298; Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 39, 99.
65
Cuba Austin quoted in, Shapiro and Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin To Ya, 191-192.

116
jazz musician in the 1920s and 1930s:

A-Eatin’ of is ‘Eart
No one knows the pangs I feel-
Only I.
No one perceives the regrets I have-
Only I.
No one sees the smile-covered tears I shed-
Only I.
For I alone must glory in my sadness
And surround myself with bitterness.66

For Armstrong, Austin, Hines, and dozens of jazz artists, the T.O.B.A. made a tough life on the

road all the more difficult.

Finally, the life of a travelling musician could be potentially life threatening due to the

dangerous conditions associated with highway travel. The constant touring associated with the

T.O.B.A. only exacerbated the problem. In the late 1920s Fletcher Henderson was involved in an

automobile accident while on the road. His wife Leora remembered that, “Believe me Fletcher

was never the same after he had that automobile accident down in Kentucky…. Fletcher was the

only one who got hurt. He had an awful hit in his head and his left shoulder bone was pushed

over to his collarbone. You know, it was the left side that got paralyzed later on. That was the

only accident he ever had, and after that⎯ why, he just changed.” Red Saunders recalled an

incident when Cecil Irwin, the saxophone player for Earl Hines’ band, died in an automobile

accident on the road. In spite of the tragic loss, the band still had to play the engagement. Travel

that did not take place over and could also be dangerous. Sidney Bechet missed an opportunity to

play in Europe in 1921, but it turned out to be potentially life-saving: “The band was going over

to play in Ireland when the ship they were travelling in got hit and sunk. And eight of the band

66
Scrapbook #2, Louis Armstrong Collection, Louis Armstrong House Museum Archives, Queens College, New
York. It is unclear if, but highly likely that, Armstrong penned the poem. Given Armstrong’s writing style that
closely matches the writing in the poem, and the fact it was found in his personal scrapbooks, it is almost certainly
his work.

117
got drowned, and they lost all their instruments. It was a terrible thing. If I hadn’t been back in

America, God Knows, I might have gone on too with those poor boys who were drowned.”67

Life on the road was dangerous for all musicians due to the hazards of travel. For African

American musicians, however, the hazards of road travel were one of many dangers along the

way.

Conclusion

The exodus of more than one million African Americans out of the South in the 1910s,

1920s, and 1930s was the result of many factors. Some left for purely economic reasons, while

others sought the full rights of citizenship they had so long been denied in the South. Jazz

musicians shared some characteristics with other migrants in their motivations to travel north.

However, the desire to express themselves artistically separated them from fellow migrants.

Once musicians voted their displeasure with southern society with their feet during the Great

Migration, the grass-roots networks that jazz musicians fostered in the Big Easy and elsewhere

became instrumental in facilitating further migration. However, migration was not always a one-

way journey.

Due to economic necessity, many musicians lived a life on the road. The rigors of

constant touring took its toll on jazz artists. The vast majority faced discrimination, segregation,

second-class accommodations, police harassment, violent and threatening crowds, exploitive

booking agencies, and dangerous conditions on the road. As Red Saunders marveled, “when you

look back you wonder how you made it.”68 Yet, the sacrifices made by musicians like Saunders

67
Leora Henderson quoted in, Shapiro and Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin To Ya, 222; Theodore “Red” Saunders,
interview transcript, March 28, 1978, Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey; Bechet,
Treat It Gentle, 133.
68
Theodore “Red” Saunders, interview transcript, March 28, 1978, Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University,
Newark, New Jersey.

118
facilitated the spread of jazz across the country in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, as travelling

musicians showcased their artistic achievements in a number of emerging jazz capitals across the

country. In two crucial jazz metropolises, Chicago and New York City, the music reached new

heights of innovation and artistic mastery. Consequently, the Windy City and the Big Apple

assumed dominant positions in the forging of new styles and artistic achievement that dictated

the direction and range of jazz as an art form well into the 1920s and 1930s.

119
Chapter 4:

I Made It My Business To Go Out for a Daily Stroll and Look This ‘Heaven’ Over:
Chicago and the New Negro of Jazz

In 1919 Buster Bailey, a young clarinet and saxophone player, made his way to Chicago.

Bailey explained that he was inspired to start a new life in Chicago because of the success of

fellow Memphis musicians: “Lil Hardin is from my home town. She caused me to want to go to

Chicago. We had been neighbors. She left… and went to Chicago where she worked at the

Dreamland and Pekin Gardens. She was making a hundred-fifty a week salary.” Compared to the

$2.60 a night wage Bailey made in Memphis, Hardin’s salary seemed enormous. In a matter of a

few months word reached Memphis of the success of Chicago musicians. Bailey made up his

mind, “to go to Chicago to get some of that money. So I left even before I finished those last two

weeks of high school.” Like dozens of other jazz artists, Bailey was allured by the opportunities

Chicago offered. For Hardin, Chicago was unlike anything she new in Memphis: “In the summer

of 1918, my folks moved from Memphis to Chicago, and I made it my business to go out for a

daily stroll and look this ‘heaven’ over. Chicago meant just that to me⎯ its beautiful brick and

stone buildings, excitement, people moving swiftly, and things happening.”1 The accounts of

Bailey and Hardin of post-World War I Chicago reflects the dream of the Windy City as a land

of hope and opportunity for African Americans during the First Great Migration. For jazz

musicians in particular, South Side Chicago presented unique avenues to openly ply their trade,

advance careers, organize collectively, and achieve a social standing and a kind of respectability

unattainable in the South (certainly the black elite would find little if anything respectable about

jazz North or South). The cabarets and theaters of Chicago’s black entertainment district, known

1
Buster Bailey in Shapiro and Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya, 91; Lil Hardin Armstrong in Shapiro and Hentoff,
Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya, 91.

120
as “The Stroll,” acted as incubators that nurtured jazz from its infancy to adolescence. Here, the

music matured into a distinct Chicago style that blended southern and northern influences,

cultures, and personalities to create a national, and uniquely American, musical art form.

The net effect of this Great Migration resulted in an explosion of African American

culture and entrepreneurship concentrated in Chicago’s South Side. Jazz stood at the vanguard of

this cultural explosion, and Chicago was the place to be for musicians from 1915 to 1930. Once

the musicians arrived on the South Side scene, just like their counterparts in the migrant

community at large, they engaged in a number of activities designed to improve the standard of

living in their new home. Musicians were not only representative of the migrants; they also

served as civic promoters of the benefits of Chicago living. As Dave Peyton, the Chicago

Defender music columnist and ardent supporter of the local black musicians’ union, explained in

1926, “The Chicago musicians are away ahead of musicians of our group in other cities of the

country. Their achievements have been wonderful.” Peyton not only extolled the

accomplishments of individual Chicago musicians, but also the African American union Local

208 of the American Federation of Musicians: “They own their own building… for the

organization that is officered entirely by members of the Race. Musicians in other places should

follow the Chicago gang. Wake up and do something. Let us make the world respect us. Ours is

an art. Organize yourselves…. Work together, acquire real estate and then you will be

independent.”2

Peyton’s comments reveal that for musicians, the social conditions in the city encouraged

economic opportunity and independence, upward mobility, and community organizing activities

not found in other regions of the country. Because of these conditions, southern transplants like

2
Dave Peyton, “The Musical Bunch,” Chicago Defender (June 12, 1926), 6.

121
Buster Bailey and Lil Hardin, found Chicago particularly alluring. Chicago attracted black

musicians from around the country. Consequently, the Windy City emerged as a critical center of

innovation for the new music and a center of activism in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s.

The South Side Was Together

In Duke Ellington’s autobiography, first published in 1973, the accomplished bandleader

remembered, “Chicago always sounded like the most glamorous place in the world to me….” In

1931 he arrived in the Windy City for an extended engagement, and he marveled at the vibrant

South Side community. Ellington explained that, “The most impressive aspect, I think, was that

the South Side was together. It was a real us-for-we, we-for-us community. It was a community

with twelve Negro millionaires, no hungry Negroes, no complaining Negroes, no crying

Negroes, and no Uncle Tom Negroes.” Ellington was struck by the sheer array of black-run

enterprises and institutions: “It was a community of men and women who were respected, people

of great dignity⎯ doctors, lawyers, policy operators, bootblacks, barbers, beauticians,

bartenders, saloonkeepers, night clerks, cab owners and cab drivers, stockyard workers, owners

of after-hours joints, bootleggers⎯ everything and everybody, but no junkies.”3 Ellington’s

description of the South Side community paints a picture of black entrepreneurship and the range

of economic enterprises African Americans engaged in. Perhaps Ellington’s depiction of the

South Side is a bit overly romantic, as jazz musicians of his stature were respected in the South

Side unlike rank and file residents. However, the accomplishments of South Side residents were

hard earned, and Ellington’s glowing account stands as a testament to the sacrifice, dedication,

and achievement of Chicago’s African American community.

3
Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1973), 131.

122
 Between 1910 and the middle of the 1930s, approximately 250,000 newly arrived African

Americans settled in Chicago’s South Side community. In a four-year period alone, beginning in

1916, some fifty to seventy thousand southern blacks moved to Chicago.4 The migrants soon

found out that the Windy City was no land of milk and honey. The expanding African American

population was cordoned off into a small strip of South Side real estate known as the “Black

Belt.” Restrictive covenants, a series of racially motivated bombings, and a bloody race riot in

1919 effectively segregated the recent arrivals into an area that contained some of the city’s

worst housing. Furthermore, the restriction of residential mobility, coupled with a constant influx

of new migrants, created overcrowded conditions in the limited available housing. Despite these

setbacks, the South Side community took advantage of the opportunities that their new, urban,

northern environment afforded them. As a result, black Chicagoans employed a number of

strategies to help new migrants adjust to the urban landscape, including self-help organizations.

Additionally, a spirit of economic and cultural nationalism and entrepreneurship emerged, and

became a source of community pride. Just as jazz musicians were representative of the larger

participants in the Great Migration, once settled in the South Side, they became representative of

what the community had to offer. Jazz and jazz musicians contributed to the success of the

burgeoning cabaret business in the South Side. The economic institutions that developed as a

result of the Great Migration signaled the growing political and economic clout of the South

Side.

As southern African Americans poured into the Black Belt, they increasingly occupied

vacated rooming houses and hotels hastily constructed for the World’s Columbian Exposition in

1893. In 1915, the African American enclave on the South Side was bound between Twelfth and

4
Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 14; Grossman, Land of Hope, 4. For more information on the South Side
community see the work of the preceding authors and Robin F. Bachin, Building the South Side: Urban Space and
Civic Culture in Chicago, 1890-1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 247-297.

123
Thirty-ninth Streets. State Street represented the western boundary, with Lake Michigan to the

east. The expansion of the Black Belt, fueled by the Great Migration, pushed the southern

boundary to Forty-seventh Street. As blacks moved in, whites vacated much of the original

housing stock, and they moved to suburban neighborhoods outside of downtown.5

The construction of new housing in the Black Belt halted during the war years. This

period also represented the height of the Great Migration and South Side expansion. A severe

housing shortage developed and was only exacerbated by the return of soldiers at war’s end.

Whites in neighboring Hyde Park and Kenwood sought to exclude African Americans from

moving into the neighborhood; residents formed the Hyde Park and Kenwood Property Owners’

Association with the intention of maintaining residential racial segregation. White residents

placed restrictive covenants on properties in Hyde Park and Kenwood that ensured the properties

were not sold to African American buyers.6 The restriction of residential mobility left black

Chicago residents with some of the city’s most dilapidated housing. Furthermore, restrictive

covenants allowed absentee landlords to “extract the highest rents for the worst housing from the

most economically disenfranchised population,” notes historian Davarian Baldwin. The South

Side faced dire housing shortages by war’s end, while other parts of the city reported housing

surpluses.7

When African Americans attempted to procure housing in restricted neighborhoods, they

often met intimidation and violence. Between mid 1917 and the early part of 1921, fifty-eight

racially motivated bombings occurred in the South Side. The bombings targeted African

Americans who moved into white neighborhoods and the real estate agents, both black and

5
Bachin, Building the South Side, 250-251.
6
Ibid, 251-252.
7
Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 23.

124
white, who brokered the sales.8 Consequently, Chicago experienced extreme racial tension by the

close of the decade of the 1910s. In the summer of 1919, the tense atmosphere in the Windy City

erupted in racialized violence, concentrated in the South Side. In July, a young African American

named Eugene Williams was lounging on a raft in Lake Michigan at the black public beach.

When his raft drifted too close to the “whites only” beach, an angry white mob drowned him. For

a period of several days, between July 27th and the 31st, armed white youths attacked African

Americans in the streets and public spaces across the South Side. Because the Chicago Police

were either unable or unwilling to stem the bloodshed, sporadic violence punctuated the ensuing

days. By the time the Illinois National Guard finally quelled the fighting, twenty-three African

Americans and fifteen whites were dead. In addition, more than 530 residents were injured as a

result of the conflict.9 The riot also brought an abrupt end to the Chicago Defender’s campaign

promoting black migration to the Windy City. The conflict exposed the problems migrants faced

in the North, and it was, therefore, increasingly difficult to portray Chicago as an ideal place to

settle. As Alan DeSantis argues, “Chicago simply had become yet another place where the black

American Dream was deferred.”10 This episode also stood in stark contrast to Ellington’s rosier

depiction. The end of the migration campaign did not, however, mark the end of the promotion

of Chicago’s civic and economic institutions on the Stroll.

Despite the setbacks, the South Side community employed a number of strategies to help

new migrants assimilate into the northern urban landscape. One strategy was the development of

a number of self-help organizations. Just as their role was crucial in the organization of migration

clubs, African American women were heavily involved with organizing and promoting self-help

8
Ibid., 25.
9
Grossman, Land of Hope, 179; Bachin, Building the South Side, 290; Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 207.
10
DeSantis, “Selling the American Dream,” WJC, 31 (Fall, 1998), 503.

125
programs. Ida B. Wells, the nationally recognized anti-lynching reformer, was a major player in

this movement. Having migrated herself from Memphis due to threats on her life, Wells founded

the Negro Fellowship League in 1910. Wells’ organization focused its efforts helping young

African American men find housing and employment in the South Side. Wells also collaborated

with Jane Addams and Mary McDowell, of the settlement house movement, to lobby for a

number of reforms on both the national and local stage. Additionally, black women in the South

Side opened their own settlement houses to help new migrants adjust to Chicago living. Places

like the Frederick Douglass Center, the Emmanuel Settlement, Bethel AME’s Institutional

Church and Settlement, and the Phyllis Wheatley Club attempted to instill in the migrants the

middle-class values of cleanliness, thrift, hard work, and piety by creating “wholesome”

recreational spaces free from the snare of vice. These black settlements offered a range of

services including day care, education, domestic arts training, libraries, employment counseling,

playgrounds, and gymnasiums.

In 1913, the Wabash YMCA opened to much fanfare in the epicenter of the South Side.

Wells had long lobbied for a black YMCA because African Americans were denied access to the

city’s other venues. In response, a fundraising campaign solicited donations from some of

Chicago’s most prominent citizens, including Cyrus McCormick, Julius Rosenwald (of the Sears

& Roebuck Co.), and Mrs. Charles Swift. Once completed, the five-story building housed a

dormitory, swimming pool, gym, reading room, bowling alley, and a restaurant. The Wabash

YMCA sponsored both men’s and women’s clubs to promote wholesome recreational

opportunities. The YMCA was not without its critics, however. While some were upset that such

a source of civic pride was underwritten with significant contributions from the city’s white

upper crust, many more charged the institution was elitist. In fact, Wells herself asserted that the

126
cost of membership alone denied significant portions of the community from reaping any

benefits from the YMCA.11

This episode illustrates a larger divide between the values and sensibilities of a

developing “old settler” versus “new settler” schism. On one side of this dynamic, old settlers

used settlement houses and the promotion of middle-class values to lure impressionable migrants

away from the vice and illicit activities associated with the Stroll. Old settlers of the self-defined

“better class” sought to distinguish themselves from the sort of irreparable behavior that they

believed reinforced stereotypes of African American inferiority. New settlers, on the other hand,

often embraced the Stroll and its social byproducts as an avenue for economic advancement and

cultural nationalism, whether these opportunities were deemed respectable or not.12 Southern

migrant and bass player Milt Hinton remembered old settlers, “got the better jobs, and these

people had a better chance at education. They became doctors and lawyers because people would

send them on to school…. And they started what they called a National Negro Music

Association, all black musicians⎯ not jazz, this was no jazz, this was the church and the

classical kind of a thing that we had going.”13 Old settlers often looked down on jazz as less than

respectable. The old settler/new settler rift also affected Chicago musicians. Orchestral musicians

often identified with old settler mores and standards of respectability, while jazz artists often

11
Bachin, Building the South Side, 260-262. For more information on the activism and reform efforts of Ida B.
Wells see: Ida B. Wells, Alfreda M. Duster, ed., Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991); Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign
Against Lynching (New York: Harper and Collins, 2008); Royster, ed., Southern Horrors and Other Writings.
12
Old vs. new settler ideologies did not necessarily follow strict rubrics. For example, one may be a new migrant
but identify with the old settler mind set. On the other hand, one may have lived in Chicago for several decades but
still supported the institutions of vice in the South Side. Most often one identified with either the old or new settler
ideology based on both their income level (i.e. middle vs. working-class) and where one made that income (i.e. the
vice district vs. the pulpit). For more information on this dichotomy see: Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 28-30.
13
Milt Hinton, interview transcript, November 1976, Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New
Jersey.

127
rejected old settler standards of acceptable music practices and adopted new settler attitudes

regarding the nighttime Stroll.

Dave Peyton, the bandleader and violin player, often praised and promoted Chicago

musicians in his weekly columns for the Chicago Defender. His thoughts on jazz, however, often

reflected old settler tastes that placed a high value on spirituals and the classics and relegated

jazz as a “lesser” brand of music. In 1926 he wrote, “Some writers have said that jazz music is

here to stay. That may be true, but jazz music will never put to rout and oblivion the good old

songs of yesterday such as ‘Gimme Dat Old-Time Religion,’ ‘Roll, Jordan, Roll,’… ‘Saved By

Grace’ and many others too numerous to mention that will always live to teach their great morals

to those who are to come.” Peyton often used his music column to lecture musicians on what he

viewed as the “proper” music techniques and professional demeanor. On one occasion, Peyton

crafted a list in his weekly column of “Don’ts for Musicians.” Items on the “Don’ts” list

included, “Don’t use profane language on the stand,” “Don’t hang around places of ill fame after

work hours,” and “Don’t be untidy on the job. It is easy to keep clean.” Peyton’s list reflected old

settler concerns that adhered to W.E.B. Dubois’s notions of a “talented tenth” of African

American leaders who lived exemplary lifestyles that all African Americans were expected to

emulate. Peyton was also very critical of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five band that made some of

the most influential recordings in jazz history. Peyton was not initially a fan of the group’s

innovations: “Louis knows how to play the cornet and he plays it well, but he should let

orchestras alone…. This orchestra of Louis’s is way out of gear. It is noisy, corrupt, contemptible

and displeasing to the ear…. Louis will learn in time to come that noise isn’t music.” At other

128
times, Peyton offered praise for the music and jazz musicians, but he was reluctant to rate jazz

the equal of spirituals and the classics.14

Peyton’s criticisms of Armstrong particularly reveal his old settler sentiments. The Louis

Armstrong Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings included such notable tunes as “Georgia Grind,”

“Heebie Jeebies,” and “West End Blues.” In the recording studio the group pioneered new vocal

techniques, known as skat singing, and they codified the role of the jazz soloist in ensemble

performances that bands followed thereafter. The success of the Hot Five and Hot Seven

recordings launched Armstrong’s career to a national stage. Peyton’s old settler tastes were not

interested in innovation, as much as following the standard rules of the western canon.15

The dynamic of restricted African American residential mobility ironically concentrated

economic entrepreneurial talent and artistic achievement in the South Side. Consequently, both

old and new settlers lived in close proximity to one another and the Stroll. This relationship

created two interdependent incarnations of the South Side entertainment district: the daytime

Stroll and the nighttime Stroll. Both versions featured institutions of economic and cultural

nationalism that reflected an entrepreneurial spirit and communal pride. The daytime and

nighttime Stroll represented the previously ignored buying power of the African American

consumer.

14
Dave Peyton, “The Musical Bunch,” Chicago Defender (May 8, 1926), 6; For Peyton’s Don’ts list see: Dave
Peyton, “The Musical Bunch,” Chicago Defender (June 11, 1927), 6; For more on W.E.B. DuBois concept of the
“Talented Tenth” see: W.E.B. DuBois, “The Talented Tenth,” in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by
Representative American Negroes of Today (New York: James Pott & Company, 1903), 31-76; For Peyton’s
criticisms of Armstrong see: Dave Peyton, “The Musical Bunch,” Chicago Defender (March 19, 1927), 6; Peyton
could be critical of jazz and praise jazz in the same article. For an example of this dynamic see: Dave Peyton, “The
Musical Bunch,” Chicago Defender (March 10, 1928) 6. Peyton’s attitudes reflected an old settler elitism that
viewed jazz as a lower brand of music than spirituals and the classics. For more on Peyton’s elitism see: Baldwin,
Chicago’s New Negroes, 138; Peretti, Creation of Jazz, 70.
15
For more information on the influence of the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings see: Gene H. Anderson, The
Original Hot Five Recordings of Louis Armstrong (New York: Pendragon Press, 2007).

129
 The real estate and banking empire of South Side entrepreneur Jesse Binga was a

significant element of the economic nationalism of the daytime Stroll. Binga, one of the most

prominent old settlers, first arrived in Chicago in 1893. By 1908, he had acquired enough real

estate to become the largest black broker in the city. Simultaneously his connections in the

business allowed him to become the leading bank owner in the South Side. Due to discriminatory

practices of white businesses, Binga’s financial institutions helped new and old settlers gain both

an economic and residential foothold in the South Side. Furthermore, the bank’s profits stayed in

the community. Binga’s real estate developments helped fuel the geographic expansion of the

Black Belt, and his empire grew at such a pace that he was the target of several racially

motivated bombings.16 In light of the less than desirable reputation the Stroll garnered in

Chicago, a 1912 Defender article sought to paint the strip in a good light by extolling the virtues

of South Side entrepreneurs. “Not the least in contributing to this ‘Great Light Way’ is the

shoemaker, the expressman, the restaurateur and other dealers in the necessity of life who lend

their money to make their part of State Street not only business producing but a part of the so-

called ‘life destroyer.’ So away with the State Street bugaboo, away with the odium against 31st

and State Streets. Let the light of intelligence come in, let the natural spirit of making merry have

full vent, and life will run smoother.”17 Other successful business enterprises associated with the

daytime Stroll included Oscar Micheaux’s film company, Andrew “Rube” Foster’s Chicago

American Giants baseball franchise of the Negro National League, Madam C.J. Walker’s black

beauty products empire, and Robert S. Abbott’s Defender.18 The wide array of business ventures

16
Bachin, Building the South Side, 252-254.
17
J. Hockley Smiley, “State Street ‘The Great White Way,’” Chicago Defender (May 11, 1912), 8.
18
Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 141-154, 209-217, 53-90; Grossman, Land of Hope, 74-81.

130
attests to the ability and creativity of Chicago’s black entrepreneurs that made the South Side

such a vibrant community.

The Defender’s coverage of the nighttime Stroll was one example of the dichotomy that

both affirmed and challenged middle-class values. Many old settlers denounced the activities of

ill repute associated with the Stroll and its main artery along State Street. The Defender echoed

these sentiments when it stated that, “Nightly crowds of men and half-grown boys sit in

unsightly positions in front of the [pool hall] or line up along the curb and walls… Vulgarity of

the worst is freely used as peaceful women wend their way past the low dives… No section of

South State Street is exempt.”19 Earlier in the same month, however, the paper reported, “If the

Afro-American would take advantage of their present opportunity they could make this street the

greatest mart in the world… There is an opening along State Street for every legitimate line of

business. Follow the crowd. The crowd is going south. Go south with it.”20 J. Hockley Smiley, in

another Defender article, entitled “State Street ‘The Great White Way’” declared that, “The

Rialto for progressive pleasure seekers on the South Side⎯ not as bad as painted⎯ reputable

business men and women make up this wonderful thoroughfare.”21 Smiley’s assessment speaks

to the new settler attitude that viewed the licit and illicit activities of the nighttime Stroll as a

legitimate avenue for economic mobility.

In fact, the line between respectable business establishments and vice was long blurred in

the South Side. In 1911, the Chicago Vice Commission rezoned the city’s vice district, from its

close proximity to downtown businesses near The Loop, to the Black Belt. This development

19
Chicago Defender (May 23, 1914) quoted in Bachin, Building the South Side, 281.
20
“State Street; It’s Pains, Pleasures and Possibilities,” Chicago Defender (May 2, 1914), 7.
21
J. Hockley Smiley, “State Street ‘The Great White Way,’” Chicago Defender (May 11, 1912), 8. For more
information on nighttime activities in urban America and reform efforts associated with these activities in this period
see: Peter C. Baldwin, In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820-1930 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2012).

131
meant that activities of business and leisure, both legal and illegal, occurred in one common

residential and commercial area.22 Furthermore, African Americans were routinely denied access

to mainstream lending institutions and traditional upwardly mobile employment. Consequently,

many legitimate South Side businesses were underwritten by vice related enterprises.23 The

burgeoning cabaret business in the South Side was one of many examples of this relationship. In

part, the revenue from illegal gambling funded some of the Stroll’s most famous black owned

clubs, where jazz was played, like the Pekin Theater, The Elite No. 1, The Elite No. 2, the

Deluxe, and the Dreamland Cafe. African American owned cabarets, known as “black and tans,”

served as highly lucrative institutions of economic and cultural nationalism. The cabarets

of the South Side employed not only jazz musicians, but also scores of cooks, bartenders,

waiters, waitresses, doormen, and managers. To new settler sensibilities, these businesses were a

source of cultural pride.24

South Side cabarets were very popular, especially for new settlers, and the events staged

at these establishments were regularly advertised in the Defender. In August 1924 the Grand

Theater at 3110 South State Street staged “Big Syncopation Week” featuring “Robinson’s Ten

Syncopators and other Big-Time Acts⎯ An All-Star Bill.” The event was so popular the theater

staged two nightly performances with three shows on Saturday and Sunday. When the Savoy

Ballroom opened on the corner of South Parkway Boulevard and 47th Street in 1927, Charles

Elgar’s band played the inaugural ball. The Defender declared, “When the new million dollar

Savoy Ballroom opens next Wednesday evening there will be men and women from all walks of

22
Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 26.
23
Ibid., 45-47. Jesse Binga’s banking empire, for example, was partially solidified by his marriage to Eudora
Johnson in 1912. Eudora was the sister of longtime South Side illegal gambling magnate, John “Mushmouth”
Johnson. When Johnson died, Eudora received sixty percent of his fortune. Those assets were transferred to Binga’s
bank after their famed wedding, thus ensuring its economic stability. For more information on this relationship see:
Bachin, Building the South Side, 271-273.
24
Kenney, Chicago Jazz, 10, 18.

132
life there to make merry until the wee hours of the morning…. Dance lovers will be given thrills

galore when they hear them [Charles Elgar’s Band]. The Savoy is really a combination of a

theater and ballroom, for there will be a regular program nightly of vaudeville and special

features.” In addition to advertising engagements at South Side cabarets, the Defender also

frequently advertised the sale of records cut by South Side musicians who played on the Stroll.

When King Oliver’s Jazz Band recorded their first songs for Okeh Records the Defender was

elated: “For years King Oliver’s Band has served up jazz to thousands, yes many thousands, at

Lincoln Gardens, Chicago’s dazzling cabaret. But, man alive, can’t those boys play it, say it in

true blues harmony. Why, they are the ones who put jazz on the map.” In another advertisement

from the same newspaper edition, the Defender declared, “Erskine Tate, well known as the

leader of Tate’s Vendome Orchestra, from Chicago’s finest theater, has also become an Okeh

record star.” Drummer Charles Walton remembered that the South Side community

affectionately referred to the neighborhood as “Bronzeville.” Walton explained, “Chicago’s

South Side became the center of black entertainment in America. Night clubs, theaters, and

lounges multiplied especially in the black community… there was live music everywhere in

Bronzeville.”25 Clearly, new settlers were proud of the cultural milieu of the South Side, as

evidenced by Walton and the glowing coverage the Defender delivered of cabarets and the

recordings by the musicians of the Stroll. Because the activities of the nighttime Stroll, the

entertainment strip provided a variety of employment options for the community. Consequently,

the line between licit and illicit activity was thin.

Former heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Johnson, opened his Café de Champion in

25
Advertisement, Chicago Defender (August 16, 1924), 7; “Elgar’s Band Set For Savoy Inaugural Ball,” Chicago
Defender (November 19, 1927), 5; Advertisement, Chicago Defender (August 18, 1923), 7; “Chicago Orchestras
Make Okeh Records,” Chicago Defender (August 18, 1923), 11; Charles Walton, “Bronzeville Conversations,” Box
1 Folder 2, Charles Walton Papers, Vivian Harsch Collection, Carter G. Woodson Branch, Chicago Public Library.

133
1912, to huge fanfare. His cabaret, at 41 West 31st Street, featured a grand ballroom where jazz

musicians, singers, and dancers practiced their crafts. Johnson intended his club to be a venue for

respectable entertainment catering to both blacks and whites in the South Side. However, when

federal investigators visited the club seeking to find evidence of wrongdoing to undermine

Johnson’s credibility, they found prostitutes working as waitresses at the Café de Champion. The

boxer’s high profile relations with white women made him a coveted target of federal scrutiny.

Despite Johnson’s statements that he in no way profited from any illicit behavior, and that they

were only employed as part of the wait staff, he was arrested in violation of the Mann Act.

Johnson eventually fled the country and his cabaret closed as a result. This episode attests to the

blurred line between vice and respectability, and the difficulty of creating separate spheres in

such close spatial proximity.26

In spite of the disillusionment African Americans faced following migration, South Side

residents employed a number of strategies to adapt to the urban landscape, including self help

organizations and institutions of economic and cultural nationalism. Just as jazz musicians

shared certain motivating characteristics with fellow migrants, once they arrived in Chicago, they

helped support institutions of economic and cultural nationalism like other new settlers. These

institutions became a source of community pride, and they signaled the growing economic clout

of the South Side. Residents of the Black Belt, and jazz musicians in particular, were also adept

at channeling economic clout into collective opportunities for racial uplift.

After the Union Showed Its Strength⎯ That’s What Did It

In 1928 Chicago’s black musicians union, Local 208 of the American Federation of

Musicians (AFM), launched a public relations campaign against theater owners in the Windy

26
Bachin, Building the South Side, 269-270.

134
City. That summer a number of owners had installed new sound systems that replaced theatre

orchestras with recorded music. The AFM and Local 208 applied public pressure on them to

reverse the trend. In Chicago, the battle centered on the larger theaters on the South Side that

replaced large orchestras with “canned music.” The Defender proclaimed, “The Musicians union

has urged upon the theaters in our district to install orchestras Sept. 5. The public deserves this

consideration for the money they pay to go into the theaters.” In a series of Defender columns

from July to September in the, Dave Peyton (a staunch union man) appealed to South Side

residents to stand with Local 208: “Conditions are bad in the theaters, many of them have

dispensed with their orchestras and it is the intention of the union to appraise the public of the

true facts in the case and the unfairness certain theatrical promoters are heaping on the

community musicians. The South Side theaters have always had fine orchestras in them and the

proprietors have always recognized the fact that music was their chief asset and that it was what

the public wanted…. The public is the judge. It is now in their hands.” In another column Peyton

railed against a group that owned four of the largest theaters in the South Side. He declared,

“This syndicate controls four theaters in the district and they are patronized mostly by members

of our Race, probably 99 percent…. But the boys feel that an injustice has been heaped upon

them and they are ready to go down fighting for a principle. They want orchestras in the theaters

patronized by their own people and they are satisfied that public support will be given them in

their fight for art perpetuation.” By late October Peyton wondered how long new sound

technology in movie theaters like the Vitaphone would last: “Fads never last long and this is just

what the Vitaphone is, a modern fad… nothing can be invented which will substitute for the

musicians and when it is all over, we are going to have larger orchestras in the theaters.”27 While

27
“Chicago Theatrical News,” Chicago Defender (August 25, 1928), 6; Dave Peyton, “The Musical Bunch,”
(September 1, 1928), 6; Dave Peyton, “The Musical Bunch,” (September 22, 1928), 6. Peyton was an orchestra

135
Peyton and the union tried to convince the public that they were being sold an inferior product

with the use of canned music, employment for musicians, and therefore the political and

economic clout of Local 208, was really at stake in the Vitaphone fight.

Thanks to pressure from Local 208 and the national AFM, Chicago musicians succeeded

in gaining concessions form large theater owners: “The large theatrical interests in Chicago and

elsewhere see this point and have not disturbed their orchestras and in many instances they have

increased them to large proportions, giving the public the benefit of the augmented entertainment

and at the same admission price. Orchestras have been dispensed with only in the smaller houses,

but this class of theaters will have their troubles in time.”28 Unfortunately for orchestral

musicians who played in movie theaters, sound systems like the Vitaphone were not a fad; Local

208’s victory over the large theater owners was short-lived.29

Bandleader and long time Local 208 Officer, William Everett Samuels, remembered the

fight between the local union and South Side theater owners over the use of canned music.

Samuels remembered with pride that, “They tried to come up with a number of gimmicks back

then to put the musicians in their place. They brought jukeboxes into the theaters [vitaphones],

but we [the union] stopped that. It never did get off the ground. See, we could stop people then.”

He was also involved in a strike of the Vendome Theater in 1932 because the owner refused to

sign a contract with Local 208. Samuels recalled, “We had a quick small strike and he fell in

leader who played in South Side theaters, and he was an ardent supporter of Local 208. In July Peyton wrote his first
column decrying the use of “canned music,” and he informed his readers by moves from the national AFM against
the practice. For a closer reading of these articles see: Dave Peyton, “The Musical Bunch,” (July 21, 1928), 6; Dave
Peyton, “The Musical Bunch,” (August 18, 1928), 6; Dave Peyton, “The Musical Bunch,” (October 27, 1928), 6.
28
Dave Peyton, “The Musical Bunch,” (October 27, 1928), 6.
29
Local 208’s stand against the Vitaphone renewed once again in 1936. In that year the American Federation of
Musicians called a general strike of theater musicians in Locals across the country to protest the installation of
Vitaphones in large movie theaters from coast to coast. The strike proved ineffective, but it highlighted the dual
nature of professional musicians as both workers and artists. For more information on the general AFM strike of
1936, and its impact on theater musicians see: Robin D. G. Kelley, “Without a Song: New York Musicians Strike
Out against Technology,” in Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last
Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 119- 156.

136
line. After the union showed its strength⎯ that’s what did it. It also helped membership.” Local

208 was also well versed in getting their message out, as the columns of Dave Peyton attest.

Since the activities of the union were advertised in the Chicago Defender, “There was no

problem in getting the Black musicians to see the need for the union. We didn’t have that

problem. They wanted to join. They knew what the problems were,” according to Samuels.30 The

organizing activities of Local 208 were one of many political strategies African American

musicians employed in the Windy City.

The political expression of jazz artists most often centered on African American owned

cabarets and the black musicians union. Consequently, the mobilizing and organizing activities

of musicians serve as a benchmark of their political acumen. In addition, the cabarets served as

incubators for social change, and they afforded musicians opportunities to intermingle with other

races in a manner previously impossible. This dynamic impacted American culture at large.

Compared to the repression of overt political activism in the South, Chicago afforded jazz artists

a variety of avenues for political expression. South Side musicians took advantage of these

opportunities and carved out political domains that catered to the aspirations and needs of the

jazz community.

Jazz musicians helped convert the emerging economic clout of the South Side into

political capital. In 1915 the Second Ward elected Oscar DePriest to represent the South Side and

serve as Chicago’s first black Alderman. After a political scandal involving DePreist supporters

threatened the viability of the alderman’s reelection campaign, Major Robert R. Jackson defeated

DePreist in the Republican primary in 1918. Jackson, who garnered the nickname “Fighting

Bob” because “of his readiness to battle for the Race,” was a member of Local 208 (though it is

30
Donald Spivey Interview with William Everett Samuels in Donald Spivey ed., Union and the Black Musician:
The Narrative of William Everett Samuels and Chicago Local 208 (New York: University Press of America, 1984),
38, 53, 119.

137
unclear what instrument he played or how often he worked as a professional musician), and he

received the unanimous endorsement of the union. Local 208 members also pledged in the

motion to endorse Jackson to, “not only do their duty toward Major Jackson by voting for him,

but that they get out, get busy and try to secure the word of their neighbor that he or she would

do the same.” He also garnered the endorsement of the Chicago Defender. In its coverage of the

Jackson primary victory the newspaper declared, “It would have been a sorry plight to see the

man [DePriest] nominated by the Race for a seat in the city government to be suddenly brought

to trial and more rot and filth thrashed out in the daily papers, not one of whom endorsed him.”

That fall Louis B. Anderson and Major Robert R. Jackson became the second and third African

Americans elected to Chicago’s City Council from the Black Belt. The newly emerged visibility

and influence of African Americans in City Hall meant increased attention to the black vote by

white politicians. Because of the overwhelming support of South Side residents, three-term

Mayor, William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson made several black political appointments.

Thompson also provided political protection for the South Side cabarets closely associated with

illicit activities.31 In November 1928 Oscar DePriest narrowly defeated Henry Baker, the white

Democratic candidate, to represent the First Illinois Congressional District in the United States

House of Representatives. With his inauguration in 1929, thanks to the political power of the

31
Kenney, Chicago Jazz, 5, 9-10, 28-29. Cabaret owners Tennan Jones and Robert T. Motts funneled money into
the political campaigns of South Side politicians. Both Jones and Motts built their fortunes, in part, on illegal
gambling enterprises. Jones was indicted for conspiracy in 1917. In the ensuing investigation Jones admitted to
providing money to both Oscar DePriest and Police Captain Stephen K. Healy. The prosecution viewed these
contributions as political “hush money” to ensure the police did not raid Jones’s club. Jones claimed his
contributions to DePriest were strictly campaign contributions. DePriest was eventually acquitted of charges related
to the investigation. Coverage of Jackson’s endorsement by Local 208 can be found in, Mrs. Blanch Smith Walton,
“Maj. Jackson Indorsed,” Chicago Defender (February 9, 1918), 6; Coverage of Jackson’s defeat of DePreist and the
meaning behind the nickname “Fighting Bob” can be found in, “Jackson Wins Over DePriest,” Chicago Defender
(March 2, 1918), 1.

138
South Side electorate, DePriest served as the first African American in Congress outside of the

South, and the first since the collapse of Reconstruction.32

While the union was busy endorsing black candidates for local office, black cabaret

owners helped to channel the political power of the South Side electorate. The owners of some of

the most prominent cabarets in the South Side were themselves black Republican Party

organizers who, according to historian William Howland Kenney, “used the musicians, their

music, and popular entertainers to attract and to focus the attention of potential black voters.”

Robert T. Motts, the prominent black politician, for example, paid his Pekin Inn customers of the

to register voters in the Second Ward. Furthermore, jazz musicians were often the featured

entertainment at ceremonial political events for local and national politicians, both black and

white. In 1919, when Mayor Thompson landed the Republican National Convention in the

Windy City, the black owned Royal Gardens hosted some of the entertainment for visiting

delegates.33 Musicians often provided entertainment at political events. Chicago Defender

columnist Maude Roberts George helped recruit musicians to play events in the election year of

1924: “During the political campaign there is a demand for musicians for the programs and it is

to be hoped that the chairmen of the large meetings will include some of our foremost musicians

in these opportunities where there is compensation. There is great opportunity for interracial

contrast and impressions at these affairs.”34 Political events connected musicians with Chicago’s

political machine, provided employment, and showcased their talent to an interracial clientele.

Jazz musicians and cabaret owners were also involved in other mobilizing efforts. Motts

offered the Pekin Inn at 2700 South State Street, shortly after conducting extensive renovations,

32
“Election of DePriest in Doubt,” Chicago Defender (November 10, 1928), 1; “Bulletin,” Chicago Defender
(November 10, 1928), 1; “DePriest Stirs U.S. Senate by Visit,” Chicago Defender (March 9, 1929), 1; “Chicagoan is
Sworn in as Makers of Laws Assemble,” Chicago Defender (April 20, 1929), 1.
33
Kenney, Chicago Jazz, 5-6, 29.
34
Maude Roberts George, “News of the Music World,” Chicago Defender (March 22, 1924), 8.

139
to Ida B. Wells to hold a fundraiser for the Frederick Douglass Center.35 In July 1926, Chicago

was the home for the seventh annual convention of the National Association for the

Advancement of Colored People. The Plantation Café at 338 East 35th Street provided a hall for

delegates, and Joe Oliver’s Orchestra provided entertainment. Dave Peyton’s band also played

for NAACP delegates. In June 1927, the South Side hosted a victory ball at the Eighth Regiment

Armory for Chicago’s Republican Party. Alderman Louie B. Anderson was honored at the

reception along with party organizer Daniel Jackson because, “Under the guidance of these

gentlemen the Second Ward swung solid for the present administration…. Every cabaret in the

district was dark on that night and they all sent their floor shows and orchestras to do honor to

the occasion.” Dave Peyton’s orchestra from the Café De Paris played the victory ball along with

jazz bands led by Sammy Stewart from the Dreamland Café, Erskine Tate from the Vendome,

and Louis Armstrong from the Sunset Café. The show stopping performance came from

Armstrong’s band: “The Sunset show and orchestra followed with a thunderous show, speed and

plenty of it. They danced, they black bottomed, they strutted and did everything else to make

merry.” Musicians also joined political organizations like the Urban League and the NAACP. In

1928 Dave Peyton promoted the work of the Urban League in his column and encouraged fellow

musicians to join: “The Chicago musicians are joining the Urban League. It is wonderful that the

musicians see the point. They are not only helping themselves, but at the same time doing good

for others. A.L. Foster, executive secretary, is having no trouble lining up the musicians. The

organization has functioned well for many years. It has done much good and will continue. It is

going to help the musician to break down the barrier of prejudice that is arrayed against them.”

In 1930 the Board of Directors of Local 208 passed a resolution “favoring and endorsing the

35
Bachin, Building the South Side, 273.

140
practices and activities of the NAACP,” and they encouraged members of Local 208 to join the

civil rights organization. From 1928 to 1944 Chicago musicians worked in collaboration with the

Defender, the Urban League, the NAACP, and the white owners of the Regal Theater staged

several concerts to benefit South Side charitable organizations.36

In 1924, black policemen in the South Side formed a street band, not unlike the street

bands of pre-migration New Orleans. The Chicago Defender explained that, “This band was

organized as a protest to the treatment afforded our policemen who were refused admission to

the white band under the regime of the former chief.” Oscar DePriest lobbied Chief Morgan A.

Collins for the consent to form a separate band, and the officers paid tribute to DePriest with a

banquet in his honor in January of that year. The work of the police band attests to the ability of

South Side musicians to utilize political connections to their benefit.37 Whether joining the Urban

League, providing services for the NAACP, or playing for South Side political functions,

Chicago musicians took advantage of the opportunity to express political sentiment in public

arenas that were simply not available in the South.

In addition to mobilizing efforts, jazz musicians were involved in a number of organizing

activities in the South Side. Education was a fundamental organizing activity. The musical

training of jazz musicians followed two distinctive and often complimentary trajectories. The

first of these was formal education in music conservatories and local high schools. Some

musicians arrived in Chicago having already been trained at Black Colleges. For example, Louis

36
Dave Peyton, “The Musical Bunch,” Chicago Defender (July 3, 1926), 6; Dave Peyton, “The Musical Bunch,”
Chicago Defender (June 19, 1926), 6; Dave Peyton, “The Musical Bunch,” Chicago Defender (June 18, 1927), 6;
Dave Peyton, “The Musical Bunch,” Chicago Defender (July 14, 1928), 6; Minutes of the Board of Directors
Meetings for Local 208 of the AFM (November 20, 1930), American Federation of Musicians File, Harold
Washington Library Center, Chicago Public Library; Clovis E. Semmes, “Charitable Collaborations in Bronzeville,
1928-1944: The Chicago Defender and the Regal Theater,” Journal of Urban History (November 2011) Vol. 37 No.
6, 975- 991.
37
“Members of Chicago Police Band,” Chicago Defender (January 12, 1924), 4.

141
Armstrong’s second wife, pianist Lil Hardin, was educated at Fisk University where she majored

in music and graduated Valedictorian. Others received training after arriving in Chicago.

Bandleader Charles Cooke earned his PhD in music from the Chicago College of Music. In

addition, the National University of Music in the South Side specialized in the training of

aspiring black musicians. Another important source of training in the South Side were the music

programs at both Wendell Phillips and DuSable High Schools. Headed by one time Tuskegee

Institute Music Director, Major N. Clark Smith, the program at Wendell Phillips produced such

noted jazz greats as Milt Hinton and Lionel Hampton. Captain Walter Dyett ran DuSable’s

program. Trombonist, Morris Ellis recalled that, “Cap taught us⎯ in fact he prepared us⎯ to be

ready to go out into the professional music world…. When the guys left DuSable, they were

ready to go out into the world and play professionally, and I don’t mean just still learn.”38 The

other avenue for music education was informal apprenticeships. Louis Armstrong owed his start

in professional music to Joe Oliver. The cornetist taught Armstrong both the latest techniques

and how to succeed in the business. Some musicians complimented their formal education with

apprentice studies. Armstrong asserted that Lil Hardin expanded her range by learning from,

“Joe Oliver, Freddie Keppard, Sugar Johnny, Lawrence Dewey, Tany Johnson, in fact all of the

pioneers from New Orleans.” Lil, in turn, helped mentor Armstrong by sharing elements of her

formal training.39

Hardin was a central figure in the early career of Armstrong in Chicago. While Joe Oliver

served as Armstrong’ musical mentor in New Orleans and his first days in Chicago, Hardin

38
Kenney, Chicago Jazz, 52; Louis Armstrong in, “The Armstrong Story,” in Brothers, ed., Louis Armstrong In His
Own Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 50; Chicago Defender (August 9, 1924), 2; Timuel D.
Black Jr. Interview with Morris Ellis in, Timuel D. Black Jr. ed., Bridges of Memory: Chicago’s First Wave of Black
Migration (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 178.
39
Armstrong, “The Armstrong Story,” in Brothers, ed., Armstrong in His Own Words, 50, 53; Collier, Louis
Armstrong, 113.

142
pushed Armstrong in new directions that elevated his career to stardom. Armstrong and Hardin

became intimate while members of Oliver’s band. They married in 1924, and Hardin challenged

Armstrong to seek new opportunities apart from Oliver. Hardin knew Oliver was intentionally

holding Armstrong back on the bandstand. Armstrong remembered, “Joe Oliver…. He said [to

Hardin], ‘As long as little Louis is with me, he can’t hurt me.’ Right away Lil thought ‘Oh God.’

Right away Lil got behind me when she told me this, and said… ‘With a thought like that in

King Oliver’s mind, as much as you idolize him, daddy, you must leave him, immediately,

because King Oliver, and his ego and wounded vanities may hurt, and may hurt your pride… It’s

all indications that King Oliver is trying to hold you back.’ It proved all indications that the

woman was in my corner.” Hardin knew Armstrong was talented enough to make a name for

himself in jazz:

At first when he was working with King Oliver he wanted to play as King. The idea
came to me that as long as he was with Joe he would never bring himself out…. I said to
Louis, ‘Now look. We married now. See I don’t want you playing second trumpet. You
got to play first… you will have to quit Joe and find you a job playing first…. You can’t
be married to Joe and married to me too….’ Ollie Powers hired him and they took the
band in the Dreamland. And he had to be first because he was the only trumpet player
they had. That’s when Louis started to playing and showing what he had in himself.
Because as long as he was with King Oliver, he was second to Joe and trying to play
Joe’s solos and which he couldn’t play because it wasn’t his style at all.

Due to Hardin’s advice, Armstrong’s reputation in Ollie Powers’ band spread across the country.

He soon received an offer to join Fletcher Henderson’s band in New York City. When Hardin

learned her husband received second billing in Henderson’s band, she lined up a new group in

Chicago and booked an engagement at the Dreamland Theater: “I had him [the booking agent at

the Dreamland] make a sign that said ‘Louis Armstrong: The World’s Greatest Trumpet Player.’

I wrote Louis and said ‘Give Fletcher your two weeks notice because I have a job for you for $75

a week…. Louis didn’t want to leave because he kind of liked playing with Fletcher. Louis

143
wasn’t anxious to be a star you know, he just enjoyed playing. And he thought I was crazy⎯ all

that name stuff⎯ putting his name out. He thought I was just silly.”40 Thanks to Hardin’s advice

and encouragement, Armstrong’s career took off. Within a year of leaving Oliver’s band he was

fronting his own group with top billing. The group, Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five (and later Hot

Seven) cut some of jazz’s most influential records in Chicago. Though Armstrong remained

grateful for Oliver’s early assistance, Lil Hardin’s promotional talents and prodding launched

Armstrong’s celebrity to new heights.

Louis Armstrong was not the only jazz artist to receive advice, encouragement and

assistance from fellow musicians. The grass-roots network that facilitated the jazz migration

continued to work on behalf of musicians in the North based on a foundation of mutual

cooperation.41 Multi-instrumentalist, George Dixon remembered receiving tutelage, advice, and

encouragement form bandleaders Dave Peyton and Erskine Tate. Ikey Robinson, a banjo player

from Virginia, recalled a jazz promoter named “Stomp King” who helped a number of

musicians. Stomp King not only fed and housed musicians, but he also helped them find work:

“He had a list that was calling him for jobs, you know. He would call you up today and be

working tonight.” Not all musicians found full time employment as musicians. Natty Dominique,

for instance, supplemented his income working in a cigar factory, and Paul Barbarin worked in

Chicago’s stockyards. Other musicians worked grueling schedules to avoid another line of work.

At times it was necessary to begin the work day playing in a theater pit orchestra for a matinee
40
Louis Armstrong, Armstrong Tapes, CD 426, Disc 1, Track 6, Louis Armstrong Collection, Louis Armstrong
House Museum Archives, Queens College, New York; Lil Hardin Armstrong, Armstrong Tapes, CD 563, Track 11-
12, Louis Armstrong Collection, Louis Armstrong House Museum Archives, Queens College, New York.
41
The grass-roots network used by musicians in Chicago was similar to the network employed by musicians who
journeyed north. Charles M. Payne has pointed out that grass-roots organizing consisted of more than helping others
find employment or education. Often, efforts that provide food and shelter are overlooked. For more information on
Payne’s analysis see: Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 276. Below, the definition of grass-roots networks takes
into account this deficiency. I define organizing activities as those efforts that improve the lives of the musicians’
community. These activities not only include economic and educational considerations, but also activities that feed
and shelter fellow musicians.

144
show, followed by an evening shift in a restaurant or dance hall, before finishing the night in an

after-hours club that stayed open until after dawn. Given these difficulties, the musicians

network proved as important in the North as it had in enabling individuals to leave the South.42

Grass-roots musicians’ networks not only aided with housing, meals, education, and

employment, they also helped pay the bills. A staple of this network was the “Rent Party.” Just

like fish fries and lawn parties, northern rent parties employed musicians and provided spaces for

urban sociability. In Chicago, due to limited space, the music was limited to one piano player or

a small combo. The brand of jazz played at rent parties was considered a “lower grade” than that

played in dance halls due to the lack of instrumentation and refined arrangements. Despite this

perception, rent parties remained popular among Chicago’s black working class, and due to their

charisma and promotional skills, a select group of women ran the most successful parties. Danny

Barker remembered that one successful businesswoman was very popular because she supplied

great entertainment, good whiskey, and excellent food. Chicago jazz artists were involved in

many more undertakings than formal political activism. Musicians were also building a jazz

community in the South Side that looked out for the interests of its members outside of party

offices, political rallies, community mobilizing meetings, and the union hall. The rent parties and

the grass roots network of musicians exemplifies the community building efforts of jazz artists in

the South Side.43

42
George Dixon, interview transcript, August 15, 1990, Chicago Jazz Archive, University of Chicago, Chicago;
Ikey Robinson, interview transcript, July 25, 1988, Chicago Jazz Archive, University of Chicago, Chicago; Natty
Dominique, interview transcript, October 24, 1981, Chicago Jazz Archive, University of Chicago, Chicago; Paul
Barbarin, interview digest, December 23, 1959, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.
43
Kenney, Chicago Jazz, 13-14; Danny Barker, interview transcript, May 30, 1980, Institute for Jazz Studies,
Rutgers University Newark, Newark, New Jersey. Chicago musicians were involved not just in political activities,
but also in building a jazz community in the South Side that looked out for the interests of its members. Often labor
histories are institutional in nature and lack the sense of community beyond the walls of the union hall. For
examples of labor histories that focus on community building see: Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial
Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); David Montgomery, Fall of the

145
 Jazz musicians also organized collectively in the black Chicago musician’s union. Local

208 of the American Federation of Musicians was formed in 1902 because Chicago’s Local 10

refused to admit African American members. Though membership increased only incrementally

in its first few years, the country’s first black local managed to survive by meeting in pool halls

and barbershops. By the end of World War I, at the height of Black Belt expansion, the local

purchased a three-story building on South State Street to serve as the union’s offices and meeting

place. Local 208 soon exerted enough clout to force club owners to accept wage scales for

member musicians. Between 1918 and 1929, the local’s membership more than doubled from

three hundred to over six hundred. The union fell on hard times during the Great Depression, but

it still managed to increase its membership to over nine hundred by 1939. The rolls of dues

paying members read as a veritable who’s who of early jazz innovators, including Erskine Tate,

Joe Oliver, and Louis Armstrong. Local 208 and Local 10 remained racially segregated until the

two merged in 1966. The merger did not go over well with Chicago’s black musicians. Drummer

Floyd Campbell remembered, “We did not benefit, in my opinion, by merging. But it was a thing

to do. We had our treasure, our secretary, our clubroom and everything. We gave all that up

when we merged. We owned a building over on Drexel and all of that went into the white union.

We don’t have the work we had when we had the colored union.”44 Unfortunately, the

House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1989).
44
Clark Halker, “A History of Local 208 and the Struggle for Racial Equality in the American Federation of
Musicians,” Black Music Research Journal, (Autumn, 1998), no. 8, 211-212; Floyd Campbell. interview transcript,
Box 3, Folder 1, Charles Walton Papers, Vivian Harsch Collection, Carter G. Woodson Branch, Chicago Public
Library. The issue of merging the two Chicago locals was very contentious and debate continued for several years
before the merger took full effect. The President’s Annual Report of Local 208 in the fall of 1963 discusses in detail
the concerns of members and what union officials hoped to gain from the merger. A copy of the President’s Annual
Report can be found at: Box 4, Folder 33, Charles Walton Papers, Vivian Harsch Collection, Carter G. Woodson
Branch, Chicago Public Library. Charles Walton also interviewed a number of musicians involved in the merger.
The accounts collected by Walton are revealing of a cross section of musicians. The interviews can be found at: Box
4, Folder 1, Charles Walton Papers, Vivian Harsch Collection, Carter G. Woodson Branch, Chicago Public Library.

146
integration of the two locals eventually destroyed the black power base that Local 208 fought so

long to create.

In the 1920s and 1930s, however, the union was adept at protecting the interests of its

members and its economic turf. George Dixon recounts a story where shortly after arriving in

Chicago, and knowing nothing of union activity, he and some band members were physically

removed from a gig when they failed to produce union cards to a rather large representative of

208. Local 208 members were also involved in the public relations campaign against theater

owners over the issue of replacing musicians with Vitaphones in 1928. The dispute over the use

of Vitaphones was not the first fight with local theater owners. In a separate incident in 1926,

Local 208 took part in a national strike of musicians against theater owners. The national AFM

demanded theaters employ a minimum of four musicians for season long engagements. Theater

owners initially balked at the AFM’s request. In mid September the AFM responded with a

nationwide strike. After four days a settlement was reached. Members of Local 208 walked

picket lines in Chicago. Dave Peyton asserted that, “The only way to get what you want is to go

after it. In our immediate district things are not just what they should be. Greater vigilance

should be exerted in regards to working conditions. Gradually the present administration of

Local 208 is washing away many evils brought about politically by preceding administrations.”

In 1932 Local 208 staged the strike of the Vendome Theater that William Everett Samuels

described previously.45

45
George Dixon, interview transcript, August 15, 1990, Chicago Jazz Archive, University of Chicago, Chicago;
Samuels, in Spivey ed., Union and the Black Musician, 38, 53; Dave Peyton, “The Musical Bunch,” Chicago
Defender (September 11, 1926), 6; Dave Peyton, “The Musical Bunch,” Chicago Defender (September 18, 1926), 6.
For more information on other segregated locals and the policy regarding race of the national AFM see: Jacob C.
Goldberg, “Swinging the Color Line: African American Musicians and the Formation of Local 802, 1886-1946,”
M.A. thesis, Amherst College, 2008; Stephen Laifer, “Merged Locals are Windows on Changing Times,”
International Musician (March 2003); Leta E. Miller, “Racial Segregation and the San Francisco Musicians’ Union,
1923-60,” Journal of the Society for American Music, (2007), Vol. 1 No. 2, 161-206.

147
 The majority of the local’s activism centered on employment issues. The union helped

members secure jobs, draw up contracts with prospective employers, enforce contracts, and set

wage scales for members. Unfortunately, a fire destroyed the majority of Local 208’s files dating

to 1930. However, contract enforcement and wage scale issues dominate the remaining records

from the early 1930s. When club owners violated contracts or failed to pay the appropriate wage

scale, they were placed on an “unfair” list by the union. Once on the unfair list, club owners had

trouble securing musicians to fill their nightly lineup. Conversely, musicians who played in

establishments on the unfair list faced stiff fines and possible expulsion. William Everett

Samuels recalled, “Contracts and wage scale is the big thing. You have to have a contract. We

would watch over our people.” Club owners who violated signed contracts were the subject of

Local 208’s Trial Board. Samuels explained, “Then, of course, if they lost the case, if the

company lost, their name was placed on the national defaulter’s list, and then no member of the

American Federation of Musicians could render service to this employer. So that was effective

alright…” These tactics served as primary weapons through which Local 208 sought to guard the

economic interests of its members.46

Chicago’s black musicians union also worked to protect its territory in the city in disputes

with the white local. The relationship between Local 208 and Local 10 was often contentious.

Increasingly the tension arose from complaints over jurisdiction. Dave Peyton explained that,

“The charter granted Local 208 gives it the right to extend its activities anywhere in Cook

County. If our contractors secure engagements out of the Race districts, the white local pulls all

sorts of tricks to get the brother out. It is always some sort of technicality that they base their

46
Samuels, in Spivey ed., Union and the Black Musician, vii, 56; Charles Walton, “Bronzeville Conversations,”
Box 4 Folder 1, Charles Walton Papers, Vivian Harsch Collection, Carter G. Woodson Branch, Chicago Public
Library. The remaining records of Local 208 can be found at: American Federation of Musicians File, Harold
Washington Library Center, Chicago Public Library. The collection houses minutes of Local 208’s Trial Board from
1928- 1965 and the Minutes of the Board of Directors beginning in 1930.

148
argument on.” William Everett Samuels remembered jurisdiction disputes between Local 208

and Local 10; long time Local 10 President James C. Petrillo spearheaded efforts to keep African

American musicians from playing jobs downtown: “Well, here on the South Side back then⎯

we couldn’t go downtown because it was segregated downtown. Paul Ashe wanted to hire Louis

Armstrong while he was at the Roosevelt Theater and Petrillo wouldn’t let Louis⎯ he wouldn’t

let Louis play there. The same thing with Eddie South. He had a job over on Rush Street. They

wanted him; they wouldn’t let him⎯ so he didn’t work over there.” The issue of jurisdiction

grew in intensity in the fall of 1926 that by the spring of 1927, the dispute was presented to the

national AFM for a proposed resolution. Peyton declared, “If square justice is meted out by the

high tribunal, the Race local will be victorious. If the answer is adverse to the Race local, well, it

might as well pack up and go for itself.” Fortunately, square justice was meted out for Local 208.

Peyton boasted at the end of 1927 that, “In Chicago Local 208 operates under its own charter,

has its own officers, and has the same sovereign power in the jurisdiction as the white locals. The

jurisdiction of Local 208 is the entire Cook County.”47

Just a year and a half after the jurisdiction disputes in Chicago, President William Green

of the American Federation of Labor (the AFL was affiliated with the AFM) addressed delegates

from the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. He called on all workers affiliated with the AFL

to unite for the good of all members. In his plea fro unity, Green declared, “I can mention some

of the organizations affiliated with the American Federation of Labor that admit colored workers

freely, heartily and cordially into membership. The great union of which I am a member and of

which I have been a member the greater part of my life has ever admitted, from the beginning,

47
Dave Peyton, “The Musical Bunch,” Chicago Defender (September 18, 1926), 6; Samuels, in Spivey ed., Union
and the Black Musician, 39-40; Dave Peyton, “The Musical Bunch,” Chicago Defender (April 2, 1927), 8; Dave
Peyton, “The Musical Bunch,” Chicago Defender (December 3, 1927), 8.

149
the colored workers. I refer to the United Mine Workers of America… Motion Picture Players’

Union, American Federation of Musicians, American Federation of Teachers… accept colored

workers into membership.” Green further revealed, “I was very proud only a few days ago when

I was privileged to listen to the most charming rendition of music by a colored orchestra. All of

them were artists and I was proud to look upon them and see the great artistic progress which

they had made. They rendered music that touched me deeply and charmed me. But I was more

proud when I was told that every one of them was a member of my great organization, the

American Federation of Labor.”48 Despite Green’s rosy assessment of race relations within the

AFL, Local 10’s effort to bar black musicians from the higher paying jobs downtown reveals that

Chicago’s musician workers were not united.

In addition to its efforts to protect the economic turf of black musicians, Local 208 also

pulled collective resources to raise money and awareness for its activities. Beginning in 1923 the

local held an annual ball with the proceeds going to the union’s daily operations and the local’s

“Building Improvement Plan.” That year Local 208 staged the gala at the Eighth Regiment

Armory in the South Side. The evening’s entertainment featured Joe Oliver’s band from the

Royal Gardens and Erskine Tate’s group from the Vendome Theater. By 1926 the event out-

grew the Eighth Regiment Armory and moved to the Chicago Coliseum on the corner of 15th St.

and Wabash Ave. on the near South Side. Dave Peyton declared, “This is the biggest thing that

has happened in the history of the local. Just think of it! Fifteen bands will play for the expected

20,000 who will be present on the night of June 12. These bands are all topnotchers, such as

Elgar’s, Stewart’s, Oliver’s, Peyton’s, Cooke’s and many others of equal prominence.” By 1928

the union raised enough money from the annual event that they bought a new building at the

48
“Workers Must Unite for Good of All, Says Wm. Green,” Chicago Defender (July 27, 1929), 1, 3.

150
corner of 51st Street and South Michigan Avenue, that once was the mansion of Chicago White

Sox owner Charles Comiskey.49

While Local 208 remained an advocate for jazz musicians throughout the 1910s, 1920s,

and 1930s, it should also be noted that some musicians were critical of what they saw as elitism

on the part of the local regarding proficiency standards to obtain a union card that were based on

the union’s perception of what constituted “acceptable” music. William Everett Samuels

remembered that, “If you can’t read music they just ignore you and don’t give you any work.”

On another occasion Samuels recalled, “You had to play; you had to be able to play, to read. If

you didn’t you just got you a job as a porter or something and got by the best way you could.

They [the non-readers] would work, but they would work in second-class places. We’ve always

had cheaper places like taverns⎯ we called ‘em toilets.” There were also internal politics in

Local 208 that dictated who got the best and worst jobs. James Mack remembered, “I had seen a

pattern of behavior and conduct which didn’t give young musicians, coming up, a chance to

make money unless they played a certain kind of game with the officials…. I can distinctly

remember, you could call Local 208 asking for some information on a given musician, or how to

get in touch with him or his group and be told, ‘Oh you don’t want him, I’ve got somebody else

to offer you.’”50 Given the fact that many jazz musicians learned the craft through informal

apprenticeships, union proficiency tests often relegated talented artists to “second-class”

establishments like the ones Samuels described. It is ironic that the artists who hewed the most

49
Chicago Defender (May 19, 1923), 4; Dave Peyton, “The Musical Bunch,” Chicago Defender (June 12, 1926), 6;
“Chicago Opens Doors to Music Festival,” Chicago Defender (June 12, 1926), A5; Dave Peyton, “The Musical
Bunch,” Chicago Defender (September 1, 1928), 6; “Chicago Theatrical News,” Chicago Defender (September 8,
1928), 6.
50
Samuels, in Spivey ed., Union and the Black Musician, 95, 37; James Mack interview, Box 4, Folder 1, Charles
Walton Papers, Vivian Harsch Collection, Carter G. Woodson Branch, Chicago Public Library.

151
innovative brand of music in the 1920s and 1930s did not receive just recognition from an

organization dedicated to protecting the interests of Chicago’s black musicians.

The camaraderie of the informal musicians network and Local 208 coalesced into a form

of emerging “race” consciousness in that certain black musicians, like Charles Elgar, felt a sense

of responsibility to help fellow African American musicians in need. This emerging

consciousness was also evidenced by the fact that Joe Oliver, Dave Peyton, and other Chicago

musicians began playing events for civil rights groups like the NAACP in the 1920s. Peyton, the

Chicago Defender music journalist, often promoted the accomplishments of black musicians as

both artists and community activists with an air of racial pride in his weekly columns, “All

factions are functioning 100 percent for a progressive future. When it comes to music and

musicians Chicago leads.”51 Musicians also engaged in consciousness-raising through their art.52

Take for example the lyrics to the 1926 song “The Bridwell Blues” by Nolan Welsh and Louis

Armstrong:53

I was standin’ on the corner

Did not mean no harm
I was standin’ on the corner, mama
Did not mean no harm
When a policeman grabbed me by my arm
And the prosecutor questioned me partner
The clerk he wrote it down
The prosecutor questioned me partner
The clerk he wrote it down
He told me “I’ll give you one chance Nolan, but you will not leave this town”

51
Danny Barker, interview transcript, April 1980, Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University Newark, Newark,
New Jersey; Dave Peyton, “The Musical Bunch,” Chicago Defender (July 3, 1926), 6.
52
Here I am borrowing the analytical framework for studying the consciousness raising effects of blues lyrics as
articulated by Angela Davis. For a more detailed explanation of this method see: Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies
and Black Feminism, xi-xiv, 54-57.
53
Nolan Welsh with Louis Armstrong, “The Bridwell Blues,” (Welsh, Nolan; Jones, Richard) [master 9727-A]
Okeh Records 8372 (June 16, 1926) Chicago, Illinois. This song title can be found today in Louis Armstrong,
Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Sony Records, 1994. Many thanks to Will Buckingham from Tulane
University’s School of Music for bringing this song to my attention, providing me an MP3 file of the tune, and a
transcription of the music and lyrics.

152
 And I’ve got too many problems
Bent down on my knees
And I’ve got too many problems
Bent down on my knees
Go on kill me jailer, jailer kill me please
And they sent me to the stone quarry
I’m standin’ in the door
They sent me to the stone quarry
I’m standin’ in the door
It’s just that way people, you know I’ve been here before

Welsh and Armstrong’s song about the harsh conditions at Chicago’s Bridwell prison and the

overt lack of equity for blacks in the American legal system reminded jazz and blues listeners of

the injustices faced in their own lives. In that vein, the call and response between the artist and

listener served as a rhetorical call for further action in combating repression during the age of the

New Negro. Welsh and Armstrong also utilized their talent and position of influence as strength

to publicize issues of unequal justice in Chicago and raise awareness within the community to

combat these problems.

It’s How You Sound

The mobilizing and organizing activities of jazz musicians challenges a common

perception that early jazz innovators were apolitical. In fact, these activities illustrate the wide

variety of political arenas jazz musicians participated in, and they attest to the political acumen

of the jazz community in Chicago. Though the political activities of jazz musicians were not a

panacea for discrimination and segregation in Chicago, jazz helped facilitate cultural integration

in the South Side. The interracial “black and tan” clubs actively courted white patrons, and quite

often their dance floors were the only socially acceptable locales for blacks and whites to

interact. Consequently, South Side black and tans acted as incubators for limited social change as

white gawkers and admirers flocked to see the latest innovations in dance and music. After the

153
clubs closed at night or in the early hours of the morning, jazz musicians, both black and white,

often congregated and exchanged ideas. This interaction represented the first time Chicago jazz

musicians interacted on personal levels, and the interaction fostered the development of the

Chicago Style of jazz.

Black and tan clubs pursued varying policies with respect to the segregation of their

customers. Some smaller black-owned cabarets admitted white customers but largely served the

local African American community. Some of the largest South Side black and tans were

specifically designed for interracial clientele, while a few white owned clubs in the Black Belt

employed black musicians but catered to white customers. Some clubs maintained strict

segregation in seating arrangements and others simply ignored such social conventions. The

degree of integration or segregation was left to the individual whim of the club owner, and these

whims changed from week to week and from one establishment to the next.54

Often, once the ritzier uptown clubs associated with white jazz closed for the evening,

their customers flocked to South Side cabarets to experience “authentic” African American

music and dancing. Clubs like the Dreamland, Sunset, and Royal Gardens “specialized in

presenting unprecedented spectacles of interracial contacts in social dancing,” according to

historian William Howland Kenney. The taboo-breaking atmosphere of black and tans

constituted the city’s only leisure spaces to experiment with both racial and sexual boundaries.

Certainly, not every white customer was an altruistic reformer. Many whites viewed an evening

at a black and tan as a form of intra-city tourism, where they could experience a night of what

they believed to be “primitive” entertainment. However, the art jazz musicians created on a

nightly basis was anything but primitive. In fact, it was the cutting edge of artistic innovation. In

54
Kenney, Chicago Jazz, 17.

154
the Progressive Era, however, venues that hosted interracial entertainment were increasingly

concentrated in black neighborhoods and considered immoral by elitist reformers, and often

these establishments were the focus of anti-vice campaigns. Such establishments were generally

tolerated so long as the venue adhered to a strict racial double standard regarding its clientele.

This meant that interracial dancing was tolerated if a white man danced with a black woman, but

not vice versa. Therefore, based on the racial fears of the period, external forces governed the

level of interracial mingling in black and tans.55

Many white musicians, including the famous “Austin High Gang,” ignored racial norms

altogether and sought advice and camaraderie of famous black musicians working in the South

Side. As a result, black and white musicians interacted not just in cabarets but after hours as well.

Trumpeter, “Wild” Bill Davison made friends with Louis Armstrong, Zutty Singleton, and Earl

Hines. Davison recalled a story where he invited Armstrong to an after hours party where

Armstrong was the only African American in attendance. Armstrong, feeling uncomfortable,

refused to leave the kitchen, so finally Davison and his friends moved the party to the kitchen.

Davison remembered that once he was known to be acquaintances with Armstrong there was

nowhere in the South Side he was not welcome: “‘Here comes Louis’s friend.’ You know what I

mean? I never even had anybody make any fancy remarks my way…. I can thank those guys for

a lot of things I did in town.” Davison also alluded to the fact that whites and blacks in South

Side cabarets did not always receive equal treatment. But he did concede that white people

received the best treatment because the clubs stood more to gain from the white influx of cash.56

Bassist, Milt Hinton also recounted interacting with white musicians:

55
Kenney, Chicago Jazz, 24; Bachin, Building the South Side, 279-280; Kevin J. Mumford, Interzones: Black/White
Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press,
1997), 20, 26-27, 30-32.
56
Burton W. Peretti, Jazz in American Culture (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997), 58; “Wild” Bill Davison interview
transcript, September 10, 1981, Chicago Jazz Archive, University of Chicago, Chicago.

155
 Well the rule said that we could not play together… but it had nothing to do with our
respect for each other as musicians. So after hours, when the clubs would close the
musicians, black and white, would get together…. We would trade choruses, and we
would get some of the academics from the white musicians, and they’d get some of the
creativity from the black musicians…. We’d have this big jam session going on. This is
why Chicago was the basis for really putting this together, because we found out that
music was in all our hearts. We didn’t care what color you were, or where you came
from, it’s how you sound.57

The interracial camaraderie of Hinton and his white friends and Louis Armstrong and Bill

Davison were motivated by artistic, not political concerns. Indeed, few white musicians from the

early period of Chicago jazz became civil rights advocates. However, such associations, and the

musicians that courted them, signaled the emergence of the biracial swing era a generation

later.58

While jazz musicians were not zealous reformers seeking to tear down all barriers of

injustice, jazz retained some power to affect limited social change before, during, and after the

Great Migration. In an era when the dominant portrayal of African Americans in pop culture was

that of the minstrel show, the emergence of national black celebrities leading jazz bands was

groundbreaking. Though his celebrity was only just being recognized by white America in 1929,

Louis Armstrong’s status as the best musician in the country was not something the black

community took lightly. To residents of the South Side in particular, he was a hero, and at a time

when there were no nationally recognized black celebrities, Armstrong’s influence was

tremendous. In the 1930s Armstrong’s fame steadily increased in white America. Audiences,

both black and white, respected Armstrong for his talents across the country. In 1931, Charlie

Black, a white college student from Texas, saw Armstrong for the first time. “He was the first

genius I had ever seen,” Black recalled. “It is impossible to overstate the significance of a

57
Milt Hinton in Ken Burns, Jazz (PBS Home Video, 2000).
58
Peretti, Jazz in American Culture, 58.

156
sixteen-year-old southern boy seeing genius, for the first time, in a black.” Charlie Black went on

to become a distinguished professor of constitutional law, and he volunteered his services in the

case of Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka to end segregation in American public

schools.59 As Black’s account testifies, Louis Armstrong’s national influence as a positive black

celebrity of unmatched talent helped transform the attitudes of white America. While elitist

critics of jazz believed the new music violated traditional American tastes and sensibilities, the

unsurpassed talents of the musicians themselves slowly gained wider recognition and praise. The

appreciation of black genius— moving beyond just the admiration for talent— was something

altogether new in American society.60

The influx of at least 250,000 African Americans to Chicago in the 1910s, 1920s, and

1930s was the result of many factors. The explosion of population in Chicago’s South Side

created unprecedented opportunities for economic and cultural nationalism. Jazz musicians were

representative of these nationalist activities. Not only were they respected by many in the

community, the clubs they were employed in were sources of racial pride in the Black Belt. The

South Side, and jazz musicians in particular, became adept at channeling their economic

resources into political clout, as a result. They engaged in a number of mobilizing and organizing

activities that attest to their political acumen. Jazz musicians not only helped South Side

politicians get elected, they also improved their own condition through educational opportunities

and union organizing. They utilized grass-roots networks to procure employment, housing, food,

and pay the rent. These efforts fostered the collective economic and social uplift of the jazz

community in Chicago.

59
Collier, Louis Armstrong, 199-200; Charlie Black quoted in Ward and Burns, Jazz, 2.
60
For a more complete analysis of jazz genius see: Farah Jasmine Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery (New
York: The Free Press, 2001), 15-16.

157
 Many white musicians and bar patrons, no matter how altruistic their feelings, admired

the innovations of black musicians. Consequently, the black and tans of Chicago’s South Side

acted as counterweights to the increasing grasp of Jim Crow across American society. These

venues represented the only leisure spaces where white and black customers could test the

boundaries of racial and sexual mores in each city. Jazz musicians themselves, both black and

white, often took advantage of this dynamic and developed camaraderie where they shared

advice and musical knowledge to further their individual careers.

Due to the confluence of individuals, personalities, and styles in Chicago the foundation

for a new musical art form were laid. At the forefront of these innovations stood Louis

Armstrong. His contributions to jazz music paved the way not only for the Swing Era of the

1930s and 1940s, but it also marked the beginning of the national black celebrity. Without the

cultural and political forces set loose by the Great Migration, it is difficult to see a figure like

Louis Armstrong rising to such prominence and jazz music becoming a national phenomenon on

such an unprecedented scale. Chicago Jazz, then, was the cultural byproduct of a decades long

struggle for economic, social, political, and artistic freedom that was introduced to the world by

the Great Migration.

158
Chapter 5:

An Attempt to Make the American Dream Work, If It Were Going To:

New York, the Harlem Renaissance, and Jazz

In 1963 the poet Amiri Baraka published a seminal study of African American musical

culture. In Blues People he asserts that the blues and jazz reveal parts of the collective African

American psyche. According to Baraka, because African cultural traditions were passed down

orally, jazz and the blues reflected an African worldview and transmitted the history of a culture

based on the oral record. African Americans assimilated into American culture, but it was not a

complete process. The blues and jazz adapted new languages, instruments, and music structures

but these art forms continued to express a uniquely African outlook. Complex rhythms, call and

response, rough vocal techniques, and improvisation were all fundamental African cultural

elements that remained strong components in both jazz and blues.

Baraka believes that as the music evolved its new forms reflected changes in African

American culture at large. The emergence of jazz out of the blues tradition and song structure,

for example, marked the beginning of the urban experience for African Americans. As African

Americans moved north during the First Great Migration, the music reflected the shifting of the

collective black psyche as the new music was faster paced, more complex, and increasingly

dissonant. All the while, the blues and jazz retained essential African elements that reflected the

collective aspirations and experiences of African Americans in the western hemisphere: “What

seems to me most important about these mass migrations was the fact that they must have

represented a still further change within the Negro as far as his relationship with America is

concerned. It can be called a psychological realignment, an attempt to reassess the worth of the

black man within the society as a whole, an attempt to make the American dream work, if it were

going to.” While African Americans were attempting to “reassess the worth of the black man

159
within the society,” members of the black middle class had their own ideas about how to best

implement racial acceptance. Baraka contends that the middle class leaders of the Harlem

Renaissance were too concerned with white approval and struggled for racial acceptance dictated

on white terms. Baraka asserts that, “The rising middle class-spawned intelligentsia invented the

term New Negro and the idea of the Negro Renaissance to convey to the white world that there

had been a change of tactics as to how to climb onto the bandwagon of mainstream American

life.”1 Members of the black intelligentsia worked within the confines of the artistic traditions of

Europe. Jazz musicians, on the other hand, chose a different path; they consciously crafted an

artistic vision rooted in African musical traditions, but applied to a modern, urban world-view.

While middle class African Americans of the literary component of the Harlem Renaissance

largely emulated established artistic traditions, jazz musicians were busy forging new music

styles and techniques that launched the New Negro of jazz onto the world stage.

Certainly, the New Negro aesthetic as an ethos encompassed an array of activities that

included politic activism and cultural production, but it was not limited to these endeavors.

Furthermore, it was not defined solely by what happened in the limited geographic space on the

northern corner of Manhattan Island, as is evidenced by the work of musicians from New

Orleans to Kansas City, to Chicago and beyond. Over emphasizing the role of Harlem jazz in the

cultural flourishing of the New Negro movement is nothing new. This misconception emerges

not from cultural critics of a later generation, but from contemporary admirers and practitioners

of the Harlem arts scene. For example, in 1930 James Weldon Johnson wrote of the centrality of

Harlem to the jazz craze enthralling the nation in the 1920s and 1930s saying that, “New Yorkers

and people visiting New York from the world over go to the night-clubs of Harlem and dance to

1
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Blues People: Negro Music in White America (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood
Press, 1963), 95-96, 134.

160
such jazz music as can be heard nowhere else; and they get an exhilaration impossible to

duplicate.”2 Certainly Harlem was a crucial center for the early development of jazz, but

Johnson’s assessment is overstated. By 1930 Harlem was emerging as one of the nation’s jazz

capitals, but it was not unrivaled or wholly unique in that regard. By casting a wider net on the

political and artistic achievements of the period, the political engagement and cultural

contributions of jazz musicians broadens our understanding of New Negro activism so closely

associated with the visual and literary artists of the Harlem Renaissance. All too often, the

accomplishments of the musicians of the period are relegated to a supporting role in the cultural

and political activism of the New Negro movement. Consequently, jazz is consigned to the mere

soundtrack of the Harlem Renaissance, leaving the impression that as Alain Locke, James

Weldon Johnson, and J. A. Rogers discussed critical theories of racial integration in Harlem

cabarets, the greatest contributions jazz musicians made was in providing background music to

the conversation. Jazz artists were very much part of the debate, and their music and activism

spoke volumes. Jazz musicians carved out cultural spaces for racial interaction that traversed Jim

Crow boundaries, and they challenged American cultural ideals through their art.

This is the Place I’ve Wanted to be All My Life

While still a teenager, the trumpet player Cootie Williams left his home in Mobile,

Alabama to try his hand in the music business. The aspiring musician was staying with a friend

of his father’s in Jacksonville, Florida when a group of white men shot Williams’ host to death

on his front porch, because he beat them in a game of poker. After the murder Williams made his

way to Miami where he found work in a successful band. The all-black orchestra was so popular

that a local radio station located on Miami Beach contracted them to play on the air, despite

2
James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930), 160.

161
“whites only” Jim Crow restrictions on South Beach. During one radio performance in 1928, the

group caught the attention of the owner of the Rosemont Ballroom in Brooklyn who sent for the

band to play a two-week engagement in the Big Apple. The orchestra made its way to Savannah,

Georgia before boarding a boat for Manhattan Harbor. Williams recalled, “I didn’t care how I

got to New York…. I didn’t care how I got there. I was coming.”3 Williams had no intention of

spending any more time in the South than he had to.

After the Rosemont Ballroom engagement was over, the band prepared to return to the

Sunshine State. Williams had other plans; “I said, ‘Not me…. This is the place I’ve wanted to be

all my life. I’m not thinking about going back to no Florida.’” Though Williams was making a

comfortable living as a musician in Florida, and though he had no jobs lined up in New York

beyond the initial run at the Rosemont, he was determined to make a better life for himself in the

Big Apple no matter what the odds. When the young trumpeter found work with Chick Webb in

Harlem, he made far less than he was making in Florida. But that did not seem to matter much to

the new Gotham resident; income was only one consideration.4 Williams’ story echoes those of

other migrant musicians who left their southern homes for a variety of reasons. Though the

experiences of migrant jazz musicians in Chicago and New York were often very different, there

are a number of similarities. It was the migration experience that informed subsequent activism

and introduced Harlem to the New Negro of jazz⎯ a New Negro whose dedication to combating

repression mirrored the dedication to one’s instrument.

Unlike Chicago, which attracted migrants primarily from the Mississippi Valley region,

New York’s migrant community was comprised of mainly southern transplants from the Atlantic

3
Cootie Williams, interview transcript, May, 1976, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New
Jersey.
4
Ibid.

162
seaboard and the Caribbean.5 As James Weldon Johnson noted in Black Manhattan, Harlem had

not always been the center of the black community in New York City; around the turn of the

twentieth century its largest African American community was located on West Fifty-third

Street. Because of residential segregation in Manhattan that afforded African Americans little

choice in where they could reside within the city, the community was overcrowded, and new

housing was in great demand.6 In 1904, black real estate magnate Philip A. Payton formed the

Afro-American Realty Company, and the company worked to open properties in Harlem for

African American home-owners and tenants. Harlem offered relatively affordable housing for

would-be African American property owners and landlords. Payton’s company engaged in over-

speculation by purchasing more properties than was financially feasible. Due to these problems

the Afro-American Realty Company folded in 1908. White realtors and investors assumed

control of Payton’s former properties, but the African American tenants who recently moved to

Harlem remained in the community. By 1914 50,000 African Americans lived in Harlem. Part of

the increase was the result of shady real estate practices. Some landlords opened their properties

to African American tenants, but due to restrictive residential mobility, they charged black

renters the highest rates for properties that were poorly maintained. Others used the threat of

selling homes to African American buyers to scare neighbors into selling their properties at

below market rates. Once properties were purchased at below market rates, real estate

speculators either rented or sold the same properties at above market rates to prospective African

American buyers or tenants. The result was the rapid transition of the neighborhood from largely

white to largely black. At the same time, whites in Harlem formed community organizations to

5
Johnson, Black Manhattan, 151-153.
6
Gilbert Osofsky’s work on Harlem remains a critical work on residential segregation in New York City. For more
information on the mechanisms that dictated a lack of residential mobility for black New Yorkers see: Gilbert
Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (New York: Harper and Row, 1963).

163
halt the expansion of black enclaves. In 1913 John G. Taylor of the Harlem Property Owners’

Improvement Corporation declared, “We are approaching a crisis. It is the question of whether

the white man will rule Harlem or the Negro.” Once a critical mass of the black community

moved into the neighborhood, white resistance was met with an organized front of African

American real estate, business, and residential interests. By 1930, when the torrent of the Great

Migration slowed to a trickle, Harlem’s black population stood at nearly 165,000, which

amounted to an increase of 115,00 in fifteen years. The black community in Harlem represented

72% of Manhattan’s African American population.7

Like Chicago, Harlem residents developed an entrepreneurial nature and channeled the

spirit of the Great Migration into political activism. James Weldon Johnson wrote in Black

Manhattan, “At the beginning of the year 1917 Negro Harlem was well along the road of

development and prosperity…. The community was beginning to feel conscious of its growing

size and strength. It had entirely rid itself of the sense of apology for its existence. It was

beginning to take pride in itself as Harlem, a Negro community.” In the years since the turn of

the twentieth century, Harlem’s population exploded and the community began to exercise its

political strength. In 1900, however, the picture was much different. In that year, a bloody race

riot consumed New York City, and African Americans were indiscriminately attacked in the

streets over the course of three days. “But the riot of 1900 woke Negro New York and stirred the

old fighting spirit,” noted James Weldon Johnson. In the immediate aftermath, black New

Yorkers led by religious, business, and community leaders formed the Citizen’s Protection

League to demand police officers be prosecuted for their role in aiding and abetting rioters and

for actively participating in the violence. As a result of the political mobilization of the

7
Johnson, Black Manhattan, 145-155; Osofsky, Harlem, 92, 96, 102-105, 107, 130.

164
community, new groups formed to unlock the political potential of black New York. In 1905 a

group of black activists headed by W.E.B. Dubois met in Buffalo New York. Out of that

meeting, the Niagara Movement formed to combat racial oppression in America. In 1910

members of the Niagara Movement along with black and white liberals formed the National

Association for the Advancement of Colored People with offices in New York City. In that same

year, black and white reformers founded the National League on Urban Conditions Among

Negroes (later the organization adopted the name the National Urban League) to provide social

services for African Americans living in urban centers. Like the NAACP, the national

headquarters of the Urban League were also in New York City.8 The NAACP and the Urban

League provided a means for interracial cooperation to solve problems of racial inequality and

segregation in America. Those organizations were also decidedly middle class in composition.

In the late 1910s a new organization formed that attracted the attention and allegiance of

the black working class in Harlem. Inspired by the work of Booker T. Washington, Marcus

Garvey organized the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in his native Jamaica

in 1914 intent on the “uniting and blending of all negroes into one strong, healthy race.”9 In 1917

Garvey moved to Harlem and moved the headquarters of the UNIA to the neighborhood in 1918.

The UNIA was widely popular among the black working class in Harlem, because of Garvey’s

calls for economic nationalism and pride in a shared African cultural heritage. The UNIA stood

for complete racial separation in the United States and for the founding of a black republic in

Africa. Garvey was a Pan-Africanist who called for all peoples of African descent to unite and

immigrate back to the land of their forefathers: “We are striking homeward toward Africa to

make her the big black republic. And in the making of Africa the big black republic, what is the
8
Johnson, Black Manhattan, 126-129, 134-135, 141-143, 231.
9
Marcus Garvey, “What We Believe,” (January 1, 1924) in Arnesen, ed., Black Protest and the Great Migration,
108; Johnson, Black Manhattan, 252-254.

165
barrier? The barrier is the white man; and we say to the white man who dominates Africa that it

is to his interest to clear out now, because we are coming… 400,000,000 strong and we mean to

retake every square inch of the 12,000,000 square miles of African territory belonging to us by

right Divine.”10

After procuring close to $200,000 from UNIA members and admirers, in 1919 Garvey

established the Black Star Line Steamship Corporation with the purpose of using the steamship

line to affect the mass emigration of all peoples of African descent back to Africa. In 1921 the

Black Star Line was in financial trouble and collapsed by the end of the year. All the while,

Garvey and the UNIA frightened middle class black leaders in Harlem, but he retained a large

following of loyal supporters. But in June 1922, he made an error that cost him the support of his

followers when he attended a secret meeting with leaders from the Ku Klux Klan and pledged his

support for racial separation. Certainly, the two groups had no interest in racial integration, but

sitting down with the KKK was treasonous in the eyes of many black Harlemites. Shortly

thereafter, the NAACP’s magazine, The Messenger, published an account of the meeting and

they soon launched a “Garvey Must Go” campaign to publicize his misdeeds. In early 1923

Garvey was arrested on federal charges of mail fraud. In February 1925 he entered a federal

penitentiary and was deported back to Jamaica in 1927.11 Regardless of Garvey’s mistakes, the

feud between the Garvey and the leaders of the NAACP speaks to the sort of class divisions

between old and new settlers so apparent in Chicago. The drummer Sonny Greer remembered,

10
Marcus Garvey quoted in, Johnson, Black Manhattan, 254.
11
Johnson, Black Manhattan, 255-259; David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Penguin
Books, 1997), 35-45 (originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1979). For more information on Marcus Garvey
and the UNIA see: Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and
the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Dover, Massachusetts: The Majority Press, 1976); Tony Martin,
Marcus Garvey: Hero A First Biography (Dover, Massachusetts: The Majority Press, 1983); Stanley Nelson,
“Marcus Garvey: Look For Me in the Whirlwind,” American Experience (PBS Home Video, 2001),
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/garvey/index.html.

166
“the better class of colored⎯ we call them the dicties, that’s what, all over in New York⎯ the

doctors’ wives, the doctors, and all. Pullman porter was a celebrity because he roamed all over

the country with his pockets full. Pullman porter he was much more than us. We was down here

and them cats was up there. And they wouldn’t fail to let you know it.”12 Class divisions within

the black community remained a fact of life in Harlem, just as in Chicago.

The dynamic of restricted African American residential mobility during and after the

Great Migration centered political activism in Harlem and, ironically, concentrated artistic

achievement and innovation in the neighborhood. The concentration of business leaders, political

figures, activists, literary luminaries, and artistic talent in the community culminated in what

cultural critics and historians have since dubbed the Harlem Renaissance. Nathan Irvin

Huggins’s Harlem Renaissance (1971) illuminates the myriad personalities that called Harlem

home in the 1920s and ‘30s, including W.E.B. DuBois, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, and

James Weldon Johnson. David Levering Lewis’s When Harlem Was in Vogue (1979) details the

literary component of the Harlem Renaissance and the personalities that promoted the work of

black artists. Together, Lewis and Huggins clearly demonstrate the connection between politics

and artistic expression as embodied in the Harlem Renaissance. Both men argue that the goals of

the New Negro movement that sought to harness black art as a means of affecting social change

was a failure.13 Failure, however, is in the eye of the beholder, as neither author devoted

12
Sonny Greer, interview transcript, January 1979, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New
Jersey.
13
For Huggins’s assessment on the success or failure of the Harlem Renaissance see: Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem
Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 7-12. Huggins also argues that the black elite relegated
jazz to a supporting role in the Renaissance saying, “Harlem intellectuals promoted Negro art, but one thing is very
curious, except for Langston Hughes, none of them took jazz⎯ the new music⎯ seriously…. Anyway, the
promoters of the Harlem Renaissance were so fixed on a vision of high culture that they did not look very hard or
well at jazz.” Huggins argues that by overlooking jazz, black intellectuals of the period overlooked a promising
avenue of New Negro expression. However, he does not explore, in depth, the effect jazz and jazz musicians had on
American society through their activism. For Lewis’s take on the movement see: Lewis, When Harlem Was in
Vogue, xxi-xxiv (originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1979). Jon Michael Spencer refutes the interpretation

167
considerable attention to the effect jazz had on American culture. In fact, jazz fostered social

interaction across racial boundaries, and in this respect, it embodied the goals of the New Negro

movement that utilized black cultural production to affect social change.

Certainly jazz stood at the forefront of innovative forms of black cultural expression in

the 1920s and 1930s. Yet opinions vary widely as to the extent jazz played in the Harlem

Renaissance, both then and now. When Alain Locke announced that a new day dawned for

African Americans with the 1925 volume The New Negro, he included little coverage on jazz

and the blues. J. A. Rogers’s essay “Jazz At Home” was the lone exception, but his take on jazz

reflected an elitism that associated the new music with vice, immorality, and primitivism.

Rogers’s final assessment of jazz advocated reforming rather than eradicating jazz; “It has come

to stay, and they are wise, who instead of protesting against it, try to lift and divert it into nobler

channels.”14 Locke’s own essay on black folk music focused entirely on the spirituals, which he

dubbed “the most characteristic product of the race genius as yet in America.”15 At the height of

the Jazz Age, it is striking that Locke overlooked the genius of jazz musicians or popular music

in general.

In 1936, Locke published a follow-up volume that sought to widen the lens of black

cultural achievement in music. The Negro and His Music, while discussing jazz and the blues in

greater detail than The New Negro, retained a qualified view of jazz and jazz musicians. Locke’s

taste for music excellence was rooted in European standards that placed high value on the

that the Harlem Renaissance was a failure. Spencer cites innovations in music and the effect black vocalists and
composers like Roland Hayes, Harry T. Burleigh, and William Grant Still had on American culture to dispute the
claims of Huggins and Lewis. For a more detailed discussion of his critique see: Jon Michael Spencer, The New
Negroes and Their Music: The Success of the Harlem Renaissance (Knoxville, Tennessee: The University of
Tennessee Press, 1997).
14
J. A. Rogers, “Jazz at Home” in Alain Locke ed., The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (New York:
Albert & Charles Boni, 1925), 224. See also Arnold Rampersad’s critique of Locke and Rogers on pages xix-xx in
the 1992 edition of The New Negro published by Simon and Schuster.
15
Alain Locke, “The Negro Spirituals” in Alain Locke ed., The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance
(New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1925), 199.

168
classics, thus his analysis is more akin to the proverbial comparison between apples and oranges.

For example, Locke is complimentary of Louis Armstrong, but his praise is tempered by

claiming that the trumpeter’s music appealed to a “racier taste.”16 Contrast that with his analysis

of Duke Ellington, whose refined manner and middle class upbringing more closely fit Locke’s

mold for the New Negro. He declared that singular praise of Ellington “becomes something quite

different when echoed here and there independently by the most competent European and

American critics and composers…. Duke Ellington is the pioneer of super-jazz and one of the

persons most likely to create the classical jazz toward which so many are striving.”17 By basing

his assessment of jazz on European aesthetics, Locke failed to judge jazz on its own merits.

The elitism expressed by Rogers, Locke, and other figures of the Harlem Renaissance

was not lost on jazz musicians. The saxophone player, bandleader, and composer Benny Carter

believed jazz was not entirely accepted by the literary and artistic community as an art form in its

own right during the Harlem Renaissance: “I wasn’t, I feel, involved in it…. I think the people…

that were involved in the Renaissance; I think jazz was looked down upon…. I think they felt it

lacked dignity.” Though Carter and his fellow musicians were well aware of the burgeoning

artistic and political achievements of the New Negro movement, they were given little respect

for their own contributions: “We in music knew there was much going on in literature, for

example, but our worlds were far apart. We sensed that the black cultural as well as moral

leaders looked down on our music as undignified.” According to Carter, the lone exception to the

lack of respect for jazz and jazz artists by the literary component of the Harlem Renaissance was

Langston Hughes. Carter called Hughes, “the poet laureate of the Renaissance, and a man who

16
Alain Locke, The Negro and His Music (New York: The Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1936), 98.
17
Ibid., 99.

169
had much respect for an understanding of this music.”18 Hughes wrote glowingly about jazz,

adopted blues phrasing in a series of poems in the 1920s, and made a conscious effort to create

Afro-centric art.

In fact, Hughes and the Harlem jazz piano impresario, James P. Johnson, once

collaborated on an operetta called De Organizer. In a letter to Johnson discussing the project,

Hughes wrote, “I am happy to have your letter and would, of course, be glad to work with you on

an opera libretto sometime in the future. In late February or early March I will be in New York

and we can get together and talk about it. I have long known and admired your work, and once

met you some years ago…. When we meet, I’d like very much to hear the ideas you have in

mind. I think we could work out something really Negro, modern, and interesting.”19 Hughes

knew well the challenges African Americans faced creating art in a white world. In June1926

George Schuyler wrote an essay in The Nation, and he was dismissive of a segment of the

Harlem Renaissance for attempting to create Afro-centric art based on folk influences, rather

than on established artistic standards he viewed as high art. Writing in The Nation, Hughes

responded,

One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, ‘I want to be a
poet⎯not a Negro poet,’ meaning, I believe, ‘I want to write like a white poet’; meaning
subconsciously, ‘I would like to be a white poet’; meaning behind that, ‘I would like to
be white.’ And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid
of being himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his
race, this boy would ever be a great poet. But this is the mountain standing in the way of
any true Negro art in America⎯this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to
pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little
Negro and as much American as possible.

18
Benny Carter, interview transcript, October 13, 1976, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New
Jersey. Benny Carter, liner notes for Benny Carter: Harlem Renaissance, Music Masters Jazz Label, 1992.
19
Letter from Langston Hughes, January 24, 1937, James P. Johnson Collection, Scrapbook 3, Scan 024, Institute
of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey.

170
In concluding the essay Hughes proclaimed, “Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the

bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing the Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near

intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand…. We younger Negro artists who create

now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people

are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful…. We build

our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free

within ourselves.”20 In the following weeks, the debate continued in the pages of The Nation. In

the July 14th issue Shuyler wrote, “Negro propaganda-art, even when glorifying the

‘primitiveness’ of the American Negro masses, is hardly more than a protest against a feeling of

inferiority, and such a psychology seldom produces art.” The following month, Hughes replied,

“But until America has completely absorbed the Negro and until segregation and racial self-

consciousness have entirely disappeared, the true work of art from the Negro artist is bound, if it

have any color and distinctiveness at all, to reflect his racial background and his racial

environment.”21

Hughes’s assessment of the black middle class intelligentsia who looked down on art

based on African cultural influences echoes the critique of Amiri Baraka. Hughes and the jazz

artists transforming American music in the 1920s were not as concerned with white artistic

standards as they were with musical and literary innovation and artistic mastery. Often

innovation involved creating Afro-centric art by applying African song structures to a jazz

format. As Duke Ellington explained in a 1936 interview with Downbeat, “I always try to get a

20
Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” The Nation, Vol. 122, No. 3181 (June 28, 1926),
692-94.. Schuyler’s essay can be found at: George Schuyler, “The Negro Art Hokum,” The Nation, Vol. 122 No.
3180 (June 16, 1926), 662-663. Harlem’s black newspaper, The New York Amsterdam News covered the debate and
printed both essays in their entirety. The Amsterdam News’s coverage of the debate can be found at: “Two ‘New
Negroes’ Discuss Negro Art in the ‘Nation,”’ The New York Amsterdam News (June 23, 1926), 16.
21
George Schuyler, “Negroes and Artists,” The Nation, Vol. 123 No. 3184 (July 14, 1926), 36; Langston Hughes,
“American Art or Negro Art?” The Nation, Vol. 123 No. 3189 (August 18, 1926), 151.

171
lift in my music⎯ that part of rhythm that causes a bouncing, buoyant, terpsichorean urge. My

idea of real Negro music is getting the different Negro idioms in cluster forms, and the

distribution of those idioms in arrangement and still retain their Negroid quality.”22 Though jazz

stood at the vanguard of black cultural innovation in this period, due to the lack of recognition

for the talents and artistry of jazz musicians, the music played second fiddle to the more

“acceptable” artistic contributions of black writers and visual artists.23 Unfortunately, Hughes’s

affinity for jazz and the artistry of jazz musicians was the exception, rather than the rule, among

the literary figures of the Harlem Renaissance.

While jazz was relegated to the supporting cast of artistic achievement, Harlem jazz

dominated the discussion when the talent of black musicians was recognized. By insisting on the

centrality of Harlem to the music, cultural observers like James Weldon Johnson devalued the

vitality of jazz in regions outside New York City. To be certain, Harlem was an emerging center

of jazz innovation by 1930, but in the 1910s and 1920s, New York jazz was playing catch-up to

the dynamic brand of jazz developed first in New Orleans and refined in Chicago.24 Innovations

in the new music were made in cities from coast to coast by the 1920s, and New York was

simply one of many jazz metropolises. Furthermore, while cities like Chicago and Memphis

infused blues tonality and song constructions into heavily improvised arrangements, the brand of

22
Duke Ellington quoted in, Carl Cons, “A Black Genius in a White Man’s World,” Downbeat (July 1936) in Frank
Alkyer and Ed Enright, eds., Downbeat⎯The Great Jazz Interviews: A 75th Anniversary Anthology (New York: Hal
Leonard Book, 2009), 5.
23
Recently, a number of authors have reassessed the role music, and jazz in particular, played in the Harlem
Renaissance. A collection of essays edited by Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. initiated a long overdue scholastic dialogue on
the influence of music on the period. For a more thorough analysis see: Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. ed., Black Music in the
Harlem Renaissance (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1990). Since the publication of the above volume,
Paul Allen Anderson took up the mantle for an expanded dialogue of the music of the period. Anderson discusses
the writings of W.E.B. DuBois, Alain Locke, Zora Neal Hurston, Langston Hughes and a number of jazz critics to
flesh out the relationship of music to the Harlem Renaissance. For the complete analysis see: Paul Allen Anderson,
Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press,
2001).
24
Baraka, Blues People, 151; Buster Bailey in, Shapiro and Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya, 206-207.

172
jazz played in Harlem in the late 1910s and early 1920s still largely followed the ragtime model

of playing that was more structured in format. The pianist Willie “The Lion” Smith described the

piano-infused, ragtime-influenced jazz of New York City by declaring, “A good pianist had to be

able to play with both hands, performing in perfect unison. It was like learning to walk

correctly… a good walker goes forth with balance and dignity.”25 The New York style practiced

by Smith, Fats Waller, and James P. Johnson, known as “stride piano,” heavily influenced piano

players of the Swing Era like Duke Ellington. In that respect it laid the foundation for Harlem as

a hub of jazz innovation in the late 1920s and early 1930s. However, in the decades preceding

the 1930s, New Orleans, Chicago, Kansas City and several other cities could just as easily claim

the mantle of America’s jazz capital.

The stride style emerged out of the rent parties of Harlem where piano players engaged in

nightly cutting contests. Barney Bigard remembered, “So in those days they used to call them

cutting contests…. And this night was piano night. James P. Johnson, Willie the Lion. They had

Duke in there and Fats Waller. All the biggies, you know. And Mexico had his little bar, and on

back of the bar was all the hammers to hit the strings, you know, in the piano, because when the

Lion would get up there, he’d⎯ the Lion’s going to roar and he’d bang the piano and all these

hammers would fly out there and they’d pick them up and start putting them back in there.” Ethel

Waters learned “a lot in Harlem about music and the men up there who played it best. All the

licks you hear, now as then, originated with musicians like James P. Johnson…. Men like him,

Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith, and Charlie Johnson could make you sing until your tonsils fell out.

Because you wanted to sing…. And you’d do anything and work until you dropped for such

25
Willie the Lion Smith with George Hoefer, Music on My Mind (New York: Doubleday, 1964), 3.

173
musicians.”26 The cutting contests and rent parties of Harlem were legendary in the community,

and the pianists involved inspired a generation of Harlem musicians. Just as in Chicago, jazz

artists were busy building a community beyond the walls of the NAACP offices or the union hall

that was responsive to the needs of the jazz community in Harlem.

David Levering Lewis explains, “Saturday nights were terrific in Harlem, but rent parties

every night were the special passion of the community. Their very existence was avoided or

barely acknowledged by most Harlem writers, like that other rare and intriguing institution, the

buffet flat, where varied and often perverse sexual pleasures were offered cafeteria-style. With

the exception of Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman almost no one… admitted attending a

rent party.”27 Because New York City was densely populated, rent parties were in compact

residential spaces. Due to limited space, the piano served as the primary instrumentation in

cutting contests. Consequently, New York’s piano players were among the best jazz had to offer,

and New York jazz featured the piano more than in cities like Chicago and New Orleans.

The New York stride style grew in popularity in the mid to late 1920s. Duke Ellington

emulated stride players and incorporated it into his big band arrangements. Duke Ellington

recalled fondly, “The Lion has been the greatest influence on most of the great piano players

who have been exposed to his fire, his harmonic lavishness, his stride⎯ what a luxury! Fats

Waller, James P. Johnson, Count Basie, Donald Lambert, Joe Turner, Sam Ervis, and of course I

swam in it.” By infusing stride piano into big band arrangements, Ellington’s group gained wide

popularity for its unique sonic textures and melodic inventiveness. The Duke Ellington Orchestra

captured the attention of the American public with live national radio broadcasts from the Cotton

26
Barney Bigard, interview transcript, July 1976, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New
Jersey; Ethel Waters in, Shapiro and Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya, 176.
27
Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 107.

174
Club beginning in 1927.28 Ellington’s band brought Harlem Jazz into the living rooms of

American households every Saturday night, and the group’s big band sound paved the way for

the Swing Era of the 1930s and 1940s.

I’ll Feed the Boys Whatever They Want

In 1924, thanks to the insistence of his wife, Louis Armstrong left Chicago to join

Fletcher Henderson’s band in New York City. Though his place in the band was secure,

Armstrong and his fellow musicians often went without work for extended periods. Luckily, he

had a base of support in the Big Apple. Armstrong remembered, “Sometimes we had to wait

around 2-3 months before we could find a job. Charlie Johnson’s wife was serving meals there at

135th St. between Lennox Ave. and 7th…. And she said, ‘I’ll feed the boys whatever they want.’”

Johnson and his wife also took up a collection to help all the members of the band pay their

bills.29 Armstrong’s experience in New York was not far afield from the sort of assistance he

received from Joe Oliver in his journey north, or the assistance scores of jazz artists received

from the grass-roots musicians network that lent a hand to fellow artists in need.

Armstrong spent close to a year in Gotham before he grew tired of his role in the

Henderson band. While the group was one of the most respected jazz acts in the city,

Armstrong’s talents were not utilized to the fullest potential, and the group lacked the discipline

and dedication he was accustomed to. Armstrong remembered, “I stayed and tolerated them

cutting up on the bandstand instead of playing the music right. I stayed until I finally gave

28
Ellington, Music Is My Mistress, 92, 80-82. For more information on the life and career of Duke Ellington see:
James Lincoln Collier, Duke Ellington (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); John Howland, Ellington
Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of
Michigan Press, 2009). For an analysis of Duke Ellington as emblematic of a New Negro artist see: Mark Tucker,
“The Renaissance Education of Duke Ellington,” in Samuel A. Floyd, ed., Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance:
A Collection of Essays (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1990), 111-128.
29
Louis Armstrong, Armstrong Tapes, CD 17, Track 6, Louis Armstrong Collection, Louis Armstrong House
Museum Archives, Queens College, New York.

175
Fletcher my notice and joined Lil at the Dreamland in Chicago…. The fellows in Fletcher’s band

had such big heads⎯ boy you talk about big head motherfuckers⎯ such big heads until⎯ even

if they miss a note ‘So what.’’ After Armstrong complained to his wife, Lil devised a plan to

help her husband and elevate his career at the same time:

When I talked to Lil on the phone and told her what was happening she immediately said
‘Come on home. I have a good job for you playing first cornet in my band. Which was an
elevation to me. Fletcher only let me play third cornet in his band, the whole time I was
in his band⎯ dig that shit. He’d only give me 16 bars at the most to get off with…. He
would say, ‘Boy that was wonderful. You know one thing? You’d be very good if you go
and take some lessons.’ I said ‘Yes sir.’ And in my head⎯ you know, to myself I’m
saying, ‘Man you go fuck yourself.’ … Fletcher was so carried away with that ‘society’
shit and his education he slipped by a small timer and a young musician⎯ me, who
wanted to do everything for him musically. I personally didn’t think Fletcher cared too
much for me anyway. Tush, tush. Ain’t that some shit? You never miss your water till
your well goes dry.30

In 1929, thanks to the popularity and success of the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings,

Armstrong made a triumphant return to New York City under his own terms. Zutty Singleton,

Armstrong’s drummer, recalled that on the trip to New York in “every big town we’d come to,

we’d hear Louis’ records being played on loudspeakers and stuff. Louis was surprised⎯ he

didn’t know he was so popular.” Now he was a featured musician, vocalist, and soloist playing

with the Carroll Dickerson Orchestra. The group played nightly engagements at the famed jazz

club, Connie’s Inn, on the corner of 131st Street and 7th Avenue. Armstrong’s growing celebrity

forced the group to change the name to reflect the status of its new leader: “The name of the

orchestra that has taken New York by storm is none other than our own Louis Armstrong and his

recording orchestra, formerly the Carroll Dickerson Orchestra of the Savoy Ballroom, Chicago.

The boys are intact just as they left the Windy City. The only change is the name of the band.

Carroll Dickerson is the leader as of yore, but the New York exhibitors thought that the name

30
Louis Armstrong, Armstrong Tapes, CD 426, Disc 1, Track 7, Louis Armstrong Collection, Louis Armstrong
House Museum Archives, Queens College, New York.

176
should be changed owing to the tremendous popularity of the famous cornetist, Louis

Armstrong.” Armstrong gave another rousing performance at the Lafayette Theater that June.

The Amsterdam News declared, “The audience simply rose and cheered as this remarkable

cornetist drew from his golden trumpet music such as has seldom been heard before here⎯

rousing, snappy jazz and sweet tender melody. Armstrong is certainly a genius.”31 Armstrong’s

rise to fame was nurtured every step of the way but a cast of supporting characters who lent

assistance, advice, encouragement, food, money, and much more along the way. Indeed, without

the musicians’ network, the journey could have been more rocky and difficult. Armstrong’s New

York experience echoes the story of dozens of musicians, in that grass-roots organizing was

essential in carving a niche for jazz artists to thrive.

As the account of Armstrong indicates, musicians often felt a responsibility to aid one

another in times of need. In 1923 Edward “Duke” Ellington arrived in New York City from

Washington D.C. to try his luck as a professional jazz artist. On the way to New York, Ellington

spent every dime in his pocket. However, he had a job lined up, and his band arrived ahead of

him, so he was not worried. When he reached his band mates, Ellington realized they too were

broke, and the job fell through. But, the group found aid from fellow jazz artists. Ellington

recalled, “Everything had gone wrong, and there was no job. Yet there were friends waiting to

help us and show me the way. Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith was one of them, and Freddie Guy used

to let us sit in for him at the Orient and, most important, split the tips.”32 Just as in Chicago, New

Orleans, and elsewhere, grass-roots networks performed organizing tasks when traditional self-

31
Zutty Singleton in, Shapiro and Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya, 170-171; Louis Armstrong, Armstrong Tapes,
CD 426, Disc 1, Track 7, Louis Armstrong Collection, Louis Armstrong House Museum Archives, Queens College,
New York; Louis Armstrong Collection, Scrapbook 83, Louis Armstrong House Museum Archives, Queens
College, New York; Louis Armstrong Collection, Scrapbook 2, Louis Armstrong House Museum Archives, Queens
College, New York; “At Harlem Theaters,” The New York Amsterdam News (June 26, 1929), 12.
32
Ellington, Music Is My Mistress, 69.

177
help organizations were unable or unwilling to fill the void. The relationships forged in the jazz

community proved essential when musicians branched out into more formal political

organizations like the American Federation of Musicians and the NAACP.

New York jazz musicians were also as astute activists as their counterparts in Chicago

and New Orleans. The Big Apple has a long history of union activism on the part of the city’s

musicians. New York musicians were among the first to create a formal union; in 1864 the

Musical Mutual Protective Union (MMPU) was organized. In the organization’s charter, adopted

on April 11, 1864, members proclaimed that the MMPU was formed with the object of, “the

cultivation of the art of music in all its branches, and the promotion of good feeling and friendly

intercourse among the members of the profession, and the relief of such of their members as

shall be fortunate, so far as their means, in their opinion, will permit.” The MMPU sought to

protect the interests of its members, set wages, and promote the work of musicians as a

respectable profession. It was also a decidedly elitist organization that favored rigid standards of

musical mastery and professional deportment. Nothing in the MMPU’s constitution or by-laws

barred black membership. In fact, in 1886 an African American violin player named Walter

Craig was the first to join the MMPU. By 1910 three hundred of the organization’s eight

thousand members were black. Though African Americans were not officially barred from

membership, the small number of blacks in MMPU was no accident. First, the elitism of the

organization placed a high premium on orchestral and classical music. Since the proficiency tests

were rigidly enforced and based on knowledge of classical music, and few black musicians

received the sort of formal musical training in the classics, African Americans membership was

kept to a minimum. Secondly, the membership fees were financially prohibitive. In the revised

laws of 1878, the initial admission fee was $20 with additional dues to follow. The result was

178
limited black membership. The MMPU officially joined the AFM in 1902 and became known as

Local 310.33

Because of the difficulty African American musicians faced in joining the MMPU, in

1904 the city’s black classical musicians formed their own organization, The New Amsterdam

Musical Association (NAMA). NAMA like the MMPU, had high music standards based on

European classics and enforced by rigid proficiency tests. Beginning in 1907, and again in 1909,

NAMA sought the consent of Local 310 to form their own all-black union. In December 1909,

Local 310 notified NAMA that their request was denied. Although NAMA’s request for a charter

in the AFM was denied, they continued to enforce membership requirements as though they

were a formal union. The organization, which counted the composer and violin player Will

Marion Cook as a member, did not admit those who could not site read music and who did not

play the classics. In December 1913 fifteen men attempted to take the proficiency test that did

not play classical music. The event caused a debate within NAMA: “These men although they

were most all good readers, they handled a certain quality of work which is not handled by this

association.” A member by the name of Foster advocated for the admission of the fifteen men,

though they did not perform the proficiency test as fluently as previous members. A Mr. Prime

objected to the proposal saying, “the association has gradually built itself and grown, it would,

therefore, be a bad precedent to his mind to have men in the association who cannot play… it

would be a decidedly backwards step to let the barriers down and take in failures. This town is

33
Musicans’ Mutual Protective Union, “Constitution and By-Laws of the Mutual Protective Union,” p.3, 10,
Records of the American Federation of Musicians Local 802, Box 2, Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Tamiment
Library, New York University, New York; Goldberg, “Swinging the Color Line,” 11, 15.

179
full of so called musicians; let them keep their way and we ours.”34 NAMA had no intention of

admitting black artists who played Afro-centric music like jazz and the blues.

NAMA’s elitism was evident to recent migrants and the Afro-centric music they

cultivated. In 1910 southern transplant James Reese Europe organized an all-black musicians

union known as the Clef Club, and served as its first President. The Clef Club functioned as a

quasi-union⎯ part booking agency and part fraternal organization. The club bought property on

West Fifty-third Street, and during the course of one business year garnered $120,000 for its

members. Not long after its founding, the Clef Club enjoyed wide success and sought permission

from Local 310 to form an all-black union of their own. As was the case with NAMA’s request

for a charter, the Clef Club’s attempt to unionize was denied by Local 310. While the Clef Club

was denied its request, the organization soon had trouble with NAMA. In late 1913 NAMA

officers complained that Europe’s Society Orchestra, comprised largely of members of the Clef

Club, employed NAMA members at an event in New York City without recognizing NAMA in

promotional advertisements. Mr. Prime asked, “if it was the sense of this board that outsiders

were to use our men, get credit for good work, and we sit down like a bunch of dummies.” A Mr.

Tate responded that, “the reason the association could not control its men was the men were

playing for outsiders who gave them better pay and thus the men had no regard for the

34
Goldberg, “Swinging the Color Line,” 22-23, 29; New Amsterdam Musical Association Board Minutes,
November 24, 1907, Box 3, Samuel E. Heyward Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New
York Public Library, New York; New Amsterdam Musical Association Board Minutes, December 5, 1909, Box 3,
Samuel E. Heyward Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New
York; New Amsterdam Musical Association Board Minutes, April 28, 1907, Box 3, Samuel E. Heyward Papers,
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York; New Amsterdam Musical
Association Board Minutes, December 28, 1913, Box 3, Samuel E. Heyward Papers, Schomburg Center for
Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York.

180
association.” The Clef Club’s challenge to NAMA signaled the emerging demand for black

musicians who played ragtime, jazz, and other Afro-centric art forms.35

The Clef Club grew as an organization throughout the 1910s adding new members and

securing new jobs along the way. In 1917, however, the organizing activities of the Clef Club

took a back seat when the United States entered the conflict already raging in continental Europe.

During World War I, James Reese Europe was a Lieutenant in the 369th Infantry, the most

decorated American unit of the conflict. The 369th earned the nickname the “Hellfighters” from

French soldiers because of their ferocity in battle. Europe led the regimental band. The music of

the Hellfighters closely resembled jazz, in that it featured syncopated rhythms based on ragtime.

The Hellfigthers made a lasting impression on European audiences, and it helped fuel the French

appetite for jazz. The Hellfighters played music unlike anything European audiences ever heard.

After playing for the French military band, The Garde Républicain, the band’s leader was

intrigued by the artistic talent of the Hellfighters: “I took an instrument and showed him how it

could be done, and he told me that his own musicians felt sure that my band had used special

instruments. Indeed, some of them, afterward attending one of my rehearsals, did not believe

what I had said until after they had examined the instruments used by my men.” Like Sidney

Bechet and Harry Carney, Europe enjoyed a celebrity and appreciation for black artistry that was

missing in the United States. Europe recalled, “I have come back from France more firmly

convinced than ever that negroes should write negro music. We have our own racial feeling and

if we try to copy whites we will make bad copies…. We won France by playing music which

35
Tirro, Jazz, 102-103; Johnson, Black Manhattan, 123; Goldberg, “Swinging the Color Line,” 29-31; New
Amsterdam Musical Association Board Minutes, December 28, 1913, Box 3, Samuel E. Heyward Papers,
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York; For more information on
New York nightlife and the opportunities it presented for African American artists see: Lewis A. Erenberg,
Steppin’s Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890-1930 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1981), 251-259.

181
was ours and not pale imitation of others, and if we develop in America we must develop along

our own lines.”36 Following his experience in France, Europe articulated a vision for African

American artistic expression based on Afro-centric influences that Amiri Baraka and Langston

Hughes later believed was so essential to the vitality and success of jazz. Europe’s racial pride

and activism is only reinforced with his work with the Clef Club in the decade of the 1910s.

Unfortunately, he was unable to fully implement his vision for the future of jazz after being

fatally stabbed by an estranged band mate in mid-1919. Europe was the first African American

granted a public funeral by the city of New York, and thousands of mourners turned out to watch

the funeral procession as it made its way through Harlem.37

Despite the loss of the revered bandleader and activist, New York’s black musicians

continued their struggle for social justice. In 1925, the Clef Club gathered to celebrate its

fifteenth anniversary. In its coverage of the event, The Amsterdam News declared, “On the roll of

the club are some of the names of the race’s most famous and accomplished musicians…. Clef

Club members are regularly employed, and it is said that nowhere in the country is there a

similar musical organization that can rank with the one made famous through the idea of the late

James Reese Europe.” The Clef Club remained active in the New York area throughout the

1920s. They enjoyed great success, and they became increasingly elitist, as a result. Because of

the club’s success, Local 310 sought to recruit their members. When individual recruitment of

Clef Club members proved too slow, Local 310 offered to waive proficiency tests and allow the

36
James Reese Europe, “A Negro Explains ‘Jazz’,” in Eileen Southern, ed., Readings in Black American Music, 2nd
Edition (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1983), 238, 240.
37
Ward and Burns, Jazz, 70; Samuel B. Charter and Leonard Kunstal, Jazz: A History of the New York Scene (New
York: Doubleday and Company, 1962), 63-72.

182
payment of initiation fees in installments to all Clef Club members. After incorporating with

Local 310, the power of the Clef Club greatly diminished.38

In 1921 a dispute between Local 310 and the AFM forced the leadership of the New York

union to disband. Shortly thereafter, a new local was formed. Local 802, at first, had trouble

convincing significant segments of the city’s African American musicians to join. In 1927, the

Chicago Defender music columnist, Dave Peyton (himself a staunch union man), received a

letter from a black activist in Local 802 complaining about the lack of African American

membership in the union. Ed Brown wrote, “Our Race musicians will be given another chance to

qualify and join the American Federation of Musicians of Greater New York, Local 802. A

similar opportunity was offered the musicians here several years ago, but our group neglected to

join at that time. Cubans, West Indians, South Americans and all other races joined the union in

large groups, but our Race musicians held out, only a few getting in line.” All the while, NAMA

and the Clef Club remained in existence, and they began to relax their stringent membership

policies in the mid 1920s. As jazz rose in popularity and jazz artists garnered prestigious jobs,

NAMA started to admit jazz musicians along with classical musicians, and Local 802 started

accepting more and more black musicians.39

In 1925 black activists within Local 802 pushed the union to join the Trade Union

Committee for Organizing Negro Workers (TUC). The TUC was the brainchild of Harlem labor

leaders, A. Phillip Randolph and Frank Crosswaith, and the two envisioned the TUC would

function as an umbrella organization that sought to protect the interests of New York’s black

workers and encourage black union participation. As the TUC was busy trying to protect the

38
“Famous Clef Club to Stage Big Celebration at Manhattan Casino, April 15,” The New York Amsterdam News
(March 18, 1925), 6; Goldberg, “Swinging the Color Line,” 31.
39
Goldberg, “Swinging the Color Line,” 36-38, 58; John Koegel, Music in German Immigrant Theater: New York
City, 1840-1940 (Rochester, New York: University of Rochester Press, 2009), 367; Dave Peyton, “The Musical
Bunch,” Chicago Defender (April 9, 1927), 6.

183
interests of its affiliated members, nine black motion picture operators appealed to the committee

to obtain help in joining Local 306 of the Moving Picture Operators of America. The men

explained that they were licensed operators by the state of New York, yet 306 refused to admit

them on anything but a temporary basis, and thus were ineligible for union protection. In a letter

to the American Fund for Public Service, Crosswaith complained that “The tragedy of this

particular case will be more easily grasped when we bear in mind that the strength of Local #306,

Moving Picture Operators of America is derived from the well organized Musicians Union, a

large percentage of whose membership are Negroes. On the basis of the latter’s strength the

Operator’s Local is able to win agreements from the Theater Owners.” Crosswaith further

explained, “In Negro Harlem there are eight Theaters catering solely to Negro patrons. Yet, these

Theater Owners cannot employ Negro Operators because they are not Union men and the Union

will not accept them because they are Negroes.” Despite the work of black activists within Local

802 that compelled union leaders to join the TUC, the New York musicians union remained only

nominally active in the committee.40

In the late 1920s a new organization formed that more closely guarded the interests of the

city’s recently arrived black musicians. Bert Hall, a recent migrant to Gotham by way of

Chicago, founded the Rhythm Club on West 132nd Street. It functioned as meeting hall, booking

agency, and community center. Duke Ellington explained, “The Rhythm Club was the great

hangout and sure enough if you landed a gig and wanted to hire some guys to work it with you,

you’d walk down that way and find enough good guys to work another three jobs.” Danny

Barker recalled, “It was a little gambling house⎯ two pool tables, in fact had three or four

different games…. And in this club, all musicians who came from New York, hung around the

40
Goldberg, “Swinging the Color Line,” 59; Frank Crosswaith, Letter to the American Fund for Public Service,
June 19, 1925, Trade Union Committee for Organizing Negro Workers, Negro Labor Committee Records,
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York.

184
Rhythm Club. Both day and night, they hung around there. We were around there waiting to see

what’s happening. Like where longshoremen hang out. What do you call them houses⎯ union or

local? Same kind of thing⎯ this was a social hall of musicians.” Mario Bauza illustrated, “In

there, the Rhythm Club, they open in there, sometimes don’t close at all. And on the floor, you

walk in and they had a piano, baby grand, so different guys come in there and play, sometimes

they’d jam. In back they had a billiard table and they had a poker table too, like a casino.” Sonny

Greer described the Rhythm Club where “they’d have different jam sessions and it was a place to

hnag out after you would get through work. A lot of guys would come in there and sit down and

jam…. It was just like a social club for the musicians. It got so popular. But the guys would go

down and if they feel like playing, they’d play.”41 Musicians at the club formed a community of

like-minded individuals who looked out for the interests of one another. The Rhythm Club

helped black musicians find employment, and it served as counterweight to the more

exclusionary organizations that held a less than favorable view of jazz. The Rhythm Club

utilized the musicians network to aid fellow musicians in need. In this manner it filled a self-help

void when NAMA and Local 802 were not responsive to the needs of the jazz community. The

Rhythm Club also helped channel members into Local 802, and it pushed the union to recognize

the issues and concerns of black artists.

Bert Hall was an outspoken advocate for black musicians and jazz artists in the New

York City. He joined Local 802, and according to Mario Bauza, Hall convinced a large number

of black musicians from the Rhythm Club to join the union. Hall was “the man that brought the

Negro musician to the 802 local. I came with that bunch too…. So they brought all this colored

41
Goldberg, “Swinging the Color Line,” 76; Duke Ellington in, Shapiro and Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya, 168;
Danny Barker, interview transcript, July 22, 1989, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans; Mario
Bauza, interview transcript, December 1978, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey;
Sonny Greer, interview transcript, January 1979, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey.

185
musicians from the Rhythm Club into 802.” In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Hall twice ran for

a position on the Governing Board of Local 802. He lost in the first campaign but was successful

in his second attempt. However, members of the Board refused to work with an African

American, so Hall was denied the opportunity to serve the union. Hall continued to agitate for a

notable African American presence within the union. In 1931 he was the first black business

chairman appointed by the local. Hall used his position of leadership to enact reforms regarding

black musicians, according to Danny Barker. Unfortunately, Hall died before his vision was

complete. Several black musicians followed the trail blazed by Hall and fought for a greater

African American presence in Local 802. Thanks to the work of Hall and black leaders that

followed, African Americans soon joined the local and staked their claim on the political

landscape of New York’s music stages. Due to their insistence and agitation, black musicians

could no longer be ignored in New York’s musicians union.42 The Rhythm Club utilized the

cultural formation of the jazz community as political strength to push the union to address their

interests.

With the influx of active black members, Local 802 became the country’s largest biracial

musicians union. At the time, Detroit was the only other major city with an integrated musicians

union, and given the fact that Chicago’s musicians unions did not integrate until 1966, biracial

cooperation in New York City was no small feat. However, biracial cooperation was hard fought

on the part of black activists; it was not until the 1930s that biracial unionism was achieved on

equal grounds. Furthermore, the continued activism and existence of NAMA, the Clef Club, and

the Rhythm Club speaks to the lack of commitment of Local 802 regarding black members

42
Mario Bauza, interview transcript, December 1978, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New
Jersey; Goldberg, “Swinging the Color Line,” 76-78.

186
throughout the 1920s. It was through the work of black activists like Bert Hall and others that

forced 802 to recognize black membership and speak to their concerns.

Just as in New Orleans and Chicago, jazz musicians in Harlem also engaged in a form of

consciousness-raising through their art. Ethel Waters was one of the most influential jazz singers

of the 1920s and 1930s. She pioneered an approach to singing that emphasized the strengths of

the individual vocalist. In an interview with Downbeat in the 1950s she clarified, “I was one of

the first to show people that there was an individual way of doing things with lyrics and

rhythms…. I want to tell that story. I want you to feel and live it.” Waters’ vocal range was

exceptional. She was immensely popular with both white and black audiences due to her ability

to sing both the blues and popular standards of the day.43 In 1930 she recorded a song for

Columbia Records in New York City entitled, “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue.” The

lyrics paint an evocative picture of the daily degradations faced by African Americans across the

country:44

Out in the street, shuffling feet

Couples passing two by two
While here am I, left high and dry
Black, and 'cause I'm black I'm blue
Browns and yellers, all have fellers
Gentlemen prefer them light
Wish I could fade, can't make the grade
Nothing but dark days in sight

Cold, empty bed, springs hard as lead

Pains in my head, feel like old Ned
What did I do to be so black and blue?
No joys for me, no company
Even the mouse ran from my house
All my life through I've been so black and blue

43
Ethel Waters quoted in, Placksin, Women in Jazz, 24; Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, 153-154.
44
Ethel Waters, “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue,” (Razaf, Andy; Waller, Fats; Brooks, Ernie) [master
2184-D] Columbia Records (April 1, 1930) New York, New York. This song title can be found today in Ethel
Waters, The Incomparable Ethel Waters, Sony Records, 2003.

187
 I'm white inside, it don't help my case
'Cause I can't hide, what is on my face, oh!
I'm so forlorn, life's just a thorn
My heart is torn, why was I born?
What did I do to be so black and blue?

'Cause you're black, folks think you lack

They laugh at you, and scorn you too
What did I do to be so black and blue?
When you are near, they laugh and sneer
Set you aside and you're denied
What did I do to be so black and blue?

How sad I am, each day I feel worse

My mark of Ham seems to be a curse, oh
How will it end? Ain't got a friend
My only sin is my skin
What did I do to be so black and blue?

Waters’ impassioned performance reminded jazz and blues listeners of the injustices faced in

their own lives. In that vein, the call and response between the artist and listener served as a

rhetorical call for further action in combating repression. Louis Armstrong also recorded a

version of the song and played it often in live performances. In a 1966 interview he explained

that when he first started playing the tune in the late 1920s and early 1930s, “I used to sing it

serious⎯ like shame on you for this and that.”45 Waters and Armstrong utilized their talent and

position of influence as strength to publicize issues of unequal justice in New York City and

beyond and to raise awareness to combat these problems.

New York’s jazz artists also engaged in mobilizing activities like their counterparts in the

Windy City. In February 1925, Fletcher Henderson volunteered his orchestra to play a benefit for

the New York branch of the NAACP. That fall, Henderson’s band played an election night event

in Harlem. The New York Amsterdam News declared, “We understand that special arrangements

have been made for this occasion in keeping with the nature of the night, which will be observed

45
Armstrong and Meryman, Louis Armstrong, 42.

188
with unusual interest because of the bitter fight being waged between the dominant parties with

Negro candidates in the field.” Henderson’s group was one of the most popular jazz acts in the

city, and the event’s organizers were overwhelmed with requests for reservations because,

“Henderson will try out some new wrinkles in jazz stuff that will take the audience by storm and

this is saying a great deal, as even Fletcher will have to go some to surpass what he has already

contributed to jazz entertainment in the past.” Henderson remained active in the Harlem

community playing engagements for The Amsterdam News to benefit Harlem’s poor, a

fundraiser for Harlem’s Martin-Smith Music School, and the Brotherhood Fraternity’s 1926

Decoration Day Dance.46

Other Harlem musicians engaged in mobilizing efforts. In 1929 the American Negro

Labor Congress staged a fundraiser for its organizing activities. The Amsterdam News declared

that at the event, Vernon Andrade’s Renaissance Orchestra will, “broadcast the weirdest jazz

Harlem can turn out. Prominent race leaders, well known writers and artists, hundreds of

members and officers of fraternal organizations will be on hand to lend color to the occasion and

Harlem’s flappers and matrons will have the opportunity to dance with men known throughout

the Negro and labor worlds.” That fall the Harlem branch of the NAACP staged a benefit that

featured a program designed by the black artist Aaron Douglas and featured poems by Langston

Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Jessie Fauset. Duke Ellington, Eubie Blake, and other black

performing artists provided the evening’s entertainment. The Amsterdam News declared the night

a success, but not without reservations: “The chief objection to the benefit was the trend toward

46
“Sub-Debs to Usher at Big Spring Dance,” The New York Amsterdam News (February 25, 1925), 4; “Henderson
and Orchestra Returning to Renaissance Casino Election Night,” The New York Amsterdam News (October 21,
1925), 7; “Election Night Dance at Renaissance Casino Attracting Wide Attention,” The New York Amsterdam News
(October 28, 1925), 6; “Baskets for Poor of Harlem Benefit At Rockland Palace Friday Night,“ The New York
Amsterdam News (December 18, 1929), 8; “Henderson, Smith to Play for Martin-Smith Benefit,” The New York
Amsterdam News (April 21, 1926), 5; “Side Lights on Society,” The New York Amsterdam News (June 2, 1926), 10.

189
sameness in the vocal jazz selections.”47 Criticism of the event aside, jazz musicians received

equal billing with the literary and visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance at this particular

engagement, and they played an active role in Harlem’s political arenas.

With Musicians It’s Always Been Alright

Harlem was a vibrant community by all accounts. James Weldon Johnson described, “A

visit to Harlem at night⎯ the principal streets never deserted, gay crowds skipping from one

place of amusement to another, lines of taxicabs and limousines standing under the sparkling

lights of the entrances to the famous night-clubs, the subway kiosks swallowing and disgorging

crowds all night long⎯ gives the impression that Harlem never sleeps and that the inhabitants

thereof jazz through existence.” Johnson noted that while the reputation of the neighborhood was

built on its nocturnal activities, the community was filled with hard-working residents, most of

whom “have never seen the inside of a night-club.” Duke Ellington argued that in Harlem, “there

were more churches than cabarets,” and that “the people were trying to find a more stable way of

living, and that the Negro was rich in experience and education.” Johnson also described the

social dynamics of the community that coalesced on city streets: “Strolling in Harlem does not

mean merely walking along Lennox or Upper Seventh Avenue or One Hundred and Thirty-fifth

Street; it means that those streets are places for socializing. One puts on one’s best clothes and

fares forth to pass the time pleasantly with the friends and acquaintances and, most important of

all, the strangers he is sure of meeting.”48 In addition to the previously described political

activities, Harlem boasted a number of black businesses, churches, and fraternal organizations

that made the community a hub of black culture, entrepreneurialship, and activism. Johnson and

47
“Labor Congress in ‘Classic Night’,” The New York Amsterdam News (January 2, 1929), 7; “Broadway
Headliners Volunteer for NAACP Benefit Show,” The New York Amsterdam News (November 20, 1929), 5;
“NAACP Sponsors First Sunday Night Benefit at Downtown Theatre,” The New York Amsterdam News (December
11, 1929), 5.
48
Johnson, Black Manhattan, 160-162; Ellington, Music Is My Mistress, 182.

190
Ellington’s descriptions speak to the vibrancy of Harlem. While, these accounts focus on the

daytime community, Harlem was most famous for what took place in the community at night.

Just as in Chicago, jazz retained the ability to cross racial boundaries in New York City.

The cabarets of Harlem were not unlike the black and tans of Chicago. Though many whites

flocked to cabarets as voyeuristic tourists to see what they considered “primitive” entertainment,

others were genuine admirers of the music. However, Harlem’s cabarets were often more

segregated than in Chicago. The Cotton Club on the corner of Lennox Avenue and West 142nd

Street notoriously drew a strict color line between the audience and black performers. Danny

Barker explained that the “Cotton Club was a white club, with black performers but they didn’t

cater to black people. It was real late before blacks could⎯ only important people would go to

the Cotton Club. People like uh, Harry Wills, Paul Robeson… generally they’d always go with

their agent or somebody… but the average black person didn’t care about the Cotton Club

because it was too staid.” Sonny Greer, Duke Ellington’s drummer, remembered black

celebrities like Bill Robinson sitting in the audience of the Cotton Club, but black customers

were the exception rather than the rule. Benny Carter recalled, “Connie’s Inn, and the Cotton

Club, they really did not welcome the black customer.” Black musicians were effectively barred

from playing the higher-paying clubs in downtown Manhattan. Carter explained that “according

to the AFM… they would have a higher scaled downtown, you know, like maybe a place like the

Roseland would be a Class A and someplace else would be a Class B, and maybe the Harlem

clubs would be a class B and a Class C, you know. I don’t know if there were any Harlem clubs

that they considered Class A.” Many whites frequented places like the Cotton Club as intra-city

tourists who wanted to experience an “authentic” night of African American entertainment.

191
However, African American entertainers playing to lily-white audiences was anything but

authentic.49

Just as in the Windy City, Harlem’s integrated cabarets represented the only spaces where

whites and blacks could openly interact in social settings, but not everyone was pleased with the

activities of the cabaret. Writing in The Amsterdam News, Edward M. Grey declared, “In Harlem

thousands of people earn a living from the activities of the community after dark…. Through

these clubs and cabarets thousands of white people are drawn to the community weekly for the

purpose of seeking amusement and diversion. Many aristocratic whites who would resent being

near a respectable colored person in a sleeping car or in a restaurant will sit for hours at tables

touching elbows with colored persons and join them as dancing partners.” Grey concluded, “Not

even a Puritan should object to the presence of well regulated night clubs in Harlem for

amusement and diversion of its population, but even a vulgar moron must see, if he has half an

eye, that the present night clubs are a decided moral liability to the community.” Edgar Grey was

not alone in his criticisms of Harlem cabarets, and his stance echoes sentiments from the black

middle class that associated jazz and jazz clubs with vice and immorality. Indeed, Dr. E. Elliot

Rawling, M.D. warned, “The form of music called jazz is just as intoxicating as morphine or

cocaine; it is just as harmful, and yet its use is not determined by law…. Jazz is killing some

people; some are going insane; others are losing their religion…. The young girls and boys, who

constantly take jazz every day and night, are becoming absolutely bad, and some criminals.”50

Certainly, the black middle class saw few positives in jazz and jazz clubs.

49
Danny Barker, interview transcript, July 22, 1989, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans; Sonny
Greer, interview transcript, January 1979, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey; Benny
Carter, interview transcript, October 13, 1976, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey.
For more information on white tourism in Harlem see: Mumford, Interzones, 148-156.
50
Edgar M. Grey, “Harlem After Dark,” The New York Amsterdam News (April 6, 1927), 16; E. Elliot Rawling,
M.D., “Keeping Fit,” The New York Amsterdam News (April 1, 1925), 16.

192
 Other observers believed integrated cabarets served important functions in the

community. As, New York Amsterdam News columnist, George S. Schuyler opined in 1927,

“Puritans and other such disagreeable ninnies around Harlem are given lustily to cursing the

cabarets and dance halls as sinks of iniquity, breeding places of crime and hotbeds of

immorality…. They vociferously wail about the ruin of the younger generation and clamor to the

gendarmes to suppress these places that offend their righteousness.” Schuyler declared that

contrary to the concerns of critics, “One great point in favor of the cabaret and dance hall as

social assets is… they afford a meeting place for the individuals of the two races where they can

know each other on a plane of equality and good-will. In many ways they are more valuable in

breaking down racial barriers than all the whooping of the inter-racial leagues from one end of

the country to the other.”51 Ethel Waters, the famous jazz and blues singer believed black-

performing artists retained the power to affect public opinion from the stage. “I realize the good

work that I and all of us colored artists have been doing. Many white people who would not

listen to any other side of Negro life will gladly hear a Negro jazz artist or blues singer. All that

helps pave the way by making them more sympathetic to our race.”52 While jazz did not tear

down the walls of racism and segregation in New York, the testimonies of Schuyler and Waters

reveals that it helped chip away at the barriers of Jim Crow.

While jazz was chipping away at Jim Crow, black and white musicians continued to

interact away from the bandstand. Sonny Greer recalled, “after all the other clubs closed the

musicians would come to ours, and often you would see forty or fifty name musicians in there at

a time. There was just a small dance floor and there wasn’t much dancing, but everybody could

sit in. At three or four I the morning, you would see Bix Beiderbecke, Tommy Dorsey, Miff
51
George S. Schuyler, “The Soap Box,” The New York Amsterdam News (August 23, 1927), 4.
52
Ethel Waters quoted in J.A. Rogers, “Ethel Waters Selected as First Subject From Pen of Gifted Writer and
Author,” The New York Amsterdam News (November 27, 1929), 9.

193
Mole, Paul Whiteman, and musicians like that.” White musicians like Beiderbecke, Dorsey,

Mole and Whiteman actively sought the advice and camaraderie of black musicians like Greer.

Greer remembered, “Because the Negro musicians, those days, they were gods to the white

boys.” In 1929 Louis Armstrong made friends in New York with many of the white musicians

who played downtown. “One night, on a Sunday, all of the White Musicians from Down on

Broadway, came up to Connie’s Inn’ gave me a big ‘party⎯ certainly a Swell Affair.⎯ ‘Ben

Pollack ‘Presented me with a Beautiful gold ‘Wrist ‘Watch, that was from the Boys from ‘Down

Town. The inscription on the watch Read as “follows⎯ GOOD ‘LUCK ALWAYS TO ‘LOUIS

ARMSTRONG FROM THE MUSICIANS ON BROADWAY. And did we have a Ball.” My

My My.”53 A particularly important site of black and white musical exchange in New York City

was Small’s Paradise on the corner of 7th Avenue and 135th Street. Duke Ellington revealed,

“Small’s was the place to go, the one spot where everybody’d drop in. And a lot of musicians

from downtown too. Jack Teagarden used to bring along his horn, and Benny and Harry

Goodman, Ray Bauduc, and a gang of others. Then on Sundays, Small used to hire a guest band,

the best he could get, and there’d be a regular jamboree.” The trumpet player Roy Eldridge

recalled that black and white musicians shared a mutual respect for one another: “with musicians

it’s always been alright, you know.”54 Musicians used the cultural interactions of the jazz

community to push the boundaries of integration in Harlem social circles. They used their

positions of influence as social capital to set an example for the rest of America regarding race

relations. White and black musicians continued to interact at places like Small’s Paradise

53
Louis Armstrong, “The Goffin Notebooks,” in Brothers, ed., Armstrong in His Own Words, 106. Louis
Armstrong often wrote in his personal papers in a style that improvised with the English language in a manner
reminiscent of his trumpet playing. The punctuation above is emblematic of his ability to emphasize certain phrases
by bending the rules of language not unlike his ability to emphasize certain music phrases with his trumpet.
54
Sonny Greer in Gottlieb, ed., Reading Jazz, 53; Duke Ellington in, Shapiro and Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya,
169-170; Roy Eldridge, interview transcript, June 15, 1982, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark,
New Jersey.

194
throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and these interactions paved the way for the biracial Swing Era

a decade later. By the end of the Great Depression, interracial bands playing for interracial

audiences were common, and it was the work of jazz artists in the 1920s that laid the

groundwork for future successes. Though biracial musicianship was no panacea for segregation,

artistic cooperation across racial boundaries signaled the dawning of a new chapter in the

development of jazz.

African American art retained the power to affect change. Though American society was

not transformed overnight, jazz helped pave the way for future progress. Furthermore, Harlem

was not the lone site of cultural innovation; it is clear that jazz was a truly national phenomenon,

thanks in no small part to the Great Migration. Thanks to the dedication to artistic innovation,

African American performing artists introduced the New Negro of jazz to the world. Most

importantly, it was the activism of the migration experience that informed subsequent activism in

new locales, and in this regard jazz musicians were just as politically active as other black artists

of the period. Jazz artists in New York engaged in a number of mobilizing and organizing

activities that attest to their political acumen. Though several attempts to form an all-black union

proved unsuccessful, black musicians forced Local 802 to recognize and address their concerns.

Because of their insistence, black musicians assumed an active role in the country’s largest

biracial union by the decade of the 1930s.

Some segments of the Harlem Renaissance did not take jazz seriously, but black

musicians reached larger portions of white America than the more heralded literary artists of the

period. Jazz, therefore, had the potential to affect American public opinion in ways that less

accessible art forms could not. Most importantly, it was a self-consciously Afro-centric art form.

195
In the words of Langston Hughes, jazz artists built “the temples of tomorrow,” and stood “ on

top of the mountain, free” within themselves.

196
Conclusion:

This New Thing of Racial Mixing on an Equal Basis:

The End of the Great Migration, the Start of the Great Depression,
and the Dawn of the Swing Era

The economic situation for black musicians in New Orleans was desperate at the outset of

the Great Depression. Danny Barker, a young guitarist and banjo player, left the Crescent City

because, “A lot of musicians were leaving here because there weren’t no money around here

man.” Barker’s uncle, the drummer Paul Barbarin, suggested Barker join him in New York City

where there was a better chance to find work. Barker was not alone. He remembered, “the

Depression had set in and musicians were coming up from all over the United States and the

Caribbean Islands to New York City because that was the place that you heard jazz played and

you heard it on the radio⎯ Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Cab Calloway⎯ black bands

who played on the radio nationally so you heard it. And that was encouraging for inspiring,

working musicians to go to New York City.” Barker received assistance and found potential

leads for jobs at the Rhythm Club. However, life was difficult despite the assistance: “the

Depression in New York⎯ man, it was a bitch.... Some mornings we’d make seventy-five cents,

other mornings we’d get twenty-five. Everybody cooperated because there was nowhere else to

go and, in fact, nobody had nothing.” Coleman Hawking echoed Barker’s sentiments saying,

“You know what used to happen during the Depression? We used to play a lot of jobs and didn’t

get paid. Everybody belonged to the union and everything, but it seemed like there wasn’t

anything we could do about it when it happened. I was still with Fletcher then and we used to do

quite a few nights for which we didn’t see any money.”1 While the 1920s was a decade of

1
Danny Barker, interview transcript, July 22, 1974, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans; Danny
Barker, interview transcript, Fall 1988, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans; Danny Barker in,
Shapiro and Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya, 196; Coleman Hawkins in, Shapiro and Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ To
Ya, 198.

197
newfound political, social, and economic freedom for black Americans and jazz musicians in

particular, the economic malaise of the 1930s threatened to undermine the foundations of the

hard-earned gains of the Great Migration period.

The Great Depression ended the Great Migration and had profound effects on the jazz

community across the country. In the year before the Stock Market Crash, the total membership

of the AFM stood at just under 150,000. By 1934, at the height of the depression, the number

declined to just over 100,000. Approximately 12,500 of the AFM’s dues paying members in

1934 also qualified for relief employment from the Works Progress Administration.

Furthermore, with less disposable income, Americans generally first abandoned the sorts of

social pleasures like an evening at a nightclub, dance hall, or record shop in favor of putting food

on the table. As a result, the record industry and businesses that catered to nightlife crowds in

cities across the country struggled mightily. Like many other Americans, jazz musicians suffered

from a loss of income and job security in the 1930s.2

At the local level the situation was dire. The New Orleans AFM local struggled to

survive, and according to jazz historian William Russell being a member of the local “wasn’t

very important in the middle of the Depression.” In Chicago Local 208 fared better than its New

Orleans counterpart, but members had a hard time finding steady employment. William Everett

Samuels recalled, “The union had a very difficult time in the Depression. They did. Membership

declined. They couldn’t pay their dues…. Say 1931, the month of June, I think I made eight

dollars. The whole Month! I seen the sign at the WPA and stuff and I applied for relief.” Since

New York was the center of what remained of the recording industry many musicians, like

Danny Barker, moved to the Big Apple in search of work. New York emerged as the de facto

2
Peretti, Creation of Jazz, 165-167.

198
depression-era jazz capital, because many of the leading bands in the country relocated there in

the 1930s to eke out a living as professional artists. In fact, so many musicians lived in New

York during the Depression that in 1934 Local 802’s membership represented close to twenty

percent of the total membership in the AFM nationwide. Increasingly, musicians turned to a life

on the road to make ends meet.3

In the 1930s AFM locals across the country suffered as some members could no longer

afford monthly fees and annual membership dues. At the national level, the AFM was fixated

with fighting the issue of Vitaphones in movie theaters. The AFM was convinced that a public

relations campaign would educate the public about the advantages of live, in-house music during

feature films. The AFM believed the audience would see the superiority of live music and

demand an end to canned music. Audiences were not convinced by the AFM’s public relations

campaign, and by 1937 it was clear that the union was fighting a losing battle.4

While the national AFM was ineffectual, unions at the local level focused their energies

at finding employment for members to little avail. In New York members of Local 802, led by

James Collis and David Freed, promoted a plan known as “One Man⎯One Job.” Essentially the

plan was an effort to spread employment among a larger pool of members. Two or three

musicians were intended to play jobs that used to require half a dozen or more members. In

theory the proposal would have provided more employment opportunities for all members. Local

802 ultimately did not adopt the proposal for fear that established and more recognizable

musicians would reap inordinate benefits. Similar proposals were adopted in Los Angeles and

Chicago, but proved ineffective in providing employment relief. Locals across the country also

3
William Russell quoted in, Peretti, Creation of Jazz, 166; Samuels, in Spivey ed., Union and the Black Musician,
47; Peretti, Creation of Jazz, 167, 172.
4
Kelley, “Without a Song,” in Three Strikes, 129-133, 144-149.

199
lowered fees, but a union card was often not enough to put food on the table. Locals also did

their best to provide relief to members, but most branches were on the brink of financial

solvency and in no position to dole out substantial benefits. In New York Local 802 appealed to

the city’s wealthy arts patrons to create the Musicians’ Emergency Fund. The fund provided

assistance to roughly four thousand musicians, but it was a temporary measure.5

In the dismal economic climate of the 1930s labor organizations and workers in a variety

of fields across the country turned increasingly militant. The Communist Party (CP) made

political inroads with black and white workers during the Depression as a result. The CP gained

black support in particular by advocating an agenda of racial equality and by supporting a group

of nine young black men falsely accused of rape in Scottsboro, Alabama who stood on death row

as a result. The case of the “Scottsboro boys” gained national attention that revealed southern

racial injustice to the nation. In 1931 and 1932 the CP and NAACP sought to provide legal help

to the wrongfully accused, and, ultimately, the CP’s legal arm, the International Labor Defense

(ILD), took up the case. In Harlem the CP set up the Scottsboro Unity Defense Committee to

raise funds for the ILD. In the spring of 1932 the Unity Defense Committee hosted a fundraiser

at the Rockland Palace Ballroom at 155th Street and 8th Avenue in Harlem that featured Duke

Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, and Fats Waller among others. A member of the ILD approached

the Board of Directors of Local 208 to request the services of members to play a similar benefit

in Chicago. The CP member, named Mr. Johnson, “Stated that he had been approached by

individual musicians and was referred to the Board by them. Mr. Johnson was instructed by

Board to report activities to Local Office and that there is no doubt will be cooperation given

5
David Freed and James Collis, “Why One Man- One Job?” 1938, Records of the American Federation of
Musicians Local 802, Box 1, Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Tamiment Library, New York University, New
York; Kelley, “Without a Song,” in Three Strikes, 137-138.

200
from this Local.”6 In this manner, jazz artists offered their services in the most galvanizing issue

for African Americans in the mid 1930s.

New York attorneys Samuel Leibowitz and Joseph Brodsky handled the Scottsboro case.

After six years and numerous trials and appeals, Leibowitz and Brodsky secured the acquittal of

four defendants, but five others were sentenced to anywhere from seventy-five years to life in

prison. Brodsky was a high-ranking member of the CP’s leadership, and later served as the

attorney for Local 802 for four years in the late 1930s. Some New York musicians joined the CP

and others, like Albert Walters, regularly attended party meetings but never formally joined.

Local 802’s more militant members remained committed to showing solidarity with fellow

laborers in trades across the Big Apple, and they marched in the city’s annual May Day parade

alongside members of New York’s other unions. While the leadership of Local 802 was

lukewarm to the interests of its more militant members, the work of black musicians as activists

within the union, with the Scottsboro case, the CP, and in showing solidarity with other labor

unions signaled that jazz artists were as committed to the radical politics of the Depression Era as

their counterparts in left-leaning social struggles. These activities also demonstrated that though

the Great Migration effectively ended with the economic collapse of the Great Depression,

musicians remained committed to political activism in a variety of fields unleashed by the

migration experience.7

6
Goldberg, “Swinging the Color Line,” 69-70; Minutes of the Board of Directors Meetings for Local 208 of the
American Federation of Musicians, February 11, 1932, American Federation of Musicians File, Harold Washington
Library Center, Chicago Public Library.
7
David B. Freed letter to John Galsel President of Local 802, December 31, 1990, Records of the American
Federation of Musicians Local 802, Box 1, Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Tamiment Library, New York
University, New York; Goldberg, “Swinging the Color Line,” 70-71; Kelley, “Without a Song,” in Three Strikes,
148. For more information on the Scottsboro case see: James R. Acker, Scottsboro and Its Legacy: The Cases that
Challenged American Legal and Social Justice (New York; Praeger, 2007); Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe:
Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina
Press, 1990) 78-91; Barak Goodman, “Scottsboro: An American Tragedy,” American Experience (PBS Home Video,
2001), http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/scottsboro/.

201
 Though jazz musicians as individuals suffered from the economic downturn, the genre

itself thrived; the work of black musicians captured America’s popular imagination and became

the national music in the 1930s. While black musicians remained politically active throughout

the Great Depression, jazz retained the power to affect limited social change and bring separate

groups together in unprecedented ways. By 1935 black and white audiences increasingly

clamored for the big band style of jazz first made famous by Fletcher Henderson and Duke

Ellington in Harlem in the mid to late 1920s. Groups led by Henderson, Ellington, Louis

Armstrong, and Count Basie and white bands led by Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, and Tommy

Dorsey kept the record industry afloat. These bands dominated the Swing Era and remained the

public faces of jazz throughout the Great Depression.

In 1936 a new jazz trio began playing for large crowds of curious spectators in Chicago.

The group featured Benny Goodman on clarinet, Gene Krupa on drums, and Teddy Wilson on

piano. At the height of the big band era, a trio was certainly out of the ordinary, but that is not

what piqued the crowd’s curiosity. The remarkable thing about the Benny Goodman Trio was

that it featured a black musician on stage with white musicians. Though black and white

musicians recorded together as far back as the 1920s, no one dared take such an act on the road.

The Benny Goodman Trio was the first to break with social convention and defy Jim Crow a full

decade before Jackie Robinson famously broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball.

Teddy Wilson was not relegated to a supporting role in the ensemble, but rather he was

featured as an equal partner to his white band mates Goodman and Krupa. Wilson remembered,

“When the Goodman Trio came out of the recording studio, where there had been many mixed

bands in the recording studio for years, but nobody played it live…. When we played— and the

public spotlight was really on me, and Krupa and them. We had a tremendous, big audience

202
watching this new thing of racial mixing on an equal basis.”8 The trio soon added two more

African American artists, Lionel Hampton on vibraphone and Charlie Christian on guitar, to

form one of the most popular bands of the decade for both black and white listeners. Sonny

Greer, Duke Ellington’s drummer, credited Goodman with challenging the status quo with

respect to interracial bands: “He was the first one to present the colored musicians with his band.

Because before then it wasn’t heard of ⎯wasn’t heard of. But a band with that reputation with

colored musicians⎯ it was a high honor. I give Benny very much credit. He kind of opened the

door. It eased open a little bit, you know.” Goodman was not the only bandleader to hire

musicians of both races. Benny Carter, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and other notable

bandleaders employed members of both races.9 It was a trend that continued, as jazz musicians

of all stripes finally had the freedom to create art with anyone they wished.

While David Levering Lewis and Nathan Irvin Huggins argue the Harlem Renaissance

did not progressively alter American society, the accounts of Teddy Wilson and Sonny Greer and

the accounts from previous chapters by Ethel Waters, Milt Hinton, and Bill Davison tell a

different story. African American art retained the power to affect change. Though American

society was not transformed overnight, jazz helped pave the way for future progress. Thanks in

no small part to the Great Migration, scores of musicians across the country contributed to a

flourishing of African American culture that introduced the New Negro of jazz to the world.

Most importantly, it was the activism of the migration experience that informed subsequent

activism in new locales, and in this regard jazz musicians were just as politically active as other

black artists of the period.

8
Teddy Wilson, interview transcript, October 2, 1979, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New
Jersey.
9
Sonny Greer, interview transcript, January 15, 1979, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New
Jersey; Buerkle and Barker, Bourbon Street Black, 106-107.

203
 Though jazz was not a panacea that cured America’s racial ills, it held the power to bring

disparate groups together on common ground and change the attitudes of segments of white

America. But jazz musicians were not content to wait for their reward in heaven. When the rate

of progress was too slow, they took matters into their own hands. From small scale economic

efforts like fish fries, lawn parties, and rent parties to organizing efforts like forming benevolent

societies in New Orleans or unionization in Chicago and New York, black musicians actively

sought to “make the American dream work,” in the words of Amiri Baraka. When the American

dream was not working, they pursued greener pastures during the Great Migration, and brought

America swinging into the Jazz Age.

204
 Bibliography

Archives

Chicago, Illinois
Chicago Jazz Archive, University of Chicago
Oral History Collection
Chicago Public Library, Harold Washington Library Center
American Federation of Musicians’ File
Chicago Public Library, Carter G. Woodson Regional Library
Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature
Charles Walton Papers
Newark, New Jersey
Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark
James P. Johnson Manuscript Collection
Oral History Collection
Periodicals Collection
New Orleans, Louisiana
William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University
Oral History Collection
Musicians’ Union File
New York, New York
Louis Armstrong House Museum Archives, Queens College
Louis Armstrong Collection
Louis Armstrong Tapes
Manuscripts
Personal Papers
Scrapbooks
New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
Manuscripts and Archives
Samuel E. Heyward Papers
Records of the Negro Labor Committee
Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Tamiment Library, New York University
Records of the American Federation of Musicians’ Local 802

Newspapers & Periodicals

Allegro
Century Illustrated Magazine
Chicago Defender
Concordia Eagle
International Musician
Journal of Negro History
Melody Maker
The Musical Visitor
The Nation

205
The New York Freeman
New Orleans Daily Picayune
New Orleans Times-Picayune
The New York Amsterdam News

Primary Sources

Adero, Malaika. ed. Up South: Stories, Studies, and Letters of This Century’s Black Migrations.
New York: The New Press, 1993.

Alkyer, Frank and Ed Enright. eds. Downbeat⎯The Great Jazz Interviews: A 75th Anniversary
Anthology. New York: Hal Leonard Book, 2009.

Armstrong, Louis and Richard Meryman. Louis Armstrong- A Self Portrait. New York: Eakins
Press, 1966.

Armstrong, Louis. Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans. New York: Da Capo Press, 1954.

Armstrong, Louis. Louis Armstrong: Swing That Music. New York: Da Capo Press, 1936.

Arnesen, Eric. ed. Black Protest and the Great Migration: A Brief History With Documents.
New York: Bedford/St. Martins Press, 2003.

Barker, Danny with Jack V. Buerkle. Bourbon Street Black: The New Orleans Black Jazzman.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Barker, Danny with Alyn Shipton. Buddy Bolden and the Last Days of Storyville. New York:
Continuum Publishing Group, 1998.

Bechet, Sidney. Treat It Gentle: An Autobiography. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1960.

Bigard, Barney. With Louis and the Duke: The Autobiography of a Jazz Clarinetist, Barry
Martyn ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Black, Timuel D., Jr. ed. Bridges of Memory: Chicago’s Second Generation of Black Migration.
Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2008.

Brothers, Thomas. ed. Louis Armstrong In His Own Words: Selected Writings. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999.

Carter, Benny. Benny Carter: Harlem Renaissance (liner notes), Music Masters Jazz Label,
1992.

Davis, Miles with Quincy Troupe. Miles: The Autobiography. New York: Simon & Schuster,
1989.

206
Desdunes, Rodolphe Lucien. Our History and Our People (Originally published in 1911 as Nos
Hommes et Notre Histoire) translated and edited by Sister Dorothea Olga McCants.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1973.

Dodds, Warren “Baby” and Larry Gara. The Baby Dodds Story. Los Angeles: Contemporary
Press, 1959.

DuBois, W.E.B. “The Talented Tenth,” in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by
Representative American Negroes of Today. New York: James Pott & Company, 1903.
Ellington, Duke. Music Is My Mistress. New York: Da Capo Press, 1976.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tales of the Jazz Age. New York: Scribners, 1922.

Foster, George “Pops” and Tom Stoddard. The Autobiography of Pops Foster: New Orleans
Jazzman. San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 1971.

Gottlieb, Robert. ed. Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism
from 1919 to Now. New York: Vintage Books, 1996.

Johnson, James Weldon. Black Manhattan. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930.

Locke, Alain. The Negro and His Music. New York: The Associates in Negro Folk Education,
1936.

Locke, Alain ed. The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Albert &
Charles Boni, 1925.

Morton, Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” and Alan Lomax. Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll
Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz.” Berkeley, California: University of
California Press, 1950.

Rampersad, Arnold. ed. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Vintage Books,
1994).

Rogers, J. A. “Jazz at Home” in Alain Locke ed. The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem
Renaissance. New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1925.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones. ed. Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching
Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

Shapiro, Nat and Nat Hentoff. eds. Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men
Who Made It. New York: Dover Publications, 1966.

Smith, Willie “the Lion” with George Hoefer. Music on My Mind. New York: Doubleday, 1964.

207
Southern, Eileen. ed. Readings in Black American Music, 2nd Edition. New York: W. W. Norton
and Company, 1983.

Spivey, Donald. Interview with William Everett Samuels in Donald Spivey ed., Union and the
Black Musician: The Narrative of William Everett Samuels and Chicago Local 208.
Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America.

Thomas, Brook. ed. Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/ St.
Martin’s Press, 1997.

Sound Recordings

Armstrong, Louis. “Basin Street Blues.” (Williams, Spencer) [master W.402154-A] Okeh
Records 8690. (December 4, 1928) Chicago, Illinois. This song can be found today in
Louis Armstrong, Hot Fives & Sevens [Box Set], JSP Records, 1999.

Waters, Ethel. “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue.” (Razaf, Andy; Waller, Fats; Brooks,
Ernie) [master 2184-D] Columbia Records. (April 1, 1930) New York, New York. This
song title can be found today in Ethel Waters, The Incomparable Ethel Waters, Sony
Records, 2003.

Welsh, Nolan with Louis Armstrong, “The Bridwell Blues.” (Welsh, Nolan; Jones, Richard)
[master 9727-A] Okeh Records 8372. (June 16, 1926) Chicago, Illinois. This song title
can be found today in Louis Armstrong, Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Sony
Records, 1994.

Video Recordings

Burns, Ken. Jazz. PBS Home Video, 2000.

Goodman, Barak. “Scottsboro: An American Tragedy.” American Experience. PBS Home Video,
2001.

Nelson, Stanley. “Marcus Garvey: Look For Me in the Whirlwind.” American Experience. PBS
Home Video, 2001.

Dissertations and Theses

Anthony, Arthé Agnes. “The Negro Creole Community in New Orleans, 1880-1920: An Oral
History.” Ph.D., University of California, Irvine, 1978.

Goldberg, Jacob C. “Swinging the Color Line: African American Musicians and the Formation
of Local 802, 1886-1946.” M.A., Amherst College, 2008.

208
Books

Acker, James R. Scottsboro and Its Legacy: The Cases that Challenged American Legal and
Social Justice. New York; Praeger, 2007.

Anderson, Gene H. The Original Hot Five Recordings of Louis Armstrong. New York:
Pendragon Press, 2007.

Anderson, Paul Allen. Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought.
Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2001.

Bachin, Robin F. Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago, 1890-
1919. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Baldwin, Davarian L. Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, The Great Migration, and Black
Urban Life. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Baldwin, Peter C. In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820-1930. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones). Blues People: Negro Music in White America. Westport,
Connecticut: Greenwood Press.

Brothers, Thomas. Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

Charter, Samuel B. and Leonard Kunstal. Jazz: A History of the New York Scene. New York:
Doubleday and Company, 1962.

Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Collier, James Lincoln. Duke Ellington. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Collier, James Lincoln. Louis Armstrong: An American Genius. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1983.

Colten, Craig E. An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans From Nature. Baton Rogue,
Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.

Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith,
and Billie Holiday. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998.

Domínguez, Virginia R. White By Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana. New

Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1986.

209
Driggs, Frank and Chuck Haddix. Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop⎯A History. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Erenberg, Lewis A. Steppin’s Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American
Culture, 1890-1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Fairclough, Adam. Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972.
Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1995.

Floyd, Samuel A. Jr. ed., Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance. Westport, Connecticut:
Greenwood Press, 1990.

Gioia, Ted. The History of Jazz. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Gregory, James N. The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White
Southerners Transformed America. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North
Carolina Press, 2005.

Griffin, Farah Jasmine. If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery. New York: The Free Press, 2001.

Grossman, James R. Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Gushee, Lawrence. Pioneers of Jazz: The Story of the Creole Band. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005.

Hahn, Steven. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from
Slavery to the Great Migration. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
2003.

Hersch, Charles. Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Hirsch, Arnold R. and Joseph Logsdon. eds. Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

Howland, John. Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert
Jazz. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2009.

Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Kelley, Robin D.G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression.
Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Kelley, Robin D. G. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New York:
The Free Press, 1994.

210
Kelman, Ari. A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans. Berkeley,
California: University of California Press, 2003.

Kenney, William Howland. Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-1930. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993.

Kenney, William Howland. Jazz on the River. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Koegel, John. Music in German Immigrant Theater: New York City, 1840-1940. Rochester, New
York: University of Rochester Press, 2009.

Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought
from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Penguin Books, 1997
(originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1979).

Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America In Rock ‘N Roll Music. New York: Penguin
Books, 1975.

Martin, Tony. Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and
the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Dover, Massachusetts: The Majority
Press, 1976.

Marquis, Donald M. In Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man of Jazz. Baton Rogue, Louisiana:
Louisiana State University Press, 1978.

Montgomery, David. Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor
Activism, 1865-1925. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Mumford, Kevin J. Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early
Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Osofsky, Gilbert. Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.

Payne, Charles M. I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi
Freedom Struggle. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995.

Peretti, Burton W. The Creation of Jazz: Music, Race, and Culture in Urban America. Urbana,
Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1992.

Peretti, Burton W. Jazz in American Culture. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997.

Phillips, Kimberley L. Alabama North: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working-

Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915-45. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

211
Placksin, Sally. American Women in Jazz: 1900 to the Present Their Words, Lives, and Music.
New York: Wideview Books, 1982.

Rose, Al. Storyville, New Orleans: Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red-
Light District. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1974.

Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans: A History 3rd Edition. New York: W. W.
Norton & Co., 1997.

Schneider, Eric C. Smack: Heroin and the American City. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

Schuller, Gunther. Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1968.

Spencer, Jon Michael. The New Negroes and Their Music: The Success of the Harlem
Renaissance. Knoxville, Tennessee: The University of Tennessee Press, 1997.

Stuckey, Sterling. Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Tirro, Frank. Jazz: A History. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1977.

Turner, Richard Brent. Jazz Religion, the Second Line, and Black New Orleans. Bloomington,
Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2009.

Ward, Geoffrey C. and Ken Burns. Jazz: A History of America’s Music. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2000.

Williams, Chad L. Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I
Era. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Williamson, Joel. The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since
Emancipation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow 2nd Revised Edition. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1966.

Zinn, Howard, Dana Frank and Robin D. G. Kelley, Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians,
Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.

Articles

Arnesen, Eric. “Turning Points: Biracial Unions in the Age of Segregation, 1893-1901,” in The
Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana History Volume XI: The African

212
 American Experience in Louisiana Part B: From the Civil War to Jim Crow, Charles
Vincent, ed., Lafayette, Louisiana: University of Louisiana Press, 2000.

DeSantis, Alan D. “Selling the American Dream Myth to Black Southerners: The Chicago
Defender and the Great Migration of 1915-1919,” Western Journal of Communication,
(Fall, 1998).

Ellison, Mary. “African American Music and Muskets in Civil War New Orleans,” Louisiana
History (Summer, 1994).

Fischer, Sue. “American Federation of Musicians Locals 174 and 496 Records at the Hogan Jazz
Archive,” The Jazz Archivist (2005-2006).

Goines, Dr. Leonard. “Father of the Blues,” Allegro: Associated Musicians of Greater New York,
Vol. LXXV, No. 9 (October, 1975).

Gushee, Lawrence. “How the Creole Band Came to Be,” Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 8,
No. 1 (1988).

Gushee, Lawrence. “The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Jazz,” Black Music Research Journal
(1994).

Halker, Clark. “A History of Local 208 and the Struggle for Racial Equality in the American
Federation of Musicians,” Black Music Research Journal (Autumn, 1998).

Jacobs, Claude F. “Benevolent Societies of New Orleans Blacks During the Late Nineteenth and
Early Twentieth Centuries,” Louisiana History (Winter, 1988).

Kraft, James P. “Artists as Workers: Musicians and Trade Unionism in America, 1880-1917,”
The Musical Quarterly (Autumn, 1995).

Laifer, Stephen. “Merged Locals are Windows on Changing Times,” International Musician
(March 2003).

LeGardeur, Lili. “Call to Save the Hall,” New Orleans Music Incorporating Footnote VOL. X
No. 1 (March, 2002).

Miller, Leta E. “Racial Segregation and the San Francisco Musicians’ Union, 1923-60,” Journal
of the Society for American Music, (2007), Vol. 1 No. 2, 161-206.

Polletta, Francesca, “’Free Spaces’ in Collective Action” Theory and Society (1999).

Semmes, Clovis E. “Charitable Collaborations in Bronzeville, 1928-1944: The Chicago

Defender and the Regal Theater,” Journal of Urban History (November 2011) Vol. 37
No. 6.

213