1 LUTHER HENDERSON NEA Jazz Master (2004) Interviewee: Luther
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Funding for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program NEA Jazz Master interview was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. LUTHER HENDERSON NEA Jazz Master (2004) Interviewee: Luther Henderson (March 14, 1919 – July 29, 2003) Interviewer: Eugene Holley Date: August 28 & 29, 1993 Repository: Archives Center, National Museum of American History Description: Transcript, 62 pp. (prep chatter...) Holley: Today is April 28, 1993. My name is Eugene Holley Jr. and we're interviewing Mr. Luther Henderson for the Smithsonian Oral History Jazz Project. Mr. Henderson, I want you basically to state your full name, your occupation, your birth date, etc. Henderson: My full name is Luther Lincoln Henderson, Jr. I don't use the Jr. anymore but generally go by Luther Henderson. And my occupation is composer, orchestrator and arranger. And what was the other thing? Holley: Place and date of birth. Henderson: Place and date of birth. Born in 1919, Kansas City, Missouri. March 14th as a matter of fact. Holley: And your race? Henderson: I am Afro-American. Holley: Your place of residence? Henderson: I'm presently residing at 340 West 57th in New York City, area code 10019. Holley: I guess we can start … I want to take you all the way back to your origins. This going to be pretty much a chronological process. I think it would be easier if we just go that route. Talk about … but before I get into that, just some other questions I want to ask. What is your religious affiliation? Henderson: I guess you'd say general. I don't uh … uh how shall I say?… proselytize or go for any particular one church, we go for unity, we go for the ...120th Street For additional information contact the Archives Center at 202.633.3270 or [email protected] 1 Billie Henderson: Riverside Henderson: Riverside Church. My folks, my mother and father, were both associated with Abyssian Baptist Church. I guess that's it… I'm open. Holley: When you were a child, were you a Protestant? Henderson: Oh, Protestant, yes. uh hm. Holley: Marital status? Henderson: Married, yes. Holley: How long you been married, may I ask. Henderson: We've been married eleven … she's looking at me …. yes, eleven years. Holley: I'm gonna start off going back to Kansas City, even before that. Talk about your mother and father. I understand your father was an actor? Henderson: Well actually, simply maybe by way of, tangentially and by default. My father and mother were both school teachers. They resided when I was born in Oklahoma. My father taught there, I believe pedagogy at Langston University and my mother taught in the public schools there. And at the time that I was to be born, I like to say that we were big and upwardly mobile family. We had connections at a hospital. It was decided that I was gonna be born in a hospital, you see, rather than what everybody did. So we went to Kansas City. There was a cousin or someone there, I don't really remember it. (chuckles) I don't remember it. But that's how that happened. Now my parents, as I said, were educated in the school, in the schools in the South. My mother mainly taught the grades below, below the high school level, elementary grades. And from Langston University … his next appointment, my father, was in Elizabeth City, State Normal College there. Now as was the custom with many of the colleges, the black colleges, Negro colleges in that time, funding for education was very hard to come by and many times they would entertain - they did various things during the summer to raise money at the various chautauquas and fairs and so forth like that. As I understand it, my father and his brothers and sisters, four of them, that had something, that had a quartet called The Henderson Quartet which they would, I guess, sing various popular songs of the day or what it would be, but anyway would take and tour the fairs and chautauquas in the summer time to raise money for this school. And after North Carolina -- ??? about how he happened to be ?????? because by the time he got to North Carolina, my sister – I have just one sister who is now deceased – became college age and it was decided they wanted her to go to have an education in a northern college and so they wanted to go to Columbia. Well at which point, she was too young. Both my sister and I were, what shall I say, we were either in classes taught by our parents or in schools in which our parents taught up until … quite a while. Holley: Couple of questions: What are the names of your mother and father? For additional information contact the Archives Center at 202.633.3270 or [email protected] 2 Henderson: My mother's name was Florence Henderson. Maiden name was Black. Florence Black Henderson. She was born in College Springs, Iowa. She was part of, um, the one black family that existed in that small college town. And my father's name was Luther, Luther Henderson, Luther Lincoln Henderson. And as I told you I was a Jr. and when he passed, I dropped the Jr and so forth. Holley: And Langston University, what … Henderson: It's in Oklahoma City. Isn't it? Oklahoma, right? Langston, Oklahoma. Holley: You mentioned your sister going to Columbia. Henderson: Yes. Holley: Columbia University in New York? Henderson: In New York, yes. Billie Henderson: Hunter? Henderson: Uh, she … you're right that she did go to Hunter College. She got her Bachelor's from Hunter College but she got her Master's Degree from Columbia University. That's where it was. Thank you, Billie. Holley: And what year was that? Henderson: Oh God. What year was that? …. That was … well now let's see, we moved to New York when I would say, around 1924 and she would have had to have been at least a year in high school because she was only 14 years old when she graduated from high school in North Carolina and she was too young to be matriculated in a college, they thought at that time and so she spent a year in a high school, a few years in a high school, I think Julia Richmond High School, and then she went to Hunter College. So that puts it '25 … 4 years, '29 … I suspect she graduated from Hunter around 1930 and probably from Columbia University probably the next year, '31 or something like that, and then went into teaching. Holley: And when you, when your family moved to Kansas City, your father was still teaching? Henderson: Well we didn't actually move to Kansas City. We just took a little side trip. The way they used to tell it to me was kind of like, you know, a holiday weekend or something like that. We went over, they had me, and then they came back and so it didn't, we still lived in Oklahoma. Holley: I see. Henderson: People, when I say Kansas City, they say: Oh you know … because so many famous jazz musicians particularly have come from Kansas City, that area … and they hear the name Henderson … and Fletcher Henderson and Horace Henderson … I would say that there's a possibility that we may have been, let’s say sprung from the same plantation. My sister at one time did a … research on the family and I think she came up For additional information contact the Archives Center at 202.633.3270 or [email protected] 3 with the fact that we had, that my grand, my great grandfather, or somebody like that in that area were slaves on a plantation owned by the Hendersohns, s-o-h-n, who were Dutch people, and that they were, if you can think of such, I guess, benevolent slaves owners in a way of speaking because they freed their slaves. Something like that. I don't know the specific details. At any rate, that’s how come Kansas City and Oklahoma, as I said, we lived in Watonga. I remember that because my mother used to show me these little photos of a little house in Watonga and she used to -- after I became of an age like 12 or 13 when I didn't wish to hear stories about when I was a baby -- she'd tell me how she would take me out and show me all the flowers and … This is a little red flower, and all that, and this is a yellow one. She used to tease me, said: Did you know when you were about two years old, you said that when you grew up, you were going to buy me a yellow piano because I showed you a yellow flower. I don't know what that means, but …. (chuckles) Holley: Watonga's a city? Henderson: Watonga's a city in Oklahoma. Holley: And point of clarification, what is a chautauqua? Henderson: I've never been to a chautauqua. I would suspect that it is perhaps an Indian, American Indian derivation of a name for a fair, a place where people come and … not exactly like an amusement park. I really don't know the exact definition of it, but I know it is a place that people go in the summer for an outing. I suspect there might have been Ferris Wheels. I suspect there might have been booths. I just often heard them used sort of interchangeable between chautauqua and fair.