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New Orleans, Barbershop Harmony, and the Blues

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New Orleans, Barbershop Harmony, and the Blues Creating Jazz Counterpoint American Made Music Series ADVISORY BOARD David Evans, General Editor Barry Jean Ancelet Edward A. Berlin Joyce J. Bolden Rob Bowman Susan C. Cook Curtis Ellison William Ferris John Edward Hasse Kip Lornell Bill Malone Eddie S. Meadows Manuel H. Peña Wayne D. Shirley Robert Walser CREATING JA Z Z COUNTERPOINT New Orleans, Barbershop Harmony, and the Blues Vic Hobson UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI JACKSON www.upress.state.ms.us Designed by Peter D. Halverson Te University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Copyright © 2014 by University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2014 ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hobson, Vic. Creating jazz counterpoint : New Orleans, barbershop harmony, and the blues / Vic Hobson. pages cm. — (American made music series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-61703-991-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61703-992-8 (ebook) 1. Jazz—Louisiana—New Orleans—History and criticism. 2. Blues (Music)—Louisiana—New Orleans—History and criticism. I. Title. ML3508.8.N48H63 2014 781.65’3—dc23 2013033566 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available Tis book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Ronald Victor Hobson. His Louis Armstrong record collection certainly started something. This page intentionally left blank Contents Foreword IX 1. Jazzmen 3 2. The Bolden Legend 7 3. Just Bunk? 32 4. Cracking-up a Chord 47 5. Bill Russell’s American Music 59 6. The “Creoles of Color” 79 7. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band 95 8. New Orleans: Capital of Jazz 109 9. The Blues and New Orleans Jazz 126 Notes 131 Bibliography 155 Index 163 This page intentionally left blank Foreword THE QUESTIONS RAISED IN THIS BOOK BEGAN TO TAKE SHAPE AT A joint conference of the Historic Brass Society and the Institute of Jazz Stud- ies at Rutgers University in 2005. I had written a paper for the conference questioning how the blues had become a part of New Orleans jazz.1 Bruce Raeburn (curator of the Hogan Jazz Archive, New Orleans) suggested that the interviews that the archive held with early New Orleans jazzmen might be a good way forward. Te following spring, as New Orleans struggled to recover from Hurricane Katrina, I took my first visit to the Crescent City. On my way back to England, I stopped off in New York and met briefly with Lewis Porter. Together we agreed that I should write an essay for Jazz Per- spectives; the result was “New Orleans Jazz and the Blues,” which appeared in the spring of 2011.2 Tis was an historical essay that relied substantially on what early jazzmen of New Orleans said about their experiences of the blues. Despite the limited scope of the essay, it did establish that the blues— in all its forms—was known and performed by the early jazz bands of New Orleans. Te question left unanswered was how these musicians had come to know the blues. Tis book explores this question. Te Hogan Jazz Archive has played a particularly important role in the writing of this book. Bruce Raeburn provided unprecedented access to the collections and valuable guidance. My visits to the archive also put me in contact with Lynn Abbott, whose encyclopedic knowledge of early blues and enthusiasm for the subject is an inspiration. Lynn asked me to write an essay for the Jazz Archivist. Tis gave me an opportunity to explore in some detail “Buddy Bolden’s Blues.”3 He read earlier drafts, and his guid- ance, particularly in relation to quartet practices, has been essential. It was though Lynn that I approached David Evans and Craig Gill to get this book published. It is a privilege to have such knowledgeable advisors. I was fortunate to receive a Woest Fellowship to the Historic New Or- leans Collection to research the Papers of Frederic Ramsey Jr. Tis gave me IX X FOREWORD access to the research notes and materials collected by both Fred Ramsey and Bill Russell. Tis became central to writing this book. My thanks to Alfred Lemmon, Mark Cave, Daniel Hammer, Siva Blake, Eric Seiferth, and Jennifer Navarra for their help in guiding me through these collections. Financial support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Roberts Funding enabled me to travel extensively to conduct my research. It was through the AHRC and the support of Jonathan Impett (University of East Anglia) that I was awarded a Kluge Scholarship in 2007. I am very grateful to Carolyn T. Brown, Mary Lou Reker, and the staff and scholars at the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress for making this pe- riod so rewarding. I am especially indebted to Todd Harvey for guiding me through the Alan Lomax collection and to Michael Taft and Jennifer Cut- ting of the American Folklife Center. Tanks too to Karl Koenig for access to his own archive material, his hospitality, and his introduction into the mysteries of baseball. Particularly important were the scrapbooks of R. Emmet Kennedy. By the time I appre- ciated the significance of Kennedy’s folklore collections, the original scrap- books had been split up between surviving family members. Karl Koenig had a copy of the complete collection. Tere are, of course, many people who have played a part in advising, encouraging, and supplying me with material in the course of writing this book. I am sure that this is not an exhaustive list, and my apologies to any- one that I have unintentionally omitted. My thanks to Lawrence Gushee (University of Illinois); Joseph B. Borel (Gretna Historical Society); Greg Johnson (curator of the Mississippi Blues Archive); Paul Garon (Beas- ley Books); Pat Schroeder (Ursinus College); Azusa Nishimoto (Aoyama Gakuin University); Michael P. Bibler (University of Mary Washington); Minnie Handy Hanson (Handy Brothers); Gunther Schuller (Historic Brass Society); Trevor Herbert (Open University); David Sager (Library of Con- gress); Krin Gabbard (Stony Brook University); John J. Joyce (Tulane Uni- versity); David Nathan, Graham Langley, and Chris Hodgkins (National Jazz Archive); Sharon Choa and Simon Waters (University of East Anglia); Jeff Nussbaum and Howard Weiner (Historic Brass Society); Gerhard Kubik (University of Vienna); Dennis Moore (Southern American Studies Associa- tion); John Howland and Steven F. Pond (Jazz Perspectives); and Neil Lerner (American Music). Creating Jazz Counterpoint This page intentionally left blank 1 Ja z z m e n TODAY JAZZ IS STUDIED IN UNIVERSITIES, DISCUSSED AT ACADEMIC conferences, and is the subject of musicological research. It was not always so. Early jazz researchers were not, in the main, historians or musicologists, but enthusiasts—people for whom day jobs got in the way of their real pas- sion—collecting “hot jazz.” Tis was a small, dedicated band of phonograph record collectors in search of what were known at the time as “race record- ings.” At the center of the American section of the loose confederation of hot jazz collectors was Frederic Ramsey Jr.1 After graduating from Princeton in 1936, Ramsey took a job in the production office with publishers Har- court Brace. Given his interest in jazz, when a manuscript on jazz arrived at the office, he was asked to review it. As he would later recall, “I read it care- fully and wrote an editor’s report. Te manuscript was miserable. Out of ‘sheer modesty,’ I wrote in the last line ‘I could make a better book on jazz.’”2 Te result was a landmark in jazz publishing, Jazzmen (1939).3 Te appearance of Jazzmen was timely. Jazz had been a part of main- stream American culture for more than two decades, and by the middle of the thirties was enjoying unparalleled widespread acceptance. When Jazzmen appeared in 1939, it was the first book of its kind: it presented jazz as music with a history and firmly placed New Orleans at the origin. Despite wartime restrictions, a U.S. Army and Navy edition for circu- lation among service personnel overseas appeared in 1945. After the war, overseas editions began to appear. Te French edition in 1947 was “the first American book on jazz translated into a foreign language.”4 Sedgwick and Jackson produced an edition to satisfy the demands of the New Orleans re- vivalists in Britain in 1958; back in the States, Harcourt-Brace were prepar- ing a “Giant Edition” for inclusion in their Harvest Book Series. In retrospect, Jazzmen’s strength was also its weakness: it relied heavily on oral testimony of the jazzmen themselves. Because it had been published within a very short period and with a severely limited budget, there was JAZZMEN very little time or opportunity to check the information for accuracy. Te greatest weakness, many would argue, was that it relied heavily on the recol- lections of the cornet player Bunk Johnson. Johnson had been located work- ing on a rice farm in New Iberia and claimed to have firsthand knowledge of the early years of jazz. As Johnson increasingly became promoted as a figurehead of the traditional jazz revival, he and his testimony came under scrutiny. Historically, much that he said simply did not seem credible. He claimed he and Buddy Bolden had started jazz in New Orleans. But there was just a single photograph of Bolden and his band, and Johnson was not in the photograph. Even if he had been in the Bolden band, there was noth- ing that proved Bolden had any significant role in the making of early jazz. Critics would also come to question when Johnson was born. Even by his own testimony he was still in short pants when Bolden was musically active.
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