1 Funding for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program NEA Jazz Master interview was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. JIMMY COBB NEA Jazz Master (2009) Interviewees: Jimmy Cobb (January 20, 1929) and Eleana Steinberg Cobb Interviewer: William Brower with recording engineer Ken Kimery Date: July 26-27, 2010 Repository: Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution Description: Transcript, 120 pp. Brower: It is Monday, July 26th, the year 2010. I am William Alston Brower. I am here to interview Jimmy Cobb on behalf of the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program. We‟re in New York City at the Wells Hotel. Mr. Cobb, if you could – we want to go from the beginning. So would you introduce us to your parents? Jimmy: My mother is Katherine Bivens Cobb, and my father is Wilbur Cobb. They met somewhere around before I was born and got married and had me. He‟s from Carolina somewhere, and she‟s from southern Maryland. How they got together, I‟m not really sure about that. That‟s how it happened. They tell me I was born in Corcoran Street – 1515 Corcoran Street – in the basement. But I‟m not really sure of that even. Sometime I have to try to check that out myself. Every time I go by there I look and say, well, maybe that was where it was. Brower: That‟s in northwest Washington [D.C.] Jimmy: Yeah, northwest, 1515. In fact, in Corcoran Street, I lived in two or three – over my lifetime, I lived in about three blocks of Corcoran Street. I remember being in – I don‟t remember being in the 1500 block. That‟s before memory. Later on I was in the For additional information contact the Archives Center at 202.633.3270 or [email protected] 2 1300 block, between 14th Street and 13th Street. Then, a little bit later, I was in the 1700 block. That was 1725 Corcoran. I remember Corcoran Street because it has a big spot in my life span. That was it. My mother was from southern Maryland, which is about 32 miles – a place called La Plata, Maryland, which is about 32 miles south of Washington, down [highway] 301. When I got old enough to be going to school, I used to go back there for the summer. I used to spend the summertime down in my grandfather‟s farm – tobacco farm. So that‟s basically how I got started. I stayed around Washington a long time. Being where we were brought up, there was not a lot of places where you could be. So my mother had me – she put me in a Catholic school which was not too far from where we lived. That was – I think the Catholic school was St. Augustine‟s. It was right in the neighborhood. I remember going there mostly all my life from kindergarten until I graduated to go to the ninth grade to go to high school. Brower: St. Augustine‟s – that‟s about 15th and V [streets], or something like that? Jimmy: Yeah, it‟s right in there somewhere. I‟m trying to think. Yeah, it‟s right there. I used to walk – be able to walk to school from wherever we were living at the time. I remember that. The teachers – sisters always - I remember them being nice and kind to me, the Dominican sisters, I think they call it. That was it for me. I was right in the neighborhood. I could go to school there. I remember one little girl that lived in the neighborhood. My mother used to get her to take me – by the time I got to go to school – used to get her to take me to school, because she went to St. Augustine‟s too. Her name was Connie Wittingham. She was a little girl that used to carry me to school who I met a lot later, after I grew up. She had moved to Detroit. So I remember little things like that, just being around that neighborhood. From being born until I went to school, I don‟t remember much about that. I remember being in a position where I used to go to school, but by the time I got to go to school, there would be a little bully in the neighborhood that would take whatever little money I had. It was guys – bigger guys used to walk around and take money from little kids. I remember that happening, because I remember once he took some money from me, and I threw a rock at him for doing it. He got – I remember it was a yard. Right on the corner was a yard. I threw a rock across the yard and missed him. He threw a brick across the yard and hit me in the head. Those are the kinds of things I remember about childhood, stuff like that, and being in that neighborhood. Overall, I like Washington, because until I was 21, that‟s all I knew, was Washington. About the childhood, going to St. Augustine‟s school was nice. Like I say, I went the whole time. I never went to another school, like a middle school or any of that. I just For additional information contact the Archives Center at 202.633.3270 or [email protected] 3 went from kindergarten all the way out until I went to high school. I don‟t know what I can think about in between that. Brower: Do you remember the Depression? You were born on the cusp of the Depression. Do you remember that at all? Jimmy: I guess I was too young to remember it. I just remember they didn‟t have food stamps or nothing like that. I remember you could go to the store and buy $5 worth of groceries and have to have somebody help you bring it back, because the dollar was worth a lot of money. I remember cigarettes being 15 cents a pack. At the corner store where I was, they used to sell cigarettes by the penny. They used to be a penny apiece, and the guys going – because they didn‟t have any money. It must have been the Depression then. They didn‟t have any money. They‟d buy a penny a cigarette. I remember it because I‟d say, that couldn‟t be too much money. The owner‟s making like five cents on a pack of cigarettes. They was really hustling hard back then. So that must be in the Depression. You could go get flour, sugar – what is it? – fatback, all that stuff that you needed to cook with in the ghetto, give them $5, and have some change coming. A carton of cigarettes, it was like a $1.39 or something like – maybe not that much, may $1.10 for ten packs of cigarettes. Brower: What did your parents do? Jimmy: By the time I got to be seven years old, I was separated – my mother and father were separated. So my mother pulled the duty of taking care of me and my sister by herself. She was a domestic worker. She used to work in people‟s houses later for $15, $20 an hour, to take care of us all her life. That‟s what she did. She was gone most of the time. Brower: You mean $15, $20 a week? Jimmy: No. Brower: An hour? Jimmy: I think she might have been – maybe it was a day. I don‟t know. She was getting minimum money for what she had to do. She was a hard-working woman. Basically, I had to be home, when I got old enough, to take care of my sister. My sister was a couple of years younger than me. Her name was Eleanor. So I was the man. I had to take care of her. So we would be together all the time. Everywhere I‟d go, she had to go, because I couldn‟t leave her anywhere. We got to be like sister and brother, for sure. For additional information contact the Archives Center at 202.633.3270 or [email protected] 4 I remember doing that, and growing up in Corcoran Street with a lot of friends. The guys used to come and hang out in my house. This – I‟m progressing now. I‟m getting to be a teenager. Guys are coming to hang out in my house. I had records. I had to do a lot of different kind of things to take care of myself, to supplement my mother‟s income, so that we could have some things that we needed. I had a shoeshine box. Sometime I would go and shine shoes. Then I had – eventually I had a paper route. That was pretty good. It was right in the neighborhood, which was very good for me, because I could just get up and within the circumference of two or three blocks, I had a paper route. I could go and do that. All of this is for me hustling on the side. Back then, they had a thing where you could save bottle tops and stuff like that, and turn them in, and go to the movies, like if you had – what? – 20 bottle tops, whatever they advertised that you had. It was a whole lot of different things – when you used to talk about the Depression, they would say that you could save tinfoil and put it in a ball, and you take it to the junkyard, and the guy would buy it from you, because of the war effort, because that was right – by the time I was a teenager, it was wartime, ‟41 to ‟45, right in there.