1 Funding for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program NEA Jazz Master interview was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. JOE WILDER NEA Jazz Master (2008) Interviewee: Joe Wilder (February 22, 1922 – May 9, 2014) Interviewer: Julie Burstein Date: August 25-26, 1992 Repository: Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution Description: Transcript, 129 pp. Burstein: I wanted to start by asking you about your beginnings in Colwyn, I guess. [She pronounces it as “coal-win.”] Wilder: Colwyn, it’s pronounced. [Wilder says “coll-win,” as in collar.] Burstein: Colwyn. Wilder: Yeah, Colwyn. Burstein: . Colywn, Pennsylvania, and about your family. Where were your folks from? Wilder: My – I think – I know my father’s family are from North Carolina. I think my mother’s family were also from North Carolina. Apparently they had come North much earlier than my father’s family, because my mother was born in Pennsylvania. My father was born in North Carolina. He left – my grandfather brought his family to Philadelphia – to Colwyn, as a matter of fact. That’s something I don’t really understand. I don’t know how they managed to end up in Colwyn, but that’s where they did. My father was 12 years old at that time. He’s now – he’ll be 92 in November – the 23rd of November. Burstein: So this was in 1912 that they came there. Wilder: Yeah, in 1912 he came – they came to Colwyn. There were – in Colwyn, I think there was my paternal grandparents and my maternal grandparents, and my aunts and uncles, and my family. I think there were four other black families in Colwyn. Most of 1 2 the people there were Pennsylvania Dutch. This is not far – this is just the outskirts of Philadelphia, near Darby, Pennsylvania. That’s where we started out. I started elementary school there. We had a fire that burned down the row houses that we lived in. It burned the whole row of houses, just completely gutted them. That’s when we moved into Philadelphia. That’s why we moved, actually. It’s funny, because I had a schoolmate, Helen Gibbons, who was – we were in elementary school together. We had a habit of chasing the fire engines, because they had a volunteer fire company, and we lived close by the firehouse. So we could go there – when they would ring the bell to get the volunteers to assemble, they’d ring the bell, and we could go up, and we’d find out where the fire was. Generally we would run and get there before the firemen got there. In this particular day, at lunchtime, we heard the fire engines, and we were running to go to the firehouse to find out where it was. As we crossed this little footbridge, we looked, and we could see the flames and everything. We didn’t know where it was, but it was near the vicinity of the firehouse. When we got there, it was our house – my house – that was on fire. I still find myself trying to chase the fire engines today. I’m always concerned. Burstein: Wow. Was everyone okay though? Wilder: Everybody survived. It turns out – my youngest brother – we had kerosene lamps. He was playing with a stick or something, holding it over the lamp, and the stick caught on fire, or whatever – paper – whatever he had, and he threw it away. He threw it behind the staircase, and there was a gallon of kerosene there that exploded. That’s what set the houses on fire. He couldn’t – he must have been three years old or something like that, maybe. I would think about three-and-a-half. That’s what caused the fire. We lost everything. Everything. Everybody lost everything. Burstein: Because it burned down the whole row of houses. Wilder: Yeah, and we moved into Philadelphia. I think my paternal grandparents had already moved into [?Pasco], where I grew up, because when we did move, we moved in with them, I remember now. That’s where it started. It had a schoolhouse there where – it’s an old-fashioned schoolhouse. They had a thing: each class in the elementary school had a chance to ring the bell. Everybody in each class would get a chance to ring the bell in the morning or at noontime, after – when we came back to classes. It was a nice thing. I remember that. Such a big honor to get the bell in your hand. Burstein: Were you in first or second grade when this happened? Wilder: I was in – I must have been in second grade, I think. Burstein: What are your earliest memories of music in your family? 2 3 Wilder: My earliest memories are my father. My father played – he originally played cornet. I don’t recall – I don’t remember him – that might have been before I was born. He played sousaphone. He studied the tuba and played that. That I do remember, because he always had this sousaphone around his neck, and that was one of the things we lost in the fire, as a matter of fact. He had been in World War I. He had put his age up. He claimed to be older than he was. He had a metal chest with a lot of bullets that he had brought back from overseas after the war. When this fire was going, these things were going whew whew whew through the room – the house. The firemen were afraid to go near them. That’s what was happening. But that’s my first recollection of music. I was just proud that my father was walking around with this sousaphone. I didn’t relate it to anything in particular. We knew he was a little different from most of the other fellows in the area. Burstein: Because when you were little, music wasn’t what he did for a living. He was – what did he do? Wilder: No. He was a truck driver at that time. He drove a truck for a stucco company in Philadelphia – in Colwyn – and then later on, when we moved into Philadelphia, he worked for a couple of coal companies. He drove trucks for them. But then he was beginning – he was playing music. He started playing music with some of the local bands. He was playing sousaphone then. Later on he took up the bass violin – studied bass violin and played the two of them. Burstein: Would you go and listen to him when he would be playing around there? Wilder: They used to – when we moved to Philadelphia, they used to rehearse at our house, some of the bands he played with. So that was interesting. That’s really what got me interested in music. But it was my father who decided I should play cornet at that time. I had an older brother – I had three brothers, and my oldest brother, Curtis, was taking piano lessons. But he didn’t like the piano very much. He preferred the bass violin and later on studied bass violin. We were the only two who played music, aside from my father. Burstein: That’s quite a few musical people in one family. Wilder: Yeah. We were lucky. Burstein: Do you remember anything else about Colwyn? I remember you telling me . Wilder: About Colwyn? I know that we had a lot of friends there that I remember as a kid. We were very fond of all the kids that we had grown up with, apparently. I remember one of my eldest brother’s schoolmates had a honey bear. We called him Honey. He had a bear as a pet, a little bear cub. I can remember that. 3 4 This one fellow, they were digging – excavating something in the schoolyard. Apparently he didn’t see it. He fell head first into this pit and ended up with a fractured skull. That I remember very vividly, and I don’t even remember his name. I think his name was Ritter, if I’m not mistaken. I think it was. I think his parents had the grocery store. That’s about – and of course the Givens family I remember very well. My aunt, one of my mother’s sisters, went to school with one of the Givens girls, and my uncle, my mother’s brother, younger, the one next to my mother – he and Bill Givens were very close friends. They went – they had gone to school in Colwyn. They went to elementary school together. Burstein: Was it hard to move into Philadelphia when you did? Or was it an adventure? Wilder: I guess it was a little traumatic, but actually, we were so young that it didn’t have the effect on us, except for the fact that we had lost these friends that we knew so well. We used to go all – we used to make trips over to visit them. It was nice. We stayed in touch with them for many years. They moved up in the farm country up in Pennsylvania, and we lost track of them. My mother kept in touch with them for many years, but I never saw them after that. Burstein: Was it – in both places, was it a community that was integrated? Or did the black families stay together and the white families stay together? Wilder: In this case, it wasn’t really a case of integration, because we were the only blacks in that area – in Colywn at that time. In the school, my mother’s younger sister and her youngest brother, they were also in school.