when one among this group—a “cracker,” in his words—pulled a blackjack and began to club him in the head. “King” Oliver grabbed the assaulter’s wrist while shouting “Don’t do that, don’t kill my drummer. That’s the only drummer I’ve got here.” The police were summoned but more than a dozen of the assaulter’s comrades declared they intended to lynch Moore. The shaken percussionist abandoned his drum set, clambered down a fire escape, and caught a freight train to Tulsa, the band’s next stop. He dared not register at the hotel where the band was slated to stay for fear of being found. Instead, he resided with an unnamed “landlady,” Three weeks later, he returned to Duncan with his face blackened and his hair longer, which foiled detection. But this adventure was not the end of his travails, for Oliver called him “skunk foot” since his feet perspired so much when drumming , which contributed to sore feet, at times hampering the removal of his shoes (not to mention generating a striking aroma).105 The superb drummer Max Roach once observed that “most of the good drummers have bad feet. Because you do a lot of exercising. You work. Sometimes I see somebody … walking strangely. I say, it’s got to be a drummer.”106 It was not just drummers. Reportedly, saxophonist Zoot Sims, born in 1925, had trouble with his feet because of having to stand and play on so many different engagements.107
It was not simply the arduousness of performing, it was also that artists often had to perform when they might have been better off in a hospital bed, quarantined. Pianist Horace Silver confessed, “I once played in San Francisco with a 104-degree temperature,”108 a product of “the show must go on” mentality, as well as the inadequate bargaining power by artists that was a by-product of this mantra.
Scholar Frederick J. Spencer is not far wrong in concluding recently that “it has become an accepted fact that jazz musicians tend to be more liable than other professionals to die early deaths … from drink, drugs, women [sic] or overwork.” The venues for their performance—speakeasies, clubs—encouraged drinking and often were controlled by unsavory characters not opposed to using violence to attain goals. According to Spencer, a few jazz businessmen even preferred to hire addicts: “Some record companies and club owners would only hire junkies. With them they could be sure they wouldn’t insist on their rights.”109 In addition, according to scholar Ronald L. Morris, “Most leading jazz entertainers after 1880 were closely allied with racketeers,” and the impresario and producer John Hammond “believed no fewer than three in every four jazz clubs and cabarets of this distant period were either fronted, backed or in some way managed by Jewish and Sicilian mobsters,” though those of Irish origin were also prominent.110
The new music, in short, got off to a rocky start, navigating—and influenced by—war, pogroms, racism, and adverse working conditions. Yet these formidable barriers could not restrain the rise of a music that proved to be sufficiently potent to overcome.
2. What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?
“PROHIBITION,” THE ERA LASTING ROUGHLY from 1920 to 1933, sought to restrict the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages. It happened to coincide with the proliferation of electricity, the advent of radios as a virtual home appliance, and the rise of phonograph records. All had a dynamic impact upon the enhanced popularity of the new music. As is now well-known, the attempt to ban alcoholic beverages provided a boost for illicit sales, thereby empowering mobsters, who, in any case, already had a toehold in the nation’s political economy. The music migrated into the emerging “speakeasies” and as much as the supposed clampdown on New Orleans’ Storyville, which was said to disperse musicians to Kansas City (hundreds of miles west, by the way, of the serpentine Mississippi River highway northward), the new trends delivered a jolt of adrenalin, contributing mightily to the enhanced popularity of the new music. Though Prohibition and its demise has been seen as being transformative of the music, musician Milt Hinton thought it was the decline of silent movies that was critical, meaning a decline of pit orchestras, meaning fewer jobs—particularly for violinists—just as the Great Depression crept closer.1 Lionel Hampton, bandleader and conservative, agreed with Hinton, and he mentioned in passing that it caused Hinton to switch from violin to a more supportive bass, since the opportunities for the former for a man like himself were not frequent.2
Saxophonist Russell Procope, born in New York City in 1908, was stunned by the discordance delivered by Prohibition. It meant frequent raids—“Even the Musicians’ club they used to raid,” he said, “on any trumped-up excuse because they used to have gambling in the back room and all that,” that is, poker tables and blackjack tables. The “standing joke,” he said, “was you could [go] in almost any apartment house and knock on almost any door and get something to drink,” meaning more opportunities for raids.3
Prohibition may have contributed to a preexisting climate of repression. It was not the proximate cause of what Eddie Barefield endured in the 1920s. “Some rich man” hired him and his fellow musicians to play but “the cops caught them and beat them up and beat the guy that was giving the party. Some of the guys were crippled for the rest of their life and some of them died from it and [the cops] broke up all their instruments..” Another time he was in Benny Moten’s band in Beaumont, Texas, and “Jimmy Rushing was sitting on the bandstand with white socks on a guy walked up there and pulled out his gun and said, ‘Nigger, take those white socks off.’”4
The musical genius Art Tatum had similar experiences in his native Toledo, where he was born in 1909. Pool halls and gambling joints were owned mostly by a Detroit mobster who had ties to the criminal “Purple Gang,” which terrorized northern Ohio from the earliest days of Prohibition. Tatum honed his marvelous piano skills at Charlie’s Chicken Shack, a nightspot in a Negro neighborhood owned by Johnnie Crocket, a place where mobsters were often found. Tatum at times played other gigs out of fear as a result of the pervasive influence of racketeers. Prohibition meant that these newer speakeasies were desperate for performers, a vacuum filled by the likes of Tatum.5
As in Toledo, so it was in Harlem, in that Prohibition brought more nightspots to the neighborhood. One estimate details that there were an astounding “twenty-two thousand speakeasies … in Manhattan alone” then, with a goodly number found uptown.6 Beginning in 1923 and continuing for a decade, Harlem was characterized as the Port Said of the eastern seaboard of North America. Shortly after this fateful decade commenced, Owney Madden, the British-born jackanapes and racketeer, had compelled many African American club owners to sell their enterprises.7 In further empowering mobsters, Prohibition brought more fear to musicians. Singled out in New York City were pianist Teddy Wilson and trumpeter Roy Eldridge. These two men were picked out to be examples in dissuading other musicians from moving downtown for a wage bonanza. Hyman “Feets” Edson was a manager of the film star George Raft, and both were in turn close friends of Owney Madden. Later, Edson managed Erskine Hawkins’s band. This unsavory character began threatening to shoot off these musicians’ fingers if they moved downtown. Unsurprisingly, Eldridge carried a weapon; as bandleader Artie Shaw put it, “he saw himself as traveling through a hostile land and he was right.”8
Neither Toledo nor Harlem were sui generis. In St. Louis in the 1920s, as the popularity of the new music continued to spread, members of the segregated local of the American Federation of Musicians began a campaign to stop “white” establishments from hiring Negro musicians. This campaign took the form of picket lines in front of these enterprises. The problem for the picketers was that often these clubs were owned by racketeers who were hardly about to be intimidated by nonviolent protest.9 In a sense, this protest boomeranged and provided an incentive for gangsters to solidify ties with Negro artists.
In some ways, what unfolded in the Mound City was a battle between the influential and virulently anti-Negro Ku Klux Klan and mobsters, embodied in the so-called Charlie Birger gang, named after the man born as Shachna Itzak Birger, of Lithuanian Jewish origin. Wielding their machine guns expertly, the Birger gang battled the KKK,
