meaning mobsters.64
The aforementioned pianist, composer, and bandleader Duke Ellington, born in 1899 in Washington, D.C., had a similar experience near the same time. While performing in Chicago, mobsters sought to extort him. They presented their demand to Sam Fleischnick, who was then the Washingtonian’s road manager. “All our boys carry guns,” he replied, adding with gusto, “If you want to shoot it out, we’ll shoot it out.” The suave Ellington considered fleeing when he heard of this contretemps, but then he telephoned the influential owner of a Manhattan club and this man arranged for the Ellington band to survive without overt molestation in Chicago.65 But mimicking Armstrong, he forged an alliance with Irving Mills, born in Russia in 1894, who somehow became the publisher of some of the pianist’s most famous compositions, including “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing,” “Sophisticated Lady,” and “Mood Indigo,” which enriched this manipulator and his descendants.66 Mills also was an agent for Cab Calloway. Mills succeeded Moe Gale after, said the bandleader, “the mob and Herman Stark” intervened.67
John Hammond, who worked for Mills, was moved to remark “how tremendously Duke was being exploited” by Mills. A consensus has emerged that Mills’s lengthy and fabulously successful career was underwritten by his lion’s share of Ellington’s copyrighted tunes.68 It was not just Ellington, however. Evidently, Fats Waller, on July 17, 1929, for a pittance, assigned all rights, title, and interest in such iconic tunes as “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and, ironically, “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue” and other leading compositions to Mills.69 Thus, by December 1944, Waller’s widow was advised solemnly that she visit the “collector of Internal Revenue and advise him that you have received no income from your husband’s estate.”70
The restrained Leonard Feather termed “questionable” the practice of Mills of putting his name on Ellington’s compositions: “I don’t think he wrote a note of music in his life,” he said of Mills. Mills, said Feather, even placed his name on a composition, “Mighty Like the Blues,” that the critic wrote. In response to Mills, Ellington formed Tempo Music, one of the first Negro-owned publishing companies, a move soon emulated by Jimmy Lunceford. W. C. Handy was among the very first Negro composers to become a publisher, said Feather, while adding accurately that it remained “very difficult for anybody black to make much headway because of the tremendous amount of racism that was prevalent” in the United States.71
Ellington well knew that the modus operandi of these unscrupulous thugs included dropping in on targeted clubs, shutting the doors, and ordering the entire staff—band, chorus “girls,” and singing and dancing waiters—to put on a show, with failure to comply inviting brutal retaliation. Ellington probably knew of likewise situated nightspots in his own town of Washington, while in Chicago he spoke directly of the unfortunate tuba player Mack Shaw: “The police, gangsters, or somebody had caught Mack out in Chicago, beaten his face in and broken up all the bones. This cat would be blowing his tuba and blow out a loose bone. He had a whole lot of loose bones in his face and he’d just put them together again and continue blowing.” Ellington was an habitué of the Cotton Club in Manhattan and knew that this enterprise was connected in turn to mobsters both in the Empire State and Philadelphia; little “Brotherly Love” was exuded when gangsters in the latter town were seeking to induce a club owner there to allow Ellington to escape a gig there so that his band could perform in Manhattan. A few well-chosen words proved to be convincing, and Ellington and his band headed hurriedly northward.72 Ellington, who was the subject of a 1931 kidnapping plot, came to carry a pistol, along with his “entire band,” he confided.73
Sited at 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem, the Cotton Club generally barred Negroes from entering, even when they arrived alongside others not so designated. As was the case generally, the local police sternly warned that racially mixed couples should be barred. It had been owned by Bernard Levy, well known as a bootlegger and numbers banker,74 before the notorious racketeer Owney Madden seized control.75
Madden was quite the character, according to Ellington drummer Sonny Greer. “He was over Dutch Schulz, Al Capone and all of them.” Madden was a “little, tiny guy. Talked like a girl” with an accent that betrayed his British origins, but he also owned a casino in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and thus was familiar with the worst Jim Crow had to offer. Yet, said Greer, he “loved Duke because him and Duke used to sit up and play ‘Grits’ and all that, ‘Coon Can’ all night long…. He loved Duke and he loved me.” Mercer Ellington, the bandleader’s son, realized that Madden appreciated the profit generated by these artists, allowing for money laundering so that cash from his illicit enterprises could be sanitized: “It was a way to turn over a good front.” Barney Bigard, another bandmate, sensed a split between Madden and Capone, leaving Ellington to lean toward the former: “This guy was Duke’s bodyguard. He’d go get Duke from the theatre with his machine gun between his legs, and they had bullet-proof glass. You see there were two factions…. They had to protect their men from each other.”76 Like many mobsters, Madden had varied political ties, including to the still potent Tammany Hall in New York City.77
Ellington was not the only musician who had to confront the malignant influence of organized crime. “My Uncle Richard and Al Capone had a good business relationship,” said vibraphonist Lionel Hampton. “Capone called my uncle every day.” Hampton, who became a key fundraiser for the Republican Party, saw the mobster as a kind of latter-day Medici, responsible for the rise of the new music. “History has proved that Al Capone was the savior of the black musicians in those days. His nightclubs alone employed hundreds.”78 Hampton, born in 1908, received his first vibraphone from a wealthy uncle who had been the leading bootlegger on Chicago’s South Side and also served as manager for songstress Bessie Smith.79
Musician Mezz Mezzrow, born in 1899, who “learned to play the sax in Pontiac Reformatory,” knew that Capone “owned a piece of the Arrowhead,” a favorite haunt of clubbers, “as well as the whole town, including the suburbs.” The club was sited in neighboring Indiana. As a result of this ownership tie, the music itself was downgraded, termed contemptuously “’nigger music’” and “’whorehouse music,’” with those plying their trade in this musical form “looked down on.” As for Burnham, Indiana, the site of these escapades, it was basically a Capone subsidiary, ensuring degradation. “There never was a town sewed up as tight as Burnham,” said Mezzrow of a town that “was under the syndicate. The chief of police was our bartender and all the waiters were aldermen.”80 Agreeing, trumpeter and bandleader Max Kaminsky argued that during the 1920s “almost everyone in Chicago in those days was sooner or later, in one way or another—mostly another—involved with racketeers and gangsters.”81
Playing before often drunken audiences, replete with racists with pistols, Armstrong and other artists were vulnerable, as they focused on their performances and not necessarily the dangers that lurked. Then there was the basic issue: would one be paid after working? Danny Barker saluted Bert Hall, a trombonist, politician, and gambler who left Chicago for New York City and attracted adherents when he helped to introduce reforms into the musicians’ union local that were welcomed by Negro members who had been victimized more than most by employers who refused to pay performers, serving further to explain Armstrong’s tie-up with Glaser. Barker also recalled that “Jelly Roll” Morton was among the artists who was “forever beefing” about being cheated by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and the mangling of his copyright protection and how he was induced to sign “his songs over to some publishers and they became wealthy but Jelly received no royalties as the composer.” Then those like Morton were cheated further when “a whole lot of black music … wasn’t played on radio stations, theaters and Hollywood movies. This was done purposely through racism.” In a metaphorical ending for the man who was said to have invented the new music, Barker recalled that “an old underworld acquaintance of Jelly’s, a dope fiend and a notorious thief, sneaked into the undertaking parlor during the night
