of being a Negro musician then. “We were stranded all over the United States,” said saxophonist, Eddie Barefield, born in 1909. Why? At times, the promoter would not pay them or “sometimes the guys would run off with the money after the intermission and leave us.”83 One could not necessarily trust the bandleader or his favored mates. Once he told a band he was with that he was departing for Cab Calloway’s group, and a “free-for-all on the bandstand” ensued and “everybody jumped on me but … Roy Eldridge” and one other. “I was just throwing guys all over the bandstand. We fought all the way down to the hotel” for “ten or fifteen blocks,” followed by “fighting in the cars.” Yet “they didn’t pay me anyway and I ended up with a black eye.”84
CLUBS THAT FEATURED PERFORMANCES of the new music had appeared in Manhattan in the 1920s. The Village Vanguard, which became the premier venue for star artists, started as an all-purpose entertainment joint in 1934 but quickly turned to jazz. It is likely that it is the oldest club where this music is played in the world, or outside of New Orleans, at least. By 1936, Nick Rongetti, a lawyer and aficionado of the music, opened an eponymous club, Nick’s, at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 10th Street, which highlighted so-called traditional jazz. By 1945, as the music reached a critical turning point, Eddie Condon opened a club carrying his surname, with gangster backing, indicating that this force remained resonant.85
This “traditional” form of the music was exemplified by the appropriately named Paul Whiteman, who somehow gained the moniker “King of Jazz.” Like LaRocca, his being surrounded by African American musicians did not seem to impact him positively but instead seemed to engender the opposite reaction, as when he bet on the size of the penis of Negro musician Wilbur Daniels. Of course, this was during a time when these descendants of the enslaved were routinely and insultingly referred to as “jigaboos.”86 This was during a time, says pianist Dr. Billy Taylor, “when white artists took most of the credit for jazz.”87
This was also during a time when the music was seen as a vector of degradation—propelled by the degraded—particularly in the degradation of women defined as “white.”88 What this hysterical reaction reflected was that African American artists were talented and, at times, had celebrity and income, making them attractive to some Euro-American women, a confluence of circumstances that at times had generated violence and lynching. The clubs where the music was performed were often the site of what was termed euphemistically as “race mixing,” seen as a foretaste of the collapse of the color line generally, meaning stiffer competition for resources (and sex).89
This injurious influence had an impact on artists. At a time when much music degraded Negroes as “prancing, dancing and fighting,” the eminent composer and violinist Will Marion Cook, born in 1869, was said to carry a weapon, but worse, he took his anti–New Deal propaganda to outspoken heights.90 It was Cook who controversially demanded a boycott of Louis Armstrong given his management ties since “the Jews of Hollywood, the stage [etc.] exploit only the worst and basest of my race. Let’s stop it now.” This would have been bad enough if he had chosen to stop there but, instead, he punctuated his inflamed remarks with “Heil Hitler!” He had studied music in Berlin91 and was an example of Negroes whose outlook had been so warped by the United States that they turned to outright fascism.
As Prohibition was lurching to a close, coincidentally the Great Depression began to bite, inducing a further outflow of musicians from New Orleans. The mostly Euro-American musicians who came to characterize the music known as Dixieland also included musicians who reflected the dominant culture of Jim Crow, hampering the ability of interracial combos, further limiting opportunities for Black musicians.92 Danny Barker was among the artists forced to flee northward, in his case, to New York City. Pushing them out was the prospect of “more money. Make more money. [Being] treated better” than in Dixie, though some “stayed there,” meaning Louisiana, “because their wives didn’t want them to go.” Yet, Barker continued, “the Depression set and there was no work” since this wave of misery “hit the South earlier than it hit other parts of the country.” After arriving in New York he found more suffering musicians, “dying of grief,” including those with “great talent. They became alcoholics. They became dope addicts … bums on the street begging for nickels … they’d be downtown with their hands out, begging …” Taking pity, his spouse “fed more musicians than the Salvation Army” to the point where Barker “had to put iron bars by the doors to keep them from [kicking down]] my kitchen” door. As for New York, he said with bitter experience, “It’ll make a man out of you or kill you … all that goes with the music.”93
3. One O’Clock Jump
IT WAS NOT JUST CHICAGO AND HARLEM and Paris that benefited from the mass flight from Dixie. Roy Wilkins, who was to become a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was residing in Kansas City during this era. This midwestern metropolis on the Missouri-Kansas border was a hotbed of organized crime—and Jim Crow, too. The difference with Dixie was the ability of many more to cast a vote, and that modicum of political power was hardly minor and certainly was perceived as such by those fleeing Arkansas and Mississippi for this town. Still, Wilkins recalled then that “in those days, even good manners could be a crime for a black man,” and apartheid was prevalent “right down to [the] bootstraps” in that “neighborhoods, schools, churches, hospitals, theaters and just about everything else were as thoroughly segregated as anything in Memphis.” There was a “large black ghetto,” said Wilkins that proved to be a hothouse for the flourishing of emerging musical trends. “Most Negroes in town,” he said, “were jammed into the Central East Side,” while on the “North Side,” there were “Italians and Negroes [who] lived easily side by side,” though this was in a sense illusory since “there didn’t seem to be any limit to what the white people would do to keep blacks from moving up,” including violence. The Kansas City Star, the major mainstream newspaper, did not report on the bombings designed to keep Negroes from moving into apartheid neighborhoods and “refused to print even a photograph of a Negro.” This miasma of intimidation meant, he said, that “almost all entertaining was done in the home, because the Jim Crow laws barred black people from most public watering holes, theaters and the like.” This presupposed that those willing to violate this brutal edict were sufficiently hardened to be unafraid of confrontation. Wilkins, a journalist for the Negro press, was told by the authorities that he was a “marked man” because of his willingness to expose illegal activity, a salient factor that ultimately contributed to his departure for Manhattan.1
Others were not as lucky in escaping and had to deal with the far-reaching political machine of Tom Pendergast, who was sufficiently powerful to propel one of his underlings, Harry S. Truman, into the White House. As in Chicago, there were “Negro jazz raids,” this time aided by the city’s police chief, John Miles. At that point, “KCMO” had more murders per capita than Chicago, but the authorities seemed preoccupied with rousting Negro musicians and club owners. The pressure placed on both, which induced frazzled harriedness, may have played a role in the impromptu performances now known as “jam sessions.”2
Brothels and gambling joints flourished under Pendergast’s dominion, as he invested heavily in construction materials, liquor, taxicabs, hotels, and race tracks, all of which were facilitated by his political tentacles stretching from the suites to the streets.3 Time magazine, then arbiter of middlebrow opinion, announced with wonder in 1934 that Pendergast’s machine was responsible for “nominating and electing” a mere “county judge, Harry S. Truman, to the U.S. Senate.”4 As early as 1931, Truman gushed, “I am obligated to the Big Boss,” speaking of Pendergast, who, he claimed curiously, was “all man.”5
Pendergast was ruthless, with a quick and at times violent temper, made more menacing by his coarse, gravelly voice. Thousands worked for him, including those who tended to his horses. He was a hopelessly addicted gambler on horses, and
