were fleeing abroad, as the “Diaspora” extended westward and eastward alike. Edmund Thornton Jenkins was not a devotee of the new music, but he was a composer born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1894, as lynching was becoming customary. Still, by 1921 this Negro musician was exiled in Europe where he became involved with the W. E. B. Du Bois–sponsored Pan African Congress.49
The growing list of those leaving included New Orleans’ Sidney Bechet. He arrived in Liverpool from New York City on 4 June 1919. By 1922 a police file on him in London described his complexion as “swarthy,” and the accusation was that he had committed an “assault” on a “female,”50 a British subject, Ruby Gordon. Bechet had been employed by a club on Tottenham Court Road in London; this “man of colour,” as he was described, was listed as 5’3” tall with a “stout build” and a “valid American passport.”51 By 1926, he was playing in Moscow and when asked subsequently where he would choose to settle down permanently to play his music, he replied instantly, “Russia,” because he was treated so well. Shortly thereafter, he was in Paris where he was jailed because of a club shooting. He was not necessarily stunned by this turn of events, since, according to his biographer, the saxophonist “regarded mayhem as one of the hazards of a musician’s working life…. For much of his life he was fascinated by gangsters and hoodlums,” not unusual given the clubs he performed in back home.52
The pianist Glover Compton, born in Kentucky in 1884, recalled the 1928 incident in Paris. Bechet and Mike McKendrick, banjoist, became embroiled in a fracas, leading to an exchange of gunshots, wounding the stunned Compton in the leg and two women in the shoulder and neck respectively. Neither duelist was hurt. Compton, a pivotal figure, wound up staying in Paris for almost fifteen years, having fled gangster-run clubs in Chicago near 22nd and State Street that had a clientele that was overwhelmingly “white.” It was Compton who introduced Earl Hines around Chicago, and it was Hines who replaced Compton in Jimmy Noone’s band when the Kentuckian departed for greener pastures in France.53
Speaking of his European miseries, Bechet recalled of one of his victims, “I didn’t slap her hard,” speaking of a woman he was accused of raping. “They knew she was a whore,” he claimed. He was deported, nonetheless. As for Paris, he carried a pistol—but was jailed anyway. He wound up running a tailor shop in Harlem, though later he was lionized in Europe for his expert artistry and riveting performances54
Embracing Moscow like Bechet did was Darnell Howard, born in Chicago in 1895, who attended school alongside Capone’s little brother, “Itchy.” By 1925, this clarinetist and violinist was in the Soviet Union with the Singing Syncopators, before heading further eastward to Shanghai.55
Though Europe may have been more welcoming to these musicians than their homeland, it would be an error to assume that they were garlanded automatically with roses upon docking at local ports. It was in 1925 that a London periodical referred with contempt to the “Coloured Problem,” that is, the recent “attempt to introduce a nigger cabaret to London failed. At the Empire, a room was beautifully decorated by an American artist, with cotton fields in the distance and a nice cookhouse in which a real coal black mammy was to make hot waffles which were to be served while Negroes danced and sang.” A man interviewed was unequivocal: “I strongly object to coloured artists being employed where food is served to white people,” said one calloused observer. “So nervous am I about coloured shows generally,” he said, that “after Jack Johnson the famed pugilist and bassist—had been engaged at a high salary for four weeks by one of my assistants, I wouldn’t let him show.”56 Still, the contemporaneous warm reception accorded Paul Robeson in London indicated that there was no unanimous hostility to visiting Negro artists.57
Nonetheless, there were objective constraints limiting the arrival of U.S. artists, ancestry set aside. A kind of “protectionism” in Britain sought to bar foreign musicians in favor of the homegrown variety.58 By 1929, Margaret Bonfield, parliamentarian, was told that “unemployment being created through the advent of Talking Pictures”—that is, the decline in pit orchestras in theatres that had been accompanying silent movies—had “already thrown out of employment some 400 musicians throughout the country, the number of which is increasing weekly and will probably affect thousands more.”59 By 1930, British musicians were complaining bitterly about foreign competition, including challenges to that traditional sinecure: military bands.60 Still, there seemed to be less resistance in London to granting visas to the Euro-American bandleader Paul Whiteman and his orchestra.61
African Americans long had toured Britain’s variety circuit with minstrel shows, various revues, and ragtime bands. The date of the arrival of the new music called “jazz” in Britain is usually set in 1919 with the arrival of an original Dixieland jazz band composed of Euro-Americans. However, although Britain may have been more advanced than the United States on matters racial, the hostile propaganda about the new music crossed the Atlantic, leaving some in London to see this art form, propelled mostly by men of African descent, as threatening.62
But the musicians kept heading eastward because conditions in the United States were often violently hostile. When asked why Britain was so welcoming to the new music despite the complications delivered, English-born trumpeter Ken Colyer replied that in his nation “we really lost most of our own folk culture and jazz has got an international appeal…. That’s why we took to it. Because we’ve got no strong folk tradition anymore, of our own, and [jazz] took the place of it.”63 He could have noted the unavoidable links between the United States and the former “mother country.” Keyboardist Roy Carew, born in 1883 in Michigan, had parents from Nova Scotia and grandparents from Britain, an inheritance that facilitated the crossing of musical borders.64
Then there were those like cornetist Johnny De Droit, born in New Orleans in 1892, who at one time garnered a then hefty $86 weekly salary but had difficulty grappling with Jim Crow since his spouse was of English and German descent and a blonde besides. He left New York because of difficulty in pursuing his golf game since he would be inevitably grouped with a “’Chinaman, Indian and Nigger,” and many of those he encountered wanted him to speak like a “coon” besides. Class conscious—he termed himself a “dyed-in-the-wool union man”—he led his union for years, making his presence in the United States even more problematic. He could not forget that performer Cliff Curry sang “’Save Your Confederate Money, the South Will Rise Again”—this was through the 1950s—which was hardly reassuring. (By contrast, when he played “China, We Owe a Lot to You,” it brought down the house and became a feature of his performances.)65 De Droit’s experience was hardly unusual, meaning that those like him were prime candidates for expatriation.
Also spending considerable time in Europe was violinist Eddie South, born in 1902, who happened to speak fluent French. However, in touring the United States with the band of Paul Whiteman, recalls pianist Dr. Billy Taylor, it happened that “because he was an African American … a curtain was placed in front of him, so that he’d be invisible to the studio audience.” Increasingly, he began to spend more and more time in Europe.66
Sam Wooding, bandleader, pianist, and arranger, born in Philadelphia in 1895, toured the Soviet Union and Germany in the 1920s. Asked if he followed events back home, the cautiously acerbic musician replied, “No, I was glad to forget it…. We were happy to say we were out of it.” Wooding was reportedly the first person to bring a jazz band to Russia and the first U.S. band of this type or U.S. band of any sort to record outside of the United States, namely, his Berlin sessions in 1925. Wooding also ventured to South America.67
Pops Foster, the self-described “New Orleans Jazzman” born in 1892, played aboard a ship to Belize in 1914. By the 1920s, he observed, “a lot of guys would get jobs on boats from the West Coast and when they got to China they’d jump the boat and get a job playing.” Some then went south to Australia, which Foster termed the “worst Jim Crow country in the world and the musicians
