and innovation were the watchwords of this new music and were represented by the father of Joseph Thomas. The younger was a clarinetist and vocalist born in 1902; the elder played a broom, drawn across the thumb, that sounded like a violin.13 Mary Lucy Hamill O’Kelly, born in Vicksburg in 1876, recalled in 1958, “I can’t remember when I first knew jazz as being jazz. I just thought it was sort of embroidery that the Negroes put on tunes that they played.” She observed, “They’d add little extra notes and quivers and trills and runs and syncopation and make the thing sound entirely different,” a fair estimate of the new music.14 There were other influences on the music. The talented trumpeter Clark Terry, born in St. Louis in 1920, attributed his distinctive style to emulating “mariachi [Mexican] players who are forced to master their mouthpieces before they’re given the horns.”15
The opera brought by European migrants also delivered a panoply of musical influences surrounding Negroes. By 1910, New Orleans also happened to have more Italian Americans than any other U.S. city, which further contributed to the rich stew of musical influences.16
THE MUSICIAN PAUL BARBARIN SAYS that growing up he could hear bands playing even if they were almost two miles away. Fewer buildings, he says, meant sound traveled with more facility, allowing exposure to diverse forms of music. Singers with booming voices could also be heard, even if they were speaking in a language other than English. He grew up with the sound of French since his mother spoke the language—she “speaks good French … she always talk in French … we understood it..”17 One witness claims that the scintillating cornet playing of the legendary Buddy Bolden “was so powerful they could dance to his music 10 miles away.”18
Charles Elgar, born in 1879 in New Orleans, studied violin with a French teacher, who was an assistant conductor with the French Opera.19 The first trumpet teacher of Johnny De Droit, born in 1892, was from the Republican Guard in France and was also first trumpet in their band.20 His parents spoke French.21 The mother of Albert Burbank, born in 1902, spoke to him in French (he would answer in English); this clarinetist often sang in French.22 According to Buddie Burton, trumpeter Natty Dominique also spoke French.23 Bassist George “Pops” Foster was born in 1892 to a father who spoke French.24 His mother was said to speak about seven languages.25 Paul Beaulieu, born in 1888 in New Orleans, studied cello with a French artist who was in the city working with a local opera company. He recalled that Alphonse and Ulysses Picou spoke as much or more “Creole French” as they did English.26 Bella Cornish, once known as Isabella Davenport, was wed to Buddy Bolden’s sideman, William “Willie” Cornish. Born in Biloxi, her father was “a Frenchman,” she said.27 Danny Barker, born in New Orleans in 1909, was a guitarist who also was part of this lineage. “My grandmother spoke French. My grandfather spoke French. They also spoke Creole, that is, a broken French.”28 Ferrand Clementin, born in 1894 and perhaps best known as a comrade of the trombonist Kid Ory, recalled that French was spoken in his family and French songs were sung.29 The trumpeter known as Don Albert, born in New Orleans in 1908, spoke French, too.30
Then there were those like Israel Gorman, a clarinetist born in 1895, who served in France for a year or so during the First World War, a venture in which he was not alone in participating.31 Thus Joseph “Fan” Borgeau, born in 1891 and best known as a banjoist, served in Germany during the war, though he was a French interpreter in France.32
A role model for many of these musicians was Victor Eugene Macarty, with roots in nineteenth century New Orleans, who received a music education in Paris, then became active in the Republican Party. In the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War, he launched a boycott that shuttered the local opera house because of its Jim Crow seating policies.33
As Macarty’s example illustrated, the Gallic influence further impelled the movement of musicians to France where they could at once escape penurious Jim Crow and—by their very presence—influence the Old Continent against their homeland. The knowledge of French also opened musicians to diverse influences, musically and otherwise. New Orleans was remarkable in another respect. So many of the Negro musicians coming to maturity as this new music was emerging were familiar with other languages besides English, which exposed them to various musical genres and opened doors to pursuing their artistic visions abroad.
There was also the German population of New Orleans, which displayed a fondness for music and song, including its own choruses, string quartets, a conservatory, and orchestra. By the 1890s, as the new music was taking flight, this group was enthusiastic about their singing societies and preserving German songs. German bands often offered entertainment to the masses as they paraded on many festive occasions and gave concerts in numerous places throughout the city.34
African Americans extended their experience when some wound up in Cuba and the Philippines after the United States declared war on Spain in 1898. Noah Cook, born in 1879 in Livingston Parish, Louisiana, trained as a jockey before decamping to the Philippines by 1900. It was there that he familiarized himself with a song often sung in Cuba by the troops that became a standard: “There’ll Be Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”35 William “Willie” Cornish, born in 1875, also fought in this transoceanic conflict.36
Another influence came from Mexico. Charles Elgar studied clarinet with Luis Tio, who hailed from there. A number of famed clarinetists, including Barney Bigard and Jimmy Noone, did so too. In 1885 a contingent of Mexican musicians arrived in New Orleans for the Cotton Exposition, familiarizing themselves with a city where several of these sojourners chose to reside. Tio and his brother Lorenzo spoke Spanish, of course, but, said Elgar, “developed the English and French … You’d never know that they weren’t original New Orleans fellows.” Elgar too was struck by the presence of opera companies featuring “fifty men in the pit,” a real “monster thing.” Speaking of this orchestra, he said, “You could go in the gallery for thirty-five cents.” Both of his parents were opera devotees and a couple of times a week took him to the opera: “The more I heard it, the more I fell in love with it,” he said. It was a constant presence in the city until it burned down in 1919.37
But it was not just high-minded opera that shaped the cultural consciousness of some musicians: bordellos arose in New Orleans simultaneous with the arrival of the new music. As early as 1850, New Orleans was deemed to be the “red light capital” of the Republic.38 Minimally, these sites provided a venue for musicians to play and contributed to a nightlife. One analyst claims that in fin-de-siècle New Orleans, prostitution “has never before or since had in America a heyday such as it had in ragtime New Orleans … In 1899 the New Orleans police admitted to the existence of 230 bordellos, 30 houses of assignations, and about 2,000 prostitutes.” Assuredly, a color bar then existed, but by 1899 the press was reporting a proliferation of assignations between Negro men and women defined as “white” (the press was not as concerned about Negro women and men of differing ancestry).39 Piano playing with various trills was a component of these sites, and musicians improvised, setting the stage for the new music. Bolstering the “candelabra” thesis about the multiple origins of the new music is the report that the pianist Eubie Blake, born in Baltimore in 1887, began playing at a local bordello at the tender age of fifteen.
It would be an error to imagine that the origins of the new music were separate and apart from the wider U.S. society or even how African Americans were maltreated. The following pages will suggest a brand of male supremacy that was hardly unique to practitioners of the new music but certainly characterized some of them. Purportedly, Blake’s father, who was enslaved on a large Virginia plantation, was used as a “stud,” fathering twenty-seven children “of which he knew.” After the Civil War, he married and fathered ten more offspring, one of whom was the renowned pianist.40 Even the precursor music known as “ragtime,” which catapulted Eubie Blake into prominence, was similarly linked to sexuality, brothels, and dens of vice.41
