First World War era when the authorities moved to circumscribe her busy business.43 There is some question as to whether the crackdown on brothels ignited a scattering of musicians that had made a living in Storyville, the redlight district of New Orleans.44 The percussionist Paul Barbarin, born in 1899, recalled that “Jelly Roll” Morton, one of the early giants of the new music, toiled on “Basin Street, at Lulu White’s house” and had to find other options when her business was hampered. As for Barbarin, he moved to Chicago in 1917 and wound up working in the stockyards.45
“Fan” Borgeau was also familiar with this bordello, recalling that a pianist there—Ed Mercier—also worked as a pimp. As for Borgeau, he claims to have visited the red-light district at the age of nine, since his uncle lived there. He also recalls that Manuel Manetta, the multi-instrumentalist born in New Orleans in 1889 and an early influence on the city’s musicians, played at White’s. This entrepreneurial madame, he says, employed blondes, brunettes—all kinds of women—in her twenty-six-room house.46 She was a “great big sort of dark-skinned woman,” he said, unlike those she employed (though others described her as being a “mulatta”). He says that he knew her sufficiently well to once hold her blonde wig.47 White’s presence notwithstanding, Negro men generally were barred from brothels in Storyville—“Even the black crib prostitutes were available to whites only,” according to one historian.48 One analyst observes that during the second decade of the twentieth century New Orleans was “densely crowded with music … not just in the brothels but also in the many cabarets, honky tonks and dance halls,” meaning “two dozen bands played … every night” in the town.49
Of the giants of New Orleans music, Kid Ory, the trombonist born in Louisiana in 1896, also was said to play at Lulu White’s bordello—along with playing at sex shows.50 The versatile instrumentalist Manuel Manetta, born in New Orleans in 1889, knew White, recalling that she hailed from White Castle, Louisiana. At her place of business, champagne was sold for $25 per bottle. Hours for musicians were nine till three in the morning without exception.51 Johnny Sala, of Sicilian ancestry and born in New Orleans in 1894, called White an “octoroon” and said she “didn’t have no white woman in there,” speaking of her brothel. “But she had Negroes but you couldn’t tell they were colored all right. All [were] beautiful … and nothin’ but white men went in there.”52
“Yes,” concurred clarinetist Barney Bigard, born in 1906 in New Orleans; Morton worked for White and besides, “was a gambler, a pimp and everything.”53 Agreeing was Eubie Blake, who said that Morton “knew all the pimps.”54 Actually, said Johnny St. Cyr, the banjoist and guitarist born in New Orleans in 1890, analysts have not properly accessed the chain of causation, in that instead of pianists being influenced by playing in brothels, these musicians all happened to be “halfway pimps anyway,” with Morton being an example.55 Manuel Manetta recalled that Morton’s lover ran a brothel—“She had a lot of stalls in there; in fact, they had white and colored stalls”—and Morton performed there.56
The presence of Morton returns us to the complicated question about the new music’s origins. Hayes Alvis, bassist and tubist, born in Chicago in 1907, felt “there was something to that claim on his [Morton’s] business card that he created jazz,” though he did not connect this to the point that he “had tendencies toward voodoo..”57 Morton’s sister, Frances Mouton Oliver, sees her brother as emblematic of New Orleans in that he spoke French as a child—their grandmother could not speak English—and the language of Voltaire was the language of their home, too: “He created jazz in 1901,” she concluded modestly.58 Ferdinand Joseph LaMenthe (or LaMothe), born in 1890 and known widely as Jelly Roll Morton, apparently worked as a pimp, making further complex the origins of the new music.59
Morton’s accompanist, Volly de Faut, concedes that the pianist “was one of the first to have a real jazz style,” an indication that Morton’s creation bravado was not altogether misplaced.60 Whether the creative Morton could claim parentage for the music has been questioned but it is evident that, like Charlie “Bird” Parker years later, he exhibited traits that did not necessarily enhance his longevity, cultivated in his early performance venues. Paul Barbarin said that Morton was “mostly a gambler … He’d lose maybe four or five hundred dollars” and that proved to be his “downfall—easy come, easy go.”61 Danny Barker said that Morton “took on the lifestyle of the notorious night people of the underworld,” including being an expert marksman with a pistol.62 Earl “Fatha” Hines, the pianist born in Duquesne, a town near Pittsburgh, in 1903, arrived in Chicago in the 1920s where he found “you had to act bad whether you were bad or not,” meaning aggressively tough. “Jelly Roll Morton had found that out long before I did,” he conceded, “and that’s why he carried a gun and talked loud.”63
Moreover, the crassly exploitative nature of the music business often left artists in a foul mood. Morton claimed that he had been “robbed of three million dollars” during his career by agents, club owners, and other vultures, not to mention those he accused of copying his music and style.64 Actually, said Creole George Guesnon, Morton “always carried him a big old ivory pistol” and “always talked [about] shooting somebody.”65
Jim Crow notwithstanding, as early as 1889 press reports were referring contemptuously to “this thing of white girls becoming enamored of Negroes becoming rather too common,” a trend that obligatorily inflamed ire—not leaving those like Morton unaffected—and was destined to foment a crackdown.66
Of course, these questionable performance venues bred traits that would bedevil Morton and musicians for generations to come, helping to spur an attempt by many of these same musicians to gain more control over their places of work.
But it was not simply the unique environs of the brothel that led Morton down this road of pistol packing. According to the reedman Volly de Faut, born in Little Rock in 1904, Morton was also a “pool shark,” which was another reason for him to “carry a .38 pistol right in his belt,” but this decision was driven by the reality that these “were hoodlum times, I mean bootleggin’ times” with men of ill temper presiding. There was, besides, a “tendency in those days … for white managers to exploit Negro talent” and given the absence or weakness of unions, self-help was often the only option available—a phrase and a trait that was to blossom decades later with the simultaneous rise of the Nation of Islam and the decline of worker organization. De Faut lamented the all too typical fate of the performers “Buck and Bubbles,” brilliant dancers both: “A manager signed them to a ten year contract when they were little kids and paid them just chicken feed..” Back then, he lamented, a “colored man … had a pretty rough time making a buck,” and Morton was no exception. He adapted to his environment, that is, “he put on a big front,” including carrying a flashy pistol.67
Morton also happened to be of a lighter hue, which was not a minor quality in a color-obsessed society. In 1938, the researcher William Russell sought to find Bill Johnson, billed then as the “oldest living jazz musician” (he was older than Buddy Bolden and had worked with Lil Armstrong in Milwaukee and Chicago). Years later, he returned to the Midwest in search of Johnson and found that he had moved to San Antonio and that he had crossed the color line, had chosen to “pass,” an option open to him because of his lighter skin color.68
The climate in which this music was forged at times was unhealthy, making the beautiful art created therein all the more remarkable. The trumpeter Clark Terry said of bandleader Fate Marable that he “never was able to settle down until he primed himself with a couple of slugs of whiskey. It used to be so strange” in that he would “wake up … get up and hurriedly before he brushed his teeth … sometimes in his pajamas, run around the bar and get a drink, and then he would start his day.” That musicians often performed in venues where imbibing alcohol was encouraged—if not being the raison d’être of the venue—hardly
