Red Lights and Hot Music

Barrelhouse and whorehouse -- the two were inseparable in Storyville. Formally established in 1897 and at its hell-raising peak in 1899, the thirty-eight block red-light district in New Orleans' French Quarter acquired world fame and a sort of vicious glamour as the only vice settlement in the United States created by specific law. Storyville was shut tight in 1917 by a wartime order from Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels. During its short life Storyville produced, by conservative estimate, more than 4,000 "career prostitutes"; it also produced an exciting new kind of musical expression called jazz.

At the turn of the century, "Tom Anderson's County" (as Storyville was sometimes called) was a roisterous and gay, wicked and alluring locality. It was the home of the sporting house -- those three and four story pseudo-mansions that lined Basin, Franklin, Conti and Liberty Streets. It was also the home of a number of far less pretentious places of assignation, with their crimson gaslights flickering behind dirty, shuttered windows.

In the small, stuffy, disease-ridden honkytonks, a man could get anything he wanted for less than an hour's pay, and ran a good chance of picking up something he definitely didn't want, too. The more elaborate, ornately furnished show places featured uniformed maids and caterers, and a customer got to see the girls perform The Naked Dance before he laid down his folding money and went upstairs with the whore of his choice.

Every pianist had his own version of The Naked Dance -- an obvious come-on similar to the age-old fertility dances of primitive societies -- and designed to put a little starch into even the most jaded observer. The performances took place on a board about three feet square, or on a table, and usually the leg-lifting dancer wore silk stockings and nothing else. The musical accompaniment was extremely rapid and pianists often used these specialties in "88 contests" to try and cut each other. Prices in the run-of-the-mill brothels began at 25¢, but in the more fancy parlor houses like the plush Star Mansion and the Studio, the going rate was $5.

A stranger in Storyville had no trouble finding the best in jazz or the most talented of the prostitutes. Tom Anderson's saloon, The Annex, was a blaze of light at the corner of Basin and Customhouse, and all a customer had to do was stop in for a drink and then thumb through Tom's "padded edition" of the New Orleans Blue Book, the Baedecker of the sporting world. Off in the corner a piano player, or sometimes a five-piece band, helped set the mood.

A number of the better parlor houses and cabarets had their own jazz bands, though the word "jazz" hadn't been invented yet, and in less than two decades some 200 prominent jazzmen found employment there. To the jazz lover, of course, the area once known as Storyville will always be hallowed ground, for it was in the district's sporting houses and nighteries that jazz got its start. Actually, jazz wasn't born anywhere; like Topsy, it "just growed." But a hell of a lot of the growing was done in Storyville. Musicians gravitated to the district because its prosperous entertainment haunts offered more work and higher wages than they could find elsewhere.

Bunk Johnson, a renowned trumpet player of the early days whose illustrious blowing has been preserved for us on a few old waxings, says that the first real jazz was played at dances, weddings and other festive Storyville occasions by Buddy Bolden's band of the late 1880s. Whether or not this is accurate, Bolden was, without doubt, one of the fathers of jazz and is generally rated among the three or four greatest cornetists of all time. He was a leader in the development of "the raggedy music" until late in 1906, when he "flipped out," as a bopster of today would say, and was confined to an asylum. Like most early jazzmen, Bolden played entirely by ear, but he could improvise like a madman (no pun intended). In his original band, only Billie Cornish, the valve trombone ace, could read music. Billie would learn a new piece and teach it to the others.

Bolden took it from there and rode it to the stars.

The excitement of this new music reached every level of Storyville society. Another well-known, if unusual, group was the Spasm White Band, made up of eight youngsters and led by Harry Gregson. The group featured a hot harmonica player named Willie Bussey. He carried the melody while the rest of the boys, coaxing music from such instruments as a homemade cigar-box fiddle and cowbell, decorated his central theme with wild, extemporaneous flourishes. The Spasm band was active in Storyville for a dozen years, playing on street corners and in the whorehouses, and passing the hat after each performance. The sounds produced by the group may not have amounted to much in the way of music, but they were exciting and rhythmic, and the antics of the boys were certainly engaging. They became so popular that, in 1906, they played a couple of engagements at the New Orleans Grand Opera House, billed as Harry Gregson's Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band.

The blues were born in the tonks on Rampart Street, moaned out by singers and instrumentalists alike. Both employed improvisations on the "bottom blues," a peculiar brand of rhythm transplanted from the bottomlands of the Red River Valley. On Franklin Street, where the top-notch cabarets and pleasure palaces were clustered, the four-and five-piece outfits played (piano and saxophone were almost always excluded from these early jazz bands). Sidney Bechet tooted at Billy Phillips' Ranch and King Keppard did his stuff across the way at the Tuxedo. Unlike the cabarets, the sporting houses only used bands for special occasions, but the old Mahogany Hall seemed to have a great many of these, and it was here that most of the great men of early jazz performed. Kid Ross, the nimble-fingered pianist, Richard M. Jones and Spencer Williams all did stints at the Hall. It was Williams who later authored the immortal Basin Street Blues and Mahogany Hall Stomp.

At Aunt Lucy's Place, the prostitutes often gave impromptu parties to pass the time on otherwise slow afternoons. Spectators at these supposedly private affairs included not merely jazzmen, but the pimps, gamblers, and other sundry hangers-on who frequented the sector. The girls often did specialty dances like the Ham-kick, that ended with the performer holding one leg high in the air. Thus exhibited, the men in the audience began bidding -- the highest bidder winning the suspended "ham." It was at Aunt Lucy's parties that the piano players, in an effort to outstrip their competition, would trot out their best numbers -- a fast tempoed bounce that was the forerunner of boogie woogie.

Over on the other side of Canal Street, the southern boundary of Storyville, were the low-class cribs and tonks of the South Rampart Street neighborhood. Here were located the Red Onion and the Keystone -- a brace of small, but well known sawdust-floored vice emporiums -- and, not far away, on Perdido Street, the famous Eagle Saloon. In back of this place was Masonic Hall, renowned in jazz history because Buddy Bolden played there frequently. Now the site is a waste-littered vacant lot, but in the old days one could find a teenaged Louis Armstrong there, attempting to essay the blues on Bunk Johnson's cornet.

Practically every jazzman in New Orleans played in Masonic Hall at one time or another. Good men moved from one outfit to another and, on occasion, a musician would play with one band at the Hall in the afternoon, then return with a different organization in the evening. A dramatic demonstration of the interrelationships between bands was made in 1940 when a pick-up band got together in the French Quarter to recreate the old style jazz. In this group the youngest member was over 40, the oldest well past 70. Almost all of them had played in the same bands at least once, and the oldest, Albert Gleny, was an accomplished jazzman even before Bolden achieved his great fame in the 1890s.

Most historians agree that jazz wasn't played with any regularity in Storyville -- or anywhere else, for that matter -- until 1910, when the 101 Ranch, a cabaret and ultra high-class cat house at Iberville and Franklin Streets, engaged a six-piece group to provide nightly music for its customers. The etymology of the word jazz has never been satisfactorily explained. It was formerly spelled "jass" and many claim it stems from an old Creole word meaning "hurry" or "speed up." It has also been suggested that the word was originally a synonym for another four-letter verb, denoting sexual activity. In any case, it appears to have been first employed as a musical description at the 101 Ranch where the Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band played for a long spell. However, this wasn't the original band of that name, and when Harry Gregson complained of infringement, the name was changed to the Razzy Dazzy Jazzy Band, more for purposes of rhyme than anything else.

The word didn't really catch the public fancy until 1915, when Tom Brown's Band from Dixieland was booked into Lamb's Cafe in Chicago. Tom's music was immensely popular and the eatery really rocked to the raucous music from New Orleans. Rival club owners, jealous of the booming business at the competitive cafe, derisively termed Tom's rhythms "jass music," connoting vulgarity. Tom decided to capitalize on this and promptly changed his billing to Brown's Dixieland Jass Band, Direct from New Orleans. The following year the group was reorganized as the original Dixieland Jass Band, and began working in Reisenweber's Restaurant in New York. D. J. LaRocca, cornetist with the group, called the band's music "a revolution in 4-4 time," and frequently spoke of its as "jazzy music." Soon the spelling "jazz" became generally accepted.

It was the Original Dixieland Band, incidentally, that brought jazz into homes all over America. They proved so popular in New York that they were signed to a recording contract by Aeolian-Vocalion and their first waxings sold over a million copies.

While the Original Dixieland Jazz Band was at the height of its popularity, spreading the gospel of Dixieland around the world, Storyville was in its death throes. Secretary Daniels, a bitter enemy of all kinds of "sin," issued an order forbidding prostitution within five miles of any naval installation. The New Orleans City Council, forced to comply with the regulation, abolished Storyville at midnight on November 12, 1917.

Thus ended the last and most successful of the several attempts made to regulate vice in New Orleans. During the city's early years, the brothels and free-lance harlots were mostly confined to a few recognized vice areas along the waterfront, where they catered to the lusty appetites of the steamboatmen. But during the 1840s vice began to spread into the business and residential districts in the new American Quarter above Canal Street. Little or no effort was made to halt this movement; the few laws that were on the books were seldom enforced. About all the police did was haul the madames and girls into court every few months under the vagrancy statutes. They were lightly fined and quickly discharged.

On March 10, 1857, the New Orleans Board of Aldermen passed an extraordinary law which, for the first and only time in an American city, licensed prostitution. Under this law, a girl could practice in any building in the city, above the first floor, provided she first got a license from the mayor's office. The license fee was $250 per year for a madame, and $100 for a prostitute. The ordinance became effective on April 1, 1857, and within the next sixty days seventeen women paid the fees and received handsome, engraved licenses signed by Mayor Charles Waterman, and decorated, appropriately enough, with little cupids. But the seventeenth applicant, shapely Emma Pickett, who operated (continued on page 49) Red lights (cont. from page 10)and worked in a stucco, balconied building on St. John Street, paid her fee under protest. She brought suit to test the legality of the statute and a higher court eventually found the law unconstitutional. The city had to refund all fees and the law was revoked.

New Orleans has always been noted for its tolerance of man's diverse frailties and Storyville, a half-century ago, especially emphasizes this. In its maze of misty lights and grilled balconies, a stranger could find comfort and companionship -- the proverbial wine, women, and song. Today, they're still playing jazz in the French Quarter -- George Lewis, Lizzie Miles, Octave Crosby and Sharkey Bonano all are ensconced in the bistros of Bourbon Street -- and it isn't very difficult to find a girl with whom to spend the evening. Most of the cab drivers have a few choice numbers on tap and, by dialing the "Tourist Guide" at TUlane 6062, you can get all the action you want. But the French Quarter now, no matter how "wild and wicked" the tourists tout it to be, is far removed from the Storyville of old. You can have as good a time, and save a wad of cash, by putting records on your phonograph and inviting the girl from the corner bar up for a drink.