Playboy's History of Jazz and Rock Part Two: Hot Jazz from Storyville

Electric Shoes! They were called St. Louis flats and Chicago flats, with cork soles, no heels, and decorated with lucky designs. The real sports implanted tiny light bulbs in the toes, attached to a battery in their pockets. When they saw a sweet Jane coming up the sidewalk along Liberty Street, or drinking in The Pig Ankle or 25's or some other Storyville honky-tonk, they'd blink their shoes to say, "Hello, I love you, won't you tell me your name?"

New Orleans around 1900 was a scene. And Buddy Bolden's band was the hottest sound in town. He was inspired enough to have created his own style on the cornet. He was the leader of what is widely considered the first popular jazz band, and he finally proved too crazy for his own good.

He did regular gigs at Johnson and Lincoln parks, which were right next to each other, south of Canal Street on Carrollton Avenue. Not just a place for picnics, they were early versions of amusement parks, as well. There were balloon ascensions, parachute jumps, fireworks displays and dance pavilions where vaudeville acts and bands performed.

The men in Bolden's Eagle Band played it loud and dirty. They'd show up at the gig doing the dozens on one another, so inventively scatological that they had the reputation of being what jazz historian Martin Williams has called "the nastiest-talking men in the history of New Orleans."

Then Bolden would begin "calling the children home," which was, basically, his method of advertising. He would blow hard and loud to let everyone in the general vicinity know his band had arrived at the park—especially those in the park next door, less than 100 yards away, where the Robichaux band was often playing. John Robichaux was a Creole, with formal musical training, unlike the self-taught black Bolden band—a racial and cultural distinction that ran through the music of New Orleans at that time.

Bolden's wilder, rougher, more ragged sound used to blow the smoother Robichaux band away, and people would stream over to hear the Bolden band play. Since no Bolden recording has ever been found, this is all legend. But everyone who ever heard him talked about the power of his playing. Some claimed that when he was blowing hard, you could hear him clear across the river in Gretna.

Bolden's Eagle Band used to gig, too, at the Odd Fellows & Masonic Hall on Perdido Street and at the Union Sons Hall just up the street. Such societies were important in black New Orleans around the turn of the century. Many of these societies had an association with a nearby funeral parlor and membership in them provided funeral insurance. It was at those funeral parlors that the famous New Orleans funeral marches began, with bands playing dolefully en route to the cemetery, then whooping and raving all the way back to a raucous wake. The halls were business and social centers, and places to party, where on Saturday nights, the faithful would dance till dawn, and where, just a few hours later on Sunday morning, they'd attend church services.

Louis Armstrong, who was born in 1900 and grew up in nearby James Alley, remembered peeking through the cracks of one of these halls when he was five or six to see what was going on inside. "It wasn't no classyfied place, just a big ol' room with a bandstand. And to a tune like The Bucket's Got a Hole in It, some of them chicks would get way down, shake everything, slapping themselves on the cheek of their behind. Yeah!"

The Bolden band gave Union Sons its more lasting name—Funky Butt Hall. The story goes that on one Saturday night, the air was particularly foul and a band member came up with some lyrics to suit the occasion:

I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say,

"Dirty, nasty stinky butt, take it away,

Dirty, nasty stinky butt, take it away,

And let Mr. Bolden play."

Everybody knew the hall as Funky Butt after that, and the tune became a standard of Bolden's repertoire.

Where Bolden got the beat nobody really knows. Certainly, it started with the sounds of the city. New Orleans has always been different from other American cities. The mix of people andcultures—and their various musical backgrounds—is what writer after writer can't resist calling a gumbo.

At first, New Orleans was variously Spanish and French, more a part of the French Caribbean than North America. Whatever their national shortcomings, the French colonialists always were more laissez-faire about matters of race than the British in their empires ever were, less concerned about children "of color" produced by interracial liaisons. And that led to a cultivated Creole class schooled in European musical traditions, with a piano in the house and formal music lessons—generally starting with violin—taken for granted.

American blacks were the city's proletariat, their general economic lot and social status considerably below that of the Creoles. In fact, the Creoles went to great pains to distinguish themselves from the blacks.

Charles "Buddy" Bolden came from the other side of the tracks—or, rather, the canal. He was born in New Orleans in 1877, the son of a wagon driver, near one of the canals that then cut right through the city. He was six when his father died, and from then on, his mother supported the family as well as she could as a laundress and maid. So he grew up as a poor kid, a little bit wild.

Bolden would have heard all kinds of music—that famous New Orleans gumbo—from the marching bands to the Baptist church choirs and spirituals on Sunday morning. And it's not hard to see him looking through a honky-tonk window, listening to some "piano professor" playing ragtime or to newcomers fresh from Delta country performing the powerful, unschooled music that would later be called the blues.

From the first, Bolden had a reputation for playing loud, with so much passion that people worried that he might blow out his brains—which, in a way, he finally did. They called it his "trance music," or "head music," as opposed to the more orderly, composed stuff the other bands were playing. And while, strictly speaking, the music he played during his heyday—from about 1895 to 1906—wasn't quite jazz, his was the first band to come close.

Bolden's music had less improvisation than jazz, but Bolden was good at faking it when he forgot a particular passage, often with off-the-beat "blue notes." He also put himself into it, making it personal, giving whatever he played his own style—which is an essential of jazz.

In black New Orleans, Bolden became a star. His occupational listing in the city directory quickly changed from "plasterer" to "musician." He soon went from being "Kid" Bolden to "King" Bolden. He had what were probably the first groupies in New Orleans. Story after story tells of how women bought him clothes and jewelry, carried his coat and cornet to gigs for him, how he lived with three women at a time (not true, says biographer Donald M. Marquis) and how he drank and partied as hard as he played.

In 1906, at the height of his popularity, he began to suffer from severe headaches and paranoia. His sudden decline has been attributed to alcoholism, tertiary syphilis or just plain insanity. In 1907, his family had him committed to a state mental institution, where he remained forgotten until his death in 1931, his jazz career one of the first to end in tragedy. And by the time Bolden died, the Funky Butt had become a Baptist church.

When his troubled mind forced Bolden into seclusion in 1906, competition was already hot—a factor that may have contributed to his mental trouble. Bolden's formerly brand-new sound was becoming widely imitated, and new players—such as cornettists Freddie Keppard and Joseph "King" Oliver—wanted, like up-and-coming prize fighters, to challenge Bolden for the title of King. And a lot of them were playing in Storyville.

Storyville was a unique social experiment in the United States. In 1897, the city council, led by Alderman Joseph Story, voted to legalize prostitution within a several-square-block area east of Canal Street—on the Downtown side. It quickly earned the nickname Storyville—though it was a name used more by the tourists than by the locals. The musicians usually just called Storyville "the District."

From 1897 until 1917, when the U.S. Navy had it shut down in order to keep the sailors more intent on World War One, Storyville was a mélange of barrel-house saloons; the "cribs" of the less expensive independent tarts, who would stand out front on the sidewalk in sexy lingerie, singing low blues between customers; and the fancy mansions with chandeliers and marble floors, champagne in crystal glasses and, naturally, the prettiest girls.

And all of this needed a sound track.

Although jazz didn't strictly begin in Storyville, it certainly bloomed in the District. Part of the reason was pure economics: Playing in the Olympia or the Excelsior or one of the other marching bands, a musician might work only two times a week. In Storyville, he would get paid every night.

While musicians flocked to Storyville, the music itself was changing because of the social realities of the Jim Crow laws that were enacted early in the 1890s. Their effect, if not chief purpose, was to remind America's blacks that they might not be slaves anymore, but they still weren't white; they were second-class citizens and had better not forget it.

To the black laborers in New Orleans, and to those country blacks drifting into town from the plantations, this discrimination wasn't exactly news. But it came as a great social and economic blow to the light-skinned Creoles who were legally reclassified as black and were newly barred from all of the jobs and social outlets from which other blacks had always been barred.

In music, European-trained Creoles now were playing beside blues-oriented blacks just in from the country. And because of popular demand, the ragtimers were forced to learn the popular blues riffs of their country counterparts. It was this reluctant cultural clash that helped create jazz.

Alan Lomax, in Mister Jelly Roll, describes the components that produced jazz:

Downtown joined forces with Uptown

Written Music was compromised by Head Music

Pure Tone sounded beside Dirty Tone

Urbanity encountered Sorrow

Nice Songs were colored by the Low-down Blues

Two musical traditions were slamming together in the cheerful nuclear reaction that became jazz.

It's significant that the word jazz wasn't used much until around 1917—derived from an African word, some said; derived from jism said others—and it was at first variously spelled jas, jaz, jass, even jascz before jazz won out.

Early clarinetist and sax player Sidney Bechet didn't like the term: "Jazz, that's a name the white people have given to the music.... When I tell you ragtime, you can feel it, there's a spirit right in the word. It comes out of the Negro spirituals, out of [the slave's] way of singing, out of his rhythm. But jazz—jazz could mean any damn thing: high times, screwing, ballroom."

Until the white people started calling this emerging music jazz, the black people who played it usually called it either ragtime or blues—though, in fact, it grew up through a crack between the two.

Ragging the music, playing it in raggedy time, was an African musical tradition that had survived slavery. And in the early 1890s, a tinkly syncopated—though composed—piano music called ragtime began to enjoy huge popularity, in part because partiers could dance the cakewalk to it.

Ragtime came out of the same social class that produced the Creole musicians—the better-off African Americans who had pianos in their homes and the money to give their kids formal musical training.

Ragtime's main man was Scott Joplin, who, like Bolden, brought together various streams into one new shining river—and did so in the boonies of Sedalia, Missouri. Joplin was born in Texarkana in 1868 and rambled all over the South and Midwest, including St. Louis' tenderloin, a riverside replica of New Orleans' District, and Sedalia, a railhead that provided work for plenty of black laborers who partied on Saturday nights.

A fallacy concerning jazz's origins is that it somehow sprang to life just in New Orleans. It was more like lightning setting fire to different parts of a dry prairie, or separate spontaneous combustions in plantations and cities across the country. Indeed, ragtime quickly became such a national phenomenon that Joplin was a popular performer during the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. By the time his delicate Maple Leaf Rag was published in 1899, ragtime had become the next big thing in popular music.

The blues were becoming a popular form as well, in part because of W. C. Handy. Two experiences in particular inspired the bandleader, who, in 1903, was touring the Mississippi Delta country with the Knights of Pythias Band. One night, he found himself at a small railroad station in rural Tutwiler, Mississippi, where he watched a musician slide a knife along the strings of his guitar, producing a mournful voicelike sound that accompanied his lyric "Goin' where the Southern cross the Dog...." When Handy asked him what it meant, the guitar player said he was just singing about his travel plans—he was on his way farther south to where two railroad lines intersected.

Somewhat later, in Cleveland, Mississippi, Handy noted a local three-man "colored" band that performed while his own band took a break. "Just a battered guitar, a mandolin and a worn-out bass," Handy later recalled. "They struck up one of these over-and-over strains that seem to have no very clear beginning and no ending at all.... It was not really annoying or unpleasant. Perhaps haunting is a better word. But I commenced to wonder if anybody besides small-town rounders and their running mates would go for it." He soon got his answer. At the end of their short set, people threw more money onto the stage for those three down-home players than what Handy's (continued on page 200)Jazz and Rock(continued from page 116) sophisticated nine-piece band had been paid for the entire night. "They had the stuff the people wanted," said Handy. "It touched the spot." Possibly the one in his wallet.

In 1912, Handy wrote and published The Memphis Blues, one of the first pieces of sheet music with "Blues" in the title. This was followed in 1914 by the St. Louis Blues, which became a huge nationwide hit. To achieve this success, Handy, a black man himself, made the blues "whiter"—since whites were the main paying audience for this sheet music and since true "blue notes" could not be reproduced on the piano, which was too orderly and European an instrument. Handy was more of a popularizer than a creator of the music, but he helped put the blues into the musical mainstream.

The blues came from the sticks. Between 1890 and 1910, there was a significant migration to the Mississippi countryside by Southern blacks who went to the logging and turpentine camps, and to plantations such as the Dockery Farms in the Mississippi Delta, looking for work.

Prominent among the many major-league bluesmen associated with Dockery's was Charley Patton. Like so many other musicians from poor backgrounds, he had figured out early that singing and playing guitar, drinking a little whiskey and having the girls chase after him—and getting paid for it—sure beat sweating in the fields all day picking cotton. By all accounts, he liked to party, too much for his own good—just like Buddy Bolden. But also like Bolden, he put his own mark on the music.

Patton influenced a string of younger players, including Roebuck Staples, father of the Gospel group the Staple Singers; growlin' Howlin' Wolf; "Bukka" White, a big influence on the young Bob Dylan-to-be; "Son" House; Robert Johnson—whose records had a big impact on the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton—and "Blind Lemon" Jefferson, born in Texas in 1897, who passed through Dockery's and eventually landed in Chicago, dying there at the age of 33, another heavy drinker gone early, leaving behind 81 sides he recorded in just four years. Jefferson, in turn, influenced Leadbelly and "Lightnin'" Hopkins.

They all learned from Charley Patton on or near the Dockery Farms—though Johnson sometimes claimed he got his licks from the Devil. The Dockerys, however kind as employers, were not particularly affected by the powerful, poignant music around them. Robert Palmer, in Deep Blues, quotes Keith Sommerville Dockery, who was married to Joe, son of Will Dockery, the original owner: "None of us really gave much thought to this blues thing.... We never heard these people sing. We were never the type of plantation owners who invited their help to come in and sing for parties. I wish we had realized that these people were so important."

Palmer quotes Joe Dockery, speaking in the insensitive diction of the time: "Now, the blues was a Saturday-night deal. The crap games started about noon Saturday, and then the niggers would start getting drunk. I've seen niggers stumbling around all over this place on a Saturday afternoon. And then they'd have frettin' and fightin' scrapes that night and all the next day. They made their own moonshine and all that kind of stuff. And, of course, some of them would end up in jail."

Dockery added: "Now, Charley Patton was around playing on Saturday nights, or going from plantation to plantation, a new woman here, a new woman there, just having a party. Daddy could have told you more about that, because he was closer to it. I think they had to get Charley Patton out of jail half the time."

•

"I personally invented jazz...in 1902," Jelly Roll Morton told Lomax. He irked people with his bragging, though even his enemies admitted that he could generally back it up—whether at the pool table or on the piano.

Jelly Roll's was a New Orleans Creole family. As a schoolboy, he spoke French and was given music lessons—starting with jew's-harp and guitar—and played in string bands by the time he was seven. At about the age often, he started playing piano, which he had avoided at first because it was thought of as a ladies' instrument. He said he was inspired to play it by attending a recital at a French opera house.

By the time he was 15, he was playing barrel-house piano at various joints around town. When his grandmother found out that he was working as a piano professor in a whorehouse, she threw him out. Barely a teenager, Jelly Roll was on his own, leading the sporting life.

He also used to play in parades that were literally battles of the bands. The "second line" marched in the parade, "armed with sticks and bottles and baseball bats...ready to fight the foe when they reached the dividing line [between two wards]," he told Lomax. "There was so many jobs for musicians in these parades that musicians didn't ever like to leave New Orleans."

But Jelly Roll did. He was a ramblin' man, one of the first New Orleans musicians to begin spreading this new music around the country.

He was a ladies' man, too, and a particular favorite among the red-light women of New Orleans. One of his songs goes: "Never had no one woman at a time/I always had six, seven, eight or nine."

For a while, Morton's primary profession was as a pool hustler. He would get himself into some new joint as the piano player, lay back as the local sharps tried to cut one another at the pool table, then go in when the betting got good and take all their money—at least that's the way he told it, as proud of his pool hustling as of his piano playing.

He traveled all over—passing through Chicago in 1912, playing clubs in "the Section" around 35th and State—and going as far as California, where in 1917, with a woman "friend" (who probably gave him the famous diamond that went back and forth from his front tooth to the pawnshop), he set up a modest little hotel/club/brothel in Watts and did business there until 1922.

If this was the jazz he personally invented, he was not the first to record it. That honor ironically went, in 1917, to a white group called the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.

"On February 26, 1917," notes jazz historian James Lincoln Collier, "five white New Orleans musicians went into the Victor studios in New York City and made the first jazz record. It was the single most significant event in the history of jazz. Before this record was issued, jazz was an obscure folk music played mainly by a few hundred blacks and a handful of whites in New Orleans, and rarely heard elsewhere. Within weeks after this record was issued, jazz was a national craze and the five white musicians were famous.... The first record sold more than a million copies, an extraordinary accomplishment for those days."

By 1917, when the Navy shut down Storyville and the so-called Diaspora from New Orleans had begun, a new generation of players was coming along. The most prominent among them, Freddie Keppard, Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong, were barely born when Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton and other older "heads" were first cooking up jazz.

Keppard was a teenaged phenomenon. He formed his Olympia Orchestra in 1905—at the age of 16—and quickly assumed the cornet throne after Bolden blew his brains away. He took the first New Orleans band on the road, heading west in 1913 and putting together the Original Creole Ragtime Band with the help of bassist Bill Johnson, who had left New Orleans for L.A. four years earlier. The band signed on with the Orpheum Theater vaudeville circuit and played up and down the West Coast until 1918, when Keppard took the outfit, by then known as the Original Creole Orchestra, to Chicago—which, thanks to the migration of Southern blacks, had become a magnet for this music from down the river.

On the circuit, Keppard played New York City, where the Victor label offered him the chance to become the first recorded jazz artist. He turned down the opportunity for artistic reasons, finding the Victor reps "too businesslike" and fearing, according to Bechet, that if he accepted the contract, "the music wouldn't be for pleasure anymore." A more likely version has it that he thought making records would make it too easy for people to steal his music. Whatever the reason, the white Original Dixieland Jazz Band made the first jazz record shortly afterward.

Bechet also landed in New York around that time. A child prodigy, he was born in 1897, and Keppard heard him playing clarinet at a party when Bechet was six years old. Before long, Bechet was playing occasionally with Frankie Dusen's Eagle band—Dusen had taken it over after Bolden went crazy—and by 1917 was a regular at Guidrey and Allen's Cabaret on Perdido Street.

"He was widely known for his beautiful tone and brilliant ideas," says Samuel B. Charters in Jazz: New Orleans, 1885–1963. "He would usually show up for the job drunk, and without his horn. Somebody would go out and borrow one for him, and one night, they came back with an E-flat clarinet [instead of the standard B-flat]. He played the whole night with it, transposing everything as he went along."

Bechet went to Chicago in the summer of 1917 and was discovered there by the bandleader Will Marion Cook. He moved to New York with Cook's Southern Syncopated Orchestra in 1919 and then toured Europe, where he introduced jazz improvisation to audiences amazed at the music that had sprung up in the U.S. In the years just after World War One, there was hardly a major U.S. city—or a minor one—that didn't have a jazz band.

The shutting down of Storyville in 1917 was one relevant factor in the spread of jazz. It put batches of musicians out of regular jobs and forced them to seek work elsewhere—in many cases, outside New Orleans. Simultaneously, a general migration north was taking place among Southern blacks. Stimulated by World War One, new big factories promised work and freedom from discrimination in Northern cities such as Chicago, which was pretty much straight up the river by railroad from New Orleans, an easy ticket.

So, out of need and a natural desire for a better social deal, black jazz musicians began leaving town around the time that Storyville was shut down.

The case of young Louis Armstrong was typical. Born in 1900, he grew up in a rough, uncertain environment. His father drifted away and his mother lived with a succession of "stepfathers"—some kind, some not. Young Armstrong was a goodhearted, likable guy. In the autobiography of his early New Orleans years, Satchmo, he finds something good to say about practically everyone and everything he did—even reminiscing fondly about picking through restaurant garbage cans.

He even got something out of reform school. On New Year's Day, 1913, 13-year-old Armstrong celebrated by borrowing his current stepfather's .38 pistol and firing it into the air in the street. For this relatively mild infraction, he was put into the Colored Waifs' Home—something James Collier suggests may have been an act of kindness on the judge's part to get Armstrong away from his rugged home life and the poverty and crime all around him.

Armstrong later said of the home, "The place was more like a health center or a boarding school than a boys' jail."

While at the Waifs' Home, an instructor took a liking to him and soon he was made a bugler, quickly moving from that instrument to the cornet, until he traded it in the Twenties for the brighter-sounding trumpet. He was sprung from the home by his father when he was 16—largely, it seems, to become a baby sitter for his father's current household—and fell into the usual musician's lot: working various day jobs as a laborer, most often as a coal hauler, and at night playing gigs in Storyville joints and elsewhere.

At some point, he began hanging out where the Kid Ory band, regarded as tops in town, was playing, with King Oliver on cornet. Oliver took a liking to the younger Armstrong, and that friendship was to change forever the history of jazz. In 1918, Armstrong was in pianist Fate Marable's band, playing the excursion boats on the Mississippi—where a young Bix Beiderbecke met him while the boat was tied up in Davenport, Iowa—and getting an occasional chance to stretch out on a jazz number or two. But in that same year, King Oliver took off for Chicago and Armstrong was hired by Ory as his replacement. In a very few years, Armstrong had become the first virtuoso jazz soloist, rising out of the largely ensemble improvising of the time.

When Oliver got on the train for Chicago, Armstrong was at the station to say so long. They didn't see each other again for four years. But when Oliver called in 1922 and urged Armstrong to join him in what had become Chicago's hottest ensemble, it signaled the beginning of something new—the ascendancy of the virtuoso soloist and a decade that would be known as the Jazz Age.

"Jazz, that's a name the white people have given to the music.... Jazz could mean any damn thing: high times, screwing, ballroom.... But when you say ragtime, you're saying the music."—Reed man Sidney Bechet

The original cover band

Everyone from Elvis Presley and Pat Boone in the Fifties to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the Sixties got rich and famous recording black music for white audiences. But the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (above) was the first to do it with jazz. Jazz legend asserts that black cornettist Freddie Keppard was the first jazzman approached by Victor, but he turned the label down because he worried that recording the music would spoil the fun—though experts say he feared that people would "steal his stuff." So the white O.D.J.B. had the honor of cutting the first jazz record in 1917, with Dixieland Jass Band One-step on one side and Livery Stable Blues on the other. It sold more than 1,000,000 copies, an amazing number for them—and for then. Almost overnight, jazz had become America's musical mania. Pictured at left is the Victor label for Mournin' Blues, a follow-up.

The Pioneer Rock Star

A fashion plate and Romeo, New Orleans Creole musician Jelly Roll Morton was the Mick Jagger of his day. Always modest, he claimed, "I personally invented jazz...in 1902." Not exactly. At 15, he was playing "barrelhouse" piano in Storyville joints with a style so distinct that passers-by could identify him. One of his modest songs went, "Never had no one woman at a time—I always had six, seven, eight or nine."

"In that block...there were church people, gamblers, hustlers, pimps, thieves, prostitutes and lots of children. There were bars, honky-tonks and saloons, and lots of women walking the streets."—Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong