Jazz and Justice. Gerald Horne
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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
“Every whorehouse had piano players,” said “Pops” Foster, but “Lulu White’s had the most,”42 a reference to the most notorious Negro proprietor. A turning point arrived during the 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