A Renegade History of the United States

by Thaddeus Russell

  Guglielmo’s analysis of voting patterns in Chicago during the 1920s shows that “many Italians willingly voted alongside African Americans throughout these years.” Furthermore, “some Italians never seemed overly concerned about belonging to the same party [Republican] as African Americans, even when the Democrats furiously fought to paint that party as ‘Negro’ through and through. Indeed, Italian-language newspapers openly advertised the point that Italians and African Americans held similar party affiliations, and on one occasion, L’Italia held up African Americans as a model for Italian political organization and behavior.” When the national political parties were demographically realigned in the 1930s, both Italian Americans and African Americans moved overwhelmingly to the Democratic Party and remained solid voting blocs for the Democrats for the next thirty years. Indeed, one of the greatest champions of black civil rights during the 1930s and 1940s was Vito Marcantonio, the left-wing New York congressman whose East Harlem district contained large numbers of both Italians and African Americans. Marcantonio sponsored several civil rights bills, led the congressional fight against the discriminatory poll tax in southern states, and worked to make lynching a federal crime.

  Though Italian Americans often resented comparisons to “primitive” blacks, for many years they did not respond to racial insults by aligning themselves with whites. Guglielmo notes that in the first five decades of mass immigration, when Italians in the United States identified themselves publicly, “they did so in any number of ways—depending on the time and context, as Italians, South and North Italians, Sicilians, Luccese, Americans, Italian Americans, workers, women and men, Catholics, and so forth—but hardly ever as whites.”

  Even in their religious practices, Italian immigrants blurred American racial lines. Italian immigrant churches across the United States displayed paintings and statues that depicted the Virgin Madonna and several saints as black. Until the 1940s, Catholics in Italian Harlem annually staged a procession of the feast of St. Benedict the Moor: the son of black slaves brought from Ethiopia to Sicily whose life in the sixteenth century was so pure that he was known in the church—and in twentieth-century Italian Harlem—as “the Holy Negro.” According to historian Robert Orsi, “it was not uncommon to see San Fratellan women [immigrants from the Sicilian village of San Fratello] barefoot, and in prayer, honoring the black saint.”

  ITALIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO BAD AMERICAN FUN

  Americans who like to drink owe a debt to the “primitivism” of Italian Americans, who did more than any other group to subvert Prohibition and did so precisely because they were unwilling to live up to the standards of “good” Americans. A writer for the Independent and Weekly Review reported in 1922 on the widespread resistance—both passive and aggressive—by Italians to Prohibition:

  To try to explain the theory of prohibition to a group of Italian workmen is very much like trying to explain to you, the reader, that in Siberia people walk on their ears. In other words, it sounds interesting, but it does not “get over” … People of this type, who are otherwise law-abiding and patriotic and well-intentioned, protect bootleggers and otherwise violate the Volstead Act with the same faith in the justice of their actions that a group of Middle Western Americans would have in evading a law that prohibited them from planting corn …

  Of course, Italian American gangsters were the frontline troops in the war against Prohibition. Quite possibly a majority of the bottles consumed illegally in the United States at one point passed through the hands of a member of an Italian crime syndicate. Even Italian women fought on the home front in the good war. According to Guglielmo, “many women” in the Italian community of Chicago “were actively involved in the illicit home production of alcohol, upon which the city’s entire bootlegging industry depended.”

  What many observers called the Italian immigrants’ resistance to “discipline and control” was heard in their musical tastes as well. “Musical as few other peoples have been, the Italians have never developed much interest in choir singing,” said Robert F. Foerster. Edward Ross described Italian American singing and dancing as “joyous, shameless gregariousness.” University of Chicago researcher Gertrude Sager toured the Near West Side and found that southern Italians “would rather sit and sing all day than do any work and improve their surroundings.” Almost as confirmation of their blackness, an extraordinary number of Italian immigrants were drawn to African American music. A sociologist working for Columbia University in 1904 studied a section of the Lower East Side of New York City inhabited by unassimilated immigrants and African Americans, and found that the defining element of its culture was disreputable dancing:

  Of all the different amusements possible to these tenement dwellers (Italians, Jews, and blacks for the most part), there is none that appeals to both sense and emotion so strongly as dancing, especially dancing conducted to the wild music of blaring cornet and loud-beating drum, with rattling sounds from a guitar and mandolin.

  The ethnomusicologist Julia Volpelletto Nakamura argues that in the early nineteen hundreds, Italian Americans began to duplicate the “black rhythms of African work songs and ceremonial dances.”

  At the turn of the century, New Orleans was the Italian capital of the United States. More people of Italian and Sicilian descent lived in the Big Easy than in any other American city. Even before they landed on shore, the immigrants were feared for their rhythm. A reporter for the New Orleans Daily Picayune sounded the alarm in his report of an “immigrant-freighted vessel” from Palermo approaching the city:

  as it came gradually closer and closer to the shore and recognition was possible from ship to landing, and from terra firma to the floating mass, there arose a chorus of excited yells, queries, exclamations, calls, in high-pitched vernacular, that was positively deafening. And the gyrations of arms, heads and bodily contortions which, strangely, seem to be indispensable with the exchanges of greetings among some of the Latin races, were enough to cause any sedate and practical onlooker to fear that a limb or two of the most vehement of the excited performers would suddenly be severed and fly off.

  Most of these “surly Sicilians” headed to the “Little Palermo” section of the French Quarter. A visitor to the neighborhood called it “an area of gin, cheap wine, and dope,” with “half-naked children,” “old, dark, fat men and women sleeping on their stoops,” and “the odor of garlic and rotten fruit everywhere.” This was where many of the funkiest men in American history were born.

  Most of the early jazz clubs in New Orleans were owned and operated by Sicilian immigrants—many of them members of the Mafia—and because of the immigrants’ affinity with African Americans and the gangsters’ disregard for social mores, they all featured both black and Italian musicians in direct violation of segregation laws. Clubs such as Matranga’s, Joe Segretta’s, Tonti’s Social Club, and Lala’s Big 25 hosted the social laboratory that created America’s classical music. The creators of that music were descendants of slaves like Joe “King” Oliver, Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, and Louis Armstrong, and men who had been the half-naked children of the old, dark, fat Sicilians of Little Palermo.

  Dominic James “Nick” LaRocca, a self-described “poor dago boy from the wrong side of the track,” claimed with some justification that he was “the creator of jazz,” though he began his musical career by imitating the African American brass bands he heard as a child in New Orleans. Whether or not LaRocca invented the music, his Original Dixieland Jass Band spread its shockingly primitive sexuality to a national audience. In 1916 the band, featuring LaRocca on cornet and his fellow Sicilian American Tony Sbarbaro on drums, traveled to Chicago, where it gained national attention for making white people dance. Antivice activists in the city hoped to drive the “blatant scream of the imported New Orleans Jass Band” back down the Mississippi River but soon found that thousands of the band’s fans were intent on “making the night hideous.” As LaRocca remembered:

  The impact we had on the people of Chicag
o was terrific. Women stood up on the dance floor, doing wild dances. They had to pull them off … The more they would carry on, the better we could play … The crowd would start yelling, ‘Give us some more jass.’ I can still see these women who would try and put on a show … raise their dresses above their knees and carry on, men shrieking and everybody having a good time.

  The following year in New York, the band made the first commercially issued jazz recordings, including LaRocca’s composition “Tiger Rag,” which became one of the most widely covered jazz standards of the twentieth century. The band’s records and its performances in large New York venues gave rhythm to millions of white people. Variety magazine described a January 1917 performance by the (slightly renamed) Original Dixieland Jazz Band at Reisenweber’s restaurant on Columbus Circle as both the moment when “jazz made its official bow in New York” and as a revolutionary learning experience for the audience:

  The band disgorged its voltaic music—a far cry from the formal waltzes, one-steps, tangos, and fox-trots to which New York had been accustomed. The music, with its piercing sonorities, its complicated rhythmic patterns, seemed like so much tonal confusion, so much riot of sound. Bewildered by this strange music, the clients at Reisenweber’s made no move toward the dance floor, but listened half perplexed, half magnetized. The band played one number after another and still no move was made toward dancing. At last the manager interposed with a polite explanation: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is jazz. It is meant for dancing!” There was some good-humored laughter, and the ice was broken. A few venturesome partners started dancing; others followed… . There is one thing that is certain, and that is that the melodies as played by the jazz organization at Reisenweber’s are quite conducive to making the dancers on the floor loosen up and go to the limit in their stepping … anyone who could move his feet rhythmically across a dance floor was capable of performing creditably… . Jazz had come to New York. For better or for worse, it had come to stay.

  One member of the audience that night was another funky Italian named Jimmy Durante. Durante had traveled downtown to the show from 125th Street in Harlem, where he was the piano player at a saloon in the basement of a burlesque club. The Brooklyn-born son of immigrants had been so inspired by the music of Scott Joplin that he dropped out of school in the eighth grade to become a full-time ragtime pianist. Soon known as “Ragtime Jimmy,” Durante developed an especially “hot” musical style conducive to dancing and was naturally drawn to LaRocca’s sound. After seeing the Reisenweber performance, Durante was inspired to assemble his own dance music group, called the Original New Orleans Jazz Band, which featured, in one of the first acts of racial integration in American popular music, a young African American clarinetist named Achille Baquet. During the 1920s, Durante also collaborated with a black songwriter named Chris Smith on several songs that were recorded by the great blues singer Mamie Smith. Ragtime Jimmy later moved into comedy and acting in vaudeville, radio, Broadway theater, movies, and television, and became one of the most famous personalities in American show business.

  Wingy Manone and Joe Marsala were two other sons of Italy who helped pioneer hot dance music. Raised in Little Palermo near Nick LaRocca’s home, Manone recorded several important swing songs including “Tar Paper Stomp,” “Nickel in the Slot,” “Downright Disgusted Blues,” and “Tailgate Ramble,” and was known for his facility with comedic “jive” talk. Marsala, a Chicago native, hosted what are considered to be the first regular interracial jam sessions for jazz musicians and in 1936 became one of the first white bandleaders to hire an African American musician when he employed the trumpeter Henry “Red” Allen. According to jazz historian Leonard Feather, “Joe Marsala was responsible in his quiet and unpublicized way for more attempts at breaking down segregation in jazz than Benny Goodman.”

  But none of these Italian Americans achieved musical fame as spectacularly as did Louis Prima. As a boy, Prima listened to the music pouring out of clubs near his home and early on established himself, according to his biographer, as “Louis Armstrong’s biggest fan in Little Palermo.” Prima began to imitate the cornet playing, singing, dancing, stage presence, and general style of his hero. “Honestagod,” Prima recalled, “from the first time I heard Armstrong, I felt such a close understanding of his phrasing, his handling of a tune, that it was impossible for me to do some tunes without being like him.” While still in high school, Prima formed two bands that specialized in “jive street jazz, a sort of raw Dixieland emphasizing Mediterranean and African melody lines.” Soon, the man who called himself “America’s Hottest Trumpeteer” headed to New York to make it on the national stage. But he was turned away because he was black.

  By the middle of the 1930s, Fifty-second Street had supplanted Harlem as the jazz capital of the world. “Swing Street,” a two-block stretch between Fifth and Seventh avenues, contained all the most important jazz clubs of the time. In the 1930s, a few of the clubs were willing to hire African American performers, but most—fearing that white patrons weren’t ready for black entertainment—maintained strictly segregated stages. Billie Holiday remembered that “white musicians were ‘swinging’ from one end of Fifty-second Street to the other, but there wasn’t a black face in sight on the street except [pianist] Teddy Wilson and me.” Guy Lombardo, one of the white bandleaders who helped popularize jazz on Fifty-second Street, recalled that for many years “nightclub owners simply refused to break the color line, fearing financial consequences.”

  Lombardo had discovered Louis Prima in 1934 on a trip to New Orleans during Mardi Gras and arranged for the young trumpeter to meet with Eddie Davis, the owner of Leon and Eddie’s, one of the most popular clubs on Swing Street. “I felt I could talk him into hiring Prima,” Lombardo remembered. But when the club owner saw Prima, he took Lombardo aside and whispered, “I can’t use him.” According to Lombardo, “Eddie Davis, on first seeing olive-skinned and swarthy Louis Prima and knowing that he came from New Orleans, had simply assumed that he was a black man. The shame is not so much that he lost a gold mine but that he capitulated to the prejudice of the times.” Prima’s penchant for “hepcat talk” and loose movements certainly didn’t help. “For six months,” he recalled, “I couldn’t get a job no matter what Guy or anyone else tried to do for me.” Finally Prima was able to convince the new owner of the Famous Door that he was white and was given a regular spot with his new band, His New Orleans Gang. Soon tickets to the Famous Door were the hottest in town, and Prima was the new, swarthy face of New York jazz.

  Though his credentials were newly Caucasian, Prima’s music was decidedly not. Billboard magazine reported that Prima’s band played “the music of a hot Negro orchestra made more compact, … that may explain why people like it—because it is savagely rhythmic, almost primitive in its quality.” According to his biographer Garry Boulard, the savagely rhythmic man from New Orleans “forever changed the way 52nd Street was viewed by jazz musicians. Before Prima, the street was a nice place to drink and listen to dance band music. After Prima, it was the only spot in town where hot, swinging jazz of a kind never heard before in New York could only be found.” According to the doorman at the Famous Door, Prima drove female patrons to “practically have an orgasm” with the “hoarse, horny voice of his.” Moreover, “word got out that he was rather well-fortified, and there were lots of tables just bulging with females.” Boulard attributes Prima’s success to his exuberant blackness: “When he danced and coiled his way across the bandstand, he presented to his New York audiences a spectacle usually confined to the more suggestive black performances of Harlem. In fact, Prima’s rather remarkable character traits were reminiscent of the more successful black entertainers of the day.” Even his sartorial style violated the norms of respectable whiteness. “Long before male entertainers broke away from the conventional dark business suit required for stage appearances, Prima was wearing lavender coats or yellow suits or even red, white, and blue-striped pants … Loud patterns, flashy colors, and
the unconventional were the predominant themes in Louie’s clothing.” His clothes, voice, mannerisms, dancing, musical style, “raw” sexual appeal, and ability to sing “scat” as well as any musician in history “prompted observers to compare Prima with various black performers.” During his stand at the Famous Door, Prima made the first recordings of his songs, including “House Rent Party Day,” in which Prima sings and speaks lyrics in the drum rhythms and which was therefore, according to The Vibe History of Hip-Hop, the first recorded forerunner of rap.

  White jazz fans were not the only admirers of Prima’s style. By the end of the 1930s, his band had played in black theaters in New York, Baltimore, and Boston, and was the only white band during the swing era that performed repeatedly at the Howard Theatre in Washington, DC, “the largest colored theatre in the world,” and the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. Sammy Davis Jr. made his first appearance at the Apollo with Prima’s orchestra, and remembered a certain racial confusion: “Half the people who came to the theatre thought Prima was black anyway. Mixed. So he was a big favorite.” The host at the Apollo, Ralph Cooper, attributed Prima’s success with black audiences to the fact that “his style merged with the Apollo. Being from New Orleans, and the Louie Armstrong–Joe Oliver background, I suppose that was one of the reasons his music appealed to us.”