Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  Baby Dodds appreciated the social interaction that was possible in Chicago, but he also acknowledged the exploitation: “We gave those fellows the time [i.e., rhythm] in music that they have now. In a way we gave something away.” What makes the situation so exploitive is the fact that the best-paying jobs—not just in Chicago, but everywhere in the United States—are open only to whites. Blacks have no reason to even think of playing at places like the Drake Hotel and the resorts at Edgewater Beach. And in the back of everybody’s mind looms the monster success of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band recording in 1917. “Should have been Freddie’s,” said Louis, referring to Fred Keppard’s decision to turn down an offer to record, thus missing fame that instead went to white imitators who called themselves “original” nevertheless.

  The little white boys are motivated to learn the music and cash in, but there is more to it than that. This music touches them deeply, in ways they may not fully understand. People their age all across the nation are attracted to the fresh sounds of jazz, but most of them are able to hear only white musicians. The bicycling youngsters in Chicago feel like they have stumbled on the authentic, original source. “We never went back to the New Orleans Rhythm Kings after hearing the King Oliver band, because we realized that in hearing the King Oliver band we were listening to the real thing,” said Bud Freeman. White musicians from New Orleans who learned from blacks are often ambivalent or deny the relationship altogether; here, it is freely acknowledged.

  Some of the alligators are children of immigrants from Europe. As they turn away from the Old World culture of their parents, in the American pattern, up pops African-American jazz. The alarming trend gives rise to a growing opposition, full of shrill and desperate rhetoric. The music appeals to the lower instincts. It threatens the civilizing power of reason. “The statistics of illegitimacy in this country show a great increase in recent years,” writes one newspaper, and jazz is the cause. “Jazz brought about the downfall of 1,000 women in Chicago alone,” hysterically writes another. No wonder the Defender nods approvingly at King Jones’s efforts to control the dance floor.

  King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band: Johnny Dodds, Baby Dodds, Honoré Dutrey, Armstrong, Joe Oliver, Lillian Hardin, Bill Johnson (The William Russell Photographic Collection, MSS 520 F. 3339, Williams Research Center, The Historic New Orleans Collection)

  For it is clear to everyone that the matter extends beyond taste, morals, and instincts: it is also about race. Jazz is putting the country in danger of “falling prey to the collective soul of the Negro.” Some of the ringside alligators are aware of how their musical fascination blends into a fascination with Negroes. They represent the first fully documented linkage of teenage rebellion with black music, a pattern that would become a twentieth-century archetype. Youths turning from Old World culture and those rejecting the “broad lawns and narrow minds” (Ernest Hemingway’s phrase) of bourgeois America, find in jazz a liberating release from inhibition, a breakthrough embrace of sexuality, a feisty rejection of parental control. As he watches the black dancers and listens to the black music, saxophonist Freeman sees “this freedom of spirit that we whites didn’t have.” Drummer Dave Tough would marry a black woman, and so would clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow (born Milton Mesirow), another alligator who eventually developed a special friendship with Armstrong.

  Someone once quipped that whites in the United States imitate Indians as children and blacks as teenagers. Music supplies the magnetic energy for the latter embrace. In their pull toward jazz at what they imagine to be its point of origin, the alligators are ahead of the curve. The wellspring flowing freely on the South Side of their hometown beckons them with unmatched excitement and creative brilliance. “I was not only hearing a new form of music but was experiencing a whole new way of life,” gushed Freeman.

  The contrast between the way these young musicians engage with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band and the way the average vaudeville patron engaged with the Creole Band’s Old Black Joe, just a few years before, is complex and revealing. Both groups orient themselves toward the music as a sonic-visual phenomenon rather than as a kinetic one; this in itself marks a shift for the New Orleanians, who have been deeply trained, as members of the African diaspora, to associate virtually all music they make with moving bodies. Both of these northern groups take a reflective attitude toward the music. The earlier vaudeville audience found a confirmation of racist ideology through the performance, a glimpse of what the slaves were really like, and a reassurance that, in essence, the situation had not changed during the intervening decades. The spectacle confirmed what they had been told so often and in so many different ways—that blacks really are fundamentally different and absolutely inferior. They may have emerged with some appreciation for the music, but that is largely unexamined. In contrast, white musicians are drawn to Lincoln Gardens by enthusiasm for the music, along with a mysterious conceptual blend of what the music represents socially, what it can do for them emotionally, and what it has to do with their emerging adult identity.

  The numbers are dramatically disproportionate: thousands watched the Old Black Joe routine during the Creole Band’s tours, but only a small handful, probably fewer than 50 altogether, sit ringside at Lincoln Gardens. As we watch Armstrong’s career unfold during the next decade or so, we will see these proportions shift. It will not happen right away, but eventually the kind of appreciation cultivated by the alligators will spread until, in the mid-1930s, it lights up the nation, a phase of musical energy known as the swing era. Yet the more degrading view will never completely disappear, and the two will mix together in subtle ways. Armstrong’s national success will be heavily conditioned by these styles of white engagement—indeed, he will be a primary agent shaping the phenomenon.

  One writer in the 1920s described African-American migration from the South to the North as movement from a medieval world to a modern one. Armstrong hardly thought of his train ride in that way. Indeed, one comfort of the relocation was the strong network of New Orleanian colleagues in Chicago; what attracted him, in other words, were the familiar ways of home, musical and otherwise. Nevertheless, August 8, 1922, was an important day in jazz history. He and his friends from New Orleans made something new in the chilly urban North, spurred on by their fellow immigrants who came looking for a better life and wanted music to go along with it. Chicago would become his home, and from there he would make his mark.

  TWO

  Oliver’s Band and the “Blues Age”

  Everybody from New Orleans can really do that thing.

  —Louis Armstrong, Gut Bucket Blues

  We do not have a lot of information about the patrons who threw their hats in the air to proclaim Joe Oliver the King of Lincoln Gardens. It was not a black-and-tan club, for the only whites were youngsters who came for their music lessons, along with the occasional celebrity stopping by while in town for a gig.2 Drummer Paul Barbarin said that African-American patrons at the hall “had come up to Chicago from all over the South, and a lot of them were in there every night … people from Georgia or New Orleans, you know, people moving up for better conditions.” They dressed up and paid 25 cents (plus coat check) to enter a hall that was not especially fancy but was certainly a step up from anything they had known back home.

  “In Chicago an opportunity is offered musicians,” wrote music columnist Dave Peyton in the Chicago Defender, “and we must make good if humanly possible.” To understand the environment that nurtured Armstrong’s musical maturity, it is important to consider this burgeoning black population; in a sense, Armstrong and his musical friends were responding to the situation the immigrants had created. The biography of Milton Hinton, who was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1910 and moved to Chicago in 1919, illustrates the immigrant experience and expectations. Hinton eventually established a career for himself as a bass player, and even toured with Armstrong a bit in the 1950s.

  Hinton’s family was inspired to leave Mississippi by a complex mixture of fear a
nd hope, idealism and practicality, collective allegiance and the urge to step out as individuals. The move took nine years for the family to complete, and it demanded a degree of secrecy. They were driven by a combination of extreme poverty and deadly barbarism. The move meant more to them than it did to Armstrong, who moved mainly to expand his career options, which were already solid in New Orleans.

  Cotton pickers, Pulaski County, Arkansas, 1944 (Library of Congress)

  Milt spent his first nine years in his grandmother Hetty’s three-room house, along with Hetty’s five surviving children. Hetty had been born a slave, and in the 1910s she washed, ironed, and cooked for a white family for $3.50 per week. Milt’s mother Hilda, the only one of Hetty’s children to receive schooling, worked for churches as a pianist most of her life. (It is often the case that our best sources for the history of African-American life during this period come from people who were positioned relatively high on scales of income and education. The fact that Hinton’s mother was the only person in her family to be educated accounts, ultimately, for the fact that we have a lot of information about him and far less about people who were less educated. This widespread historical problem skews the historical record in many ways.) The church choir rehearsed at Hetty’s house because she owned a piano. Booker T. Washington wrote about dining with sharecroppers in Alabama who lacked cutlery, but somehow managed to scrape together payments for an organ. “[Hetty] must have paid 50 cents a week on it for like a hundred years,” Hinton imagined.

  Walking home one day, Hinton witnessed a lynching. Flames roared up around the body of a black man hanging from a wire attached to a tree limb, while a group of men made a sport of firing bullets into it. The next day the tree was cut down, its stump painted red. Hinton remembered his grandmother putting black pepper in his socks, a desperate tactic designed to keep away tracking dogs used for lynching hunts.

  The move to Chicago was inspired by the local preacher. As the tide of emigration began to swell and white businessmen could plainly see the implications of a dwindling supply of cheap labor, Defender sales were banned in some locations, while pastors were bribed to discourage departure. Reverend Jones took the opposite stance and praised the glories of Chicago. When word of his activism eventually leaked out, he was run out of town.

  “In 1910 a black man could not just leave Mississippi and go North,” insisted Hinton. “He had to have some excuse.” His uncle Bob lied to his employer about needing to visit a sick relative in Memphis; instead he moved directly to Chicago and found work as a hotel porter. Hinton explained that porters were typically southern immigrants who knew how to dish out the “yes sirs”—“what we consider Uncle Tom.” The family followed Bob gradually, Milt finally leaving with his grandmother and aunt in 1919, dressed in a little suit and cap his mother had sent.

  When the Hintons arrived in Chicago, perhaps they shared with novelist Richard Wright the disorienting experience of looking around in vain for the “White” and “Colored” signs they knew from Mississippi. Perhaps they hesitated, as Wright did, to sit next to a white man on a streetcar. If they gathered courage to take that seat, perhaps they were disturbed by the icy anonymity of their new surroundings, as Wright was. The family settled in an apartment on 36th Street, around the corner from cornetist Fred Keppard. Hinton recalled a “beautiful childhood” in Chicago. His aunts and uncles all held jobs while Hetty watched over him. Uncle Matt was “crazy” about Louis Armstrong and liked to pick out popular songs by ear on the piano, a cigarette dangling from his lips. His mother and her boyfriend led group singing around the piano.

  Hinton’s mother joined a club of former residents from Vicksburg. For Hinton, Chicago was a place where adults looked out for other people’s children and where neighbors helped when someone took sick. Men worked in meatpacking and steel industries or on the railroad, women in the garment industry and as domestics. A neighborhood man called “Pappy,” also from Vicksburg, asked if he could join the family on Sundays; since he worked in the stockyards, he always brought meat for dinner. Milt was fascinated by his hands, stained white from his job salting pork, in contrast with the dark skin on the rest of his body. After dinner with the family, Pappy got comfortable in a living room chair and took a nap.

  Life on the South Side was not flawlessly peaceful. The 1919 race riots, provoked by the murder of a hapless African-American youth who had wandered into a white swimming area, were the most obvious reminders of that. The riots were violent and shocking; at least one musician from New Orleans (pianist-composer-publisher Clarence Williams) dodged a bullet and immediately dashed to New York. But their impact was different from that of the so-called Robert Charles riots in New Orleans in the summer of 1900, a year before Armstrong’s birth. African Americans in Chicago gave as much as they got and showed an ability to defend themselves. And the Chicago riots were followed by a nonpartisan Interracial Commission on Race Relations that ended up recommending increased city services in black neighborhoods, the elimination of segregation at places of public accommodation, and capitalization of the word “Negro.”

  On the South Side it was possible to shop in Negro-owned stores, be assisted by Negro policemen, be represented by a Negro state senator—and even, in 1928, by a Negro in the House of Representatives of the United States of America. Black achievement was everywhere, the world of white exploitation somewhat hidden. “Anybody I saw was black in the metropolitan area,” Hinton remembered. “There was no white–black problem because our whole community was black.” People called themselves “colored,” which “sounded a little soft and pleasing to our ears,” he said. “‘Negro’ was an academic word, and “black” was considered offensive.”

  Selling the Defender (Library of Congress)

  “There was no thought of integration back there in Chicago,” he explained, “they just wanted to live nice amongst themselves.” The Defender’s claim that migration was a “second Emancipation” did not seem like an exaggeration. The phrase most often used by those who moved north, when asked about personal goals, was “to better my position,” which meant, at the least, education, voting rights, facilities that were truly equal, and good-paying jobs. “A thousand percent better than we had in Mississippi,” was Hinton’s view. Mahalia Jackson, a year younger than Hinton and arriving in Chicago in 1927, said it was possible for someone there to “lay down his burden of being a colored person in the white man’s world and lead his own life.”

  The word “freedom” was often heard—freedom from humiliation, freedom to vote, freedom to quit a job, freedom to walk around town. Freedom could mean reinventing a personal identity. Tony Jackson, the great pianist, songwriter, and entertainer, moved from New Orleans to Chicago early in part because of the liberation it offered him as a homosexual (macommère in New Orleans). “He felt more free in Chicago than in his hometown,” explained Jelly Roll Morton. There must have been a broad sense that in Chicago it was possible to escape social restrictions and blossom in a place where the new and forward-looking was popping up everywhere you turned.

  Blues People

  After the gig at Lincoln Gardens was finished, Oliver escorted Louis to his apartment at 31st and State Streets, where Oliver’s wife Stella served up a late meal. Louis’s mind jumped back to his midteenage years, when he visited Oliver’s house for cornet lessons and meals in exchange for running errands. Sitting down to the spread of red beans, rice, bread, and lemonade made him feel secure. “They were a happy family and I became one of them,” he remembered.

  Oliver then took him to a nearby boardinghouse where he had arranged a room. He mentioned that the room had a private bath, but Louis didn’t know what that meant, prompting some edgy teasing from Oliver. “He had forgotten that he must have asked the same question when he first came up from New Orleans,” wrote Armstrong. “In the neighborhood where we lived we never heard of such a thing as a bathtub, let alone a private bath.” His hostess was a woman from New Orleans named Filo. “Is this my home boy?” she
asked as he stepped inside. Filo made money on the side brewing strong beer.

  A guy from New Orleans named Nicholas lived there, too, and the next day Filo cooked the two of them a Creole dish with shrimp, chicken, and oysters. Armstrong spelled the dish phonetically as “Feefay” (“I give you the sound and you go on from there,” he wrote; probably étouffée). He ate so much that it hurt. He understood at this moment that he was not going to get homesick. In the afternoon Nicholas showed him around town. They stopped first at Ed Victor’s Barber Shop, on South State Street between 33rd and 34th Streets. Ed was another New Orleanian, and his shop was full of gambling and camaraderie. Surrounded by men from home, Louis forgot where he was. Jelly Roll Morton liked to roll up in front of the place in his chauffeur-driven Cadillac, his entourage right behind in a Stutz Bearcat that he also owned. It is difficult to track the comings and goings of the musicians from New Orleans precisely, but it has been estimated that some 20 to 30 were in town around this time.

  For some, the old caste distinction between downtown Creoles of color and uptown Negroes no longer mattered, it being more important to stick together and solidify common advantages, which were considerable. That attitude was not universally shared, and Fred Keppard, for one, urged his fellow Creoles to speak in French dialect as a gesture of exclusion. But for the most part, the New Orleanian musicians, Negro and Creole, were known as a cliquish society that excluded musicians from other places. “The only time a New Orleans leader hired a musician who was not from … Louisiana, was when he couldn’t get one from there,” explained Preston Jackson. Just as Hinton’s mother enjoyed the company of people who had relocated from Vicksburg, so did the transplanted New Orleanian musicians find comfort in their familiar ways.