Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  The neighborhood was full of excitement. Jack Johnson, boxing champ and hero to African Americans everywhere, had a mansion nearby. From the barbershop, Nicholas pointed across the street to Mecca Flats, a huge apartment building that took up a whole block and was full of so-called buffet flats. In Nicholas’s opinion, they compared favorably with the famous prostitution halls of Storyville and served “everything from soup to nuts.” “He could see from the expression on my face that I could hardly wait [to visit],” Armstrong wrote. Pianists who worked in Mecca Flats sometimes camped out for days without leaving the building.

  Mecca Flats, 34th and South State Streets (The William Russell Photographic Collection, MSS 520 F. 730, Williams Research Center, The Historic New Orleans Collection)

  Back at home he took a nap, and when he got up Filo offered a ham sandwich covered with pineapple and brown sugar. “You got to do a lot of blowing and you need something to hold you up,” she said. He put on his “roast beef” (“that was what we called an old ragged tuxedo”), satisfied that the wear spots and patches would be noticed only by people standing very close. At 8:30 p.m. a cab arrived to take him to Lincoln Gardens for showtime at 9:00, when he would take his place as second cornet player in King Oliver’s Jazz Band.

  He was nervous, of course. The musicians were sitting on the bandstand, warming up their instruments and smoking cigarettes, and he was in awe of these men. He settled in quickly when the patrons demanded an encore of the first number.

  After the floor show came the dance section of the evening, and someone in the crowd, sensing the moment, called out, “let the youngster blow.” Oliver nodded and his protégé ignored the butterflies in his stomach and played his “rendition of the blues.” “I was really in heaven at that particular minute,” he remembered. It was not by accident that the choice for the moment was the blues.

  In a study of how social class is coordinated with cultural taste, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu came to the conclusion that “nothing more clearly affirms one’s ‘class,’ nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music.” The African-American population of early-1920s Chicago was hardly an exception to that claim. When Armstrong stepped into Lincoln Gardens, he already had a feeling for different kinds of social-musical configurations, and whatever he didn’t know about his new town would come into focus soon enough. No one was bashful about proclaiming allegiances, and a working musician knew better than anyone who was listening to what and for what reasons.

  Many of the newcomers were entranced with the blues. Their interest was so strong that they lay good claim to Amiri Baraka’s famous phrase “blues people.” F. Scott Fitzgerald thought of the 1920s as the jazz age, but for African Americans in Chicago—at least during the first half of that decade—it would be more appropriate to speak of a blues age.

  There has long been controversy about where jazz came from, but no one has ever seriously doubted the origins of blues. “Blues come out of the fields, baby,” was the pithy historical analysis of singer-guitarist Lightning Hopkins. Especially the fields belonging to the large plantations of Louisiana and the “delta” region of western Mississippi. “They were singing the blues in Mississippi and Louisiana ever since there were colored peoples living there to my way of knowing,” explained Albert Luandrew, also known as Sunnyland Slim. From these areas came huge numbers of the Chicago immigrants, and many others from cities like New Orleans had strong connections—Armstrong’s mother, for example, came to New Orleans directly from a plantation, as did the families of Joe Oliver and Mahalia Jackson. These demographic facts made the association of blues with the Great Migration almost inevitable. “Everybody from New Orleans can really do that thing,” Armstrong said at the beginning of Gut Bucket Blues, and everyone understood what he meant.

  The rural, southern stamp that was imprinted on the idiom from the very beginning was never fully shaken off, even as it underwent a series of transformations over the course of the twentieth century. Other parts of the African cultural legacy were strong as well on plantations, yet blues, along with the ecstatic style of religious music, could seem to represent the entire range of African-American vernacular culture all by itself. The unequivocally black identity of blues marked a cultural boundary with whites, which in turn promoted the idiom as a way of asserting independence and strength.

  At its points of origin in the fields, levee camps, and loading docks, blues was a vocal idiom full of ornamentation. The practice of bending pitch, a way of sliding from one pitch to another and of featuring pitches that are slightly lower than those of the conventional Western scale, gave rise to the term “blue notes.” The idiom was marked by casual, conversational delivery, with ambiguous definition of pitch and rhythm. A blurred boundary between speech and song, one of the foundations of African-American vernacular culture, encouraged performers to take advantage of the expressive potential of both and of fluid movement between the two. “Louis swings more telling a joke than most others do playing a horn,” insisted saxophonist Bud Freeman. Growls, moans, and blue notes indicated heightened emotion, as performers explored a range from detached, cool, and ironic through heated, passionate, and intense.

  Blues phrasing often included a sense of darting in and out of synchrony with a steady, “fixed” foundation to make the music automatically danceable. Fleeting rhythmic patterns, forming and dissolving quickly, peppered the melodic flow, and the practice of dragging behind a steady beat was common. An ancient melody-type was very strong: a leap up to a high, strained pitch followed by gradual and indirect descent, a jagged contour of falls and rises outlining a “sawtooth” design. A feeling of improvisational suppleness conditioned the entire flow of pitch, rhythm, and tone quality, communicating qualities of resilience. None of this can be captured in musical notation. Blues became emblematic of African-American vernacular culture because it fit so precisely the twin sides of what vernacular practice was all about: it was clearly a practice that belonged to ordinary African Americans, and it foregrounded performer-centered techniques that could only be learned by ear.

  When Armstrong arrived in Chicago, he could hear the plantation tradition on the streets in pretty much its pure form. Hinton remembered one Mr. Hoskins, who shoveled coal for a living and liked to sit on his front stoop after dinner, playing bottleneck guitar in the delta tradition and singing blues with a nasal tone. Professional blues heard in theaters, cabarets, and dance halls could be audibly connected to the plantations, too, depending on the individual musician. This was one key to the idiom’s success: it could be adapted to different circumstances without losing a blues identity and all of the social-historical dynamics associated with it. It was easy to have things both ways, according to any number of stylistic and social permutations.

  Because of its associations with cornfields, cotton bales, and cane brakes, blues was opposed by the “old settlers,” those African Americans who had made Chicago their home before the onset of the Great Migration, and by assimilative immigrants. “They wanted to forget all about the things for which the southern Negro was noted,” observed pianist Willie “The Lion” Smith. Leaflets pasted around town and articles printed in the Defender advised new arrivals to avoid head scarves, aprons, and other “marks of servitude” in public. Scorn was heaped on iconic foods like watermelon and barbecue. “It’s no difficult task to get people out of the South, but you have a job on your hands when you attempt to get the South out of them,” complained the Chicago Whip in 1922. Some churches negotiated compromises as a way to woo the plantation immigrants: let them “shout a little” while gently turning toward the preferred path of racial progress. It is not surprising that a taste for blues was not shared by everyone.

  But the attack on blues was mitigated by various adaptations that were already under way. One of the strongest came when blues found a home in published sheet music marketed to “people of color,” as some advertisements explicitly say. W. C. Handy was the most successful of the composer-entrepreneurs who found
a way to conjure up blues feeling through the dots and dashes of musical notation. His 1912 Memphis Blues demonstrated the commercial possibilities, which then expanded dramatically in 1914 with the publication of St. Louis Blues, the song recorded more often than any other during the years between World War I and World War II. Armstrong himself recorded St. Louis Blues some 75 times, the most famous version being the very first, with Bessie Smith in January 1925.

  Handy’s success depended on his ability to highlight a few salient gestures from the vernacular, especially, in the case of St. Louis Blues, these two: descending melodic lines that pass through a blue note on the third degree of the scale, and the habanera rhythm that was circulating during these years as part of the tango fad. Compared to everyday blues, Handy’s songs have more melodic, harmonic, and textural variety. More formal variety, too, though the standard blues form—successive choruses, each in an AAB pattern of words, phrases, and chords—is always placed in a central position.

  Handy’s songs circulated more extensively through African-American society than any single performer possibly could. The Pittsburgh Courier’s description of him as “organizer of the blues” is felicitous in both a compositional and a social sense. The prestige and popularity of his songs helped put blues in a fresh position, out of the cornfields and into a broader social range. The songs are about Memphis and St. Louis, not about barefoot shouters harvesting cotton. There are charming references in the black press to blues songs as “colored folks’ opera,” an indicator of their social importance and of the emotional power and theatricality of professional performers. The swelling popularity of published blues coincided with the expanse of the Great Migration during the mid-1910s, which allowed the songs to serve as unifiers valued by people living almost anywhere one might move from or to. “Some time ago ‘blues’ … appealed only to the lower classes of Race folks,” wrote Peyton in the Defender in June 1926. “Handy is the man who revolutionized their construction, eradicated vulgarities, commercialized them… .”

  Blues were taken up in minstrel shows, circuses, and vaudeville circuits, where Ma Rainey was one of the first to make the idiom her specialty. On one tour her troupe consisted of eight dancing girls, some singing and dancing boys, a couple of comedians, a female ballad singer and a male one, a tap dancer, a juggler, a bicycling man dressed in Japanese costume, and a little band of strings, piano, and drums. At the climax of the two-hour show Rainey made her entrance, starting a song from behind a curtain and then strutting onto the stage in a flash of costumed splendor, with gold silk gown, rhinestone walking cane, and high hat with feathers, her gold teeth sparkling.

  Singers like Rainey performed colored folks’ opera, and they looked and acted like divas. “She possessed her listeners; they swayed, they rocked, they moaned and groaned,” remembered accompanist-composer Thomas Dorsey. She took St. Louis Blues at a very slow tempo, and she excelled at the vernacular touches that Handy could not possibly capture in notation, dragging behind the beat, growls, and dramatically slurred blue notes. She and others thus completed the loop that the songwriters had initiated, from vernacular practice to notated composition and back.

  The blues divas made a niche for themselves in vaudeville circuits like the Theater Owners Booking Association. TOBA theaters eliminated the humiliation blacks experienced when they were forced to enter white theaters by trekking down an alley, through a back door, and up five or six flights of stairs. Whites rarely attended TOBA outside of the occasional “whites-only” night.3 The 3100 block of South State Street offered three theaters catering to blacks—the Phoenix, the Vendome, and the Grand, with the Monogram a few blocks away. When Rainey and Bessie Smith appeared in these venues, they sang gutbucket blues with southern diction and a complete absence of dicty pretense, to the delight of the newcomers (“dicty” meaning imitation of whites).

  Slow tempos and narrow vocal range directed attention toward the melismas, slides, moans, and blue notes. Smith’s regal presence and musical intensity led to analogies with preaching. “She, in a sense, was like people like Billy Graham are today,” said Danny Barker. “Bessie was in a class with those people. She could bring about mass hypnotism.” Smith walked onto the stage of the Grand Theater to thunderous applause, head bowed and eyes turned to the floor. After the applause faded, she stood in silence for what seemed like several minutes, finally releasing Backwater Blues, her powerful voice filling the theater and tingling the spine of the enraptured patron who later wrote about it. Dorsey was in an excellent position to understand the similarities between blues and church: “It [blues] gets down into the individual to set him on fire, dig him up or dig her up way down there ’til they come out with an expression verbally. If they’re in the church, they say, ‘Amen.’ If they’re in the blues, they say, ‘Sing it now.’”

  No one mistook Ma Rainey or Bessie Smith for preachers, just as no one mistook them for farm laborers. Composers like Handy organized blues into opera arias, and divas like Rainey and Smith were exceptionally good at “digging, picking, pricking at the very depth of your mental environment and the feelings of your heart,” as Dorsey put it. Highly paid professionals acquired the aura of a life lived under special conditions, with licenses of behavior afforded by wealth and status. They represented an image of what everywoman or everyman could become, a fantastic range of experience, wealth, and fame granted to “one of us”—musically this was clear. In this way they became part of the hopeful vision of the immigrants. Their success was part of the equation that established blues as the music of the Great Migration.

  In 1920, OKeh Records decided to expand its business to include the African-American vernacular, leading to yet another intervention in blues sociology. The key figure here was pianist and composer Perry Bradford, who convinced the company to take a chance and record cabaret singer Mamie Smith. Her August 1920 recording of Crazy Blues proved him right: it has been estimated that sales topped one million. “We’d get in 500 of those records, the clerk wouldn’t even put them in a bag,” said a seller in Atlanta. “Just take a dollar and hand them out—just like you were selling tickets.” “You couldn’t walk down the street in a colored neighborhood and not hear that record,” recalled Alberta Hunter. “It was everywhere.” Smith was soon commanding $1,000 per appearance. Eighteen thousand people heard her sing in Norfolk, Virginia, on a December evening in 1920. For a performance in Atlantic City, she donned a $3,000 ostrich-plumed cape. After Crazy Blues there would no longer be any doubt about the commercial potential of “race records,” sold on designated labels and marketed explicitly to African Americans.

  Mamie Smith belonged to a tradition of northern show-style singing that had little in common with plantation singing. She was not a “rough, coarse shouter,” as Defender columnist Tony Langston wrote approvingly. She did not bend pitch; as clarinetist Garvin Bushell put it, “she didn’t get in between the notes the way Bessie did.” But her success opened up the recording industry to performer-centered vernacular blues.

  Bessie Smith was initially rejected because she was precisely the rough, coarse shouter that Mamie Smith was not. Again, the white businessmen—and, in this case, the black businessman Harry Pace of Black Swan Records, as well—were surprised when Smith proved to be the most successful diva of all, beginning with her 1923 recording of Down Hearted Blues. The limitations of these primitive, tinny records did not hinder the enjoyment of African Americans across the nation. “The Negro is naturally musical and will often buy music before he will buy bread,” crowed the trade magazine Talking Machine World in 1920, echoing in a celebratory way Booker T. Washington’s earlier lament about the misguided priorities of sharecroppers who valued pedal organs more than cutlery. Observers in 1925 estimated that African Americans in the South were buying five to six million records per year; more recent estimates suggest ten million. Along with institutions like the Defender and national Baptist conventions, blues tied the African-American South to the African-American North. Handy, Bradford,
Rainey, and Smith understood the dynamics of this social-musical loop and used it to build their careers.

  One could sing along with Bessie Smith, but that did not contradict the fact that she was a skilled performer who held pride of place in an elaborate commercial structure. In the early 1920s, blues stood triumphant as one of the most modern and popular articulations of working-class African-American identity, a musical identity that drew a boundary between blacks and whites on the one hand, while combining vernacular tradition with urban sophistication on the other. The ongoing African-American experience of coming together in changing social formations was now manifesting the sense of a larger black community that extended beyond any person’s local experience of place. Blues helped define what that community was all about.

  Handy, Rainey, Smith, and Bradford professionalized blues through sheet music, vaudeville, and phonograph recordings, and the transplanted New Orleanians were doing the same thing in dance halls. Their music was perceived as a transformation of the bluesy vernacular, accomplished in such a way and at such a high level that they could not be matched by dance-band musicians from any other part of the country. Armstrong’s solo debut with the Oliver band was a matter of marking his place in this musical-social network.

  How uptown New Orleanians in general and Armstrong in particular came to this position of advantage is a key part of the story of early jazz. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, musicians in New Orleans developed a regional specialty of blues on wind instruments, especially cornet and clarinet. Anybody who had access to a wind instrument could experiment with blues, and part of what made New Orleans so special was that a good number of people did exactly that.