Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  Light-skinned female singers and chorines tapped into legendary fantasies of the octoroon. Singer Mae Alix, a mainstay at the Sunset who sang duets with Armstrong, was described as a rare beauty with a shapely body who looked white; given her limited vocal ability, as revealed in recordings, it is easy to believe those reports. Alix sang, flirted, and did running splits, picking up bills as she slid across the floor and stuffing them down the front of her dress. “Margaret Simms, a New Yorker, is hitting ’em up at the Sunset Café these breezy days with her little ‘Wrigley’ dance,” ran one write-up. “Mae Alex [sic] in ‘Hello Aloha’ wriggles also, so the argument around the house is who is the wriggliest.”

  Twenty-four chorus girls worked at the Sunset, many looking “almost white” and dividing into two sets of twelve each, the “parade girls” and the “ponies.” Hines explained that the parade girls were used for “picture numbers,” which implies some kind of tableau vivant; picture numbers were accompanied by light classics like Poet and Peasant Overture and Rhapsody in Blue. The ponies, smaller in height than the parade girls, were the dancers. “Sometimes the chorus would steal the show at the Sunset and Louis used to get a great kick out of backing them up,” remembered Hines. Moralists routinely complained about the “nudity” of chorines, whose costumes exposed a lot of skin.

  Cotton Club program, New York City (Collection of Duncan Schiedt)

  The first option for customers interested in more than passive gazing was to get up and dance. The ponies and the headlining dance teams demonstrated the latest hip-shaking dances, and descriptions of new steps were written up on little cards placed on tables. In 1926 the Heebie Jeebies, the Mess Around, the Charleston, and the Black Bottom, each with firm origins in the black vernacular, were in full, vigorous motion at 35th and Calumet. “Hip dancing is carried out wholesaledly between the customers,” wrote Variety in April. “Native jazz has no conscience.” The pretense employed by the Castle dance team during the 1910s that black-derived dances were good for your health was irrelevant in this environment, and the Juvenile Protective Association complained constantly about the new “supremacy of the extreme ‘Jazz Dances.’”

  The Mess Around had been popular for a long time in the black community and was just now breaking through. The dance was said to have come from Louisiana. Paul Barbarin wrote a tune with the title Don’t Forget to Mess Around in February 1926, and Armstrong added lyrics that included the line, “Don’t forget to mess around when you’re doing the Charleston.”55 The strategy is clear: having hooked a song to a dance, why not hook it also to the most popular dance of the day?

  By early summer the Brown Brothers had introduced the Mess Around to the Plantation, while Valaida Snow and Brown and McGraw did the same thing at the Sunset.56 In early July W. E. B. Du Bois visited Chicago and the weekly magazine Heebie Jeebies scored an interview at a breakfast gathering. In a light moment, Du Bois danced the Charleston, right there at breakfast, demonstrating how he was still keeping up with things at age fifty-eight; he had to admit that he didn’t know the Mess Around.57

  “Black Bottom” was slang for an area inhabited by poor blacks. This dance, too, had been around the black vernacular for some time. One description alludes to crouching, a position of power in African dances: “You clap your hands on your rear end. Then you bend your legs and go down, down to the floor, twisting and turning, close to your partner. Then you come back up and move away from your partner and give him the come-on with your fingers down here.”58

  In the summer of 1926, the Black Bottom drew white attention when Ann Pennington featured it in the Broadway show Scandals. It quickly became a multidimensional success with dedicated songs, singers, bands, and film.59 The Defender responded with an amusing little feature (July 24, 1926) entitled “Aristocracy,” which aligned cultural taste with social class according to four categories: “Low-Brow,” “High Low-Brow,” Low HighBrow,” and “HighBrow.” Gold, W. E. B. Du Bois, and slumming forums defined HighBrow; Episcopalians, the NAACP, operetta, and phrases like “I shahn’t because I can’t” belonged to Low HighBrow; spirituals, the Charleston, Marcus Garvey, and cabarets were High Low-Brow; and craps, poor grammar, Holy Roller churches, and the Black Bottom were Low-Brow.

  One can only guess if such ridicule weakened or heightened white enthusiasm. In September, the (white) Dancing Masters of America declared the Charleston out of date; it had been replaced by the Black Bottom, described by the Masters as a “combination of the hula-hula, the Charleston, and the shuffle.” That same month the Los Angeles Times reminded its readers that “we always told you no good could come from these gallivanting dances” and gleefully reported an injury to an actress who had been stepped on while dancing the Black Bottom at a cabaret. In October the prince and princess of Romania announced that they were looking forward to visiting the United States so that they could learn the dance. This momentum inspired Percy Venable to compose for the Sunset a humorous number entitled Irish Black Bottom, which Armstrong sang with enthusiasm for a Hot Five recording session on November 27.

  Several videos show whites dancing the Black Bottom, one featuring a gyrating Joan Crawford. The dances were so popular that some venues were forced to prohibit them. Guyon’s Paradise in Chicago, accommodating 4,000 dancers, banned the Charleston, which must have made it all the more thrilling to trek south to 35th and Calumet for the real thing. Like all African-American dances, the Charleston was basically open-ended and improvisatory; as often happened, whites then codified the steps. The black and white versions inevitably differed. We may assume that the Defender was not thinking of Joan Crawford when it grouped the Black Bottom with craps and Holy Roller churches. Yet it appears that white dancers at the Sunset were exploring some of the more provocative possibilities—according to police reports, anyway.

  In December 1926 the Juvenile Protective Association teamed up with the Chicago police to simultaneously raid the Sunset and the Plantation. “The so called ‘Black Bottom,’ as danced in these places, has ceased to be a dance at all and is merely an immoral exhibition,” the association explained to Chief Collins, who agreed, adding that the dance is “particularly vicious in [its] effect upon young men and women.” Collins noted the great number of college students in attendance, even some intoxicated seventeen-year-old girls, dancing wildly. Joe Glaser, manager of the Sunset (and Armstrong’s future manager), was arrested, and so was Ed Fox, manager of the Plantation (and Hines’s future manager). Judge John F. Haas declared the Sunset a public nuisance.

  But that was hardly enough to stop either the Black Bottom or the Sunset. In early February Percy Venable designed a new show featuring Eddie Rector, “the world’s greatest buck dancer”; Armstrong, a “prime attraction,” singing Big Butter and Egg Man; Lillian Westmoreland, the “double voiced marvel”; and soubrettes Mae Alix and Mae Fanning. By March (and probably before that), the Black Bottom and Charleston contest nights were in place again.60

  Armstrong himself was one of the demonstrating dancers at the Sunset. “Four of us would close the show doing the Charleston,” he remembered, “and I was as fat as ever.” The act was designed for him and based on Noel Coward’s song Poor Little Rich Girl; we know that it was performed in February 1927, with a “mixed” quartet of fat and thin musicians (the characterizations of body types come from Armstrong): Armstrong (fat), Hines (thin), drummer Tubby Hall (fat), and trumpeter Bobby Williams (thin).

  I know of no video footage that shows Armstrong dancing, but James P. Johnson praised him as the “finest dancer among the musicians.” He had grown up in an environment where dancing was highly valued. Two of his childhood buddies, Red Happy Bolton and Nicodeemus, were known for their dancing skill, and there are several reports of Armstrong’s own dance activity during his youth, one describing how he “used to dance, shadow box, everything.” He himself said that he had a “jive routine” with tap dancing. At the Sunset he became, at least for a moment, a quadruple threat—song, comedy, dance, and trumpet. Vers
atility like this had big advantages, as Willie “The Lion” Smith explained: “It was the Lion’s policy to give the yearlings tips on how to make it in show business. I used to tell them to learn to sing and dance. They could starve if they depended too much on just being a good instrumentalist.”

  “If you’ve been in vaudeville, you have a knowledge of every type, every nook and corner of show business,” explained singer and comedian Billy Glason—“dramatics, comedy, timing, pacing.” The dance team Butterbeans and Susie, who made a phonograph recording with Armstrong and the Hot Five in the summer of 1926, learned how to mix in a little comic bantering between their stepping numbers. Gradually the banter became the main attraction, the dancing a supplement; Susie then added a few blues songs. Armstrong turned out to be good at this kind of category hopping. If nothing else, the dance routine gave him additional training in how to hold a stage. The demands on jazz musicians in 1926 were very different than they would be in the late 1940s, when the expectation was singleminded focus on solo improvisation. A purist view of jazz took over and Armstrong fell victim to it, though it certainly must have comforted him to know that in terms of sheer popularity he towered above almost all other jazz musicians even during the last, impure decades of his career.

  The thrill for slumming whites of hooking up with black women and black men must have been one of the reasons that the Chicago black and tans maintained integrated policies—and one of the reasons that moralists were so outraged. “Slumming parties … are apparently pleased with the atmosphere of sensuality and find delight in seeing the intermingling of the races,” complained the Juvenile Protective Association. When the Plantation burned to the ground in the spring of 1927, the Defender pointed its finger at “white reform organizations which were bitterly opposed to seeing the two races mix.” “The audience, the dancers [i.e., social dancing] were ‘mixed,’” explained trumpeter Reuben Reeves, and then he added: “Do not pass over that term lightly.” “Even the mixing of white girls and colored pimps seemed to be an attraction” at the Sunset, acknowledged Hines. A tradition of flirting via notes delivered by waiters was called passing “grenades” because of the occasional blowups the practice generated. Prostitutes solicited by winking from the tables. “Stags are abundant,” wrote Variety.

  The list of white musicians known to have patronized the Sunset is long: Bix Beiderbecke, Frank Teschemacher, Paul Whiteman, Mildred Bailey, Hoagy Carmichael, Benny Goodman, Mezz Mezzrow, Eddie Condon, Wild Bill Davison, Jess Stacey, George Wettling, Muggsy Spanier, James Rosy McHargue, Bud Freeman, Art Hodes, Jimmy Dorsey, Tommy Dorsey, Tut Soper, Joe Sullivan, Whitey Berquist, Red Nichols, Miff Mole, Wingy Manone, Bing Crosby—that’s a start. “It was a ritual that every Friday night after work we’d all pile into the Sunset,” remembered Benny Goodman’s brother, Freddy. They frequently sat in with the band, giving Armstrong and his colleagues a welcome break. For white musicians to sit in with black musicians—the reverse was not allowed by white clubs—was considered a natural thing to do, part of the mix of condescension and admiration that drove primitivist attitudes. Hines made clear the need to be deferential: “Whatever section they wanted to sit in, why a musician would step out from his chair.” “I had a lot of nerve doing it but we were nervier when we were kids,” admitted Freeman. Armstrong was flattered by the attention. “I just came up from the South, I was just thrilled with the closeness and warmth of these great musicians, performers, etc.,” he wrote 30 years later. “In fact, it gave me such a lift until, the Leader could see the beam all over my face… .”

  How did a dark-skinned cornetist working in black neighborhoods become the dominating influence in jazz in the mid-1920s? The Hot Five recordings are one answer, and alligators hanging out at the Sunset Café are another. “It has been the custom for many years for the white musicians to come around our orchestras, spending a few dollars for drinks, getting our players to feeling good and then having them (our players) to show them the different jazz tricks that they make on their instruments,” wrote Dave Peyton in October 1926. “Hold on to your ideas. Don’t show them a thing,” he warned. Peyton even insisted that anyone who violated this principle was an Uncle Tom.

  But his words had no measurable impact. There was too much momentum in the other direction. “We had most of their tunes memorized and could really swing out on them,” admitted Spanier. Wild Bill Davison kept his own table at the Sunset and was there every night at 11:00. “In 1928 I made an OKeh recording of Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man and Craze-O-Logy,” said Freeman, “and to my ear today it’s ALL Armstrong. I put in everything I could remember that he played.” (The connection is clearest in Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man.) “Ain’t a trumpet player alive that don’t play a little something I used to play,” said Armstrong 40 years later. “Makes them feel like they’re getting hot or something. Real Negroid. That’s all right. Makes me feel good.”

  The involvement of the alligators with African-American jazz ranged through different levels of engagement, from adolescent rebellion to preprofessional study, from postwar revolt against Victorian mores to full-scale primitivist embrace. Clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow staked out the extreme end of the spectrum. Mezzrow craved as much of the primitive as he could get. “To me there’s more natural suggestion in the snap of a colored singer’s fingers than you get from all the acrobatic routines of these so-called ‘hot’ [white] singers,” he wrote. His autobiographical account of deep and thorough attraction to black music, black culture, and black people may be an unprecedented document. (It is also fun to read, self-aggrandizing, intelligent, and insightful.) By 1926, he remembered, “I’d started to use so many of the phrases and intonations of the Negro, I must have sounded like I was trying to pass for colored.” In 1928 he moved to Harlem, and when he was later arrested for drug possession he insisted on being housed in the black section of the segregated prison. “My education was completed on The Stroll [in Harlem], and I became a Negro,” he wrote.

  Mezzrow’s extreme position makes clear what the rest of the patrons were and what they were not. The black and tans were not processing the “negroization” of the 1920s. Those who leaped into the Charleston contest at the Sunset were no more interested in becoming Negroes than Marie Antoinette was interested in becoming a cow-milking peasant. Theirs was a bracketed fun—temporary, expensive, protected, and therapeutic. The primitive energy put at their disposal served two goals simultaneously: it helped the customers cut loose and it confirmed their superiority over blacks. Perhaps they recognized the desire to “stir the savage in us with a pleasant tickle,” as one writer in the 1910s described the effects of black music. To paraphrase Erenberg, the embrace of liberating black culture at the Sunset did not represent a rejection of white values; rather, it was a reward for having arrived at a point so secure that a little loosening up did not threaten the established order. It was an “emotional holiday,” as George Tichenor put it in 1930.

  The challenge was to locate a balance between control and liberation, and the 1920s had to find its own way. White interest in black dance, which had been growing for many years, experienced a fresh rush of enthusiasm in the postwar revolt against Victorian conventions. The black and tans in Chicago—and the Sunset and Plantation were probably the most famous black and tans in the country in 1926—put this enterprise into high relief. On a personal level the typical Sunset patron might purchase the services of a black prostitute, but he did not advocate cross-racial marriage; on a cultural level, he enjoyed the Black Bottom but understood its place. In his celebrated book The Seven Lively Arts, Gilbert Seldes showed respect for African Americans and for jazz while keeping both at arm’s length: “I say the Negro is not our salvation because with all my feelings for what he instinctively offers, for his desirable indifference to our set of conventions about emotional decency, I am on the side of civilization.” Mezzrow, on the side of the Negroes, shows what had become possible on the radical fringe.

  Across the turn of the twentieth century, bl
ack music moved from its traditional primitivist location, on the minstrel stage, to vaudeville, to black Broadway productions, and to cabarets. This movement involved as much discontinuity as continuity. On the minstrel stage the emphasis was on ridicule, farce, and parody, iconically defined by blackface makeup. The minstrel mask shifted the balance to the side of social control; personal liberation of the Freudian libido was less clearly in play, and we must force our imaginations in an effort to tease it out. In contrast, the business of the black and tans was to offer the correct dosage, individually defined according to the taste of each patron, of interior-savage tickling. It is not simply that the venues and audiences changed: the music now moved into a position where it could function more fully in a culture of risk taking, losing inhibition, slumming.

  The 1920s black and tans document a transition to white attitudes about black entertainment that are still in place today. They were based on a vision, however contorted, of a shared humanity that made black culture not only fun but therapeutic. The case can be made that this same balance between control and liberation remained at the center of most white interest in jazz, continuing through the 1930s and hanging around until the advent of rock and roll, which then took over that function. Armstrong was a witness to the expansion of this phenomenon as he watched the young white alligators riding their bikes to Lincoln Gardens, and then the larger numbers of slumming whites at the Sunset.

  And what primitive role (beyond demonstrating the Charleston) did he play at the Sunset? Certainly his scat vocal in Heebie Jeebies slaked primitivist thirst in a novel way during the summer of 1926; as we have seen, this performance pushed him into the center of a revue finale for the first time. More fundamental were blues gestures that indexed orality, the vitality of percussive attack, eccentric phrasing, improvisation, and the integration of music with movement. His year or so doubling at the Vendome Theater and the Sunset Café was based on a strange musical-social mixture: the qualities that made him a cutting-edge African-American modernist at the Vendome, playing for black audiences, were framed as fresh primitivist energy by wealthy whites at the Sunset. That contradiction was thoroughly part of the times. One of the main arguments of this book is that his most important asset at both venues was the one that often goes unremarked, even though it is absolutely foundational—his ability to invent a new melodic idiom that was, at its core, identified as black.