Bruce Boyd Raeburn and the late Richard B. Allen of the William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive of Tulane University also aided in my research. It was Dick Allen who drew my attention to the whereabouts of the professional diary maintained by Paul Barnes during the period of his performing in King Oliver’s dance band in the mid-1930s, and it was Bruce Raeburn who encouraged my research and provided access to that gig book following Allen’s death.
I am grateful to Professor Alex Albright of East Carolina University for sharing information from Mose McQuitty’s route book concerning tent shows in the southern coalfields.
On two separate occasions, in 2002 and 2005, the West Virginia Humanities Council awarded me research fellowships that facilitated my work, as did smaller development grants awarded by West Virginia University and its College of Creative Arts. This support facilitated my travels to the southern coal fields and the opportunity to meet those individuals who became my informants.
I wish to thank the readers of portions of this study as it was developing. Professor John Renton of the Department of Geology and Geography, Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University, ensured that my synopsis of the relevant geological history of the state was accurate. Charles K. Cannon, Professor Emeritus of English at Coe College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, read a number of the early chapters and offered very useful comments on both argumentation and style. To the readers at work on behalf of the University Press of Mississippi I owe many thanks for their very useful and highly constructive criticism of the book.
Of all of the readers of this work as it was progressing, I must single out Jule P. Wilkinson, my late mother, for particular comment. A professional editor for many years, she brought to the task of reading early drafts of various chapters a keen sense of style. Having a personal interest in the music under discussion, she also provided the perspective of an extremely intelligent lay reader of a subject of great interest. The result is a text that is far better than would otherwise have been the case.
In the final analysis, of course, the strengths of this study are very much a testament to the help I received from those previously mentioned. Whatever shortcomings that remain are my own responsibility.
I am also grateful for the support and, above all, the patience shown by Craig Gill, my editor at the University Press of Mississippi. I also thank Anne Stascavage, Managing Editor at the Press, for her assistance in preparing the manuscript for publication, as well as other members of her staff who contributed their efforts to the cause.
In conclusion, I must thank my family that now extends over three generations for its interest and support. My wife, Carroll, endured the most. My son Sam, his wife Bobbi Nesbitt, their children Alexis and Jack observed what was going on from a greater distance. Even so, they provided the encouragement so essential to a project that has taken more than a decade to complete. One could not ask for more.
Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia, 1930–1942
Introduction
Coal, Railroads, and the Establishment of African American Life in West Virginia
“Well, all the bands were goin’ through West Virginia because the mines were in operation, and everyone, you know, was employed.” Jazz clarinetist and saxophonist Herbert Hall made this observation on February 23, 1980, in the course of an interview with Sterlin Holmesly, a journalist with the San Antonio Express News. Hall recounted details of his life including his years as a member of a dance band that the New Orleans–born trumpet player Don Albert formed in October 1929, and broke up in the summer of 1940. While exploring Hall’s memories of his years with Albert’s band, Holmesly took up the subject of its tours; there were twelve during the almost eleven-year history of the band. Holmesly started reciting the names of various states, asking Hall if the band had played in any of them. Arkansas? Yes. Tennessee? Yes. Kentucky? Yes. Virginia? Yes. West Virginia? In response, Hall made the statement quoted above.
One does not associate the idea that “everyone was employed” with the Great Depression; massive, persistent unemployment was one of the defining characteristics of that period. One does not associate West Virginia with the comparative prosperity that steady employment might bring, particularly in a period of the nation’s history when so many were in desperate economic straits. It was certainly not that way in the spring of 1960 when John F. Kennedy traveled to the Mountain State during his presidential campaign and drew attention to the seemingly endemic poverty of the coal fields and, by doing so, unwittingly created an image of the state that has endured to this day. That there had been a black population of sufficient size to attract dance bands to the Mountain State in the 1930s, let alone one that would produce on many occasions hundreds of people eager to dance to the music of those bands seems equally improbable. Finally, that the economic foundation of this musical culture was coal mining, a dangerous occupation carried out by workers regularly subject to unsafe working conditions and economic exploitation, may also strain credulity.
Hall’s recollections have proven to be accurate. The extent of interest in big band jazz and dance music in the Mountain State is demonstrated by the fact that, between April 1930 and August 1942, newspapers published in West Virginia as well as the Pittsburgh Courier documented a total of 256 public dances presented by various dance bands for black Mountaineers. Most took place in the months of February, April, July, November, and December. April was the “dancing-est” month, perhaps because the constraints of the Lenten season were past but equally likely because winter was giving way to spring, and travel was easier.
That same coverage included numerous references to the exceptionally large numbers of attendees, of which the following are representative. Noble Sissle’s band reportedly drew 1,000 to a dance at the National Guard armory in Charleston in March 1934 (PC 3.31.34, 3). The following September, Jimmie Lunceford’s Orchestra attracted a crowd of almost 700 for a dance in Fairmont, the first of nineteen engagements he would play in West Virginia between 1934 and 1942 (PC 9.29.34, 2/7). In 1936 Andy Kirk and his Twelve Clouds of Joy had advance ticket sales of over 600 for his debut in Fairmont (PC 10.24.36, 2/7). In September 1940 a crowd “estimated at close to 4,000 people turned out ... recently at Charleston’s auditorium to hear Joan Lunceford and her orchestra,” according to a report in the Pittsburgh Courier (PC 9.28.40, 20).
Hall’s association of this lively culture of big band jazz and dance music with an active mining industry is corroborated most convincingly by a diary kept by Paul Barnes, who for several months was a clarinetist/saxophonist in Joe “King” Oliver’s dance band. As will be discussed in detail in chapter 3, Barnes’s “gig book” listed, among other items of information, the money paid to each player at the end of each of the band’s engagements between October 1934 and the end of June 1935. In that period, the band played a total of 151 dances, twenty-two of which were held in various communities within the Mountain State. Barnes’s gig book documents the fact that engagements in West Virginia paid Oliver’s musicians almost twice as much as those played in neighboring states to the east and west and a third more than those played further south. All of the available evidence indicates that many other black bands including those mentioned above did at least as well, if not better.
The musical culture upon which this study is focused was ultimately dependent upon enormous deposits of high-quality bituminous coal in the Mountain State (the existence of which became known a few years after it achieved statehood on June 20, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War). Understanding the history of the development of the coal industry in West Virginia is key to understanding why the state later proved to be so attractive to touring black dance bands in the 1930s.
In his study of coal mining, David Alan Corbin summarized the impact of America’s post–Civil War industrialization on what would become the southern coalfields of the Mountain State.
At the end of the 1870s, southern West Virginia was a relatively isolated, underpopulated, agrarian region, occupied by subsistence fa
rmers, hunters, and family clans like the Hatfields and McCoys. The rise of the coal industry in the next decade, however, transformed the area economically, politically, and socially into both an industrialized region and an economic colony. The growth of the coal industry gave the coal operators a dominance in the state government over southern West Virginia until the New Deal. It also broke down the traditional mountain culture, introduced new values, and brought in tens of thousands of southern blacks and Europeans to mix with the native population in the confines of the company town. By 1921 southern West Virginia was a heavily populated, industrial economy dependent upon coal production and linked to national and international markets (Corbin, 1981, 1).
The migration of African Americans was shaped by the growth of the coal industry during the period Corbin discussed. According to Thomas E. Posey, in 1860, 18,371 slaves and 2,773 free blacks resided in six counties that, with the exception of Kanawha County, were located in what would become the eastern region of the new state where agriculture was the principal activity (Posey 1935, 5). By 1870 the official number of black residents had declined to 17,980 as many moved away following Emancipation, but by 1880 almost 26,000 African Americans resided in the Mountain State, some having returned from temporary residence elsewhere, others migrating from adjacent states. Ten years later that number had increased to 32,690, and by 1900 it had reached just under 45,000. Over the next forty years it continued to grow to 64,178 (1910), 86,345 (1920), 114,893 (1930), peaking in 1940 at 117,754 or 6.2 percent of the state’s total population of 1,901,974 (Sixteenth Census of the United States 1940 1941. Population: Second Series, Table 4, 10).1
Fig. I.1. The Northern (Fairmont) and Southern Coalfields with those counties highlighted that had significant African American populations during the 1930s. County seats are also identified. (West Virginia University–University Relations–Design)
That this growth in the black population was linked to the coal industry is also documented by census data that consistently show that throughout the first four decades of the twentieth century the vast majority of African American Mountaineers resided in just two regions of the state. Some lived and worked in three of the six counties that made up the northern coal field, known locally as the Fairmont Field—Harrison, Marion, and Monongalia. In far greater numbers, black West Virginians resided in six counties embraced by the far larger southern fields, a dramatic shift from the antebellum distribution of the black population that had reflected their work as farmers and farm workers (see Fig. 1.1). Kanawha, McDowell, and Raleigh counties were home to three-quarters of the state’s black population. African Americans constituted one-quarter of McDowell County’s population according to both the 1930 and 1940 censuses (Sixteenth Census of the United States 1940. Population: Second Series, Table 21, 40–43).
The significant black employment in the coal industry was also documented in tables, entitled “Nationalities of Persons Employed at the Mines and Coke Ovens by Counties,” that regularly were included in the annual reports of the state’s Department of Mines until 1933. These data show that not only did blacks regularly constitute the second largest “nationality” after “native-born Whites,” but that they worked in greatest numbers in the southern counties.2 They, their families, and other African Americans employed on the railroads and elsewhere in the coalfields constituted the source of the large audiences for big band jazz and dance music in the Mountain State during the Great Depression.
This introduction examines four developments that account for the presence of so many blacks in the Mountain State and their creation of a lively musical culture that would come to embrace the big bands: the formation of the enormous reserve of high quality bituminous coal for which there was a continuing demand; the role of black Mountaineers in building the railroads that would ship that coal to its many markets both in the United States and abroad and that would remain the second major employer of African American Mountaineers until the 1940s; the nature and extent of blacks’ political and economic power not to be found in Kentucky, Virginia, or other states lying further south having substantial black populations, and the benefits of that power served to attract still more black immigrants to the state.
The final topic concerns a development that did not occur until the first one hundred days of the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: an agreement forged in 1933 by Roosevelt’s administration between West Virginia’s coal companies and the United Mine Workers of America that led to a period of stability and growth in the coal industry that would prove exceptional in its history and a marked contrast to the state of the economy in many other parts of the country during most of the 1930s. As a consequence, from late in 1933 to the middle of 1942 black Mountaineers enjoyed a higher level of economic prosperity than was typical of African America. Their comparatively good fortune was reflected in part by their frequent attendance at dances for which the music was provided by black dance bands.
The Formation of West Virginia’s Coalfields
Understanding the importance of coal mining to this culture raises the question, how did so much of this mineral come to underlie so much of West Virginia in the first place? By way of background, the surface of the earth is broken into a number of “plates,” many consisting of portions of both the visible land and of the adjacent ocean floor. Of the numerous plates covering the earth’s surface, our concern is with the North American plate, which, like the others, has been moving around the planet since it first formed.
The formation of West Virginia’s coal deposits began in the Pennsylvanian or Upper Carboniferous Period around 323 million years ago, when the North American plate was located close to the equator, not unlike Indonesia today. For thirty million years or so, climatic conditions were right for the formation of the coalfields now located in the Mountain State as well as in eastern Kentucky, eastern Ohio, and southwestern Pennsylvania because of the North American plate’s location.
The coast of the North American plate was then characterized by swamps lush with tropical vegetation. In Annals of the Former World, John McPhee explained what happened to initiate the formation of the coalfields:
The freshwater swamp forests stood beside the nervously hanging coastline of a saltwater bay, just as Sumatran swamps now stand beside the Straits of Malacca and Bornean everglades beside the Java Sea. This was when glacial cycles elsewhere in the world were causing sea level to oscillate with geologic rapidity, and so the swamps pursued the shoreline as the sea went down, and marine limestone buried the swamps as the sea returned. In just one of these cycles, the shoreline would move as much as five hundred miles.... There were so many such cycles at close intervals in Pennsylvanian time that Pennsylvanian [and West Virginian] rock sequences are often striped like regimental ties—the signature of glaciers half the world away. (McPhee 1998, 246)
Thereafter, over millions of years the North American plate with its load of carboniferous material moved north, colliding at least twice with adjacent plates and acquiring some portion of their material in the process. The second collision, 248 million years ago, involved the North American and African plates in what geologists refer to as the Alleghenian Orogeny (Byerly and Renton 2006, 5). Those plates “came together not head-on but like scissors closing from the north, folding and faulting their conjoining boundaries to make the Atlas Mountains [of Morocco] and the Appalachian chain” (McPhee 1998, 126). Gradually, the carboniferous material, buried for millions of years under thousands of feet of newer rock, was compressed and heated by the plates’ collision, hardening into the bituminous coal found in great quantity in the Mountain State.
The force of the collision also elevated to altitudes comparable to those of the Himalayas today the sequences of rock that McPhee suggested resembled the stripes of a regimental tie, the black “stripes” being the coal. Erosion over the next 150 million years then washed away the highest elevations. Around 65 million years ago, for reasons not fully understood (though plate tectonics was apparently not inv
olved), another uplifting of much of what is now the eastern United States began. Subsequent erosion created the terrain of West Virginia we know today (Byerly and Renton 2006, 6).
Reflecting the impact of this geological history, West Virginia is divided into two regions. To the east lies a series of ridges and valleys running from southwest to northeast: a major portion of the Allegheny Mountains—the central Appalachians by another name. To the west is the heavily eroded Allegheny plateau—“dissected” is the geologist’s term—that extends from the westernmost ridge of the Alleghenies across the state and into eastern Kentucky and eastern Ohio.
The plateau presents itself as a series of seemingly innumerable ridges running in all directions separating V-shaped valleys carved over millennia by small streams. The sides of many of these valleys have angles of 35 to 40 degrees, some so deep that the sun rarely reaches the bottom and then only in the height of summer, and many so narrow that the bottom land can barely accommodate a single-lane road, a single railroad track, and a single line of houses. The rail line would have served one or more coal mines; the houses, built and owned by one of the mining companies, would have housed its employees—among them black miners and their families, the audiences for the touring big bands during the 1930s.
The erosion that created those valleys also exposed one coal seam after another, making them easy to mine at first. As Joseph T. Lambie observed in his study of the Norfolk & Western Railway, the rough terrain
that impeded agriculture favored mining by exposure of the coal beds on every hillside. In nine-tenths of the area the veins are either horizontal or gently sloping—a condition that permits drift or slope mining, which is much more economical than the shaft mining of most of the bituminous regions to the northward. There is usually enough incline in the seams to provide good drainage and make hauling easy.... Over most of the field the strata are strong enough to provide stable roofs in the mines, so that the minimum of timbering is required.... And a major factor in their favor was the thickness of the seams. Through a large area the Pocahontas Number Three seam runs from six to twelve feet. (Lambie 1954, 40–41)
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