Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia

by Christopher Wilkinson

  Table 2.3. Financial data and analysis of 29 dances outside of West Virginia (10/1/34-2/25/35) for which Joe Oliver’s Band provided music.

  Summary:

  Note

  1. Entry in Barnes’s diary for October 19, 1934, includes the following: “School dance played by [Jimmie] Gunn’s Orch. Killed our dance.” Jimmie Gunn led a very popular black dance band based in Charlotte, North Carolina, in this period.

  Barnes’s entries document the fact that the average payment for the ninety-two black dances in the southeast was $1.71, or just 65 percent of wages in West Virginia. Average earnings from the six white dances in the Mountain State were more than a third higher than the average for those four white dances in Florida. Disregarding the issue of race, the average pay for each musician in this region was $1.73, whereas in West Virginia, it was $2.94. Undeniably, the band did better in the southeast than it had in the states contiguous with the Mountain State in which, as documented in Table 2.3, each player $1.11 per engagement, which was just 37.5 percent of the wage for a dance in West Virginia. By all available measures, the best money was to be found in the Mountain State.

  As dramatic as these data are, one must bear in mind that they concern a band flirting with both financial and artistic disaster due to the indifferent leadership of Joe Oliver. A second factor to consider is the season: the milder weather in March through June in the southeastern states would probably have tempted more people to go out to a dance than would the winter months in which the band was located in Huntington.

  The difference between the total number of dances played by the band in the southeast and that of engagements in West Virginia and surrounding states is also noteworthy. The band had lots of engagements in the eight southeastern states: ninety-eight dances spread over 120 days between March 1 and June 28, 1935. By comparison, from October 1, 1934, when it took up residence in West Virginia until it played its last engagement on February 25, 1935, in Beckley (148 days in all), the band played only fifty-three dances. More engagements might presumably mean greater popularity with audiences, but, if so, it did not mean greater income for the players.

  A fourth consideration that may account for the drastically different earnings by Oliver’s musicians in the Mountain State as compared with those in the rest of the territory in which the band played might be the varied income levels of black and white audiences in West Virginia compared to those in the eight southeastern states. As noted earlier, evidence from other studies suggests that the incomes of southern blacks were considerably smaller than the wages of those at work in the mines of West Virginia. Barnes’s data provides further confirmation of the economic advantages of working in the coal industry compared to sharecropping, domestic service, or unskilled industrial labor in the South.

  It must be conceded that much of this argument on behalf of Herbert Hall’s contention hinges upon a single source. One may presume, however, that Paul Barnes’s document is an accurate accounting of his income as well as of the relevant data concerning the places Oliver’s band performed and the race of audience entertained. Hardly anticipating this use of his gig books, Barnes would have had little reason to misrepresent his professional activities. Nevertheless, comparable documents from other musicians would have been most welcome. For example, were one available, it would be interesting to examine the gig book of a member of one of the leading bands, such as those led by Duke Ellington, Count Basie, or Jimmie Lunceford. So far, none has come to light. Yet, even if one would appear, it is uncertain that it could tell us everything we would like to know. Since those bands were under New York–based management demanding guaranteed engagements, the night-to-night earnings of the band would probably not have been available to a sideman. Moreover, since the cut taken by the managers of the name bands was not always known (though it appears to have been significant), it is impossible to determine a name band’s net earnings from individual engagements.

  What does reinforce the implications of the figures in Barnes’s diary regarding the advantages of performing in the Mountain State is the regularity with which the name bands returned to play there, suggesting that local dance entrepreneurs were confident of attracting large crowds of dancers to successive engagements. Within the period of this study, the Lunceford band played a total of nineteen engagements in West Virginia. Andy Kirk played ten. Chick Webb played five dances in the state before his untimely death in 1938, and Ella Fitzgerald, who kept the band going for a while, brought it back to West Virginia four more times. Erskine Hawkins played nine times in the Mountain State. Combined with the engagements by a number of other touring black dance bands, it has been possible to document 137 appearances by name bands in the state between 1931 and 1942.

  The data from Paul Barnes’s gig book combined with the evidence of frequent visits from nationally managed bands appears to validate Herbert Hall’s recollection of the economic benefits of booking engagements in the Mountain State. Its distinctive economic conditions provided the foundation for an extraordinary musical culture. At the core of that culture were the bands that played for black West Virginians. In the second part of this study, attention will be turned first to the role of radio and newspapers in disseminating this musical culture in West Virginia and then to the history of the culture of big band jazz and dance music. Central to that discussion will be consideration of the bands that provided this music, the styles in which they played, the place of their engagements in West Virginia within their larger performance histories, and their contemporary and historical reputations.

  PART TWO

  Big Bands in Black West Virginia: 1929–1935

  CHAPTER THREE

  Newspapers and Radio Bring the World of the Big Bands to Black West Virginia

  The establishment of big band music as a vital part of the musical culture of black West Virginia reflected the impact of multiple forces of which the two most powerful were newspapers and radio. African Americans in West Virginia were avid readers of the Pittsburgh Courier, “the newspaper for people of color” as Francis Flippen recalled (Flippen 2005). The Courier appeared every Saturday and almost always devoted at least two full pages to news of the world of black entertainment, including the activities of leading dance bands. Some of this reportage took the form of short articles summarizing the future destinations of a band on tour, often accompanied by a photo of that band or of its leader. Publicity photos accompanied by a brief caption announcing one or two of a band’s next engagements could also be quite informative.

  Late in the 1930s the destinations of touring bands were listed without comment. Readers, knowing the bands’ reputations, presumably made plans to attend upcoming dances in their community on the basis of these brief notices. Occasionally there were announcements as to when a particular black band might be heard on the radio. In September 1932 the unidentified reporter of news of the black community in Fairmont drew attention to the fact that “Local well wishers of Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra may tune in on WLW every Saturday and Sunday evening at 10 o’clock” (PC 9.17.32, 1/7).

  Like the Courier, some of the Mountain State’s newspapers included news of upcoming dances within their local communities. This information was often found in a column entitled “Local Colored News” that regularly appeared in several of the dailies published in the southern coalfields, Whether the dance was to take place in the town where the paper was published or elsewhere in the region, local black readers were kept informed.

  For the historian, this documentation of the musical culture of black Mountaineers is invaluable. It provides evidence of the activities of bands that never recorded, that may have had only local or, at best, regional reputations, and that as a consequence have had little or no place in the larger historical narrative of this music. Despite this, their existence is important to an understanding of the impact of big band jazz and dance music on black West Virginia, because they played a key role in implanting this musical culture within the state’s African American c
ommunities. Unlike Lunceford’s, Basie’s, Kirk’s, or Ellington’s bands, the local bands, as long as they performed regularly, served as a constant reminder of the existence and appeal of the music for which the touring name bands justifiably earned both national and enduring reputations, though their presence in the Mountain State was of very short duration on any given occasion.

  The Importance of Radio in the Mountain State

  The impact of radio on the evolving musical tastes and sophistication of black Mountaineers was profound. Its influence on American society as a whole was enormous, for it was the first electronic medium to reach the entire nation. This resulted in the gradual creation of a national musical culture and simultaneously an accelerating transformation of local musical scenes by its introduction of music from other regions. As a consequence, regional styles attracted new fans and gradually the multiple regional styles within a certain tradition were in a sense homogenized into what could be termed a national style (Schuller 1968, 242).1

  To argue for radio’s influence on the musical life of black West Virginians living in the coalfields requires answers to three questions. In this rural and mountainous state, was electricity widely available to power radios, particularly those in the company houses where miners resided? Even if it were available, what is the evidence that miners had radios that could pick up the signals transmitted by the stations then in existence? Finally, what is the evidence that radio stations broadcast performances of jazz and other dance music by big bands, especially black ones, in this period?

  Electricity was widely available in the coalfields for one reason: it was essential to operate the mines. As Figure 3.1 shows, the state’s electrical grid overlapped the boundaries of both the northern and southern coalfields. Thus, 70 percent of houses in company towns had electricity by 1927. In sharp contrast to the coalfields, in much of the rest of West Virginia electrification was rare or entirely nonexistent (Report of the Coal Commission 1925, III, 1473, Table 19). In 1934, only 3.3 percent of West Virginia’s farms had electricity. As a consequence, the state was ranked thirty-fifth out of the forty eight states in rural electrification (Rural Electrification Administration 1940, 332).

  Fig. 3.1. Electronic Service and Transmission Lines, State of West Virginia [1927]. West Virginia: One of America’s Most Astounding Concentrations of Power-Wealth-Opportunity (1929), 12. (West Virginia and Regional History Collection)

  One implication of this sharp discrepancy between the coalfields and the rest of West Virginia was the apparent coexistence of two distinct cultural spheres. Coalfield areas were linked by radio to the larger national culture and thus, comparatively speaking, were more cosmopolitan. This stands in dramatic contrast to many of the central counties of the state that lacked rural electrification and consequently remained largely cut off from the national musical culture (and therefore, to a far greater extent, retained musical and other traditions rooted in preindustrial Appalachian life). Indeed, the image of a rural, agricultural (and almost entirely white) world shapes many peoples’ perceptions of West Virginia’s historic musical culture to this day.

  The presence of radios in the coal camps has been repeatedly confirmed by the testimony of older African Americans. One informant, who as a child resided in a coal camp near Williamson, reported that, although her family’s company house had only outdoor plumbing and a cold water tap on the back porch, it had electricity. The family owned a radio and listened to station WLW from Cincinnati (Glover 2005). Others from that region of the state have described similar accommodations and listened to the same station (Williams 2005; Mack 2005). In the northern field, one station of choice was KDKA from Pittsburgh (Nallen 2001).

  That good radio reception was possible in the mountainous terrain of the state was due to the nature of the transmission of signals using amplitude modulation (AM). The signal both follows the terrain and also bounces off the ionosphere, unlike frequency modulated (FM) signals which can only reach the horizon and do not follow the intervening terrain. From late fall through early spring, the absence of foliage further aids transmission as do cold dry winter nights when AM signals skipping off the ionosphere can travel as much as a thousand miles or more from the transmitter’s antenna. Even now, with the atmosphere filled with all sorts of electronic “clutter,” it is possible to pull in distant AM stations late at night during the winter. By 1930 Charleston’s WOBU, for instance, transmitting with just 250 watts of power, was heard as far away as Chula Vista, California, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Havana, Cuba, as documented by correspondence received from listeners in those cities (Owston 1989).

  Beyond the environmental benefits of AM radio, a station like Cincinnati’s WLW had definite advantages over much of its competition, including WOBU. It broadcast with 50,000 watts of power and was a clear-channel radio station, meaning no other station occupied the same frequency, 700, on the AM dial. Thus, particularly at night, virtually nothing would interfere with its signal. This was particularly helpful to listeners in Logan, McDowell, and Mingo Counties in the southern coalfields, for not before 1939 were stations established in their respective county seats: WLOG in Logan, WBRW in Welch, and WBTH in Williamson.

  That WLW dominated the radio waves did not mean other stations had no role in disseminating the national culture of swing to the state’s residents. Located in Pittsburgh, the first commercial radio station in the United States, and another clear-channel, 50,000-watt station, KDKA also broadcast big band jazz and other dance musics and was heard in the Mountain State (Cranford 2008).

  The Columbia Broadcasting System had in its network five stations in West Virginia as of 1940: WWVA in Wheeling, WMMN in Fairmont, WCHS in Charleston (which had begun as WOBU), WSAZ in Huntington, and WPAR in Parkersburg. Of these, WPAR was the decided late-comer, having gone on the air only in 1935, while the rest had been founded between 1926 and 1929 (Tribe 1984, 76–78). Like WLW and KDKA, the CBS network featured a succession of big bands performing in various locations around the country on Friday and Saturday nights. Those able to tune in WLW as well as the nearest CBS station could hear a great variety of big band music. Consider the programming on Saturday, November 20, 1937. An evening of live music could begin as early as 7:00 p.m. with the program Swing Session on CBS. After a miscellany of other programs, at 10:00 p.m. WLW broadcast the dance band led by the African American composer and arranger Noble Sissle, a program opposite Your Hit Parade on CBS. At 11:00, one could choose among several minor dance bands; at 11:30 Benny Goodman, the “King of Swing,” began a half-hour program on CBS, after which one could “swing and sway with Sammy Kaye,” the leader of a “sweet” society dance orchestra and a marked contrast to Goodman’s hot jazz sound (CE 11.20.37, 16). Evidence of the stations’ interest in building audiences in the coalfields appeared in the Logan Banner in the form of advertisements for specific programs broadcast on WOBU, KDKA, and WLW as early as 1932 (LB 9.27.32, 7; 12.2.32, 7).

  The Synergy of Radio and Newspapers:

  The Impact of the Pittsburgh Courier

  The importance of newspapers and radio to the reconstruction of the history of big band jazz within the musical culture of the Mountain State is in large part due to their interdependence. Newspapers documented the importance of radio by printing program schedules, something now associated only with television. The popularity of the bands heard over the radio explains in part the papers’ attention to them. The Pittsburgh Courier during the early 1930s regularly listed the broadcasts of nationally prominent black bands in a column called “Radio Highlights,” compiled by the paper’s radio editor, Allen E. Eckstein, who also wrote a companion column entitled “Wave Lengths.” In his column of February 20, 1932, Eckstein confirmed the reach of radio stations located at great distances from Pittsburgh and, by extension, the central Appalachians, noting that, while a particular program had not been broadcast on a Pittsburgh station, most local listeners “find in Cleveland or New York itself convenient kilocycles to Smoketown” (PC 2.20.32, 2/1).
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  Broadcasts of more local interest were documented in the Yellow Jacket, the newspaper published six or eight times a years by students at West Virginia State College located in Institute near Charleston and one of the state’s three black colleges. In March, 1931, it reported that three students, “Aggie” Riley, “Red” Payne, and Charles Cheatham, who called themselves “Riley’s Night Hawks” were to be heard on four successive Thursday evenings over WOBU (YJ 3.27.31, 1). The Yellow Jacket also proved to be an invaluable source of information about dance music in the Mountain State for it documented numerous dances, both on and off campus, and the bands that provided the music for them.

  That black West Virginians did in fact listen to broadcasts by big bands is also documented by newspaper coverage. Already mentioned was the notice in the Pittsburgh Courier of the fact that Bennie Moten’s band could be heard on WLW by listeners in Fairmont in the northern coalfield. During the Courier’s “Most Popular Band” contest conducted in the Fall of 1932, Mrs. Talitha G. Saunders of Winding Gulf, West Virginia, a company town located south of Beckley in the southern coalfields, wrote to say that “Noble Sissle and his international orchestra are to my way of thinking superior to all the rest. He is my ideal and is appreciated most because of his ultra rhythmic syncopation that is so sweet and hot” (PC 10.15.32, 2/1). Her opinion could only have been formed by listening to the radio; Noble Sissle did not perform anywhere in southern West Virginia until February, 1934 (PC 2.17.34, 2/8).