In the same “Wave Lengths” column in which he noted that New York and Cleveland radio stations could be heard in Pittsburgh, Allen Eckstein published portions of a letter from a West Virginian identified only as “Mr. Redd” who described himself as a “regular radio maniac” always happy to hear the bands led by “Fatha” Hines, Don Redman, Cab Calloway, and Noble Sissle, but “if you want to give me an idea of Paradise kindly let me have an occasional idea of the whereabouts of the incomparable Duke Ellington, the renowned Fletcher Henderson, and the one and only McKinney’s Cotton Pickers ... these three constitute the radio world’s idea of heaven” (PC 2.20.32, 2/1).
It is thanks to such testimony as well as more conventional newspaper coverage that we can recover both the history of and enthusiasm for big band jazz and dance music among black Mountaineers during the 1930s and early 1940s. This reportage, along with the evidence within Paul Barnes’s gig book, previously discussed, further corroborates Herbert Hall’s testimony concerning the state’s exceptional support for dance music of the period.
If the evidence in that gig book constitutes only a snap shot of the importance of this music to black West Virginians in one short period, newspapers provided a panoramic view of the popularity of big band jazz in the Mountain State throughout the remainder of the 1930s and the early years of the following decade. The fact that this reportage grew in frequency and extent points to growing interest in this music on the part of the African American population in the period. At the same time, it would suggest that those folks were able and willing to underwrite engagements with some of the wages that had been secured by various labor agreements between the coal industry and the United Mine Workers of America beginning with the Bituminous Coal Code of 1933.
CHAPTER FOUR
Local and Territory Bands in the Emerging Culture of Big Band Jazz and Dance Music in the Mountain State
The early 1930s were a time of near economic chaos in the coalfields. The newspaper record shows that in the Mountain State the vast majority of live dance music was provided by local bands and by touring “territory bands,” mostly based in the southeast and south-central part of the country as well as in the Midwest. These ensembles would be either partially or totally eclipsed when New York–based name bands began to arrive in the state with increasing regularity after the NRA stabilized the mining industry and wages increased beginning late in 1933.
Given the prominence of the name bands, why should the mere existence of such seemingly lesser groups detain us? The territory bands recorded rarely, if at all; the local ensembles never, making judgments of their quality virtually impossible. That fact alone would imply that they hardly merit attention. Like many such bands performing today in any style of American vernacular music, both categories of dance bands presumably depended on the name bands to determine the repertory and style to be played for the local audiences. If the audience heard a song over the radio performed by Andy Kirk’s or Cab Calloway’s band, we may assume that song earned a live performance by the local talent.
The local bands’ job was, therefore, to “cover” such hits with performances of their own, many of which would probably have been based upon commercial “stock” arrangements. Such arrangements were quickly produced by music publishers for any song that proved popular by adhering to simple arranging formulas. Jeffrey Magee summarized their usual characteristics in the course of discussing innovations made by Don Redman (1900–1964) when he was a member of Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra in the early 1920s. Redman is widely regarded as perhaps the first great arranger of music for jazz band.
Stock arrangements of popular songs in the early 1920s usually had a four- to eight-bar introduction, followed by the song’s verse and two or three statements of the song’s [thirty-two measure] refrain, also known as “the chorus.” Each section featured one predominant texture and timbre—whether played by the full ensemble, a section of the band, or, more rarely, a soloist—from beginning to end. Most stocks offered a choice of instrumentation by aligning two staves on each part. An occasional duet or trio break might be inserted for color. Largely, however, instrumentation on stocks tended to change more between chorus statements than within them. Although stocks would become more intricate through the 1920s, the publishers’ in-house arrangers of stocks generally aimed more for maximum accessibility than for ingenuity.... (Magee 2005, 41)
“Maximum accessibility” implies that the purpose of such arrangements was to satisfy a market for dance music that could be played at sight by reasonably competent musicians (and, after a few performances, in their sleep).
Discerning listeners almost instantly can distinguish Basie’s band from Lunceford’s or Ellington’s by the manner in which their arrangers exploited the distinctive instrumental colors and styles of the individual performers regardless of the song being played. In contrast, it did not matter which group of musicians played a stock arrangement; one band’s performance would sound pretty much like another’s, because the arrangement lacked any personality.
Yet before writing off West Virginia’s local black dance bands, it would be well to consider several facts. The first concerns the stock arrangements themselves: they did not have to constrain imaginative musicians regardless of where they played. Don Albert founded a band in October 1929 in New Orleans, for the purpose of fulfilling engagements in Dallas during the Texas State Fair, and was given a large quantity of “stocks” by another bandleader who had no use for them. While getting started, Don Albert and His Ten Pals played them as written, but after a while they began to alter those charts in the course of rehearsals by figuring out how to interpolate solos and other new material within them to allow individual musicians to stand out (Wilkinson 2001, 71). Indeed, Don Redman’s first innovations as an arranger had been prompted by a desire to “doctor” the commercial arrangements that in its earliest years Henderson’s band relied on for its repertory (Magee 2005, 41).
Another important point regarding West Virginia’s bands is evidence of the presence of one or more arrangers within at least two of those ensembles, which suggests the possibility that still other local bands also had their own arrangers. Chappie Willet’s Campus Revelers of West Virginia State College included at least two arrangers. There is more to Willet’s story than the fact that he led a band of fellow college students, but for now it is sufficient to draw attention to the fact that in a five-paragraph story in his “Wave Length” column of January 16, 1932, Allen Eckstein noted that, as a result of the band’s broadcasts over WOBU, they were earning the praise of both black and white listeners, “with their extended repertoire of music which includes some special arrangements by Richard Poore and Chappie” (PC 1.16.32, 2/1). Poore was a saxophonist; Willet played piano. Willet is known to have studied composition with Joseph Grider, a member of State’s faculty; presumably, Poore also received some formal education in the same subject from the same instructor (Wriggle 2007, 4).
The band director at Garnett High School in Charleston also provided instruction in arranging for interested students. She was reportedly formidable both in name and appearance. Dr. Maude Wanzer Lanes was, according to an alumnus of the high school, both a large individual and highly dedicated to her subject: “220 pounds and all music,” in the words of Hughie Mills. She encouraged Mills, his sister, and his brothers to learn the dances associated with big band jazz and taught William “Keg” Purnell, among others, how to arrange music for dance band (Cranford et al. 2008).
Purnell studied at State from 1932 to 1934, and in that period reportedly created arrangements for Cal Grear’s Sweet Swing Orchestra, which was based in Huntington but played frequently both in Charleston and at West Virginia State (Cranford et al. 2008). For nine or ten months beginning on December 25, 1934, he was the drummer in King Oliver’s band; his arrival was noted in the entry for Christmas Day in Paul Barnes’s gig book (see Fig. 3.1). After quitting the Oliver band in the fall of 1935, he returned home but subsequently departed for New York, pl
ayed with Benny Carter and Claude Hopkins’s bands between 1939 and 1942, and remained in the city until his death in 1965 (Vollmer Grove Music Online).
The newspaper record in the Mountain State provides limited information about local bands, but it does confirm that they performed with some regularity. Table 4.1 lists a number of local bands and the cities in which they were based, as well as their respective periods of existence as documented either by newspaper coverage or other sources. Most are grouped by the region of the state they served: the northern or southern coalfields. There were also several bands affiliated with two of the state’s black colleges that for various reasons deserve special attention.
Table 4.1. West Virginia’s black dance bands
Newspapers usually documented little apart from the date, place, and start time of engagements by these bands. Taken at face value, the limited coverage suggests that most existed for only brief periods. What must be borne in mind, however, is that black bands did not rely primarily on newspaper coverage to draw crowds. Publicity usually took the form of hand-bills circulated within black communities and word-of-mouth advertising.
This is not to argue that some bands did not have short lives, but rather to assert that their absence from the newspaper record is not in itself evidence of this. The following pair of items in a single story of news from Fairmont that appeared in the Pittsburgh Courier suggests that more was going on than made the paper. Fairmont’s correspondent informed readers that “[Virginia] Peppy Parker’s orchestra clicked favorably last Monday night [September 12, 1932] in the Elks Rest, where a dance was in progress” (PC 9.17.32, 1/7). The Elks Rest was the lodge of the Monongahela Elks Club, a black social organization. That Parker’s band was a hit was confirmed by a notice in the same column that it would be providing the music for “the regular weekly dances to be staged in the Elks Rest in Cleveland Avenue” (PC 9.17.32, 1/7). While it is regrettable that we learn nothing of the size, personnel, or repertory of her “orchestra,” that it was for a time the house band of the Elks Rest suggests two conclusions: first, that it provided music for dancing of a standard that satisfied the members; second, that as a house band it would not elicit continuing attention from the press. It is not the routine that is newsworthy; it is the exceptional.
Another of the bands of interest is Louis Redman’s Bellhops, known to some as the Cumberland Bellhops, led by the younger brother of Don Redman, the innovative arranger for Fletcher Henderson’s band in the early 1920s. Though based in Cumberland, Maryland, the Bellhops played in West Virginia’s northern coalfield communities from time to time and even played an engagement at the Rose Garden Inn in Beckley in February 1935. By August of that year the band had relocated to Utica in central New York State. The Courier article conveying that information also described it as “one of the best swing bands of the up-State [sic]. They feature 12 all finished musicians,” meaning musicians who could read music and presumably were well trained on their instruments; who those players were remains a mystery (PC 8.3.35, 2/6).
At least one of the bands based in the southern coalfields was led by a second-generation dance bandleader: Edward Watkins of Bluefield. His father, Harry Watkins, had formed Watkins’ Orchestra right after World War I, a six-piece band that would break up in 1925. Wherever else it played, it was to be found at the white Bluefield Country Club on Saturday nights. Sometime in the early 1930s Edward started his own small band, known variously as the Harlem Hotshots and Watkins Serenaders, made up of players from Bluefield and vicinity. Among its steadier though probably uncompensated engagements was to broadcast over Bluefield’s radio station, WHIS, on Sunday afternoons (TSNO clipping 9.1992).
Notice was taken of Edward Watkins’s band twice in the Courier. The issue of May 15, 1937, reported that it furnished music for “the most glamorous event of the season” in the McDowell County town of Keystone: “a Colonial Garden party given by the Les Precieuses Club at the American Legion building on May 7” (PC 5.15.37, 21). The Hotshots were joined by singer Viola Clark, whose home at that time was in Elkhorn, a few miles east of Keystone, and whose brother Walter was the band’s pianist (Meador 1987, 29). Just before Christmas of that same year, the Courier carried a report of the “annual Snow Ball given by the Beta Lambda Omega Chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority ... the leading event of the social season” to benefit the scholarship fund for Bluefield State College. “The music and dancing was furnished by the much improved augmented Watkins Serenaders” (PC 1.1.38, 2/9). One wonders at the reference to the band being “much improved.” Had the reporter been previously unimpressed by its collective musicianship or did the fact that it was now larger constitute improvement, bigger presumably being better?
The circumstances surrounding these two engagements cast light on another dimension of African American life in the coalfields: the array of social activities that linked women of like values, interests, and social standing from across the region. There were several social organizations such as the Les Precieuses Club in the coalfield counties, both north and south. Local newspapers reported frequently on their many activities. Such groups were a secular counterpart to the numerous and busy church-based social circles organized by black Mountaineer women, which also were extensively covered.1
Both types of organizations were not limited in their membership to the residents of a single company town. Rather, they drew their numbers from the many coal camps located in close proximity to one another in the numerous valleys that defined the terrain of the coalfields, as well as from the larger towns nearby. If organizations such as Les Precieuses appear to suggest (if only by its French name) the aspirations of some for what might be termed a middle-class way of life, the Snow Ball sponsored by the local chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha is unmistakably emblematic of middle-class black America. It was and remains one of the two oldest and most elite black sororities in the country, the other being Delta Sigma Theta. There were chapters of A.K.A. not only at Bluefield State but also at West Virginia State. Each organized frequent social events on campus and off. Like those of the closely affiliated fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, its members could be seen as part of W. E. B. DuBois’s Talented Tenth of African America: well-educated, ambitious, and prepared to lift up the race through their accomplishments. This chapter’s efforts to support the educational mission at the local black college, from which presumably many of its members had graduated, were entirely congruent with that larger purpose.
Gilmore’s Midnighters: A Local Black Dance Band of the Period
Before turning to the subject of bands made up of students at West Virginia State, we should consider what may be learned of the local bands that played in the coalfields during the 1930s beyond the limited evidence provided by the press. Though we do not know who the members of these bands were, they were no doubt on a first-name basis with their neighbors in the black communities in which they were based. From the testimony provided years later by Edward Watkins, Nat Reece, and others mentioned in this discussion so far, the local bands did not serve as major sources of income for their members. Some, like Thomas Clark of the Harlem Hot-shots, were miners (Meador 1987, 29). Others worked for one of the railroads or were schoolteachers.
Thanks to two lengthy conversations with a former sideman, I have discovered a great deal of information about one of these local bands that enlarges our understanding of the contributions made by all of these groups to the culture of big band dance music in the Mountain State. My informant, Lester Clifford, during the 1930s played saxophone in Gilmore’s Midnighters, a band based in the town of Piedmont.2
There are two towns named Piedmont in the Mountain State. One is in McDowell County in the southern coalfields; the other is in Mineral County, at the southern edge of the Cumberland-Piedmont Field, just to the east of the northern West Virginia field. This second Piedmont was home to Lester Clifford, James Gilmore, and to most of the members of Gilmore’s band. The community was, and remains, a small one. It lies on the west branch of the
Potomac River which forms the boundary separating eastern West Virginia from Maryland. Along the river and through the town runs one of the two major routes of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, the one that ran across the northern counties of western Virginia before the Civil War and that because of its strategic importance led to those counties being incorporated into the new state in 1863.
Though in a coalfield, Piedmont was not a coal company town. Rather, it was (and remains) one of three communities wherein have resided much of the work force for a paper mill owned by what was originally the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company, subsequently became Westvaco, and today is part of Meade-Westvaco. The other communities (constituting what are known locally as the Tri-Towns) are Westernport and Luke, Maryland. Less than a mile separates the towns from one another, and the Potomac, which at that point is very small, is bridged in two places to connect them.
Fig. 4.1. Piedmont, WV, City Band, c. 1910. Front row from left: Wesley Streets, Ed Bursh, Hennis “Henny” Taylor, Don Redman, “Shavey” Scott, Richard Gilmore (not a member), Melvin Washington, Eulis Kent, Pete James. Back row from left: James Gilmore, Clarence Martin, Mack Clifford, Harry Stewart, “Happy” Washington. (Author’s collection)
Westvaco did not operate company towns in the manner of the coal companies. The black workers in many cases rented their homes from white landlords, but the company was not directly involved either in their construction or ownership. If strictly speaking they were not company towns, Piedmont, Luke, and Westernport were nonetheless virtually one-industry towns.
Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia Page 9
