Phillip Jefferson
Banjo
Douglas Anderson
Bass
Eugene Scott
Drums
According to one report, in 1928 it toured the South with the Stepin Fetchit Review (NO 2.15.89, 8). For a time it was managed by Sylvester Massey of Huntington, who, as noted earlier, was briefly the regional booker for Alfonso Trent’s Texas-based dance band. At some point in the first half of 1930, thanks in part to Massey’s promotion, Edwards’ Collegians landed a job as the house band for Cincinnati’s Greystone Ballroom, from whence it regularly broadcast over WLW for at least eighteen months (PC 10.31.31, 2/7).
Such was its reputation that in 1931 it earned eighth place in the Pittsburgh Courier’s Most Popular Band Contest, a consequence, at least in part, of its continuing presence on the airwaves. In 1932 and 1933, still led by Edwards but managed by Frank Fairfax, another West Virginia State alumnus, the Collegians made an extensive tour of the southeastern United States (see Fig. 4.3). By September of that year Chappie Willet assumed leadership and subsequently the band left what had become its home base in Cincinnati and relocated to Philadelphia, Willet’s hometown. Regrettably, by 1934 the band broke up. Whether this was a consequence of too much competition from resident bands, an uncertain economy in the black community of Philadelphia, or because its members developed new professional agendas is unclear (Wriggle 2007, 13).
What this evidence confirms is that black Mountaineers were closely connected to the larger musical culture of the nation. As shown in the introduction, they brought a great deal of that world with them when they migrated to the state, and they imported much of the rest by means of radio, recordings, and the printed page, the latter including commercial arrangements of popular songs to be played by local bands.
Gilmore’s Midnighters, Chappie Willet’s Campus Revelers, and Cal Grear’s Sweet Swing Orchestra played the music of Berlin, Ellington, Gershwin, Waller, and others from New York for dancers residing in African American communities throughout the Mountain State. And thanks to the availability of electricity, if one could not attend a public dance to hear this repertory performed live, there was always the radio, which blanketed the coalfields with music of all kinds, not the least of which would be the reigning popular style of the nation after 1935: big band jazz.
Fig. 4.3. Phil Edwards’ Collegians somewhere on the road, perhaps during their tour of the southeast during 1932 and 1933. (Eastern Regional Coal Archives, Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, WV)
Given this cultural environment, as well as economic conditions after 1933, it seems natural that West Virginia would be an attractive destination for touring dance bands, as Herbert Hall later recalled. In the chapters to follow, the identities of those bands and their places of origins, the routes that led them to the Mountain State, as well as the music they played for black (and white) Mountaineers will be examined.
CHAPTER FIVE
Big Band Jazz Comes to the Mountain State: 1929–1933
The complexities of the musical culture of black West Virginians before World War II should by now be obvious. Sacred and secular, oral and notated, indigenous and imported, the styles and genres of African American music found in the Mountain State during the 1930s were every bit as diverse as those found elsewhere in the nation. Situated between urban northern and rural southern black culture, the Mountain State accommodated the musics of both domains with equal ease. Black music had arrived from further south and east with the miners, railroad workers, and their families, while newer styles cultivated further north, among them being hot and sweet styles of big band dance music, were introduced over the air and in the grooves of recordings as much as by appearances by the dance bands both local and touring. Concurrent with the formation of dance bands in Fairmont, Charleston, Huntington, and Piedmont, black Mountaineers had opportunities to hear and dance to bands from elsewhere in the nation. Until the fall of 1934 most of the visitors were territory bands; in the remainder of the decade and in the early 1940s name bands based in New York City became the dominant force.
Gunther Schuller associated the term “territory band” exclusively with black dance bands—based not in New York but elsewhere in African America—that toured extensively because that was the only way their members could make ends meet, contrasting their experience with that of white bands which “tended to have the more lucrative and permanent jobs and therefore were not required to travel as much as the black bands” (Schuller 1989, 770, n1).
In the 1930s, when the term apparently became commonplace, there were in effect only two categories of dance bands: those based in or near New York and all the rest. The number of territories and the states found in each one reflect well-established assumptions about the regions into which the United States may be divided: Northeast, Midwest, Southeast, West Coast (i.e., California), and the Northwest. The one exception concerns the designation of those states in what might conventionally be termed the south-central part of the country: Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. In jazz history, this territory was known as the Southwest for reasons having to do with the approximate boundaries of the Confederacy during the first half of the 1860s, these states making up the southwestern portion of that region, and among African Americans the term “Southwest” apparently stuck.
In the years of the Great Depression, the vast majority of African Americans resided in the Southeast and Southwest, even as many were participating in the Great Migration either to midwestern cities of which Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, and Toledo represented the principal destinations, to the northeastern cities of which New York was the most attractive, or to the West Coast.
Where one situates West Virginia within these geographical subdivisions is problematic. Its early history and name would connect it to Virginia, a southeastern state, and thus by implication with that territory. The history of West Virginia following the Civil War does provide some support for this. The constitutional ban on interracial marriage and the requirement of racially segregated schools would appear to be emblematic of a southern orientation. But that same history also rejects affiliation with the Southeast as demonstrated by black voting rights and consequent political power, non-segregated public transportation, the state’s anti-lynching law, and the principle of equal pay for equal work in the mines during the 1930s.
Until this study there has been no systematic consideration of the big band jazz culture in the state, and therefore, not surprisingly, almost no one has considered where to locate the Mountain State within the territories. The exception appears to have been Thomas Hennessey, who placed West Virginia among the midwestern states (Hennessey 1994, 54). Hennessey’s rationale for the territorial boundaries he drew stated that his choices reflected “musical styles, geographic contact between bands and musicians, similarities in social and racial structures including racial segregation, and the size of the black population” (183, n1).
In From Jazz to Swing: African-American Jazz Musicians and Their Music, 1890–1935 (1994), Hennessey also observes that at the beginning of the 1930s, the music industry had “adopted an informal structure resembling professional baseball with major leagues and various grades of minor leagues from AAA down to A” (135). Thus, there were four tiers of bands. At the bottom were the local bands, of which the reader has already been introduced to four: those led by James Gilmore, Virginia “Peppy” Parker, Charles “Inky” Russell, and Cal Greer. Above them were bands originally associated with a particular city which subsequently cultivated a regional reputation extending beyond a state’s boundaries thanks to run-out engagements, regular broadcasts on the local radio station, or both. Phil Edwards’ Collegians surely attained this status during its residence as the house band at the Greystone Ballroom in Cincinnati in 1930 and 1931. On the third tier were bands that enjoyed a widespread following in a particular region of the country. The Collegians were undoubtedly aiming for that status when they toured the southeastern part of the country in
1932 and 1933. Bands that had clearly attained this standing (Hennessey’s equivalent of the Triple-A minor leagues in baseball) were the territory bands, including Don Albert and his Ten Pals from San Antonio, and thus the Southwest; Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra, also a Southwest territory band; and King Oliver’s Victor Recording Orchestra from New Orleans, and thus to be associated with the Southeast. At the top (playing in the major leagues, to continue Hennessey’s metaphor) were bands enjoying national reputations, including those led by Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Louis Armstrong (Hennessey 1994, 135).
The introduction of big band jazz in West Virginia began with local and territory bands. Only when the economic benefits became obvious did name bands regularly come to the Mountain State. By that time any association of the state with a particular territory would seem to have been irrelevant: name bands played their way through the state heading either east or west, north or south, as they were doing with every other state to which they traveled.
The available evidence argues for a division into three periods of the history of big band jazz and dance music in West Virginia during the 1930s and early 1940s. The first began in the fall of 1929 and ended with the adoption of the Bituminous Coal Code in September 1933, which mitigated the impact of the Crash of October 24, 1929, on the coalfields by changing the economic landscape for the coal industry, for the railroads that served it, and for the local economy of the coalfield counties. The resulting significant financial gains by miners and railroad workers proved more than sufficient to create a market for the music of touring bands.
The middle period, during which New York–based bands began playing multiple engagements within the state, continued through the spring of 1935, when the Pittsburgh Courier first documents the activities of George Morton of Beckley. As a regional booker for Joe Glaser of the New York booking company Rockwell-O’Keefe (later General Artists Corporation), Morton’s work brought many of the name bands to play in the Mountain State and by doing so linked black West Virginians to the national culture of big band jazz. That they came with such frequency is further testimony to the comparative prosperity of the coalfields. Thus in this final period, from April 1935 until June 1942, a combination of local, regional, and national bands played for African American Mountaineers, thereby linking them with their counterparts elsewhere in the country as active participants in the predominant popular musical style of the second half of the 1930s through World War II. After the spring of 1935, West Virginia came increasingly under the control of the New York–based music industry when it came to participation in the national culture of big band jazz and dance music.
The First Period: Emerging Interest in Big Band Music, October 1929–September 1933
All was not silent in the early years of the Depression, although the effects of the economic collapse included reduced work weeks and closed mines. Newspapers document the fact that black Mountaineers attended dances for which a total of twenty-nine bands provided music. Twenty-one were from out of state, of which one had gotten its start in West Virginia, and seven or eight were local. The home bases of three others could not be determined either from the newspaper record or from previously published histories of the dance bands of this period.
It bears repeating that to expect the newspapers of the time to have documented all dances for one or another black community is unrealistic, since there were more effective and less costly ways to get the word out about an upcoming dance that unfortunately did not appear in the historical record. The same holds true for the number of dances for which these bands provided music, since those data are also a product of newspaper reportage. In 1930 there were eleven documented dances, the next year nineteen, in 1932 seventeen, and in the period from January 1 to September 1, 1933, there were only five. In this period, then, there was a total of fifty-two dances according to press accounts and advertising. There can be little doubt that flying under the radar of newspaper documentation were additional public dances, to say nothing of those Friday or Saturday night dances in homes in the multitude of company towns as well as in the parlors of families residing in the larger communities of the coalfields.
Table 5.1. Bands playing for Black Mountaineers October 1929–September 1933
Notes
1. Apart from a short notice of undated performances in Clarksburg and Parkersburg during the course of a tour of Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia and the fact that the band consisted of “ten accomplished musicians,” nothing is known of what was apparently an early “all-girl” dance band (PC 5.20.33, 2/6).
2. Uniontown, PA, the home of Emory Howard’s Syncopators, lies about 50 miles north of Fairmont, where its sole documented engagement in West Virginia took place on May 20, 1930. It was also reported to have played an engagement in Brownsville, PA, about 20 miles west of Uniontown. From the available information, it would appear to be another example of a local band, though not based in the Mountain State. It is grouped with other Northeast bands by virtue of its place of origin.
3. A single article about upcoming dances between Christmas and New Year’s Eve 1932 in the West Virginia State College newspaper, the Yellow Jacket, makes reference to “The Campus Syncopators.” Whether this was the reporter’s own term for either the Campus Nighthawks or the Campus Revelers or the name of still another college dance band cannot be determined (YJ 12.21.32, 3).
4. Other than the fact that Wolfe’s Orchestra and The Nightingales each played for a single dance in Parkersburg, nothing is known of these bands. It is possible that they were one and the same.
5. The caption of a photograph of the Royal Ambassadors Orchestra printed in the January 24, 1931, issue of the Pittsburgh Courier informs readers that the band had performed for two weeks at the Virginia Theater in Wheeling, immediately following “three successful years of playing in Eastern Canada.” The band was headed to the Hotel Vendome in Buffalo, New York, for “an indefinite run.”
Since twenty-nine bands played for fifty-two dances, it is obvious that most made only a single appearance in the state, additional evidence of the economic crisis of the period. Only eight bands played more than one engagement, and of these the band with the most gigs was Chappie Willet’s Campus Revelers, which played on a number of occasions on the campus of West Virginia State College where most, if not all, its members were students. The only bands from elsewhere in the country that secure multiple engagements were those led by Phil Edwards, Jordan Embry, Earl “Fatha” Hines, Walter Barnes, C. S. Belton, and Blanche Calloway. In all but one case these bands played for two dances; after playing for one dance in Wheeling, Hines returned for a weeklong engagement there after completing a circuit of several Ohio towns. The rest played a single engagement and moved on.
Table 5.1 groups all of the bands that played for black West Virginians between October 1929 and September 1933, by the territories from which they came and indicates, where this can be determined, where they originated. From the data, it seems apparent that while West Virginia might appear, for sociological reasons, to have been part of the Midwest territory, as Thomas Hennessey proposed, nobody informed either those booking touring bands or the bandleaders of this fact. Nine bands from that territory did come to the Mountain State; of these, seven had a major regional following in their time. In contrast to bands led by Walter Barnes, “Fatha” Hines, and Lawrence “Speed” Webb, among others, the New Dardenella Girls and Jordan Embry’s Band appear to have had only limited appeal. The New Dardenella Girls do not reappear in the newspaper record following the notice in the Courier of their appearances in Clarksburg and Parkersburg sometime in May 1933 (PC 5.20.33, 2/6). Embry’s reputation would grow at least at West Virginia State College later in the decade, when his band would be booked regularly to play for dances there. Organized in Madison, Wisconsin, and known then as Jordan Embry and His Bluebird Entertainers, according to a report of a dance held at the Fairmont armory on April 25, 1930, the band was later known as the Kentucky Bluebirds, suggesting th
at it had relocated to the Bluegrass State, perhaps to Ashland, which lies just west of the Big Sandy River separating Kentucky and West Virginia (PC 4.12.30, 1/11; YJ 5.15.33, 15).
When we include the three bands from the Southeast, the two from the Southwest, along with the five bands from major eastern cities, West Virginia’s ties to the Midwest appear to be somewhat more tenuous. Instead, just as it was a border state during the Civil War, these data suggest that it was located along the boundary separating the northeastern, midwestern, and southeastern territories as Hennessey defined these.
Looking at the numbers and locations of performances, we also see that, regardless of their places of origins, for some bands one city in West Virginia, Wheeling, was a brief stop simply because it was on the route to other towns lying west in Ohio or, from the opposite direction, east in Pennsylvania. In other instances, a West Virginia town represented the furthest extent of a tour. A tour by Earl Hines’s band based in the Grand Terrace Ballroom in Chicago, and another by C. S. Belton’s Society Syncopators from West Palm Beach, Florida, illustrate each of these patterns.
Fig. 5.1. In and out of the Mountain State: the routes taken by Earl “Fatha” Hines’s Grand Terrace Orchestra and C. S. Belton’s Society Syncopators in 1930 and 1931 respectively. Neither band played more than a single engagement in West Virginia. (West Virginia University–University Relations– Design)
Solid lines indicate documented routes; dashed lines indicate possible routes between documented performance sites.
Hines’s band departed Chicago (1) at some point late in June 1930 for Pittsburgh (2), where it played on June 23. It then played in Wheeling, WV (3), on the 24th; Akron, OH (4), on the 25th; Columbus, OH (5), on the 26th; and Cleveland, OH (6) on the 27th. Subsequently, it returned to Wheeling to play a two-week engagement, after which it made its way back to Chicago.
Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia Page 11
