The extended 1931 tour by Belton’s Society Syncopators is less precisely documented. Based in West Palm Beach, FL (a), the band played engagements in close succession in Chattanooga, TN (b), Knoxville, TN (c), and Bristol TN/VA (d), before playing in Beckley, WV (e), on June 19 for the State Medical Association Ball. It immediately left the state to play North Carolina engagements in Asheville (f), Gastonia (g), Salisbury (h), Winston-Salem (i), Charlotte (j), Greensboro (k), and Durham (l). It then headed north to play dates in Danville (m) and Roanoke, VA (n). It would not return home until the middle of November 1931.
Hines’s band traveled east from Chicago late in June 1930 to play in Pittsburgh on the 23rd, Wheeling, West Virginia, on the 24th, and then in Akron, Columbus, and Cleveland, Ohio, on the 25th, 26th, and 27th, respectively (PC 6.21.30, 1/8). Located on U.S. Route 40—the National Road—a major transcontinental highway (now superseded by Interstate 70), Wheeling is situated in the state’s northern panhandle, a little finger-shaped territory not much more than twenty miles at its widest point wedged between Pennsylvania’s western border and the Ohio River (see Fig. 5.1). While not on the most direct route from Pittsburgh to Akron, Wheeling could be counted on to produce a crowd of dancers. In addition to members of its own black population, it is easy to imagine a black audience including eastern Ohioans and southwestern Pennsylvanians as well. That there was a substantial audience is confirmed by the fact that following a dance in Cleveland, the band returned to Wheeling for a two-week engagement, filling a vacancy in its schedule created when an engagement of comparable length at the Villa Venice Night Club in Chicago fell through (PC 7.12.30, 2/7).
A number of other bands on tour and making use of Route 40 heading either east or west would book gigs in Wheeling if the opportunity presented itself. One was Blanche Calloway (Cab Calloway’s sister) and Her Joy Boys on September 21, 1931 (PC 9.19.31, 2/9). This band returned a month later, part of a group of four bands that toured together. Between stops in Pittsburgh and Columbus, they put on a “Battle of Music” in Wheeling. The other bands participating in the battle were Chick Webb and His Chicks, which had just finished an engagement at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra, Zach Whyte and his Chocolate Beau Brummels from Cincinnati, and Roy A. Johnson’s Happy Pals, based in Richmond, Virginia (PC 10.3.31, 2/9). In December 1931 the Mills Blue Rhythm Band played a one-nighter in Wheeling in between performances in Cleveland and Columbus (PC 11.28.31, 2/8).
Little is known of C. S. Belton’s Society Syncopators from Florida. The band never recorded and may have fallen victim to the Depression by 1933. We have a hint of its style and reputation from a brief letter by Ruth E. Price of Orlando, Florida, published in the October 10, 1931, issue of the Pittsburgh Courier in the course of a contest to select the most popular black dance band of that year (about which more later). According to Ms. Price, “These boys are one hundred per cent musicians and how they can play. Speaking of harmony they have it; jazz, Gee! But they can play it, and when it comes to rhythm they can’t be beat at it. Their slogan rings true to all, ‘If you can’t dance you’ll vibrate’” (PC 10.10.31, 2/1).
Like many other territory bands, the Society Syncopators toured not only to find engagements outside of its home state and region, which had not been economically prosperous even during the 1920s, but probably also in a quest for a national reputation. Almost a year after Hines’s tour discussed above, the ten-piece Society Syncopators were in the midst of an extensive tour that included engagements in Chattanooga, Knoxville, and Bristol, Tennessee/Virginia, before the band made a single appearance in West Virginia at the National Guard armory in Beckley to play for the State Medical Association ball on June 19, 1931. Thereafter, it left the state en route to Asheville, Gastonia, Salisbury, Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Greensboro, and Durham, North Carolina. It then turned north to Danville and Roanoke, Virginia (PC 6.20.31, 2/8).
Far removed from towns in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia which were comparatively close to one another and linked by U.S. 11, Beckley represented both the northernmost and most remote destination of that portion of what proved to be a far longer tour reported on in June 1931. The Society Syncopators would not return to their home in West Palm Beach, Florida, until the middle of November, by which time that band had reportedly played in eleven states and traveled 40,000 miles in the course of doing so. Once back home, the musicians settled in to “entertain the aristocrats of the state in their private homes and at the leading hotels, as is their custom each winter” (PC 11.28.31, 2/8). Conceivably, as the Depression deepened, those white “aristocrats” who had lost their fortunes may not have traveled south in sufficient numbers to provide the Society Syncopators with the economic foundation they had enjoyed before the Crash and with it the financial backing necessary to stay in business.
What the evidence summarized above indicates is that in the early 1930s, West Virginia was yet to be seen as a particularly desirable place to play. Even Edwards’ Collegians, formed in Bluefield but with a growing regional reputation forged from its work as house band for Cincinnati’s Greystone Ballroom and regular broadcasts over WLW, played only one engagement apiece in Huntington and Charleston, towns forty miles apart, and comparatively close to Ohio and Kentucky, after which it headed back west. Such in-and-out bookings would change as the decade continued. Beginning in 1934, we see with increasing consistency that name bands under national management played their way through the heart of the Mountain State’s coalfields by means of three, four, even five engagements for black audiences on consecutive nights in as many West Virginia towns.
That bands, black or white, toured at all in the early part of the decade was a consequence of a pair of interrelated developments, both of which occurred in the 1920s. The first was the advent of the “talkies” in 1927, which eliminated the need for live musicians to create a soundtrack for movies. The second was the consolidation of ownership of movie theaters into several chains: MGM-Loews, Paramount-Publix, Warner Brothers-First National, and Radio-Keith-Orpheum among a few others. As the Depression tightened its grip, these chains, already heavily invested in sound technology, cut costs by laying off musicians. This was as true of black bands that had played in movie theaters in African American communities as it was for their white counterparts elsewhere (Hennessey 1994, 128).
Although bands were no longer needed to accompany screenings of films, the concept of a theater show that combined movies with live musical entertainment endured (in major cities, well into the 1940s). However, rather than retaining a house band, so to speak, theater owners began booking touring bands for a week or two, thus promising their customers a new band at least twice a month. Erstwhile house bands able to get bookings out of town went on the road. In some instances, they arranged a series of engagements with the manager of a chain of theaters, thus guaranteeing performances spread over several weeks or months in cities that were relatively close to one another (Hennessey 1994, 128).
One former movie house band to come to West Virginia at the beginning of the 1930s was led by Erskine Tate, which had for a number of years performed daily at the Vendome Theater on South State Street in the principal black community of Chicago. A featured attraction of Tate’s band during its heyday on the South Side was Louis Armstrong, whose jazz solos galvanized the audience.
Tate’s twelve-piece “Hot Band” embarked on what was described as an “extensive tour” on April 20, 1931, including a dance sponsored by a men’s social organization in Fairmont known as the Bears Club, on May 15 (PC 4.25.31, 2/8; 5.23.31, 2/6). As reported in a dispatch headlined “Fairmont, W. Va,” “quite a number of out-of-town people attended the dance,” which took place in the National Guard armory. As was the case with the Society Syncopators, once the engagement was completed, Tate left West Virginia for other destinations.
That Tate’s and other bands began to plan long tours in the spring of 1931 reflected the belief that the effects of the 1929 Crash were beginning to wa
ne and that there were comparatively prosperous parts of the country that promised profitable engagements even if times elsewhere were still tough. Walter Barnes, another Chicago bandleader and columnist on the entertainment page of the Defender, expressed this opinion and in doing so urged bandleaders to make plans to start touring the country:
Times have changed—and how. Bands, I mean big bands are now taking to the road rather than hold one stand indefinitely. There’s more money on the road and in barnstorming, even in one-night jumps.... Radio has so popularized good music that the smaller towns want and are willing to pay to hear good bands in person. Big name bands who are barnstorming or will be are... Duke Ellington, on a theatrical tour, Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake, Dave Peyton, Andy Kirk, George Lee, Bennie Moten and any number who could get steady stands if they wanted them. But the road calls both with more appreciative audiences and bigger do-re-mi. (CD 3.2.31, 9)
It is, of course, impossible to say whether Barnes’s announcement prompted the subsequent tours by Tate and the other bandleaders previously discussed. What is revealing is his connecting radio broadcasts to the development of a band’s reputation. That black Mountaineers living in the coalfields had radios and listened to bands’ broadcasts, as documented in chapter 3, indicates that they were joining people from other parts of rural America to form a national audience for big band jazz and dance music.
It would be a distortion of the historical record to assert that radio begat touring dance bands: Phil Edwards’ Collegians, for example, toured prior to extensive radio broadcasting in the late 1920s. That radio was an important element in forging that band’s growing reputation was demonstrated by reports of its tours in the fall of 1931 that appeared in the Pittsburgh Courier and by its standing in a concurrent popularity contest that the newspaper also conducted. As black bandleader Claude Hopkins stated in an interview with Stanley Dance: “The radio made audiences for you when you went on tour” (Dance 1974, 38).
Under a headline that read “Edwards Collegians Secured for Armistice Night Ball,” the report of their impending performance in Pittsburgh on November 11, 1931, at the Grand Military Ball of the Crispus Attucks Post of the American Legion led with the following somewhat voluminous sentence: “Edwards Collegians, toast of the radio world, whose rhythmic tunes have been heard over the air from the Crosley radio station WLW in Cincinnati, who have played for a year and a half at the Greystone Ballroom in Cincinnati, regarded as one of the finest ballrooms in the country, and whose music has hypnotized college youths at big ‘proms’ in every section of the country, have been secured to appear here for a single engagement” (PC 10.24.31, 1/8).
As noted previously, WLW was a powerful, clear-channel AM station most frequently cited by my informants residing in the southern coalfields as the station to which their families listened with greatest regularity. A survey of the broadcast schedule printed in the Cincinnati Enquirer in October 1930 revealed that Edwards’ Collegians, billed as the “Greystone Orchestra,” broadcast for about thirty minutes beginning at either 11:00 or 11:30 p.m., depending on the day of the week (CE 10.1.30, 2; 10.18.30, 7). In March 1932 their program began at midnight (CE 3.7.31, 11). Theirs was probably a “sustaining” program, meaning that the radio station filled up its air time with the band’s music without commercial sponsorship so as to fulfill the Federal Communication Commission’s requirement to broadcast for a certain number of hours each day in exchange for the right to the radio frequency assigned to the station. While the musicians were not being paid to perform by WLW, they were being paid by the ballroom from which they broadcast, and, in any case, the publicity from regular broadcasts was itself of enormous benefit in terms of developing a following within the broad reach of the station’s signal.
As evidence of that reputation, their standing in the aforementioned popularity contest was clearly as much the result of a fan base of radio listeners as of supporters who heard them live. This is demonstrated in part by correspondence that accompanied individuals’ votes for the band they liked most of all. The contest began on August 8, 1931, and concluded on December 5. People voted for their favorite bands by sending in post cards or letters of not more than 200 words; each letter would represent ten votes in favor of a particular band. Letters accompanied by a payment of $2.00 for an annual subscription to the Pittsburgh Courier were given 100 votes. The authors of letters chosen for publication would be rewarded with free subscriptions of different lengths depending upon whether theirs was the first, second, or third letter published. The contest was run by Floyd Snelson, editor of the entertainment pages for the Courier, who began the contest by listing thirty bands, including the Collegians (PC 8.8.31, 2.8).
The third letter that appeared in the issue of November 7, 1931, thus earning its writer a three-month subscription to the newspaper, pointed to the importance of the band’s radio broadcasts as a source of what was claimed to be a reputation of national proportions. Written on behalf of a social organization known as the Royal 400, located in the southern coal-field community of Elkhorn in eastern McDowell County, the author at first rebuked Snelson for calling the band the “dark horse” of the contest, arguing that “The Collegians are known from coast to coast as the ‘Trail Blazers’ of modern jazz music.” The concluding paragraph expressed the support of the club for this band and the reasons for it:
Our whole club is for Edwards; we like him so much until words cannot express our love for him. It was these Collegians who went into the home of the Crossley [sic] Radio Corporation in Cincinnati and created a sensation among radio fans. It was these same Collegians who were invited into the magnificent ballroom in Flint, Michigan, and drove their jazz into the hearts of hundreds of people. Edwards’ Orchestra has rhythm and harmony in their music, and these are the two qualities that go to make up a good orchestra. There are 424 members in this organization and all are Edwards voters (PC 11.7.31, 2/8).
The Collegians continued to be competitive during the rest of the contest, which was extended more than a month from its announced concluding date, due perhaps to the volume of mail and perhaps as well to the boost it was providing in numbers of paid subscribers. While, not surprisingly, Duke Ellington ultimately won the contest with 50,000 votes, the Collegians came in ninth with 27,000, behind Louis Armstrong (30,000) but ahead of Bennie Moten (25,000). Occupying the eleventh spot was C. S. Belton’s Society Syncopators with 16,000 votes. Five bands based in New York were among the top ten bands. Apart from Ellington’s, they included those of Fletcher Henderson (#2), Cab Calloway (#4), Noble Sissle (#5), and the Mills Blue Rhythm Band (#6). All of the other bands were from elsewhere in the country. The newspaper associated Blanche Calloway (#7) with Philadelphia, Armstrong with New Orleans (though he was constantly on the move), in addition to the Collegians with Bluefield (though Cincinnati had been home for more than a year), Moten with Kansas City, and the Society Syncopators with West Palm Beach (PC 12.12.31, 2/8). This geographical distribution, while admittedly favoring New York as the base of operations of major black dance bands near the beginning of the 1930s, does suggest that some territory bands were still enjoying a rough parity with name bands when it came to their reputations with audiences. The results of this poll (however unscientific) are largely congruent with what the record of performances by touring bands in West Virginia indicates: black Mountaineers, like their contemporaries elsewhere, responded favorably to a band’s performance regardless of its home address, and in the first period of the 1930s, those home addresses were widely scattered.
Though inadvertent, developments in the first part of the 1930s were preparatory for the flowering of interest in and support for big band jazz and dance music by black West Virginians later in the decade—inadvertent because African American Mountaineers could hardly have foretold the future place of this music in their lives, preparatory because of the foundation that was laid for the subsequent growth in interest in this music in the Mountain State. The evidence of the growing reputation of Edwards’
Collegians based on their radio audience points to both the importance of radio as an audience builder for live performances and to the fact that West Virginians were among those tuning into these broadcasts.
Tours by territory bands from as far south as Florida, as far west as Chicago, and as far east as New York, however brief their stay in the Mountain State, led them to communities large enough to provide both venues for dances and audiences of sufficient size to make their engagements pay off. The towns to which those bands came to play—Beckley, Charleston, Fairmont, Huntington, and Wheeling—were all county seats, had large venues, and attracted not only their own residents to the dances, but also folks from the surrounding region. As the decade unfolded, all of these communities would attract touring bands with greater frequency and would be joined by still other coalfield communities as locations in which dances were held. The annual proms and other formal dances held at West Virginia State College not only attest to students’ interest in this music but also introduce us to what would become the future audience for public dances, as those students graduated and began life in the adult world.
At the same time, it must be observed that all of these developments do not set West Virginia apart from neighboring states. Again, reference to the newspaper record of touring bands indicates all the states in which there were audiences for whom to perform. Radios were ubiquitous, and the atmospheric conditions that allowed Mountaineers to tune into WLW in Cincinnati (to say nothing of stations further away) were universal, and thus so was access to the nation’s music regardless of the place from which it was broadcast or the location of its listener. In sum, at this point, West Virginia was no different than any other state with a significant black population, and as a consequence Herbert Hall’s recollection that “all the bands were goin’ through West Virginia” was not descriptive of developments in the early 1930s.
Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia Page 12
