CHAPTER 6
Comparative Prosperity Arrives: September 1933–April 1935
The fortunes of the Price Hill miners photographed in 1931 changed dramatically after September 18, 1933, as did those of miners throughout the Mountain State. For it was on that day that President Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 6137, “Code of Fair Competition for the Bituminous Coal Industry.” That order ratified labor agreements between the coal operators and the United Mine Workers of America and brought stability to an industry that had been in chaos since October 1929.
As previously noted, the positive effects of the Bituminous Coal Code on the economy of the Mountain State in general and upon its thousands of miners, both black and white, were dramatic. Employment in the mines rose 28 percent by 1935. Job growth led to increased coal production, up by almost 14 percent in the same period. Wages, reflecting standards agreed to by labor and management, began to increase dramatically as well (Thomas 1998, 99).
The last of these developments is most germane to the present discussion. As wages rose above the amount needed simply to feed, clothe, and house their families, miners were in a position to spend a portion of their earnings on entertainment. This occurred after the Bituminous Coal Code was implemented. The improved financial conditions were reflected in a dramatic increase in the number of public dances held and in the number of bands that played for these occasions.
Table 6.1 documents the increase in the number of dances that surely was a consequence of the improving coal economy in the state. It not only shows the upsurge in the number of public dances that occurred beginning in 1934, it also shows that the number of coalfield communities that provided sites for these dances was expanding as well.
Table 6.1. Locations and numbers of public dances in West Virginia September 1933–April 1935
As can be seen from the data, it is not until the year 1934 that an unmistakable transformation occurred in the culture of big band jazz and dance music in black West Virginia. One can infer why this might have been the case. If we begin with a consideration of economic conditions in the company towns, the first thing to note is that the miners would have had to adjust to the reality of increased wages. The more fiscally prudent no doubt wanted to make certain that their newfound fortune, such as it was, would not suddenly evaporate, and until they were so assured did not start spending money in ways not previously done. Many may have taken a few paydays to settle longstanding accounts at their company stores, to replace some portion of their families’ wardrobe that had been worn thin in the tight times beginning in the fall of 1929, perhaps even to begin to put some money into savings.
From a regional and even national perspective, word had to get out of state to the bandleaders and their managers that the financial situation in West Virginia’s coalfields was improving. That may have required several months of word-of-mouth communication of the promising circumstances created by the Bituminous Coal Code as well as whatever reassurance consistent newspaper coverage of its positive economic impact might have provided.
Finally, even if the economics of the band business were improving in the Mountain State, there was the matter of the season: winter weather made it difficult for bands to tour by bus—the most common mode of transportation. While many of the state’s highways were paved, where they could not reach their next destination by following a river valley they had to climb out of the state’s deep V-shaped valleys, often on steep grades that sometimes included switchbacks as well. These were (and some still are) difficult to negotiate in the summer months when brakes were repeatedly put to a severe test. Add snow and ice to the challenges of the terrain, and many might choose to avoid travel through the central Appalachians altogether until spring.
That something like these multiple developments occurred is reflected in the data presented in Table 6.1. From September through December 1933, only six dances for black Mountaineers took place, one each in Charleston, Gary (located in McDowell County), Welch, and Wheeling, in addition to two at West Virginia State College. Five bands provided the music for these occasions, of which four were territory bands: Jimmie Raschel and his New Orleans Ramblers from the Crescent City, Smiling Billy Stewart’s Floridians from Jacksonville, Jordan Embry from eastern Kentucky, and Zach Whyte and his Chocolate Beau Brummels from Cincinnati. Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra from New York played for a Halloween Dance on October 30 in Wheeling as part of a tour of the region.
The presence of these bands shows that the state continued to attract bands from the Midwest and Southeast territories, as well as from New York, during the final third of 1933. The one-nighter in Wheeling played by Henderson’s band continued the practice established by earlier New York bands of brief stopovers in the northern panhandle before moving on. The other bands also came and left the state after a single engagement, with the exception of Zach Whyte’s band, the Chocolate Beau Brummels, which played on the West Virginia State College campus for a Breakfast Dance in the morning and then for a Victory Ball in the evening of November 4, 1933, the day of the annual football game between Bluefield State and West Virginia State. Thus, in most respects the final four months of 1933 represented an uninterrupted continuation of the pattern established after the start of the Depression.
The next year was a period of enormous growth of interest in dances on the part of black Mountaineers, as well as the year in which name bands from New York began to take notice of West Virginia’s improved economic circumstances. The evidence of the surge of interest in public dances is dramatic. In the four-year period from 1930 to the end of 1933 a total of fifty-six dances were documented in the press: 1.16 per month. In sharp contrast, fifty-two dances took place in the sixteen-month period between January 1934 and April 1935, or 3.25 per month. In 1934 alone there were thirty-six dances, of which fifteen took place in Fairmont in the northern coalfield.
Table 6.2. Territory bands playing for black Mountaineers: 1934–April 1935
In that sixteen-month period, territory bands played for thirty-six of the dances; New York bands played for eleven. Bobby Smith and His Collegians, the house band for West Virginia State, played for three dances at the college, and two bands of unknown origin played one dance apiece at the Elks Rest in Fairmont. Table 6.2 lists the territory bands, as well as the pair of bands of unknown origin, and the number of engagements each played in West Virginia between January 1934 and April of the following year.
A quick comparison of the number of territory bands that came to West Virginia in this period with the number that played for black Mountaineers between 1930 and the end of 1933 shows a significant reduction. In addition to three bands from New York, which by definition were not territory bands, nineteen had come prior to 1934 of which eight were from the Midwest, three from the Southeast, two from the Southwest, and three from the Northeast. In the sixteen months considered in Table 6.2, only a dozen territory bands played engagements in the state. This might suggest that the state’s economic condition prior to the implementation of the Bituminous Coal Code had discouraged other bands from including West Virginia in their plans. It also suggests that a number of bands may have gone out of business due to the chronically depressed economy elsewhere in the country.
Table 6.3. New York bands playing for black Mountaineers in 1934
One statistic stands out: King Oliver’s Victor Recording Orchestra played sixteen dances in this period for black West Virginians, to which could be added six played for whites. As was discussed at some length in chapter 2, the band’s five-month period of residence in Huntington beginning late in September 1934 enabled it to move about the state fairly easily and thus build an audience for repeated engagements in several of the county seats where public dances were held with the greatest frequency. Prior to that residence, the band had played one engagement in Williamson on May 9, 1934, and appeared in Fairmont on September 24, just six days prior to its arrival in Huntington. It is conceivable that those two engagements, along with whatever news of West
Virginia’s changing fortunes Oliver or his manager Ross McConnell had picked up while on the road, led to the decision to stay in the area for a while. The economic benefits of having done so were documented in Paul Barnes’s gig book.
While the engagements of local and territory bands in this second period in some respects represent a continuation of the pattern established at the beginning of the 1930s, the activities of New York–based bands in 1934 foreshadows developments that will shape the second half of the decade and the early 1940s. Without exception, these are name bands, at least within African America. All had established reputations based on regular radio broadcasts. Table 6.3 lists them in alphabetical order along with the dates of their engagements in the Mountain State in 1934.
Cab Calloway’s performance in Charleston represented his first appearance in the state. Notice of this dance, in the “Fairmont, W. Va.” report of news in that community published in the Pittsburgh Courier of September 1, reveals the determination of some fans to see and hear Calloway’s band: “Richard Moore, John Miles, and others attended the dance in Charleston Friday night. Music was furnished by Cab Calloway and his band” (PC 9.1.34, 2/6). Given the highway system of the state at that time, attending that dance meant a one-way drive of perhaps three to four hours.
Claude Hopkins played an engagement at the Market Auditorium in Wheeling as part of a longer summer tour that included a highly successful engagement at Pittsburgh’s Savoy Ballroom on May 25, after which he toured in the Midwest before going to Wheeling (PC 6.2.34, 2/8). His had been the house band for three years at the Roseland Ballroom in midtown Manhattan, an engagement enhanced by the fact that it included a nightly broadcast over the fledgling NBC radio network, so his own experience confirmed his statement that “the radio made audiences for you when you went on tour” (Dance 1973, 38). Some in that audience undoubtedly were in the crowd attending the dance at the Market Auditorium.
Don Redman, native son of West Virginia, performed for a dance at the Fairmont armory on October 4. Like Calloway and Hopkins, his reputation preceded him, thanks in part to regular broadcasts over the CBS radio network, so much so that in addition to the African American Mountaineers who were expected to constitute “the biggest crowd of colored terpsichorean experts ever assembled at one time on the local floor... because of Redman’s local popularity among the white folks, arrangements have been made to seat approximately 100 spectators in the balcony” (WV 10.3.34, 5). The spectators would have presumably paid the same admission fee and the dancers, thus adding to the band’s income for the engagement.
Taken as a whole, the limited number of engagements by these five bands might appear to contradict the assertion that they represented the wave of the future; but closer examination of the circumstances surrounding engagements by Noble Sissle’s and Jimmie Lunceford’s orchestras reveals why these were indicative of subsequent developments. Attention will be focused first on Noble Sissle’s four performances for black West Virginians (the band also played a separate engagement for whites), because they suggest that some involved in the music industry were discovering that the Mountain State included multiple locations where audiences might now be found. The achievements of Lunceford’s band in the months preceding its debut in Fairmont on September 18, 1934, foreshadow other developments in big band jazz and dance music that enlarge our understanding of the role played by radio in building an audience for his music among black Mountaineers.
The succession of gigs played by Noble Sissle’s Orchestra constitute the first instance in which, after a name band had played a single engagement in the state, it did not immediately go elsewhere in the country in pursuit of its next one. Moreover, Sissle’s engagements show that it was desirable to arrange for a series of dance dates in relatively close succession within West Virginia, thus reducing travel time and costs between them.
The story begins on February 15, 1934, when Sissle’s band arrived from Chicago to play an engagement in Wheeling for a white audience. According to a report in the Pittsburgh Courier, this dance was “the result of popular demand because when Sissle and his Sizzling Orchestra played in Wheeling several months ago [in October 1933] at a colored dance, more than 500 white people stormed the balcony and raved over his music. At the dance in Wheeling, colored spectators will be given an opportunity to hear Sissle again” (PC 2.3.34, 2/6). This reference to the presence in the balcony of a venue of fans of a different race than that for which the band was booked (as was the case in Fairmont at the Redman dance noted above) not only serves as a reminder of practices designed to maintain racial segregation but also provides insight into how elements of the culture of dance music were passed from members of one race to those of the other. No doubt whites had not only enjoyed Sissle’s music on that previous occasion but also took in the styles of dancing that it prompted from its black audience. The more adept among the whites surely incorporated some of the moves they observed into their own approach to the dances of the day.
The next night found Sissle in Huntington, down the Ohio River from Wheeling, playing for a black dance at the Vanity Fair Ballroom, rented for the occasion by the local West Virginia State College Club, an alumni organization (PC 2.17.34, 2/8). Following an extended engagement in Louisville, Kentucky, it returned to West Virginia to play for three dances on three successive nights (PC 3.10.34, 1/8). On March 20 the band played for a black audience in Wheeling, which the dance’s promoter anticipated would be larger than the thousand who had turned out the previous fall when there were 500 white observers present. On the 21st it performed at the National Guard armory in Welch for what was described as a dance “for the benefit of the colored youth to start a garment factory in the state” (WDN 3.22.34,1). The dance was to kick off a statewide plan for economic self-help for African Americans conceived by State Supervisor of Negro Education I.J.K. Wells and supported by other black leaders in West Virginia. Known as the Wells Plan, it proposed to raise funds to underwrite new businesses to be owned and operated by graduates of the state’s black high schools. According to both the Welch Daily News and the Pittsburgh Courier, more than a thousand people waited until the band, delayed by bad weather and a wrong turn on the drive, arrived at 11:30 p.m. to perform.
The next day the band traveled through a snowstorm to Charleston for a second benefit dance on behalf of the Wells Plan held in that city’s armory, where a crowd comparable in size was in attendance. According to a report by William Nunn, an editor at the Courier who attended both dances, “People came to Charleston through that miserable weather from miles and miles around. In fact we met several parties who had motored from distances as far as 100 miles away” (PC 3.31.34, 2/3).
Whether the crowds attending the dances in Welch and Charleston turned out in large numbers because of the purpose of the benefit dances to support economic development for black Mountaineers, because they liked Sissle’s music, or both, those two dances and the one in Wheeling surely demonstrated both to the bandleader and his manager that the Mountain State had several discrete audiences, each of considerable number, one in each of the three communities in which the band had played.
These towns were all county seats and thus important commercial centers for their regions. Numerous small black communities in coal company towns surrounded Welch and Charleston. As these county seats had venues that would accommodate hundreds of dancers, not only were they promising locations for future engagements, but evidence also suggested that other large towns in the southern coalfields, such as Beckley (Raleigh County), Bluefield (Mercer), and Logan (Logan), might also prove to be profitable sites for future engagements by black dance bands, particularly if dances could be arranged in close succession.
If Sissle’s engagements are prophetic of the future patterns for dances by name bands, Jimmie Lunceford’s debut performance in Fairmont (seat of Marion County in the northern coalfield) presents an opportunity to see how the influence of radio, recordings, and newspaper publicity worked collectively to build large
audiences. More than 700 dancers reportedly crowded into the dance at the Fairmont armory on September 18, 1934, and a number of them had come from some distance to attend. Like Noble Sissle’s earlier engagements, Lunceford’s date in Fairmont demonstrated the potential for profitable engagements for black bands in the Mountain State. Also significant for this study is that it is possible to identify at least some of the repertory performed that night, specifically those compositions that the band had already recorded or would record within a few weeks of this performance, music it had previously performed to great acclaim at the Cotton Club in Harlem.
Formed in 1927 at Manassas High School, one of two black high schools in Memphis, Tennessee, and known first as the Chickasaw Syncopators, the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra would become one of the most popular black dance bands of the 1930s and 1940s (Determeyer 2006, 30). Most bands had distinctive sounds reflecting the aesthetic values of leaders as realized by one or more arrangers. One obvious example was Duke Ellington’s band, a creature of his own musical imagination and the talents and timbres of a number of his musicians, supplemented though not fundamentally altered by the presence of Billy Strayhorn beginning in the late 1930s. Another was the Benny Goodman Orchestra, the repertory of which was dominated by Fletcher Henderson’s arrangements. Lunceford’s band was different. At different times it included as many as four or five arrangers, each projecting a different style. The band both played and recorded a varied repertory that ranged from sweet to hot numbers—in the words of Gunther Schuller: “music for dancing, sentimental ballads, novelty tunes, and virtuoso ‘flag wavers’” (Schuller 1989, 202).
By all accounts, the music that it recorded was typical of that which it played for dancers. This fact sets the band apart from most black bands because recording executives usually took great care to limit their range of musical styles. The industry demanded that black bands record jazz and blues (“race” music to be issued on “race” records), even though their collection of arrangements might include dance music in other styles and rhythms that they played during live engagements. Jeffrey Magee observed: “[Fletcher] Henderson’s band was admired by some for playing arrangements of the classics and especially for waltzes. But governing racial stereotypes forced Henderson to suppress this repertory when he entered the recording studio” (Magee 2005, 7–8). The same was true for many black bands; Lunceford’s appears to have been exceptional in this regard, given the breadth of styles found on its recordings.
Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia Page 13
