Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia

by Christopher Wilkinson

  The year 1934 was a tumultuous one for Lunceford and his men. After a rocky start in New York’s Lafayette Theater the previous September, where its opening night accompaniment to a revue entitled It’s a Knockout was an unmitigated disaster, the band recovered its form, completed the four-week engagement plus an extension, and then departed for Chicago, where it played at three important venues: the Top, the College Inn, and the Regal Theater. It then returned to New York and the Lafayette Theater for another four-week stint, after which it secured the highly coveted job of house band for the Cotton Club in Harlem, having been preceded in that engagement by Duke Ellington and then Cab Calloway.

  That engagement and Lunceford’s first recording session in eight months reflected the influence of his manager Irving Mills, though it has been argued that Mills was in reality not merely the manager but the owner of the Lunceford band. In the words of Lunceford biographer Eddy Determeyer:

  Every major black orchestra in New York was owned by music mogul Irving Mills: Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Lucky Millinder, Fletcher Henderson, Benny Carter, Willie Lewis, Don Redman. “Owned” is the right expression: they were his, copyrights and all. His artists’ songs were exploited by his publishing firm Mills Music, Inc. Mills Artists Bureau had all the right contacts. It had connections with RCA staff and the Cotton Club, and so through Mills’s efforts the Lunceford orchestra entered the recording studio on January 26, 1934. (Determeyer 2006, 67)

  That January session was the first of eight that year, the others occurring on March 20, September 4 and 5, October 29, November 7, and December 17 and 18. The first two sessions were for the Victor label; the remaining six fulfilled a contract with Decca Records, a British company that had just opened an American branch. Typically, four “sides” were recorded at a session, each rarely longer than three minutes. A pair of sides would be released as a single ten-inch 78 r.p.m. disc, the recording medium for jazz and other American vernacular styles at that time. A total of twenty-nine different compositions were recorded that covered a wide range of styles from hot to sweet, several in two takes, each of which was eventually issued (Lord 1995, L625–L627).

  A number of the pieces recorded had all been included in the band’s performances at the Cotton Club, some in the floor show called the “Cotton Club Parade,” the rest serving as dance numbers for the patrons. In addition to its live performances at one of New York’s most popular nightclubs, the Lunceford band broadcast regularly during the same period. With all the publicity arising from its success in New York, the band was rapidly establishing its reputation as a name band.

  Fig. 6.1. Two articles from the Fairmont, WV, West Virginian. The first appeared on September 11, 1934, announcing the forthcoming engagement by Jimmie Lunceford and His New York Cotton Club Orchestra to perform “for colored dancers.” The second, published on the day of the dance, September 18, draws attention to the fact that in attendance will be people residing not only in West Virginia but also in Pennsylvania and Maryland. (Times West Virginian)

  In the course of this mounting success, Lunceford became fed up with Irving Mills’s exploitation of the band’s talented players, and he and his musicians bought out their contracts with Mills and set out on their own. They would not be alone in making this decision: Fletcher Henderson and Cab Calloway shortly thereafter parted company with Mills as well. The manager retaliated against Lunceford, presumably as the leader of this revolt.

  Closely allied with other white managers, including Joe Glaser and William Morris, all of whom were effectively the gatekeepers to well-paying jobs in the dance band business, by the middle of 1934 Mills had ensured that Lunceford was denied access to major hotel ballrooms and theaters that catered to whites. Harold Oxley, who succeeded Mills as Lunceford’s manager, was able to secure those six recording dates with Decca between September and December 1934. As a consequence of being blackballed by Mills, missing for a number of years would be access to radio. Thus, Lunceford’s reputation would go into eclipse. Cut off from a large segment of his former New York audience, he began to tour the country in search of fans who knew of his music from radio broadcasts, most of whom would be black (Determeyer 2006, 74–75). Among the earliest of what would prove to be almost countless one-night engagements in the course of numerous tours was the Fairmont dance that September.

  Newspaper advertising for the Fairmont dance included two short articles in the city’s daily newspaper, the West Virginian (see Fig. 6.1). Another appeared in the Pittsburgh Courier. Word of mouth was also clearly a factor in building the audience, as implied in the concluding sentence of the article that appeared in the West Virginian of September 18, 1934: “Parties from Cumberland, Piedmont, Weston, Elkins, Morgantown, Clarksburg, and Uniontown will attend the affair which promises to bring the largest assemblage of colored dancers in the past few years” (WV 9.18.34, 10).

  Fairmont, seat of Marion County, is centrally located in the northern West Virginia coalfield. About thirty miles southwest lies Clarksburg, seat of Harrison County, the southernmost county in that field, and about the same distance further south and west is Weston. Morgantown, seat of Monongalia County, lies about twenty-five miles north of Fairmont. All four communities are located in the rolling countryside of the Allegheny Plateau and are linked by U.S. Highway 19, making travel among them fairly easy, if slow. Weston might have been as much as an hour away from Fairmont by car.

  Located about forty miles northeast of Morgantown in southwestern Pennsylvania is Uniontown; those from that town who attended the Lunceford dance had about seventy miles to drive, which could easily have taken two hours or more. Elkins, southeast of Fairmont in the more mountainous terrain at the eastern edge of the Plateau, was also as much as two hours from Fairmont.

  To drive to Fairmont from Cumberland, Maryland, and Piedmont, West Virginia, required crossing the Allegheny Mountains on U.S. 50 with long, and in places steep, grades over the high ridges and down into the river valleys that ran parallel to them. This was the route that Gilmore’s Midnighters traveled when they played in Fairmont, and it was not an easy drive. To understand how imposing this terrain was (and remains), it is worth noting that, on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad’s route from Cumberland to Parkersburg that roughly parallels U.S. 50, this stretch routinely required the use of helper locomotives to enable both freight and passenger trains to climb the long, steep grades. Enthusiasts of Jimmie Lunceford’s music were obviously prepared to undertake some serious mountain driving to attend this dance.

  Lunceford organized his engagements to appeal to audiences having diverse expectations. As a result, according to Albert McCarthy, “To the dancers it was a fine dance band; to the people who went to see a show it was a good theatrical spectacle; to the jazz fans it was a good jazz group” (McCarthy 1964, 136). The theatrical spectacle was created in part by the performance practice of the band members themselves as they tossed their instruments into the air, swayed back and forth in time to the music, and performed novelty numbers. Lunceford also brought dancers and other entertainers along on his tours, who were featured at different times during the evening.

  Table 6.4. Recordings made by the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra in 1934 prior to performing in Fairmont, West Virginia, on September 18th

  * numbers performed as part of the Cotton Club Parade

  ** numbers known to have been performed by Lunceford’s band at the Cotton Club but not as part of this revue

  As for the repertory that was performed in Fairmont, while not all of it can be determined, it seem probable that many of the numbers recorded during 1934 were, including compositions that had been arranged for the Cotton Club Parade. Table 6.4 lists titles grouped by the dates of their recordings. Where there was more than one take, the total number appears in parentheses following the song title. The arranger of each piece is also identified. The Cotton Club Parade numbers are identified by asterisks (*). Those not part of the floor show but known to have been played by the band at the Cotton Club are i
dentified by double asterisks (**) (Determeyer 2006, 70–70).

  Five arrangers, three from within the band, were responsible for the charts recorded in New York and presumably played in Fairmont. Pianist Edwin Wilcox, clarinetist/alto saxophonist Willie Smith, trumpet player and sometime vocalist Sy Oliver were band members; Tom Whaley worked independently, and Will Hudson was employed by Irving Mills to write charts for whichever band in Mills’s stable needed them. By a simple count, Sy Oliver was the most prominent of these arrangers in this period: six of the seventeen charts were his. Both their number and quality led Gunther Schuller to argue that “From early 1934 on, for almost two years, Oliver produced a series of arrangements that really set the Lunceford band apart and gave it a sound and performance style that at its best could compete even with Ellington’s” (Schuller 1989, 206–7). Of the remaining arrangements, running a close second to Oliver was Edwin Wilcox, who contributed five, Willie Smith three, Will Hudson two, and Tom Whaley one.

  The numbers themselves came from a variety of people, including Will Hudson, composer of “White Heat,” “Remember When,” and “Jazznocracy,” which became the Lunceford band’s theme song. Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler, who had been hired to write songs for the Cotton Club Parade, composed “Breakfast Ball” and “Here Goes a Fool” for that show. “Black and Tan Fantasy,” “Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated Lady,” and “Solitude” were, of course, by Duke Ellington and various collaborators among his sidemen. Also recorded in an Edwin Wilcox arrangement was Cole Porter’s chilling song about the lynching of a young woman who had killed her lover: “Miss Otis Regrets.” Hoagy Carmichael composed “Star Dust,” Thomas “Fats” Waller and Andy Razaf collaborated on “Leaving Me,” and Mitchel Parrish, Sy Oliver, and Jimmie Lunceford co-composed “Swingin’ Uptown.”

  Just as this band was based in New York, so too were the composers and arrangers of the repertory it recorded and undoubtedly featured in live performances. A common repertory links Lunceford’s band with Gilmore’s Midnighters. Despite their very different origins and presumed musical qualities, the local band from Piedmont and the national band from the Big Apple presented to their West Virginia audiences a variety of the American popular song repertory of the day, and those audiences were clearly prepared to embrace the musical culture which the big bands represented.

  While both bands engaged with the same musical material, that we have the Lunceford band’s recordings enables us to consider its audiences’ probable musical tastes. Beyond McCarthy’s identification of three audiences for this band: one of dancers, a second of those wishing to be entertained, and a third of jazz devotees (and nothing prevented an individual from being part of more than one of these cohorts), we are able to identify arrangements in a hot jazz style, those in a far cooler sweet style, and some that occupy a middle ground, including those that began in a sweet style and gradually “heated up.”

  From the perspective of the inquiring historian it would have been helpful had someone attending Lunceford’s Fairmont dance carefully documented the succession of numbers performed, noting the short breaks between sets and the intermission as well, and then published this information prominently. What we do have is a description by a young New York fan of the band that, though retrospective, appears to focus of the mid-1930s. Ralph J. Gleason, who subsequently would make important contributions to jazz history through his articles in Down Beat and elsewhere, offered this description of the Lunceford band in action with particular attention to the centrality of dance music:

  The songs were all played, regardless of their simplicity or complexity, for dancers, basically. And they were programmed in the sets to serve that function.... The dance, of course, was the fox trot and its acrobatic extension, the Lindy Hop. Lunceford programmed those sets to take care of the dancers. They began with the slow, dreamy ones, and they ended with the up-tempo stomps, and periodically towards the end of the night the whole house would be rocking and rolling to “Running Wild” or “White Heat” after an interim period of the middle-tempo groovers like “Pigeon Walk.”

  They would set up the whole evening with swinging versions of “Annie Laurie” or “Four or Five Times” and then cut loose with a screaming version of one of their flag-wavers. Or maybe they would do “For Dancers Only” for half an hour, grinding down the blues-ish sound and feeling in the growls and the riffs and making the whole audience meld together into one homogenous mass extension of the music. (Gleason 1975; 1999, 498)

  Of five pieces Gleason cited, only “White Heat” was recorded prior to the engagement in Fairmont; but at least two of the remaining four, “Four or Five Times” and “Running Wild,” may have been part of the band’s book at that time, given the fact that they were recorded in the same session on May 29, 1935 (Lord 1995, L628).

  Gleason referred to three kinds of charts: “slow, dreamy ones,” “middle-tempo groovers,” and “up-tempo stomps” which could accelerate into “flag-wavers.” He noted as well that this dance-oriented repertory was “centered on the fox-trot and its acrobatic extension, the Lindy Hop.” Implicit in this description is the idea that a couple would dance in the close position of the fox-trot in response to slow and moderate tempos and then break into the Lindy during fast numbers. Another, and perhaps more conventional, way to think about Lunceford’s music is to consider, as Gleason implied, that its styles run from sweet at one end to hot at the other. The faster the tempo, the hotter the style, though Lunceford’s arrangers could begin a piece sweetly and then introduce unmistakable jazz elements as the piece went on, almost as if to lure the staid dancers of the fox-trot to try some of faster steps.

  In an effort to identify the music that the 700 patrons of the Fairmont dance heard and the styles it encompassed, an analysis of those recordings made in 1934 will confine itself to the seventeen sides made in the four sessions that preceded September 18. Recordings made in January and March for Victor had no doubt been issued during the summer, and fans in West Virginia could have acquired one or more of these, either in local businesses or through the mail. Those made in the back-to-back sessions for Decca on September 4 and 5 were no doubt in the early stages of production but not yet released. Since, as Eddy Determeyer observed, “it was the leader’s policy to first test tunes in live situations” before recording them, there is every reason to believe this music was part of the band’s growing collection of arrangements and probably near the top of the pile when it came time to put together the program for this dance (Determeyer 2006, 171).

  These seventeen numbers present a rough survey of the stylistic range of Lunceford’s dance music, providing evidence for the success of the Fairmont engagement and sketching out the range of taste of the audience of black Mountaineers who came from near and far to attend. Table 6.5 suggests where the various pieces would fit along a continuum of style from sweet to hot.

  That such a diversity of style may have appealed to black Mountaineers may seem surprising to some, particularly the sweet arrangements characterized by the shimmering sound of Lunceford’s reed section, square, symmetric rhythms, limited space for improvised solos, generous use of the full ensemble, and sentimental lyrics sung in a crooning style by either the tenor voice of trombonist Henry Wells (as in “Here Goes a Fool”) or by a vocal trio made up of Wells, reed man and arranger Willie Smith, and trumpeter Eddie Tompkins (e.g. “Chillun, Get Up”). Recall Lester Clifford’s observation noted in the previous chapter that when Gilmore’s Midnighters played for white dancers the music was “smoother” than the “jump” style that blacks allegedly preferred; this assumption of style preferences based upon racial identity is overly simple.

  Table 6.5. Styles of the Lunceford Band’s repertory recorded between January and September 1934

  Contradicting that assumption are two statements published in the Pittsburgh Courier during the paper’s 1932 band popularity contest by fans of Noble Sissle. A woman of varied tastes, Mrs. Talitha G. Saunders of Winding Gulf, West Virginia, a company tow
n located south of Beckley in the southern coalfields (see Fig. 6.2), asserted 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). Gladys Mike of Wheeling appeared to prefer a sweet style exclusively: “I think that Noble Sissle has the only Negro band on the radio that can compare with my great favorite, Guy Lombardo. His band has tone, harmony, volume, and sweetness; in fact, everything to make an excellent orchestra. He has certainly made a hit with me” (PC 10.29.32, 1/5).

  Fig. 6.2. The company town of Winding Gulf, West Virginia, home of Talitha G. Saunders who greatly appreciated the “ultra rhythmic syncopation that is so sweet and hot” performed by the Noble Sissle Orchestra. Note the company houses in the rear to the left and the single-track branch line of the Virginian Railway to the right. That branch terminated in Winding Gulf. (Eastern Regional Coal Archives, Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, WV)