Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia

by Christopher Wilkinson

  Fig. 7.2. The county seats (in bold) and satellite communities in which resided associates of George Morton who advertised dances and sold tickets for them. (West Virginia University–University Relations–Design)

  Coverage of the Calloway benefit dances also reveals a second layer of activity: the sale of tickets for dances in communities surrounding the county seats where the engagements took place. Four businesses in the city sold tickets for the June 8 dance at the Charleston armory, of which two were pharmacies. Unidentified locations in Williamson, Logan, Montgomery, and Huntington also sold tickets. To buy tickets to the dance in Blue-field on June 11 (Calloway had jumped from Charleston to Columbus, Ohio, for another benefit on June 10 before heading to Bluefield), one could go to Kingslow’s Drug Store in town; those who resided near the McDowell County communities of Keystone, Kimball, or Gary could get tickets from Sam Wade, C. F. Shelton (possibly the son of J. A. Shelton of Welch), and R. L. Robertson, respectively. For the Beckley dance on June 12, Morton’s Drug Store was the place to go, the business owned by George Morton’s father, in addition to unidentified locations in Mount Hope and Hinton. That drug stores sold tickets suggests that Morton made use of his father’s professional connections to establish this group of local vendors (PC 6.1.35, 2/8). Their use also reminds us that in the past many of these businesses served as neighborhood social centers because their soda fountains and associated food service brought members of the community together.

  The coverage of the Hines and Calloway engagements of April and June 1935 begins to form a picture of a network of entrepreneurs covering both the southern and northern coalfields, which George Morton would activate upon getting word from New York that a tour was being put together that would come through West Virginia. It is summarized in Table 7.1 below and illustrated by Figure 7.2.

  This network clearly served Morton well in his role as middleman booking name bands for multiple engagements in the southern part of the state, usually including one in Beckley, and less regularly facilitating a gig up north in Fairmont, leaving his contacts to make local arrangements in their respective communities. Frances Flippen recalled that her brother worked more or less exclusively with Joe Glaser, one of the principal managers of black bands in the nation in the course of his association first with the Rockwell-O’Keefe agency, later as head of Associated Booking Artists. In that capacity Glaser managed a number of black bands, including those led by Louis Armstrong, Andy Kirk, and Lionel Hampton.

  In his study of the music industry during the 1930s, Swing Changes: Big Band Jazz in New Deal America, David W. Stowe described Glaser as one of several managers who, in effect, “served as gatekeepers of the venues and media [and] who enabled swing to become a national phenomenon of popular culture” (Stowe 1994, 103). In West Virginia, George Morton effectively unlocked the “gate” to enable black Mountaineers to gain access to swing. As of June 12, 1937, his organization was known as Universal Promoters, consisting undoubtedly of many, if not all, of the Kings of Amusement who, residing in other coalfield communities, handled local arrangements in their own towns (PC 6.12.37, 22).

  While Glaser was his principal New York contact, when the opportunity presented itself Morton was also prepared to book bands not under Glaser’s control. For example, he booked Chick Webb and his Savoy Swing Orchestra with Ella Fitzgerald for a dance in Huntington sponsored by the West Virginia State College Club at the Vanity Fair on June 12, 1937 (PC 6.12.37). Webb was managed by Moe Gale, who also owned the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem (Stowe 1994, 103). Morton also arranged engagements for Jimmie Lunceford’s Harlem Express (PC 3.25.39), Myron “Tiny” Bradshaw’s Orchestra (PC 9.24.38), and a band based in Miami led by Hartley Toots (PC 3.18.39).

  Working for Joe Glaser was always something of a gamble, because he demanded a fixed fee for each engagement by one of his bands. No commonwealth principle was in operation as was the case with Joe Oliver’s Band or Jimmie Lunceford’s, in which each musician got a percentage of the gate regardless of the number of attendees. If for some reason, Morton or one of his associates could not attract a sufficiently large crowd for a dance, that individual was responsible for making up the difference.

  Not only did Morton organize successive engagements in the Mountain State, he also oversaw the dances that took place in his hometown. For each of these he had to rent a venue and see to advertising. Such locations in and around Beckley included, in addition to the city’s armory, the gymnasium of DuBois High School in nearby Mount Hope as well as the armory located there, and the Rose Garden Inn, a local nightclub that he rented for several dances over the years.

  To promote these engagements, while the Raleigh Register and the Beckley Post-Herald might have seemed logical places to publish notices of upcoming dances, Morton adopted what was apparently more reliable, cost-effective, and informal strategies for spreading the word. His younger sister recalled that he advertised by using “placards in windows of stores and barbershop... and handbills, and placards they would nail on telegraph poles.” Some of those placards were placed in the windows of businesses that also sold tickets to the dances. Such advertising no doubt led to word-of-mouth communication within and between black communities as well (Flippen 2005). Similar strategies were no doubt employed by his partners in the other towns for which he engaged bands. One consequence is that there was little, if any, notice taken in the local press, despite the fact that hundreds turned out for these events; thus, for the historian the Pittsburgh Courier serves as the primary source of information.

  Another part of the local arrangements concerned making overnight accommodations for the band members. Hotels owned and operated by black West Virginians included the Travelers’ Hotel in Bluefield; the Ferguson Hotel in Charleston; and Capehart’s Hotel in Welch, which, incidentally, was owned and operated by Hugh J. Capehart, the same McDowell County member of the House of Delegates of the State of West Virginia who had overseen passage in 1921 of the anti-lynching bill discussed earlier. Fairmont, in the northern coalfield, offered accommodations at Rowles’s Restaurant and Hotel (Belmear 2000). In other communities including Beckley, band members had to be lodged with local families. There, the Mortons’ home was one of those that accommodated traveling musicians.

  Table 7.2. Bands booked by George Morton for engagements in West Virginia between April 9, 1935, and February 6, 1940

  It was essential to the entire enterprise that close attention be paid to the receipts for each dance. The fixed fees had to be paid before Morton could earn any income. Frances Flippen recalled that when she worked for her brother, her job was to sell tickets and track receipts for dances in Beckley because her brother trusted only her with the cash (Flippen 2005).

  In the four years and ten months that George Morton booked black bands for engagements in the Mountain State, directly or indirectly, he was responsible for at least forty-six dances as documented in the Pittsburgh Courier. Table 7.2 identifies the bands that performed, the towns in which they played, and the dates on which they did so.

  This list does not necessarily include all of the occasions for which Morton booked bands, only those in which coverage in the Courier cited him as promoter. The newspaper also published reports of engagements of bands that he had often booked that took place in the same communities and in the same venues with which he was associated. In these instances, however, the paper did not identify him as the organizer. Thus these forty-six engagements do not necessarily encompass all of his booking activities. No other individual came close to George Morton in linking black Mountaineers to the music of the national bands that defined the Swing Era of jazz history.

  Morton’s death was reported in the February 10, 1940, issue of the Courier by a captioned photograph as well as a short article that stated that his younger sister would take over the work of Universal Promoters. That turned out to be unfounded speculation; the business died with him (Flippen 2005). The article also listed some of those who had sent floral offerings to his funeral. Th
ey included, among others, bandleaders he had booked and their managers: Cab Calloway, Jimmie Lunceford and his manager Harold Oxley, Count Basie, Joe Glaser, Moe Gale, as well as William G. Nunn of the Courier, who may well have attended the service and filed the story (PC 2.10.40, 20).

  Beyond uniting the southern coalfields of the Mountain State with the national African American culture of big band jazz and dance music, Morton’s business acumen created a network of venues and the routes that name bands would continue to use after his death. In June 1940 Erskine Hawkins played an engagement in Charleston on the 22nd, followed by another in Mount Hope on the 24th before heading east to play a dance in Richmond, Virginia, on the 25th (PC 6.15.40, 21). Departing Charlottesville on July 18, 1940, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm played in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, on the 19th, Beckley on the 22nd, Logan on the 25th, Bluefield on the 26th, and Charleston on the 27th (PC 7.13.40, 21). In 1941 the bands of Jimmie Lunceford, Tiny Bradshaw, and Ella Fitzgerald would follow through the southern part of the state the well-beaten paths upon which George Morton had relied in organizing engagements (PC 1.4.41, 18; 3.22.41, 21; 4.12.41, 21).

  No single individual emerged to replace Morton as regional booker for the southern coalfields. Bands continued to come but were apparently engaged by entrepreneurs residing in the towns where the dances were to take place. Perhaps one legacy of his work was that the New York managers who before had worked through him now were content to contact multiple individuals, each in a different coalfield town, who had become well known thanks to George Morton.

  Dance Promoters in Fairmont

  There were far fewer black Mountaineers living in the northern coalfield during the 1930s than further south. The census of 1940 noted that roughly 85,500 of approximately 114,000 African Americans residing in West Virginia, fully three-quarters of them, resided in Kanawha, McDowell, and Raleigh counties. In the three counties of the northern field (Harrison, Marion, and Monongalia) lived fewer than ten percent of that number: 8,366 (Sixteenth Census, 40–43). Clearly, the black audience for big bands was far more dispersed in the northern part of the state, as evidenced by the distances people traveled to attend dances in Fairmont, seat of Marion County and the most frequent stop for national bands.

  Coverage of Fairmont engagements in the Courier took two forms: reports written at the newspaper based on promotional materials from New York managers, and references in weekly news columns written by one or another of the residents of the town’s black community. Some of these columns provided useful information concerning the numbers who turned out for a dance and from where they had traveled to attend.

  There was no single dance promoter in Fairmont, no equivalent to George Morton. Several men tried their hands at booking bands at different times during the 1930s and early 1940s: Samuel Carpenter, Clarence Lee, Vernon Morrow, Charles “Turk” Nelson, Charles Saunders, James W. West, and Yancey Whittaker. Whittaker was the only one reported to have collaborated with Morton’s Universal Promoters, bringing Jimmie Lunceford to Fairmont on March 29, 1939, as part of a series of engagements in the Mountain State (PC 3.25.39, 21). A group of individuals known only as “the Nighthawks,” which may have included one or more of those cited above, was active in for a short time in 1934.

  The recollections of Samuel Carpenter’s daughter Geraldine Carpenter Belmear provide useful information concerning her father’s activities as a sometime booker as well as Fairmont’s black community and the audiences that attended dances at that time. Her parents moved to Fairmont from Lynchburg, Virginia, around 1920. Her father worked as a bellhop in the Fairmont Hotel until sometime in 1937, for a time found work in Pittsburgh, and returned to Fairmont in 1940 first to work at a white country club and later as a bailiff in the federal courthouse (Belmear 2000).

  Carpenter booked bands in the hope of adding to the family income, reportedly having become aware that elsewhere in the state local entrepreneurs were organizing dances and thereby earning additional money. He was not the first in Fairmont to bring in a national band; the unidentified promoter responsible for the Jimmie Lunceford engagement of September 18, 1934, preceded him. The first name band that Carpenter booked for a dance was Noble Sissle’s on July 3, 1935 (PC 6.29.35, 2/10).

  Belmear recalled that her father had had to persuade the authorities in charge of the armory to allow him to hold a dance for the black community there. Perhaps because of their numbers, the approximately 700 attendees of the Lunceford engagement had disconcerted the white community. Among his arguments may have been the fact that the local black Elks club, the Elks Rest, where several bands had played (including King Oliver’s just six nights after the Lunceford dance), was too small to accommodate what would probably be a large crowd, thus perhaps leading to even more problems for Fairmont’s white folk than would the black community’s use of the armory (Belmear 2000).

  Samuel Carpenter’s promotional strategies were similar to Morton’s. Because he knew his potential audience to be widely dispersed, he began by writing to associates in communities both near and far who could be counted upon to post notices of a dance in barbershops, the meeting places of social organizations such as Elks Lodges, and in Methodist churches. Like Morton, Carpenter distributed posters to businesses in various locations at which tickets could be purchased.

  The geographically dispersed audience used various means of transportation, some public, others private, to converge upon Fairmont’s armory. About twenty-five miles southeast of the town was Grafton, seat of Taylor County, located on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. There were few black miners in Taylor County, but the railroad employed a great many African Americans, mostly as track liners. Dancers from Grafton could take the B&O #35 which departed daily at 7:15 p.m. and arrived in Fairmont at 8:10 p.m. around the time a dance would begin. To return, they would have to leave dances before what was typically a 2:00 a.m. conclusion so as to catch #54/16, which departed for Grafton (and ultimately New York City) at 1:35 a.m. If they missed that train, the next one did not leave until 5:00 a.m. Those coming from Clarksburg to the south or Morgantown to the north could take an inter-urban line. Those from further east, including residents of Piedmont and Keyser, West Virginia, and Cumberland, Maryland, would travel by car; usually a minimum of two vehicles would convoy together over the ridges of the Allegheny Mountains. Given the terrain encountered and the slow speeds that it imposed, these folks probably did not get home until dawn, assuming they did not spend the night in Fairmont before heading back (Belmear 2000).

  Opportunities to book touring bands were widely separated because Fairmont was not on one of the well-established routes through the central Appalachians. It was comparatively close to Pittsburgh, and bands that performed in Fairmont usually did so by detouring away from the east-west routes that ran through or at least close to that city. The Courier’s coverage confirms Belmear’s memory that her father organized just four dances in an eighteen-month period beginning with Sissle’s engagement in the summer of 1935. Ruth Ellington’s Orchestra performed at the armory on December 26 of that year. Andy Kirk Twelve Clouds of Joy may well have sold out the armory on October 24, 1936.

  Disaster struck the night of December 25, 1936, when Zack Whyte and His Chocolate Beau Brummels from Cincinnati failed to appear at the Fairmont armory to play for what was reportedly a crowd of more than 1,000 dancers. Under the headline “Zach Whyte Disappoints W. Va. Crowd,” the Courier noted: “Carpenter, who had advanced a deposit, had booked the band for the holiday night, following another engagement in Akron, O., on Christmas Eve. Zack and his orchestra disappointed promoters in both spots ... arriving in Akron, it is alleged, too late for the engagement and then returning to Cincinnati.” The story closed by stating that “Just what action Carpenter will take to collect his deposit has not been ascertained” (PC 1.2.37, 2/6).

  The financial outcome of this disaster is not known, but it marked the end of Samuel Carpenter’s activities as a dance promoter. His daughter recalled th
at Charles Saunders would be the next to take a turn at booking bands for the black community, though it was not until early in the summer of 1941 that Saunders is reported to have booked first Count Basie and then Andy Kirk to play in the armory (Belmear 2000; PC 6.28.41).

  The work of George Morton, Samuel Carpenter, and other black Mountaineers whose entrepreneurial spirit led them into the booking business was essential to establishing and maintaining the culture of big band jazz and dance music in West Virginia. By linking the big bands of the North to an audience in the central Appalachians, they cultivated a new fan base and simultaneously extended the reach and influence of the music industry into a part of the country that had previously been far more reliant on its own musical resources than it would ever be again. From the perspective of the big bands, these men made essential contributions to their success by creating new opportunities to perform directly for their fans along that part of “the road” that was the Mountain State.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Big Bands’ Audience in the Mountain State

  We know where dances were held and who was responsible for getting the bands to those venues. But who danced to the music of the black name bands of the period in West Virginia, and what did they hear? First, we must examine the available evidence concerning the identity of the potential audience based on what can be determined about the larger African American population of the coalfields.