Dances not organized by a local promoter, such as George Morton or one of his associates, were put on by a variety of organizations. This included social clubs such as Les Precieuses, made up of women residing in McDowell County who sponsored a Colonial Garden party on May 7, 1937, in Kimball, a community located on U.S. Route 52 and the Norfolk & Western Railway approximately halfway between Bluefield and Welch. Edward Watkins and his Harlem Hotshots, a band based in Bluefield, provided the music (PC 5.15.37, 21). In February 1936 the Tuxedo Club of Charleston held a dance highlighted by “a ‘Truckin’ Contest’... to the winners of which cash prizes will be awarded.” Jimmie Lunceford’s Orchestra played that engagement, having been booked by one of the Kings of Amusement associated with George Morton (PC 1.25.36, 2/6). Alumni organizations associated with Bluefield State and West Virginia State Colleges put on dances. In the autumn months these were usually held in conjunction with football games. In July 1934 the Indianapolis-based band led by “Speed” Webb played a dance at the armory in Logan, seat of Logan County, that concluded a convention of a fledgling political organization, the Southern West Virginia Negro Democratic League. A report published in the Logan Banner described the crowd attending the dance as “huge” (PC 7.14.24, 1/5; LB 7.20.34, 20). It is safe to assume that many of the members of these various organizations constituted a portion of the black middle class of the Mountain State.
The Black Middle Class and the Promotion of Dances
Happily, it is possible to go beyond the level of social organizations to that of individuals, thanks in large part to evidence found within the enumerators’ sheets of the U.S. Census of 1930. Additional information in some instances appears in one or another of the biannual city directories of major cities in West Virginia published by R. L. Polk of Pittsburgh. What follows is a series of thumbnail sketches of men and women previously mentioned in this study who actively participated in staging dances for black Mountaineers.
The first group to be considered are the five Kings of Amusement affiliated with George Morton, along with three of their associates located in smaller communities. The first documented collaboration of these individuals resulted in a series of benefit dances on behalf of black American Legion posts in the summer of 1935 for which Cab Calloway’s band provided music (PC 3.30.35, 2/9). As noted earlier, three members of this consortium resided in Charleston.
The first was LeRoy Fonteneau, a native of Louisiana and age twenty-three in 1930 according to the census, which also indicated that he worked as an insurance agent and lived with his wife, Thelma, and two-year-old daughter, Audrey, in the home of Thelma’s parents, Elliott and Elizabeth Dabney. Thelma had been born in Illinois, her parents in North Carolina and Virginia respectively, facts reminding us that many black Mountaineers had recently immigrated from elsewhere in the country. In 1936, according Polk’s Charleston City Directory, Fonteneau clerked at a bookstore. By December 1938, sporting the nickname “Tex” and described in a report in the Pittsburgh Courier as an “energetic promoter and wide-awake business man,” he opened the Alhambra Nightclub in the basement of the Ferguson Hotel at 1000 Washington Street, both establishments catering to African Americans. Cal Grear’s Sweet Swing Orchestra was the club’s house band for at least the first two months of operation (PC 12.17.38, 12). Fonteneau continued to manage the nightclub at least through November 1941, possibly longer (PC 11.15.41, 21).
The second Amusement King residing in Charleston was also a businessman. Since at least 1934, Dr. Thomas L. Mitchell was co-owner with Leo M. Solomon of the M&S Pharmacy, 1000 Washington Street, next door to the Ferguson Hotel (Polk’s Charleston City Directory 1936, 374). Previously, he had worked as a pharmacist for one George H. Willis, owner of the Gem Pharmacy, which had been located less than a block from the site of his future business at 912 Washington. Of C. W. Hart, the third of the Charleston group, little is known except that he was a clerk in the state auditor’s office and thus a civil servant (Polk’s Charleston City Directory 1936, 258).
The two remaining Amusement Kings resided in Welch and Bluefield respectively. Much like those of Fonteneau and Mitchell in Charleston, James Shelton’s profession as a teacher in one of McDowell County’s black public schools and James Martin’s practice in dentistry in Bluefield enlarge our perspective on the African American middle class in the southern coalfields. Shelton, born in Kentucky in 1896 and thus thirty-four at the time of the 1930 census, resided in Welch, was married, and had two children. His wife was a native of the Mountain State (U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Fifteenth Census of the United States 1930—Population Schedule,” West Virginia, MacDowell County, Enumerator District 24-23, Sheet 32A, lines 18–19). A dentist who had opened his practice in 1928 at 725½ Bland Street in Bluefield, James Ernest Martin, age 33 in 1930, was originally from Massachusetts (Rankin, 13). He and his wife, Bernice, born in 1903 in Virginia, lived over the business (1930 Census, Mercer County, Enumerator District 28-10, Sheet 18A, lines 20–21; Polk’s Bluefield City Directory 1936, 149).
Three other individuals associated with the Amusement Kings but not included within the group were C. F. Shelton of Kimball, Sam Wade of Northfork, and Robert L. Robinson of Gary, communities east and south of Welch in McDowell County. Kimball and Northfork were not company towns but were surrounded by mining operations, each having its own resident labor force. On the other hand, Gary was a company town, its mines producing coal for United States Steel.
What Clarence F. Shelton, age 18 in 1930, did for a living could not be determined, but he was the son of James Shelton, Welch’s Amusement King, and thus his ties to the group of promoters is clear. Sam Wade, 43, was employed as a teamster for an unidentified company in the 1930 census (1930 Census, MacDowell County, Enumerator District 24-41, Sheet 22B, line 38). Robert L. Robinson, 35, was a constable, the equivalent of a deputy sheriff in West Virginia law, for the Adkins Magisterial District of McDowell County (1930 Census, MacDowell County, Enumerator District 24-2, Sheet 26B, line 38). One who “keeps peace,” which was how Constable Robinson described his work to the census enumerator, would surely know almost everyone in the vicinity of Gary and thus would be useful in promoting a dance to members of that community. Not knowing for whom Sam Wade worked, we are left to assume that his knowledge of the coal towns in the vicinity of Northfork and their residents enabled him to assist the Amusement Kings in promoting dances.
Three of the founders of the previously mentioned Les Precieuses women’s club were included in the 1930 census which revealed that all three were teachers in one or another of McDowell County’s black schools. Beatrice Crider of Kimball, 27 in 1930, was married to Douglas, 30, the owner of a clothes pressing shop. Incidentally, next door lived Samuel Crider, age 62 and apparently a widower, along with his daughter Ella, age 32, and two children whose ages were 10 and 8. That Mr. Crider was a justice of the peace is further evidence of the active role that black Mountaineers played in the social institutions of the state (1930 Census, MacDowell County, Enumerator District 24-21, Sheet 14A, lines 33–38). Ardelia Carter, 45, and her husband Bassett, 60, were both public schoolteachers in Kimball (1930 Census, MacDowell County, Enumerator District 24-21, Sheet 4B, lines 81–82). Lena Watkins, the youngest of the three at 23 supported her seventy-year-old father and fifty-eight-year-old mother as a teacher, the family residing in Northfork (1930 Census, MacDowell County, Enumerator District 24-43, Sheet 18A, lines 41–43).
Backgrounds of other fans of the black dance bands can also be sketched out from the 1930 census. Talitha G. Saunders, 30, a resident of the Winding Gulf company town in 1932 when she sang the praises of Noble Sissle in a letter the Courier, had previously lived in Mabscott, like Winding Gulf located in Raleigh County; her husband Robert, 33, was mining coal there as he would in Winding Gulf. The Saunders had a four-year-old daughter, Karen (PC 10.15.32, 2/1; 1930 Census, Raleigh County, Enumerator District 41-19, Sheet 3B, lines 98–100). Their move to Winding Gulf may have been prompted by closure of the Mabscott operation
, perhaps because it had mined all the coal in the property it had leased.
Ernest Owens—who, as reported in the Courier, held a “radio party” for friends in his Fairmont home in September 1934 with music provided by broadcasts of bands led by Noble Sissle, Wayne King, and Claude Hopkins—shined shoes for a living at the time of the 1930 census when he was just 18 and, along with his older brother Floyd, a barber age 36, supported their mother. The family had moved to West Virginia from Tennessee (1930 Census, Marion County, Enumerator District 25-7, Sheet 12B, lines 90–92). Richard Moore, another Fairmont resident and one of two men who the Courier reported had traveled to Charleston in August 1934 to hear Cab Calloway’s band, was working as a chauffeur for a private family in 1930. Twenty-four years old, he lived with his father, a barber, his mother, a younger sister, as well as a lodger; the latter two individuals were teachers (1930 Census, Marion County, Enumerator District 25-8, Sheet 15B, lines 93–97).
Taken together, most of the people discussed thus far were members of the black middle class in the Mountain State: teachers, owners of small businesses, and employees of either state or local government. While these folks may not be entirely representative of the population as a whole, nevertheless the information associated with each contributes to our understanding of both the diversity of salaried employment available to African Americans in the coalfields and of the active role middle-class African Americans played in advancing the cause of big band jazz and dance music in West Virginia.
The Working-Class Black Community of Price hill, West Virginia
By far the largest proportion of the audience for big band jazz and dance music among black Mountaineers were miners and their families: the working-class fans of the dance bands. Despite their numbers, however, these are the individuals least easily documented. They mostly exist as statistics in the Annual Report of the [West Virginia] Department of Mines through 1933. They stare out of photographs by “Red” Ribble and others hired to document the workers at various coal mines, though no captions attach names to faces. Apart from anecdotes of descendants concerning one or another individual, their lives are undocumented, save for census data.
Already discussed was the nature of the work of a typical miner’s work during the Depression. Having argued that their relative prosperity following the implementation of the Bituminous Coal Code in the fall of 1933 created the economic conditions in which big band jazz could flourish in the coalfields of the Mountain State, it seems appropriate to examine what evidence there is that can shed light on the individual lives of some of those men. After all, it was their collective decision to devote discretionary income to attend dances that encouraged black bands to tour the state with considerable regularity.
In chapter 2 I discussed the connections between the work of the coal miner and local promoters, such as George Morton, in booking bands to play in the coalfields to the evidence of the earnings of one touring band, that led by Joe “King” Oliver, that validated the assertion by Herb Hall that black bands came regularly to West Virginia “because the mines were working ... and everyone was employed.”
While some readers may wonder at the reliability of an analysis of such a limited source of information as the census enumerator’s sheets for the black residents of a single coal company town, there would seem to be little reason to suspect great variance in places of origin, age range, and family structure among the thousands of black miners at work in hundreds of mines scattered throughout the coalfields. Most came from the same states, Virginia primarily, and most had similar motivations for doing so: the promise of regular wages that would support a wife and one or more children in comparative comfort, especially when a mining family’s standard of living was compared to that of the sharecropper’s life that many left behind. For these reasons, I believe, we can gain insight into the lives of the working-class majority of the African American audience for the big bands in the Mountain State by looking at the black community embedded within the company town of Price Hill, West Virginia, located in northern Raleigh County.
There are several reasons for choosing this community. First, we have photographic evidence of the presence of black miners in the work force. Second, the community is less than two miles from Mount Hope, the location of both a National Guard armory and the gymnasium of DuBois High School, in both of which George Morton put on dances. Among the bands that played there were those led by Lil Hardin Armstrong (November 29, 1937), Count Basie (March 28, 1938), Hartley Toots (September 5, 1938, and April 10, 1939), and Jimmie Lunceford (March 27, 1939). The distance from Price Hill to Beckley was about eight miles. Beckley was the site of ten dances for which bands were booked by Morton, beginning with the first dance he ever promoted: the Earl “Fatha” Hines engagement of April 9, 1935. Thus, there would seem little reason to believe that those residents of Price Hill who wanted to attend dances faced significant obstacles to doing so. It is impossible to determine which individuals from this town went to dances or the number of dances they might have attended, but it is certainly reasonable to suppose that among those turning out to hear the bands booked by George Morton in Mount Hope and Beckley were residents of Price Hill. Who might they have been?
On April 4 and 5, 1930, Roscoe Williams, employed as an enumerator for the 1930 census, made his way along Oswald Road in Price Hill, stopping at each house to record by hand a variety of data about each resident: name, status within the household (head, wife, son or daughter, lodger, etc.), gender, age, race, marital status, place of birth, place of parents’ births, whether employed or not, the occupation of the employed, and the industry in which that work was done.
As noted earlier and typical of company towns, the black population was more or less segregated from the whites. For some reason, Charlie Canko and his wife, natives of Czechoslovakia, resided in a house within the otherwise black neighborhood, perhaps a matter of convenience for the company which had a vacant house to rent at the time the Cankos needed housing. Apart from them, one sees immediately from Mr. Williams’s documentation a succession of homes occupied by African Americans at the end of which the race of residents changes to white.
A total of forty-two black families resided along Oswald Road. Almost all of the men worked as miners, the exception being Lyman Leveret, a janitor in a public school. Almost all were married, and many supported not only their spouses but several children. Most of the men were in their thirties or forties, and most had been born in either West Virginia, Virginia, or North Carolina. The following seven miners and their families were in many respects representative of the black community of Price Hill, and therefore probably typical of the working-class African American Mountaineers who attended dances featuring the big bands of the period.
We begin with Major Green, age 38, a native of North Carolina, whose wife Ruby, age 30, was a native of West Virginia. The Greens had three young daughters: Annie (age 4), Minnie (3), and Mildred (1). Two houses away lived Sam Scott, age 40, originally from Virginia; his wife Roma, 24, also from the Old Dominion; and their six-year-old son, Hobart. A young, probably newlywed couple lived next door: Thomas and Lola Perkins, both from Virginia. He was 18, and she was 16. Odell and Rosa Byrd lived in the next house. He was from South Carolina, and she had been born in Virginia. Mr. Byrd was 42, his spouse 32. Their daughter, Mary, was ten years old. Next to the Byrds resided Price and Stella Massey, ages 50 and 49 respectively. Both were natives of Virginia (1930 Census, Raleigh County, Enumerator District 41-23, Sheet 4A, lines 31–45).
Coal company houses were not large. Down the road from the Byrds lived the Gains family, for whom space was surely at a premium. Walter, 36, and his wife Lucy, 30, he from Virginia, she from West Virginia, were rearing six children, three daughters: Virgie, Jettie, and Fannie, ages 14, 11, and 5, and three sons: Walter Jr., John, and Lawrence, ages 8, 7, and 2, in a house that may have had no more than four rooms (1930 Census, Raleigh County, Enumerator District 41-23, Sheet 3B, lines 91–98).
Henry and Es
tella Brooks, both in their 30s, had it a bit easier. In addition to their three children: Leroy, age 6, and twins Isadora and Henry [Jr.] who were not quite 2 on the day the census taker came to call, residing with them was Mr. Brooks’s seventeen-year-old niece, Mary E. Brooks. Perhaps she was there to help with the twins (930 Census, Raleigh County, Enumerator District 41-23, Sheet 14A, lines 23–28). While more of the forty-one black miners and their families who lived in Price Hill could be discussed, these individuals seem representative of the entire group in terms of age as well as marital and family status.
Were any of these men among the thirteen black miners who appeared in Red Ribble’s panoramic photo of the afternoon shift at the Price Hill Colliery Company’s operation taken sometime in 1931? We may never know for certain, though the fact that both the census of 1930 and the photo of the following year occurred in the darkest days of the Depression when jobs were scarce and money was tight would support the idea that most, if not all, of the Price Hill miners documented in the census would have still been on the job the following year if they could help it, particularly those with families to feed and house. Judging from annual reports published by West Virginia’s Department of Mines, the last year of the Price Hill operation was 1938; there are no references to it subsequently (Annual Report of the Department of Mines: 1938, 46–47, 86–87). With the labor agreements of 1933 and their subsequent renewals ensuring higher wages than previously, it is reasonable to suppose that many of these families remained there until operations ceased.
Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia Page 17
