The evidence taken together also suggests that the black audience for big band jazz and dance music in the Mountain State included members of both the working and middle classes. Unlike the large northern cities where venues for entertainment existed in sufficient numbers to allow patrons to sort themselves out by shared levels of income, common forms of employment, and even age should they have chosen to do so, in West Virginia the armories, high school gymnasiums, and other improvised venues provided a common social ground for people who were economically and occupationally diverse. Teachers and miners, trackliners and doctors, civil servants and teamsters, along with their spouses or significant others assembled to waltz, fox-trot, and Lindy Hop, and, presumably, to watch others do the same.
It is easy to imagine couples from the company towns grouping themselves in one part of the venue, those from the larger communities elsewhere. No doubt people came in groups as well and naturally would sit and dance together. At the same time, such an occasion enabled those with friends or relatives residing elsewhere in the coalfields to meet for several hours to catch up on one another’s news and discuss, if not solve, the problems of the world. Geraldine Belmear recalled that the four dances her father Samuel Carpenter booked in the mid-1930s attracted people from all social classes (Belmear 2000).
Dressed in their best to honor the occasion, to an outsider the day jobs of the dancers hardly would have been apparent. Undoubtedly, to the musicians for whom each engagement represented just another stop on what after a while may have seemed a perpetual tour, the black Mountaineers they entertained probably looked and acted little different from those making up the other audiences for whom they played on the road.
What bands may have found initially surprising were the sizes of audiences in a state that may have seemed to outsiders to be extremely rural with only a small population. Not only would that assumption have been quickly contradicted by the hundreds who turned out to see the touring bands, just as quickly invalidated would have been the corollary that as the state’s population was presumably small, so too would be the night’s wages. By 1935 when Herbert Hall, as baritone saxophonist and clarinetist in “Don Albert’s Music: America’s Favorite Swing Band,” first came to Charleston, he and the rest of that band were introduced to the prosperity enjoyed by African Americans in West Virginia’s coalfields. As he would note years later, this was not news to any of the bandleaders and their managers at the time. The industriousness of the miners and the local economies that prospered thanks to their labor would in turn have assured most bands that their night’s work in the Mountain State would be better compensated than was the case elsewhere in the region.
CHAPTER TEN
The Party Winds Down
The coal industry provided the economic foundation for the culture of big band jazz and dance music in the Mountain State during the 1930s, and it would be that same industry that initiated its decline. Events following the start of World War II would complete that process.
It will be recalled that at the beginning of the 1930s much of the work associated with mining coal was done by hand. In chapter 1, the work of “hand loaders” was summarized by William Purvience Tams Jr. Tams also discussed the modification of that job description that resulted when mine operators acquired cutting machines that prepared the coal face for dynamiting by cutting into the bottom of a seam in far less time than a miner could by hand. In the words of labor historian Ronald L. Lewis, “the cutting machine did not displace the miner but rather converted him from a generalist to a specialized worker” (Lewis 1987, 167). Thus, while this equipment obviously enhanced productivity, it did not accomplish in dramatic fashion what mine owners wanted: a significant reduction in labor costs.
That goal seemed attainable beginning in 1935, when a piece of equipment that had been around since the early 1920s suddenly began to be acquired in considerable numbers, initially by many larger operations, subsequently by smaller ones: a mechanical loading machine developed by Joseph F. Joy. Joy had worked as a hand loader in mines in the vicinity of Cumberland, Maryland, beginning in 1898 at the age of fifteen, and had firsthand knowledge of the nature of this work and the time required to load mine cars with coal that had just been blown down from the seam. As its name suggests, the Joy loader was designed to take over the work of hand loaders. Operated by a single individual, it could scoop up coal and carry it via conveyer belt to waiting mine cars to be transported to the surface. Separate work spaces, “rooms,” in which individual miners had worked to shoot down and load coal could now be replaced by larger exposures of the coal seam, and one operator could do the work formerly done by several miners. As Lewis also observed: “As the use of mechanical loaders spread throughout the industry during the 1930s and 1940s, the integrated factory system moved underground, transforming not only the production process but the nature of the work itself. With more machinery, coal mining became less labor intensive, and the number of machine operators, maintenance men, and service personnel increased, while the percentage of independent practical miners declined” (Lewis 1987, 167).
Investing in Joy loaders paid off handsomely for coal operators in increased productivity: “Between 1935 and 1947, coal loaded by machine in West Virginia grew from 2.1 million tons per year to 99.8 million tons, an increase of 4,900 percent” (Lewis 1987, 169). The same investment led to significant reductions in the labor force. Among Lewis’s “independent practical miners,” Tams’s “hand loaders” by another name, it was the blacks who felt the impact first since they were discriminated against when the time came for mine superintendents to choose which men would be trained to use the modern equipment and which would be let go. Accounts of black miners being denied access to training are numerous. Others document the fact that, despite their seniority within a particular mine, African Americans were passed over in favor of their European-American co-workers when opportunities to operate the new machinery presented themselves. The intention to deny blacks the opportunity to learn to operate loaders and other equipment was often justified by superintendents and mine owners because they believed that blacks lacked the necessary intelligence to master the machinery or because they regarded such employment as a “white man’s job.” Even when confronted with evidence that a black miner had received the training necessary to operate the new mining machinery, rejection followed. In one operation, when a new superintendent took charge, the black miners who had constituted a majority of the equipment operators were summarily removed from those jobs and replaced by whites. The UMWA chose not to intervene on behalf of its black members in this or in other instances of similar injustice. After all, the white miners were also union members (Lewis 1987, 170).
The upsurge in mechanization combined with the denial of access to employment opportunities associated with this development initiated the steady decline of black employment in the West Virginia coalfields. Whereas there were 22,089 black miners (22.7 percent of the work force) in the Mountain State in 1930, that number dropped to 18,356 (17.3 percent of the work force) by 1940 (Barnum 1970, 28). The decline accelerated in the next decade, but that takes us beyond the scope of this study.
A survey of the number of dances presented to black Mountaineers in the period from 1939 to 1942 is only partially suggestive of the changing coal industry. In 1939 twenty dances for which touring bands provided music can be documented in the newspaper record, in 1940 only fifteen dances. Beyond the transformations wrought by mechanization of mining, it must be noted that in that year the nation slipped into recession, which had an adverse impact upon the state’s mining industry. In 1941 there was a robust turnaround: traveling bands provided music for twenty-six dances. Unknown is whether there was a drop in attendance as black miners and their families departed the state, initiating a pattern of out-migration that would accelerate in the postwar period as further mechanization wiped out the jobs of thousands of miners of all races and ethnicities.
It is clear that employment practices in the coal indus
try would have eliminated most of the economic foundation for big band jazz and dance music in West Virginia eventually. Beyond the impact on their own livelihoods, it should also be borne in mind that the incomes of the thousands of black miners also supported many in the Mountain State’s black middle class. The weakening of their economic circumstances did further damage to the prospects of touring bands. Yet, the deciding factors in bringing to an end the active cultivation of this music among black West Virginians were World War II and three federal policies arising from the war effort that were implemented by the middle of 1942. Their effect on this musical culture was devastating.
War-related problems for black bandleaders began to be observed as early as February 1942. In the February 14 issue of the Pittsburgh Courier, a story headlined “War Priorities Have Hit Les Hite” reported that the bandleader “was unable to find a new or suitable tire to replace a completely worn one on his bus.” The story continued: “Like every big band, Hite’s crew relies on the bus form of transportation to cover the jump from one engagement to another, the cost of rail traveling being much more expensive” (PC 2.14.42, 20). The reporter overreached a bit—Duke Ellington traveled by train routinely while on tour and had for a number of years—but the fact was that every band (apart from Ellington’s) that toured West Virginia did so by bus.
Two weeks later the Courier printed the following report under the headline “War Curb Effective On Musical Instruments”: “One of the most effective curtailments to hit the music profession came into being here this week with the War Production Board ordering a two-month curb on the use of critical metals and plastics in the making of musical instruments. The new order came about the by great war demands which needs such metals for planes, weapons, and ships” (PC 2.28.42, 20).
Fig. 10.1. Report by Billy Rowe, theatrical editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, on the devastating impact on black dance bands of the rationing of rubber and gasoline as well as the confiscation of chartered buses by the federal government, June 6, 1942. (Pittsburgh Courier Archives)
On June 1, 1942, the Office of Defense Transportation (ODT) implemented its policies regarding rationing of both rubber and gasoline. The Courier’s theatrical editor, Billy Rowe, reported two consequences (see Fig. 10.1). “The curtailment of transportation facilities that went into effect June 1 has one nite [sic] dance promoters tearing their hair and gambling on short odds.” With only a few exceptions throughout the entire period of this study, every dance in West Virginia was a “one nite” engagement. Rowe went on: “The new law also takes telling effect on bands in all brackets of success as it calls for the immediate confiscation of chartered buses, the main mode of traveling of every aggregation in the country.” Later in the article, he summarized the consequences of these policies for big bands. “The new transportation problem coupled with many others which will take a heavy toll in the huge band business will kill many of the small bands” (PC 6.6.42, 21).
The managers of the most famous bands, including Joe Glaser, Moe Gale, and Harold Oxley, immediately went to work lining up “location jobs,” long-term engagements in hotels and commercial dance venues for the bands they had under contract. Many bands went out of business. Later, the ODT agreed that bands could travel by train from one military base to another to play for the troops and, when doing so, sandwich in engagements for civilians where possible. West Virginia did not then, nor does it now, have a military base of any sort; any wartime engagements played in the state could only occur when bands traversed the entire state in order to travel from one base to another.
By September a small measure of relief was granted by the ODT to black bands, when it agreed that five buses would be allocated for the exclusive use of “colored outfits, who find their most lucrative territory in the south, but who are not able to travel to these points via rail because of the jim-crow conditions. Even when they have been able to travel on the trains, the have often found that many small towns are not accessible by these means” (PC 9.5.42, 21). Presumably, the “jim-crow” conditions referred not only to limited seating for black passengers on many trains but also to the lack of space for instruments, suitcases, and other band equipment in the baggage cars.
The constraints imposed on touring bands obviously had a comparable impact on black Mountaineers who in the past traveled by car to a dance held in a nearby (or not so nearby) town. The wartime ration of four gallons of gasoline per week did not allow for a lot of recreational driving. As can be easily imagined, the big band culture for most black communities was reduced to what could be heard on the radio. Even production of radio receivers for civilian use was also sharply reduced, as was the availability of shellac, essential at the time in the manufacturing of recordings (PC 8.15.42, 20). For all of these reasons, it is fair to say that the summer of 1942 was the period in which the lively musical culture of big band jazz and dance music in black West Virginia established in the early 1930s came to an end.
Conclusions
This has been a study of a remarkable and previously unexamined series of developments in the history of American music. Like all such developments, these were contingent on a set of preconditions the impact of which could not have been anticipated: the geology of West Virginia that created the coalfields, the post–Civil War industrial and technological developments associated with railroading and coal mining, issues of public policy at both the state and federal levels that created a favorable social environment for black Mountaineers, and African American musical traditions and aesthetic values that made it easy to embrace big band jazz and other dance musics once these arrived in the Mountain State.
Large quantities of high-quality bituminous coal were prerequisite, as was the construction of railroads to export that coal to the nation and abroad. The discovery of West Virginia’s vast coal reserves—preceded by post–Civil War emancipation of enslaved blacks and their discovery of the economic limitations of agricultural life as sharecroppers in Virginia, the Carolinas, and elsewhere in the Old South—encouraged steady migration to the Mountain State by African Americans to build railroads and mine coal. Beyond that, West Virginia’s state constitution ensured resident males of all races the right to vote. The concentration of black Mountaineers in certain counties gave them a degree of political influence in the state not seen in most parts of the country, north or south.
Bringing their own musical traditions with them, the African Americans living in the coalfields preserved much of the oral tradition of their home states and quickly adopted new practices where these proved useful. Despite formidable terrain, the Mountain State did not impose obstacles to traveling tent shows in the early twentieth century, further enriching the black music of the coalfields and keeping it up to date.
That the mines needed electricity and brought it to most of their company towns meant that residents, both black and white, could listen to music on the radio. By the 1930s radio broadcasts increasingly featured big band dance music, including jazz. A large percentage of the black population of West Virginia appears to have had more or less easy access to radios and thus to the emerging national culture of music.
Despite all of these conditions favorable to local cultivation of big band dance music, the principal factor that energized the musical developments at the heart of this study was the Bituminous Coal Code of 1933, with its empowering of the United Mine Workers of America, and the union’s commitment to equal pay for equal work for African Americans. With the stabilization of the mining industry and the rise in wages came a sense of economic security, on the part of African American miners and those who provided them services among the black middle class, that was reflected in their enthusiastic support of this musical culture.
Taken together, these forces distinguished the black musical history of the Mountain State from that of states further south and west having significant African American populations. What West Virginia’s blacks shared with their brothers and sisters in the Deep South were numbers and a rural life. They d
id not have to share (or, more accurately, have to endure) the economic exploitation and hostile, at times even terrifying, social environment of the southern states. In arguing this position, I am not suggesting that black Mountaineers found “Jerusalem in West Virginia’s green and pleasant land,” to paraphrase a line from William Blake’s poem. Life was hardly perfect. However, even though segregated in public education and denied services in a variety of public businesses, they had a degree of agency, opportunity, and, from late in 1933 to the end of the decade, a degree of economic prosperity that was hard to find elsewhere.
Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia Page 20
