Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia

by Christopher Wilkinson

  2. The 1933 report confirmed that those counties having the largest number of black residents also included the largest numbers of black miners: Fayette, 2,932; Kanawha, 908; Logan, 2,440; McDowell, 5,566; Mercer, 833; Mingo, 573; and Raleigh, 3,426 (“Nationalities of Persons....” Annual Report 1933, 114–17). That there were, literally, “tens of thousands of southern blacks” residing in West Virginia in this period stands in stark contrast to the more recent past. The decline in the state’s African American population accompanied an overall decline in the number of West Virginians is explained by the fact that as coal companies turned increasingly to mechanizing their operations, the need for labor declined precipitously. Black miners were among the first to be laid off, but by the 1950s miners of all ethnicities were let go with increasing frequency throughout the entire industry. As noted by Ronald L. Lewis, “Between 1950 and 1970, the white work force fell [nationally] from 483,818 to 128,375 men, a decline of 73.5 percent. The effect on blacks was even more devastating as their total plunged from 30,042 to 3,673, a reduction of 87.8 percent in twenty years” (Lewis, 1987, 180). Absent alternative job opportunities in the state, miners both black and white left for the industrial centers of the North. The departure of African American miners and their families explains the “whitening” of the state’s population, leading to its current image in the popular imagination.

  3. Jedidiah Hotchkiss drew attention to one new operation prompted by the arrival of the C&O: “at Cannelton, the railroad has already given a stimulus to a mining operation conducted... on a very large scale.” Cannelton is located on Fullpush Fork, a tributary of the Kanawha, about ten miles north of Montgomery in Fayette County (Hotchkiss 1873, 289).

  4. Work songs performed by blacks at work on the railroads of West Virginia were recorded and transcribed by Cortez D. Reece in “A study of selected folksongs collected mainly in southern West Virginia,” PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1955.

  5. The cultural transformation resulting from the rise of the coal industry may also be observed in the emergence of new musical styles resulting from the blending of practices associated with the several distinct populations from which came the workforce for the mines, interactions representing those “widely varying trajectories of change and cross-fertilization” that existed within the cultural spaces that were company towns where “a variety of musical practices coexist[ed].” One example of this cross-fertilization in the central Appalachians is that blend of diverse folk traditions known as bluegrass. The now well-established instrumentation of bluegrass bands clearly illustrates this cultural fusion. The fiddle, double bass, and mandolin are of Italian origin (as were many of the European-immigrant miners in West Virginia’s coalfields); although the mandolin only recently had been introduced, violins and basses had been part of American musical culture since the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. The guitar was Spanish, but while ubiquitous in the South and Southwest regions of the country only came to the mountains by way of the Sears Roebuck mail-order catalogue following World War I (NYT 10.10.1999, 20). The banjo is of West African ancestry. The presence of improvisation in many bluegrass performances also reflects influences of black musical traditions of America, particularly that of the blues.

  6. Because there were only three black families in Cassville, Cranford recalls that they were not segregated from the white residents, either native or foreign-born. The family encountered racial segregation when it traveled to nearby Morgantown, the county seat.

  7. In the period following World War I, according to Price Van Meter Fishback, while black agricultural workers (that is, sharecroppers) in the South earned on average between $.75 and $1.00 a day in the mid-1920s and unskilled black factory workers earned around $2.50 per day, African American coal miners in central Appalachia earned between $3.20 and $7.40 per eight-hour shift (“Employment Conditions of Blacks in the Coal Industry, 1900–1930,” Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1983, 147–69).

  8. While racially segregated public education became symbolic of racial oppression in the former Confederacy, it cannot be denied that in the North similar discrimination was practiced, though with greater subtlety. Allowing blacks to live only in certain neighborhoods in northern towns and cities and then drawing boundaries defining school districts in such a way that white and black children did not attend the same schools accomplished the same end.

  9. Kenneth Gray, a generation younger than Ray Williams, recalled that in the late 1940s there were four black high schools in McDowell County: Elkhorn, Kimball (in the town named for Frederick Kimball, the financier of the Norfolk & Western Railway that runs through it), Gary District, and his own alma mater: Excelsior.

  Chapter One

  1. One place this phenomenon can be observed is along U.S. Highway 52, a road that traverses the state from east to west through the southern coalfields, entering the state at Bluefield, exiting it at Huntington. In eastern McDowell County, one community follows another so closely that often only a road sign indicates that one has left one settlement and entered another.

  2. “Smokeless coal” was one of several terms referring to the type of bituminous (soft) coal found throughout southern West Virginia. Other terms include “metallurgical” because of its use in steel making, “steam,” or “low sulphur” coal.

  Chapter Two

  1. The two volumes are now part of the collection of the Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans. Portions of the gig book relevant to Joe Oliver’s life appeared in transcription in Walter C. Allen and Brian Rust’s King Joe Oliver first published in 1955 and reissued in a revised edition entitled simply King Oliver by Laurie Wright in 1987. That transcription does not present all entries in their entirety, however, and in a number of instances it contains errors as well.

  2. Herbert Hall noted that maintenance of the first bus that the Don Albert Orchestra acquired in 1931 was of such importance that “that was taken care of first so we could get to the next town... and what’s left, then we divide[d] it” (Hall 1980; Wilkinson 2001, 74).

  3. As uncertain as income based on a percentage of the gate may seem, it should also be noted that black bands under national management saw only a very small percentage of the money they earned for a guaranteed wage. Much later in life Andy Kirk, one of Joe Glaser’s bandleaders, reflected on this state of affairs. “People may wonder if we were exploited by agents. We all were. In contracts. The bookers and managers had their own lawyers who were ours too. That didn’t make any sense. Glaser got his cut, the territory booker [e.g. George Morton] got his cut, the ballroom or location got their cut. We had what was left. But we were happy to be playing, so we didn’t think too much about the money” (Kirk 1989, 93–94).

  Chapter Three

  1. Schuller’s discussion of big bands in the 1920s in the sixth chapter of Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development focuses on recordings, which is understandable since his study is grounded in recordings of this music. He noted: “As jazz expands in the 1920s, it becomes increasingly difficult to sort out the many strands of... regional-social characteristics. At one level, it is self-evident that the sudden wide dissemination of records (and radio) broke down regional differences. A musician in Kansas City did not have to travel to Chicago or New York to know what was being played in those cities. He could hear it on records, and he could be influenced by what he heard (if he was so inclined)” (242). In West Virginia, recordings were not as easily available as were radios; it was the latter medium that widely disseminated the sound of the big bands in the Mountain State.

  Chapter Four

  1. Les Precieuses Club was founded in 1931 by seven women with the purpose of promoting “civic and social development,” according to Mrs. Nakomis Shelton in an article on the history of black McDowell County published at some point late in the 1950s in the Welch Daily News. Such development included, at least by the 1950s, the funding of scholarship, support for the Red Cross and the Home for the Aged, the location
of which was not indicated (WDN, date unknown).

  2. I interviewed Lester Clifford at his home in Piedmont on two occasions: June 27 and July 11, 2001. Additionally, I had a short telephone conversation with him on July 20 of the same year. The description of the Midnighters’ history is based entirely on those interviews.

  3. The titles were selected from Table 3, “Jazz Standards in Order of Publication,” of Richard Crawford and Jeffrey Magee’s Jazz Standards on Record, 1900–1942: A Core Repertory, xii–xiii.

  4. Best known of such college bands was the ’Bama State Collegians, originally from Alabama State University. Led by trumpet player Erskine Hawkins, the band had a style that was alternately sweet and hot that ultimately appealed to dancers more than to fans of jazz. Gunther Schuller wrote that it had a “single-minded function as a superior dance band” (1989, 412). In doing so, he was damning it with faint praise.

  Chapter Seven

  1. The West Virginia newspapers documenting the dances held in 1934 are the Beckley Post-Herald, Bluefield Daily Telegraph, Charleston Daily Mail, Charleston Gazette, Fairmont Times, Fairmont Times–West Virginian, Fairmont West Virginian, Huntington Advertiser, Logan Banner, Welch Daily News, and the West Virginia Weekly.

  Chapter Ten

  1. In the introduction to his study, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African-American Culture between the World Wars, Joel Dinnerstein situates public dances in a larger cultural context: “The social function of nearly all African American musical practice before 1945 was to create a public forum that provided the following: social bonding through music and dance, an opportunity to create an individual style within a collective form, and a dense rhythmic wave that imparts ‘participatory consciousness’ to the audience” (7–8).

  2. As its subtitle suggests, Dinnerstein’s Swinging the Machine argues for a close connection between jazz-related dance and the impact of machines on American life: “big-band swing, tap dance, and the lindy hop were public models of humanized machine aesthetics” (12). He goes on to assert that “as machines speeded up hands, hearts, and minds individuals had to engage these new aesthetics on the body” (13). Epitomizing such a connection was Duke Ellington’s virtuosic, high-speed composition from 1930, “Daybreak Express.” It seems plausible that a connection between the demands of assembly-line labor and an up-tempo dance that empowered the dancers to make their own moves may have been at work in the factories of the urban North. Not so in the coalfields of West Virginia. Mining was not assembly line work; each miner set his own tempo. The trains moved slowly on the constantly curving tracks that climbed or descended long and in places steep grades. I suspect the popularity of the Lindy Hop among black Mountaineers had far more to do with the simple fact that it was an up-to-date, big-city dance that permitted individual expression, provided an opportunity to demonstrate creativity in collaboration with a partner, and in the final analysis was just plain fun to dance, rather than being a conscious projection of larger cultural forces.

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