With Billie

by Julia Blackburn

  † Quoted in Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, Jazz: A History of America’s Music, p. 311.

  ‡ There were several particularly bloody battles with the Irish Catholics who arrived in the late 1840s, escaping from the horrors of the potato famine. They were at once thrown into conflict with the resident black population, competing for the lowest-paid jobs and the cheapest housing. In 1854 there were open street fights between the two groups, and in 1863 there was a riot when Irish youths went on the rampage. In 1900 another Irish-led riot left hundreds dead and wounded. By then the police were mostly Irish and did little to control the violence, and even participated in it.

  § How the Other Half Lives, 1891, p. 156.

  ‖ By 1940 that number had increased to 500,000, still contained within the same area.

  a According to Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 1944, in 1928 in the United States as a whole there was one bed for every 139 white persons and one bed for every 1,941 coloureds (p. 172).

  b The strange madness of segregation was strictly maintained at the Cotton Club, where the ‘high-yeller dancing girls, who in white company could pass for Caucasian’, were not allowed to mix with the all-white audience who had come to be entertained.

  c Welfare Island housed a hospital and a workhouse. Most of the women who were sent there were charged with prostitution and, according to Harry Anslinger at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, ‘practically all the prostitutes committed were drug addicts’ (The Traffic in Narcotics, 1953, p. 94).

  d Quoted in David Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 1981, p. 306.

  e John Chilton, Billie’s Blues, 1975, p. 22.

  f Dove was born Lillian Bohny in New York in 1900. She joined the Ziegfeld Follies in 1917, made her first film in 1921 and hit the big time in 1923, playing opposite Douglas Fairbanks in The Black Pirate. After twelve years she retired from show business, and in her private life she was a pilot, a painter and a poet.

  ELEVEN

  Elmer Snowden

  ‘She’d call me her daddy.’

  Elmer Snowden* was seventy-one years old when he was interviewed by Linda Kuehl in October 1971. He said nobody could believe he was so old, and anyway he didn’t care because he could still ‘get almost as much at seventy’ with the young girls who hung around the bandstand as he did when he was a young man.

  He first met Clarence Holiday in Baltimore around 1910 when they were just ‘kids in short pants’. They went to school together at the Tin Factory on Calvin and Gold, and then Clarence moved to somewhere in the east of the city, but Elmer couldn’t remember the name of the street. He thought Clarence was about two years older than him and had been born in Baltimore, but he wasn’t sure.†

  They were both learning to play banjo. Elmer started with the Northwest Baltimore Group and Clarence was with the East Baltimore Group; and then Elmer was in Eubie Blake’s band, but Clarence was not taken on there because he couldn’t read music. They’d see each other when they played a dance. ‘We weren’t that close because we were from different sections of town. But he was a fine guy to hang out with and when we got together we were good friends; he was a musician and I was a musician, and musicians have a language of their own.’

  While they were still young they played Murray’s Casino on Preston Street and St Mary’s Hall and the Pitheon Castle, and Elmer remembered going to big rough places like Galilee Fishner’s Dance Hall in East Baltimore. They’d change into long pants when they went out on a job. The girls were always there, ‘hanging around when we was playing. You never had to worry.’ As soon as the performance was over the musicians set down their instruments while they went to get paid, and that was the sign for the girls to move in. The one who managed to grab your instrument was the one you’d be with for the night and ‘you were her man’.‡

  The bands used to have ‘battles’ to see who got the most applause on a particular instrument, and Clarence and Elmer competed on the banjo. Elmer said he was the best at that time and ‘It got so they wouldn’t let me play and made me a judge.’ The prize for winning was five dollars.

  Everyone who spoke of Clarence Holiday remembered him as a ‘happy-go-lucky guy’ who was full of fun. The trombone player Sandy Williams was in Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra with Clarence in the early 1930s. He tried to explain more about this happy-go-luckiness. He said, ‘All sorts of things would seem funny to him. If he saw a guy walk across the street and break his neck, he’d be laughing. He was that type. He and Billie were not the same. He was more of a clown, but I’ve never seen Billie being a clown.’

  Clarence laughed when he was sober, but he laughed even more when he was drunk. According to Sandy Williams, ‘He was a liquor-head, just like his daughter … he loved his booze. He’d drink anything you put into a glass.’ He remembered how he and Clarence were once in Atlantic City together with the orchestra, and every morning they’d get up early and go down to the beach with bottles of whisky – or was it gin? – and they’d bury a bottle in the wet sand to keep it cool. On one occasion the tide came right up, leaving the bottle buried far out to sea. Clarence didn’t want to wait for the tide to turn and so he waded out into the water. He went as deep as his armpits, fully dressed, and never mind that he couldn’t even swim! That was the kind of man he was.

  Everyone who spoke of him agreed that Clarence was not ambitious. He never wanted to set up his own band and he was never a soloist. People remembered him for his steady rhythm. He was also said to be a good singer, ‘a shouter not a crooner’, but he never recorded, so it’s not possible to compare his voice with his daughter’s. He earnt himself the nickname LibLab, because he knew how to chat up the girls, but even when he was drunk he was never violent to women.

  Elmer remembered the first time he heard of Billie’s existence. This was in October or November 1917. Clarence said to him quite casually, ‘ “You know I’m a daddy now!” I said, “You’re a what?” I never even heard of a wife or nothing, but in those days it was one of those things. A wife? What’s that? Because there were kids here, there and everywhere.’

  And then Elmer was introduced to Billie – he thought it was in 1918 or 1919. Anyway, he was with Eubie Blake’s band at the time and a piano player called Joe Rochester invited them all to go over to the house where Clarence was living on Jefferson Street in East Baltimore. And there in the house Elmer saw a three-year-old child whom he described as ‘an ugly little thing, a homely-looking baby’. Clarence explained that this was his daughter and asked Elmer to be the girl’s godfather. ‘I was too young to know what godfather meant, so I asked the piano player, who was a man, and he told me it meant I had to take care of her. But I thought, I can’t even take care of myself with the money I’m making … so I never said if I would or wouldn’t be her godfather.’§

  The next time Elmer met Billie was in New York in 1927, or it might have been 1929. By then he was running five different bands and doing very well. She was singing in a little back room at a club called the GoGrabbers, and he told her that he liked her sound and that she shouldn’t be performing in such a dump. He tried to persuade her to go to the Hot Feet Club. She said she’d see about the Hot Feet, but went to Pod and Jerry’s instead. He felt it was not such a bad choice because ‘you could make good money there too’. He remembered how the gangsters used to come in at Pod and Jerry’s and they’d say, ‘Close the door! Put the floor show on!’ And there was one gangster who liked to produce a 500-dollar bill and put a match to it and let it burn. Sometimes the musicians would try to grab the bill from him before the serial number was destroyed, because then it could still be redeemed at a bank.

  After a while Elmer got talking with Billie, but he didn’t ‘put her together with Clarence’. And the name Holiday ‘didn’t ring a bell’. Then she told him she was from Baltimore and said, ‘My father’s a musician too’, and it all fell into place. Elmer didn’t want to confess that he was more or less her godfather, because he had not done much in the way of taking care of her, but wh
en he finally got round to it, Billie told him not to worry, she knew the story already.

  Elmer found her a lovely, beautiful person. He’d often come to see her with his girlfriend when he’d finished playing at Small’s Paradise and she was always friendly and lively. They’d sit and talk, and then they’d go through a side door to a bar at the back where they could buy ‘needle beer, which had something in it – usually ether – to make you high’, or they’d have ‘bath-tub gin’ – another Prohibition speciality. After that they might go to a basement place west of 7th Avenue where Art Tatum was playing piano, and they often ended up at Elmer’s reefer pad, because he had ‘the biggest reefer pad in New York. If they had raided my place, not a show in New York would have gone on. A girl from Chicago used to come with a shoe box of the stuff … She was selling the reefers and I was selling the reefers, and between the two of us we made good. And we paid off the elevator man who kept the cops off us. I had all the white bands, all the coloured shows … Glenn Miller’s band … and Tommy Dorsey and his group, and Jimmy Dorsey and his … They’d call in for their orders and I’d have it all wrapped up for ’em, every night. And Louis [Armstrong] – every night when he got off from work, I’d put forty reefers in a kitchen matchbox for him.’

  Sometimes Elmer was with Billie when she met up with her father. They didn’t see too much of each other because Clarence was often away on tour with Fletcher Henderson,‖ but when they were both in town, they’d ‘hang out and have a ball’. They’d meet at the Rhythm Club or the Band Box, or at a place called Big John’s. Big John was an Italian who was ‘father to all the musicians, and he’d have a pot of soul food – lima beans and pigs’ feet – always on the stove in the back of his gin mill,a so you always had something to eat and a place to sleep if you needed it.

  Billie wanted everybody to know that Clarence was her father, even though Clarence preferred to keep this fact a secret because he felt it made him seem old. Elmer said that the two of them had ‘very different dispositions’ but ‘They were just like this. Like brother and sister. Very close.’ Clarence had a ‘very warm feeling towards his daughter’, and whenever he was on his own with Elmer he’d always say, ‘Now don’t you forget. I want you to take care of her.’b On 23 February 1937, Clarence died as a result of influenzal pneumonia. He claimed he had always had weak lungs, ever since he had been gassed in the trenches in France during the last year of the First World War,c and because of that even the slightest cold could lead to life-threatening complications. He was on a tour of the South, and he first got sick when they were in Fletcher Henderson’s home town of Cuthbert in Georgia. He stayed in hospital there for a couple of days and then went on with the band to Texas. It was there that the sickness got much worse, but nowhere would take him in until they reached Dallas, where he was admitted to a servicemen’s hospital. Billie was told of his death on 1 March.

  Elmer said Billie never wanted to talk about her father’s death. ‘It hit her harder than her mother’s death, because she loved her father so.’ And after Clarence died she made a point of always trying to come and see Elmer anywhere he was playing, and he would try to go and see her too. ‘And when I went to where she was working she would jump off the bandstand and hug and kiss me and call me her daddy. Because her daddy had gone.’

  * Elmer Snowden, guitar, banjo, saxophones, band leader and very successful businessman. He was born in 1900 and died in 1973.

  † Elmer kept changing the date of their first meeting and later in the interview he said it was in 1914 or 1915, when ‘I was about seventeen and he was a littler older’.

  ‡ According to Wee Wee Hill, Billie’s mother Sadie met Clarence at a carnival and he ‘romanced her’ on that first night. Maybe he was playing banjo and she was the one who picked it up. Elmer Snowden never saw her together with Clarence in Baltimore, although he met her later.

  § Elmer said he was making fifty-six cents a night, fifty cents for overtime and seventy-five cents for an ‘out-of-town engagement’.

  ‖ Billie was keen to work alongside Clarence in the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra and for a while she did until Clarence’s wife Fanny became jealous and Billie was made to leave. John Hammond gave a very different account of Billie’s relationship with her father. ‘I said, “Clarence, you didn’t tell me you had a daughter. She’s the greatest thing I ever heard!” He said, “For Christ sake, John, don’t talk about Billie in front of all the guys. They’ll think I’m old. She was something I stole when I was fourteen.” … I never heard a parent referring to a child with so much contempt and horror. So I knew there was no relationship between the two.’

  a ‘Any cheap saloon, bar or night-club’, but, during Prohibition times, ‘a speakeasy, selling bootleg whisky without a licence’ (Dictionary of American Slang).

  b Elmer was sorry that he couldn’t take care of her and was upset when he saw Billie without work and in difficulties. ‘I remember Billie in 1941, 1942. She wouldn’t have a job. She’d just be sitting in a corner like this. And she’d see me coming in and I’d put my arms around her and I could feel the warmth coming from her, and I’d say, “How are you doing?” And she’d say, “So-so.” ’

  c According to Nicholson, Clarence’s ship set out for France on 20 October 1918, twenty-two days before Armistice Day, and so he had little time to see action.

  TWELVE

  Fanny Holiday and Clara Winston

  ‘She was a fat thing with big titties.’

  People described Clarence’s wife, Fanny Holiday, as a short, dumpy woman, who was quiet and nice and friendly. But that was not the way she saw herself. She said she certainly wasn’t as short as Billie’s mother Sadie and on top of that, she was from Virginia and ‘we’re the meanest women in the world’.

  Fanny first met Clarence one night in 1920 when she went to a dance at the Waltz Dream Ballroom in Philadelphia; but he wasn’t in a band playing the guitar or banjo, he was just running the elevator. They started to live together in 1924, when he was ‘working to be a musician’ and had got himself a room in New York. They were married in 1927.* Talking about him more than thirty years after his death, Fanny still had fond memories of Clarence. She said he was a good-looking boy who loved to romance her, and he’d sing songs to her in the house. Of course he was a ‘liquor-head’ just like his daughter, but he was also the boss and Fanny looked up to him and listened to him.

  Clarence wasn’t considered to be a lady’s man† and his friends insisted he was no pimp, either. For her part, Fanny accepted that her husband went out catting sometimes‡ and she knew all about his relationship with a big white woman called Atlanta Shepherd, who worked as a dime-a-dance dancer at Remie’s Dance Hall on 66th and 67th Streets. Atlanta had borne Clarence a daughter called Mary,§ on his birthday in 1932, but even that didn’t seem to bother Fanny; she always referred to Atlanta as ‘wife-in-law’ and the two of them were on friendly terms. But she hated Billie’s mother Sadie with a vengeance. She saw her as a serious rival who was always hanging around her husband and ‘dibbin and dabbin’ and following him wherever he went.

  Fanny remembered an occasion when she and Clarence were at a club on Lenox Avenue, along with a whole party. He was minding his own business, but then Sadie came in and started to talk to him. Fanny was sure ‘she was trying to agitate me. My temper went up. I took up my fists and beat her. A guy picked me up and took me out of the club and wouldn’t let me come back.’ Another time she had a hunch that Clarence and Sadie were together somewhere and so she took a ride around 125th Street until she found them. And that was when she said she did her best to try to kill Sadie.

  When Billie first came to New York, she wanted to stay with her father and her stepmother, but Fanny wouldn’t hear of it. She and Clarence had recently moved to an apartment on St Nicholas Avenue‖ and they had three bedrooms as well as a sitting-room, so there was lots of space. Clarence was often away on tour with Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra while Fanny made herself a bit of money by run
ning an ‘after-hours in-the-home place’ where you could go and ‘have a little taste’ and take your girlfriends up. But it was just for friends who knew the family well; she had to know who you were, and you had to be invited.

  As far as Fanny was concerned, Billie was no better than her mother, what with calling Clarence Daddy, ‘just to be insulting to me’, and trying to win his sympathy in one way or another. She said that Billie was nothing but a ‘fat thing with big titties’, and she didn’t approve of the kind of life she was living and certainly didn’t want her to be ‘doing it in my home … She was growed up then. I couldn’t teach her nothing. Couldn’t do nothing with her. She didn’t look no thirteen. She looked like a growed woman.’

  One night Billie turned up and complained that a boyfriend of Sadie’s had approached her; she pleaded to be allowed to stay in St Nicholas Avenue because she was scared. But Fanny was sure this was just a cunning way of trying to get Clarence’s sympathy and wouldn’t change her mind.

  For a while, however, Billie did sometimes sing with Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra, and Clarence was pleased to have her around. But Fanny saw this as a threat and persuaded Fletcher to throw Billie out, saying that if he kept her it was going to cause the break-up of her marriage and there would be ‘a lot of hair pulling and a whole lot of things’.

  Clara Winston had also known Fanny and Clarence at this time. Linda Kuehl described Clara as a ‘plump, bleached-blonde woman who had been one of the biggest madams in Harlem’. When they met for the interview she was wearing a blue shortie negligee and at one point during the conversation she lifted it up to show off a naked buttock.

  Clara explained that, as a woman, she’d ‘been through hell’ and nowadays she was a bit of a lush and liked to drink beer or maybe some Henessy brandy, because she figured it stimulated her a bit. She said in that way she was different to most of her friends because they didn’t ‘go for the wet stuff any more. They go for the dry stuff. They go for cocaine. Everybody is each for his own. They can have it.’