by Linda Dahl
Seymour and Jeanette, who had appeared on Broadway in the hit show Plantation Days, knew all the entertainers who counted. “They introduced us to all the big players—James P. Johnson and Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller,” John recalled. They met the young comedienne Jackie “Moms” Mabley and her partner, John Mason, and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, whom Mary recalled as a great pool player and a terrific runner, able to race backwards and still beat the forward competition—and stars like Nina Mae McKinney, Adelaide Hall, and especially beautiful Florence Mills, who would die the following year. The Rhythm Club, where all the musicians went to jam, was close by. There Mary heard Willie “The Lion” Smith hold forth at the piano, and Benny Carter; and there she got reacquainted with Louis Armstrong. “People,” she wrote, “treated him like a god.” Seymour and Jeanette played the Lafayette Theater, and next door was Connie’s Inn, where Fats Waller played and wrote music for the shows at the club. Waller’s “Handful of Keys” was among Mary’s favorites then, and meeting the composer was one of her cherished memories. Although Waller was only six years older than Mary, he was already a recognized genius. “There was a musician friend of Fats Waller in Connie’s Inn, playing for the chorus girls, and this musician put me over in a corner and I just sat there,” Mary remembered. “Fats was a fabulous composer. He’d wait until the chorus had gotten set up, then the conductor would say to him, ‘Okay, Fats, compose a tune for this.’ Right away, he’d sing it off and play it. Later on, the musician said to Fats, ‘You see that little girl?’ Now, I used to weigh like ninety pounds, and I looked,” she added with characteristic poetic license, “like I was nine or ten years old. ‘She can play everything you composed today.’ Waller said, ‘She can’t.’ He put me on a stool and I played that tune and the other things he’d composed and he went simply mad, he threw me up to the ceiling—I thought he was going to kill me, he was so happy about it. And during that period I could play anything, even the classics if I heard them, you know.”
She added, “The owner, Leonard Harper, must have caught me playing, for I received an offer to play intermission piano in Connie’s Inn for two weeks while the band was doubling in the Lafayette Theater, making about $60 a week for about an hour. But my pay was swindled by my greedy husband, who taught me how to play blackjack and won all my money, keeping it. And then, Leonard Harper used me for his Brooklyn shows and several things in Newark to help out. I actually made enough to share with our group until we decided to go back to Chicago.”
Mary met the great Jelly Roll Morton, another major influence, around the same time, but she got a very different reception from him. Though reluctant, she was persuaded to go to Morton’s office, where she played her favorite of his pieces, “The Pearls.” “Almost immediately I was stopped and reprimanded, told the right way to phrase it. I played it the way Jelly told me, and when I had it to his satisfaction, I slipped in one of my own tunes. This made no difference. I was soon stopped and told, ‘Now that passage should be phrased like this.’ ” (Eleven years later, she had her chance to play “The Pearls” as she wanted on a record.)
THOUGH JOHN LIKED to maintain that Mary stayed quietly at home at the rooming house while he, to use her pungent phrase, was roaming “up and down the chorus line,” this was not altogether true. She was hardly living it up, but she had fallen in love: with the band’s banjo player, Jo Williams (no relation to John). “I remember taking long walks [with him] on Seventh Avenue, saving just enough money to eat one meal. We had such great times together. He never left my side.” They would stop at a landmark uptown, long since vanished: the famous wishing tree. It was a gathering place for out-of-work entertainers. “We’d find so many happy people there, including musicians and performers, all looking for work. There was always laughter there and fabulous jokes. Sadness and worry never stayed long.” Holding hands, she and Jo Williams would keep on walking. “It was just the most beautiful friendship anyone could wish for,” she wrote. They were both sixteen, and their closeness bothered John not a bit. “In love?” he scoffed. “I’d go out at night and leave them playing cards together. They were like two kids.”
Yet it was to Jo, not John, that Mary turned for protection from her landlord, an elderly man who was constantly on the prowl—”scaring me almost to death,” she wrote. “And I used to have awful nightmares. One night, I jumped out of bed and almost fell out of the window. After I told Jo about the landlord and my nightmares, he used to come to my room and sit in a chair, sleeping until dawn. In fact, he stayed with me both day and night. He was my best friend, who had tried so hard to protect me from harm. To tell the truth, we had fallen in love, being thrown together so much, but he was such a fine young man and respected John so very much that he’d never get out of line in any way. He would never attempt to hug or kiss me. And I was very much in love with him. We never mentioned my troubles to John. He probably would have said, ‘Oh she can take care of herself.’ For some reason I felt kind of loyal to John, who was never around. His slogan was, ‘Don’t worry about what your wife or girlfriend is doing.’ ”
AS FALL APPROACHED, life looked rosy. A year’s worth of work was lined up, at far better theaters than on the TOBA circuit. Indeed, Seymour and Jeanette were in the inner circle, as a list of black acts working in the white theaters in 1926 makes clear. There was a total of only twenty-one on all of the white vaudeville circuits—ten of them with Keith Albee and two with Pantages—and one of those acts was Seymour and Jeanette. Seymour James was a fabulous strut dancer; Jeanette’s specialty was “eccentric dancing” and rhythmic slapstick, as well as belting pop tunes. Both had elegant stage presence. “On opening night Seymour and Jeanette were just beautiful when they stepped out on the stage in their white clothes,” recalled Mary. “Jeanette had on a white dress and hat, the dress with fur on the bottom of it, and Seymour was in his white suit and straw hat.” Everything pointed to a fine future for Seymour and Jeanette—and the Syncopators. “The tour began on the Pantages circuit,” recalled John Williams. “Our first week was in St. Paul, and the next week we played the World Theater in Omaha. And the third week we were in Kansas City. All this time Seymour was really a sick man. He told us he ate soap to make his heart bad to stay out of the army. After he would do his little dance and come off the stage, they’d have a chair for him. He’d have to sit for maybe twenty minutes before he could go to his dressing room to get ready for the next show, and our whole show wasn’t but seventeen minutes. Anyway, he made it that week but he was too sick for us to go any farther. He wired New York and told them to set our route back, because we’d just played three weeks of our forty-two. Jeanette said we’re going to sit for a month and let Seymie recuperate and feel better.”
John sent Mary back to Pittsburgh and, with no prospects for work in sight, soon followed her there. They hung around for a month or so, but they could find no steady work together. John spent time gambling with Fletcher Burley while Mary, the native daughter, found intermittent work as a single. “Then we decided to go down to Memphis until Seymour got better; then we’d continue on those other thirty-nine weeks we had coming. I was always a mama’s boy, so I’d go to see my mother and father. Mary said, ‘I’m going too,’ and I told Mary, ‘You do, you pay your own fare,’ and she said, ‘I don’t care.’
“In Memphis, we had a six-room house, and Mama gave her a room in the front and me one in the back. Although Mama was there and we were in separate rooms,” John recalled, “Mama said, ‘People are talking, and Mary said she loves you and she wants to get married.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to get married,’ but she said, ‘Son, I think that’s the thing you oughta do.’ I said I hadn’t got any money—I did—and then she said, ‘Here’s five dollars, go down to the Justice of the Peace.’ So, November the tenth, 1926, we got married. No cake, no ceremony. No nothing. Just a marriage certificate. And we were young, and sowing our wild oats! Well, I wanted to sow mine.” Their open relationship became, if anything, even more relaxed after the marri
age; they were both free to come and go as they pleased, in John’s phrase, but had to be “home” by 3 A.M. to sleep in the same bed (although this rule appears to have been bent or broken quite a few times).
“There was very little love left on either side,” Mary wrote flatly. Despite this, they were more comfortable in Memphis than either had been in years, with a neatly kept house and a large backyard with a garden and chickens. “I was happy to be back where there were flowers and plenty of grass,” wrote Mary, who always took pleasure in nature.
Within weeks, Seymour James was dead. End of the act, but Jeanette wired them to hold on. Soon, she sent them train tickets to join her in Chicago to hone a new act; and in the winter of 1927, they did go north, hoping to get back into the big-time. As they worked on the act, Jeanette James persuaded “Ink” Williams, a talent scout for Paramount, to let Mary accompany her on a record date. It was Mary’s first time on record, and although she dismissed the date as “bandana days music”—the musicians all sound as if they were inside a tin drum, and they even misspelled her name Mary Leo Burley—her short solos on “Midnight Stomp,” “The Bumps,” and “Now Cut Loose” were, in the words of a reviewer many decades later, “strikingly precocious.” Conductor and music historian Gunther Schuller agrees, characterizing her solos on “Midnight Stomp” and “Now Cut Loose” as “notable for both their advanced conception and virtuosic execution, second only to Hines and Johnson.” To be sure, Mary’s technical arsenal at seventeen was precocious. Schuller enumerates: “Broken ‘walking’ tenths, right-hand octaves and tremolos (à la Hines), stomping shifted rhythmic accents, fleet hand crossing over-hand cascade figures, and other surprises—but in each instance shuffled around in different sequences.” For all her brilliant harmonic explorations and refinements over the next half a century, Mary’s approach to craft as an improviser, her rhythmic security, seem to have been clearly decided before she was even in her late teens. It is as fellow pianist Billy Taylor put it: she was “a natural metronome,” if at times she pulls the time a tad too breathlessly.
Making a record then was apparently no big deal. “We didn’t care about those records or the names they put on them,” said John Williams. “All we cared about was traveling. We were kids and were making more money than the average black person, who was working for $10 a week, and we were seeing all the big cities, so we didn’t care. And all through all the recordings, including the ones with Andy Kirk and the Twelve Clouds of Joy, not a dime royalty to me or Mary. Not a dime.”
The Syncopators followed Jeanette James to New York, but the unit broke up soon after when she quarreled with her new partner over money. “And that,” said John, “was the end of the band.” “Stranded again,” Mary wrote. “I couldn’t cook but I would try, like some spaghetti in a cheap dish that we all could share. One day I had only enough money to buy rice, and I remember cooking rice pudding for the guys in the combo, and I put it out on the window to cool. Half an hour later, I looked outside and saw a cat eating like mad. I said nothing to the boys, just raked off the top where paw tracks were and no one knew.”
While John hustled blackjack, poker, and crap games, Mary tried to get work as a single, and Jeanette James, also struggling to make it on her own, hired her again when she got work. The stage star Nina Mae McKinney heard Mary and offered her a job as her accompanist, but John was opposed to her going out on the road without him. She had offers to make piano rolls for a few dollars, but they fell through. “By now,” Mary wrote, “I was quite used to starvation.” When she got a job with a pit band backing the beautiful dancer Fredi Washington, who became a well-known actress, the star bought her a dress and shoes for the stage. “I’ve never forgotten her kindness,” Mary recalled. “She went to the I. Miller shoe store and bought me the most beautiful pair of shoes, silver evening slippers for $25, to open the show.”
She met Duke Ellington and his Washingtonians—not yet a full band—when she was backing Jeanette James at the now-vanished Lincoln Theater off Lenox Avenue, and played with several of the Washingtonians in the pit before they went on stage with Ellington. As John Williams explained, “The union had a rule all over the United States that when a traveling act like Jeanette James came in, they would make you hire two or three musicians who were in that local even if they didn’t do anything but stand by. They had to be there. So Tricky Sam and Bubber Miley sat in the pit and helped play the show.”
“I played the entire show in the pit, then went on stage to accompany her act,” Mary recollected. “That week was the most exciting of my life thus far. I was working with some of Duke Ellington’s boys: Sonny Greer, Bubber Miley and Tricky Sam Nanton. Never had I heard such music before.” Elsewhere she added, “If they were telling jokes that I should not hear, I heard them say, ‘Cool it, here comes the kid.’ Tricky Sam Nanton had a jug of whiskey—it seemed that this was the style—and he would throw his jug over his shoulder and take a big drink, but he was a great trombonist and guy. He helped me quite a bit with my music.”
These were the highlights in an otherwise grim existence, and in the spring, Mary and John, accompanied by Jo Williams, gave up on New York, limping back to Pittsburgh again to wait for the fall vaudeville season. They patched together work in Pittsburgh that summer of 1927 at a place called the Liberty Gardens. Then John’s luck picked up, as they thought, when a telegram came, asking if he’d back singer Mamie Smith. He and Mary went back to New York for a fresh start. “They gave the trumpet player from the Syncopators, a trombone player, and myself a job,” said John. “But there was nothing for Mary there in New York, and no way to make a living, so I sent Mary home.
“In 1920, Mamie Smith was the queen with the ‘Crazy Blues,’ ” John continued. “But by the fall of 1927, when I joined her, there was Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Ida Cox; so many blues singers that Mamie Smith couldn’t make a comeback. Well, the show broke up in about six weeks. Then the Musicians Union gave me my fare back to Pittsburgh. But Mary and I decided to go back to Memphis in time for Christmas of 1927.” Remaining in Pittsburgh, Jo Williams snowed Mary under with letters. What a contrast between Jo’s beautiful handwriting—the penmanship that all schoolchildren used to learn—and the descriptions he relayed of his mean existence. Jo attempted to sound jocular about his bouts of drinking. He was trying to quit, he reported, but sometimes got home too late for dinner. “I always keep a hot coal fire in my room and I was going to fry eggs in the hearth grate, but Ginnie, and Mrs. Riser and Anna Mae throwed water on my fire and put it out, so I went out and got me a big hunk of pork and onion and coffee. Then they said they were going to treat me like you did that time you cracked me when I was drunk. So they beat me with player rolls.”
Music was the basis of Jo’s passionate bond with Mary. He was searching for the sheet music to “Rhapsody in Blue” that she’d asked for, and in his letters mentioned arrangements by Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington and Red Nichols. Gaunt and wracked by coughs, the seventeen-year-old was fatally ill (and probably knew it)—with tuberculosis. By the following year, he’d be dead, only the first of a number of dear friends to die at a cruelly young age.
IN MEMPHIS, MARY soon started getting work on her own. “A dancehall promoter billed her as ‘Memphis Mary,’ but “she didn’t like that,” said John. “We didn’t go for all that clowning and stuff.” She worked on Beale Street at the TOBA theater. She was backing blues singers like Ida Cox and Alberta Hunter, who became legends in their own right, but what she remembered most vividly were the particularly filthy conditions of the theater and the abysmal wages. Musicians had to depend on tips to survive. John, however, brought about improvements. “There was no real union for black musicians then, and he got a union going,” Mary wrote. “One thing I have to say for John: he knew how to talk up salaries. Memphis musicians were getting $1.50 or $2.00 a night when we were there. John kept working on it and by the time we left they were making five and seven bucks, and I was making ten.”
By January of
1928, John had taken over leadership of a band that became very popular locally. “Everybody wanted me, so I could do what I wanted. I took over this band and had it for about eight months. We had eight pieces: two trumpets, two saxophones, a banjo, bass, drums, and Mary on piano.” (Among the players they recalled were Charlie Robinson and Clarence Davis on trumpet; Dickie Mullen on tenor sax; Harry Rooks on bass; Morris Mill on drums; and sometimes “the other” John Williams on bass or tuba.) “John maneuvered the new combo into clubs and hotels that ordinarily never employed a colored outfit,” Mary wrote. “Yes,” John responded, “but they only paid $5 for the guys in the band, and $8 for me, and that’s all.”
By springtime, John’s band, still called the Syncopators, was working steadily in a dance hall with the lovely name of the Pink Rose Ballroom, for which the band was redubbed the Pink Rose Orchestra. “There were tales that a very rich ofay had purchased this estate for his mistress, a black woman, years before, and it was considered very modern then,” Mary wrote. But John, ever the realist of the two, called it “just a barn built in back of this guy’s house right in the neighborhood, about two or three blocks from my house. It was a big backyard.” Today the site of the Pink Rose is a grassy slope, in an area dotted with abandoned buildings and drug dealing. “You could crowd maybe a thousand doing that close dancing they did in that time,” John went on. “But no Lindy hopping. Robert Henry did the bookings. His father was a white man, and you couldn’t tell Robert Henry from white. But he was a black man. We played about twice a week there, and then I would get other gigs with people. We did a lot of house parties, Mary and me,” said John.
Right about the time John and Mary moved back to Memphis and started the band, a shabbily dressed young man named Jimmie Lunceford also arrived in town to be the music teacher at one of the two black high schools in town. Lunceford, who was to become a well-known bandleader in the Swing Era, was soon a friendly rival of John’s: both had ambitions beyond the sleepy southern town, and John’s success at the Pink Rose fueled Lunceford’s ambition to put his own group together. He started the Chickasaw Syncopators, using high school talent and a good local pianist, Bobbie Jones, before casting his net beyond Memphis for players. “They were very good friends,” wrote Mary. “Everything that John did, Jimmie would try to do better. He and John used to play checkers and John would beat him. Jimmie’d say, ‘That’s all right; I’m going to get a band better than you.’ ” A decade later, Mary’s composition “What’s Your Story, Morning Glory?” became a hit in a new arrangement by Lunceford’s orchestra.
