by Linda Dahl
But aside from such highly crafted pieces, it is likely that Mary also strove for a hit with the Clouds of Joy (she certainly tried to get one later). But she who had perfect pitch had a tin ear for the marketplace. The market in hits was cornered mainly by Tin Pan Alley, that quasi-incestuous warren of song-pluggers, composers, hucksters, hustlers, and businessmen. It was Tin Pan Alley that took credit for “Until the Real Thing Comes Along.” “Real Thing” started as a folk tune called “The Slave Song” (as in “slave” of love) that was strummed around the streets of Kansas City by two young boys with ukuleles whose names have been lost. “I’ll work for you, slave for you, lay my body down and die for you,” went the lyric. Recalled John Williams, “Everybody in Kansas City that could sing or entertain in a little club, they sang ‘The Slave Song.’ ” “They put everybody’s name but those two boys’ on it—it made me sick,” Delilah Jackson reports of Andy Kirk.
“Jack Kapp didn’t want us to record ‘The Slave Song,’ ” recalled John Williams. “He said, ‘No ballads, we got Guy Lombardo for that.’ ” (Kirk recalled that Kapp pushed for more things like “Froggy Bottom.”) Continues Williams, “I told him we don’t got any more songs. And Kapp finally said okay.” He liked the wistful, pretty melody and decided it would do with a new lyric and a good arrangement—Mary’s job. (In later years, Mary was loath to admit her part in “Real Thing,” disliking its corniness. But, says jazz historian Phil Schaap, “I got Mary to admit she wrote the 22-bar saxophone passage in the middle.”) The young team of Sammy Cahn and Saul Chaplin, along with help from others, including the team of Holiner and Nichols, who wrote for Ethel Waters, wrote a new lyric. “Cahn and Chaplin, those songwriters, they were little old boys hanging around us,” said John Williams. “Cahn was up there in the studio everyday; he would run errands for us.
“ ‘The Real Thing’ put us on big time,” John continued, “and that’s when we began to make a steady salary. It was on the Hit Parade for two weeks. That was the big thing in New York. Your band made the Hit Parade, whoever wrote the number had it made. Cahn and Chaplin idolized us after we made that, because we really made them. Cahn ended up a millionaire.”
But no one else associated with the tune did. John Williams ended as a hotel porter and factory worker. Andy Kirk took a clerk’s job for the Musicians Union in New York. The two boys with ukuleles never left Kansas City. Mary received her standard fee of fifteen dollars for arranging the tune.
The die was now cast. “After that, Kapp didn’t want us to play no more swing music,” said Williams. “We had to play all ballads—’What Would I Tell My Heart,’ ‘I’m Glad for Your Sake,’ things like that.” The band was now traveling regularly, in demand because of “Real Thing.” But it was the same old low-paying grind, Mary complained. “The sidemen were making $8 a night and paying $2 or $3 for a decent room,” wrote Mary. “Some of the guys gave me money—60 cents—to save for them every week, so they’d have money when they got to a major city.”
Meanwhile, the communal nature of the Clouds of Joy was being compromised. “Different agents and promoters were flying out to Kansas City to try and book the band,” recalled Williams. “On Labor Day of ’36, Andy flew to Chicago to meet Joe Glaser, who flew in from New York. They had dinner, and he signed Andy up. Glaser paid off the mortgage on Andy’s home and bought him some clothes and he had Andy sign him up as half-owner of our band. Which was the first big mistake Andy made, ’cause all the boys was mad about it.” “Andy sold them all out,” Claude Williams says bluntly, decades later. “And we didn’t need him—he was just the leader.” John agreed: “Under the old system, I paid off. First I would take out enough money for gasoline, to try to get to wherever we were going, then whatever was left was split 12 ways. If we made $50, we would split it with 12 people. If we only made $12, we’d split that with 12 people! And I have split up 75 cents. It wasn’t written, the commonwealth system, it was just one of those things.”
The Clouds had never really had a powerful outside manager before. Kansas City–based Harold Duncan, who had been booking the band around the Southwest, was bush-league. Glaser bought out the band’s contract with Duncan and elbowed aside other big-time, would-be bookers, including Willard Alexander and John Hammond, the Columbia A&R man who flew in to Kansas City to try to secure the Clouds—too late. Glaser’s influence over the Clouds of Joy was immediate and profound. While he certainly recognized and admired Mary as a musician (as their correspondence over several decades makes clear), Glaser was first and last a businessmen. And by all accounts, a tough, crude one if you got on his bad side.
Riding the crest of the “Real Thing” wave, Glaser got the band heavy exposure. “Glaser put us in the Trianon ballroom in Cleveland, where we broadcast nightly over a national hookup on NBC radio with America’s top sports commentator. What power and money can do!” Mary noted drily of this important date in the winter of 1937. As John Williams remembered, Glaser exploited the Trianon broadcast by taping the Clouds off the air. “He stole a record from Andy. That dirty rascal.” Those Trianon broadcasts, ironically, are among the few examples to document how effervescent the band was when it played for live audiences—reminding us how much this music was meant for dancing. The broadcasts also offer rare examples of Mary’s arrangements not recorded elsewhere: a delicate version of “Spring Holiday,” a rousing Kansas City–swing version of “Honeysuckle Rose,” and an ambitious arrangement of “Dear Old Southland,” amusingly studded with quotes from “St. Louis Blues.”
Mary was now getting the highest salary in the band. She and Dick Wilson had been given separate contracts at a special rate by Glaser, though they did not receive their pay if the band did not draw enough in a given week. She was now well dressed, in couture-gown copies (many made by Anna Mae back in Pittsburgh), a fur wrap, and her beloved I. Miller shoes. Yet she distrusted the new management, principally because she saw her friends continuing to be paid dismal wages. “I made a nuisance out of myself asking for a raise for others. I became real unhappy.” Mary scornfully dubbed the new setup of stars versus sidemen “The Golden System.” The egalitarianism of the past was officially over. For John Williams in particular, the arrival of Glaser meant the end of his privileged position in the band. (“I took care of the band. I was the band.”) But he and the other musicians were helpless to change the situation.
The band never was as big with the public as Benny Goodman’s, Artie Shaw’s, Jimmie Lunceford’s, or Duke Ellington’s; but for a time in the late thirties the Clouds of Joy ranked very high with connoisseurs. Despite pressure from Kapp and Glaser to concentrate on “sweet” ballads, the Clouds resisted abandoning their jazz roots, though treacly commercial tunes did begin to dominate. Kirk, says Peter O’Brien, was proud of the “sweet”—i.e., non-jazz—material. “I used to visit Andy Kirk all the time in the ’70s, at the local musicians’ union in New York where he worked in the office,” says O’Brien. “He told me one day that The Sweet Side of Andy Kirk, this double-pocket record on MCA, was coming out, and he was very, very happy about that. Andy’s idea was not to do that ‘jazz stuff.’ He used to say he played for the ‘elite.’ ” Remarked Mary pointedly, “When we first began to hit, everybody thought Andy was white—they had never seen a picture of him—because the band sounded like it on some things that we played.” “When we played the Apollo in Harlem for the first time,” added John, laughing, “the chorus girls were so surprised we were black.”
Even if Kirk had wanted to have a jazz band, he had little chance after throwing in with Glaser, who cast Mary and Dick Wilson, and others later, as niche players. They would be allowed their moment of jazz glory for one or two numbers, but the real draw, the real money, came from attracting the well-heeled, unhip society crowd—Kirk’s “elite.”
“JOE GLASER WAS the most obscene, the most outrageous, and the toughest agent I’ve ever bought an act from,” wrote Max Gordon, impresario of the Village Vanguard jazz club in New York. “Joe had started out
managing heavyweight fighters in Chicago in the Twenties and he never got over the manner and style of his Chicago days, even after he took over the management of Louis Armstrong and moved to New York, where he built up an independent talent agency with branches all over America and in Europe. He was tough, but we always got along. He proved to be right more often than wrong, and in the end I learned to like him. He once lent me 10 grand when I sorely needed it. ‘No interest, Max. Pay me back when you have it.’ That was Joe.” Others, like Mary’s boss in the forties, Café Society owner Barney Josephson, found no redeeming qualities in the man. But musicians accepted Glaser as a necessary evil. A black man, Louis Armstrong once said, had to have a white man working for him (and Glaser took on that job with Armstrong for the rest of his life). And if this were so, how much truer for a black woman.
In serving as booking agent and occasional manager for Mary over the years, Glaser wrote numerous letters to her, which she saved. They often reveal him as patient to a fault, occasionally sensitive, more often blunt; the letters of a man who liked the role of Big Daddy. She was proud of the esteem he held her in and liked to relate the high compliment he’d paid her: “You’re the only woman that’s a real musician.” She dedicated her hit boogie-woogie “Little Joe from Chicago” to him. Deep down, however, she was ambivalent about his influence. As the thirties wore on, it was no longer her face or Wilson’s featured on the posters and ads for the band but that of crooner Pha Terrell, and, later, vocalist June Richmond.
Whatever his failings, Glaser had real regard for the artists he represented. He used his toughness to bargain with tough Jack Kapp for a better contract for the Clouds of Joy, and separately for Andy Kirk, in 1937, demanding that Kapp throw out the contract Kirk had naïvely signed a year before (Kapp had signed up the Basie band to similarly dismal terms).
Still, Andy Kirk had reason to regret his relationship with Glaser. Late in his life, after Glaser had died, Kirk aired his feelings. Publicly, he remained reserved: “I didn’t like Joe Glaser too much. But I couldn’t dislike him, because he was bringing in the money. I played Yale, Harvard, all of them, through Joe Glaser’s office.” But speaking in private, many years later, Kirk was blunter. “You know what?” he told Delilah Jackson. “If I could have knocked him in the mouth, he would love me. If you cursed him out, he liked you. But I wasn’t that type. He acted like a crook.”
John Williams asserted that Glaser kept double books, a practice by which the agent books the band at a certain fee but pays it a lower rate, the agent pocketing the difference—plus his percentage of the “door.” (Louis Armstrong is said to have told Glaser that if he found out Glaser was stiffing him that way, he’d kill him.) “Andy told me that myself,” repeated Williams. “Andy didn’t have no business being a bandleader in the first place, ’cause he was easygoing and easy to take advantage of. It was easy to take the money. Billy Shaw was Glaser’s man, and he would be the one out front collecting the money. He would tell Andy how much we took in—and Andy was all trusting. A lot of those promoters stole from the black acts at that time,” continued Williams. “I mean, we were so glad to get a job and make money and travel and live like human beings that we were making enough, more than the average black anyway. They was skimming off of the top, but we knew it. Besides Andy, Glaser stole from Louis and all the black acts he had, like Lionel Hampton.”
Relates Peter O’Brien, “Mary said that John Hammond told her that Glaser was skimming off Mary’s private contract as well.” But were there wheels within wheels? Some in the band felt sure that Andy Kirk also kept two sets of books for the band, and that John Williams, as the second in command (and long in charge of the payroll) had helped himself to receipts too. (When Kirk opened a barbecue restaurant in Harlem in 1940, run by his wife Mary during the day and John at night, John’s gambling habit—and a need for ready cash—caused the business to fail, in Kirk’s opinion.) John, on the other hand, felt that Kirk would not have been “capable” of skimming money from the band. At any rate, to prove any such allegations would have been both difficult and dangerous. A musician who made such an accusation could easily lose his job, not to mention life or limb. And whatever the arrangements that Glaser made concerning the Clouds of Joy, the documents that the Associated Booking Agency kept have long since been shredded, a perfectly legal procedure.
History would judge Mary to be of central importance to the band, but after 1937 she began to clash more and more with Kirk about her role in the Clouds. Kirk was not disingenuous when he said, “There was nothing you could do to make Mary more impressive. So, we just let her do what she could do best.” That was only partly true. His vision was of well-oiled, predictable music, the obverse of what drove an artist like Mary. “When I used to play ‘Froggy Bottom,’ ” she remembered, “I would play a different solo each time and this used to make Andy Kirk angry because people wanted you to play exactly the same as the record, but I wouldn’t.” Indeed, Mary’s harmonics on the keyboard, which may have seemed “wrong” then, are conventional today, such as when she added an extra note, “like the sixth of a chord” instead of relying on the “sweet” major chords that predominated in the stock arrangements of the thirties. “Andy Kirk said to me, ‘Mary, you can’t use that note, that’s against the rules.’ ‘Rules?’ I said. ‘That’s what I hear.’ I’d write anything I heard.” (She also could fly into a temper when her music was not taken seriously by the band. “I was very high strung and sensitive. And when the boys fooled around at rehearsal with what I wrote, I got mad and snatched the music off their stands and began to cry and went home to bed.”)
Years later, when the verdict about the band was in, Andy Kirk realized that the feather-light yet dissonant chords Mary laid down in the background of her creamy, clean arrangements were the very elements that set the Clouds apart from other bands and appealed to listeners. But Kirk, like John Williams, also seemed nettled by all the critical attention that went to Mary. There were other arrangers in the band, they liked to point out, citing trumpeter Earl Thompson, who was a fine player (taking an excellent solo, for example, on “Zonky”) and wrote “All the Jive Is Gone” and “Bear Down” and tailored stock arrangements for the band. “Many of the things Mary Lou got credit for were actually done by him, but he was taken for granted,” said John Williams (and Andy Kirk); both felt that Mary was often given credit for compositions that were produced by the band at rehearsals. “We’d get together and we’d take a song that’s real popular and we’d make riffs. Trumpets, you do so and so, you make this riff, the guy next to him will do second harmony, third harmony, and you’d work it out.” Such claims have been made about Duke Ellington, too: players complained that “their” riffs were coopted (Johnny Hodges’s complaints are well documented). Still, it was undeniably Ellington’s overarching creative vision—and Mary’s in the Clouds of Joy—that gave each band its “sound.” Says Schuller, “Arranger Mary Lou Williams, with her light touch and sense of clarity, was the ideal moulder of the band’s identity.” Not every critic was as enthusiastic. Big-band writer Albert McCarthy feels that her writing contained “little that is really unexpected—unusual voicings or ingenuity of tempo or melodic line.… Craft preponderates over genuine creativity.” But Schuller, who took a microscope to swing in his history of the era, builds a convincing case for Mary’s often cutting-edge skills as arranger and “melodic editor.”
A case in point is Mary’s very fine Kansas City–swing composition “Twinklin’.” “Some of the things that she gave a name to, they were other songs,” said John. “She was using the chords out of those songs and improvising. Like ‘Twinklin’ ’ is actually ‘I Never Slept a Wink Last Night.’ ” While John correctly identifies the source of her inspiration, he begs the question of how good jazz material develops. “Of course, she used the chords on other songs,” says Peter O’Brien. “But everybody does that. Singling her out for it is subtly trying to take credit away from her.”
On the other hand, Mary
herself complained that her ideas were being stolen. It was always others who were making the money, she felt, no matter how hard and how brilliantly she worked. “I did 20 things in one week for Decca. They were all hits and people stole like mad,” she said. “They were just snatching tunes like mad.” Little wonder she would implode with rage (much more rarely would she explode). She fought for the publishing royalties due for her original compositions, but she rarely won. The fact was that small labels rarely did pay them, and sometimes the large companies as well. Says Peter O’Brien, “Decca Records—they ripped her off. Moe Asch of Asch/Folkways Records didn’t pay royalties at all. He said as much to me. Mary would go down there to his office in the ’40s, cry, scream, throw things—and finally get a check of some kind from him. Fighting to get your royalties: that’s a common thing even now. You’ve got to get a lawyer and raise hell. It’s rough. It’s very easy to rip off.”
In the late 1930s, when everybody went to the movies, there was always a newsreel, a cartoon, and usually a double feature. Mary’s niece Helen remembers Mary was visiting at her home soon after the release of one of her great songs, “What’s Your Story, Morning Glory?” (popular with the Clouds, but even more popular in the Billy Moore arrangement for Jimmie Lunceford’s band). Helen came home excitedly from the movies, announcing: “Aunt Mary, I heard your song ‘Morning Glory’ playing on the cartoon!” She never forgot her aunt’s response. Mary shrugged, knowing she’d never see a dime of royalties from the use of her song and said, pointing at her head, “I don’t care. They can take my music but they can’t take this. I can always do some more.”
“What’s Your Story, Morning Glory?” illustrates the complexities of musical borrowing. “Morning Glory” was recorded by the Clouds of Joy in 1938. It was not a completely original idea, strictly speaking; the first three lines of “Morning Glory” have the same chord changes as an old tune called “Aunt Hagar’s Blues.” And Mary did not take sole credit for the composition. She and trumpeter Paul Webster, in Jimmie Lunceford’s band, often corresponded, writing “letters like lyrical talking notes—it would be music,” said Mary. “I’d write the letter to music. So this time he said, ‘What’s your story, morning glory? I haven’t heard from you.’ And in about 10 or 15 minutes I wrote this tune. And he gave me a starter of two or four bars, so I put his name on it because otherwise I wouldn’t have written it.” But Webster, according to Mary, then took the 16-bar blues in “Morning Glory,” added a bridge of 8 bars with collaborator Sonny Burke, and dubbed it a new song. The result was the hit song “Black Coffee.” (Both songs have been recorded by vocalists such as Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Anita O’Day and others, and in band arrangements. Mary herself recorded “Morning Glory” as a solo at least four times.) Mary fought for compensation from Webster and Burke, but although, as she said, she demonstrated that “Black Coffee” was actually her own, she settled for peanuts—$300.
