by Gary Krist
For a ten-year-old boy with a yet-unrealized musical gift, working-class New Orleans in the 1880s was an auspicious place to grow up. Music was everywhere around him, and thanks to the cosmopolitan nature of the city’s population, it was as varied as it was ubiquitous. Peddlers in the alleys advertised their wares by blowing riffs on old tin horns; “spasm bands” of children, wielding cigar-box banjos and soapbox basses, played tunes for handouts on street corners; Latin and Caribbean songs spilled from the decks of ships at anchor on the wharves. In that age before radio, events like parades and picnics were the everyday diversions, and each one came with its own performing brass bands. Churches, meanwhile, reverberated with hymns and spirituals, dockworkers sang work songs and blues, and even funerals were held with a complete musical accompaniment.
“The city was full of the sounds of music,” one old-time New Orleanian remembered. “It was like a phenomenon, like the Aurora Borealis.… The sound of men playing would be so clear, but we wouldn’t be sure where [it was] coming from. So we’d start trotting, start moving—‘It’s this way!’ ‘It’s that way!’… Music could come on you anytime like that.”
Despite being surrounded by this feast of sounds, however, young Bolden apparently had no musical training until about 1894, at the age of sixteen or seventeen. That was when his mother allowed him to take cornet lessons from a neighbor named Manuel Hall, a short-order cook who was keeping company with her at the time. It was a late start for a musician, but Buddy learned quickly. He also had plenty of opportunities to play: The city’s established brass bands—groups like the Excelsior, Onward, and Eureka bands—would sometimes work long days, playing funerals or association affairs that stretched from early morning to very late at night. The older musicians would need a break now and then to have a beer or simply to rest their chops, and teenagers like Buddy would fill in for them. By 1897, though, he was already playing with his own regular band at parades and picnics. And despite (or maybe because of) his lack of formal training, he was soon attracting attention by “ragging the hymns, street songs, and dance tunes to create a musical sound that people were unfamiliar with.”
The Bolden sound, to hear witnesses describe it, was hot, wide-open, low-down, and—like his most ardent fans—“ratty.” It was bluesy and folksy, “music that [made] you want to dance.” Like many Uptown black musicians, Buddy couldn’t read music very well, but that didn’t matter much, since he could pick up anything he needed by ear. “He could go and hear a band playing in the theater,” one old friend recalled, “and he come on out and practice in between dances, and that morning, before the ball was over, he play that piece and play it well.” And it wasn’t only other bands he borrowed from. According to another contemporary, Bolden got ideas from everywhere—from what he heard in the “Holy Roller” churches he sometimes attended with his mother and sister, or even from the man peddling rags with his tin horn: “Buddy, he stole lots of things from the rag man,” one friend confessed. But each time, he’d “put his own feeling to it,” and thus make it his own.
And the music he made was electric. It was showy, improvisational, sometimes raunchy, and always very, very loud: “Bolden would blow so hard,” one musician claimed, “he actually blew the tuning slide out of his cornet and it would land twenty feet away.”
This, of course, is a physical impossibility, but it was only one of the legends that eventually grew up around the Bolden persona. Young Buddy did not, for instance, publish a scandal sheet called The Cricket, and he was not a barber. He did, however, spend a lot of time in barbershops, as did many of the early jazzmen, since the shops were common rendezvous points for musicians assembling personnel for upcoming gigs. At Charlie Galloway’s barbershop on South Rampart Street in the late ’90s, Bolden—still in his teens—got many of his earliest jobs. Working by day as a laborer and occasional plasterer, he would play by night in the neighborhood halls and honky-tonks. And the Bolden Band was soon attracting plenty of attention—and spawning a raft of imitators.
Even some of the older musicians took notice. Bandleaders like Galloway, Edward Clem, and Henry Peyton had already been making some innovative music when Bolden came up, but Buddy took the music in new directions. “Buddy was the first to play blues for dancing,” one fellow musician said, summing it up. Bolden was also one of the first New Orleans musicians to perform improvised solos, or “rides.” “With all those notes he’d throw in and out of nowhere,” another musician said, “you never heard anything like it.” But it was the younger musicians in particular who were picking up the new sound. Not just other cornetists, but clarinetists, trombone and bass players, drummers, and guitarists. Musicians like Freddie Keppard, Bunk Johnson, George Baquet, Pops Foster, “Big Eye” Louis Nelson, Willie Cornish, Frankie Dusen, even a young Creole pianist (something of an outsider among the Uptowners) named Jelly Roll Morton … all were soon doing their own innovations, taking old tunes—or making up new ones—and stamping them with their own personalities.
What exactly were they all playing? Critics would argue for decades about what the new music actually was. They traced its lineage to African, Caribbean, French, and/or Spanish roots, to ragtime, to various religious forms, and to secular traditions like the blues. But in a way, it was utterly new—music created by largely untrained musicians without much experience in any formal tradition: “That’s where jazz came from—from the routine men, ya understand—the men that didn’t know nothin’ about music. They just make up their own ideas.”
Perhaps guitarist Danny Barker summed it up best: “Who cared if you read music? You were free: free to take liberties, free to express yourself from deep inside. The public was clamoring for it!”
Many who heard him claimed that Bolden actually wasn’t a very skilled player technically. “He wasn’t really a musician,” trombonist Kid Ory once said of him. “He didn’t study. I mean, he was gifted, playing with effect, but no tone. He just played loud.” But that loud, piercing horn helped him break the music free from the more reined-in style of his predecessors, bringing the soloist—that is, himself—to the fore.
And people began noticing, especially women. Bolden—an attractive, “light brown-skin boy” with reddish-black hair, a round face, and a “sort of Maori look about him”—was soon a local celebrity in black Uptown, traveling around with a harem of female admirers who would fight one another to hold his hat, his coat, even his handkerchief (but never his cornet, which he allegedly didn’t let out of his sight). And he appreciated the attention. “Oh, he was crazy about womens,” a friend would later say. One of those “womens”—an older neighbor named Hattie Oliver—even bore him a baby son before his twentieth birthday. Buddy took care of both mother and child, at least for a while.
Eventually, though, the new sound played by Bolden and his emulators became so popular—among working-class audiences both black and white—that it began to draw attention from some unwanted quarters as well. Police would show up at so-called cutting contests (where two bands would meet and try to outplay each other) and begin “whipping heads” to restore order. And eventually the city’s reformers began to take notice, and they did not like what they heard. To their ears, the new sound was dangerous, an affront to their notions of respectability, restraint, temperance, and civil order. This new black music represented excess and licentiousness, a direct flouting of traditional moral values. Perhaps most perniciously, it promoted contact—much of it of the most scandalous type—across the color line, and in a context of social equality that was simply intolerable to most Southern whites.
Even before Bolden began to make his mark, reformers had already started protesting about the detrimental effects of so-called coon music. In 1890, the Mascot had railed against a “nigger band” then playing in one of the city’s more notorious venues: “Here male and female, black and yellow, and even white, meet on terms of equality and abandon themselves to the extreme limit of obscenity and lasciviousness.” Soon the Daily Picayune was also taking
up arms against the new sound, calling it “demoralizing and degrading”—something “wholly forced and unnatural.”
And now, with the rising popularity of Bolden and his peers, black music in New Orleans had taken an ominous new turn. “Jazz,” as one historian would later put it, represented the equivalent of “musical miscegenation.” In the context of the city’s ongoing crusade for order, racial purity, and respectability, that meant it had to be suppressed.
FOR black New Orleanians—particularly for those old enough to remember the days of Reconstruction—the last few years of the nineteenth century had seen some dismaying changes in the city. The New Orleans of their youth had been a relatively accommodating place for people of color. In the Louisiana of the early 1870s, black citizens could vote and serve on juries. Schools were desegregated, and interracial marriage was legal. Blacks and whites rode on the same streetcars, frequented the same parks and lakeside beaches, and often lived side by side in the same neighborhoods. Of course, racial prejudice did exist—as it always had, in New Orleans as in most places both North and South—and some of these freedoms were often denied in the day-to-day conduct of life. But as one historian observed, “For at least two decades after the war, many residents from the rank and file of both races played and worked together on amicable, harmonious, even equalitarian terms.”
In fact, New Orleans had had a long tradition of interracial fraternity extending back into its French and Spanish days. Relatively liberal manumission laws under the old colonial slave codes, combined with substantial immigration from Haiti, Cuba, and Martinique, had given the pre-American city a large and often prosperous community of free people of color. They often intermarried with their white French and Spanish neighbors, giving rise to a significant population of mixed-race children and grandchildren. These so-called Creoles of Color, most of them French-speaking Catholics, came to occupy a position in the city’s social hierarchy somewhere between whites and their African American slaves; Creoles of Color often took up trades like cigar making, carpentry, ironwork, and shoemaking (some of them even owned slaves of their own).
In the cosmopolitan atmosphere of nineteenth-century New Orleans, social and sexual relations between these people of color and white New Orleanians were not unusual, even engendering a widely accepted system known as placage, in which a married white man would establish his mixed-race mistress in a separate household of her own. So-called quadroon balls—widely anticipated and often quite formal and luxurious—would bring these couples together, providing a context in which white men and young mixed-race women (and usually the women’s mothers) could meet and come to mutually agreeable terms for a relationship. Such liaisons continued to occur well beyond the end of the Civil War, and were regarded, at least in some circles, as perfectly normal and acceptable.
After Emancipation, of course, a steady migration to New Orleans of rural ex-slaves complicated the racial dynamics of the city. The newly arrived African Americans—far less educated and predominantly Protestant and English-speaking—tended to cluster in Uptown neighborhoods, while Creoles of Color remained mostly in their old neighborhoods on the other, downriver side of Canal Street. But although tensions and competition existed between the two groups, they often worked together for Reconstruction-era legislation granting rights to all people of color, whether black or mixed-race, African American or Afro-Creole.
All of this had begun to change in the late 1870s, when the Compromise of 1876 brought the end of Reconstruction. With the removal of federal troops from the South, white “Redeemers” had acted quickly to assert political control over New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana. A new state constitution in 1879 removed many of the equal-rights provisions put in place right after the war. But even so, the Redeemers (many of whom eventually wound up on the Committee of Fifty that played such an important role in the Hennessy affair) were reluctant to do too much too soon. Fearing a return of federal military intervention, they did not begin to codify white supremacy (a term that in nineteenth-century Louisiana carried no pejorative connotation among most whites) for some time. Even as late as 1884–85, when New Orleans hosted the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, interracial contact was still relatively free. One prominent visitor of the day, writer Charles Dudley Warner, was pleasantly surprised by what he saw at the fair. “White and colored people mingled freely,” he reported. “On ‘Louisiana Day’… the colored citizens took their full share of the parade and honors. Their societies marched with the others, and the races mingled on the grounds in unconscious equality of privileges.”
But starting in 1890—just around the time that Mayor Shakspeare and his allies had begun their campaign against the Italian underworld—Louisiana whites decided it was time to reassert old racial hierarchies as well. And in this task the white elites had the full support of the white working class, now feeling the pinch of job competition from black workers. New steps were taken to assert an inviolable color line in everyday life, and at the same time to systematically erase the “middle-caste” distinction enjoyed by the city’s Creoles of Color. The most ominous of these efforts was a movement to institute a railroad segregation law. Naturally, political opposition to the proposed measure—Section 2 of the 1890 Louisiana Legislature’s Act 111—was fierce. But by the summer of 1890, Act 111 had been passed by the legislature, becoming the state’s first official Jim Crow law. Unfortunately, it would not be the last.
The story of how this pernicious new law was tested by a young man named Homer Plessy, a light-skinned Creole from the Faubourg Tremé, is well known. Less well known is the fact that Plessy’s arrest on June 7, 1892, was entirely orchestrated by an organization of well-heeled Creoles of Color known as the Comité des Citoyens. Even the train conductor and arresting policeman were in on the plot, calmly apprehending the young shoemaker when he refused to leave the whites-only carriage of an East Louisiana Railroad train. But although Plessy’s court challenge would take years to work its way to the Supreme Court, the onslaught of Jim Crow in Louisiana just continued. Over the next few years, other new laws were passed to suppress the status and freedom of the state’s black population. Interracial marriage was banned again, and even interracial boxing was prohibited (after a match in which a black featherweight fighter convincingly dismantled his white opponent in the ring). Worst of all, a movement arose for yet another new state constitution, the effect of which would be to deprive virtually all of the state’s black residents of their right to vote. And when Plessy v. Ferguson was finally decided by the Supreme Court in 1896, it was yet another blow: the court upheld the Separate Car Act, institutionalizing the concept of “separate but equal” accommodations for whites and blacks (both African American and Creole) for decades to come. Jim Crow had arrived in Louisiana to stay.
And now, in the late ’90s, the self-styled forces of white supremacy began to target yet another arena of black aspiration—the new music being played by Buddy Bolden and the other proto-jazzmen. For many whites in the city, the music challenged the spirit of Jim Crow in a literal way, by bringing white and black audiences together, but also symbolically as well. Jazz was, in a very real sense, an expression of defiance, a projection of black male power that rebelled against the increasing efforts to marginalize and suppress the race. As such, it was viewed as a threat not just to respectability but to the entire social order that was being reasserted in the post-Reconstruction South.
Even so, an organized effort to quash this less tangible form of black self-assertion would come only gradually over the next years. In the meantime, there were just sporadic and unorganized acts of intimidation—a band at a “Negro fish fry” broken up here, a racially mixed street concert raided by police there. In 1896, during one of the city’s occasional smallpox epidemics, an effort would be made to close the notorious “Negro dives” of Franklin Street, ostensibly for health reasons; the effort did not succeed. But with the opening of the two Storyvilles in 1898, it was hoped that the black jaz
z culture could similarly be segregated and contained, moved out of the sight of respectable New Orleanians. In this first phase of the city’s war of reform, all that was disrespectable and disruptive, if it could not be stamped out, would at least be kept within boundaries.
But jazz, like prostitution, would not be so easy to control. A few months after the opening of Storyville, after the start of the Spanish-American War, Buddy Bolden and his band were playing at the wharf at the end of St. Louis Street, sending off a Negro regiment bound for Cuba. The band was playing “Home, Sweet Home”—in their own expressive way—as the ship moved away from the dock. But then many of the soldiers on board, overcome by a nostalgia evoked by the music, began jumping off the ship with their own musical instruments and swimming back to shore. “I’m telling you, that was it,” one musician said, recalling the incident. “Over the side the boys went; they just couldn’t take it. [We] had banjos and violins floating on that river for a week.”
Of course, this story may be at least partly apocryphal, but it hints at the power of Bolden’s music as the kind of disruptive force unwelcome to the city’s powers-that-be. In fact, according to some reports, military bands in New Orleans were forever-after forbidden to play “Home, Sweet Home”—in a jazzy style or otherwise. The song’s message, after all, was hardly conducive to persuading men to go off and be killed for their country.
