by Herb Boyd
Meanwhile, within a few months, the former vicar, the Rev. Monroe, had parted company with Saint Matthew’s. By 1859, given his friendship with Mr. and Mrs. Henry Bibb and the further inducement promulgated in the speeches and sermons of the Rev. Garnet, he was ready to consider a new faith. He found the appeal of emigrationism irresistible, particularly after the draconian enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. He was soon off to Liberia, the US colony in Africa, as a missionary.9
Most black Americans were not interested in leaving the United States, believing that eventually the nation would live up to its hallowed creed. Though it brought unintended consequences, such as the riot of 1863, the Civil War was an indicator that change was on the horizon. Once again, amid the troubling and violent encounters, for the city’s black residents the church became an important refuge from the hostile environment. However, even the church was reeling from the impact of injustice and, worse, from an economic climate that necessitated the sale of Saint Matthew’s for $4,500 to Shaarey Zedek, a group of orthodox Jews who had withdrawn from Temple Beth-El.10 The leaders of Shaarey Zedek and Beth-El were often sympathetic to the plight of black slaves. Several of them, such as Rabbi Liebman Adler of Beth-El and fur dealer Mark Sloman, were abolitionists who assisted fugitives’ escape to Canada.11 Adler never equivocated on his antislavery sentiments. Throughout his stay in Detroit, he was openly supportive of the Republican Party because of its stance on slavery. The members of Shaarey Zedek were steadfast in their fight against slavery, and they had even greater civic clout after laying the cornerstone for a new synagogue, the first to be built by Detroit Jews and the first building in the state specifically built as a synagogue.12
After the sale of the church, Saint Matthew’s began its precipitous decline. That downward spiral would continue for a score of years before stability returned. Meanwhile, the smaller congregation met at various sites. The services often consisted of only Sunday school. The regular schooling begun in 1839 by the Rev. Monroe, also one of the teachers at Second Baptist, had vanished with him. At Bethel and Second Baptist, classes for children continued.
By the early 1880s, the gains made during the previous decade were fading fast. The influx of European immigrants in sections of downtown Detroit that were traditionally black quarters compounded the problems. The Jewish presence was particularly pronounced on Hastings Street, the main thoroughfare of what was gradually becoming a Jewish community. From 1880 to 1890, Detroit’s Jewish population swelled from about a thousand to ten thousand. Gradually, Jewish merchants dominated the area. The most that blacks could expect from this emergence was the possibility of employment, primarily as custodial staff, stock handlers, shippers and receivers, or warehouse workers. They had little choice but to accept menial jobs as immigrants slowly replaced black workers as longshoremen, coopers (barrel makers), barbers, cooks, teamsters, and doormen. It made little difference if the newcomers were not fluent in English.
As in the future, the black churches were facilitators, providing the businesses with a steady flow of laborers who, church elders hoped, would benefit the coffers with their tithes. The churches resorted to a number of attractions to build their congregations. A powerful, charismatic preacher was an absolute requirement; his presence was complemented by a choir that could, depending on the denomination, either rock a church or hold listeners rapt with comforting spirituals.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Second Baptist hosted several civic events. It was there that the Phillis Wheatley Home for Aged Colored Ladies, with the indomitable educator Fannie Richards as its leader, held its meetings. By 1898, the church had its first mortgage-burning ceremony after making its final payment of $700.13 Richards, a native of Virginia, had arrived in Detroit with her family in 1851. Considered the city’s first black teacher, she was the first to be hired on a permanent basis and was relentless in her determination to desegregate the city’s public schools.
In 1890, an anonymous scholar composed a fanciful sketch of what he believed to be a composite of the typical black family in Detroit. James Wilson was the name given to the composite head of the family:
He is 34, has a 32-year-old wife, an 8-year-old daughter, named Mary, and a 6-year-old son named Robert. A third child is due in five months. Wilson was born in Detroit, and his wife was born in Windsor, Ontario. His father was born free in Kentucky but moved to Ohio and then to Detroit in the 1850s to escape harassment. His mother was born a slave in Virginia, was emancipated and settled in Cass County, Michigan, by her former owners in the 1840s, and came to Detroit with her parents in the 1850s. The Wilsons are renting (and hope in a few years to buy) a small frame house on Hastings Street between Elizabeth and Columbia. There is a Negro neighbor on one side, a German on the other, and a Jewish family directly across the street. He lives one-half mile from work and usually walks there.14
The family was also probably a member of Bethel AME, Second Baptist, or Saint Matthew’s.
The Lamberts and the Pelhams could never in any way be considered average families like the fictional Wilsons. One patriarch, Robert Pelham, was energetic, with a sunny disposition; the other, William Lambert, was slipping into the darkness of despair. In April 1890, Lambert was found hanging from a rafter in the woodshed at the rear of his house. A week before, Lambert, seventy-two, had been found unconscious, apparently stricken with a brain disorder, from which he nearly died. After attending church one evening, he took a length of doubled clothesline, climbed on a sawhorse, passed the loop through a ring in the rafter, placed the loop around his neck, and then kicked the sawhorse from under his feet.15
Lambert’s death was a front-page story in the Detroit Plaindealer, a paper owned by the Pelham brothers. His funeral services were held at Christ Church, with the Rev. Dr. C. H. Thompson officiating. Among the pallbearers was attorney D. A. Straker, affectionately known as the black Irish lawyer, as well as Theodore Finney and Robert Pelham Jr. He is interred at Elmwood Cemetery.
Throughout his remarkable life, Lambert was a pillar of the community, an implacable foe of slavery armed with a steely resolve to uplift his people. In many ways, he stands as an unwavering beacon, a freedom fighter whose life and legacy is the template for self-determination.
6
BLACK ARTS IN THE GILDED AGE
The Gilded Age for Detroit occurred after the Civil War, from 1870 to the turn of the century. This was a bountiful era for a Midwestern city with an active port, and Detroit was an ideal location as a gateway to the West. Being on the winning side of the war and a staunchly Republican town also brought economic advantages. There was a gradual shift from wealth accumulated through land ownership to the development of a merchant class. Industrial growth, particularly in the manufacture of machine parts, teamster equipment, and stoves, was the mother of this emerging wealthy upper class. “In general, landownership remained important but became an auxiliary, rather than a main source, to major wealth until the real estate expansion of the 1920s.”1
During this period, there was a proliferation of gentlemen’s clubs, lodges, beer gardens, and various entertainment venues. These businesses, in their need for waiters, valets, busboys, coachmen, cooks, maids, and musicians, gave black Detroiters opportunities for employment. Particularly in demand were professional musicians. During the war, African Americans had acquired extensive experience in the regimental bands.
One of the most prominent bands was formed and led by Theodore Finney, who in 1857 had come to Detroit from Columbus, Ohio. When he joined forces with John Bailey, their thirty-three-piece orchestra was extremely successful and was among the first groups to feature syncopated music.2
According to several musicologists, Detroit was a proving ground for syncopated music, and Finney’s arrangements were exemplary of the sound and rhythm. Finney’s music, a reformation of the marching-band style soon to be popularized by John Philip Sousa, was a direct antecedent to the jazz-related brass bands that were to become so popular in the next decade. After Bailey’s d
eath in 1870, Finney reorganized the orchestra, and for several years it performed on the old steamer Frank Kirby, which plied the river between Detroit and Sandusky, Ohio.
When the bands weren’t performing for white audiences, there were engagements at black concerts, formals, weddings, and other celebrations. By 1870, the black population had expanded to more than two thousand, still less than 3 percent of the city’s population.3 An increase in the population meant more performances for the musicians among the city’s slowly emerging black elite.
Finney was not only a gifted and versatile musician, but also a savvy entrepreneur with interests in civic affairs. For the next twenty years, his orchestra would be an important institution and a training ground for some of the city’s finest musicians. Fred Stone and Ben Shook, who later led their own bands, were two members of Finney’s orchestra who gained considerable recognition.
Ensembles like Finney’s were basically concert bands that played a repertoire that included parade marches and political rally songs, as well as concert arrangements for picnics and social functions. By the 1880s, however, these public performances were few, and musicians were employed mainly in “disorderly houses.”4
When John W. Johnson settled in Detroit, his arrival marked the beginning of the brass bands. Born in 1865 in Ontario, Canada, Johnson had been trained as a cabinetmaker, but his interest in proficiency on the cornet gradually became a full-time endeavor. In 1884 he joined Dr. Carver’s Wild West Show and toured the whole of Canada. After several years on tour, he settled in Detroit in 1890.5
For a brief period, after his Canadian experiences, Johnson was a member of Finney’s orchestra. It was from this association that he learned more about music and how to develop his own organization. With the assistance of his wife, Katie, the Johnson household was a center of musical activity. After assembling his own band, he began performing throughout the city. His performances at Belle Isle and in Sunday-afternoon concerts at the old Germania Turner Hall were the talk of the town. It was through these performances that many aspiring musicians in Detroit improved both their musicianship and their job opportunities.
As it was with the brass bands in New Orleans led by John Robichaux, Johnson’s brass band was a small but powerful aggregation of twelve to fifteen players. Like the previous decade’s concert bands, his was in great demand. “The usual instrumentation of the brass bands was three cornets, one e-flat, two valve trombones, alto horn, baritone horn, tuba, one or two clarinets . . . snare drum and bass drum.”6
The popularity of the brass bands, with their emphasis on the Dixieland beat and the interplay among the horns, was slowly being overtaken by ragtime. This music associated with the renowned composer Scott Joplin was primarily performed by pianists. Joplin’s name is inseparable from ragtime, especially his “Treemonisha,” but Harry P. Guy, who migrated from Ohio to the city, claims the music originated in Detroit.
A musical genius, Guy as an organist and pianist provided an important bridge to classical music and the music of the black church. On Sundays he was the organist at Saint Matthew’s Episcopal Church, and on secular occasions he accompanied the internationally known Fisk Jubilee Singers. Not one to take a social indignity without protest, he must have been incensed in 1882 when the Singers were denied hotel accommodations in Detroit—a blatant example of the city’s continuing discrimination; by the late 1890s, only the theaters were free of discrimination.7
When his busy schedule permitted, Guy directed a boys’ choir. He founded the first African American music academy in the city. He was also a fine composer, and his music bounced with syncopation. His stylish arrangements were used by top entertainers, such as Eddie Cantor, Bert Williams, and Sophie Tucker.8
A consensus of historians believes it was Guy, Fred Stone, and Ben Shook who were responsible for giving the Finney Orchestra and later derivative groups their unique drive and energy. By the 1890s, this propulsive beat and the blues tonality attracted a coterie of composers to Detroit, including W. C. Handy. It was after attending a rehearsal of Stone’s Orchestra that Handy, who had toured the country as a cornetist with a circus band, first heard the moving syncopation of a Detroit band. In his autobiography, Father of the Blues, Handy recalled this visitation and his musical intentions: “. . . I had a secret plan to include a stirring ragtime number, ‘My Ragtime Baby,’ which our minstrel band had featured. It was written by a Detroit Negro, Fred Stone. I rewrote the high-stepper and programmed it ‘Greetings to Toussaint L’Ouverture’ so that the manuscript sheets would create the impression of classical music without changing a note of the original.”9 Stone and Finney, according to some music experts, may have been the inspiration for Handy’s “St. Louis Blues.”
When Finney died, in 1899, the blues was just beginning to sweep the country. His band of musicians were crestfallen by his death, but they were not about to let his precious institution crumble. Ben Shook, who had come to Detroit from Ohio—like so many other musicians of the day—stepped in and guided Finney’s orchestra quite capably for several years. The band prospered for a while, but it was hard to hold it together without a consistent flow of engagements. Gradually members began to drift away, joining other more productive units. But Shook was not dismayed. Like Fred Stone, his longtime Finney bandmate, he began assembling his own orchestra.
Shook not only handled the responsibility of fronting and booking his own band, but he was also a booking agent for other groups that played almost exclusively to white audiences. “He was a very fine musician and a pretty good agent,” recalled Charles Victor Moore, who was in Shook’s trumpet section, and saxophonist Johnny Trafton, also a member of the band, agreed.10 He could make his violin sing, and Shook often showcased his rich baritone singing voice. Through Shook and Stone, the Finney tradition survived.11
With the arrival of the Gay Nineties, an era fueled by the musical genius of black composer James Bland, the Gilded Age was slowly coming to a close. Bland, of course, can’t be credited entirely with that decade’s reputation for alluring entertainment, though it was his songs “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers,” and “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” that brought him lasting fame, a bit of fortune, and unfortunate calumny from black Americans. The latter song became the state song of Virginia until the 1960s, when African Americans could no longer stand to hear the song’s demeaning lyrics, none more detestable than the line “There’s where this darkey’s heart am longed to go.” Bland died of tuberculosis in Philadelphia in 1911, just about the time Charles “Doc” Cook launched his popular bands in Detroit and Chicago, principally on Saint Antoine Street, then the hottest thoroughfare in Paradise Valley—not that the entire valley was a paradise, according to the memory and poetry of Robert Hayden, who came of age there.12
Cook’s music had a way of turning the most depressing moments into a fanfare of gaiety and jubilation. It is not clear when and where his music career began, although by the time he was eighteen, he was living in Detroit. Also, according to Albert McCarthy in his book Big Band Jazz, as early as 1909, Cook (or Cooke) was already active as a composer and arranger in Detroit.13 One fact that backs up the testimonies of Moore and Trafton about Cook’s musical acumen is that he was one of a few black Americans to earn a doctorate from the American Conservatory of Music.14
Before leaving for Chicago, Cook led several bands in Detroit; Cookie and his Ginger Snaps was one of the more memorable. Though Chicago became his home, he still ventured to Detroit for many of his concert dates, which carried him all over the Midwest. Cook firmly links the music of the brass bands with the first identifiable jazz in Detroit. He was a solid extension of Finney’s music, having played with Fred Stone’s Orchestra and later in Ben Shook’s band.15
Almost matching Cook’s popularity was Leroy Smith’s band. Born in 1888 in Romeo, Michigan, located at the base of the thumb on the state outline, about a thirty-minute drive northeast of Detroit, Smith and his band was clearly within the society orchestra tradition—slow danceable wal
tzes and foxtrots with just a pinch of pep. His father was a trumpeter in Finney’s Orchestra, and in later years, he praised his father for the lessons from one of the best private violin teachers in Detroit. It was Smith’s opinion that the musicians twenty years earlier were better than those of the 1930s; he considered the earlier bands more versatile, not married just to swing.16
By 1914, Smith was leading a sixteen-piece ensemble at the Pier Ballroom, which was billed as a “ballroom of refinement,” indicating that it catered to white audiences of relatively high social standing. After this gig, he departed for New York, and by 1921 he was a headliner at Connie’s Inn, one of Harlem’s most celebrated venues.17
The Finney, Stone, Shook, Guy, and Cook tradition was the lifeblood of Detroit’s music scene for several decades. While their arrangements were imbued with elements of ragtime and early blues, they were also quite adept at performing spirituals or “sorrow songs,” as W.E.B. Du Bois characterized the music in his book The Souls of Black Folk. Classically trained musicians, such as pianist Bertha Allena Hansbury and organist Frances Preston of Second Baptist Church were even more exemplary exponents of sorrow songs. Hansbury was a graduate of the Detroit Conservatory of Music and did postgraduate work in Germany. Upon her return from Europe in 1909, she began giving private lessons from her studio on East Forest Avenue. Within a decade, she taught more than three hundred students.18
Preston, an accomplished virtuoso pianist, was more a performer than a teacher, and she occasionally traveled and performed in recitals with a company of singers. She had moved to Detroit from Richmond, Virginia, with her parents and quickly immersed herself in school and church activities. “She took a course in Detroit Training School of Elocution and English Literature and graduated in 1882 at the head of her class.”19 Despite her busy schedule and commitment to the church, she took graduate courses that prepared her as a lecturer and organizer for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. She was personally responsible for generating more than seven thousand pledges against the sale and consumption of alcohol.20
