The Missing Link in Jazz History ~ by Jason Berry ~

54 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\ Fall1998

" 0 one know, p,ed,ely when the di,tinctive wund of jazz music found its form. By 1905, Buddy Bolden's pio­neering horn play had made him a highly popular figure in black New Orleans. How much of a definable idiom had come together before then is a mystery. Bolden's band reportedly made a recording; however it was never found. Bolden himself was never interviewed. In 1907, after a ner­vous breakdown, he was institutionalized and spent the last quarter-century of his life at a state sanitarium near St. Francisville.

The word "jazz" did not gain popular currency until about 1914 (three years before the first jazz recordings were made). For at least a decade before World War I musicians called it "ragtime" or simply, "the music."

A 1993 series by Scott Aiges and John McCusker in the Times-Picayune sounded several authorities on the question of origins. Richard B. Allen, former curator of The William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive of Tulane University, estimated that jazz began about 1900. Bruce Raeburn, who succeeded Allen as curator, made a more general estimate - " the decade of 1895-1905." Lawrence Gushee, a University of Illinois music professor who has done important historical essays, told the newspaper: "My own view is that by 1912-13 there were New Orleans bands that were playing things that were pretty much like what was recorded 10 years later .. .! don't think we could go much further beyond that."

Jack Stewart, a researcher and member of the New Leviathan Oriental Foxtrot Orchestra, took a later view, of 1917 as when "the last pieces of the jazz puzzle were put together."

There is indeed a puzzle to early jazz and it encompasses more than differences on a point of origin. Perhaps there is no consensus on "when" because we lack a probing explana­tion of "how." How exactly did the music emerge? What were the streams of society and culture in a remote Southern

A 1rihvrc (a 1hr (rQdlt> of JAIZ

ORSON WELLES m"'ft of mem";"

"Bunk" Johnson's new orleans iazz band

TUES. JAN. l ra:3Q1 pm !

TOWN HAll

port that explain the flowering of a new American art form, sometime between 1895 and 19177

A large, untapped terrain of research surrounds the African­American churches in New Orleans and its environs during those years when the idiom grew. In the body of historical writings about early jazz, churches have been all but ignored. Yet the musical dynamics within black churches carry a powerful story about cultural memory as the music took shape. In a very real sense, churches constitute the missing link of jazz history.

~ In the body of historical

writings about early jazz,

churches have been an but

large personal archive, which is now a part of The Historic New Orleans Collection. Although some of Russell's research in Jazzmen has been revised or cor­rected (notably in Donald M. Marquis's 1978 biography, In Search of Buddy Bolden), the thematic lines that Russell sketched have worn well since the book's 1939 publication. Russell stressed the importance of early nineteenth-century slave dances at Congo Square as a cornerstone of New Orleans culture; he also saw the city as a unique environment - a multiculture before the term was

ignored. Yet the musical

dynamics within black

churches carry a powerful

story about cultural memory

as the music took shape. ~

Theory and the absence of churches In the six decades since Frederic Ramsey, Jr. collaborated

with William Russell and several other writers and record­collectors on the groundbreaking history, Jazzmen, a substan­tial body of research has given depth and texture to our understanding of the society that gave birth to jazz. Important raw mater-ials lie in the oral history interviews with dozens of first- and second-generati-on jazzmen at Tulane's Hogan Jazz Archive - as well as in Bill Russell's

coined, steeped in musical tides that sent jazz spreading across America.

Another collaborator on the book, Charles Edward Smith, made a lasting contribution with his chapter on the role of white New Orleans musicians.

Jazzmen provided a foundation for history. The theory goes something like this: New Orleans was a melting pot marked by the fusion of European and African musical forms. Congo Square slave dances planted seeds of a poly-

Fall 1998/ LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 55

Louis Armstrong, 1943.

rhythmic sensibility whose tendrils entwined with a late-19th century brass band style as it absorbed strands of ragtime and blues. Jazz emerged from a melding of African polyrhythm with European instru­mentation and melody.

In The Making of Jazz (1978), James Lincoln Collier wrote:

"The rags had the "stride" bass; the marches had the drumbeats; the dances ... the sound of the feet on the floor. This was hardly accidental: blacks, with their tradition of cross-rhythms, would be drawn to music with an explicit ground beat. As black musicians came into closer contact with the Creoles, they began to acquire the Creole repertory of marches, rags, dances .. . At the same time, young black Creole musicians, despite the objections of their parents, were hearing the blues being played in black honky-tonks, and they were beginning to inflect their music with blue notes and those implications of cross-rhythms so much a part of black music."

Like most jazz historians, Collier overlooks the dynamic role of church music in the birth of the idiom; however, he

56 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Fall 1998

underscores an important distinction between the darker black and fairer colored Creole musicians. The classically-trained Creoles, descendants of free persons, carried a European sensibility toward music, yet one that was flexible enough to adapt "blue notes" and "cross-rhythms" of musicians who carried a cultural memory of slavery.

Musicians on the role of churches Most of the Creoles were Roman Catholic.

Hymns of the Latin Mass, perhaps most elo­quently heard in Gregorian chant, were a far cry from the churches rooted in an African spirituality, with call-and-response singing, polyrhythms of hand-clapping, foot-stomp-

ing, freer body language and dramatic pulpit oratory. French was no longer the dominant language of Creole musicians in the early 1900s; however, it was a strand in the Creole cul­tural fabric that fostered an insular sense of superiority.

Music professor Manuel Manetta (1880-1969), spotlighted the elitism in a 1958 interview with Bill Russell, discussing early dance halls. "Bolden played on Cherokee Street, col­ored halls uptown .. . St. Katherine's Hall was right next to the church. Nice respectable dances. Perseverance, Cooperators, Economy Hall, Francs Amis - that was respectable. All the bright people would go there. The dark person wouldn't go there ... All the people was fair. Very particular too. They couldn't talk English good" - meaning they spoke Creole French.

"Uptown people wouldn't go down there," continued

Manetta, referring to the downtown halls of Creole benevo­lent societies. "And the Creoles wouldn't go in kinda halls like that Masonic [on top of the Eagle Saloon on Perdido and South Rampart.] All wild people. Ratty, you know? And uptown, they had ratty bands. King Bolden."

St. Katherine's, long since demolished, was a Catholic parish on Tulane Avenue that hosted weekend dances. Holy Ghost Church, farther uptown on Louisiana Avenue, spon­sored a brass band in the 1920s where a young Harold Dejan, who would become the longtime leader of the Olympia Brass Band, got his musical start. Catholic churches played only a small role.

One of the most popular venues where Bolden played, was the Union and Sons Hall, nicknamed Funky Butt, on Gravier Street downtown - long since demolished, across from City Hall. On Sunday mornings, just a few hours after dances that were by various reports rather earthy, the hall

Manuel Manetta.

turned into worship space for the First Lincoln Baptist Church!

In his 1986 memoir, A Life in Jazz, Danny Barker wrote: "Check out these small Baptist churches. That's where it start­ed and that's where it's at (emphasis added) ... Go to any place where there is a large group of under-privileged black peo­ple and, at the church services, you will steal away, steal away to Jesus! The city still practices burying the late deceased brothers and some sisters with the musical send off. There are still brass bands, about a dozen, but they don't have the sound of the old Onward, Excelsior, Eureka. Well, jazz still lives in New Orleans in the churches, and in the

future will come out and entertain the swingers under a new name."

Barker's linkage between churches and funerals is a vital theme in the birth of jazz. As early-century brass bands marched through the city - ushering funeral corteges toward the cemetery, playing doleful dirges in slow tempo - a ritual psyche was taking shape.

It was through brass band funerals that the music of sacred spaces reached a more pro-

fane arena of the streets; the slow tolling of dirges on the march to the graveyard gave softer spiritual currents to a culture that rocked with hot bluesy rhythms played in honky-tonks and bawdy houses of Storyville, not to mention the more respectable ragtime played at society balls and Creole halls like Economy, Perseverance, Artisan and Francs Amis.

A song like "Old Rugged Cross" (to cite but one dirge) sang of life's burdens, awaiting a happier realm, a world view shaped by slavery. After the coffin was lowered into the ground, the band departed the burial grounds, and broke into uptempo, bravura music - a "cutting loose" that signaled the soul's release from earthly ties. Dancers in the second line formed a cross-rhythm to the beat of the drum

Fall 1998 / LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 57

~ "The children and the old /olks

would come back from the cemetery

... They would all get right into the

jubilant /eeling 0/ this jazz music.

So that s how a lot 0/ the songs I sing today has that type 0/ beat . ..

The type 0/ music r m talking

about, known to all New Orleans

people alter they buried their dead,

was 'Second Line. '" ~

~ Mahalia Jackson

Wen you really deserve it, sit back and enjoy the pleasures of the Rib Room.

Sip a legendary "wash bucket" martini, try one of Chef Toups' weekly signature specials

An African-American woman dancing or marching in a street parade, August, 1951.

with the shuffle and scrape of shoes on the street. Historians have stressed that brass bands were catalytic

to the development of jazz. Comparatively little has been written about the street dancing in parades that followed the bands, though there is an ample photographic record in var-

ious collections, as well as a good deal of descriptive journalism about second liners and brass bands since the la te 1960s.

The flow of music between streets and sacred spaces left a lasting impres-sion on early artists. Of his boyhood, Louis Armstrong recalled "going to church regularly for both grandma and my great-grandmother were Christian women ... In church and Sunday school I did a whole lot of singing. That, I guess, is how I acquired my singing tactics ... At church my heart went into every hymn I sang." A few pages later in Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, he reflects: "When I was in church and when I was 'second lining' - that is, fol­lowing the brass bands in parades - I started to listen carefully to the different instruments, noticing the things they played and how they played them."

or treat yourself to the best prime rib that money can buy.

Kid Ory, the pioneering trombonist who gave Louis one of his first jobs grew up on a plantation near LaPlace in the 1890s, made trips to New Orleans as a teenager, and moved to the city in 1907, at twenty-one. In a memorable interview with Russell, Ory said: "Bolden got most of his tunes from the 'Holy Roller Church,' the Baptist church on Jackson Avenue and Franklin. I knew

Now is the right time to come to the French Quarter ... because the theater that is Royal Street is in full production and you can always find a front row seat at the Rib Room.

Free parking at Omni Royal Orleans Garage.

RIB BboM ROTISSERIE EXTRAQRDtNAIRE

CORNER OF ROYAL & ST LOLlS STREETS IN THE HEART OF THE FRENCH QUARTER. (504) 529-7045.

58 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\ Fall1998

he used to go that church, but not for religion, he went there to get ideas on music. He'd hear those songs and he would change them a little. In those Baptist churches, they sometimes had drums and a piano while the people sang and clapped their hands. Sometimes they'd have guests and invite

Mahalia Jackson, 1954.

a trumpet player or a trombone player to come over and play with them .... That's where Buddy got it from and that's how it all started."

That's how it all started. Bolden biographer Don Marquis identifies a Baptist church in a different neighborhood, where the Bolden family lived and worshipped; he draws no musical linkage between the church and the repertoire of blues and rags that Bolden played. Ory's remark is problem­atic on another score. Before the mid-century rise of gospel music, Baptist churches historically looked down on jazz and blues as sinful tunes. "Holy Roller" churches were small, vernacular congregations like the Sanctified, or Holiness churches, which shared commonalties of trance­like possessions with the Church of God in Christ and later, the Spiritual Churches. These congregations were more expressive and less conventional than the black Baptist churches.

Even if Ory inaccurately labeled a Baptist church as "Holy Roller," his comment, like Danny Barker's, is freight­ed with implications for jazz history.

"Each Sunday Bolden went to church, and that's where he got his idea of jazz music," veteran guitarist Bud Scott (1890-1950) recalled in the September 1947 issue of the Record Changer. Although a Baptist Bolden may well have drawn inspiration from one of the smaller, vernacular churches, where rhythms of religious song, the cadences of

The William Russell Jazz Collection

William "Bill" Russell (1905-1992) was a violinist, composer, archivist, and jazz historian. His extensive jazz collection was acquired by the Historic New Orleans Collection in 1992. It is available to the public, Tuesday through Saturday at the Williams Research Center, 410 Chartres St., New Orleans, La. 70130. (504-598-7171; Wrc@hnoc.org).

Some highlights of the Russell Collection include col­lections devoted to Jelly Roll Morton, Bunk Johnson, Mahalia Jackson, Manuel Manetta, Baby Dodds, Johnny Dodds, 78 rpm jazz records, ragtime, brass bands, jazz books and periodicals, New Orleans books and pam-

Bill Russell, 1958.

phlets, photographs, postcards, and sheet music. For more information about the William Russell Jazz

Collection, readers should consult Jazz Scrapbook: Bill Russell and Some Highly Musical Friends (New Orleans: Historic New Orleans Collection, 1998), and "Bill Russell: An American Ensemble," a special issue of the Southern Quarterly (Winter, 1998). Both items are available through the Shop at the Historic New Orleans Collection.

"Made in America: Bill Russell's World of Jazz" is on view at the Historic New Orleans Collection, 533 Royal Street, in the French Quarter, through October 31,1998.

preachers, the call-and-response patterns between pulpit and pews sent a vital current flowing through the city.

The great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson told writer Jules Schwerin of her childhood: "The children and the old folks would come back from the cemetery, walking or on bicycles, on trucks or wagons. They would all get right into the jubi­lant feeling of this jazz music. So that's how a lot of our songs I sing today has that type of beat, because it's my inheritance, things that I've always been doing, born and raised-up and seen .. . The type of music I'm talking about, known to all New Orleans people after they buried their dead, was 'Second Line.'"

A lifelong Baptist, Mahalia Jackson credited the small Sanctified church in her childhood neighborhood, uptown near the levee, as a shaping influence. Most Protestant churches of the black South in the early 1900s used organs or pianos. The Sanctified, Holiness and later Spiritual Churches branched away from conventional African-American wor­ship by incorporating an instrumental family akin to jazz ensembles - drums, tambourines, strings, cymbals, even occasional horns. These were the churches of poor folk whose roots clung to African traditions like "holy dances" in which people danced in rings and shouted exaltations to the Lord, a tradition at least as old as the early 1800s at Congo Square, where slaves danced in rings, commemorating African gods.

60 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES \ Fall 1998

Buddy Bolden's Band, circa 1903.

Those small, poor churches of the early 1900s rocked to a beat closer to the jazz melodies of dance halls - quite differ­ent from the a cappella hymns sung by quartets and choirs in mainstream Baptist or African Methodist Episcopal (AME) churches. "Everybody sang and clapped and stomped their feet, sang with their whole bodies!" Mahalia Jackson recalled. "They had the beat, a powerful beat, a rhythm we held onto from slavery days, and their music was so strong and expressive, it used to bring tears to my eyes."

Kinesthesis ... a drama of history The powerful beat "from slavery days" was a religious

expression of the movement-and-rhythm Mahalia Jackson described in the second line.

Another word for this phenomenon is kinesthesis, a col­lective memory of restored behavior, carried in the flow of body rhythms across time.

Some historians, notably Marshall Stearns, have touched on the kinesthetic nature of jazz as expressive of cultural memory. Stearns's The Story of Jazz makes a brief comparison of African burial rites and jazz funerals. It has become a commonplace in jazz history to highlight the role of the trumpeter, sending out "call" lines for "response" by the clarinet and rhythm players, as a structural echo of African

tribal music. Call-and-response is also central to the evolu­tion of African-American church services, the preacher's "call" evoking waves of "response" from the flock.

Consider the January 1851 account of a Swedish writer, Fredrika Bremer, at the New Orleans service of an "African" church. Th~ African Methodist Episcopal began in Philadelphia in 1794 as a breakaway Methodist group that merged with an Episcopal congregation. The leader, Richard Allen, was deeply influenced by the church's doctrine of personal piety and a gospel of salvation. Slavery was the divisive wedge with white Protestantism.

Police spied on the New Orleans AME in the 1840s and fifties, harassed members and raided services of the "slave church" where free people and slaves affirmed a gospel of freedom. Bremer describes a ring dance, similar to the circu­lar body movements as reported by observers of the slave dances at Congo Square. Bremer witnesses a Christian ritual, steeped in African kinesthetics:

The words were heard, "Yes, come, Lord, Jesus! come oh come, oh glory!" and they who thus cried aloud began to leap - leaped aloft with a motion as of a cork flying out of a bottle, while in the air, as if they were endeavoring to bring something down, and all the while crying aloud, "Come, oh come!" And as they leaped, they twisted their bodies round in a sort of corkscrew fashion, and were evidently in a state of convulsion; sometimes they fell down and rolled in the aisle, amid loud, lamenting cries and groans ... Amid all the wild tumult of crying and leaping, on the right and the left, [a woman] continued to walk up and down the church in all directions, with outspread arms, eyes cast upward, exclaim­ing in a low voice, "Hallelujah! Hallelujah!" At length she sank down upon her knees on the platform by the altar, and there she became still ... What has happened to her? we inquired from a young Negro girl whom she knew. "Converted," she said laconically, and joined those who were softly rubbing the palms of the converted.

Bremer's account is one that Louis Armstrong and Mahalia Jackson, who were born a half-century later, would have recognized. The" convulsive" cries and leaps of wor­shipers carried down the years in churches with trance-like

Masonic parade in Algiers with the Eureka Brass Band, March, 1956.

visitations. These "comings of the spirit" distilled an essence of African spirituality - the presence of ancestors, invoked as the living-dead.

"The circle is linked to the most important of all African ceremonies, the burial ceremony," writes Sterling Stucky in Slave Culture. "Where ever in Africa the counter-clockwise dance ceremony was performed ... the dancing and singing were directed to the ancestors and gods." Such was the ritu­al psyche at the slave dances of Congo Square. As the ring dances folded into holy dances of the churches, so the circle slowly opened, turning outward in brass band funeral marches, sending waves of spontaneous dancers in a sinu­ous second line.

If funerals are the connective tissue between streets and sacred spaces, the musicians' oral histories tell us much more about the parades and the benevolent societies that sponsored them than about went [what?]transpired in the churches. The coming together of these disparate forces -the European tradition of military marching bands, and the dynamism of African-American church services - was a slow drama unfolding across the nineteenth-century.

A poignant cameo of this transformation rises from pages of The Weekly Pelican, a black Republican paper published in New Orleans in the 1880s, which listed notices of benevolent society gatherings, parades and musical events. On Apri19, 1887, the paper reported that the Excelsior Brass Band­perhaps the leading Creole band of the day - "furnished the music" for a "grand rally" at Central Church. The songs included "Rock of Ages." The unsigned article reflects an awareness of something new taking place: "This part of the service was an innovation in the worship of the church, but the program was so excellently carried out in every detail as to lend additional charm to the impressiveness of the sur­roundings. The band deserves great credit for the wonderful ability and capacity it displayed."

We know all too little about black New Orleans churches from Recon-struction through the early years of this century. Until we train the lens upon that religious culture, and its interaction with brass bands, the birth of jazz will remain story more than history, and an elusive one at that. LeV

Jason Berry, an author and jazz researcher at The Historic New Orleans Collection, is at work on a history of brass band funerals.

Fall 1998/ LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 61