The presence of Morton returns us to the complicated question about the new music’s origins. Hayes Alvis, bassist and tubist, born in Chicago in 1907, felt “there was something to that claim on his [Morton’s] business card that he created jazz,” though he did not connect this to the point that he “had tendencies toward voodoo..”57 Morton’s sister, Frances Mouton Oliver, sees her brother as emblematic of New Orleans in that he spoke French as a child—their grandmother could not speak English—and the language of Voltaire was the language of their home, too: “He created jazz in 1901,” she concluded modestly.58 Ferdinand Joseph LaMenthe (or LaMothe), born in 1890 and known widely as Jelly Roll Morton, apparently worked as a pimp, making further complex the origins of the new music.59
Morton’s accompanist, Volly de Faut, concedes that the pianist “was one of the first to have a real jazz style,” an indication that Morton’s creation bravado was not altogether misplaced.60 Whether the creative Morton could claim parentage for the music has been questioned but it is evident that, like Charlie “Bird” Parker years later, he exhibited traits that did not necessarily enhance his longevity, cultivated in his early performance venues. Paul Barbarin said that Morton was “mostly a gambler … He’d lose maybe four or five hundred dollars” and that proved to be his “downfall—easy come, easy go.”61 Danny Barker said that Morton “took on the lifestyle of the notorious night people of the underworld,” including being an expert marksman with a pistol.62 Earl “Fatha” Hines, the pianist born in Duquesne, a town near Pittsburgh, in 1903, arrived in Chicago in the 1920s where he found “you had to act bad whether you were bad or not,” meaning aggressively tough. “Jelly Roll Morton had found that out long before I did,” he conceded, “and that’s why he carried a gun and talked loud.”63
Moreover, the crassly exploitative nature of the music business often left artists in a foul mood. Morton claimed that he had been “robbed of three million dollars” during his career by agents, club owners, and other vultures, not to mention those he accused of copying his music and style.64 Actually, said Creole George Guesnon, Morton “always carried him a big old ivory pistol” and “always talked [about] shooting somebody.”65
Jim Crow notwithstanding, as early as 1889 press reports were referring contemptuously to “this thing of white girls becoming enamored of Negroes becoming rather too common,” a trend that obligatorily inflamed ire—not leaving those like Morton unaffected—and was destined to foment a crackdown.66
Of course, these questionable performance venues bred traits that would bedevil Morton and musicians for generations to come, helping to spur an attempt by many of these same musicians to gain more control over their places of work.
But it was not simply the unique environs of the brothel that led Morton down this road of pistol packing. According to the reedman Volly de Faut, born in Little Rock in 1904, Morton was also a “pool shark,” which was another reason for him to “carry a .38 pistol right in his belt,” but this decision was driven by the reality that these “were hoodlum times, I mean bootleggin’ times” with men of ill temper presiding. There was, besides, a “tendency in those days … for white managers to exploit Negro talent” and given the absence or weakness of unions, self-help was often the only option available—a phrase and a trait that was to blossom decades later with the simultaneous rise of the Nation of Islam and the decline of worker organization. De Faut lamented the all too typical fate of the performers “Buck and Bubbles,” brilliant dancers both: “A manager signed them to a ten year contract when they were little kids and paid them just chicken feed..” Back then, he lamented, a “colored man … had a pretty rough time making a buck,” and Morton was no exception. He adapted to his environment, that is, “he put on a big front,” including carrying a flashy pistol.67
Morton also happened to be of a lighter hue, which was not a minor quality in a color-obsessed society. In 1938, the researcher William Russell sought to find Bill Johnson, billed then as the “oldest living jazz musician” (he was older than Buddy Bolden and had worked with Lil Armstrong in Milwaukee and Chicago). Years later, he returned to the Midwest in search of Johnson and found that he had moved to San Antonio and that he had crossed the color line, had chosen to “pass,” an option open to him because of his lighter skin color.68
The climate in which this music was forged at times was unhealthy, making the beautiful art created therein all the more remarkable. The trumpeter Clark Terry said of bandleader Fate Marable that he “never was able to settle down until he primed himself with a couple of slugs of whiskey. It used to be so strange” in that he would “wake up … get up and hurriedly before he brushed his teeth … sometimes in his pajamas, run around the bar and get a drink, and then he would start his day.” That musicians often performed in venues where imbibing alcohol was encouraged—if not being the raison d’être of the venue—hardly discouraged alcoholism,69 which could allow unscrupulous proprietors to cloud the thinking of musicians by plying them with various brews. (Club owners were not the only employers who sought to manipulate workers by dispensing intoxicants; apparently there were those who felt that Negro servants worked harder under the influence of cocaine.)70
There was a “long association of jazz with alcohol,” according to one scholar, meaning “many musicians suffered from alcoholism.” Musicians often ran up a tab as they grabbed drinks from the bar—or were plied with same—that could consume their paycheck. The unusual late-night working hours sapped energy, disrupting circadian rhythms, and often led to unusual musical rhythms. Unscrupulous club owners were not averse to “paying” musicians with alcohol. They were also not above closing their establishment every thirty days, issuing a new lease to a dummy lessee, and reopening under a new name, thereby cheating the artists and, perhaps, driving them to drown their sorrows in drink.71
Louis Armstrong once told Buck Clayton “how many people he knew had been killed in little clubs while listening to jazz by somebody that was either jealous or drunk. Louie once told me that even he had once been cut.”72 In some ways, this renowned trumpeter and vocalist can be viewed as the shining embodiment of the new music. After all, the erudite scholar, Dr. Allison Davis, was said to have remarked that this musician’s rendition of “‘West End Blues’ may be the greatest thing American civilization has ever produced,” a statement that is hardly exaggerated and thus casts into bold relief his own hardscrabble existence in Louisiana.73 For Armstrong’s own experience in New Orleans provides a glimpse of the atmosphere in which the new music was incubated. As a youngster, he was playing in the streets “when all of a sudden a guy on the opposite side of the street pulled out a little old six shooter pistol and fired it..” Without hesitating, the budding trumpeter “pulled out my stepfather’s revolver from my bosom and raised my arm into the air and let her go..” In a transformative episode, he was arrested and jailed. “I was scared,” he confessed, “more scared than I was the day Jack Johnson knocked out Jim Jeffries,” a reference to the tumultuous day when the ebony heavyweight champion defeated his white challenger, leading to racist pogroms nationally. Armstrong was sent to the “Colored Waifs’ Home” for boys, which fortunately did not derail his career.74
Alcohol at times loosened the tongues of those in the audience, often not in a good way. Danny Barker has said that “in the Negro joints we played relaxed, at home; but in the white joints were all eyes and ears, and anything could happen … there were descriptive slurs,” he said, including “niggers, darkies, Zulus, piccaninnies