In Search of the Blues by Marybeth Hamilton

Author:Marybeth Hamilton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books

five

Been Here and Gone

WHEN THEY LOOKED BACK TO THE BEGINNING, FREDERIC Ramsey, Charles Edward Smith, and William Russell remembered the rundown building on the corner of U Street in Washington, D.C., with a hamburger joint on the ground floor and no indication of anything else. It was the late 1930s, they were white, and this was a segregated black neighborhood, but still they opened the door alongside the burger shop and climbed the rickety stairs. On the top floor was a large, dingy room; the dank, chill air was barely affected by the coal-black iron stove. Only the bar, the jukebox, and the battered piano indicated that it was a nightclub, which for a time had been called the Music Box but now had been rechristened the Jungle Inn. Behind the bar, mixing a drink for a customer, was a light-skinned black man of uncertain age, thin, slow-moving (in retrospect they realized he was sick), and the look he gave them was somber and grave. At first he did not seem to believe that they were interested in hearing his music, the hits he had generated on the Victor label before his fortunes turned sour in the Depression. But eventually he unplugged the jukebox and sat down at the piano, and before he played, when he flashed them a brief, wary smile, the light glinted on a diamond in his front tooth.

So incandescent was that introduction to Jelly Roll Morton that the three men would later downplay the long quest that had led to it: years spent listening to race records and foraging tirelessly for those they could not easily find. Ramsey’s passion for Morton’s recordings had hit him in the early 1930s when he was a student at Princeton, around the same time that it overtook Charles Edward Smith. But it was William Russell who had heard him first. Back in 1929, when he was teaching music composition at a high school on Staten Island, Russell had asked his students to bring in some of their parents’ records from home. As a classically trained violinist, he expected the exercise would demonstrate the supremacy of the European tradition, but among the disks brought in was “Shoeshiners’ Drag” by Jelly Roll Morton and His Red Hot Peppers. From the first bars Russell was hooked. The sheer complexity of the music was what was most immediately striking—the dazzling, rich, polyphonic rhythms, as intricate as anything Arnold Schoenberg had devised but even more vital and free. Since childhood Russell had nurtured ambitions to be a composer, but what he was hearing was so much more imaginative, so much more sophisticated, than anything he could possibly write.

In the years that followed, Russell made it a mission to acquire all of Morton’s recordings. The expense was not an issue: no one else seemed to want them, and you could buy the records in bulk for as little as thirty-five cents a box. The problem was finding them. Morton had recorded his sides for Victor and Gennett in the early 1920s, and since then black consumers had consigned him to the margins.

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