Before the Fires by Mark Naison

Author:Mark Naison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2016-06-01T17:46:30+00:00

Joseph Orange

Joseph Orange (1941–), a professional trombone player for many years, recently retired as a vice president of Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

My family moved to Prospect Avenue and 168th Street in Morrisania in 1941, the year I was born. They’d moved there from Harlem, where they lived right behind the Apollo Theater on 126th Street. I’m the youngest in my family of nine, and my older brothers and sisters, who were already in their teens when we moved to the Bronx, spent a lot of time reminiscing about growing up on 126th Street.

We had only three bedrooms, but fortunately, because of the spread of age, we were never all there at the same time. When I was four, my brother was off in the army. I never remember all of us living there together, but I do remember us sharing rooms. My two sisters had a room together. My two brothers. I was the baby, so I was always out on the couch somewhere.

My father worked for the Union News Company, which owned newspaper stands and restaurants in Manhattan, and he was a Gullah. The Gullah culture is from South Carolina, from one of the Sea Islands, and unfortunately my father died when I was only four so I don’t have a very vivid memory of him. But my older brothers and sisters said he spoke the Gullah language and that his English was difficult to understand because of that mixture of West Indian, African, and Southern.

My mother, who was seventeen when she married my father, was from a small town outside Atlanta called Social Circle, Georgia. I didn’t visit that town until about five years ago, when we had a family reunion and we went back to Social Circle to see where my mother was born and the church where she was baptized.

My parents met in the South when my father was working in Atlanta, and they lived in Savannah, Georgia, for a while before moving to New York. They were married for about fifteen years before they had any children, but then they had children one after another.

There were a number of musicians on my mother’s side of the family. My mother had a brother named J. C. Higginbotham, and in the thirties and forties he was considered the top jazz trombone player in the world. If you listen to the original version of Louis Armstrong playing “When the Saints Go Marching In,” the first time that song was ever recorded in the thirties, on that recording you’ll hear him saying, “Here comes brother Higginbotham walking down the aisle.”

My uncle plays the famous jazz trombone solo on that recording. He went on to play with Armstrong, and he played with Fletcher Henderson, who led one of the premier jazz bands of the 1930s. Later in his career he spent many years with Henry Red Allen, another Bronxite. Henry Red Allen lived a block from me, and they played for years at the Metropole Café at Forty-Eighth and Broadway in Manhattan.

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