SYMHC Classics: Buddy Bolden and the Birth of Jazz

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. This year, twenty twenty three is being marked as the fiftieth anniversary of hip hop, and we've selected Today's Saturday Classic as a nod to that theme. One of hip hop's many precursors is jazz, and a key figure in the development of jazz was New Orleans musician Buddy Bolden, whose career as a musician was brief but just incredibly influential and groundbreaking. And there are some sad elements to this story. Buddy Bolden dealt with serious symptoms of mental illness at a time when diagnoses were vague and there really weren't many effective treatments, and in black men in particular, mental illnesses were often viewed through a lens of racist stereotypes. More recent research has also suggested another possible cause of his symptoms. An article published in twenty twenty in the magazine sixty four Parishes, which is a project of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, argues the bold and symptoms may have been a result of the nyasin deficiency known as pelagra, which was widespread in poorer communities in the early twentieth century. This episode originally came out December nineteenth, twenty eighteen. So enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So, a couple of years back, when I was doing some research for a project completely unrelated to the podcast, just kind of side projects that I was working with friends, I came across the story of Buddy Bolden and he immediately went onto my list of future topics. And then recently, as you may recall, because we aired the episode, we went to New Orleans to do a live show at the National World War II Museum, and while we were there, we timed it so that we kind of made a little bit of vacation out of it, and one of my best friends was there with me too. Of my best friends were actually there with me, but this one in particular, it was her birthday weekend and she absolutely loves music and loves jazz, and she wanted to hit all of the jazz spots that she could while we were there, and I was reminded of Buddy's story, so it kind of bubbled back up into my consciousness and it seemed a good time to finally give him a moment. And before we start, I feel like we need to talk about him as a challenging topic for historians because author Donald M. Marquis, who wrote really the first and only comprehensive biography of Bolden, noted early on in his book that when he was researching Buddy's history and his family history, it became really really apparent that there were some problems. For example, the name Bolden had been spelled innumerable different ways on various documents, so birth certificates, death certificates, and wedding certificates for any one person might show the last name with completely different spellings on each. For example, one of Buddy's aunts was listed with the last name bolding on her marriage certificate, but her signature on that same certificate clearly shows the spelling of Bolden bolde n So even on that one document, the names were inconsistent. And this sort of disparity is all over the various records that exist related to Buddy Bolden's life, even though there aren't really that many records to begin with, and they also include things like age discrepancies and address discrepancies. It's kind of all over the place, and all of this, as well as Buddy's charisma and talent as a performer, has contributed to a number of falsehoods and a lot of mythologizing over the years. So there will be a couple of things that we point out along the way as unverifiable. We do know when he was born, though Charles Joseph Bolden was born on September sixth, eighteen seventy seven, we don't really know when he got the nickname Buddy, though his mom referred to him as Charles throughout his life. He was Wesmore and Alice Bolden's second child. Their first child was a daughter who was christened Latta but went by Lottie. She was born two years before Buddy was and Westmore worked as a driver for a businessman named William Walker, who had employed Buddy's grandfather Gustavus and grandmother Francis as well, and it's been speculated that Gustavus was born into slavery, although that is one of those places where there is no definitive documentation. But Gustavus and Francis and then Westmore and Alice lived in servants quarters on Walker's property and they were employees there, they were not enslaved by him. Westmore had moved his family a few blocks away before Buddy was born, and then moved back in eighteen seventy eight when west Moore's brother Thomas moved out, and then they moved away again in anticipation of their third child, Cora, who was born in eighteen eighty Buddy's older sister, Lottie died. She had encephalitis since she died in eighteen eighty one at the age of six. His father, Wes Moore, also died on December twenty third of eighteen eighty three at the age of thirty two. He had come down with what was recorded as acute plural pneumonia. For several years after that. It's not totally clear where Alice and the surviving two children lived, but in eighteen eighty seven they moved into a home at three eighty five First Street. But he was ten at the time, and if you're familiar with New Orleans, that's on what's the twenty three hundred block of First Street today. In the eighteen eighties, the neighborhood had a pretty diverse mix of people, but the residents mostly were Irish and German, and Alice, despite being a single mother, wanted all of her children in school rather than working, so Buddy attended school at least into the early eighteen nineties, although the records are once again a little unclear there. Buddy as Charles Bolden did not appear in a city directory separately from Alice until eighteen ninety seven, when he would have been twenty years old, and at that point he was listed as a plasterer, although in reality he was taking a variety of ten jobs to make ends meet. While Bolden grew up in a city that was just full of music, he didn't start taking cornette lessons until a little later. That was in the mid eighteen nineties from a neighbor named Manuel Hall, who worked as a cook in the French Quarter and who was close with Buddy's mother Alice. Yeah, it appears that Alice and Manuel probably were romantically linked at some point and possibly for a long ongoing time. Sometimes he is kind of referred to almost as a father figure in Buddy Bolden's life, and it was with Manuel Hall that Buddy first played in a band. He also joined up with Charlie Galloway, a neighbor about eight years older than he was, who had a barber shop. At this point, barber shops were common meeting places for musicians, so much so that part of the Buddy Bolden mythology that has been repeated over the years spread the false information that he was a barber, because surely he was spending all this time in barber shops. He was not a barber. That is just a location where people met. There was kind of an ongoing shuffling going on at the time, and the bands that Buddy was part of, some of them formed really loosely just to play for a particular party or dance, and then others went through ongoing reorganization as the members disagreed on the sound, with the style, or just moved on to other groups. Yeah. I feel like if anybody ever played in non orchestra type bands in high school, they know this dance all too well, of bands falling apart and reforming and other people meeting up and playing in a band for a night or two. But Buddy and Galloway started playing together not long after Buddy had picked up the Cornett. It is believed that Buddy made appearances with Galloway's band as early as eighteen ninety four, so that was the year that he first started taking lessons, and as Buddy began performing around the city, he got really good, really fast, and he garnered a following for himself. He always had a bevy of young women who were happy to hang around near the bandstand and hold his things, and Buddy definitely enjoyed this attention, and he was romantically linked to a number of ladies in the second half of the eighteen nineties, and one woman, Hattie Oliver, who was older than Buddy, kept regular company with the musician. In eighteen ninety seven, Hattie and Buddy had a child, Charles Joseph Bolden Junior. This wasn't the beginning of a family scenario, though, Buddy and Hattie weren't married, and while he did try to financially support them for a while, it didn't really last. Hattie went by the name Hattie Bolden for a while in a common law arrangement, but by nineteen hundred she was back to going by Hattie Oliver. By nineteen hundred, also, just six years after he first started taking lessons with Manuel Hall, Buddy had built a pretty significant name for himself on the New Orleans music scene. He was doing things differently than musicians before him had. He played differently and he arranged songs differently. We're going to talk about that a little bit more towards the end of the episode. And while the people that he played with had been a fluid group, things started to get some consistency in terms of band members at the turn of the century. Willie Cornish, who had come and gone through Buddy's band before, came back in eighteen ninety nine and played the trombone. Jimmy Johnson played the bass and was the youngest member of the band. He could often be seen bicycling through the town on the way to gigs with his bass on his back, which delights me. There were two clarinet players, William Warner and on the cea clarinet and Frank Lewis on the B flat clarinet. Jefferson Mumford played guitar, and Cornelius Tillman became the regular drummer after he and Henry Zino alternated in that position for a while. Yeah, there is a I did not end up including it in this episode, just in terms of time. It became a whole scope shift. If we tried to do it. But there is like one photograph of this band, although Cornelius Tillman isn't in it, and it is one of those sort of history mysteries. Will include a link to a paper about it in our show notes where no one can decide how this photograph should be flipped, because initially people saw it and thought, oh, that looks like people are playing left handed. This must be wrong, we'll flip it, And then they realized if they flipped it, it looked like two other band members were playing left handed, and this has been the source of much discussion and analysis for years and years and years. But it's also the possibility that it's just a posed picture where they weren't holding their instruments naturally the way they would when they were playing. So we'll link to that paper because it's quite delightful. But in a moment, we're going to talk about the area of New Orleans that is very closely linked to Buddy's success. But first we are going to pause for a word from one of the sponsors that keeps this show going. Muddy Bolden's story goes hand in hand with another story of New Orleans at the time, and that is the red light or vice district known as Storyville, and the city had several such districts going back to the eighteen fifties, but Storyville, which formed in eighteen ninety seven, was the last and the smallest of them. In the so called busy season, which was tied to the horse racing calendar, as many as three thousand sex workers were working in Storyville's brothels, which were defined by a city ordinance put forth by Alderman Sidney story that made it illegal for vice businesses to operate outside the limits of certain blocks. It's kind of an interesting thing because it doesn't say if you're in this space you can be doing these things. It just says if you're outside this space, you can't be doing these things, which is a weird way to word something like that. At one point, near the end of the district's existence, and officer of the Secretary of War's Commission of Training Camp Activities called Storyville a Gibraltar of commercialized vice, twenty four blocks given over to human degradation and lust. But despite the focus on the CD or lures of Storyville, it was actually alcohol sales that turned over some of the highest profits in the district. We actually have an episode in the archive about Storyville and Buddy Bolden gets to mention in it, if folks want to track that down in the archive. Bolden and his band played all over New Orleans, just to be clear, but his name was closely tied to Storyville and it was a really rowdy area. There was a unique kind of symbiosis between the red light district and the music scene. The enticements of the neighborhood brought people in, and musicians like Bolden playing in places like the Odd Fellows in Masonic Hall gained a following and then drew more people into the district. Yeah, kind of each of the various industries going on there kept feeding the others. And one of the most famous spots for Bolden to play was the Union Sons Hall, which had been established in eighteen sixty six by a group of free persons of color, and it was part of Black Storyville since a lot of the Vice district would not accept black patrons, and the Union Sons Hall also went by other nicknames, including Kenna's Hall, named I Believe for a musician that predated Buddy Bolden, and Funky Butt Hall, which was tied very closely to Bolden. He had a song with those words and the lyrics or in the name, And sometimes the Saturday night dances that were going on at Union Sun's would drag into the morning hours, so much so that they had to be cut off so that the hall could be rearranged quickly and used for Sunday morning church services. What's interesting is that even while Buddy was experimenting and improvising new ways to play old standards, making the brass more prominent and changing up the rhythms, there are also accounts of his band playing places like the Blue Ribbon Social Club, which was an organization for teenage girls, and being perfect gentlemen, both in their personal behavior and in the performances. They played appropriate dance music like waltzes and quadrilles and nothing jazzy at all. Yeah, there's a cute quote from somebody that I read where they're describing it. I think they say none of that jazzy stuff, And I don't know why that charmed me. In nineteen oh two, Buddy started seeing a woman named Nora Bass, who he took to church for dates initially, and the two moved in together that same year at twenty seven nineteen Philip Street, and they started living as a married couple, even though they were not ever legally wed. This basically a common law marriage established sort of a double life for Buddy. Nora was not part of the music scene. She was not particularly interested in the culture of Storyville. But even away from the music scene, Buddy had this other duality going on because he split his nights between his old family homes, staying with his mother Alice, and then the rest of the time staying with Nora. Buddy and Nora had a daughter named Bernadine in nineteen oh three, but Buddy's second effort at family life seems to have been a struggle, just like it was before with Hattie. In nineteen oh four, he was back to living with his mother full time, at least according to a city directory, although she had at that point moved across First Street to another home, and Buddy's sister Cora, who had married in nineteen oh two and that marriage did not work out, was also living back with their mother, Alice. But just as his work and his fame were reaching the highest heights of the New Orleans seen, things really started to crumble for him. In nineteen oh six, Buddy started to exhibit signs of mental illness. At this point, people called him King, and he keenly felt the pressure of being called the King. He knew that he had to keep coming up with new ideas to keep the audiences happy. Yeah, there are stories of audiences just chanting King Bolden over and over and over as they anticipated his arrival on a stage, which is one of those things that sounds like rockstar amazing, but it also made him feel really, really stressed because he wanted to maintain that level. Buddy had been a heavy drinker from a pretty young age, but that got a lot worse as he grappled with the pressures that he felt, and what had once seemed like mere drunkenness started to really morph into more troubling behavior. He complained of headaches. He became very paranoid. He was often found just mumbling to himself, and the headaches got bad enough that they impeded his playing. It said that he would play the wrong note, and then that would only make the situation worse because he would realize that all of this pressure was stuff that he could not meet. If this headache was causing his playing to suffer. Nora was still in his life at this point, although they weren't really maintaining a full time marriage, and she said at times that he seemed to be afraid of his own cornet. He had always kept it with him, and he worried that his position as the music scenes most prominent innovator would be overthrown by some other musician in terms of his immediate livelihood. He started missing gigs and fighting with his band members. Yeah, he had initially responded to this pressure by just booking more and more gigs. He was just going to saturate the market. And then, of course that's impossible. When you are stressed, the worst thing to do is make your schedule even more intense. So it kind of kept folding in on itself, this problem, and on Saturday, March twenty third of nineteen oh six, the police were called to the Bolden home. Buddy had become delusional. He was convinced that his mother, Alice, was trying to poison him, and at the time, Nora's sister Dora and her mother Ida were visiting the house and Buddy hit Ida, we think we'll explain why there's all we think there in just a moment with a water pitcher. Because the women were afraid of more violent behavior, they had called the police. Buddy was arrested and he was booked at the twelfth Precinct station that night. His charge is simply listed as insane. The newspaper has picked up the story, and this is the only press coverage that Buddy ever got in his lifetime. It ran as a brief news blurb and the New Orleans Item and the Daily Picune. The two newspapers differ on one key detail, though one item says that Buddy struck his mother, the Pickiune says that it was his mother in law. Both agree that the wound was not serious. Though later that year, most of Bolden's bandmates were no longer playing with him. It is unclear if they got frustrated with his behavior and walked out or if he just got super angry and fired them, but those relationships were severed. A series of musicians cycled through his group on his gigs from that point on, including several that really had poor reputations on the music scene and were likely just taking advantage of this unstable situation for their own benefit. Stories from this time in Buddy's life all paint a picture of a man who was at times disoriented, referring in conversations to people no one seemed to know, shortchanging bandmates on their payouts, and clearly losing touch with reality. On September third, nineteen oh six, Buddy, like every other musician in New Orleans, was booked to march in the Labor Day Parade, but he walked off the parade route. There's been several different stories as to whether he was part of some kind of altercation or whether he just left and was felt like he was unable to complete the route in the very hot and humid weather. But after that day, his mental state started declining really quickly. On Saturday night night September eighth, so just a few days later, his mother called the police again. His booking record at four am Sunday morning once again lists insanity as the reason he was arrested, and then for reasons unknown, his given address, which his mother gave the police, was not his home, but a nearby vacant lot that was situated across the street from the home of his close friend Lewis Jones. There's been speculation that she and his friend Lewis both felt like they didn't know what to do with him, and they were trying to maybe just get him out of their lives in sort of a passive way, but we don't know. Buddy was released after this arrest, but he never played his cornet again. The next several months were spent drinking and hanging around his mother's house, occasionally lapsing into angry and violent behavior. He was arrested for insanity again on March thirteenth, nineteen oh seven. His mother, Alice and sister Cora couldn't manage him anymore, and on April fourth, after almost a month in jail, he was examined by a doctor and committed to the Jackson Insane Asylum. His declaration of insanity review and paperwork to list him as judicially committed, though weren't completed for another month. The cause of insanity was listed simply as alcohol, and he made the trip to Jackson on June fifth. His years in treatment are not entirely well documented. Some of those documents probably existed and have gone missing, but he was sort of treated in this weird catch all category that black men were frequently lumped into. The treatment was kind of along the lines of how they would treat manic depressives at the time, that is no longer a term that would be used, but it was basically like, we don't know, they seemed violent, We're going to kind of give them this non individualized and kind of unspecific course of treatment. It's actually not until a nineteen twenty five examination records, so again that is almost twenty years after he was committed to the asylum that the diagnosis of dementia praecox paranoid type appears. That terminology is outdated now. It was used for a while interchangeably with the term schizophrenia, and then it was supplanted by the use of the word schizophrenia completely at one point. Initially, Alice and Cora Bolden visited Buddy in the asylum at fairly regular intervals, and at one point they even thought that he might be well enough to return home, although his doctors cautioned against it. But over time Buddy became less and less responsive, and eventually he didn't recognize his mother or sister, and the Boldens eventually stopped visiting. They would instead write letters to the hospital staff asking after Buddy's wellness, and they would receive reassuring although not two reassuring replies. These missives generally stated that Buddy was in good health, but that he showed no improvement in regards to his mental state. In nineteen twenty seven, Buddy's daughter Bernadine, who was twenty four at the time and hadn't had contact with him since she was four, wrote to the hospital from Evanston, Illinois, and she asked about her father's condition. Bernadine's mother, Nora, hadn't maintained a relationship with the Boldens, so she didn't really know what her father's status was until the hospital wrote her back and said that he was not improving. I feel like that's a whole story. I would be very interested to hear, like at what point did she decide she wanted to reach out and like how did she end up in Illinois? And we don't really have those pieces of the puzzle. There is one really bittersweet aspect of Bolden's time in the asylum. So in the nineteen twenties, a music therapy program was started there by a doctor E. M. Richards, who was himself a musician, and there was a jazz band that formed with some of the black patients. Although Buddy was not one of them, but on occasion, according to staff accounts, Buddy would just walk up to the bandstand and grab a trumpet or cornett, depending on what was there, and play, but almost no one realized that they were in the presence of a former bandstand. King. Buddy's mother, Alice Bolden, died on August eleventh, nineteen thirty one, and when Cora wrote their usual letter to the asylum asking after her brother, she included this news and the letter the hospital just responded to let her knew that her brother was having heart trouble. Buddy died on November fourth, nineteen thirty one, in Parker General Hospital, which is part of the same property as the asylum. His cause of death was cerebral arterial sclerosis. No death notice ran in the paper, and the city that had celebrated him as King Bolden at one time had no idea that he had died. Today, we don't know where Buddy Bolden is buried exactly. He was buried in Holt Cemetery and a pauper's grave on city owned land. His sister, Cora had been either unable or unwilling to pay the burial fee of five dollars. She also wasn't able to keep up with the payments that were needed for maintenance of the grave site, so after two years, his body was exhumed and reburied at a greater depth to make room for a fresh grave on top of his. Yeah, that cemetery has since become very overgrown. There's a general sense of it's kind of somewhere right around this area, but we really don't know, and there are likely several more burials on top of it in addition to that one that happened a couple years later. Buddy's brief but intense time as a New Orleans musical celebrity is much discussed by historians as the point where Dixie Land Jazz was born. But this discussion also gets a little bit tricky because we have no recordings of him playing. We don't know exactly what he sounded like, and so everything is an interpretation of descriptions that other people have given, and sometimes those accounts contradict one another because they're subjective. One thing that I noticed that was interesting reading some of those is like some people would be like, he had amazing tone, and other people would be like, he didn't have tone, but he had really good rhythm and like, there were just these literally completely contradicting accounts of what he sounded like. There has been speculation that Bolden and an early incarnation of his band made a cylinder recording sometime before eighteen ninety eight, but if they did this, that recording has been lost and it has eluded historian searches, of which there have been many. Because of the mythical nature of Buddy's work and the lack of documentation of it, there are ongoing disagreements about what did and didn't originate with him. If you've ever watched the Ken Burns Jazz documentary series, when Marsalis attributes what's called a big four beat, which is a syncopated pattern that accents the second fourth beat of a march to Bolden, but that beat might have started any number of places, including after Buddy was no longer playing regularly, and it's unlikely a definitive origin point that anybody will ever be able to conclusively prove. Yeah, if you wanna, you know, read some online arguments, go and just search around the internet for like that footage and watch all of the comments be about that's not true. What Marsalis doesn't know, what he's talking about. It's pretty interesting, but basically, really again, it's that thing where he's mythological in nature at this point, and you could say any things were things that he invanted and we don't know, but there's also every possibility that he did do that. And even though Buddy hadn't started learning Cornett until he was a teen, as we mentioned, which was late for a kid in New Orleans at the time, he had an incredible ear and he could pick up a song just by hearing it and then kind of playing around with it on his cornette briefly to make sure he had it worked out. Whether he was able to read music is another hotly debated point, but he was a skilled improviser. Sometimes he would maybe forget a segment of a song while playing and he could just fake his way through it, or he would just fake his way through songs that he maybe just didn't really know all that well. To begin with that main biographer who's written about Bolden that I mentioned earlier, Donald M. Marquee Warrnton his book, that this skill, when people talk about it, should not be equated with the improvisational jazz of today. It was more of a way of an embellishing and known melody and setting it to a different beat to create something new. He also wasn't just playing his own thing. He was playing all kinds of music almost anywhere he could to establish himself as a musician. Hot music, the place where Balden was really innovating, combined the brass band marches that were common in New Orleans with blues and ragtime, and this is where dixieland jazz begins. But it's important to contextualize it as happening in the same dance halls where waltzes and quadrilles were also being played, and by musicians who could cover all of that territory. Yeah, sometimes I think if you read sort of a glossy blurb version of it, it sounds like he's only this rebel that's outplaying his own versions of things. And really he was accomplished at covering all of the bases that he might be required to. After Bolden's death, the ideas that he pioneered, both in the sounds, songs and arrangements, as well as the style of bands, continued to evolve in Louisiana and beyond. String bands and orchestras started to give way to smaller jazz ensembles like the ones that Buddy had put together, and New Orleans quickly established itself as the birthplace of Yixilian jazz, as well as a place where the music form evolved and took other shapes. Buddy's life has been featured in a lot of works over the years. The novel Coming Through Slaughter, published in nineteen seventy six by Michael Mdacci, features a fictionalized version of Bolden's life. A biopic called Bolden with an exclamation Point was filmed in twenty fifteen and is still listed us in post production on IMDb. There have also been theatrical productions where he's featured as a character and he makes cameos and a number of pieces of fiction. On September sixth, nineteen ninety six, which would have been Buddies one hundred and nineteenth birthday, he finally got a New Orleans jazz funeral, and that was attended by his granddaughter and great granddaughter. Six years later, the City Council of New Orleans named a block of Tulou Street Buddy Bolden Place. Oh all right, this is one of those things where I think about We've talked about it on the show before how our knowledge of mental health treatment and diagnosis has evolved a great deal, but it's it's one of those places where I personally feel slightly cheated, similar to how we talked in our Dwight Fry episode about how if he had only sought medical treatment, he could have had potentially a much longer acting career and given us heaven only knows what kind of amazing performances. Similarly, but he was only thirty when he was sent to the asylum. Like, think of the music he could have played had he actually gotten reasonable treatment for his mental illness and maybe taken better care of his body along the way. So I'll just feel selfish in wanting to travel back in time and fix those problems. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. 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