The record changer (Jan-Dec 1944)

the Rampart Street of hot jazz. Tn one juke-joint, packed and jammed on Saturday night, the favored records were schmaltzy ; one souse put nickel on top of nickel in order to hear IVheii the lights go on again, all over the world . . . The sentiment was fine, hut I am afraid that it was the falsetto that got him. And it was on Rampart Street that I ran into a tall white man selling a song of his composing, a hymn of which, as unbelievable as it may sound, the second line of the chorus ran "And we shall all be as white as snow." Dr. Livingston, I presume. On the scrap piles of the record shops, however, there were some finds : the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's Livery Stable Blues, a few of Clarence Williams' Red Onion Fives, and Jelly Roll's OhdJidn't He Ramble, that good-natured cartoon of the old funeral processions. T took this record to the house of some New Orleans friends and it quickened their memories. Chummy remembered how instead of Home Siveet Home, Papa Celestine would send the dancers away with Old Man Mose Is Dead, and Kid Rena would play Get Out of Here. He remembered Kid Ory's "tail -gate" trombone ; and Bechet's wild, free clarinet. Before Bechet would have you in his band, he told me, you would have to play High Society to his taste. And his taste was the way Picon had played it. Among the Creoles, Picon was remembered better than some of these others, but Perez and Robichaux were recalled, and a few light Creoles, Dave Perkins especially, who played with both colored and white bands. Everybody remembered the river steamboats, where Fate Marable assembled noted crews of jazzmen. Both Chummy and Ferd told of the great appeal of the funeral bands. Chummy said that he would never miss a funeral, he and two others of the "second lines," the New Orleans kids who, just as kids anywhere, would stream behind the band, but who, unlike the others, had better bands to mimic. Ferd said that he would wait, at Bienville and North Claiborne, and then fall in; whites and blacks and inbetweens, there was no segregation then with jazz leveling the low barriers. They remembered how after the slow funeral marches to the graveyard, on the way back the band would kick out on I'll Be Glad When You're Dead, You Rascal You! Mrs. Chummy recalled the tale of the funeral of a big shot,^ a bon vivant, whose respectable cortege was suddenly swelled when the girls from the crib houses filed out to take their mourning places. Bring out your rubber-tired hearses, bring out your rubber-tired hacks They're taking old Johnnie to the grave- yard, and they ain't gonna bring him back. Most of the memories were of the funeral parades, as my informants could go to these but not to the honky-tonk dances, or Storyville maisons de joie, or to Antoine's, world famous restaurant, where Picon had a high class orchestra. Those funerals must have been grand experiences : the stalwart horses, plumed and decked out in nets and feathers (I learned from Mr. Geddes, one of the city's most prosperous undertakers, that his father's livery stable was famous for its fine horses). After the slow, doleful music, there was shrill or muted weeping at the tomb. And then the return : a roll of the drums, a few quick blasts on trumpet, and then the band kicking, jamming, definitely not dead. They tell me those dressed up horses pranced to the music, throwing their hooves high. I should like to have been one of that "second line" of kids. But that too was a lost custom. At Geddes' Funeral Parlor, limousines had replaced the noble horses. Out of deep sentiment, Mr. Geddes had kept some of the stalls of the old livery stable, and his doorway was lighted by heavy carriage lamps (he was the first to use these in New Orleans, he said proudly, wistfully). I attended two wakes at his parlors. He told me that one of the deceased, a World War veteran, was to have a band at his funeral, but it would not be like the bands of old, it was a military band instead. I did not go to hear it. There were a few good jazz combinations in town, I learned, but most of them were playing in white places where I could have gone only at the cost of problems. I found later that "Bunk" Johnson had recently come to town from New Iberia, and had been driven down Rampart Street between sidewalks crowded with yelling people. This was in 1942. Since then Bunk Johnson has come back to the jazz world and for the first time to the recording studios. Jazz lovers over the nation bought him a new set of teeth ; Sidney Bechet's dentist brother made them for him. "I'm glad you got your chops back, man." Charles Smith's essay Land of Dreams rebuilds his fascinating and lucky journey in search of lost New Orleans jazzmen. Better sleuths than I have discov(Continued on page 51) 9