Dangerous Rhythms, page 6
The vigilantes had a list: Charles Matranga was not on that list. His life was spared, a telling indicator, perhaps, of the Matranga family’s abiding influence on the street.
The victims were all Italians, and all were unarmed. Few of these men were shown to be members of the mafia; one was a cobbler who had the misfortune of owning a shop across the street from where Hennessy was murdered. Others were common laborers and merchants whose primary reason for being a suspect was their Italian ancestry.
Three of the Italians were found hiding in the women’s prison. They were beaten and blasted with shotguns. Six others were shot in the prison yard, some in the face, some in the back, then their bodies were dragged out in front of the prison. Two men were still alive; they were also dragged out in front of the prison along with the dead bodies.
The crowd was now in the thousands, white men baying for blood. The two men who were alive were strung up and hanged with a rope around the neck. One man was hanged from a tree, the other from a lamppost at the corner of Tremé and St. Anne Streets. Various people in the crowd riddled the hanging bodies with bullets.
The bodies were left hanging in the breeze. The nine other dead bodies were lined up in front of the prison so that a steady parade of onlookers, including women and children, could walk by and gawk at the deceased Italians. Said Parkerson, the leader of the vigilantes, “Of course, it is not a courageous thing to attack a man who is not armed . . . But we looked upon these men as so many reptiles . . . This was a great emergency, greater than has ever happened in New York, Cincinnati, or Chicago . . . Hennessy’s killing struck at the very root of American institutions. The intimidation of the Mafia and the corruption of our juries are to be met only with strong measures. I recognize no power above the people.”
Mayor Shakespeare accepted kudos from far and wide; it was an event that attracted mostly favorable attention around the United States and even the world. Asked by a newspaper reporter about the position of the mafia in New Orleans after the lynching, the mayor was boastful. “They are quiet, quieter than they have been for years. The lesson taught them at the Parish Prison has had a most excellent effect, and I do not anticipate we will have any more trouble with them.” And then, in one of the more irrelevant and wrongheaded statements in the city’s history, the mayor added, “You may announce that the reign of the mafia in New Orleans is over.”
For the city’s African American population, the lynching in February 1891 must have seemed a strange and unusual occurrence. Black people in the city of New Orleans, the state of Louisiana, and in the entire South knew all about lynching. Since the Reconstruction era, there was hardly a Black family in the South that had not been directly touched in some way by white terrorism. In Louisiana, in particular, lynching had become institutionalized. White supremacist organizations like the KKK and the White League strung up Black folks in the town square, then mutilated the bodies and lit them on fire. Rarely was anyone ever prosecuted for lynching. In fact, whites in the criminal justice system—sheriffs and judges—were sometimes members of the organizations that perpetrated the violence.
There were occasionally instances of non-Black people being lynched. There are a few documented instances of Irish immigrant laborers having been lynched in the South in the 1850s. In Los Angeles, in 1871, an estimated seventeen to twenty Chinese immigrants were hanged by a mob of five hundred people in what is remembered as “the Chinese massacre.” In the not too distant future, lynching of Mexican nationals would become common in a number of U.S. states. But in 1891, in the city of New Orleans, the wholesale lynching of what were legally considered to be “white people” was a rare occurrence.
And the killings at Parish Prison were not a one-off. Over the next decade, there were at least seven other documented instances of Sicilians being lynched by white mobs in the state of Louisiana. The killings in New Orleans had started a trend, with Italians and Italian Americans on the receiving end of a particularly violent and perverse mode of American racism.
It was at this same time, as the earliest inklings of jazz were beginning to take shape, that African American musicians found themselves interacting with Sicilian club owners in the city. The musicians—and, for that matter, Black people in general—now had reason to view their Sicilian counterparts in a slightly different light. Sicilian immigrants—especially those who were seen as having any association, real or imagined, with the mafia—were susceptible to a kind of bigotry and racism that African Americans knew all too well. In a sense, they now had a shared experience, however temporal, as “niggers.” There may well have resulted a kind of kindred understanding, perhaps empathy or solidarity, that laid the groundwork for a mutually conducive working relationship. Having been on the receiving end of the rope, Sicilians and Blacks had reason to understand one another, or at least to have a shared understanding of who the enemy was, or could be, and how their identities as outsiders made them ideal habitués of what would become an underworld culture of honky-tonks, bordellos, gambling parlors, and nightclubs, where jazz was soon to become the music of the downtrodden, the hipster, and those with a taste for the cutting edge.
White Jazz
Sicilians in New Orleans were not exclusively nightclub operators or mafiosi; they were also musicians. From the beginning, there were a number of white musicians in the city, though in the streets, at the funeral parades, and in the honky-tonks it was clear that “jass,” or jazz, was something singular and historically profound: an expression of African American culture that was undeniably infectious, even for white folks—or, at least, a certain type of white person who could accept the possibility of African American artistry as something worth celebrating.
Some Sicilian musicians from New Orleans would go on to find fame and fortune, none more so than Louis Prima, who was born December 7, 1910, in the neighborhood of Little Palermo. As a trumpet player, singer, and entertainer, Prima would become a jazz legend. His roots in New Orleans were a classic byproduct of his Italian American heritage in the city at a time when jazz was inspiring levels of excitement that bordered on pandemonium.
Prima’s parentage on both sides was Sicilian. His father, Anthony, was born in New Orleans in 1887, just four years before the Parish Prison lynching, at a time when anti-Italian bigotry in the city had been given full agency among the city’s white gentry. In 1906, at the age of nineteen, Anthony married Angelina Caravalla in St. Ann’s Catholic Church. Anthony worked for a soda pop delivery company. Angelina was the daughter of a barber. She had show business pretentions, and from the beginning she encouraged her three children to take part in music and entertainment. Louis, the second oldest son, was first given a violin to learn, which he soon ditched in favor of the trumpet, an instrument that was being made desirable—and famous—by his musical hero, Louis Armstrong.
Like most Italian New Orleanians with a taste for jazz, the Primas rubbed shoulders with the city’s African American population in ways that other white citizens did not. Angelina regularly took part—in blackface—in a celebration that paid homage to the King of the Zulus, an honorary figurehead of the city’s Mardi Gras.
Minstrelsy was a form of American entertainment that went back decades. Some of the earliest influences on jazz, from ragtime to Negro spirituals, first found expression in minstrel shows, a form of entertainment that later gave way to vaudeville. White people blackening their faces to play African American characters in skits and plays was a common element of the show. These performances were often meant to disparage and lampoon Black folks and plantation life, but not always. Angelina Prima’s participation in the Zulu parade was meant as a tribute, and it was undertaken with reverence. More than most immigrants of European extraction, Sicilians acknowledged and respected Black culture. Some might argue that it had to do with Sicilian roots in North Africa as descendants of the Moors. For whatever reasons, some Sicilians identified with Black folks and even resembled people of African descent in hair type, skin color, and facial features. Louis Prima, who had kinky black hair and spoke in the manner of a New Orleans Black man (modeled, he would admit, on Louis Armstrong), was denied jobs early in his career in clubs because booking agents thought he was Black.
Sicilians and Blacks in New Orleans banded together in honky-tonks like Matranga’s, Joe Zegretto’s, Pete Lala’s, Lala’s 25 Club, Eddie Graciele’s, Dante’s Lodge, and other Sicilian-owned clubs. It was a relationship that would continue, in various permutations, throughout the history of jazz.
The most renowned Sicilian jazz musician of his day was Dominic James “Nick” LaRocca. Born April 11, 1889, he was raised in the Irish Channel, the same hardscrabble neighborhood as Tom Anderson, the boss of Storyville. LaRocca’s Sicilian-born father had come to New Orleans as a cornet player, but he didn’t want his son Nick having anything to do with the dubious prospect of a career in music. LaRocca began working as a laborer in New Orleans when he was a teenager, but before long, as jazz emerged as a cultural phenomenon, Nick was bitten by the bug. He bought a used cornet and, without his father’s knowledge, in 1908 he formed a band comprised mostly of Italian American youngsters. LaRocca’s band was strictly a ragtime combination, like most New Orleans bands at the time. But as young Nick began to compose his own music, he incorporated elements that appealed to him, including military parade band music as pioneered by John Philip Sousa, and even opera.
From the beginning, LaRocca showed a proclivity—both as a composer and bandleader—toward spirited interaction between the musicians. More than anything, this is what excited budding young musicians about jazz. You could play ahead of the beat, or slightly behind the beat. You could riff off the melody and work out musical ideas during extended solos. You could engage fellow bandmates in a kind of call-and-response, a musical dialogue between instruments that was unlike anything ever presented to listeners in the form of public entertainment.
LaRocca wasn’t the greatest horn player, but he distinguished himself as someone with a strong lip; he could play for long stretches during funeral marches and parades. This landed him a job playing with Papa Jack Laine’s band. As a bandleader, Laine was noteworthy for defying segregation laws by hiring light-skinned African American musicians and calling them Cuban or Mexican.
By 1916, New Orleans musicians were in demand in other cities, especially Chicago, where jazz was on fire. As a last-minute replacement, Nick LaRocca was offered an opportunity to play cornet in a band led by drummer Johnny Stein in Chicago. He took the gig; the rest, as they say, is history. The band would become known as the Original Dixieland Jass Band, and it became the first band to make commercially issued jazz recordings for a record label. By then, Stein had left the band and LaRocca took over as leader.
The term “Dixieland” was controversial from the start. Some felt it was meant to connote “white,” as the Original Dixieland Jass Band was an all-white group. It was no accident that an all-white band was the first to be paid to record the music. The Victor Talking Machine Company, which recorded LaRocca’s band on February 26, 1917, had been looking for an all-white band to record. It was complicated enough that jazz was perceived to be “Negro music” without having to sell the idea to white consumers that they should patronize Black musicians. Racism in America was about white supremacy, but it was also a commercial construct. The Original Dixieland Jass Band solved this problem. They were not exactly original, borrowing as they did from Buddy Bolden, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and other New Orleans masters of African descent, but they played with enthusiasm and creativity. In “Livery Stable Blues,” their first recorded hit tune, the musicians approximated the sounds of farm animals braying and communicating with one another. The song was a sensation, as was “Tiger Rag,” the first jazz composition—along with songs composed by Jelly Roll Morton—to become standards played by aspiring bands around the country.
Being white and one of the form’s first bona fide recording stars did not insulate Nick LaRocca from the underworld side of the jazz life. On the contrary: Because LaRocca was Sicilian, as were the majority of players in his band, this may have implied a relationship that was or was not there. While in New York recording with the Victor Talking Machine Company, the Original Dixieland Jass Band booked gigs at Reisenweber’s, a dance club and restaurant. The establishment was known for fierce competition between bands. One night, a rival band of LaRocca’s group was startled to find that, right before they were scheduled to take the stage, their instruments had been vandalized—drums slashed and horns mangled. Though it was never proven to be the case, it was believed by some that LaRocca and his Sicilian bandmates had friends in the mafia who were looking out for them.
Even before that, in Chicago, LaRocca learned that his Italian heritage might put him in an unusual position with the club owners and hangers-on in the jazz world.
LaRocca and his Original Dixieland Jass Band were playing a club called Casino Gardens on the North Side. The club was the headquarters of a robbery gang led by an Irish mobster named Mickey Collins. Every afternoon, the gang’s members showed up with bags of stolen loot, which they divvied up at the club.
Whenever LaRocca and his band members showed up, the gangsters had a good laugh. The musicians, all of whom hailed originally from New Orleans, wore threadbare coats that were poorly suited to the frigid winter conditions in Chicago. An Italian member of Collins’s crew took a liking to LaRocca. As Nick hung up his coat, the gangster asked, “Why you wear a flimsy coat like that? Why don’t you get yourself a decent winter coat?” LaRocca explained that most of the money he made from the gig he sent home to his mother in New Orleans. Said the hood, “Meet me at Sears Roebuck tomorrow afternoon and I’ll buy you one.”
The next day, LaRocca went to Sears. The gangster wasn’t there, but the clerk seemed to be expecting the young musician. He helped LaRocca try on different coats until he found one he liked. LaRocca was told by the clerk, “Very good, sir. I’ll hold this one for you.”
Later that night, after his gig at Casino Gardens, LaRocca went to get his old coat and discovered that it had been slashed to ribbons. Before he could even react, he turned around and there was the Italian gangster with the coat he had picked out that afternoon at Sears Roebuck. The gangster presented LaRocca with the coat as a gift.
LaRocca was no dummy; he knew that accepting a gift from a mobster was a dubious proposition. He accepted the coat, but he also started carrying an automatic handgun in his coat pocket, leading bandmates to tag the cornet player with a new nickname: Nick the Gunman.
Not long after that, LaRocca began dating a statuesque blonde who, unbeknownst to him, was also the girlfriend of Joe Bova, leader of the South Side Gang, a rival of Mickey Collins’s North Side crew. One night at Casino Gardens, Bova paid an unexpected visit to the club and confronted LaRocca. “Stop fraternizing with my lady-friend,” he said, “or somebody is likely to find a waterlogged cornet player floating in the Chicago River.”
LaRocca was shaken by the threat. A few moments later, the musician was approached by Mickey Collins, who said, “I saw you talking to Joe Bova. What’s that punk doing in here?”
Collins listened carefully while LaRocca explained the situation. Not long after that, Bova was snatched from the back of the club and taken to an office, where he was confronted by Collins and the Italian underling who gave LaRocca the new coat. According to LaRocca, Collins and the Italian beat Bova to a pulp and then pinned him to the wall by his ears, using long hatpins.
LaRocca, however, stopped dating the blonde. After leaving Chicago, he went on to bigger and better things, namely recording the first hit jazz record of the twentieth century. But from that point onward he was well aware of the potentially perilous relationships a musician could form with a mobster, including those who did you favors or called you their friend.
Farewell to Storyville
On October 9, 1917, eight months after the Original Dixieland Jass Band recorded the first jazz record, Storyville was no more. This startling turn of events was the result of a groundswell that had given rise to the American Temperance Society, a movement that would, in two short years, result in passage of the Eighteenth Amendment and the beginning of Prohibition. In the minds of reformers, the worlds of vice, jazz, and booze had become inexorably intertwined.
Officially, the primary culprit in the eradication of Storyville was the U.S. Navy. With the United States officially entering the First World War in April 1917, the War Department, along with the secretary of the navy, became concerned about prostitution in port cities like New Orleans serving as a temptation for soldiers on shore leave. The navy secretary personally undertook an investigation of Storyville, interviewing the likes of Tom Anderson and other impresarios of the district. On behalf of the navy, the secretary declared that in his view Storyville was in violation of a decree issued earlier that year by the War Department making it illegal for a prostitution business to exist within five miles of a military installation. The secretary demanded that Storyville be shut down. Within months, all houses of prostitution within the district were put out of business, which meant, parenthetically, that Storyville no longer had a reason to exist.
Some called it the Triumph of Virtue, but in fact, prostitution in New Orleans did not come to an end. Bordellos continued to exist, now spread around the city as they had been before Storyville ever came into existence. What did come to an end was the concept of a vice district where prostitution was the lure for an entertainment scene that included a multitude of jazz venues all within a few blocks of one another. The French Quarter, to a degree, would pick up where Storyville left off and become a nexus point for jazz in the city, but the closing of Storyville had a powerful psychological and symbolic effect. Thus began an era when many of the best jazz musicians left New Orleans, a movement that would continue over the next decade.
In many ways, the transformation had already begun. Since at least the turn of the century, steam- and paddleboats leaving from the port of New Orleans and heading up the Mississippi River had become a popular leisure activity for people from the southern and midwestern states. A big attraction on these excursions was riverboat gambling and also jazz bands, which had become de rigueur on the boats.
