Dangerous Rhythms, page 7
In the year 1918, none other than Louis Armstrong was hired to play on a boat known as the Sydney, which was part of the Streckfus Steamboat Line. Satchmo, as Armstrong was now commonly known, had been playing cornet in Kid Ory’s band when he was approached by Fate Marable, a piano player whose acclaimed band had been playing the Streckfus Line for more than a decade. Marable offered Armstrong a slot in his band. Having never been outside of Louisiana, Armstrong, still only seventeen years of age, jumped at the opportunity.
The steamboats are remembered in the lore of jazz history for having brought the music “up stream.” Armstrong wrote about it in his memoir, noting that in Jim Crow America, white folks in places like St. Louis and Davenport, Iowa, were seeing all-Negro bands for the first time in their lives:
The ofays were not used to seeing colored boys blowing horns and making fine music for them to dance by. At first we ran into some ugly experiences while we were on the bandstand, and we had to listen to plenty of nasty remarks. But most of us were from the South anyway. We were used to that kind of jive, and we would keep on swinging as though nothing had happened. Before the evening was over they loved us.
One thing that Armstrong noticed, in many of the cities where the riverboats docked for the night, was that jazz in one form or another had already arrived. The New Orleans musicians may have been the most sophisticated and accomplished at the new music, but it seemed as though the seeds of jazz as a new art form had found fertile soil in a number of localities along the Mississippi River and its many tributaries. Also in many of these towns and cities—and, for that matter, on riverboats like the Sydney and others—the music attracted its share of riff-raff. Gamblers, hustlers, pimps, and prostitutes circulated around the jazz universe like bees to a hive. Rightly or wrongly, the music continued to be viewed as a form of entertainment for shady characters.
This reality would have repercussions for the development of the music, but even more significantly it would have a profound impact on the business of jazz.
As of yet, jazz was hardly a business at all. Recording the music for phonograph records, even with the success of the Original Dixieland Jass Band, was in its infancy. Few bands or musicians were known well enough to sell records or draw an audience that would pay an admission fee. Jazz was still mostly street music—the mellifluous conjuring of honky-tonks, whorehouses, and steamboats. But these sounds could not be denied. It wasn’t just that jazz was infectious; it certainly was that. It was also something more. Jazz was a cultural expression that helped to define America as a place of diversity and possibilities. It represented the creation of something spontaneous and wondrous. In this freshly tilled soil, the seeds had taken root; jazz was spreading, and wherever it spread, it took on the dimensions of a potentially lucrative commercial venture.
There were the musicians, and there were the money changers—club owners, managers, agents, and promoters. Which meant there were many points of entry for businessmen hustlers and their underworld associates.
It appeared that jazz was on the cusp of sprouting like a ripe fruit tree, with branches that reached around the United States. Inevitably, in the many localities where the fruit flourished, the mob was there looking to harvest the bounty and savor the juice.
3
Kansas City Stomp
By the 1920s, the phonograph player had been around for decades, but not many people owned one. The Original Dixieland Jass Band and a few other New Orleans bands had been recorded, but to be aware of this fact you had to be either wealthy or have access to drinking parlors or private clubs where phonograph players were put on display, as if they were novelty items from another galaxy. It was common for classical music or symphonies to be recorded and sold as discs, but most felt that jazz was beneath the commercial requirements of this new technology. The thinking was that if you were a fan of this music, you likely did not have the money to purchase a disc, much less an actual phonograph player. Jazz was the music of the proletariat; it had not yet been formulated into something that could be monetized on a mass scale.
As the music spread, however, the desire to hear this new confection was becoming a genuine phenomenon. In social gathering places, on riverboats and in saloons—and, increasingly, in theaters and concert halls—the music stoked the imagination and brought rhythm to the feet of those who were open to its charms. Jazz began taking shape in many cities and towns, but where it urgently and most emphatically become institutionalized was in cities that had a native population and social philosophy that was predisposed to give the people what they desired. It also helped to have a commercial and political structure that was conducive to the idea of vice and the underworld as a legitimate social construct. Cities that had evolved around the concept of a political machine, which, as in New Orleans, was open to the codification of good times and chicanery as a fact of life—this is where the new music was most likely to gain traction.
People’s response to the music itself was one thing, but to turn jazz into a commercial venture seemed to require a specific district where the music could flourish. A vice district. In this regard, Kansas City, Missouri, which had only recently emerged from being a cow town to being an actual city, was ahead of the game.
If Storyville had Tom Anderson, who had the vision—and the political skills—to create the proper environment for jazz, Kansas City had Thomas Joseph “T. J.” Pendergast. These two men had many things in common besides the fact that they were both named Tom. Both were of Irish descent and Democratic Party political bosses at a time when being a political boss made you, locally speaking, as powerful as any dictator. Anderson had maximum control in Storyville, until a power larger than himself usurped his authority and rendered him and the district over which he presided a historical afterthought. Tom Pendergast’s reign was more deeply rooted.
In 1911, Tom inherited the organization known as the Pendergast machine from his older brother Jim, a former factory worker who became a Democratic Party committeeman from the city’s First Ward. Jim was also proprietor of the American House, a multipurpose saloon that featured gambling tables in the back and rooms upstairs for quick, commercially transacted assignations. Tom Pendergast served an apprenticeship as doorman and bouncer at the popular saloon.
By the turn of the century, a number of U.S. cities had seen the rise of political machines. In big cities like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia—and even smaller cities like Albany (New York), Boston, and Jersey City (New Jersey)—political organizations that revolved around working people, immigrants, and the poor would become a staple of urban life. Tammany Hall in New York set the standard. An elaborate system for delivering jobs, city services, and power to “the little man” in exchange for electoral support helped to grease the wheels of progress and underwrite a period of accelerated industrialization.
In Kansas City, the political machine run by one Pendergast (Jim) and then another (Tom) was sometimes referred to as “Little Tammany,” but in many ways the Pendergast machine was, for half a century, the most stalwart of them all. The organization became a symbol of benevolence for those it serviced. The only way the machine could exist is if it delivered, and deliver it did with basic needs like coal for heat during the winters, holiday turkeys, a roof over the head, food, a job. By the time Tom Pendergast took over the organization after his brother’s sudden death, the machine would be credited with transforming a onetime midwestern cow pasture into one of the most energetic cities in America—and, almost by accident, give birth to one of the most storied jazz eras to ever exist.
Born July 22, 1872, in Saint Joseph, Missouri, Pendergast’s ancestors were Potato Famine immigrants who hailed from County Tipperary, in the Irish midlands. As a child, Pendergast was raised in a section of Kansas City known as West Bottoms, an industrial area in the First Ward that would become the home base for the machine.
By the 1920s, Kansas City was an emerging industrial hub, with stockyards and slaughterhouses. The city had transitioned from a wasteland to being thought of as the most significant crossroads of what were known as “the Territories”—Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Arkansas, and Louisiana. The city’s reputation was based in large part on Pendergast, whose power was far reaching. Locally, City Hall became known as “the House of Pendergast.” The state capital in Jefferson City was referred to as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Harry S. Truman, who was handpicked by Boss Tom to run for the U.S. Senate and eventually became the thirty-third president of the United States, was sarcastically known as “the senator from Pendergast.” The boss was unapologetic about his power: “I’m not bragging when I say I run the show in Kansas City. I am the boss. If I were a Republican, they would call me a leader.”
Voter fraud was common in local elections. Ghost voting and stuffing the ballot box were common tactics of the machine, as was voter intimidation. Election day was often violent in Kansas City, which resulted in a relationship between the political apparatus and men of violence that sometimes reasserted itself during labor disputes, municipal contract negotiations, or whenever it was needed. Through force and guile, Pendergast reigned supreme. Built like a football player, with a big head and magnetic smile, he was earthy and blunt. He was a local chieftain who laughed, cried, and seemed to genuinely care about the lives of his constituents. He could be kindly and sentimental but was also a tough-as-nails, gravelly voiced brute who mangled the English language and wasn’t afraid to get rough with anyone he felt deserved it.
In a newspaper interview, Pendergast once explained how he handled two underlings who questioned an order: “One of them hesitated, said he didn’t know anything about it. Well, I slapped him with an open hand. The other tried to protest. I hit him with my fist and knocked him through the glass door.”
Pendergast didn’t have to get rough very often. There was a reason that throughout the Territories, Kansas City was known as “Tom’s Town.”
The biggest single boon to the machine occurred on January 16, 1919, with passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, which, once it went into effect one year later, inaugurated the long, bloody era known as Prohibition. The Volstead Act—a series of laws and regulations that sought to eliminate the manufacture, distribution, and consumption of alcohol in the United States—became the law of the land. Thus began the most robust era in the history of organized crime. It was also a time when the new music became elevated to an exalted cultural status, so much so that a young author named F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1922 published a collection of short stories titled Tales of the Jazz Age. From that point onward, both Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age were on their way.
The Pendergast machine was well positioned to make the most of new restrictions on booze. For one thing, the boss was the owner of the T. J. Pendergast Wholesale Liquor Company, the largest liquor distributor in the state. Shortly after the Volstead Act was passed by the U.S. Congress, Pendergast sued the federal government on the grounds that Prohibition was unconstitutional. He lost the lawsuit and later that year made a show of liquidating his liquor company by turning it into a soft-drink dealership. It didn’t matter. Kansas City would become known as “the wettest city in the Territories,” and no one doubted that the man who made the booze flow was T. J. Pendergast.
Built on a stratified system of aldermen, ward bosses, precinct captains, and block captains, the machine could determine how the booze was stored and distributed; it could bring the product to the people. The machine also had near total control over the police department, with its many members of Irish descent, to make sure that things ran smoothly. In the entire run of Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933, not a single felony conviction for violation of the Volstead Act was ever imposed in Tom’s Town.
Last but not least in the consortium of players who would become essential brokers during the era were the gangsters.
Among other things, the imposition of Prohibition gave rise to an idea, one that would alter America in ways few could have imagined. As it turned out, people didn’t want only to be able to consume alcohol as they saw fit; they wanted a place that set the proper mood for engaging in what was now an illegal activity. An entire generation of Americans crossed over to the dark side by knowingly and willingly breaking the law. And they were determined to have a good time doing it.
This intertwining of the worlds of alcohol, hoodlums, and all forms of vice was certainly not new. New Orleans had seen the rise and fall of its legendary vice district before Prohibition was ever instituted. The underworld is where a person went to taste the hoary fruits of the devil. It just so happened that in Kansas City, as jazz was asserting itself as the new music for people with adventurous spirits, reformers and the United States government created a scenario that would unwittingly lay the groundwork for a staggering new epoch of crime, vice, and music.
Pendergast was the boss, but a coterie of characters emerged as leading lights of the era. In the African American community, few were better connected than Felix H. Payne, a popular nightclub owner, community leader, sporting man, and silver-tongued orator who would become one of the city’s leading public figures during the Pendergast years.
A flashy dresser with spats, a silk scarf in his breast pocket, hair conked and slicked back, Payne was often seen at the Jefferson Hotel, where Boss Tom maintained the office of the Jackson County Democratic Club, until it later moved to a small, unassuming brick building at 1908 Main Street. Payne was possibly the machine’s most influential Negro. He would eventually buy a piece of the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Baseball League and, in 1928, began publishing the Kansas City American, an African American weekly newspaper that was a robust supporter of Pendergast and his Democratic Party machine.
Few were as capable as Payne when it came to delivering “the colored vote” on election day. Ensuring he had the influence to guarantee a certain percentage of voters, Payne established a reputation in the city’s premier Black neighborhood as a deliverer of good times. He owned numerous nightclubs in what became known as the 18th and Vine jazz district, most notably the Sunset Cafe, a popular honky-tonk at 12th and Highland. Whiskey and beer flowed freely at the Sunset, but one of the biggest draws was the man who worked behind the bar: Kansas City–born blues singer Big Joe Turner.
While serving drinks or making change, Turner might break into a chorus of “Morning Glory” backed by the boogie-woogie revelry of Pete Johnson, the house pianist. Turner became the patron saint of blues and jazz singers in the city and would go on to become a giant figure in the history of American folk music.
Along with the Sunset, Payne was the proprietor of the Eastside Musicians Club, a notorious gambling parlor where patrons could bet the daily number on a huge policy wheel that was spun each day by the ward boss.
Payne’s partner, the man who served as manager at the Sunset and other clubs, was Piney Brown (not to be confused with Walter “Piney” Brown, a well-known Kansas City blues singer who emerged on the scene a generation later). Whereas Payne projected the air of an aristocrat, Piney Brown was a country Negro known to be an irascible ladies’ man and degenerate gambler. His legend in town was best expressed by Joe Turner who, after Brown died prematurely in the late 1920s, immortalized the club manager in “Piney Brown Blues”:
I dreamed last night I was standing on
18th and Vine
I shook hands with Piney Brown, and I could
hardly keep from crying.
Brown first established his managerial bona fides at another Felix Payne–owned establishment, the Subway Club, located in a basement at 1516 18th Street. Saxophonist Eddie Barefield, a sideman in Kansas City who regularly played at the Subway Club, remembered Brown as being generous to a fault. “I don’t think he made any money off the Subway, because he gave away too much . . . You could go down there any night and get juiced and eat and do whatever you wanted to do. If you came there as a musician, it never cost you anything.”
It was at the Sunset, with Felix Payne as his overlord, that Piney Brown hosted some of the hottest late-night jam sessions in the city. Musicians wound up at the Sunset because they knew they would be taken care of. “Piney was the patron saint of all musicians. He used to take care of them,” recalled Barefield. “In fact, he was like a father to me . . . Most all the playing and jamming happened at Piney’s place. He didn’t care how much it cost . . . If you needed money to pay rent, he would give it to you and take you out and buy you booze. He was a man you could depend on for something if you needed it.”
The saxophonist was talking about Piney Brown, but he could easily have been talking about Boss Tom or the Pendergast organization in general. You could depend on it if you needed it: The machine philosophy was based on doing favors for those who identified themselves as being one of its constituents. In that sense, musicians were like everyone else in the city. You pledged your support to the machine, and it was incumbent upon the machine to deliver. Those who delivered with sincerity and benevolence, from Felix Payne and Piney Brown all the way up to Boss Tom, were revered by those they served.
It was an arrangement that enemies of the machine could never quite understand. The Kansas City Star, the city’s preeminent daily newspaper, routinely characterized the machine as dictatorial and corrupt. Why would anyone pledge fealty to an organization that tacitly condoned sin and vice as a money-making proposition; that skimmed money from municipal projects, the money then going into the pockets of ward bosses; that demanded fealty on election day using techniques that included coercion bordering on thuggery?
The answer was not complicated: In times of need, it sometimes seemed that the only person you could depend on was the ward boss, the local committeeman, the block captain, or the machine-affiliated saloon owner in your district—who treated you, not as a freeloader and an imposition, but as a friend and a human being.
