Empire of Sin (20 page)

Like many of the early white jazzmen, LaRocca was Sicilian (as was, for that matter, Jack Laine, whose real surname was Vitale); as such, he was already considered ipso facto disreputable by the likes of the Garden District elite. Playing jazz just reinforced that impression. “
Whites who played jazz altered their racial identity,” as one historian has put it, “becoming less white in the eyes of ‘respectable’ Caucasians.” And LaRocca, again like many of the Creoles, had to face the disapproval of his family when his interest in music went beyond the acceptable weekend-hobby stage.
When Giarolamo LaRocca discovered that his young son Nick had taught himself to play his (Giarolamo’s) own cornet, the father took the instrument out to the yard and destroyed it with an ax. Fortunately, this didn’t discourage the boy for long, and he soon had saved up enough money to buy his own cornet. But when his father found out about it, he grabbed his ax and smashed the new cornet as well.

Despite such discouragements, the new music was soon attracting white audiences as well—and not only among the working classes. Edmond Souchon, a doctor who grew up in New Orleans in what he called “
the citadel of white caste privileges,” described stealing off to the District when he was still a boy in short pants in order to hear his idol, Joe Oliver, playing at Big 25. (When challenged by police, Souchon would claim to be a newsboy delivering a paper that Oliver had ordered from him—which worked, for a time.) Bassist Pops Foster remembered lots of whites listening to jazz in the early years, even in allegedly all-black venues: “
Most saloons had two sides, one for whites and one for colored. The colored had so much fun on their side dancing, singing, and guitar playing, that you couldn’t get in for the whites. It was the same way at Lincoln Park for the colored; you couldn’t tell
who
it was for, there were so many whites there.”

Still, given its association with sex, alcohol,
a rise in cocaine use among blacks, and interracial mixing, the music was developing a major image problem in the early years of the 20th century. The entire culture of jazz seemed an affront to decency for many people in New Orleans, including many middle-class blacks. Describing the scene at a Negro dance hall in 1902, the
Item
could barely contain its abhorrence: “
The orchestra consisted of a clarinet, a guitar, and a bass fiddle. The guitar was plucked by a bullet-headed Negro with a far-away look in his eyes, and a molasses-colored musician that blew the clarinet had to brace his feet against the railing of the players’ stand to prevent himself from being hurled backward by the strength of his breath, which at each blast into the instrument had the effect of making the player kick back like a shotgun.… Even the music had an indecent ring about it that was disgusting.”

The bad image of jazz and jazzmen was also not helped by the growing number of violent incidents occurring in places where the music was played. Jelly Roll Morton described one incident at a Bolden performance—probably in early 1905—at Jackson Hall.
A short, ill-tempered man was standing at the bar, listening to the music, when a “great big husky guy” stepped on his foot. An argument erupted between the two (with Morton standing right between them), during which the small man pulled out a very large gun and shot the other man at close range, just barely missing the pianist. “This big guy laid there on the floor, dead,” Morton recalled, “and, my goodness, Buddy Bolden—he was up on the balcony with the band—started blazing away with his trumpet, trying to keep the crowd together. Many of us realized it was a killing and we started breaking out windows and through doors and just run over the police they had there.”

Bolden himself was arrested in the incident—much to Morton’s puzzlement (“
I’ve often wondered why they would put Mr. Bolden in the patrol [wagon] when he was up there blowing high notes to keep everyone quiet”). But King Bolden in particular seemed to be regarded by the white establishment—when they became aware of him—as a threat. Sidney Bechet recalled the reaction when his own band would play “Funky Butt”: “
When we started off playing Buddy’s theme song, ‘I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say,’ the police put you in jail if they heard you singing that song.” Like the Robert Charles song, Buddy Bolden’s song had political connotations that the police tried hard to discourage. As one historian has noted, both were “
manifestations of cultural resistance within African American circles; each made the white power structure nervous.”

Even the way these black men dressed was considered a provocation: “
These guys wouldn’t wear anything but a blue coat and some kind of stripe in their trousers,” Jelly Roll Morton recalled, “and those trousers had to be very, very tight. They’d fit um like a sausage. I’m telling you, it was very seldom you could button the top button of a person’s trousers those days in New Orleans.” One of Bolden’s suspenders would always be hanging down, and his shirt would be “busted open so that you could discern his red flannel undershirt.” And all of this was carried off with a kind of strut or “mosey walk”—commonly known as “walking the agate”—that allegedly made the women wild.

But Bolden’s days as leader of this defiant subculture were to be tragically brief. The year 1905 marked the peak of his popularity. At that point, as one witness put it, “
just the sight of the famous cornetist was enough to satisfy some of his fans.” Whenever he practiced on his front steps, neighborhood children would gather around him on the sidewalks, shouting “
King Bolden! King Bolden!” And his effect on women was legendary. In 1902, he had met and married one of his neighbors,
Nora Bass, a twenty-two-year-old mixed-race woman from a religious family, and had had a daughter by her sometime the next year. But the attention he received from his young female fans didn’t end. “Sometimes,” according to one of his friends,
“he would have to run away from the women.”

But this kind of celebrity eventually took its toll. In March of 1906, Bolden began to experience
severe headaches.
Other symptoms appeared: He seemed disoriented at times, failed to recognize his friends, and would walk the streets talking incoherently to strangers. Sometimes his mother and sister would have to
send Buddy’s friend Louis Jones to find him and bring him home. He even developed what seemed to be
a fear of his own cornet.

No one really knows what caused Bolden to begin losing his grip on reality.
Some said he drank too much and slept too little; others said he simply succumbed to the pressure of having to keep innovating to avoid becoming yesterday’s sensation; Louis Jones thought it might have something to do with
an untreated ear infection. But the mother of drummer Paul Barbarin had the simplest explanation—she’d always told her son that Bolden would blow his brains out someday because
he just played too loud.

Whatever the cause, his deterioration was rapid. He eventually was even kicked out of his own band. After Buddy had failed to pay his band members once too often, they began arranging their own gigs without him. At the start of one of these engagements—at Odd Fellows Hall on Perdido—Bolden arrived late, only to find that his band had replaced him with his old rival Edward Clem.

“
You can go back home,” Frankie Dusen, his second cornetist, told him.

“You mean to tell me you’re gonna put me out of my own band?” Bolden asked. He reminded Dusen that he had hired the younger man “when nobody would have you.”

“That makes no difference,” Dusen replied. “I’m the King now.”

In the spring of 1906—while bedridden and being tended by his mother and his mother-in-law, Ida Bass—Bolden turned violent. Convinced that he was being poisoned, he jumped out of bed and
attacked Mrs. Bass with a water pitcher. She suffered only a minor head wound, and Bolden was soon calmed down again. But the two women, concerned that more violence might follow, had him arrested on a charge of insanity. He was held in jail for a few days and released. But there were more incidents and arrests to come. According to one uncorroborated story, Bolden even
threw a neighbor’s baby out of a window. Soon parents and older siblings were warning kids away from him. “
He’s nuts, you know,” one neighbor explained to his younger brother.

Bolden’s last gig was playing for the Labor Day parade in New Orleans later that year. It was a huge parade, and virtually every musician in town would have been playing in it. But sometime before the marching was over, Bolden had to drop out. He spent a troubled week at home, and by Saturday his mental state was bad enough for his mother to have him incarcerated again on an insanity charge. Again he was released after a few days, but he was by now too far-gone for help. He spent the winter drinking heavily and doing little else. Then, on March 13, 1907, Alice Bolden had her son arrested for a third—and final—time.

Bolden sat in the House of Detention for several weeks before finally being transferred to the State Insane Asylum in Jackson, Louisiana. The commitment document read, in part, as follows: “
Character of Disease: Insanity. Cause of Insanity: Alcohol. Is Patient Dangerous to Himself or Others? To others.”

Bolden would remain at Jackson for the rest of his life. But though the first “King” of jazz was gone, there were many musicians in New Orleans who would carry on—and expand upon—his legacy. One of them was just a small boy when Bolden was put away. He would later tell conflicting stories about whether he really remembered hearing Bolden play, but it was actually likely that he did. He lived quite near Funky Butt Hall on Perdido, and recalled listening—when he was a boy of four or five, just when Bolden would have been at his peak—to a band playing to advertise Saturday-night dances at the hall. “
Before the dance,” the boy would later write, “the band would play out front about a half hour. And us little kids would all do little dances. If I ever heard Buddy Bolden play the cornet, I figure that’s when.”

The boy was named Louis Armstrong, and he would eventually do more than anyone in history to spread Bolden’s new sound beyond the confines of the ghettos of New Orleans and out into the world.

Are We to Have a “Wide-Open” City?

Representative Anderson of the Fourth Ward of the city, but commonly known as the mayor of Storyville, has succeeded in passing through the House of Representatives a bill allowing prize fights up to twenty-five rounds in regularly organized clubs in New Orleans, without asking the consent of the mayor.

Doubtless the classes whom Mr. Anderson specially represents desire a “wide-open” city, and so far there has been nothing to prevent [it]. It will be astonishing if the General Assembly of Louisiana shall permit the purveyors of vice and the habitués of the purlieus of New Orleans to set the legal and official standard of the morals of the city.

—New Orleans Daily Picayune
, June 20, 1902

BY 1905, THE CITY OF NEW ORLEANS—OR AT LEAST that part of it known to an increasing portion of the world as Storyville—was just about as “wide-open” as the poor
Daily Picayune
had feared. In the seven or eight years that the District had been open, it had developed into a vast, well-functioning factory of sin,
as lucrative and efficient as any lumber mill or city gasworks in the country. Its 230 brothels, 60 assignation houses, and scores of one-room cribs could by now process the raw materials of male sexual desire at an astonishing rate of speed. “
I’ll tell you, five minutes was a long time to spend in one of those rooms,” one customer said of a typical brothel visit. “In fact, from the time you’d come in the front door of the house until you’d be back on the banquette [sidewalk] hardly ever took more than fifteen minutes. And there you’d be, standing on the banquette without a cent in your pocket, and no place to go but maybe home. And that would be the last place in the world you’d want to go.”

Like the factories of other American industries, moreover, the vice mills of Storyville were kept churning day and night, rotating workers as needed. “
This Tenderloin District was like something that nobody has ever seen before or since,” Jelly Roll Morton insisted. “The doors were taken off the saloons from one year to the next.” Why bother with doors, after all, if your establishment never closed? Even the crib women marched to and from their shifts like factory workers. “
A lot of the prostitutes lived in different sections of the city and would come down to Storyville just like they had a job,” Louis Armstrong remembered. “There were different shifts for them.… Sometimes—two prostitutes would share the rent in the same crib together.… One would work in the day and the other would beat out that night shift.”