Keeping the Beat on the Street (17 page)

I haven't played guitar or banjo for a long while, but I still have an instrument. I mostly chord, but as soon as I get into a groove, a string pops. I sang in the church choir. My ma and my uncle used to sing all the time. They'd spin the bottle. If it stopped onyou, you had to sing. Another thing they'd do, you had to dance with the bottle. You put the wine bottle on the floor, and you take your two feet, and you move like that. And you sing, “Joli palme, joli palme on beau ai, joli palme on beau, que bec se, joli palme on beau, joli palme….” Move round the bottle and cut back up. After you did that, if the bottle lay flat, you had to buy some wine. You used a fifth bottle. You could take that down to the barroom, put a funnel in it, fill it right up. A pint of wine like that would cost you about thirty-five cents. At the bar, you could get a ten-cent shot or a fifteen-cent shot. Muscatel and like that
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In the Tremé, the majority were beer and wine drinkers. They didn't care too much about whiskey. When I was a young boy, I used to hate that. I used to wash all them bottles to make the home brew. That would be hard liquor too. Them old people would cap the bottles. You'd be laying in your bed at night and all of a sudden, “Boom! Boom!” The bottles would explode
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The police would walk the beat in the Tremé. They were all white. They mostly got on OK with the people, but maybe two or three of them didn't. They were, you know, a little more stiffer than the others. They would walk the beat, and when they got to the corner, they would hit that nightstick, and that let you know that they were around. But some of them got along without a stick. Just doing their job. When we played dice on the corner, we used to have to run from them. They'd creep up on you at the corner to make you run. Then they'd pick up the monej and split. Playing dice was legal, but not on the sidewalk. Sometimes they'd throw the nightstick at you
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I remember once on Barracks and St. Claude, someone took the nightstick and handcuffed the damn policeman. He heard no more about that. But the policeman lost his job. It was like, “If you can whip my butt you can go free, but if I win, you're going to have a butt whipped and you're going to jail.”

I was mischievous—I wasn't bad. Some of those boys I came up with were real bad boys. They'd drop out of school, start doing the wrong things. They'd wind up at what they called doing their “college”—they'd be locked up in jail. They didn't do like it is now, you know, shooting. They would fight—I've seen a fellow bust me in the head with a Jax beer bottle—it hurt, too. Go by the drugstore, get them to shave around the cut, put a little iodine or Mercurochrome on it, put a patch. Then I went right back to the barroom—the one that busted my head was in there. But it was over with. His eye was puffed up, I had a patch on my head, but it was over with. But now, someone just can't stand to be a loser
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The square right on Galvez near Banks, they called that Nanny Goat Square. There was a whole lot of fights that they would meet at Nanny Goat Square. They would say, “I'll meet you in the square,” and they would give them a time. Cabbage Alley was around Perdido Street. They had a lot of musicians down there—it was almost like a [red light] district—fast women. Near the battlefield. They had a whole lot of pimps, too, in there
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When I was young I liked to go dancing to Sidney Desvigne and Herb Leary. I remember he had a big old bus—on the back it was light blue and dark blue. We'd go to a dance and do the Trucking, the Suzie Q, and when it came to waltzing—you can't touch me for waltzing. But these days, you can't get a youngster… if you gave them a thousand dollars, they can't waltz. Me, Papoose, a fellow by the name of Chin, we all used to go to the dances. I used to like the kind of music that Sidney Desvigne played, real sentimental. He'd play the hell out of that song called “In the Mood.” And then, after he started getting away, he went to the coast—that's when Dave Bartholomew came in. At the Famous Door after World War II, that's where Sharkey Bonano used to perform
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I used to dance in the street, for nickels and dimes—me and this fellow called Bird, we'd be dancing on Bourbon Street. When we got to St. Philip, where we would turn to come back to the Tremé, we would sit on a step and count the money
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We would go to dances at the San Jacinto Club. The Autocrat Club, it was a question of complexion—they'd hold a paper bag up, and if you was darker than the bag, they wouldn't let you in. The guy that ran it, he was kind of
passe á blanc.
And Edwin “Beansie” Fauria had something to do with it. There was a girl in the neighborhood-name was Doris, pretty girl, spoke real well—she took me there. She told them, “If you don't let him in here I'm going to call my father. My daddy is a big-time judge. I'll get him to come down here.” Her father was nothing but a riverfront worker!

They were all mixed people in the Tremé. Ursuline Street, from the river to Bayou St. John, there was white both sides. From the French Quarter, St. Philip had black and white next door to one another. And all them houses from Rampart had slave quarters to the back, generally two rooms, with an outhouse in between. They got along with no trouble
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We didn't have a segregation problem in the Tremé area. We would sit down together in the house and eat. You didn't have all that robbing in those days. In that neighborhood, they had real feelings for one another; they loved one another. So there wasn't no hard times. The white would look out for the black, the black would raise the white kids. I've seen a sister nurse a black child on that side and a white child on this
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The barrooms had a wagon to go and get ice. It came from the icehouse on St. Peter between Claiborne and Robertson. On Marais and Dumaine, they had a sawmill there; the name was Lafitte. On St. Peter Street there was a lumberyard. My brother Norman, he had a goat. It wouldpull this little wagon round to pick up ice or to get charcoal for the furnace. One day he went over by my grandmother, and when he came back, he looked for the goat. But someone had ate it! Norman did some crying
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The Baby Dolls were my momma, my aunt, and the older women in the Tremé area. They came out masked at Carnival. They had the Baby Dolls, they had the Dirty Dozen, they had the Million Dollar Dolls. The night before Carnival, they would be drinking, playing the guitar, costuming for the Dirty Dozen. They got their name from the way they would mask. Some would take mustard and put it on the back of their leg, put a diaper on. Baby Dolls would wear a nice hat, short dresses. They'd wear the leg stockings, put paper money in there. But if you reached for the woman's leg, then you're in trouble. People lined up to see us come by; the Baby Dolls would dance and play tambourines
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When we started out, we played kazoos—that was what we had. I played the banjo. My oldest sister carried the bass line; she would bass into a gallon jug. You had the lead, you had harmonies—I would blow real high. I had a brother called Aitken—he could play so many riffs. That was the original Dirty Dozen Kazoo Band. We played at the Jazz Fest, with Alan Jaffe on bass horn. Got a big crowd round us
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When I was in school, I was on snare drum. And the fellow that played the bass drum, he was absent—he was ill. It was a real big old antique bass drum. I thought, “I can't tote that big old drum.” I let that drum roll from upstairs downstairs, trying to break it
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I made my first set of drums: I made the foot pedal with an inner tube for a spring. The bass drum was a washtub, I beat it to tune it. And I used a slop bucket. The first band I played with was the Olympia. The first band I played out of town with was the Crescent City, with Dalton Rousseau, the trumpet player. The grand marshal was Anderson Minor
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I worked with Tuba Fats—to me, he's one of the finest tuba players you got. I'm the one that got him into the Olympia Band. Harold Dejan's related to my oldest sister-in-law
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When I was younger, I would go over by the Palace Theater—it was what they called vaudeville. Harold Dejan was performing there. I had a sister-in-law, she used to sing over there. Harold played saxophone on the vaudeville night. Anyone, black and white, could go to the Palace Theater—you could sit anywhere. It was on Dauphine, one block before Canal. It cost eighteen cents to get in. We used to go by the Gypsy Tea Room too
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Benny Jones is the one that put the Dirty Dozen Brass Band together. He couldn't travel like they wanted, because of his family. So he put my son to play drums with them. Then he started the Tremé Brass Band, which is a good band. See, the way Benny and I play with the Tremé band, we listen to the crowd—we have something to give the older ones: give them a chance to get up and dance, remember the time they first heard that number. If you're playing and nobody's interested, that's depressing to me. What the hell to play to make them get up? They sitting like they're in church
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Nowadays, the tempos are faster, and I find the young bands of today play school music. I could play with those young bands; I've played with the Rebirth. I have to play my music. The youngsters get their music from school and reading the music. The band teacher gets a hold of a tune that he would like, so he sits there and writes it, and they move it to a tempo where they can march with it. Sometimes it's not clear; in other words, it's not snappy. They play this number called “Casanova”—that's not a traditional song. You can't play that traditional—it should be mostly vocal. Everything is choppy. But the youngsters like it, and the dancing is different
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Tremé Brass Band at Freddie Kohlman's funeral, 1990 (Frederick Shepherd, Revert Andrews, Butch Gomez, Lionel Batiste Snr., Kerwin James)
Photo by Bill Dickens

Of all the bands going today, the Tremé flays the most traditional. I've flayed with the Algiers band, and they flay traditional too. When I was coming up, my favorite bass drum flayer was Emile Knox. And you had Willie Parker, I remember him. There was Earl Palmer—he was good—and John Boudreaux
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Michael White, he tries to keef that old-time thing going. I had a gig with him. So he tells me the dress code, and I say “I know, it's black and white.” Well, we met up at Tulane, sitting round waiting. So I took the cap off. Michael says to me, “Uncle, your cap.” I say, “Yeah, give me the hat band to Put on it.” He said, “No—will you take your
pins
off the hat?” Man, I have some fins on that hat—I had to take them all off. I haven't had time to put them all back on yet
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I miss New Orleans when I'm away. I remember once—we were overseas for Carnival. Everybody sitting around saying, “Man, I wonder what this one is doing. I wonder what's happening.” One of the guys called home—the phone just rang, nobody answered. We said, “Man, your wife ain't home, she's out there somewhere.” And it got to him
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When I go on the street now, I'm looking for a combination of things: the music, the money, and the girls. When you get up in age, everything slows up. I may not be able to do that long walking like I used to. So far, my legs are fine
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The masking traditions carried on by Lionel Batiste's family go back in history almost as far as jazz itself. Beatrice Hill, who claimed to be “the first Baby Doll,” recalled: “Liberty and Perdido was red hot back in 1912 when that idea started. And we decided to call ourselves the Million Dollar Baby Dolls…. I remember one nigger trying to tear my stockings open to get at my money till my man hit him over the head with a chair.”
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Austin Leslie, interviewed for the Tremé Oral History Project, agreed the Baby Dolls were not to be messed with: “Then they had the Baby Dolls: all those women dressed like little babies, in hot pink and sky blue. You fool with them, they'd cut you too.”
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It was indeed a colorful scene, as George Guesnon described it in a 1959 interview: “Gilbert Young took me to the Humming Bird Cabaret on Bienville and Marais on St. Joseph's night 1927, and what I saw there I ain't never saw before. It was the Baby Dolls. All those whores with their asses out, kicking high their pretty legs in the fancy lace stockings, filled with fifty and one hundred dollar bills. All them bitches were just having themselves a ball, you know?”
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These were no ordinary goings-on. “If a girl's dress wasn't way below the knee, people would knock her head off,” explained Henry “Booker T” Glass. “The members of the Baby Dolls Club wore short dresses on Carnival Parades, but they also wore masks.”
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As Earl Palmer (born 1924) recollected, “The Baby Dolls were women that masqueraded as little baby girls. It just started as a comedic gesture, these great big fat women in baby doll outfits, bonnets tied under their chins, and little socks, and sometimes they wore a diaper. Thighs this big sticking out of their tiny bloomers. Some of them got a little nasty sometimes. But we're talking about the days when they wasn't allowed to do anything real nasty, as opposed to now, when they show their pussies on Bourbon Street. The Baby Dolls wouldn't dare do that.”
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