Category Archives: Missouri History and Legend

1960: Elvis Presley Drives Highway 61 Southbound

Preview episode of the book River Shows, Blues, Ragtime, Jazz and Country Music: It All Equals Rockabilly, Part One, by Matt Chaney

Copyright ©2023 for historical arrangement and original content by Matt Chaney, Four Walls Publishing

Friday, July 21, 2023, chaneysblog.com

During the 1960s, U.S. Highway 61 was reduced to a byway in southeast Missouri—and throughout the Lower Mississippi River Valley—supplanted by Interstate 55 of the new federal road system. And traveling southbound from Cape Girardeau, where I-55 blazed over knobby foothills, motorists met a stunning sight:

The great delta flatland, stretching into beyond. The interstate’s twin tracks bore straight south, melding together in the distance, with the horizon a flat line.

Southeast Missouri had been ocean coastline in eons past, an ancient embayment subsequently altered through ice ages and meltdowns, concluded geologists. The modern Mississippi River stood relatively young at around 10,000 years of age, scientists calculated in the 20th Century, with the alluvial basin composed of sediments washed from across the continental interior. Core drilling indicated more than 1,000 cubic miles of sediment filled an entrenched rock valley from Cape Girardeau to New Orleans. Geologists determined that the New Madrid Fault, notorious seismic rift, would never resolve for encroachment of boulders far underground.

In the 1900s, delta swamps and spillways were drained, levees were fortified, and farms and communities developed from Missouri to Louisiana. Population influx was led by planters and sharecroppers from the Old South, escaping regions beset by soil depletion and the boll weevil. For “reclaimed” delta land, the basic scenery was row crops, flat expanses of cotton, corn, beans and alfalfa, framed only by fence and tree lines. The sky was enormous above.

On appearances the delta seemed no place for artistic greatness to influence a civilization, yet this became the wellspring for American music. Multiple genres were impacted, including folk, gospel, blues, ragtime, jazz, “hillbilly” or country music, and, ultimately, rock ‘n’ roll. The essential delta factor, according to many, was the rub of class and race in a harsh frontier.

“All the music culture that’s come into Memphis has come in here from poor whites and poor blacks,” said Judd Phillips, record producer, in 1979. “I think we need to take into consideration that poor whites and poor blacks came in here looking for jobs… and they were singing their hearts out. It’s not there in Chicago, or New York, or on the West Coast. It came from right here in the melting pot of human suffering.”

“These untrained musicians in the Mid-South, from the delta of Mississippi, the delta of Arkansas, west Tennessee, southeast Missouri, northwest Alabama—you had a combination of country people,” said Sam Phillips, brother of Judd and founder of Sun Records. “I mean really country musicians, amateur musicians, black and white, the likes of which no other section in this land had.”

Delta songsmiths “created a sound out of the way they lived and their backgrounds and their roots,” said Al Bennett, recording magnate reared on a farm in northeast Arkansas. “I don’t think it was designed.”

“There are two choices in Arkansas…,” said singer Ronnie Hawkins, founding member of The Hawks. “You either pick cotton for three or four dollars a day, or you can play music and get out. So there’s an awful lot of people trying to pick guitars in that area.”

Johnny Cash recalled helping his family clear swamp tangle for a meager farm at Dyess, Ark., with floodwater the perennial threat. Cash believed the experience translated later for his music, attracting wide audience. “When you work close to the earth on some poor dirt farm… you learn to understand the basic things about love and hate and what people want from life,” Cash observed.

“I think the Mississippi delta was just as fertile to American culture as the delta was in ancient Egypt,” said author Nick Tousches, biographer of Jerry Lee Lewis, in 1994. “It was where black people heard the white man’s music and made something new out of it. It was where the white man heard the black man’s music. And people say the blues came from Africa; well, I think they really came from the Deep South.”

Author Rose Marie Kinder heard lyricism in everyday language of her native southeast Missouri, where expression “differs from anywhere else in the state or country,” Kinder said. “It’s subtle, perhaps, but you’ll know the true southeast Missouri vernacular when you hear it. It’s not Southern inflection, not just metaphor and certainly not just colloquialisms. It’s wit and pacing and sharp, apt observation.”

“An added pronoun or two can make music if they’re in the right place.”

***

Elvis Presley appreciated modern aircraft, he just did not like flying. Now the TWA jet he had boarded in Los Angeles struck turbulence at 35,000 feet, bearing east at 600 mph. A storm system draped the country early this Thursday morning, June 30, 1960, with damaging winds having struck St. Louis at midnight.

Presley’s flight charged on through rough skies and then, three hours airborne, the Boeing 707 decelerated noticeably, dropping in elevation. The aircraft nosed downward, immersed in clouds, jumpy through pockets, pitching about. The fuselage quivered and visibility was zero outside.

Young Elvis shook in his seat. He would have been terrified a few years earlier but had learned better of flying on Army transports. This was Presley’s first jet flight. He was tense on descent in the 707 but knew landing was near in St. Louis. He thought good thoughts, like the old saying, of reaching home in Memphis, his Graceland Estate, and of getting there by car, his preferred mode of travel.

The plane’s landing navigation was state of the art, leading pilots and aircraft to earth electronically. Cloud cover separated and Lambert Airport came into view below, its runways grid in a giant outlay. New Interstate 70,  the “Mark Twain Expressway,” ran alongside the busy airport. Morning sunlight burned through from the east, shimmering off the Mississippi River at downtown St. Louis.

Urban sprawl westward represented St. Louis County suburbia and commercial development, including the airport and auto plants, fascinating from above. Cars crawled on superhighways, swirling round cloverleaf interchanges. Lindbergh Boulevard marked the metro’s western belt, and new I-70 was pure freeway, a few miles of pavement opened thus far. Subdivisions clustered along Lindbergh below, in honeycombs of streets and cul-de-sacs, strands of uniform homes, cookie-cutter models of ranch and split level.

The plane came down right over Lindbergh car traffic to land yonder on Runway One at Lambert. Pilots hit the brakes and reversed thrust. Big rubber tires bowed and groaned, and the Boeing cut to taxi speed within 4,800 feet. Elvis Presley—age 25, heartthrob singer-actor, more famous than the president—exhaled after a long night and morning yet. He was wide awake now, no amphetamines required, ready to go home after 10 weeks shooting the movie G.I. Blues in Hollywood.

St. Louis weather was sultry and blustery, rain light, with storms still forecast.

Presley and his cousin Gene Smith disembarked the aircraft, donning sunglasses under dark skies, avoiding recognition. Passing incognito was not their entire goal, for Elvis enjoyed meeting fans and signing autographs, posing for photos. Getting mobbed was his constant fear, capable of happening in seconds, as the superstar experienced worldwide. Nothing of the sort transpired at Lambert, and local media had no clue Elvis was here.

He and Gene loaded a rental Cadillac without interference. Elvis slid into the driver’s seat as usual, turning the ignition key and hitting the gas. The luxury car shot out of the lot, onto a cloverleaf exit for Lindbergh Boulevard, and round the down ramp, tires squealing. Elvis merged quickly into traffic, southbound.

Presley put pedal to the metal, coming up fast on the new Holiday Inn at the Lindbergh intersection with I-70. The Holiday Inns of America Inc. was brainchild of Kemmons Wilson, Memphis businessman, acquaintance of Presley and an investment partner of Sam Phillips, Sun Records. Phillips had produced pioneer rockabilly hits of Elvis with Scotty Moore and Bill Black during 1954-55. Sun sold Presley’s contract to RCA for $40,000 after Wilson, reputed genius of business, advised Phillips to make the deal.

Presley glanced at the first Holiday Inn of St. Louis, its choice location at major highways and the airport. On another morning he might grab a room for sleep, to “crash” after a restless night, but not today. Rainy weather meant no females at the hotel pool, none for Gene to herd toward Elvis in his room. The celebrity was Memphis bound, besides, where plenty “chicks” awaited him.

The Cadillac sped on, weaving around cars and trucks. Lindbergh was a most dangerous roadway labeled “Racetrack of Death” by a coroner. The notorious Dead Man’s Stretch, some three miles of the four-lane, would tally 12 fatalities for the year. White crosses marked the dead at roadside, erected by activists.

Never mind, Presley tore through in the big car, ignoring track hazards. Heck, since ’56 he had driven New York expressways, California freeways and German autobahns. Elvis relished flying low in vehicles on the ground, like hauling ass around Memphis on his motorcycles.

Presley would not stop for food in St. Louis although eateries lined the boulevard. Lindbergh classics were Schneithorst’s Restaurant for breakfast, Dohack’s for barbecue, and The Parkmoor for burgers. Spencer’s Grill in Kirkwood was an institution open 24 hours. New franchises popped along the parkway like Steak ’N Shake, Dairy Queen, Big Boy Burger, and Howard Johnson’s, Ho-Jo’s.

Billboards pasted the roadsides of St. Louis, prompting The Post-Dispatch to complain “our highways are being disfigured.” Billboards for Meramec Caverns and Onondaga Cave were everywhere, a joke among locals and visitors alike. Lindbergh stood littered with cave ads since the road linked to Ozarks routes, particularly Highway 66.

Cave signs had suspect claims or “Ozark truth” in marketing, such as declaring Daniel Boone discovered Onondaga. Billboards blared: “VISIT THE FAMOUS Jesse James CAVERN… MERAMEC CAVERNS… JESSE JAMES HIDEOUT… World’s Only Natural Air-Conditioned Restaurant and Souvenir Stand.”

Elvis always noticed a theater marquee, cataloguing movies in his memory. Big-screen Ronnie’s Drive In was a fixture of suburban St. Louis at Lindbergh and Route 21. A double feature was slated to begin at nightfall with Stop! Look! and Laugh!, starring The Three Stooges, and the opener, My Dog, Buddy, starring a German shepherd. The outdoor theater was also a travel marker for Lindbergh drivers.

Presley’s next turnoff came directly, Lemay Ferry, where he struck the “River Road” south to Memphis—Highway 61.

***

When Elvis Presley was an Army private at Fort Hood, he went home to Memphis on a furlough widely publicized. Texas folks waited at roadside to see the star’s Lincoln Continental sweep past. Signs were posted on trees and fences: “Elvis Passed Here.”

Later in eastern Missouri, a summer morning in 1960, no one expected to see Presley in a Cadillac headed south on Highway 61. Surely someone recognized the matinee idol below St. Louis, flying by in the Caddy rental—he was driving—which would jibe with sightings elsewhere. Memphians spoke of Presley on motorcycles around the city, toting exotic women at his back, leggy dancers and Natalie Wood among them. Near Graceland, a girl playing catch with friends spied Elvis on a Harley. She turned to look and was hit in the mouth by a baseball, losing her front teeth. She said it was worth it, seeing Elvis.

No reports made Missouri news as Presley and his cousin Gene Smith sped down Highway 61 on Thursday, June 30. Presumably they enjoyed themselves in the hinterland, heading home to Memphis following a Hollywood film shoot and their harried jet ride to St. Louis, through storms.

Highway 61 southbound traversed Missouri of the Mississippi Valley, exquisite scenery below Festus and Crystal City. High hills with deep valleys resembled an American Rhineland. Motorists were stunned for the views and antiquity communities founded by French and German immigrants. Travel writers lauded the trip, “wandering along banks of history in backroads Missouri… rich in legends and lore, time-haunted towns and evocative byways,” as one described.

The road moved through Ste. Genevieve, renowned for French Creole architecture, a western settlement attacked by Osage Indians in the 1700s. Farther south, the counties of Perry and Cape Girardeau boasted the Saxony Lutherans, their historic district of postcard farms and towns, stops like Brewer, Perryville, Longtown, Uniontown, Altenburg, Old Appleton, Pocahontas and Fruitland.

In Cape Girardeau, college town of 23,000, Route 61 became Kingshighway Street. Here a trading post opened at the river around 1733, historians said. “Cape” teemed with lore ranging from explorers, Indians and military leaders to steamboat pilots, musicians, composers, circus performers and baseball players. A rich line of American figures had visited, with many residing.

Cape Girardeau’s entertainment past predated the Civil War with flatboat theaters and steam showboats. American circus industry broke out along interior rivers, and companies toured southeast Missouri for generations. Circuses wintered and trained in the region.

Music greats of the 1920s and ’30s played boat excursions from Cape, including local product Jess Stacy, pianist, and Fate Marable of Paducah, Ky., a bandleader for Streckfus Steamers Inc. Marable recruited New Orleans jazz and blues players such as Louis Armstrong. Cape hosted traveling shows of “hillbilly” musicians and “radio stars.” Hillbilly groups of radio were local favorites through World War Two, led by troupes of the WLS Barn Dance program, from Chicago, and WSM’s Grand Ole Opry from Nashville.

Rockabilly pioneers frequented Cape Girardeau in the Boomer Fifties, representing Sun Records in Memphis, like Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Charlie Rich, Onie Wheeler, Narvel Felts, and Presley’s Blue Moon Boys—Elvis, Scotty Moore and Bill Black—who played the Arena Building in July of 1955.

A writer described Cape County as “Snortherner,” where foothills leveled off into the Mississippi Valley delta, bridging North and South, if not mending cultural differences. In June 1960, Elvis Presley drove a bypass route around Cape Girardeau, down into the great flatland. Memphis stood 170 miles away on delta highways, and he knew every place in between since a kid.

Elvis was right at home.

***

Conservation writer Jim Keefe visited southeast Missouri to view riverine topography in 1956. “To cruise southward down Highway 61 from Cape Girardeau, to burst dramatically and unexpectedly into the great flat alluvial plain of the delta, comes as a shock,” he remarked. “For the delta counties—Pemiscot, Dunklin, Mississippi, Scott, New Madrid, Stoddard, Butler—are unique to the beholder the first time he travels into them.”

But Elvis Presley knew exactly where he was going, down into the Missouri delta on June 30, 1960, with his cousin Gene Smith. Elvis had traveled this road since boyhood. Cotton fields appeared along Highway 61 with early blossoms at Morley village in Scott County. White bolls burst forth from leafy plants, and a local paper announced: “Welcome, Queen Cotton Blossom.”

Presley had a good friend in Morley, Onie Wheeler, country rock musician and songwriter. Elvis respected Wheeler, a war veteran, Opry performer and Sun artist. Wheeler was a guitar stylist in mold of Hank Williams. Wheeler was also among the few, anymore, who could show up unannounced at Presley’s gate in Memphis for a visit.

The morning was hot, but Elvis and Gene rolled cool in the Cadillac, air-conditioned luxury. The temperature outside exceeded 80 degrees at 11 o’clock.

Loamy farm fields were damp along Highway 61. The dew point was steamy under sunshine, greenhouse conditions. Crops over a thousand square miles stood in fine shape after two days of “multi-million-dollar rain,” said a county agent.

The wheat harvest was yielding super hauls like 55 bushels an acre on a farm at Morley. Cotton was popping, and soybeans and sorghum pushed upward. Seed corn had height in strong green stalks, topped by gold tasseling and silk.

Laborers dotted the field rows, adults and kids, mostly black, yanking hoe blades to uproot weeds. Elvis and Gene knew that job, “chopping cotton” or beans, and had not forgotten. The work looked sweltering out there; they never wanted to go back.

The road dipped into an ancient river channel which flooded until the 1930s, when drainage ditches and massive levees finally won out in “Swampeast Missouri.” The Cadillac dashed over dry spillway and up again, more than 20 feet in elevation, riding the backbone of Sikeston Ridge, uplift of the alluvial plain. Floods of two centuries had not reached the crest of Sikeston Ridge, not one.

Sikeston Ridge carried south to Arkansas almost unbroken, riding high to support U.S. 61, railroads, communities and farms. Sixty-One followed old King’s Highway, El Camino Real, laid down by the Spanish in Upper Louisiana.

Presley and Smith passed Haywood City, black community founded by sharecroppers, followed by the new Scott County Schools, a reconsolidated, integrated district.

Elvis spied the Delta Drive In, a second outdoor theater within 15 miles. The movie complex was set back in farm fields with the big screen blocked from highway eyes, particularly of passing kids. Movies typically showed “a little skin” at the Delta, and the marquee listed a double feature after dusk, The Lonely Sex and Girls Incorporated.

The Cadillac was burning gasoline since St. Louis, blasting AC, down to a quarter-tank on the gauge. The little store at Grant City had gas pumps, but Presley did not slow for the Shell sign. Elvis could stop in Sikeston ahead, a prominent community with close relatives of his, but likely not.

Back in 1955, Presley played several locations in southeast Missouri along 61. Moving through Sikeston, he saw the Armory Building, where he appeared twice with Scotty and Bill.

At southern edge of town, the Cadillac crossed Highway 60. Eastward lay Cairo, Ill., legendary destination for generations of musicians, including strolling bluesmen seeking gigs and the IC Railroad to Chicago.

Suped-up cars flew by in the opposite direction, Chevys, Fords, Pontiacs and Plymouths, roaring with engines and exhaust. Presley hit the gas, determined no local would pass him—or recognize and give chase.

***

The gas gauge was on “E,” the stomach was empty, and Elvis Presley knew the spot to pull over in a few miles—Hayti, along Highway 61 in the Missouri delta. Presley and his cousin Gene Smith were damn hungry in the car. They needed food, a restroom and gas refill to get home to Memphis, covering their last hundred miles after a plane flight from Los Angeles to St. Louis.

While the Cadillac rolled on fumes through rural Pemiscot County, the world consumed Elvis gossip in bulk on radio, TV and news pages.

Wire photos from the G.I. Blues film set featured Presley with costar Juliette Prowse and twin babies, shooting a scene. Elvis had grabbed a big bass guitar, clowning between takes, and cameras flashed. Luminaries visited the Hollywood set, pining for photos with Elvis, coming expressly to meet him, like Tennessee Williams and the King and Queen of Thailand.

News reports and features had Presley romancing numerous women. Starlets were linked such as Prowse—Sinatra’s girlfriend—and teen beauty Priscilla Beaulieu, whom Presley met in Germany, daughter of a military officer. Elvis impersonators humored America, along with a pony named Elvis, saved from a barn fire, all headlined in news.

Southern Democrats pushed Elvis to endorse Lyndon Johnson for president, and a racetrack exhibited his  BMW sportscar. Miss Japan discussed Elvis at the Miss Universe Pageant. A gossip columnist, citing unnamed sources, claimed Elvis to be paranoid and controlling on movie sets. Another pundit declared him a paper man, versus real hero Tom Mix. But director Norman Taurog “raved” about Elvis, declaring “he’s the most polite, gentlemanly actor” ever worked with.

Gleeful critics depicted rock ‘n’ roll as a quaint beat of fossilized musicians, ripping Presley in particular. Indeed, grassroots evidence of rockabilly’s demise stood at the musical intersection of highways 61 and 84 in Hayti.

The Zanza Club and Joy Theatre had ceased booking rock acts, after bringing talent for years. Carl Perkins and Carl Mann last appeared at Zanza Club in 1959. Joy Theatre once booked a line of names, including Jerry Lee Lewis, Billy Lee Riley, Warren Smith, Narvel Felts, Hayden Thompson, Charlie Feathers, Travis Wammack, and Eddie Bond. But none since ’57.

Elvis Presley never played Hayti stages, but now the man himself was driving up at Thursday noon, wheeling his rental car into Gwin’s Service Station. Witnesses would later confuse the Cadillac’s color, some calling it pink, others peach. Elvis had stopped here before, but not since road-busting days of the Blue Moon Boys with Scotty and Bill. At that time the trio played a roadhouse on the Pemiscot County line with Dunklin, the B&B Club at Gobler, as did every Sun rockabilly.

A friendly Elvis and Gene exited the car at gas pumps, chatting up wide-eyed attendants. They asked for and followed directions to the Men’s Room. Soon the pair emerged casually without sunglasses, their hair slicked back—Elvis’ dyed black—and strode through front door of the station.

Locals were moving in for the Elvis alert sweeping the town of 3,700. A station attendant asked if there were time to phone his kids. “Call ’em,” Elvis replied. On a wall in Gwin’s Café Room, a tarnished brass plate confirmed “Elvis Presley Dined Here.”

On this visit he drove next door to Bob’s Daisy Queen for burgers and fries. Bob Inmon, owner of the drive in, was on site for a lunch crush over the celebrity’s appearance. 

“In 10 minutes time our place was covered up with teenagers and oldsters as well, wanting to get a look at Elvis,” Inmon said later. Elvis and Gene told Inmon about the 707 flight to St. Louis, along with the Cadillac rental from Lambert Airport. They enjoyed the drive down 61.

Elvis and Gene sat a half-hour in Daisy Queen, with the singer “most liberal in signing autographs.” Then they returned to Gwin’s where he finished with fans.

Leaving, the Caddy pulled back onto 61 in midday heat. Presley and Smith waved goodbye and rolled up the windows for air conditioning. At 3 o’clock they reached Graceland Estate in Memphis, where dinner was black-eyed peas, Elvis’ favorite, joined by Anita Wood, his “Number One” girlfriend.

The next week in Hayti, The Missouri Herald confirmed:

“ELVIS WAS HERE.”

–30–

Author Matt Chaney will discuss delta music on Carbondale radio, WDBX FM 91.1, wdbx.org, on Sunday, August 6, with the crew of Louisiana Gumbo Pot. This kickin’ show airs from noon to 2 p.m. every Sunday on WDBX.

Chaney’s new book is on Amazon, with copies shipping soon from his Four Walls Publishing company: River Shows, Blues, Ragtime, Jazz and Country Music: It All Equals Rockabilly, Part One. Chaney is compiling companion books on Southern music of the upper delta, Lower Mississippi River Valley. For more information, including Chaney’s previous books, visit fourwallspublishing.com.com and chaneysblog.com. See the page “Stories from River Music to Rock in the Northern Delta.” Email: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com.

Ragtime syncopation, Excursion boats and Beale Street

Preview Book Chapter

River Shows, Blues, Ragtime, Jazz and Country Music

It All Equals Rockabilly, Part One

For release in July 2023

By Matt Chaney, chaneysblog.com

Excerpt posted Wednesday, February 8, 2023

Copyright 2023 for historical arrangement and original content by Matt Chaney, FourWallsPublishing

Throughout the 1890s, experts groped to identify an “American music.” Some claimed white minstrelsy was the genuine brand while others anointed black spirituals. Some declared Protestant hymnology as native music; others argued for massive choral singings in the Northeast, thousands of voices together, multi-ethnic, singing to heaven, but rather contrived for originality. American symphony and opera were hyped as pure pedigrees, but composers and players copied the Europeans in perpetual default.

Meantime, “rag” and blues music broke out along the midland rivers, and jazz method gelled in the Mississippi Valley delta. Ragtime enthusiasts proclaimed birth of an American music, and much of the world agreed. Ragtime music and piano rolls were printed to document a style and ignite a dance revolution. Around 1900 a syncopated masterpiece in publication fairly settled the debate over a native sound, the “Maple Leaf Rag” by Scott Joplin, Afro-American composer in Sedalia, Mo.

“Now you may go anywhere along the Mississippi River from St. Louis to New Orleans—at Cairo, Memphis, Natchez—anywhere that negroes congregate among the cotton bales or drone away the summertime among the grain wharves, and you will hear the rag,” observed Charles E. Trevathan, white composer and music critic, reared in the upper delta. “Sometimes it is slow, mournful, wailing; sometimes it swings sensuously; sometimes, when the gin is in, it is wild, half barbaric; sometimes it takes on that shu-sha of the buck and wing, quick, sharp, staccato and dangerous to the Christian heel which deems dancing a sin.”

“The rag is by no means a musical clown. Its peculiar rhythm fits the wail and the sob of melody quite as well as the sugar heel shakes; it all depends upon the manner of expression. Rag is rhythm. It has nothing to do with the melody. It is simply a time beat, which is not march, schottische, waltz or anything but rag. But it makes some homely tunes delightful. You might call it broken time; time with joints in it; but time which is perfect in that the beats are true to the measure. Artists say one may put two colors close together and between them produce the effect of a third. The dropped note isn’t lost.”

“Rag goes on doing that for you,” Trevathan stated. “Giving you cues and suggestions until the melody is done. You think you never heard ‘Suwanee River’ quite like that before.”

*******

John Streckfus, Sr., died at St. Louis in 1925, age 69, at zenith of his excursion boat empire on the rivers. Streckfus had extended the steamboat business with his pleasure crafts, modified “gingerbread” packets and ferries of the Victorian Era, during the early 20th Century. Moreover, the Streckfus boats constituted “a floating conservatory” of dance music, spanning decades, to influence entertainment worldwide.

Streckfus excursion boats brought waves of music stars, Louis Armstrong among them, along with untold talents lesser known. A legend followed that Streckfus “brought jazz upriver” with black musicians from New Orleans, a misnomer, because his company found cutting-edge, multi-ethnic artists ranging from Iowa to Louisiana. Additionally, musical improvisation was scarce on the boats; some said it was nonexistent. John Streckfus and sons mandated set numbers from pop to swing, for every band.

Ragtime syncopation carried hot dance numbers on Streckfus boats from 1899 to 1916, played largely by whites of the North. Many musicians hailed from Rock Island, Ill, Moline, Ill., and Davenport, Ia., or the “Tri-Cities”—later designated the Quad Cities with Bettendorf, Ia.—native region of the Streckfus clan in America.

John Streckfus was born on a farm of upland prairie near Edgington in Rock Island County, a few miles off the Mississippi, in 1856. His parents were German immigrants, Balthazar and Anna Streckfus, and Johnny was their blonde son, bright and chafing at farm life. He heard steamboat whistles over the hills, and calliope music. He spied the smoke from boats and longed for the river, even so young. Balthazar drove wagonloads of wood to steamer landings, and Johnny happily went along. Their drop sites included Drury’s Coal and Wood Yard in the bottoms off Illinois bluffs, across from Muscatine, Ia.

Johnny’s favorite place was Rock Island, an industrious town with Moline adjoined, and Davenport across the river. The Tri-Cities comprised a unique culture settled by émigré Germans, Belgians and Swedes. Quality workmanship was the hallmark of local products from manufacturing to milling.

John Deere’s Moline Plow Factory was pride of all, famed riverfront complex of stone and brick, employing 120 craftsmen in iron, steel and wood works. “Mr. John Deere is the first man who succeeded in making a steel plow which would scour and keep uniformly bright in the light rich soil of the prairie and bottomlands of the West,” noted the Des Moines Statesman. “The large factory is so perfectly arranged, and the different parts so systematically constructed, that it is almost impossible for an imperfect one to leave the shop.” The Rock Island Argus stated western farmers “owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. John Deere.” In 1865 the factory produced 15,000 plows and 2,000 cultivators that sold out, for appreciation repaid by tillers of the land.

Rock Island had foundries, machines shops, wagon factories, furniture makers, boat builders, printers and mercantile stores. Brick groceries towered above streets, two and three stories high. Trains clattered in and out for the Chicago & Rock Island Railroad yard and transfer barges. Timber industry fueled commerce on the Upper Mississippi, Northern pine felled by lumberjacks, sending down massive log rafts rom Minnesota and Wisconsin. Sawmills cranked into the nights along lowlands of Rock Island Township. The Weyerhaeuser and Denkmann mill cut a million logs annually, with peak turnout of 150,000 board feet and 110,000 shingles per week, among products.

Papa Streckfus preferred Rock Island for milling his grain as well as jobs in wagon-making. Balthazar was known as “Mister S,” a likeable, honest man, religious, dedicated to task. Balthazar Streckfus was a skilled woodworker and smithy who crafted wagons, carriages and sleighs. He was increasingly in demand at Rock Island, where Johnny’s river obsession came to a head between father and son. Johnny stowed away on a departing steamer one afternoon, but Balthazar caught up at the next landing, racing to with his wagon team. Johnny was punished, and he cried, “I will have a steamboat of my own someday!”

Balthazar and Anna disapproved. They kept Johnny focused on a “land occupation,” farm work, and he was accepting, respectful of their wishes. Johnny valued discipline and grasped the bravery of his parents for once fleeing a torn homeland, toting two small girls with Anna pregnant, boarding a boat to sail across the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico. Their first son, Michael, was born at sea and baptized Catholic upon arrival in New Orleans.

Steamboats lined the New Orleans wharf, but Balthazar and Anna could afford none, so they cobbled together a flatboat from scrap for cordelling up the Mississippi, towing it by line from riverside. The process was called “bushwhacking” and most appropriately, as the young parents discovered. They plodded upstream along the bending river, tugging rope against current and obstructions, negotiating paths and brush.

The couple pulled their flatboat upriver during summer 1850, with toddlers, infant and goods, crawling past Cairo, St. Louis and Keokuk, to reach Drury’s Landing at tip of Rock Island County. Winter was coming and the family had few possessions, scant money, but within the decade Balthazar and Anna owned a tidy farm and home near Edgington. The farm was the secure setting of earliest memories for Johnny. He trusted and obeyed his parents, if grudgingly at times. Their actions spoke of high standards, working full days and evenings, sacrificing and succeeding for six children, all to reach adulthood.

In 1867 Balthazar Streckfus made a move to Rock Island, purchasing a wagon works with living quarters near the Mississippi waterfront. Johnny was thrilled. Now he visited the river daily, counting the steamers, surveying freight and passengers, meeting roustabouts, deckhands and pilots. Stories were swapped, data exchanged, and the kid impressed people with his river facts and trivia.

Johnny Streckfus “was able to distinguish every boat on the river by its whistle,” read an account. “His knowledge of the river and boats while yet a mere lad… was so phenomenal that he gained the sobriquet of The Boy Wonder among rivermen. He knew the location of every sandbar, every twist of the channel, the names of all the boats, their owners and captains.”

Obviously, the boy scoured news and maps of the Mississippi while retaining observations and conversational bits. At night he watched gaslights twinkle from Davenport, across the water, and wondered of that place.

“Davenport goes in heavily on metropolitan affairs,” remarked the Rock Island newspaper, criticizing social agenda across the river. “A grand citizens ball is be given at the [Davenport] Opera House, with ‘full promenade band and dancing orchestra’—what that is we don’t know,” cracked The Argus.

But Rock Island editors could only feign disgust because their community had plenty entertainment, starting with full orchestras for waltzing promenades at masked balls. Quadrille bands held square dances, their fiddlers lording over jigs and breakdowns. Ethnic musicians played polkas, schottisches and mazurkas. Brass bands and concert ensembles rendered the classics of symphony and opera. Every local musician of dance bands knew popular tunes.

Rock Island was home of bandleader Jacob Strasser, dean of Tri-City musicians, “Paganini of The Northwest” on violin. Strasser turned fiddler for Turkey In The Straw, a preference of dancers. Flashy cornetist August Storm led his band on Steamer Kate Cassel, for local excursions and weekend trips to St. Louis. “They are all Germans and know how to talk music through their instruments,” The Argus reviewed.

Steamer excursions grabbed Johnny’s attention, the mirthful parties on cleared decks, folks sharing food, dancing, cruising along. Decorated pleasure boats were novel and colorful in contrast to steam packets of mere freight and travelers. “Moonlight Excursion” trips were booked by fraternal organizations and women’s societies; by companies, labor groups, clubs and schools; and by churches such as St. Mary’s Catholic of Rock Island, where the Streckfus family worshipped. The steamers Duke, Phil Sheridan, Ben Campbell, Charley Cheever, Mary Morgan, Jennie Brown and Fanny Harris were packets for Tri-City pleasure trips of the latter 19th Century.

Touring productions and entertainers appeared regularly during the 1860s and ’70s, as John Streckfus finished school and entered the family business. Troupes and performers arrived by river, railroad and trail, showing primarily in big tents and local venues. Rock Island showplaces were Dart’s Hall and Harper’s Theatre, hosting many of the same acts as Cairo venues on the Lower Mississippi. Circuses and menageries included shows of Spalding and Rogers, Dan Rice, Isaac Van Amburgh, Dan Castello, George DeHaven, Bill and Agnes Lake, Seth B. Howes, Adam Forepaugh, John Robinson, and Fayette “Yankee” Robinson.

Rock Island sold out for Jacob “Herr” Driesbach and his menagerie, accompanying Mabie’s Circus from Delavan, Wis. Driesbach was legendary trainer of big cats, one of the greats alongside “Lion King” Van Amburgh. Al Ringling was a circus strongman for Yankee Robinson prior to the launch of the Ringling brothers’ wagon show from Baraboo, Wis., in 1884.

Minstrelsy stars played Rock Island such as Tony Pastor, Ben Cotton, Sam Sharpley, Frank Dumont, Billy Birch, Edwin French, E.M. Hall, George Wilson, David Wambold, Billy Emerson, Billy Manning, E.N. Slocum and Cal Edwards. Afro-American groups brought Billy Kersands, Tom McIntosh, Dick Little, Jimmy Bland, Sam Lucas, the Bohee brothers, and the Hyer Sisters. Black pianist Blind Tom Wiggins wowed his participatory audience, naturally, replaying contributed snatches precisely, down to errors, for feats of memory and imitation. Norwegian violinist Ole Bull packed Dart’s Hall, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West troupe rattled Harper’s Theatre, thrilling the house with song, dance and gunshots. There were headliner vocalists, bell ringers and comedians with The Alleghanians, Hutchinson Family, and Peak Family. Tony Denier’s pantomime clowns were encored for comedy dance, acrobatics and trapeze. Burlesque drew heavy in Rock Island, especially the Wallace Sisters and Madame Rentz’s troupe.

Entrepreneur John Streckfus savored music and theatre, played some violin, but he was usually busy as others indulged entertainment. Streckfus did not make society pages except for news of his marriage to Theresa Bartemeier, of Davenport. Streckfus advertised his enterprises in grocery, milling, storage and rentals. He did operate Streckfus Hall one winter, hosting parties and hiring bands along with a dance instructor—his idea of fun, business-connected.

Streckfus hung out at Kahlke marine ways in a harbor near town, a wondrous place where steamers were overhauled, and boats built. John and his brothers constructed their own business buildings and family homes, impeccably maintained. John Streckfus was foreman of the Wide-Awake Boys, volunteer firemen of Rock Island, and he boosted brick-paved roads and more civic improvements. Streckfus attended St. Mary’s Church, serving as pallbearer for a priest’s funeral. He and Theresa gave church offerings and underwrote parish fundraising while starting their brood, eventually nine children.

Family patriarch Balthazar Streckfus died in 1881, and John assumed control of enterprises in Rock Island. His brothers Michael and Henry were agrarians at heart, working on their county farmland, and each would relocate to Kansas.

John Streckfus prospered and expanded interests, taking a partner for the grocery and mill in Joseph Schaab, a cousin who managed the stores. Streckfus was publicized occasionally in business, typically for upkeep of property and implements. His Rock Island buildings were always painted shiny with clean awnings, as The Argus chronicled, and his wagons were strongest, regularly overhauled then replaced with new models. Streckfus bred horses, showcasing fine-blooded teams for his wagons, carriages and racing buggies.

A gregarious man, big and handsome, Streckfus charmed most people he met, especially those involving trade. He advertised weekly in the papers, hand-delivering copy to newsrooms, schmoozing with editors and typesetters. Streckfus was a “thrifty, money-making, honest German, and a Democrat,” commented a scribe.

As a flour distributor, Streckfus rode packets on the river, stoking his desire to own a steamboat, and 1889 brought change. A possible factor was a confrontation between Streckfus and two butchers who mistreated his daughter Lilly. Reportedly the fight was brief, two-on-one, and Streckfus emerged victorious if angry. An announcement soon followed: John Streckfus was in the packet business, having acquired the steamer Verne Swain.

“The boat will be run just as she always has been, only that her purchaser, who is now a grocer in Rock Island, will go aboard and take command,” reported the Davenport Democrat. “John Streckfus… is of the opinion that sailing the river over is better than selling groceries.” Friends and acquaintances were startled, seeing this merchant pursue the riverboat fantasy. He was not the first man to do so. Streckfus heard laughter, ridicule, prediction of failure. Skeptics called him “Captain Farmer” and the cornfield pilot.

But Theresa Streckfus backed her husband, as did editors of the Rock Island Argus. The man was driven, productive, and river commerce could not get any worse itself, what with railroads’ taking over freight and passenger traffic. “Mr. Streckfus is a thorough businessman, making a success of everything he goes into, and will doubtless prove as accomplished and energetic a skipper as he has a merchant,” The Argus editorialized. “We wish him abundant success.”

Streckfus hustled through the final months of packet season, winning customers and positive press for his steamer, cutting time on the daily run, ending by 9 at night instead of 11. “Capt. Streckfus is acknowledged to have the fastest boat on this part of the river,” The Argus declared. Davenport Democrat editors were impressed: “John Streckfus of Rock Island is making lots of friends. He spares no pains to accommodate his patrons, and his management is becoming decidedly popular along the river.”

Streckfus moved forward in steam-boating, selling his grocery and mill shares to Schaab. He overhauled the Verne Swain at Kahlke boatyard. “It is the theory and practice of Capt. John Streckfus to keep his craft in the best possible condition,” The Argus reported. “He puts on repairs before they are fairly needed, on the principle of taking a stitch in time to save many more.”

“The Vernie” steamer, as affectionately referred by Streckfus children, was fitted with an iron hull and wider guards. The remodeled cabin was a clear signal of John’s emphasis on pleasure trips. Stained glass was installed for windows. The wood floor was cleared for gatherings and dancing. A grand piano and easy chairs were placed about.

Streckfus designed and built a party barge, Little Verne, for attachment on excursions. Food and beverage were available along with beach items like folding chairs, dishes, cups and utensils. Excursionists brought picnic baskets and potluck meals. Cleanliness was premium, maintained by Streckfus, and news writers lauded the concept. “There is not a prettier little craft on the inland seas today than the Verne Swain, and Captain Streckfus may feel pride in her.”

Streckfus made steamboat rides fashionable again from Keokuk north to Clinton. Many commuters forsook trains for Verne service, pleasant and prompt. “The Verne Swain is the best-paying and altogether the most satisfactory little packet on the upper river in the short trade,” observed The Argus on a summer weekday. “She has a good passenger list all the time she runs, and nowadays it is more than merely good. This morning her deck was crowded.”

During the 1890s, Streckfus expanded his market and flotilla. He added the fast Steamer Freddie, built by the Kahlke brothers, and City of Winona, a sizeable packet.  Barge Acme enhanced the line, a double-deck party raft with electric lights, named for Streckfus’ Acme Packet Company. Excursions offered amusements such as sightseeing, shopping, Kodak picture-taking, fishing, berry-picking, picnicking, singing and dancing. Around the Tri-Cities, boat music was furnished by choirs, quartets, soloists, instrumentalists, brass bands, string bands and full orchestras.

Ragtime tunes were standard along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, and Streckfus artists rendered syncopation in the Tri-Cities. Lee Grabbe, boat pianist and songsmith, composed ragtime covered by the Haverly’s Minstrels and Mahara’s Minstrels. Iowan Jack Mahara brought minstrel bandleader W.C. Handy to Rock Island, Moline and Davenport during 1896-97. Handy ragged his cornet flurries of Grabbe melodies at the Tri-Cities. The local Ernst Otto Band presented raggy compositions on Streckfus boats, and Charles Ogden’s group specialized in “ragtime two-step.”

Streckfus hosted an excursion for a group of Iowa news editors, who had a grand time. “John and the Verne are a pair of great entertainers,” attributed the Davenport Democrat. “Captain Streckfus knows his business, and he has demonstrated to others that he knows it.”

“He, himself, proved to be one of the best skippers on the river and with his iron will and determination made every port on schedule,” remarked the Muscatine News-Tribune. “The residents along the river soon commenced to set their clocks by the Verne Swain; they fixed their lunchtime by it.”

“By her whistle the chickens timed their laying, the pigs their swilling, and the cows their milking.”

At winter’s onset, Streckfus steamed south to Cairo with the Verne and Little Verne, working the Lower Mississippi and up the Ohio to Evansville. He contracted freight loads and sold pleasure trips, making money in the supposed down season for river business—and making news on the cold Upper Mississippi. “Too Much Money Afloat In The South,” headlined the La Crosse Tribune. “Streckfus Won’t Tie Up His Boats.”

“Arrangements have been made by Captain John to operate his boats all during the winter in Southern waters.”

John Streckfus, cornfield boat pilot, eyed a new market: New Orleans.

*******

In summer 1896, river travelers heard ragtime on the Mississippi, North and South. “Some night when the boat is slipping along between the narrow and overhanging banks, when the moon is playing coy with you through the shifting trees, when sleep is not for you, and the day is immeasurable distances away, you may hear the rag,” reported Charles E. Trevathan, a native of Union City in western Tennessee, on his return to the delta.

“Down on the lower deck, sitting on a cotton bale, a negro begins a low croon, and the guitar whispers. Then low, rich, soft voices fall in with alto and tenor and bass. Then you hear minor harmonies, exquisite, tender, emotional. The guitar swings into the melody with a rhythm you have not known, the whole sense of the song changes, growing sadder or gladder, as the mood of the time may please; you drift off into the paradise whence music knew its being, swaying your body to the movement of the guitar, and shifting your emotions to the mood of the melody.”

“That is the witchery of the rag.”

Ragtime’s precise origin was unknown, but the music belonged to Afro-Americans, declared practitioners such as Trevathan, a white composer and musician of note. Slaves had played “raggy” banjo melodies by accenting the thumb string. “They didn’t pick it like a guitar, or tinkle it like a mandolin,” Trevathan stated. “They beat it, striking the strings with a whole arm movement, catching the short string with the thumb after the chord had been struck. Playing an accompaniment, the thumb string made an extra and unnecessary beat, but it gave character to the music.”

“Then the rag was a simple beat, but practice brought it to the dignity of a rhythm, weird, in no degree like any other musical expression, and intensely characteristic of the people who gave it birth.”

A white piano player was popularizing ragtime, Ben R. Harney from Louisville, through his printed music and New York performances in blackface. In 1897 the Kansas City Star endorsed ragtime but panned “Harvey,” misspelling the performer’s name. “Mr. Harvey is a slim, dreadfully bored-looking young man who hasn’t much of a voice. Mr. Harvey, dazzlingly New York in his figure and weary attitude, sings against a black South Carolina negro [backdrop] and explains, in a sort of lecture, the characteristics of ‘rag-time’ and the negro melody in general.”

Ben R. Harney appeared in Sedalia, Mo., where he possibly crossed paths with Scott Joplin, an Afro-American pianist and Texas native. Joplin was master of ragtime syncopation at the Maple Leaf Club, incorporated by blacks on East Main in Sedalia. Local music store owner John Stark, a white piano teacher, published Joplin’s composition “Maple Leaf Rag” in late 1899. Stark soon relocated to St. Louis, followed by Joplin, who joined rag piano greats Louis Chauvin and Tom Turpin in the city.

Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag flew along the Mississippi River with “a terrific wallop” during 1901, “a little number which went on to revolutionize popular piano playing,” recalled Harry L. Thomas, reared in Quincy, Ill. “Broadway between Second and Third streets was lined, both sides, with nightclubs. Each was complete with a piano-playing ‘professor.’ To get to the riverfront, you had to walk down Broadway. At about 11 p.m., when a half dozen cut loose with ‘Maple Leaf’ simultaneously—oh, boy!”

Ragtime piano players made news in city and hinterland, including St. Louis, Ste. Genevieve, Cairo and Bird’s Point. In Washington, D.C., Theodore Roosevelt danced to ragtime in the White House. The orchestra struck up “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” drawing the president to the dance floor with his daughter, Miss Alice Roosevelt, for her coming out party.

The Maple Leaf Rag would top a million sales in sheet music and rolls. “I accord to ‘ragtime’ all honor,” saluted Roberta Seawell, Nashville pianist. “I believe in it is found the true basis of an American national music. Syncopation, the foundation on which all ‘ragtime’ is built, bears the same relation to the folk song of the negro.” Seawell, a teacher of classical piano, attested that “one cannot listen to a ‘rag’ melody and not have all one’s rhythmic senses set going, and this, after all, is the very elemental principle of music.”

“Sousa is not so popular now,” proclaimed the New Orleans Times-Democrat for a feature on ragtime, describing “jerky, zigzag melodies, these catchy syncopations, these welded musical fragments which have gained such a popular hold on the general public.”

 “Music dealers in New Orleans are still surfeited with productions of the ‘ragtime’ variety, and from present indications there is not likely to be an early decadence of this popular musical eccentricity… there is not a music dealer who would not say that ‘raggy’ music is more frequently called for than any other kind.”

“The public is demanding the frolicsome in music. The gay and giddy air is the thing that catches the public taste,” stated the newspaper. “They will listen with profound indifference to the sweeter symphonies of Mozart and Gounod, and all the rest, but they will sway and swoon in a perfect spasm of ecstasy over a clever hit in ragtime.”

Modern analysts concurred, a century after the creation. “Most ragtime is robust and cheerful. You can’t listen to it or play it and stay downcast for very long,” said John E. Hasse in 1984, a Kentucky pianist and historian who would become curator of American music for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Ragtime “has a motor effect and kind of gets into your body,” Hasse said. “That driving, propelling rhythm gets to you.”

“The beauty of ragtime lies in its metrical cadence,” observed Robert W. Tabscott, expert on black history, for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2000. “That syncopation started music to swing and gave rise to a tradition so happy, so tuneful and so authentic that in its youth it seemed as if America was singing to itself. The London Times, way back then, called ragtime ‘the seed of a national art.’ ”

“Piano rag was created by southern blacks out of folk melodies and the syncopation of plantation banjos. Those rhythmic skills, coupled with other cultural and artistic styles, produced a music that is truly American.”

St. Louis had its golden age of song at turn of the 20th Century, with Scott Joplin among the influx of contributors. Joplin composed classics in the city, including “The Entertainer: A Rag Time Two Step,” epitomizing piano syncopation between left hand and right. “The Entertainer” became famed for the movie The Sting. “Along the docks and up and down St. Louis’ Walnut and Chestnut streets were saloons, sporting houses and pubs,” Tabscott wrote. “The better-known piano players could be heard at Honest John Turpin’s Silver Dollar Saloon or at his brother Tom’s Rose Bud Café.”

“Into this gaudy setting came swarms of artists, musicians and dancers, many from downriver out of the Mississippi delta. They brought with them field songs, spirituals, cakewalk, ragtime, jazz, blues and gospel—the seeds of our contemporary music traditions.”

“Some of those itinerant musicians were immortalized: Scott Joplin, Tom Turpin, W.C. Handy, and Blind Boone, whose renditions literally set America to dancing.”

*******

Fewer steamboats were built anymore, at the turn of the century. Costs for boat construction skyrocketed while the railroads dominated freight and travel. Yet John Streckfus gambled as a boatman, once again, building his $30,000 steam design at the Howard Shipyard in Jeffersonville, Ind., along the Ohio River, during winter 1900-01.

“It is an oft-repeated assertion that ‘the river business is not what it was in olden days,’ ” remarked the Caruthersville Democrat in Bootheel Missouri, adding “our honored, gray-haired citizens point with glowing pride to the good old antebellum times when the steamboat was the only means of travel, and over that such times are past, never to return. Aye! Glorious days that they were.”

“It is true that railroads have sprung up and become, in a sense, a formidable competitor of the steamboat.”

The riverport editorial argued nothing ranked with the steamboat for travel. “She runs easy and smoothly and the noise is reduced to a minimum, while the dust is eliminated altogether. One feels that he is at home, or at any rate in a comfortable place, where enjoyment and pleasure can be had.”

“It may be somewhat slow and with an uncertain schedule, but the public will always like the steamboat for traveling.”

Streckfus believed Americans would continue to patronize steamboats, but not for freight and traditional passenger service. Rather, in his business model, passenger pleasure was the selling point, specifically excursion trips for fun and leisure. So, Streckfus sold the Verne Swain for $7,000, his freight packet that was functional for excursions, to build a boat dedicated to pleasure tripping, from the hull up. Streckfus operated from Rock Island, Ill., of the riverine Tri-Cities with Moline and Davenport, Ia.

“Captain John Streckfus, the well-known Mississippi River man, has let the contract for the building of what will be the finest steamer upon the inland waters of the United States,” reported the Cassville Index in Wisconsin. “It is being built on an entirely new plan, the object being to attract passengers to the novel craft.”

The Davenport Democrat expressed skepticism. Editors had seen Streckfus emphasize excursions for his little steamer fleet, without sharing his enthusiasm. “If the rumors descriptive of the new passenger packet that Captain John Streckfus is building are correct, he is going to start a new deal in the architecture of boats of that kind on the Upper Mississippi. For years he has had an idea of building at boat much on the principle of the observation cars that run on some of the railroads of this country—glass on all sides, and nothing to obstruct the view.”

“Captain Streckfus has at last made all that he legitimately could make out of the scenic beauties of the Rock Island rapids,” cracked the Davenport paper. “He has advertised them as though they surpassed the palisades of the Hudson, the Dalles of the Columbia, or the castled promontories of the Rhine.”

“The new boat is to be built, according to all reports, to make the most of it for the passenger. It remains to be seen what this care for the comfort and entertainment of his patrons will have to do in the way of increasing their number.”

Streckfus arrived home for Christmas and met with newsmen of the Tri-Cities, explaining his steamer under construction, displaying blueprints—and promising a concentrated advertising campaign. Instantly, the editorial tone switched for the Davenport Democrat, from a few weeks prior, reporting:

“Mention has been made of this boat several times, but this is the first time she has really begun to take shape as a tangible and actual creation. The great Howard ways, at Jeffersonville, is building her, the largest steamboat yard in the country. Hegewald, of New Albany, Ind., is making her machinery, which is saying the utmost for its perfection and efficiency.”

“In this boat… Captain Streckfus is putting the result of his experience and observation as a steamboat owner, master and pilot… He has gathered some original ideas, and he is working them out.”

“She is high enough not to look squat and will have plenty of height between decks. Her proportions will give her beauty in every way. Her hull is modeled for the fastest running that any steamer is capable of making. She will have the best engines that Hegewald can build, with cylinders 16-inches by seven-feet stroke.”

“It will be her accommodations for passengers that will specially mark the new steamer as a great institution, next to her speed. She will be rated for 1,800 people and then room to spare. She will have a [main deck] cabin 100-feet long by 35-feet wide, on the salon plan. She will have no staterooms. Being only a day or at best an evening boat, there will be need for quarters for none but the crew, and they will occupy rooms in the Texas [deck], overhead. A guard wide enough to serve as a veritable verandah will surround the cabin on all sides, affording ample room for people to line the railing, and yet allow promenaders to pass.”

In Rock Island, The Argus praised favorite son John Streckfus for “modern steamboat ideas.” His pending craft had a name, “secret for the present.”

In late June of 1901, John Streckfus launched his new Steamer J.S.—initialed for the owner and captain—and headed down the Ohio River, bound for the Upper Mississippi. The sternwheeler was 175-feet long by 43-feet wide with Victorian woodwork, ornate gingerbread, white as snow. Guard walkways were seven feet wide. An electric generator powered bright lights that draped the three decks. The glass-enclosed dance cabin was trimmed in chestnut, to the window frames. Up top, the hurricane deck had steamer chairs, picnic tables, card tables and arcade games.

Streckfus had designed his excursion boat with a model in mind, the massive Island Queen, 281-foot pleasure craft of Cincinnati. For Streckfus’ patriotism, the J.S. bore pennants of all nations and flew large American flags, the Stars and Stripes, sailing at front and sides. Cabin lights twinkled in red, white and blue.

Thousands turned out along the riverbanks, town and countryside, for “the magnificent steamer.” It passed Owensboro, stopped at Evansville, and turned into Paducah harbor at night, dazzling folks already accustomed to the Island Queen. At Paducah, “When [the J.S.] rounded the foot of the island, her electric power was put in full operation, making fantastic flashlights all over the boat, and the lights were reflected strongly on the pagoda-built pilothouse, showing her name in burning letters of electricity.”

The J.S. headed up the Mississippi from Cairo, wowing Cape Girardeau, Chester, Ste Genevieve and Crystal City. Factory whistles blew, steamers and towboats blasted salutes. The Streckfus steamer was publicized little outside the Tri-Cities, but word of mouth was huge for its coming.

In St. Louis, “The new excursion steamer ‘J.S.’ was at the wharf… visited by a number of steamboat men, who were very much pleased with her arrangements,” reported the Globe-Democrat. “She left later in the day for Rock Island, Ill., the scene of her future operations.”

Above Keokuk, shoreline crowds intensified through the Iowa-Illinois corridor. The J.S. passed Nauvoo, Fort Madison, Burlington and Muscatine. It chugged through the complex of Davenport, Moline and Rock Island, and farther up to Clinton. “It was an interesting sight to see the demonstrations at various hamlets along the river when the big boat passed by,” remarked the Davenport Republican.

“Boys and men stood ready with cannon, large firecrackers and other explosives, and when the J.S. paralleled them, the echo of the admiring populace was heard on the waters.”

Ragtime piano entertained guests aboard the boat, of course, provided by Lee Grabbe, songsmith for famous minstrels. “Grabbe’s orchestra of Davenport furnished music during the trip, and those inclined to dance were accommodated in the magnificently appointed room for this specific purpose on the hurricane deck.”

“On the return of the boat in the evening, the landing points in Rock Island and Davenport were a sea of anxious persons to see the big J.S. Judging from the spirit and appreciation expressed by the crowds wherever the boat went, the J.S. has been elected the pride and idol on this upper section of the Mississippi.”

“Captain Streckfus deserves all the credit and success that he is receiving,” declared the Waterways Journal, which endorsed excursion vessels, later known as “dance boats.” The St. Louis journal applauded Streckfus for “great energy and enterprise in building this floating palace, in face of the fact that he is hemmed in by railroads on both sides of the river.”

“May further success crown his efforts.”

*******

Memphis was the gambling capital on the Mississippi at turn of the century, a bettor’s destination for horseracing, cockfighting, boxing, billiards, slots, dice, poker, roulette wheels and lotteries. Memphis nightlife complemented the action with saloons, “dives,” “joints” and riverboats, offering music, alcohol, drugs and sex. The river city of 100,000 was a railroad hub with corrupt politicians and police, beckoning American hustlers and party seekers.

Two gamblers visited regularly from St. Louis, “Dangerous Jim” Ray and Ed “Fatty” Grimes, black club owners who competed in their home city on friendly terms—until 1904. Trouble brewed as Jim Ray sojourned downriver to Memphis then across to Hot Springs, Ark., gone for a month. Returning home, he discovered his wife had hocked a saloon and diamonds, leaving him for another man. The cheating couple took refuge with Grimes on Chestnut Street, enraging Jim Ray, a killer of record already in St. Louis.

Fatty Grimes owned the Falstaff Club, and Ray sent word he was coming for vengeance. “I will be there,” answered Fatty, proficient himself in cutting and shooting. A battle of guns and knives ensued, and Jim Ray went down in the bloody barroom, dead at age 36. Bystanders stepped over debris to remove gold and diamonds from the corpse. Grimes was jailed but released without prosecution, and he left town, landing on Beale Street in Memphis.

A black saloon man on Beale, Hammitt Ashford, was a “great good friend” of the late Jim Ray. Ashford was angry, insulted, seeing Fatty Grimes in the neighborhood, Ray’s killer. Fatty was handsome and bejeweled, attracting females, enflaming Beale Street. The cocky Grimes sported “fine tailored clothes and expensive shoes,” wrote George Washington Lee, author on Beale. “When he promenaded down the avenue under the blaze of the streetlights, women crowded close to get a word with him.”

Ashford’s saloon was in the notorious 300 Block of Beale, Number 350 at northwest corner with DeSoto Street [later renamed South Fourth]. One night in wee hour, Fatty Grimes came through Ashford’s front door expecting a woman but meeting gunmen instead. Fatty wheeled and they fired, striking his backside with shots of different calibers. He stumbled outside, drawing his gun late, fumbling, bleeding. Grimes veered a couple doors down to collapse in front the Monarch Saloon, 340 Beale, where he had hustled gamblers and country bumpkins, keeping bar.

Now Fatty was dying. A scavenger snatched up his pistol and strode off. Another thief handled Grimes, removing a huge diamond ring, an encrusted pin, and a gold watch on chain, bling worth $1,500. An undertaker behind the Monarch rushed to the body as it bled out, staking his claim for postmortem business.

Hammitt Ashford was politically wired to the mayor’s office like practically any saloon owner on Beale. A known thug, Ashford assaulted males and females indiscriminately; once, he horse-whipped a black woman for bumping his carriage. Ashford and crew were arrested for the Grimes murder then tried in Memphis mock fashion, being acquitted for a further insult to dead Fatty, killer of Jim Ray.

This was delta reality—inseparable entertainment, alcohol, vice and violence—validated by Beale Street. Many musicians were toughs like R.T. Brown, captain of the Memphis Zouave Guards and brass band, who lost the position for brawling. Pioneer bluesman Charles Bynum won a battle of knives and pistols on Beale, in the 300 Block, vanquishing foes in the melee alongside his brother, John “Hardtimes” Bynum. W.C. Handy left Mahara’s Minstrels for fist-fighting a bully performer, and he packed a gun while the troupe fended off racists nationwide.

Handy began directing delta bands from Clarksdale, Miss., in 1903. Soon he commuted by train to Memphis, as weekly instructor of Matthew Thornton’s marching band, the Colored Knights of Pythias. Handy relocated his family to the city in late 1905, renting a house on Ayers Street. He had known Dangerous Jim Ray and would always recall the “payback trap” for Fatty Grimes on Beale, which inspired songs in “red-light dives.”

Handy administered a network of black music talents in Memphis, receiving messages and booking bands from Pee-Wee’s Saloon, 317 Beale, across from the Monarch and Ashford’s dive. Pee-Wee’s had the only payphone in South Memphis, and musical instruments were stored in a back room, “checked by freelance musicians who got their calls over phone number 2893,” Handy noted. “Sometimes you couldn’t step for the bull fiddles. I’ve seen a dozen or more of them in there at one time.”

The Pee-Wee was owned by Lorenzo Pacini, Italian bookmaker whom Handy met in the 1890s through Jim Turner. The bar and its twin brick building were near the southeast corner of Beale and Hernando, busy site since the Civil War.

The addresses were 117-119 Beale during the 1800s with ground floor businesses and rooms upstairs. Lymus Wallace, the first black alderman of Memphis, closed his saloon at 117 Beale in 1883, and Italian immigrant Virgilio Maffei soon claimed the joint. Maffei was a mini brute nicknamed Pee-Wee, reportedly standing 4 ½-feet tall as Beale’s biggest gambler, betting thousands in a day. The Pee-Wee stories included an arm-wrestling match with boxer Jack Johnson, on a wager, and his swimming across the Mississippi to Arkansas. Lorenzo Pacini married Fortunata Maffei, sister of Pee-Wee. The Pacinis took over the Beale saloon around 1892, eventually adding a poolroom next door.

Pacini and sons operated Pee-Wee’s for a half-century, hosting all types of characters, many dangerous. The craps table at rear was a flashpoint for confrontation, remembered Maurice Hulbert, a musician for Handy. “I was back in there one time when these two guys got into an argument over 15 cents,” Hulbert said. “Both of them pulled switchblades, and I was stuck between them. Every time I moved they moved too, and I stayed between them. I finally got out of there, and they started cutting each other up like they were hogs.”

The Italians usually prevented serious assaults inside Pee-Wee’s, and racial groups typically got along, whites, mulattos and “black negroes,” so designated. Bouncers frisked patrons, checking guns and knives at the door. Anyone pulling a weapon risked being shot by management. Moreover, if any Pacini were harmed, the culprit faced a tribe in retaliation by family and associates. Lorenzo Pacini was a friendly man, charitable, helpful to folks, but no one to cross. His son Joseph Pacini was feared. “Each member of the family took a daily turn behind the bar during the four shifts, since the place never closed,” Handy wrote in his autobiography of 1941.

“Through Pee-Wee’s swinging doors passed the heroic dark-town figures of an age now becoming fabulous. They ranged from cooks and waiters to professional gamblers, jockeys and racetrack men of the period. Glittering young devils in silk toppers and Prince Alberts drifted in and out with insolent self-assurance.”

In The Pee-Wee, Handy watched Dangerous Jim Ray and Fatty Grimes throw dice before their deaths. “A wistful gaiety filled the place in the old days. Mack Harris was often there, one of the great poker players of his time. Gamblers of all complexions came from St. Louis, Chicago, Philadelphia and New York to take a hand with him and find out for themselves whether or not he was as good as his reputation.”

“Mack entertained them all, even when the bets went into the thousands.”

*******

A swarm of Baptists gathered at the river wharf in Muscatine, Ia., August 1903, “coming via rail in 15 coaches from Galesburg and other Illinois and Missouri points,” reported the local News-Tribune. The congregation was novel for Muscatine, and folks “marveled at the big crowd,” some 25 miles downriver from Davenport and Rock Island.

The morning was a Friday, and 2,000 Baptists had not convened for an old-time baptismal at river’s edge. They came for a modern boat ride, excursion style, on Steamboat J.S. of operator John Streckfus, who grew up on a hill farm across the Mississippi.

Steam calliope music sounded, and long whistle blasts, from the bend northeast of town. Dark smoke billowed over the trees then the J.S. appeared, a spectacle at Muscatine. “The stream of humanity that crosses the staging from the landing to the boat, whenever she has a large party, is something astounding to the onlooker,” remarked The News-Tribune. “It is no wonder that many are erroneously impressed with the idea that the boat is overloaded.”

At the Keokuk locks, officials suspected violations on approach of the J.S. approached with the Baptists. “She was detained and the human cargo counted. As only 2,194 people were on board, and as Captain Streckfus convinced the marshal that his license permitted the carrying of 3,000, the craft was allowed to proceed unmolested.”

Such was business for Streckfus, guiding his “tramp boat” on the rivers. The J.S. covered from Memphis north to St. Paul on the Mississippi, from Louisville on the Ohio west to Kansas City on the Missouri, and to Peoria on the Illinois. Steamer J.S. had logged 28,000 miles in the past year.

“A ‘tramp’ steamer is one not in the regular trade between fixed ports,” observed the Davenport Democrat. “The ‘tramp’ vessel goes anywhere there is prospect of a paying cargo. Some of the largest boats afloat are in the ‘tramp’ business, and there are more of them in American waters just now than ever before.”

“The ‘tramp’ boats are the kind that travel to and from, from place to place, making long jumps generally and picking up the cream as they go along,” stated the Alton Telegraph. “Years ago G.M. Sively started in this [excursion] line and was followed by J.S. Streckfus.”

The ranging excursion business appealed to John Streckfus, 47, especially as a boat operator in Rock Island, where the Upper Mississippi froze over in winter, often till spring. Streckfus had reached far ports on midland rivers in two years with the J.S., and now he aimed for the Deep South. His Acme Packet Company sought to add market from Vicksburg to New Orleans, storied river stretch that Streckfus boats had not explored.

Industry experts said an excursion boat would not profit in New Orleans without tandem freight routes. Operators of the Island Queen had talked of New Orleans since unveiling the great pleasure craft at Cincinnati in 1896. Colonel Lee H. Brooks frequented the South, investigating possibilities for The Queen in the Crescent City. “While [Brooks] said he had received much encouragement from the people and had been offered extra inducements by the wharf company, he had some doubts in his own mind as to a strictly excursion boat doing a paying business,” reported the New Orleans Picayune.

Brooks waffled for years on New Orleans until finally bringing the Island Queen for Mardi Gras in 1902. Success was limited, given news evidence, and the boat left after eight weeks. A Mardi Gras run was publicized for The Queen in February 1903, but the steamer only brought Ohio River patrons for an overnight in New Orleans.

Hustling John Streckfus monitored the Island Queen and business of its owner Coney Island Company, contemplating a competition at New Orleans. Streckfus believed his Steamer J.S. had “a field for her” in southern Louisiana. In early September 1903, a Kentucky paper reported the Island Queen would “spend the winter in the excursion business at New Orleans.”

Streckfus was undeterred, speaking with the Muscatine Journal, which announced the operator “Will Go South.” The dispatch stated: “The Steamer J.S. of Rock Island will not be seen on the upper river anymore this season… Captain Streckfus has already made arrangements for 35 excursions to be run out of New Orleans the coming winter. He will also work the ports along the Ohio River. Mr. Streckfus expects to start back [north] about March of 1904 and will work all the cities along the [Mississippi].” Streckfus designated the Acme Packet boat Winona for winter freight routes in the South.

Streckfus retained his teen calliope player of Muscatine, talented Charles H. Little, and the crew readied for downriver. At departure, the idling J.S. “got up steam” at Rock Island while the “steam piano” entertained and touched hearts, featuring Little on the brass keys. “That piano played ragtime and it played selections from comic opera. It warbled grand opera airs and it crooned Chopin melodies,” related an account. The J.S. left the dock on whistle bursts. Charlie Little softened well-wishers at the wharf with “Auld Lang Syne.” The crew would not forget old acquaintances and loved ones, but the boat would not return for a long while.

Boat members were tested in their visit to Caruthersville, Mo., where drunks brawled on the J.S. Burly John Streckfus and his bouncers fought back, ejecting offenders at a riverbank. Farther down, the boat won accolades at Vicksburg, Miss., “sounding her tuneful and well-manipulated calliope on the way, the best ever heard in these parts,” observed the local Herald. “She soon had a crowd aboard of her, which included all classes and kinds of humanity, lost in admiration of the handsome craft.” The Vicksburg paper saluted the J.S. dance band, a youthful three-piece with Little on piano, James Graham, cornet, and Carl Herzog, violin.

Praise was quick in New Orleans, where the J.S. debuted with excursions on November 1, a Sunday. “The steamer is a four-deck affair and will easily accommodate 2,000 passengers,” reported the New Orleans Times-Democrat. “Her main or lower deck is a handsome glass-enclosed [cabin] that is not only a fine observatory, but with its hardwood polished floor is a splendid dancing hall. The boat carries its own orchestra, which furnishes music for the dancers. The two upper decks are promenade decks fitted with steamer chairs. There are lunch and coffee counters on the lower deck.”

“The increase in the number of passengers on each trip gives evidence of the increasing popularity of the J.S.,” the paper observed. “Recognizing the difference between this boat and the excursion boats formerly operated out of New Orleans, and the fact that the difference is in this boat’s favor, the better class of New Orleans have come to patronize her. Captain John Streckfus, an experienced steamboat man and a thorough gentleman, has made it a point to thoroughly advertise the fact that there are no barrooms, slot machines or gambling devices on board his boat.”

Alcohol was barred on the J.S. with passenger weapons checked at the gate. Abusive language and loud profanity were policed by the captain and security men. Mistreatment of anyone was not tolerated. Offenders were locked in a hold or let off at riverside, with some tossed overboard, splashing below. “This has served to increase the number of ladies on each trip.”

“Many sightseers took in the river excursions yesterday on the excursion steamer J.S.,” The Times-Democrat updated on December 7. “All who made the excursions seemed to thoroughly enjoy them and were loud in their expressions of praise for the boat and the trip.”

“The excursion steamer J.S. has become quite a popular institution of the city,” remarked the Vicksburg American, from New Orleans. No excursion competition was forthcoming from the Island Queen, which cancelled on New Orleans, as usual.

The J.S. capitalized on prime dock position at Canal Street, sucking in customers for harbor trips. “Her promenade decks and glass-enclosed cabin afford excellent viewpoints.” The boat moved alongside the levee for a unique overlook into New Orleans, a sunken, fascinating city within dikes. Other excursions went beyond, like a hundred miles south to jetties at the Gulf. A Sunday Mass was celebrated on board so the priest and picnickers could have lunch at their destination. The J.S. was magnet for power brokers and everyday folks, hosting entities public and private, entreating news writers, following the Streckfus marketing template.

The boat carried large crowds during Mardi Gras of 1904, reported The Times-Democrat, with the publication’s editors won over by Streckfus. The J.S. figured prominently in the water parade for the arrival of King Rex at Canal Street. “Captain Streckfus proposes to keep his boat down here until after Mardi Gras, and an extension of his stay depends almost entirely upon the patronage of his boat.”

The J.S. continued a “rushing business” while the staff saw changes in New Orleans. Musicians Charles Little and Carl Herzog left for a vaudeville troupe in St. Paul. Little’s replacement would be Charles Mills on calliope and piano, a young Afro-American of Quincy, Ill., who likely joined the crew in New Orleans, given available news evidence.

The Streckfus steamboat left New Orleans as an American headliner in early April, heading up the Mississippi to fanfare at Plaquemine, La., and at Natchez, Vicksburg and Memphis. The J.S. reached Osceola, Ark., on a chilly spring evening, with a quality stock troupe appearing in the opera house. But “notwithstanding the fact… several hundred people braved the bleak north wind to the landing and took in the excursion and listened to the dulcet tones of the steam calliope,” related the Osceola Times.

John Streckfus was well-received in familiar stops at Memphis, Hickman, Ky., Cairo, Ill., and at Paducah, Ky., on the Ohio. The riverboat tramped along rivers into May, wending up the Tennessee and Cumberland.

“The ‘J.S.’ will next week go as far south as Alabama, and will then go up the Ohio River to Evansville,” reported the Davenport Democrat. “Later in the season it will make a trip north on the Mississippi to St. Paul. Streckfus is finding the excursion business very profitable in the South, and his boat is proving to be one of the most profitable crafts.”

“The J.S. made a profitable season out of what usually is a dead loss,” commented a river analyst. “The companies operating steamers from these Southern cities had their eyes opened by the example set by Captain Streckfus.”

“The J.S. is the pride of the steamboat world,” proclaimed the Davenport Times on May 3, 1904. “She is as well known in the vicinity of Red Wing, and in the vicinity of the Gulf of Mexico, as she is to those who have seen her so often here in her home port.”

“The boat has steamed on every navigable tributary of the big river from the headwater to the outlet.”

John Streckfus excelled among contemporaries in the steamboat industry. Moreover, he set the stage for music history.

Matt Chaney’s new book releases this summer, It All Equals Rockabilly: River Shows, Jazz, Blues and Country Music. For more information visit www.fourwallspublishing.com. Email: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com.

Chapter References

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1909: W.C. Handy, ‘Memphis Blues’ and the Crump Machine

Book Preview

Posted Friday, March 18, 2022

By Matt Chaney, for chaneysblog.com

©Copyright 2022 for historical arrangement and original content by Matthew Chaney, Four Walls Publishing

“The blues” was breaking out, music purely conceived of the American South. Blues pickers sang about sorrow and elation in the delta, and vice, violence. From Memphis joints on Beale Street, “there came the sound of banjos, of automatic pianos, and of the weary blues.” Machine politics inspired music at Memphis, dating to the prison chain of deputy Joe Turney, the ballad of Joe Turner.

Edward H. Crump campaigned for Memphis mayor in the 1909 election. A police commissioner, Crump ran on the reform platform, promising to eliminate gambling and liquor sales to square with dry laws of Tennessee. The red-headed Crump, 34, blamed crooked cops and officials for debauchery. He was a native of Mississippi, son of a Confederate, a hard-working, successful merchant, and a crafty politician.

Crump upstaged the police and sitting mayor, gathering his own deputy posse to raid “Negro dives” from Memphis south into Mississippi. Newsmen went along, recording scores of arrests, and Crump enjoyed good press. The Commercial Appeal hailed him as “pathfinder” for local law enforcement. “He has done a good service for the city, and members of the legislative council applaud him.”

Memphis was “wide open,” recalled Luke Kingsley, former jug musician and bartender at the Monarch Saloon on Beale. “You had to check your knife and gun at the front door before you could get in.”

“I could remember counting 14 opium dens in town. Drugstores made a fortune selling nothing but opium. Whorehouses were all over town. The going rate was 50 cents. They were thought of as being just as legitimate as grocery stores. And the only kind of policemen you had were down-and-outers.”

In political ads and rhetoric, Crump made examples of two Memphis criminals: black saloonist Hammitt Ashford and white dive-keeper Bill Latura. Crump branded them thug cronies of the mayor’s office, immune from prosecution in exchange for their delivering black votes, by whatever means. Afro-Americans constituted the rising voting bloc of Memphis and western Tennessee, harnessed by politicians through dangerous associates, black and white. Election fraud was a delta staple and simple for Ashford and Latura, reputed racketeers and killers who were bitter enemies on Beale.

Beale Street stood urbanized by the 20th century, from the 1845 muddy lane named for a cotton dealer. On east end of the avenue, residential development hemmed around old antebellum mansions, estates dwindling for parcels sold. Back west of the Beale intersection with DeSoto, center of modern action, former stately homes were boardinghouses. Beale’s large commercial buildings clustered near Main Street, down to the riverfront.

A newsman took in Beale on a Saturday night, strolling eastward from Main. “The street itself, the peculiar mixed style of its architecture, its crooked topography, and the curious jumble it presents of pretentious buildings looking down in lofty contempt upon the mean shanties that surround them, these things alone are worth the visit,” he reported. “But the life of the street itself, the cosmopolitan character of its inhabitants, the dense mass of humanity that bars the progress of pedestrians on its sidewalks, the multiplex character of the shops that line the populous thoroughfare, the indescribable variety of goods that fill the shelves of the shops—all these present points of interest.”

“Pass by the cheap [whiskey] barrelhouse, where a small placard labeled ‘Drinks 5 cents’ describes the character of the commodities sold within.”

Beale Street was “Negro America,” declared George Washington Lee, resident writer. “There are many other streets upon which the Negro lives and moves, but only one Beale Street… Adventurers, drawn to it by some hidden attraction, wander up and down this old avenue of gray buildings where golden balls above pawnshops glisten in the sun; where Jewish vendors stretch their racks of clothing across the store fronts, and glib-tongued barkers call to passersby to come in and view the bargains; where laughter and song ring out from the cafes and dance halls, and electric pianos join with the traffic noise to create a sound triumphant.”

At nightfall on Beale, electric lights cast colorful hues, “red, pink and yellow” on storefronts aglow. A writer met “throngs of people on the sidewalks” at sundown one holiday. “The colored folks were out in force [with] broad grins and boisterous laughter, with oft recurring ‘snorts’ taken at barrelhouses… everywhere the utmost good humor prevailed.”

But some folks frowned passing Hammitt Ashford’s saloon, 352 Beale, for its open doors and windows, wall paintings of nudes blaring visible outside, among elements. The joint sat at northwest corner of the raucous DeSoto intersection, with gamblers, drug dealers and prostitutes cavorting day and night. Pimps, or “mashers,” sold mere kids, such as the 17-year-old dead of her botched abortion in Ashford’s home. Ashford distributed a masher business card, “bearing his picture and offensive language,” remarked the Commercial Appeal. A woman notified the mayor, alleging “she has suffered at the hands of the notorious Negro… Ashford is enticing young girls into his place and ruining them.”

Hammitt Ashford’s publicized assaults and victim complaints demonstrated his brutality against females for a decade in Memphis, yet he avoided prison time. Ashford also committed cowardly attacks on males, cutting and shooting them in ambush. The “payback” assassination of Fatty Grimes was legend, occurring at the front door of Ashford’s dive, with the saloonist one of four accused gunmen acquitted of murder charges.

Jim “Bad Eye” Musgrove fought a friend of Ashford in Robert Church’s saloon, 324 Beale. Ashford and his hyenas jumped in, knifing Musgrove viciously, leaving entrails “protruding from several abdominal wounds.” Musgrove survived but others did  not, tangling with Ashford crews. George “Cousin Hog” Flynn, gambler and bouncer, shot Ashford in M.L. Clay’s saloon, 351 Beale. While Hammitt recovered Cousin Hog busied himself on DeSoto Street, where he stabbed a man to death. Back on Beale he chased Clay with gunshots, and Cousin Hog probably sensed fate at hand. An assassin appeared at his door beside the Monarch and shot him dead.

“Wild Bill” Latura was worse than Ashford. A serial killer, Latura’s carnage began at his family’s Italian grocery and barroom in 1902. A drunk wielded a knife and Latura beat him to death with a baseball bat. Latura ran Negro gambling houses and frequented brothels, acquiring girlfriends and racist grudges. Ashford thrashed a black mistress of Latura, cracking her with a buggy whip. Latura, enraged, shot the woman in an argument and afterward targeted black males, numerous incidents. He struck one man with a car and shot at others, wounding a porter in the Dixie Saloon on South Third, surprising M.L. Clay at his joint on Beale. Clay dodged bullets and fired back. Beat cops were terrified of Latura, a crazed “Negro Hater,” everyone said, who sought a showdown with Hammitt Ashford.

On a December night in 1908, Bill Latura strode into Ashford’s place on Beale, looking for the dive-keeper. Learning Ashford wasn’t present, Latura brandished an automatic pistol and strafed blacks around a pool table. Four males died and a female was hit, shielding her fallen man. At trial doctors testified Latura was insane, a delusional paranoiac, and a white jury astonished the public, dismissing quadruple murder charges. Critics objected, alleging political protection for Latura, 28, a cousin of the sheriff. Predictably, a judge ordered Latura released from mental care after one year, and he continued to intimidate cops, court witnesses, juries, newsmen and rivals. Roaming as the most feared man in Memphis, Latura would kill again.

For corrupt officials, Ashford and Latura, Democrat E.H. Crump made political hay in 1909, ripping them all on campaign. Crump won the mayoral election, edging Joseph John Williams by 79 votes. Afro-Americans favored Williams, who topped voting precincts along Beale, but Crump “reform” carried the white bloc and enough blacks. Crump’s victory set in motion his political machine to become infamous above predecessors. But a larger mark of the Memphis time swept America—milestone music by W.C. Handy, bandleader and composer.

Handy, three years in the city with his family, had clawed to the top of black bandsmen, rivaled only by Charles Bynum. Handy’s dance band was a headliner at Church’s Park on Beale, Dixie Park on the Southside, and on excursion steamers like the Pattona and White Light. During the last week of October 1909, Handy and his players worked both sides of the political aisle, first welcoming Republican President William Howard Taft to Memphis, belting their patriotic tunes from Steamer Kate Adams.

Handy also contracted with local Democrats for Crump. Jim Mulcahy, saloon owner and Crump operative, hired the band for campaign music. Mulcahy wanted a Crump theme song but Handy wasn’t interested in covering familiar melody, pop or otherwise. “Hot-cha music was the stuff we needed, and it had to be mellow,” wrote Handy. “Where was it to be found? Certainly not in any existing files. I closed my eyes and tried to dream it.”

Handy considered instrumentals and lyrical snatches “half-moaned, half-spoken,” from his experience. He imagined Spanish tango rhythm, Italian crescendo, Hawaiian guitar and country picking—disparate entries coming melodious together, now in mind. He heard again a black pianist in Pee-Wee’s, plunking melody “haunting and thoroughly original.” Handy remembered delta Mississippi, waiting on a train, when the black guitarist wailed and pressed knife blade to strings. “I could hear what I wanted. It was a weird melody in much the same mood as the one that had been strummed on the guitar at Tutwiler.”

Handy composed a campaign instrumental, Mister Crump, writing on the cigar stand in Pee-Wee’s. He assembled players for a street band, aiming to sway black votes from Republican to Democrat. The ensemble was Handy on trumpet; brothers Paul and Ed Wyer on violin, and possibly Jim Turner; Archie Walls, bass violin; George Higgins, guitar; Bob Young, clarinet; James Osborne, saxophone; and George Williams, trombone.

“They put us in a two-horse wagon and hauled us to Main and Madison,” Young told the Commercial-Appeal decades later, for this account: The band played the song, with its eerie blues rhythm… and pretty soon, says ‘Uncle Bob,’ everybody on the street corner was dancing—they just couldn’t resist the urge that the odd melody seemed to give them. Young recalled: “Professor Handy, as leader, was bearing down on his trumpet so hard that he almost made it smoke.”

Handy designed music breaks for solos, and two players got creative: Young improvised a flurry on clarinet, and Paul Wyer finished memorably on violin. Wyer “went wild,” producing “something new and unheard-of,” reviewed Abbe Niles in the book edited by Handy, Blues: An Anthology. Wyer “deviated from his score and put in some licks on his own account; he licentiously patted his feet.” Niles noted that Handy “learned something from this; from then on his musicians had carte blanche in the breaks of his blues, of which they, and soon other Negro bands, made use with gusto. Such things cannot be hid under a bushel, and it was not long before whites were doing the same thing.”

“The effect was electrical wherever heard,” Handy wrote for New York Age. “When we played, no matter where, the people could not refrain from dancing. They danced in parks, halls, stores, on sidewalks, streetcars—anywhere. I shall never forget the night we played this for a colored dance as a tryout. We had played only a few measures when a shout went up that thrilled me.”

Recollections conflicted over whether words were initially part of the song. Handy and Young thought so, decades later, maintaining that “Mister Crump” was mentioned from outset. But evidence indicates the ditty remained an instrumental through end of 1909. Ed Crump later insisted his name wasn’t used until 1910, when Handy visited to ask permission, first time they met, for a song titled “Mister Crump Blues.”

Regardless, Mister Crump was a three-line blues number in 1911, for the mayor’s reelection. E.H. Crump had lost Beale precincts in his first mayoral drive, but he swept the city this time, trouncing J.J. Williams.  Eyesight, meanwhile, confirmed Crump “reform” meant nothing along the packed streets of Beale and Gayoso, DeSoto and Hernando, prime Afro districts.

Gambling and alcohol still reigned and dive owners paid poll tax on behalf of black voters, bundling thousands for Crump. Hammitt Ashford left Memphis for North Little Rock then Pine Bluff, Ark., still a bootlegger and pimp committing assaults, accused of pummeling two females with a baseball bat, among reports. Bill Latura remained on Memphis streets, having switched his allegiance to the Crump Machine, though changing in no other way.

The lyrics of Mister Crump were satirical, belying reality, purporting he banished hustlers and revelers, “easy   riders.” Phrasing was borrowed from the folk song Mama don’t ’low no pickin’ and singin’ round here. Memphis musicians and audiences contributed wry words, chanting merrily over instrumentals:

Mister Crump don’t ’low… no easy-riders round here.

Mister Crump don’t ’low… no easy-riders round here;

Well, I don’t care what Mister Crump don’t ’low.

We gonna barrel-house any-how.

Mister Crump don’t ’low, and ain’t gonna have it here.

Well, Mister Crum can go… and get his-self some air.

Handy self-published an instrumental version in 1912, renaming the song Memphis Blues, and distributed more than a thousand copies, many hand-written. Black vaudeville shows demanded Memphis Blues, including Salem Tutt Whitney’s Southern Smart Set, which employed the lyrics for singers like Mamie Smith and Goldie Chappelle. Unfortunately a store pianist bamboozled Handy, catching the musician strapped for cash. Theron C. Bennett bought song rights for $50, securing himself a small musical fortune and enduring notoriety as a con artist.

Composer W.C. Handy won adoration of the planet, applause everlasting, as a founder of American music.

“The ‘Memphis Blues’ is known all over this country and its composer is almost as well known,” observed the Nashville Tennessean in 1916. “Down in Memphis town Handy reigns almost supreme at most of the dances, his music being the one big boast that Memphians have.” G.W. Lee, on Beale Street, said his friend Will Handy “changed the entire tempo of American music.”

In 1930 Clifford McGuinness, Pittsburgh Courier, credited Handy for the “first real blues” published. “After the success of the ‘Memphis Blues,’ which ushered in the present era of jazz, both races recognized his genius and lent encouragement.” Elsewhere in the Negro press, poet Langston Hughes lauded Handy, 1954, writing for New York Age: “Given new vitality just before the First World War by the folk blues and the personal creations of W.C. Handy in blues form, Negro syncopation became the popular music of America.”

“Handy was the father of it all; he was the beginning,” said Papa John Gordy, Dixieland jazzman, following the composer’s death in 1958. “I never met him, never had the chance. I never had to. What he did has been in my blood all the time I’ve played.”

Merl Eppse of Nashville, expert in African-American history, had met Handy on occasion. “He captured something great and left it behind. We’re lucky, I think. I always liked him as a person.”

O.V. Wright, singer of R&B and gospel, cited Handy for the chart-busting “Memphis Sound” of Stax Records in 1968. “Some people call it ‘soul,’ but it’s only the old blues. I think it’s the old Handy sound passed down to a new generation.”

Judy Peiser, 1990, Center for Southern Folklore, said “eventually someone would have written the blues, because it was a music of the people. The reason Handy is so important is that he was a classically trained musician. Not only could he conceive and perform the music, but he could write it down.”

“Handy has become a controversial figure, his mythical title father of the blues much disputed,” author Preston Lauterbach stated in 2015. “But his true claim to fame was never to have invented blues music outright but to have crossed the music over from Beale Street to Main Street, from colored honky-tonks to mainstream America.”

Matt Chaney is compiling companion books on Southern music, tentatively titled River Shows, Jazz, Blues and Country Music and, the sequel, Rockabillies in the Missouri Delta. See the page Stories from River Music to Rock in the Northern Delta. For more information, including Chaney’s previous books, visit www.fourwallspublishing.com.  Email: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com.

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Flowers, P. (1968, Feb. 8). Greenhouse. Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 6.

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Grand Jurors Hold A Levee. (1907, Sept. 14). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 4.

Grumich, C. (1958, March 29). His music grew like classics. Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 2.

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Half Of Voters In Precinct Illegal. (1916, July 28). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, pp. 1, 6.

Hammet Ashford Is Arrested. (1905, Sept. 26). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 5.

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Hammit Ashford Again. (1906, May 4). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 5.

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Handy, W. C. (1916, Dec. 7). How I came to write the “Memphis Blues.” New York Age NY, p. 6.

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Handy, W.C. [Ed.], & Niles, A. (1926). Blues: An anthology. A & C. Boni: New York NY.

He Counldn’t Stay Away. (1910, March 29). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 6.

Hemmit Ashford Arrested. (1896, Dec. 29). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 5.

Henry Shields And “Cousin Hog.” (1894, Nov. 24). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 5.

Higgins & Eckfords Orchestra. (1908, Jan. 12). [Advertisement.] Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 7.

Hixson, F. (1936, Aug. 20). Chattanooga Times TN, p. 2.

Hot Shot For Latura. (1903, July 15). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 6.

In The Courts. (1896, Sept. 25). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 3.

Ingalls Asks $15,000. (1916, Jan. 16). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 5.

Italian Picnic. (1902, May 25). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 8.

Judge Sip Suds Under Injunction. (1916, Feb. 3). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 1.

Judge Young Calls Crain To Nashville. (1914, July 26). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 5.

Justice Gallina Furnishes Bond. (1907, Nov. 14). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 4.

Latura Adds To Record. (1912, June 16). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 5.

Latura Has Brain Storms. (1909, Feb. 4). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p.4.

Latura Held Without Bond. (1908, Dec. 12). Latura held without bond. Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, pp. 1, 5.

Latura Is Convicted; Gets Prison Sentence. (1916, July 21). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 5.

Latura Shoots Another Negro. (1908, Jan. 10. Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 4.

Latura Sobs Like A Child. (1909, Feb. 5). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 5.

Lauterbach, P. (2015). Beale Street dynasty: Sex, song and the struggle for the soul of Memphis. W.W. Norton & Company: New York NY.

Lee, G.W. (1934). Beale Street: Where the blues began. McGrath Publishing Company: College Park MD.

Less, David. (2020). Memphis mayhem: A story of the music that shook up the world. ECW Press: Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Let’s Have A Little Law. (1911, May 12). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 6.

Lid Closed Tight In Memphis When Word Went Down Line. (1954, Oct. 17). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 9.

Liquor Into River. (1915, March 23). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 9.

Locke, C.G. (1890, Dec. 13). Third in business. Memphis Public Ledger TN, p. 4.

Locke, C.G. (1892, Sept. 24). A change in spelling. Memphis Public Ledger TN, p. 5.

Mama Don’t ’Low—. (1946, Jan. 28). Knoxville News-Sentinel TN, p. 5.

Mama Don’t ’Low. (1947, Dec. 4). Birmingham News AL, p. 16.

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Margerum Slashes Anti-Crump Banner. (1916, Aug. 1). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, pp. 1, 5.

Mayor Vs. Police Chief. (1908, Jan. 26). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 1.

McCaskill, W. (1934, Jan. 7). Topp mansion sad sentinel of Old South. Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 49.

Mike Haggerty, Once Political Chief, Dies. (1929, Dec. 30). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 5.

“Mister Crump.” (1912, Sept. 29). [Advertisement.] Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 42.

Mister Crump Don’ ’Low It. (2021, April 20). W.C. Handy, the founding father of American music, Series One, Episode Two. Blues Alley Podcast. [Online] https://bluesalley.podbean.com/.

Mister Crump Testifies—In A Paper. (1917, Oct. 27). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p.  6.

Mr. Crump Fooled The ministers Once But He Will Not Do It Again. (1911, Oct. 22). [Advertisement.] Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 9.

Mr. Crump Gets Busy. (1908, Jan. 19). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 10.

‘Mr. Jim’ Mulcahy Is Dead—And Many Have Lost A Friend. (1940, Sept. 6). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 9.

Nager, L. (2001, Jan. 4). Mamie Smith: Blues and jazz great broke barriers. Cincinnati Enquirer OH, p. E3.

Negro Freed On Own Recognizance. (1931, July 21). Belleville Advocate IL, p. 5.

“Negro Hater” Kills 4, Wounds 3 With Pistol. (1908, Dec. 11). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 2.

Negro Murderer Arrested. (1904, July 14). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 4.

Negroes Taught To Write “Reichman.” (1914, Aug. 2). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 10.

News Over Tennessee. (1916, July 21). Nashville Banner TN, p. 16.

Not Allowed To Make Bond. (1905, July 23). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 5.

Noted Negro Composer Here With Orchestra. (1916, Feb. 22). Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 7.

Oasis Found In Good Old Shelby. (1909, June 20). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 4.

Offensive Picture. (1904, Aug. 3). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 4.

Old Order Changeth, Giving Way To New. (1915, April 15). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 5.

Olsson, B. (1973, August-September). Biography. In Cannon’s Jug Stompers, the complete works in chronological order 1927-1930. (1975). Yazoo Records: Newton NJ.

Oscar Owens Died. (1902, March 11). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 12.

Ouster Hearing Full Of Sensations. (1917, Sept. 27). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, pp. 1, 9.

Paducah Negro Is Carved Up. (1897, Nov. 16). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 5.

Paid Poll Taxes For 60-Year-Old Negroes. (1916, Jan. 10). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, pp. 1, 6.

Personal. (1908, June 24). W.C. Handy’s band and orchestra [Advertisement]. Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 14.

Police And Deputies Raid Old King Craps. (1915, May 3). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 5.

Police To Test New Liquor Law. (1909, July 10). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 4.

Poll Tax Payments Have Reached 11,422. (1911, Nov. 4). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 4.

Released On Bond. (1905, Sept. 20). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 5.

Resents Insinuation. (1906, Aug. 4). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 4.

Rick Comes Forward With Another Alibi. (1916, Jan. 28). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, pp. 1, 8.

Refused Jail. (1903, Aug. 27). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 7.

Round About Notes. (1890, Dec. 25). Memphis Appeal-Avalanche TN, p. 4.

Shall The Dives Elect The Next Mayor. (1909, Oct. 30). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 13.

Sheriff’s Men Raid Three County Dives. (1914, Sept. 21). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 5.

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Slight Errors Are Corrected. (1909, Aug. 14). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 5.

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1845: Beale Street named for cotton dealer, said Memphis family

Book Preview

By Matt Chaney, for chaneysblog.com

Posted Wednesday, February 9, 2022

Copyright ©2022 for historical arrangement and original content by Matthew L. Chaney, FourWallsPublishing

Around Christmas Day, 1811, the first steamboat on the Mississippi River came down to the “Third Chickasaw Bluff,” imposing limestone uplift at the Tennessee shoreline, future site of Memphis. Atop the hills, Chickasaw Indian lookouts had watched the steamer trail smoke for miles, coming round the bend from the northwest. The braves were concerned about the strange machine and resolute in their response.

Steamboat New Orleans was a model of Fulton engineering in New York, built at Pittsburgh on the Monongahela, launched down the Ohio to the Mississippi. The sleek craft was wood and iron with sky blue hull, black trim, measuring 134-feet long by 20 at beam. The steamer swept in at Third Chickasaw Bluff traveling 9 to 10 mph, bellowing smoke and sparks, and canoes sprang from both sides of the river, loaded with warriors in body paint.

Boatmen hurried about the boiler deck, tossing wood blocks in fireboxes, arming themselves, readying battle positions.  The steamer had passed through major earthquakes of the New Madrid seismic zone, bobbing along a volatile river amidst enormous shocks, collapsing banks and liquefying earth. Chaos reigned at villages and clearings, where structures tumbled and people panicked. But Chickasaw war parties posed a nightmare for Easterners aboard the steamboat, and they wouldn’t pause at the bluff. The New Orleans chugged ahead of the canoes and Chickasaw braves were content enough, chasing it off.

Theater man Noah Ludlow came along a few years afterward, on a flatboat full of actors for New Orleans. The Third Chickasaw Bluff stood higher than floodwater could reach, Ludlow marveled, recording a “beautiful site for a city” that stretched “southwardly on a plane.” Another traveler described the limestone as “delightful elevation” above a vast flatland of river, marsh and timber. “The bluff begins at the mouth of Wolf River and extends south about four miles.”

In 1819 white settlers laid out a town north on the bluff which they christened Memphis, for Egypt’s ancient city of the Nile Valley. Memphis trade catered to Indian tribes of western Tennessee, whose couriers followed narrow pathways through wilderness. Merchants exchanged supplies for “ponies, beef cattle, hides, furs and peltries,” recalled early Memphis resident Thomas P. Young. “Up to 1833 the Indian trade was better than the white, their annuities mostly spent in this place.”

“We had no sawmills, no cotton gins, no lumber to be had, and to build a shanty you had to get an empty flatboat which had sold out its load of produce, break her up, and build you a house… It was along about 1830 or 1831 before we had brickyards.”

“The Indian trade held up till cotton began to come in, and then we all went for cotton. I don’t remember the year when cotton first made its appearance, but think it was about 1829, increasing every year from that date.”

American treaties “settled” Indian land claims and thousands of native people were removed west of the Mississippi, including nations of the Chickasaws, Choctaws and Creeks. A greater depravation continued at Memphis, human bondage, ownership and trade of slaves of African descent, driven by cotton industry. Slave auctions were conducted at Auction Square, with bidding for Afro men, women and children on the sale block, as livestock, rendering families shattered among the suffering.

Cotton, steamboats and stagecoaches keyed development of the Memphis area in the 1830s. Town population increased as business and residential districts expanded; Shelby County gained farms, villages and roads. In 1840 cotton buyers shipped 35,000 bales from Memphis, primarily to New Orleans for international markets. In 1844 Memphis shipped 100,000 bales, sending steamboats stuffed with product, piled deck upon fluffy deck. “Memphis is the largest cotton market in the interior of the country,” proclaimed the New York Tribune.

Wagons poured into Memphis from every delta direction, including ferrying across the Mississippi from Arkansas. “In those days before the advent of railroads, cotton was hauled to Memphis by ox and mule teams for a hundred miles in the interior, and in the winter season the roads were very bad,” recalled John Hallum, early resident. “I have seen many caravans of cotton wagons five miles long.” At night wagons backed up on the short Memphis riverfront, stringing southward into woods and undergrowth. Farmers felled trees and lit bonfires to last the darkness.

The clearing of “savage forest” was undertaken everywhere, creating home lots and cotton fields, and a hot sector emerged below Union Avenue, southern boundary of Memphis. Investors platted South Memphis by 1839, after departure of Indian tribes, with streets laid out on the highest points of old Chickasaw Bluff. South Memphis was “regarded as the most beautiful portion of the bluff, and the property was eagerly sought,” read an account. “All this tended to draw most of the newcomers and many of the old citizens from North Memphis.”

Stately homes multiplied along a “muddy tree-bordered lane” to be known as Beal Street, where land magnate Robertson Topp constructed his mansion and grounds. Topp, an attorney and legislator, cleared acres of wood and tangle, utilizing a mass of slaves, reportedly owning hundreds of them for his various properties. The Topp estate took three years to complete, finished by “a small army of workmen” about 1843, according to Memphis writer William McCaskill. “Every packet [boat] brought new fixtures and equipment—rosewood furniture, French mirrors, silver hinges and door knobs, shrubbery and flowers. A Creole artist was brought from New Orleans to paint the frescoes, and a landscape architect from St. Louis came to design the garden.”

Planters, cotton buyers and slave traders erected more columned mansions along the road in South Memphis. The boggy thoroughfare, west to east, extended from its river landing uphill to a high plane, then over streams and knobs for a mile, ending at Pigeon Roost Road, headed to Mississippi. “They were fabulously wealthy, as wealth went in those days,” McCaskill wrote of residents on the gilded lane. “To the south and west of Memphis stretched their great plantations, where small armies of black men toiled from sunup to sundown in the blistering heat. Their cotton, piled high on the palatial river packets which ploughed the Mississippi, found a ready market in New Orleans. The black virgin soil was rich and cheap and it gave forth a harvest of abundance.”

The term “Beal Street” did not show in any document—whether plat or map, business proposal or advertisement, news text or book—until likely 1845, when South Memphis leaders applied for incorporation with lawmakers at Nashville. No document dated earlier suggested otherwise, none located for this book. Newspaper evidence and maps from 1819 to 1846, electronically available, indicated the streets of South Memphis weren’t publicly named until filings and hearings for incorporation.

A Nashville newspaper mentioned the Beal Street landing of South Memphis in the initial week of 1846. The township act of incorporation was ratified by legislators in June, and that summer the Memphis Enquirer began designating Beal Street in advertisements. The Memphis Eagle, among news-pages available for this book, was first to mention “Beale Street,” spelled with an “e,” 1849, for a gunfight between partner cabinetmakers, both wounded. Memphis and South Memphis merged the following year, with a combined population pushing 10,000.

Robertson Topp died in 1876, his fortune wiped out by the Civil War and business failures. He left no written record or direct quote regarding origin of Beale Street, but family members said Old Topp named the thoroughfare for a military hero unknown to them. None was sure of the name’s proper spelling, either, Beal or Beale.

The Locke family of Memphis, meanwhile, declared the namesake for Beale Street was an antebellum man of business and politics, not warfare. Gardner B. Locke, an early mayor of Memphis, was county assessor and tax collector in 1845-46. Locke bought and sold South Memphis properties, becoming acquainted with William M. Beal of New Orleans, himself a Shelby County landowner planning to relocate. Beal’s reputation preceded him at Memphis as a banker, investor and cotton broker known across the South, boasting heavy contacts in Washington.

For publicity and advertising of William M. Beal, appearing in historic newspapers, his career included the following: 1828, cotton trade at New Orleans and Nashville; 1831, lawsuit victory in western Tennessee, Obion County, north of Memphis; 1837, brokerage trade in Nashville and Selma; 1838 to 1839, brokerage trade in Jackson, Miss., and Louisville; from 1838 to 1840, Beal sold “Texian Bonds” issued by the “Texian government,” speculating on U.S. annexation, and a Vicksburg bank claimed $40,000 lost in a “swindle”; 1841 to 1843, slave trade in Kentucky, Beal purchased a young “negro man named John” in Union County then resold him at Hopkinsville, within 16 months; 1841, sugar plantation listed for sale by Beal, Gulf Coast; 1841, property purchases in Tallahatchie County, Miss., where Beal had a power partner in Senator Robert J. Walker of Natchez; and, 1844, controversy of the Texas Annexation bill which, if passed, figured to reap riches for co-investors Beal and Walker, alleged the Vicksburg Whig. In 1845 the U.S. Senate confirmed Walker as Secretary of the Treasury, setting up Beal for a federal post, and meanwhile Texas was granted statehood.

Beal died in 1850 at New Orleans, succumbing of sudden “paralysis.” His demise cast “gloom over a large circle in which he had moved for so long a time,” remarked the Times-Picayune. “He had many warm friends, among whom it was our pleasure to number all the editors of this newspaper… He was a native of Georgia, and removed to this city in 1823, when quite a young man.” Beal was 40-something at death and a federal treasury official in New Orleans, appointed by President Zachary Taylor. Beal granted emancipation for at least two slaves in his will: John B. Jordan and Stephen W. Rogers, who later appeared in news as freemen.

Gardner B. Locke died in 1860 at Memphis, apparently maintaining that Beal Street, or Beale, was named for his late associate William M. Beal. A son of Locke later declared as much, Charles G. Locke, longtime business manager and copywriter for the Memphis Public Ledger. C.G. Locke was a crippled former Confederate soldier who lived with his widowed mother. Relaying local tidbits through advertising, C.G. Locke identified William M. Beal as Beale Street’s namesake, stating the entrepreneur once intended to reside in South Memphis but “failed to carry out his plans.”

“The city government and the maps of the city generally spell Beal Street with the final ‘e,’ making it Beale,” Locke wrote in 1892. “The street was named in honor of Wm. M. Beal, who was a prominent merchant of New Orleans at the time South Memphis was laid off into streets. His name was Beal and not Beale.”

Matt Chaney is compiling companion books on Southern music, tentatively titled River Shows, Jazz, Blues and Country Music and, the sequel, Rockabillies in the Missouri Delta. See the page Stories from River Music to Rock in the Northern Delta. For more information, including Chaney’s previous books, visit www.fourwallspublishing.com.  Email: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com.

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Memphis, Old And New. (1881, Oct. 16). [Reprint from New York Graphic NY.] Memphis Avalanche TN, p. 4.

Memphis Property. (1835, May 15). [Advertisement.] National Banner and Nashville Whig TN, p. 3.

Mr. Charles G. Locke. (1882, July 3). Memphis Public Ledger TN, p. 1.

Mrs. Mary J. Locke. (1891, Nov. 1). Memphis Avalanche-Appeal TN, p. 5.

Natchez, Jan. 2 Important Arrival. (1812, Feb. 22). Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser, St. Louis MO, p. 2.

New Emigration. (1859, April 10. New Orleans Times-Picayune LA, p. 5.

Notice. (1846, Aug. 15). [Advertisement.] Memphis Enquirer TN, p. 3.

Ohio River Has Romantic History. (1924, June 17). Louisville Courier-Journal KY, p. E2.

Only A Little Mud-Hole. (1890, Aug. 3). Memphis Commercial TN, p. 2.

Opening The Ohio. (1884, Jan. 6). Louisville Courier KY, p. 9.

Our Readers Will See. (1845, Dec. 6). Holly Springs Gazette MS, p. 2.

Owner’s Names. (1846, June 2). Memphis Enquirer TN, p. 3.

Pedraza. (1833, May 25). Southern Statesman, Jackson TN, p. 1.

Personal. (1883, June 28). Memphis Public Ledger TN, p. 4.

Personal. (1883, July 11). Memphis Public Ledger TN, p. 4.

Personal. (1883, Aug. 13). Memphis Public Ledger TN, p. 4.

Personal. (1883, Aug. 24). Memphis Public Ledger TN, p. 4.

Personal. (1885, Feb. 4). Memphis Public Ledger TN, p. 4.

Places Of Public Interest. (1892, Feb. 27). Memphis Public Ledger TN, p. 5.

Port Of New Orleans. (1828, Dec. 13). New Orleans Commercial Bulletin LA, p. 2.

Premium Cotton Gin. (1846, July 16). [Advertisement.] Memphis Enquirer TN, p. 1.

Prescott, J.P. (1888, Sept. 1). From an Indian village. Memphis Avalanche TN, p. 11.

Public Ledger. (1883, July 13). Memphis Public Ledger TN, p. 2.

Railroad Meeting. (1849, March 1). Memphis Eagle TN, p. 1.

Rawlings, J.J. (1888, Sept. 1. From an Indian village. Memphis Avalanche TN, p. 11.

Rucker, E.W. (1858). Map of the City of Memphis including Fort Pickering and Hopefield, Ark., together with the Original Grants and Their Subdivisions. City of Memphis: Memphis TN.

Senate. (1845, Nov. 6). Nashville Union TN, p. 2.

Smith, W. (1983, Feb. 20). Uncovering the history of Beale Street. Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. B1.

South Memphis. (1828, March 15). [Advertisement.] National Banner and Nashville Whig, Nashville TN, p. 3.

South Memphis For Sale!!! (1846, July 9). [Advertisement.] Memphis Enquirer TN, p. 3.

Sugar On Plantation. (1841, May 30). New Orleans Times-Picayune LA, p. 2.

Texas Lands For Sale At A Low Price. (1852, Feb. 11). New Orleans Times-Picayune LA, p. 1.

That Big Sandbar. (1899, Jan. 8). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 4.

The Advocate. (1834, Nov. 28). Arkansas Advocate, Little Rock AR, p. 2.

The Bluffs. (1887, Sept. 7). Memphis Public Ledger TN, p. 4.

The Cold Snap. (1892, Dec. 28). Memphis Public Ledger TN, p. 5.

The Dust. (1892, Feb. 13). Memphis Public Ledger TN, p. 1.

The Eclipse. (1892, Oct. 22). Memphis Public Ledger TN, p. 5.

The Gayoso Festival In Memphis. (1858, March 14). Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 2.

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The Hustler. (1892, Nov. 16). Memphis Public Ledger TN, p. 4.

The South-West—Memphis. (1844, Jan. 4). New York Herald NY, p. 1.

The State Of Mississippi. (1848, March 24). [Advertisement.] Jackson Southron MS, p. 3.

The Treaty Of Annexation. (1844, May 20). Vicksburg Whig MS, p. 2.

The Whig Mass Failure. (1844, June 10). Vicksburg Sentinel MS, p. 2.

Theaters And Hotels. (1887, July 10). Memphis Avalanche TN, p. 11.

They Were Born To Lead. (1887, July 10). Memphis Avalanche TN, p. 5.

Third In Business. (1890, Dec. 13). [Advertisement.] Memphis Public Ledger TN, p. 4.

Thompson & Drennan. (1828, May 24). [Advertisement.] National Banner and Nashville Whig TN, p. 3.

To The Editor Of The Vicksburg Sentinel. (1839, March 28). Vicksburg Sentinel MS, p. 2.

Town Of Memphis. (1820, June 27). [Advertisement.] Nashville Clarion and Tennessee State Gazette TN, p. 1.

Upon A Reperusal Of The Article We Published. (1833, April 29). National Banner and Nashville Advertiser, Nashville TN, p. 3.

W.M. Beal. (1838, May 25). Jackson Mississippian MS, p. 4.

We Direct The Attention Of Our Readers. (1849, Nov. 8). Memphis Enquirer TN, p. 2.

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1932: Final Tour For Jimmie Rodgers, Father Of Country Music

Details Surface of Lost Shows in Missouri and Arkansas

By Matt Chaney, for ChaneysBlog.com

Posted Thursday, August 15, 2019

Copyright ©2019 for original content and historical arrangement by Matthew L. Chaney, Four Walls Publishing

Issues confronted star musician Jimmie Rodgers at San Antonio in late 1932.

Rodgers, 35, someday known as Father of Country Music, faced waning record sales, property loss, marital discord and lethal disease. The yodeling string player was forced to hock his mansion and move wife and child into an apartment. Likewise he was losing to tuberculosis, often bedridden with breathing difficulty, bloody mucus and body pain.

Rodgers took off from Texas by Cadillac, anyway, pursuing cash work, show dates of any sort amidst Depression economy. He was bound for the Mississippi River Valley at behest of old friend Billy Terrell, for an interstate music tour to be his last.

That much we’ve known of James Charles Rodgers, retrospectively, and now additional details emerge through electronic search of historic newspapers in Missouri, Mississippi and Alabama.

Advertisements, reports and witness accounts of Jimmie Rodgers in 1932 —long buried within miles of microfilm—are becoming readily retrievable as e-search opens old news-pages. Advent of cyber search, in fact, already spurs revisions in so-called history, edits and corrections, for topics like American football.

Recently uncovered in music are portions of Rodgers’ farewell loop through western Mississippi, southeast Missouri and northeast Arkansas. Imagery is vivid when considering Rodgers in the delta, given new information to complement the biographical Jimmy Rodgers: The Life and Times of America’s Blue Yodeler [1979], by Nolan Porterfield, a college instructor of mine at Southeast Missouri State.

Early November, 1932, Jimmie and Carrie Rodgers reached his father’s house in Alabama. Aaron W. Rodgers was a railroad man retired at Geiger, his native community just inside the state line. Two decades previous, over in Mississippi, Aaron had secured son Jimmie’s job with the Mobile & Ohio at Meridian. The boy was 14, quitting school to labor around trains and track, and so marked was the art of Jimmy Rodgers. His music and performance oozed railroad culture, ranging from lyrics and visuals to his whistle imitations and a second stage name, The Singing Brakeman.

Jimmie and Carrie traveled on to hometown Meridian, where her three married sisters lived in the same block. They drove west from the Mississippi hills, down into the delta from Greenwood to Indianola, where he booked gigs at familiar venues. “Jimmie Rodgers has been visiting over his home state between his recording and regular theatre engagements,” reported the Indianola Enterprise, cheerily. “Jimmie takes his vacation by getting out and playing the dances in the towns among the people he knows and loves.”

In truth Rodgers suffered on that trip, badly as anytime since TB unleashed a lung hemorrhage eight years before. He’d been a hearty young man to that point, standing 5-foot-10 and 165 pounds, but subsequent, recurring  illness diminished his frame and fortitude.

Rodgers arrived at southeast Missouri in December 1932, resembling “a walking skeleton” for his first and only performances in the Bootheel. The visit began with ice and snow whipping over the bald, deforested flatland. “A strong north wind was blowing that seemed to drive the cold right into your bones,” recalled Robert E. Legan, writing decades later for the Malden Press-Merit.

Legan was 21, clerking in Miller’s Store at Malden on Dec. 10, 1932, a Saturday, when the living legend appeared about noon. “Jimmie Rodgers came in, bundled up in an overcoat with a hunter’s cap pulled down over his ears. He was shivering and said he could not get warm,” Legan recounted. “Because of the weather we were all standing around without very much to do and I think we all helped to wait on Jimmy. We sold him a pair of overshoes, a heavy sweater and a muffler. He put them all on.”

“Before he left I told him how much I liked his singing and his songs—especially Waiting For A Train. He thanked me and started out. He hesitated a moment and looked out through the glass door at the terrible weather outside. Then he shrugged his shoulders, turned up his coat collar and went out into the cold… ”

Seeing Rodgers go, his splaying legs and bony hips didn’t fill the trousers. “Time was running out,” Porterfield noted of the TB stage. “For him there was no long-range anything, as he knew all too well.”

Rodgers was in Malden with showman Billy Terrell, veteran Missouri talent and proprietor of popular comedy companies. Terrell once hired Rodgers for the Blue Yodeler’s first tour, straight out of Meridian. At Malden, Rodgers picked guitar and sang during matinee and night shows for Terrell under canvas, winter elements be damned.

“Billy had a big coal stove on each side of the tent, with the stovepipes going out under the tent flaps,” wrote Legan, who had adored and followed Terrell since boyhood. But Legan also grasped the dire context for famed Jimmie Rodgers, “down to traveling with a tent show.”

Packed houses savored the entertainment, stirred by Rodgers, renowned for his overriding optimism amidst hard times—embodying the essence of blues theme. “He could still sing,” Legan recalled in 1978. “His songs were of a natural melancholy nature and the sight of this emaciated, doleful creature, singing his heart out with his shining eyes, glowing away back in their sockets, just naturally drew compassion from the audience.”

“I will never forget him or his songs that somehow took hold of the common people.”

The tour of Jimmie Rodgers continued through southeast Missouri and northeast Arkansas. Scheduled performances are now documented at the Malone Theatre in Sikeston [Dec. 15-16, 1932] and the Ritz in Blytheville [Dec. 18-19], per news texts recently retrieved. The vintage advertisements and reports don’t mention Terrell, indicating Rodgers booked dates and provided promotional copy himself.

The Sikeston Standard reported “thousands of country folks have developed a taste for Jimmie’s particular talent, and his record of ‘packing ’em in’ is well-known wherever he has appeared in theatres outside of the large cities.” And this from the Steele Enterprise: “Jimmie is that same likeable fellow that he was when he sat high in the [train caboose], strumming the guitar and singing the songs that made him famous on both continents.”

Note that presently only a fraction of the region’s historic news-pages are available for electronic search. Rodgers possibly appeared elsewhere locally, with evidence yet uncovered. Anyone can review newspapers on microfilm for the month of Rodgers’ visit, representing localities like Poplar Bluff, Dexter, Chaffee, Cape Girardeau, Illmo-Fornfelt, Benton, Charleston, New Madrid, Portageville and Kennett in Missouri; Cairo in Illinois; and Blytheville in Arkansas. A host of indexes and microfilm editions are available through The State Historical Society of Missouri, website shsmo.org.

Regarding December 1932 in southeast Missouri, the news-pages available for modern search were published at Malden, Sikeston, Caruthersville, Hayti and Steele. See newspapers.com and maldenmuseum.com for more information.

***

Jimmie and Carrie Rodgers apparently returned to Texas by outset of 1933, where Porterfield picked up their trail again in his research. That January Rodgers played the Joy Theatre in Dallas then started a tour of Texas towns with showman J. Doug Morgan. “But Jimmie had ignored the elements and jeopardized his health once too often,” Porterfield observed. “While they were playing Lufkin during the second week of February, he collapsed and was rushed to Methodist Hospital in Houston.”

Family members traveled to his side. “Little, if any, hope is held for the recovery of Jimmie Rodgers,” reported the Chocktaw Plaindealer in Mississippi. After a month hospitalized, however, Rodgers rose again from sick bed, seeking work. “Money did not mean much to him personally…” Porterfield stated, “but now he was increasingly anxious about those he would leave behind, especially twelve-year-old [daughter] Anita.”

Rodgers scheduled recording sessions in New York for a $3,000 advance at completion. He boarded an ocean liner at Galveston, accompanied by personal nurse, and arrived in Manhattan on May 14. Rodgers cut some 10 songs in studio but his lungs hemorrhaged catastrophically at a hotel. He fell comatose and succumbed in his room on May 26, 1933.

“Jimmie Rodgers had not quite literally died alone, but it was very much the same thing,” Porterfield remarked. “To his family and friends, his death had been imminent for years, yet all of them were far away when the time came.”

Writer and consultant Matt Chaney is compiling companion books on Southern music. Tentative titles are River Shows, Jazz and Country Music in the Northern Delta: Legends of Song, Dance and Circus; and Rockabillies in the Missouri Delta. See Chaney’s page Stories from River Music to Rock in the Northern Delta. For more information, including Chaney’s previous books, visit www.fourwallspublishing.com.  Email: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com.

Select References

Do You Suffer From Painful Feet? (1928, March 2). [Advertisement.] Malden Merit MO, p. 5.

From Railway Boxcar To Stardom Overnight. (1932, Dec. 15). Steele Enterprise MO, p. 3.

Geiger, Panol And Gainesville Voters. (1928, May 2). Our Southern Home, Livingston AL, p. 4.

Ice And Cold On Weather Menu. (1932, Dec. 13). Sikeston Standard MO, p. 5.

Jimmie Rodgers, “Blue Yodeler,” To Be Stage Attraction Dec. 15-16. (1932, Dec. 9). Sikeston Standard MO, p. 1.

Jimmie Rodgers, Famous Singer, Coming. (1932, Nov. 24). Indianola Enterprise MS, p. 1.

Jimmie Rodgers, Yodeling Brakeman, Dies in New York. (1933, June 1). Kerrville Mountain Sun TX, p. 1.

Legan, R.E. (1978, April 27). Things I Remember About Malden: ‘Toby’ shows and Jimmy Rodgers. Malden Press-Merit MO, p. 74.

Like Your Music “Grand Ole Opry” Style? (1953, April 19). [Advertisement.] Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 71.

Little Hope Held For Recovery Of Jimmie Rodgers. (1933, Feb. 24). Chocktaw Plaindealer, Ackerman MS, p. 4.

Look Who’s Coming! (1932, Dec. 13). [Advertisement.] Sikeston Standard MO, p. 2.

Look Who’s Coming! (1932, Dec. 16). [Advertisement.] Sikeston Standard MO, p. 7.

Over The County. (1932, Nov. 9). Our Southern Home, Livingston AL, p. 1.

Over The County. (1933, March 1). Our Southern Home, Livingston AL, p. 1.

Peterson Purchases Home In Westland. (1933, March 23). Kerrville Mountain Sun TX, p. 1.

Porterfield, N. (1979). Jimmie Rodgers: The life and times of America’s Blue Yodeler. University of Illinois Press: Urbana and Chicago IL.

Ritz Theatre. (1932, Dec. 15). [Advertisement.] Steele Enterprise MO, p. 4.

Skelton, B. (1972, May 23). Meridian’s Jimmie Rodgers father of country music. Jackson Clarion-Ledger MS, pp. 27, 30.

Smith, B. [Dir.] (1930). Jimmie Rogers in The Singing Brakeman. Columbia Pictures Corporation: Hollywood CA.

Society. (1932, Nov. 28). Greenwood Commonwealth MS, p. 3.

Some Relief From Weather. (1932, Dec. 15). Caruthersville Republican MO, p. 1.

The Tactless Texan. (1933, June 6). Amarillo Globe-Times TX, p. 2.

Worst Ice And Sleet Storm In Years Visits This Area. (1932, Dec. 16). Malden Merit MO, p. 8.

 

1917 River Jazz: W.C. Handy and Fate Marable in the Northern Delta

Thirty-First in a Series

By Matt Chaney, for ChaneysBlog.com

Posted Saturday, June 8, 2019

Copyright ©2019 for original content and historical arrangement by Matthew L. Chaney, Four Walls Publishing

Cairo, Ill., remained a place of converging forces, of conflict and collaboration, creation, even as the old river town struggled in early 20th century.

New railroads and a bridge bypassed Cairo, crossing the Mississippi near Cape Girardeau. Paved highways were routed elsewhere, establishing automobile traffic through southeast Missouri and western Kentucky. Aircraft flew overhead but only stunt pilots landed at Cairo, marshy tip of southern Illinois.

River commerce had been reduced to barge freight and local packets, to showboats and excursion rides. Timber and grain drove Cairo industry but supplies were shrinking from southeast Missouri, booming itself through deforestation, draining and settlement of vast bottom lands. Bootheel crop farmers, burgeoning in number, stored and sold harvests through new elevators on their side of the river. Sikeston’s high-rise grain elevator, a concrete cluster of 12 towers, held 800,000 bushels.

Cairo was fading in significance, increasingly cut off in the northern delta. This confluence of great rivers, merge point of the Mississippi and Ohio, wasn’t so important anymore. Town population peaked at about 15,000 during the 1910s, outset of the First World War. Talk of Cairo as a budding metropolis was over, and meanwhile the pressing concern, as for a century, remained flood protection. Cairo’s survival had relied on federal aid and development since the Civil War. Only government could maintain the huge levees, river gates and pumps for repelling catastrophic river surges.

Entertainment and show business, and complementary vice, endured as Cairo’s consistent economy—and community pride or infamy, depending on perspective. Many citizens were fed up with the “live town” reputation.

“Cairo’s future depends, in one important sense at least, upon the people of the city themselves,” wrote John M. Lansden, attorney and local historian. “They cannot change its geographical features, nor its topographical features very much; but they can and should make it a place from which good and desirable people will not turn away.”

But Cairo always relied on show business and nightlife, even illicit gambling, said advocates. And brothels and unlicensed saloons were incidental problems, not a plague, they said. More outside folks were attracted than not for Cairo’s entertainment scene; positives outweighed negatives, advocates argued.

Local culture for performing arts was special, undeniably. Historic Cairo still attracted major shows and talent while nurturing young musicians, dancers, actors and comedians.

The circus was tradition for generations here, since Dan Rice and Spalding’s Floating Palace on the Mississippi. Circuses no longer wintered around Cairo but big shows visited into the 20th century, including Barnum and Bailey, Sells and Downs, Hagenbeck-Wallace, and Ringling Brothers. The modern circus arrived by railroad in the night, “awe-inspiring for the ease with which it flits from hither to yon,” remarked a columnist. “A circus carrying a thousand people and 500 varieties of fierce and fragrant beasts will slip into a town at 4 a.m. and by breakfast time will have set up 10 acres of tents and will have its calliope fired up.”

Showboat lore traced to the floating barges of Ludlow, Chapman and Lennox, and the steamer tug Banjo of Spalding, in period of early to mid-1800s on the rivers. The 1900s showboats, like predecessors, set up at Cairo wharf and across the way at Bird’s Point. Modern vessels were spectacles on water, a football field in length and electrically illuminated, led by Markle’s Goldenrod and Emerson’s Cotton Blossom.

Classical drama and opera waned in popularity but remained trademarks of Cairo, drawing enough regional audience to support major shows and performers. Famed Lillian Russell appeared here in twilight of her stage career, 1913. Cecille B. DeMille and Marguerite Clark made acting runs at the Opera House prior to entering silent movies, he as a director. Helena Modjeska, acclaimed tragedian, made a farewell appearance at age 67.

But the crowds turned out for song, dance and laughs, from stars like vaudevillians Lew Dockstader, Max Bloom and Al. H. “Metz” Wilson, showing at the Opera House.

Music was popular as ever in Cairo and the riverine delta. American genres had emerged, pure native styles with hot beats, along with technology like the phonograph player. Entertainment infrastructure expanded along automobile routes, adding live venues. And black artists impacted music in facets such as song composition, instrumentals, stage performance and marketing.

Pioneer blues singer Ma Rainey played Cairo, starring for the Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels, while soprano Matilda Sissieretta Jones visited on numerous dates, leading her Black Patti Musical Comedy Company. Jones was a songbird of range from grand opera to pop, known as “Black Patti” in deference to Italian great Adelina Patti. In 1911 Jones’ troupe advertised “40 Colored Comedians, Vocalists and Dancers” at Cairo.

The Smart Set Company packed showplaces in the South and North, from Cairo Opera House to the Lafayette Theatre in New York. The Smart Set was a “black vaudeville” institution for decades with lead men such as Tom McIntosh, Sherman H. Dudley, and the Whitney brothers, Salem Tutt and J. Homer Tutt.

In 1915 a “Negro Renaissance” was apparent in the arts. James Reese Europe, Afro-American composer and conductor, said contemporary spotlight trained on black performers because of “modern dances, and the consequent demand for dance music of which the distinguishing characteristic is an eccentric tempo. Such music usually takes the form of a highly syncopated melody, which in the early period of its development was known as ‘ragtime’ music.”

“Perhaps it is fair to say that the negro has contributed to American music whatever distinctive quality it possesses,” Europe said. “Certainly he is the originator of the highly syncopated melody so much in favor today [jazz].” Europe headed an association of black musicians in New York City, where they endured prejudice and royalties theft from music publishers but likewise dominated jobs for shows and dances. “Our negro musicians have nearly cleared the field of the so-called gypsy orchestras,” he said.

Jim Europe highly admired W.C. Handy of Memphis, the bandleader who composed early blues songs that burst barriers and captured mainstream audience, endearing white fans and black. Handy was a pioneer of American music whom dancers should thank for the fox trot, Europe said in Harlem, adding, “both the tango and the fox trot are really negro dances, as is the one-step.”

Handy stood revered in the lower Mississippi and Ohio valleys, already, and across the South.

“The Memphis Blues is known all over this country and its composer is almost as well known,” remarked a Nashville critic. “Down in Memphis town Handy reigns almost supreme at most of the dances, his music being the one big boast that the Memphians have.” An Atlanta paper saluted Handy’s band as “a Memphis musical institution.” A Texas advertisement touted “Dance Music That Will Make You Kick Back The Rugs.”

Atlanta reporter Britt Craig was struck that hundreds of whites turned out with blacks to see Handy’s band. “The variety demonstrated the democracy of ragtime,” Craig stated. “The applause that greeted the livelier ragtime numbers, especially The Memphis Blues, shook the rafters. Handy was compelled to render the Blues three times when he first played it, then later by special request.”

The self-effacing Handy credited blues music to multi-ethnic artists preceding him along the Mississippi: “Negro roustabouts, honky-tonk piano players, wanderers and others of their underprivileged but undaunted clan from Missouri to the Gulf.” A son of slaves, Handy drew inspiration from experience, his past of incidents and encounters. “There was what we called the folk blues,” he recalled. “It seemed to me I’d always heard them. Our people talked of ‘singing the blues,’ but that was just a phrase. Blues wasn’t written music then. There would be just a snatch of song among my people. It was music from the heart.”

Handy appeared frequently in the northern delta during the 1910s, particularly at Caruthersville and Cairo. He conceived a classic melody on visit to St. Louis, jotting notes in a riverfront saloon. A century later, the BBC recounted: “In 1914, Handy followed up Memphis Blues with his next hit… called St Louis Blues. It was even more popular and influential than its predecessor and it went on to become a jazz standard.”

As America was drawn into world conflict, W.C. Handy played Cairo on multiple occasions, with varying combinations of his Memphis players. The term “jass” or “jaz” was just surfacing in the northern delta. A reporter described the music, close kin of ragtime and blues, as “that peculiar brand of ultra-syncopation.” For longtime ahead, many would refer to jazz as ragtime, “raggy” tunes.

“A jass band is composed of oboes, clarinets, cornets, trombones, banjos and always a drum,” commented a New Orleans musician in 1917. “But the music is a matter of ear and not of technique. None of us knows music. One carries the melody and others do what they please. Some play counter melodies, some play freak noises, and some just play. I can’t tell you how. You got to feel jass. The time is syncopated. Jass, I think, means a jumble.”

Jazz was long heard in locales besides New Orleans, according to Elijah “Lige” Shaw, legendary drummer born in Tennessee south of Cairo, 1900. “We just called it music, not jazz,” Shaw recalled of boyhood in Jackson, Tenn., where he earned money dancing and playing drums in his father’s saloon.

“So this music, everybody says that this music comes from New Orleans, but that isn’t necessarily true, because I’ve been hearing it all my life and I didn’t know New Orleans existed. But it’s the same music as the older musicians that I would follow around as a little boy, getting a whooping every night for staying out because I was out and around where the musicians were.”

Shaw had 15 siblings and left Jackson as a teen, after his mother died. He landed at Memphis and in 1915 joined a network of musicians and bands supervised by Handy. Shaw toured at age 16 with the Dandy Dixie Minstrels, operating from Cotton Plant, Ark. The outfit played Cairo theaters and tent shows. “We’d make a different town every day,” Shaw said. “There was always excitement; every day you could count on a laugh and a change of scenery.”

Handy appeared twice at Cairo in 1917, when Columbia Records released his Jazz Dance Blues—“weird and super-syncopated strains… compelling call to the dance floor”—in national distribution. Handy ended each show with St. Louis Blues, packing the floor of dancers and ensuring encores. Cairo couples enjoyed modern dancing, controversial moves, some considered taboo, of names like the tango, fox trot, turkey trot, bunny hug, grizzly bear, shimmy and toe wiggle.

A modern dancer moved “with every part of one’s body”—alarming churchmen locally. Methodist minister Curwen Henley denounced dancing in “most ardent” fashion, reported the Bulletin. “I am set against the practice of dancing,” said Henley. “I do not believe in being a sanctimonious church member in Cairo and a dancer on the boat. The modern dances are of death.”

Reverend Henley had penchant for making headlines, including as a leader of the Anti-Saloon League. Illinois elders of the Southern Methodists assigned Henley to Cairo, where he admonished the community for “lawlessness and anarchy.” The pulpit firebrand equated locals to hedonists and vowed to fight evil “with every drop of blood in my veins.” Pastor Henley condemned Cairo for infidelity and divorce, alcohol consumption, dancing, gambling and more ills. Given Cairo alone, the “second coming of Christ seems near,” he cried.

Newsmen covered Sunday sermons of Henley, harvesting quotes that grabbed attention on frontpage. “Why should Cairo be the only open town for miles around?” Henley pleaded, championing the Temperance Movement for banning alcohol. “We are surrounded by dry territory; should we continue open so as to invite all the vile here? We will never build up our city that way. Shall we stay open just to be conspicuous?”

In spring 1917 Preacher Henley headed into a showdown. The Handy band was fantastic for dancers at an Elks party, thrilling Cairo generally, but dance opponents felt differently, and the annual picnic for Sunday schools was coming up. The gathering was multi-denominational and this year featured a river excursion aboard the palatial Steamer Saint Paul of the Streckfus Line. Many anticipated trouble with Henley around, since the boat offered dance tunes from bandleader Fate Marable and his jazzy players.

Marable pushed the issue straight away, on morning of the event, a May Saturday, by broadcasting calliope music from atop the Saint Paul moored at Cairo wharf. Gangplanks were opened and church picnickers came rushing. The side-wheel steamer was 300-feet long, wooden hulled, four stories tall, painted bright white with latticework from stern to bow. Tall black stacks streamed thin smoke as the Saint Paul got up steam for the excursion run. Launch was in a half-hour.

Marable, 27, refined pianist and master calliope player, hit notes on the steam organ like none other—“when Fate allows his fingers to wander dreamily over the brass keys all lovers of ragtime sit up and take notice,” gushed a river listener. And as 600 church people boarded Marable’s boat, toes were tapping and fingers snapping, especially among youths.

At a quarter past 9 o’clock, Marable left his calliope perch under the smokestacks. He headed downstairs to the second deck, with its 200-foot hardwood dance floor, to join his musicians. Marable was an Afro-American of light complexion and red hair, native of nearby Paducah, fronting a band of black players from his hometown. In final minutes until boat launch they played catchy melodies, snatches of their advertised “special dance program,” to stir the crowd.

Gangways were withdrawn onto the Saint Paul and moorings untied, ropes reeled in. Deckhands signaled up to the pilot house for departure. At 9:30 sharp the captain gripped the brass handle on the ship’s telegraph mount, a porcelain dial of throttle commands for the engine room. He pushed the dial from STAND BY to SLOW AHEAD, and engines fired below. At rear of the ship the big paddle wheel turned forward, churning water.

The Saint Paul pulled away from Cairo wharf, billowing dark smoke, horn blaring, and made a wide U-turn on the Ohio to point upriver. Straightening out, the pilot ordered steam power to FULL AHEAD; pouring on the coals, the boat glided toward picnic grounds 20 miles up the channel.

Marable’s band played loudly on the dance deck, and there was action. Many churchgoers would dawdle no longer. “Although they knew there would be objection, a large number of the young people succumbed to the lure of the music,” the Bulletin later reported, “and the magnificent dance floor was soon filled with swaying couples.”

But the band was interrupted, told to stop by churchmen, and Reverend Henley and Fate Marable came face-to-face. Marable wouldn’t relent, informing the anti-dance crusaders his band would continue, with or without couples on the floor. And music resumed.

“Instantly the floor was again filled with dancers, and several numbers were played with the same result,” the Bulletin reported. Henley and company halted the music, once again, but Marable remained determined to perform. Henley mentioned sacred songs as proper for the gathering, and, perhaps to his surprise, Marable agreed.  Now only hymns would be heard from the bandstand.

“For a while it was thought the dancers had been defeated,” the Bulletin relayed, “but first one and then another couple returned to the floor. It was found that music of hymns, when properly played by an orchestra accustomed to furnishing dance music, was just as good as ragtime for their purposes.”

Music and the fox trot rolled on. The nifty collaboration between Marable and churchy dancers had won out, their resorting to Bringing In The Sheaves and such. Preacher Henley fumed over the sacrilege, leading his disciples at edge of the floor.

“Charges of desecration were hurled at the dancers by the outraged objectors and many personalities were indulged in, but as long as the music continued, some remained on the floor,” the Bulletin reported. “They flung back a challenge to make them stop and told their criticizers they were bigoted and narrow-minded.”

“The dance or not to dance at a Sunday school picnic… was never settled.”

Reverend Henley was perturbed that night in Cairo. “No person truly a Christian can endorse or favor the dance idea,” he said. “The dance never builds character but destroys it. It never builds the constitution but undermines it.”

In 1918 Fate Marable and his steamboat musicians were billed as the Kentucky Jazz Band by Streckfus Steamers. The next year Marable retained only one Paducah musician, Boyd Atkins, while hiring a host of New Orleans players, including Warren “Baby” Dodds and teenager Louis Armstrong.

The group, known as Marable’s Jaz-E-Saz Band, toured the rivers on Streckfus steamers Saint Paul and Sidney. Armstrong performed his first trumpet solo from a boat at Caruthersville. Marable nicknamed the kid “Satchmo,” and decades later Armstrong credited the pianist “for lots of us youngsters getting a start.”

“We were the first hot band to come up on the boats and people thought we were really something out of the ordinary,” Armstrong said. “Baby Dodds used to play on the rims of the drums, y’know… we really had ’em jumpin’. Deedy, we used to make ’em swing.”

In 1918 Reverend Henley left Cairo, reassigned to Murphysboro by the Southern Methodists. Soon after he saw a cherished cause become federal mandate in the 18th Amendment, which outlawed the manufacture, sale and consumption of alcohol in the United States.

Prohibition of booze didn’t last. Jass did.

Writer and consultant Matt Chaney is compiling a book on historical song and dance, tentatively titled Stories from River Music to Rock in the Northern Delta. For more information, including Chaney’s previous books, visit www.fourwallspublishing.com.  Email: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com.

Select References

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Stories From River Music to Rock in the Northern Delta

By Matt Chaney, for ChaneysBlog.com

Copyright ©2019 for historical arrangement and original content by Matthew L. Chaney, Four Walls Publishing

Feb. 16, 2017

Missouri Boasts Its Place in Rock ‘n’ Roll History

March 6, 2017

Rock ‘n’ Roll Thrived in Underworld of the Missouri Delta

March 16, 2017

1964: The Beatles Flee For Hills of Missouri

April 2, 2017

The Local Elvis: From Good Kid to Garbo in Rock Legend

April 27, 2017

The Missouri Delta Nurtured Rock ‘n’ Roll

May 6, 2017

Memphis Cast Delta Beacon for Rockabillies

June 3, 2017

As Rockabilly Fell, Musicians Adapted in Delta

July 22, 2017

1955: Elvis Effect Rocked The Missouri Delta

July 29, 2017

Memphis, Sun Records Integrated Music in Race and Genre

Aug. 9, 2017

Rockabilly Born of Boomer America

Aug. 12, 2017

1955: The Local Elvis in Missouri, Cut 2

Aug. 24, 2017

1956: Girls Mob Elvis from Missouri to New York

Sept. 14, 2017

The Delta Factor In Great American Music

Sept. 26, 2017

Pioneer American Pop Star: Nelson Kneass

Sept. 30, 2017

Steamboats Impacted The South Despite Quaky Start

Oct. 16, 2017

Entertainers Followed Rivers West and South

Oct. 24, 2017

River Music, American Music Prior to Civil War

Nov. 10, 2017

American Pop Music’s Bittersweet, Essential Beginning

Nov. 19, 2017

River Entertainment Illuminated Cairo in Desolate Delta

Dec. 1, 2017

Blacks Electrified Early American Music and Dance

Dec. 14, 2017

Showbiz Hooked the Kids of Cairo, Illinois

Jan. 13, 2018

Music and Social Mores in Swamp-east Missouri

Feb. 2, 2018

American Music: ‘Jazz horns were on fire along the delta’

June 28, 2018

Jazz Great Jess Stacy Lived The Highs, Lows of Showbiz

July 8, 2018

Hot Dancing’s Popularity Overwhelmed Churchmen a Century Ago

August 10, 2018

Showbiz Landed at the Missouri Delta and Cairo

August 31, 2018

Olden Circus Topped Baseball for Athleticism at Cairo, Illinois

September 19, 2018

Circus Spectacle Inspired Show Hopefuls at Cairo, Illinois

November 10, 2018

Delta Youths Gravitated Toward Music, Stage Stardom

December 29, 2018

1881: Song and Dance Rocked the Opera House at Cairo, Illinois

January 29, 2019

Pioneer Radio Aired Jazz and Country Music from Paducah

January 31, 2019

Radio Rolled Out Grand Ole Opry from Nashville

February 26, 2019

Jess Stacy Grew With American Music in the Missouri Delta

Writer and consultant Matt Chaney is compiling companion books on Southern music. Tentative titles are River Shows, Jazz and Country Music in the Northern Delta: Legends of Song, Dance and Circus; and Rockabillies in the Missouri Delta. See Chaney’s page Stories from River Music to Rock in the Northern Delta. For more information, including Chaney’s previous books, visit www.fourwallspublishing.com.  Email: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com.

Jess Stacy Grew With American Music In The Missouri Delta

Thirtieth in a Series

By Matt Chaney, for ChaneysBlog.com

Posted Tuesday, February 26, 2019

Copyright ©2019 for historical arrangement and original content by Matthew L. Chaney, Four Walls Publishing

The Illinois Central Railroad stood famed for men and machines at outset of the 20th century.

Legends of “The IC” included a young attorney of the 1850s, Abraham Lincoln, whose representation helped establish the line. During the Civil War the railroad keyed Union victory westward, funneling troops, arms and supplies down to Cairo. In 1900 locomotive engineer Casey Jones died heroically on the Cannonball Run from Memphis. Casey sacrificed himself on IC Engine No. 1, slowing his train before collision with freight cars, saving passengers and crew, for immortality in song.

Fred Stacy was another storied engineer of the Illinois Central, heroic in his own right, of many friends, as characterized in newspapers. The personable railroad veteran resided at Bird’s Point, Mo., across the Mississippi from Cairo, where he also piloted a steamboat ferry for railcars.

Stacy had driven the first “fast through train” from Chicago to New Orleans; his IC Limited topped 80 miles per hour on runs, preceding the Panama Limited to become iconic. Stacy once helped foil train robbers, protecting a shipment of gold and currency from the World’s Fair in Chicago. Desperadoes attacked Stacy’s train at Centralia, but workers and passengers fought back. Stacy cracked one bandit with a wrench, knocking him from the train, and seized a pistol to join gunfire that scattered the others. Stacy and crew were awarded gold medals and IC stock for their bravery.

But questions confronted this railroad man after turn of the century, personally and professionally. Eyesight was deteriorating in his 40s, curtailing operation of trains, and driving the tug barge was dangerous, ferrying railcars over conjoined mighty rivers.

The channel between Cairo and Bird’s Point was a most perilous on the Mississippi, cut by rocks, currents and heavy traffic at confluence with the Ohio. Extreme weather conditions ranged from thunderstorms and drought to massive flooding and ice. Drowning victims were routine along Missouri shoreline, daily sometimes, corpses washed up or otherwise recovered.

The waters pounded Missouri’s banks, collapsing ground in acreage. Trains, wagons, buildings, people and livestock were deposited into Big Muddy. Railcars broke loose on earthen ramps to water, destroying track and crashing transfer barges. Periodically an incline caved into liquefaction,dunking everything with it.

Moreover, by 1904, Fred Stacy had a new family with younger wife Vada, who was 29 and pregnant. The Stacys were impoverished, dwelling in an old boxcar and pasture at merge of the great rivers near Bird’s Point. Hot summer dragged on and Vada delivered a baby boy on August 11, whom the couple named Jesse Alexandria Stacy.

Facts on the family at Bird’s Point would be scant for future accounts, but apparently neither Fred nor Vada considered the swampy vicinity of raucous Cairo as suitable for child-rearing. Vada, a professional seamstress and devout mother, certainly wanted to relocate. Decades later the son, musician Jess Stacy, discussed his parents in an interview with New Yorker magazine. Jess described Fred as gregarious, carefree: “he never worried, which was the exact opposite of my mother.”

Malden, Mo., was attractive to the Stacys, a town of 1,500 where Fred and Vada each had siblings. The mother and infant headed first to Malden and the father followed in September.

Malden was a key railroad stop on the Cotton Belt, some 65 miles southwest of Cairo across the delta. The blossoming community nestled around a sand ridge with decent elevation and no major river in sight. Meanwhile, back at Bird’s Point, the relentless Mississippi chewed and swallowed former home turf of the Stacys. Thousands of feet of earth dropped into churning water, taking the old boxcar and pasture; the area of “Merge Point” was dissolved, gone.

The Stacys lived poor but stable in Malden, nurtured by family network and friendships. Fred held jobs as a railroad brakeman and store salesman, and Vada built repute as a superior dressmaker while she expanded into clothing sales. Jesse, an only child, grew and worked odd jobs, earning from two bits to a half-dollar per day.

Jesse excelled in grade school and acted in plays, exhibiting flair for performance. “Neither of my parents was musical,” he would recall, “so the first music I heard was played by an old music teacher, from across the street, who knew things like Memphis Blues and In The Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.”

That music teacher was likely Elmore E. Mason, horn blower and bandleader, although a young man during his Malden tenure at beginning of World War One. Mason performed across the Mid-South when Memphis Blues was a song for youthful players, typically acquired either from ear or from sheet music printed by composer W.C. Handy.

E.E. Mason, native of the Missouri Lead Belt, played trombone and cornet for circuses, troupes and theaters. He founded orchestras and marching bands in the Bootheel, attracting crowds and publicity. Mason was a talented musician and educated instructor, adept in classical song, opera, folk, pop, and the hot new sound—jazz.

Jesse Stacy played snare drum in school and was recruited for Mason’s Military Band at Malden in spring of 1915. The drummer boy was 10 years old, joining Mason’s group for a big event at Caruthersville, live town on the Mississippi.

Boosters promoted Caruthersville as entertainment hotbed, calling it the new Cairo on Missouri side of the river. The town of 4,000 hopped with shows and events, drawing partygoers from near and far. Caruthersville boasted theaters, dance halls, saloons, club rooms, classic showboats and flashy excursion steamers. There were fine musicians, amateur and pro, in every bloom of American music, playing ragtime and jazz, blues and ballad. The local social whirl involved weekly dances, holiday picnics and balls, fairs, rodeos, circuses, carnivals and business conventions. Vice was readily available, too, notorious gambling and prostitution of Pemiscot County, on marshland border with Arkansas.

Jesse Stacy was wide-eyed at Caruthersville, marching for Mason’s drum line in the annual parade of a salesmen confab. Thousands watched him, in turn, but the kid wasn’t intimidated, performing with relish to cheers along streets.

“Jesse Stacy, drummer boy for Mason’s Military Band, made a ‘hit’ with the [conventioneers], spectators and citizens in general at Caruthersville,” reported the hometown Malden Merit. “Jesse is a manly and talented little fellow who is deserving of every compliment that can be bestowed on him. The band boys in general won the recognition of being a first-class aggregation, which is a compliment to Malden and their very able leader and instructor, Prof. E.E. Mason.”

Multiple musicians influenced young Stacy at Malden, such as Jeannette McCombs, teen housemate in foster care of Vada. The girl “had a piano, which was moved in, and she took lessons,” Jess Stacy said later. “I’d listen to her practicing, and then sit down and play what I’d heard by ear. When my mother caught me doing that, she said I should have lessons.”

Jesse began piano in Malden, but Vada fretted for his schooling post-elementary, among her concerns. She’d become primary income provider of the household, and largely so, after Fred’s failing eyesight halted his railroad career. Fred still worked sporadically for Sexton’s Store, but Vada found employment elsewhere, a new place, as Jesse turned 14 in summer of 1918.

The Merit reported: “Mrs. F. L. Stacy, one of Malden’s oldest dressmakers, has accepted a position in the alteration department at [Vandivort’s Store], Cape Girardeau, Mo., and would be glad to have her friends while in the city to call on her and see the new Princess Coats and Suits.”

Jesse Stacy accompanied Vada to picturesque Cape Girardeau, settled among bluffs overlooking the Mississippi, where he would benefit of “school advantages,” she told the Malden paper. And within months Fred joined the family at “Cape,” as regionally known, where he and wife would remain permanently.

Music was elemental of the old French town, capturing Jesse’s fancy, especially the dance beats resounding from river wharf up to hilltop college. “I took [piano] lessons in Cape Girardeau from Professor Clyde Brandt, and he had me playing Beethoven sonatas and Mozart and Bach partitas,” Stacy said in 1975. “I think it was then I realized that Bach was the first swing pianist.”

“I’m sorry now I didn’t practice more, but all I wanted was to play in a dance band and get the hell out of Cape Girardeau.”

Writer and consultant Matt Chaney is compiling a book on historical song and dance, tentatively titled River Music and Rockabilly in the Northern Delta. For more information see the ChaneysBlog page “Music History and Legend of the Missouri Delta.” For information on Chaney’s previous books, visit www.fourwallspublishing.com.  Email: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com.

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Radio Rolled Out Grand Ole Opry from Nashville

Twenty-Ninth in a Series

By Matt Chaney, for ChaneysBlog.com

Posted Thursday, January 31, 2019

Copyright ©2019 for historical arrangement and original content by Matthew L. Chaney, Four Walls Publishing

The radio show to become known as Grand Ole Opry was born Nov. 28, 1925, on newbie station WSM in Nashville—according to official version. But the show’s actual genesis appears to have occurred earlier, particularly the Nov. 5 broadcast from Ryman Auditorium.

A mass gathered in downtown Nashville that Thursday evening, for the annual Policemen’s Benefit. Many people came because of WSM, its old-time music and promotion of the event. Hilarious Uncle Dave Macon headlined with his banjo talent, and reportedly 6,000 fans jammed inside Ryman, hardly bigger than a dairy barn. A couple thousand remained outside.

The show began, carried three hours, and the crowd cheered throughout. “It was a miscellaneous program of music, instrumental, song and comedy…,” The Tennessean reported, “presenting a range from the finest touches in the classical to the old-time ‘break-down,’ and most ‘scientific jazz.’ ”

“Uncle Dave Macon [was] introduced as the ‘struttingest strutter that ever strutted a strut,’ either with his banjo, guitar or laryngeal equipment. Uncle Dave confessed to some embarrassment in being transplanted from a home far back in the country to the stage, without a big wood fireplace in which to expectorate and throw things. Some of the numbers presented jointly by himself and Mr. [Sid] Harkreader were: Turkey In The Straw, Sugar Walks Down The Street, Ain’t Goin’ to Rain No Mo’, Don’t Reckon Twill Happen Again, and Go Way Mule.”

“Both Harkreader and Uncle Dave kept the audience in an uproar.”

Dozens of telegrams reached WSM that night, lauding the Ryman broadcast, and within months the Nashville show was a radio phenomenon. The “WSM Barn Dance” stood listed in Saturday broadcast schedules of newspapers nationwide.

“Old tunes like old lovers are the best, at least judging from the applause which the new Saturday night feature at station WSM receives from its listeners in all parts of the country,” touted George D. Hay, show announcer. “Jazz has not completely turned the tables on such tunes as Pop Goes The Weasel and Turkey In The Straw.”

Uncle Jimmy Thompson was press sensation for WSM, an “old fiddler” at 80-something. “Uncle Jimmy made his first appearance a month ago and telegrams were received from all parts of the United States, encouraging him in his task of furnishing barn dance music for a million homes,” Hay promoted. “He puts his heart and soul into his work and is one of the quaintest characters radio has yet discovered.”

Uncle Jimmy, crusty and endearing, was a ready human-interest story, meeting reporters to discuss life and fiddling championships. And public challenges rose immediately for Thompson, from other old fiddlers, bristling over press claims he was America’s best. Mellie Dunham of Maine, 72-year-old winner of Ford fiddle contests in the North, openly questioned the validity of Uncle Jimmy.

From Nashville the radio star bit back. “If Mellie Dunham will come down here to this WSM station, I’ll lay with him like a bulldog,” growled Uncle Jimmy. “He cain’t beat me. Why, he’s only a youngster, 72. I was plowin’ in a field ’fore he was born.” Their tussle went no further, apparently, as Dunham didn’t visit the South on vaudeville tour.

But Thompson traveled to Missouri for a Midwest fiddling contest, aired on WOS radio Jefferson City. A Missouri fiddler won the listener voting, Daniel Boone Jones, topping Uncle Jimmy Thompson and other entrants. Reportedly 250,000 votes were cast in calls, telegrams and letters to the station.

“Hillbilly music” entered lexicon as latest label in country genre. Uncle Dave Macon wrote and recorded his “Hill Billie Blues,” declaring “I am a billy and I live in the hills.” The 1924 record was unprecedented for use of the term. Bands emerged bearing the moniker, including George Daniell’s Hill Billies of Atlanta and the Al Hopkins Hill Billies of Washington, D.C.

Hillbilly books and movies sold, and record sales exploded. “Hill-Billy tunes are the new fashion in popular songs this year,” a scribe reported from New York in 1926. “Along Tin Pan Alley the vogue is spreading.”

Novelist Rose Wilder Lane, author of Hill Billy, had researched in the Missouri Ozarks. “We live in such a complicated world that a distinct movement is on hand among thinking people to restore simplicity,” she said. “While I was collecting the material for my book, I spend a great deal of time with the hill folks of the Ozarks. I found among them what I believe to be the real folk music of America—the hillbilly songs. These songs go back to the time before jazz, or even negro music, was heard on this continent.”

“When I came out of the mountains, I found that the first hillbilly tune, The Prisoner’s Song, had reached Broadway.”

Hillbilly was also a slur against country folks, deployed by 1800s newspapers, for example, to attack Kentucky highlanders in print. During 1925 Tennessee turned into tempest with hillbilly derogatory a factor, over media hysteria for the Scopes trial that pit evolution theory versus Bible scripture. Hill folks were depicted in vilest terms nationally, and ridiculed at home by uppity Tennesseans.

Nashville elitists extended their hillbilly ire to “WSM Barn Dance,” appalled of that commotion seemingly from nowhere. Elitists had nurtured Nashville music for generations, seeding awareness and hopefully greatness for classic symphony and grand opera. They were still anticipating a homegrown Mozart or Patti when suddenly 1,000-watt WSM started broadcasting from an insurance building downtown.

The radio station dismantled Nashville’s musical foundation in weeks, decried the intellectuals, by broadcasting mere rubes, hillbilly goofs and noisemakers on the airwaves. And to the entire nation! Nashville had been dumbed and disgraced by WSM, wailed the elitists. Their chum local newspaper critic protested by ignoring the country radio show, as he extolled opera.

Hillbilly fans struck back everywhere, defiantly supporting the music revived on radio. And country people always had comebacks for high-brow types, insults. They made fun of stuffy opera, twanging the word as opery or op’ry since before the Civil War. The comic-strip philosopher Abe Martin, wry rube character, proclaimed, “O stands for opery, grand opery, you know. Nobuddy likes it, but a few have t’ go.”

The opera barb led to a lasting name for WSM’s country show, uttered by announcer Hay on Dec. 10, 1927, according to his recall and news evidence. That evening the Barn Dance cast waited in studio as a network opera concluded in New York, for NBC at top of the hour.

After changeover to local programming, Hay aired his particular remark on WSM, along these words: “For the past hour we have been listening to music from the grand opera, but from now on we will present the grand old op’ry.” No recording of the broadcast was cut in disc, but evidence of a new show title was published next morning—“Grand  Old Op’ry,” as capitalized within quote marks—by the Sunday Tennessean.

The name would stick and Grand Ole Opry rolled by 1930, entertaining national audience from Nashville. Music elites could cry in their grand opera. The WSM hillbilly show boasted a bona fide star of American music in Macon, 60, former banjo-picking wagoner in the hills around Nashville.

“Uncle Dave Macon has taken the air by storm,” Hay promoted earnestly from WSM. “His character is rich with humor and his folk songs seem to strike home.”

Macon, for posterity, “was one of the first country recording stars and was the single most popular performer on the first 15 years of the Grand Ole Opry,” observed historian Charles K. Wolfe. “He saw country music develop from an age of sawdust floors and kerosene lanterns to an age of Hollywood glamour, million-selling phonograph records, and nationwide radio broadcasts. His repertoire ranged from pre-Civil War folksongs to Eddy Arnold hits. But his individual songs were not so important as his manner of presenting them… he wanted to feel a kinship with all his fans.”

Eddy Arnold spoke of Uncle Dave in 1971. “He was a showman—now that was the first thing about him,” Arnold said. “He’d get up and dance and take his hat and beat it on his banjo and stand the banjo down on the floor, go around it… he would tear an audience apart.”

“I learned, by George, you’d better be a showman to follow him.”

In 1928 Uncle Dave was portrayed in a novel, garnering fiction immortality like his colleague Blind Joe Mangrum on The Opry. Mangrum had come to Nashville and WSM after career revival in Paducah radio, Southern tours and fiddle contests. He was helped around by Mary, his devoted wife of more than a decade.

“I play now better than I ever did,” Mangrum said in Nashville, his former haunt with Fiddling Bob Taylor, late governor and senator. “Many’s the night I have played all night for ‘Our Bob.’ There was a man who dearly loved music…. I wish Governor Bob Taylor was back here now. We’d show them what music is.”

“Uncle Joe was one of the dearest people I’ve ever known in my life,” Alcyone Bate Beasley later recalled, original Opry performer with her father, Dr. Humphrey Bate. “He had a sweet wife who came with him every Saturday night, Aunt Mary. Used to bring him up there and stay right with him.”

“Uncle Joe was a talented man. I’ll tell you what he played—he played so beautifully—he played Italian things, some of those things, you can almost see gondolas. He played a lot that did not really fit in with the Opry, but it was so fine.”

The historian Wolfe summarized: “Uncle Joe Mangrum represented The Opry’s deepest roots in nineteenth century music.”

Mangrum starred in the glittering Opry shows of 1931, accompanied by Fred Shriver on accordion. Performers included the Macons, Dave and son Dorris; Dr. Bate and Alcyone with the Possum Hunters; G.W. Wilkerson and the Fruit Jar Drinkers; Sid Harkreader; the Crook Brothers; DeFord Bailey; Theron Hale; and Paul Warmack and the Gully Jumpers.

In remote broadcasts the Grand Ole Opry hosted crowds of 2,000 in War Memorial Auditorium, and a local music critic finally showed up, Alvin S. Wiggers, to review a show. Wiggers had avoided the WSM hillbillies for five years, covering everything else musical in Nashville, imploring readers to support grand opera especially.

Yet when Wiggers laid his eyes on and opened ears to Opry performers, he was pleasantly surprised and a good sport about it. “It was a novel experience for the writer, who felt like he had just dropped in from the moon,” Wiggers confessed in The Tennessean, adding he “didn’t know there was so much musical talent in Nashville, and had never seen so many fiddles, guitars, banjos, harmonicas, and accordions before, all played by experts who had spent their lives in studying their chosen instruments.”

Listeners sent song requests by telegram from multiple states, impressing Wiggers, who critiqued the players in positive notes. “Dr. Humphrey Bates and his ‘Possum Hunters’ played Take Your Foot Out Of The Mud and other classics, and varied their playing with occasional outbursts of vocalism or a hand-clapping concerto,” Wiggers wrote.

“Uncle Dave Macon, with his unique personality, gates-ajar collar, gold teeth and goatee, received an ovation. His son Dorris assisted in Red Wing and Jonah And The Whale, and Uncle Dave’s shouting and prancing brought down the house.”

“Uncle Joe Mangrum, who in his 79 years has never seen the light of day on his violin, and Fred Shriver, on the accordion, played Golden Slippers very entertainingly.”

Mangrum would’ve been better known in the 1932, when WSM went “clear channel” on its own radio frequency with 50,000-watts power. But the musical great died of a heart attack in January. Opry stars led by Macon performed a melodious tribute to Uncle Joe on the show.

A newsman friend wrote of Mangrum in remembrance, William Valentine Barry, at Lexington, Tenn. “I can still say that in all my life I never have heard anyone play The Mocking Bird as Joe did… He loved his violin and all who loved it. He would sit for hours and play for one man who listened attentively.”

“We hear of harps in heaven, but I take it that with Joe, it will be his old violin, reincarnated and transported to the Celestial Empire.”

Writer and consultant Matt Chaney is compiling a book on historical song and dance, tentatively titled River Music and Rockabilly in the Northern Delta. For more information see the ChaneysBlog page “Music History and Legend of the Missouri Delta.” For information on Chaney’s previous books, visit www.fourwallspublishing.com.  Email: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com.

Select References

A Genuine Treat. (1922, Nov. 12). Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 18.

Albert Spalding A. K. Guest Artist on WSM Tonight. (1931, Jan. 4). Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 6.

“Artemus Ward Sees Patti.” (1861, Feb. 1). Vicksburg Citizen MS, p. 2.

Barry, W.V. (1932, Jan. 22) Blind Violinist Dead. Lexington Progress TN, p. 6.

“Blind Joe” Mangrum Dies in Nashville. (1932, Jan. 15). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 1.

“Blind Joe” Mangrum, Once Known Far and Wide as Violinist, Here. (1927, Feb. 14). Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 2.

“Blind Joe” Mangrum to Enter Vaudeville. (1909, May 16). Louisville Courier-Journal KY, p. 6.

“Blind Joe” Mangrum Sees How Paducah has Grown. (1906, Jan. 6). Paducah News-Democrat NY, p. 8.

Blind Joe Stirs Up Memories of Early Days. (1909, May 18). Montgomery Times AL, p. 1.

Blind Joe’s Music Pleases Radio Fans Far Away. (1922, Dec. 9). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 1.

Blind Violinist Artist Again for WIAR Radio Post. (1922, Dec. 29). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 1.

Bob Taylor’s Lecture. (1907, Oct. 31). Jackson Daily News MS, p. 5.

Coming Germanization of the Southwest. (1906, June 3). St. Louis Post-Dispatch MO, p. 58.

D.B. Jones Voted “Champ” Fiddler. (1926, April 19). Sedalia Democrat MO, p. 10.

Darrow’s Eloquent Appeal Wasted on Ears that Heed only Bryan, Says Mencken. (1925, July 14). Baltimore Sun MD, pp. 1-2.

Dennis, P.R. (2000, May). Music in Jackson, Tennessee: 1875-1917. Doctoral thesis in musicology, University of Memphis: Memphis TN.

Distant Stations Pick Up WIAR Music Programs and Ask for More Just Like It. (1922, Nov. 30). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 1.

George B. Daniell to be Buried Today. (1933, Sept. 26). Atlanta Constitution GA, p. 9.

Gilchrist, A.S. (1910). The Night-Rider’s Daughter. Marshall & Bruce Company: Nashville TN.

Grand Opera On Air Wednesday. (1927, Nov. 27). Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 26.

Green, S. (2019, Jan. 11, accessed). Blind Joe Mangrum. traildriver.com.

Hay, G.D. (1925, Dec. 26). Uncle Jimmy is feature at WSM. Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 17.

Hay, G.D. (1925, Dec. 27). WSM to feature old-time tunes. Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 17.

Heard Last Night on the Air. (1925, Dec. 15). Hartford Courant CT, p. 12.

How Jeff Davis Won a Vote. (1910, Feb. 23). Shelby County Herald, Shelbyville MO, p. 6.

Johnson, N. (1925, July 24). One word after another. Brooklyn Eagle NY, p. 12.

Major Jones on His Travels. (1846, Aug. 12). Spirit of The South, Eufaula AL, p. 1.

Malone, B.C. (1979). Southern Music, American Music. The University Press of Kentucky: Lexington KY.

Malone, B.C. (1985). Country Music, U.S.A. University of Texas Press: Austin TX.

Malone, B.C., & McCulloh, J. [Eds.] (1975). Stars of Country Music. University of Illinois Press: Urbana IL.

Mencken Angers Daytonians. (1925, July 17). Wilmington News Journal DE, p. 6.

Mountain Writer is Visitor in City. (1928, Sept. 4). Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 3.

Musicians, Entertainers and Invited officials to Attend WSM Opening. (1925, Sept. 27). Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 20.

Nashville Broadcasts. (1925, Nov. 28). Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 2.

News and Gossip of State Capitol. (1916, Sept. 1). Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 3.

“Nuttyville News.” (1924, Feb. 29). Pemiscot Argus, Caruthersville MO, p. 2.

Obituary. (1912, Feb. 4). Mrs. A.S. Gilchrist. Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 23.

Old-Time Fiddlers of 9 States Contest for Middle West Title. (1926, April 3). Joplin Globe MO, p. 2.

Old-Time Fiddlers Show Their Skill; John W. Harris, 104, Takes a Prize. (1922, Sept. 22). Nashville Tennessean TN, pp. 1, 5.

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Uncle Jack to Jasper. (1902, Jan. 19). Pine Bluff Graphic AR, p.3.

Want Blind Joe to Broadcast. (1926, Jan. 15). Paducah News-Democrat KY, p. 2.

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Wiggers, A.S. (1931, March 2). Big crowd hears Grand Ol’ Opry. Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 3.

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Pioneer Radio Aired Jazz and Country Music from Paducah

Twenty-Eighth in a Series

By Matt Chaney, for ChaneysBlog.com

Posted Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Copyright ©2019 for historical arrangement and original content by Matthew L. Chaney, Four Walls Publishing

H.R. Lovelace’s new radio was malfunctioning at his home in Charleston, Mo., approaching midnight on Dec. 8, 1922. The set produced only static and hum, and Lovelace wanted to hear jazz from station WIAR in Paducah, Ky., 43 miles away over delta flatland. Time was running out.

Loveless determined the problem was faulty antenna grounding, which wouldn’t be fixed in cold windy darkness. An antenna had to be improvised indoors, quickly. A few WIAR listeners used bedsprings for backup reception, including a guy in Pennsylvania, but Lovelace chose copper wire instead, a spool of D.C.C., double-cotton covered. He rushed through the house, wrapping the beige line around chair posts and wending to the receiver. He hooked in the replacement “aerial” and tuned to 360 meters, electro-magnetic wavelength for WIAR, and hit live music immediately.

The jazz horns came in clear and amplified, music from studio by Hillman’s Orchestra, top black group in Paducah. Lovelace jotted a note to WIAR: “Your dance program heard around 11:45 fine. Also caught some conversation. Heard some young fellow asking a young lady for the next dance, and I could also hear the movement of feet.”

The dance broadcast was among earliest in radio, with WIAR among the South’s initial stations, transmitting long distance through open airwaves. Paducah radio reached nationwide and into Canada, Cuba, generating 100 watts from the lower Ohio Valley.  River jazz and ragtime hooked listeners. “Syncopated harmony, mellow as the Kentucky moonlight… from broadcasting station WIAR,” the station promoted at Christmas 1922.

Radios were multiplying across the delta of southeast Missouri, southern Illinois, western Kentucky and Tennessee, amounting to a few thousand sets. Folks tended their radio contraptions like gardens, harvesting entertainment from “the circumambient ether.” Young and old tinkered day and night, adjusting tubes and antenna get-ups to catch distant stations.

“It is a novelty—in some measure a fad, perhaps—but undoubtedly there is much pleasure to be derived from listening in on the inspiring programs which come from far-away cities—music rendered by the best orchestras or vocalists,” remarked O.W. Chilton, newspaper publisher in Caruthersville.

Music over the airwaves was transcendent, dissolving distance and isolation for audience. “The wonder of radio has never failed to intrigue me,” waxed T.H. Alexander, Nashville columnist. “Each night I tune [in] with a new thrill as the stations march by with their gay music, floating in the air like banners… Turn the dial and rescue the faint music. It booms in, maybe from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago.”

Escape through entertainment wasn’t novel in the northern delta, still a marshy basin although populating rapidly. Circuses, showboats and excursion steamers were mainstays while theaters, dance halls and honky-tonks dotted the sandy ridges. Automobiles were proliferating along with leisure drivers, and in summer motorboats plied the rivers, toting sunbathers to sandbars. But the radio experience could be private and homebound, affordable and peaceful, unlike outings that posed risk in these parts, especially for armed drunks.

Pioneer Paducah radio lasted less than a year under two owners, the Rudy merchant family and Evening Sun newspaper. But WIAR aired long enough to imprint broadcast entertainment of America.

Businessman J. Henry Rudy was station founder, a “wireless” enthusiast before radio broadcasts reached town in 1920, from Pittsburgh and Detroit, elsewhere. By then Rudy’s Department Store blasted phonograph music through upper-floor windows along Broadway. Rudy’s Store staged concerts such as W.C. Handy, recording star and “Father of The Blues,” with his incredible Memphis band.

Paducah radio—“Rudy’s Station”— debuted with live music on Saturday, July 15, 1922, from third floor of the store. The Kentucky Jazz Band performed, fittingly, local black group originally assembled by Fate Marable, star bandleader of Streckfus steamers. Milestone programming besides jazz blowers included pop artists, string pickers and gospel singers, long before similar radio in Chicago and Nashville. For bands with a beat on WIAR, dancing couples sashayed about the studio, inspiring musicians and listeners. The WIAR “truck radio” patrolled streets, making musical loops along the Ohio riverfront and foothills of town.

No single performer attracted audience like Joe Mangrum, age 70, concerto violinist, country fiddler, and blind since infancy. A Southern great, Mangrum’s moribund showbiz career was revived on WIAR, launching his course to the future Grand Ole Opry. At Paducah in 1922, his star was arisen through the synergy of radio and olden country music. “Blind Joe” Mangrum was suddenly chic, a dean of “old-time fiddlers” blowing up in popularity.

Paducah radio was onto something. “How’s the Bluegrass Country?” a listener card greeted from New York City. “You are putting it on Broadway.” Another fan wrote WIAR from Kansas, requesting “more of that old-fashioned Southern music.”

Hot jazz was a given for radio marketing but hillbilly music, as to become known, would prove the wellspring for epic broadcasting. Indeed, banjos filled radio air gaps on election night 1920, for the landmark broadcast by Westinghouse station KDKA in East Pittsburgh.

“Commercial potential had never been totally absent from southern rural music, but the radio provided a means of immediate and widespread exposure far more advantageous than any medium yet created,” observed modern musicologist Bill C. Malone, author of Southern Music, American Music.

“If some people rejected hillbilly music because of what they considered its crassness, others may have gravitated toward it because it represented to them an image of an older and simpler America, and an alternative to the frenetic dance music of the Twenties.”

***

In the early 1860s at Dresden, Tenn., two local boys were a curiosity together, palling about town. One was black, a slave, William Alonzo Janes, leading around a white kid, Joseph Mangrum, who was “blind as a bat.” As Joseph stumbled in step, William took his hand. The kids didn’t care about their differences because they had fun, especially sharing music. William played banjo, Joseph violin, and each shed his burdens in song and dance, their mutual passion.

Mangrum was a musical wunderkind by age 9 and accomplished at 12, per accounts. He taught himself violin and memorized songs by ear, with no formal instruction. “I remember the first piece I learned to play,” Mangrum would say. “It was Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing. I learned to play Listen to the Mocking Bird by following a mocking bird across the square at Dresden.”

In 1935, a few years after Mangrum’s death in Nashville, William A. Janes discussed his late friend, and slavery, during a newspaper interview in northern Illinois. For the 85-year-old Janes, his native west Tennessee stood in memory, the towns and plantations, low hills and bottoms across the Mississippi from Bootheel Missouri. Dresden was the seat of Weakley County, where the delta’s eastern rim met uplands. It was key crossroads for well-traveled routes northward, some 65 miles apiece, leading to Cairo, Ill., and Paducah, Ky. Armies ranged over the area during the Civil War, Union and Confederate, along with marauding gangs.

Janes described “dread, fear and wonder” of human bondage in his youth. “My life prior to emancipation of the slaves was experienced by the majority of boys who had both a master and a taskmaster. I worked in the cotton fields. We grew tobacco, hemp, flax, peanuts and yams.”

“The constant grind of toil; the conduct of the whitecaps or ghost riders, as they were called before they became known as the Ku Klux [Klan]; the dread of being sold away from our loved ones and acquaintances, terrorized and intimidated,” he said. “The rebel and Confederate guerillas… added no small amount of fear in me. But through it all I emerged whole and free.”

“When it came to the song and dance, we were there! The white children would join us in the dance, to music furnished by the singers and ‘patters.’ Occasionally we had the luxury of a five-stringed banjo, a mighty orchestra in its day.”

Janes and Mangrum performed music together in the postwar then took divergent paths. Janes moved on to Kentucky then Illinois, farming and playing music—a standout violinist he became, too, inspired by his friend.

The name Blind Joe Mangrum—or “Mangum” as commonly misspelled—became legend. “He is a most excellent musician, and can justly be styled a prodigy,” The Memphis Appeal stated in 1882. Nashville columnists and correspondents heaped praise, anointing Mangrum as violin virtuoso of west Tennessee, “greatest master in the South,” among reviews.

“His Mocking Bird is acknowledged by competent critics to be the finest thing they ever heard.”

Mangrum performed with “Fiddling Bob Taylor,” Tennessee politician whose musical campaigning caught national attention. Taylor charmed state voters to win the gubernatorial election of 1886, defeating his brother Alfred, also a string player. Governor Robert Taylor was a folk hero for many, “Our Bob,” with fiddler Blind Joe part of the lore.

“Mangrum… is undoubtedly a genius,” declared the Jackson Clarion-Ledger in Mississippi, 1894, about the time the musician turned 40. “His lost sense [of eyesight] seems to have been given entirely to touch and ear. Besides being a skillful performer he is a composer, and his productions have given delight to many.”

Mangrum preferred operatic and classical pieces, but folks raved over his country fiddling, and he was supremely confident in old-time songs. One night at Jackson, Tenn., Jenny Day’s Southern Hotel, circa 1900, Mangrum listened to hoedowns of a young man with fiddle. When the novice melody segued into Arkansas Traveler, Mangrum interjected.

“Boy, let me show you something,” he said, “breaking down” on bow and violin.

“And he played that old classic as I never heard it before,” a witness remembered, adding: “So long as Mrs. Day lived and Joe went to Jackson, he had a free room and a meal ticket in the Southern Hotel.”

Jenny Day was among guardian types for Mangrum in the Mid-South, enabling him to travel, maneuver and rest. Likewise friends and relatives cared for him in Illinois, Arkansas and Mississippi. The families were often affluent, hosting him for days, weeks or months.

Yet in middle age, the sightless man needed others to lead him around and interpret information. Mangrum declined offers to tour Eastern cities because expenses wouldn’t pay for family or friend to accompany him. Blind Joe relied on people whose voices he recognized, with familiar ground under foot.

Homey sanctuaries grew fewer for Mangrum at turn of the century. He bounced among jobs and locales, living for periods at Union City, Tenn., Cairo and Paducah, showing up at the latter in 1906. “Mr. Mangrum is well-known in Paducah, where he has spent several years of his life at various times,” a scribe reported. Blind Joe himself was impressed with new streets and sidewalks in town: “No more high steppings, bumps and loose plank culverts to trip you up,” he complimented.

The musician played for coins on streets, for meals at churches, and, sometimes, for lone listeners in nickelodeons. Friends and relatives urged Mangrum to accept gainful employment somewhere, befitting his talent. News writers pleaded same, and a Cairo paper admonished locals for failing to support Mangrum at nickel shows, forcing his departure from town. Mangrum twice headed for St. Louis, agreeing to major gigs supposedly permanent, only to leave both shortly. A reporter noted “this maker of melodies knows no real resting place, for like a gypsy he visits many places.”

Mangrum’s dilemma even made fiction of a novelist friend, Annie Somers Gilchrist. The writer was known for devising characters of stark resemblance to acquaintances and family. Violinist “Blind Joe Mangrum” was a figure by name, hardly fictionalized as the man himself, in her story The Night-Rider’s Daughter. The setting was Union City and Reelfoot Lake in the west Tennessee bottoms, across the Mississippi from New Madrid.

In the novel Mangrum was houseguest of Squire Lomax, Mrs. Lomax and son Algernon at their lake farm. One evening the family desired music and Algernon fetched Joe from upstairs. “Footsteps on the carpeted stairs were heard descending—some steady, some uncertain and hesitating,” narrated Gilchrist.

Algernon led Joe by hand into the parlor, for hearty greetings from the squire. Joe was seated, provided his violin and bow, and Mrs. Lomax accompanied on piano. Gilchrist continued in the passage:

Every note of The Mocking Bird was exquisitely rendered. Wonderful trills, staccato notes, and legato strains pulsed out on the starry October night… When the last wonderful phrasing died on the air, a deep breath heaved from the massive breast of the ’Squire. After an impressive pause, the lady said:

“Joe, you are a genius, a wonder. Why don’t you go starring and make a future for yourself?”

“I don’t want to go among strangers unless my brother or some of my near friends would go with me. My blindness—“

“I understand, Joe; but Ole Bull, for all his great fame, couldn’t play with you. I’ve heard him; he couldn’t draw such strains from the violin as you drew tonight.”

He bent his head, and said in a low voice:

“Thank you, Mrs. Lomax. Shall we play the Serenade?”

“Not unless you want to, Joe,” said the ’Squire. “Let’s keep The Mocking Bird in our souls tonight. The Serenade will drive him away. Suppose we all retire.”

His wife closed the piano, Algernon put the violin in its case, and, while his parents vanished into an adjoining room, he led the blind musician upstairs to his apartment.

The novel was written as real Joe Mangrum apparently got the break everyone hoped for. He signed a vaudeville contract to tour Southern cities, reportedly for $200 a week, commencing in spring 1909. Newspapers of at least three states applauded the development.

“Mr. Mangrum has been generous with his gifts and has made no attempt heretofore to commercialize his ability,” commented The Louisville Courier-Journal. “He has spent most of his life in a comparatively small radius of country, playing for charity entertainments and for the delectation of his friends. In his limited field, however, he has delighted thousands of people with his playing, and all who know him have confidence that his venture in vaudeville will prove successful.”

“In the event that his Southern trip, which is something in the nature of a tryout, should show satisfactory results, he is promised booking on the Eastern circuit.”

Mangrum lit up Montgomery, Ala., wowing audiences of the Theatrical Club and the Majestic Theatre. At Little Rock, crowds turned out at the Majestic and Elks Club.

“Joe Mangrum, a blind violinist, is of the kind usually seen at advanced prices,” reviewed The Arkansas Democrat. “He has the technique and the execution. His playing is perfect, containing melody, harmony, volume, and touch… a wizard with the stringed instrument.”

“Mr. Mangrum plays with much expression and got several encores,” added The Arkansas Gazette. “Blind Joe Mangrum was received with great applause.”

Then news coverage stopped cold. Mangrum’s vaudeville tour had ended quickly as begun, for whatever reason. Soon the blind artist was back in west Tennessee and Kentucky, seeking livelihood and refuge.

Writer and consultant Matt Chaney is compiling a book on historical song and dance, tentatively titled River Music and Rockabilly in the Northern Delta. For more information see the ChaneysBlog page “Music History and Legend of the Missouri Delta.” For information on Chaney’s previous books, visit www.fourwallspublishing.com.  Email: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com.

Select References

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Hay, G.D. (1925, Dec. 27). WSM to feature old-time tunes. Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 17.

Heath, P.S. (1889, Dec. 25). The lives of great men. Omaha Bee NE, p. 2.

Hill-Billy Tunes are Fad in Tin Pan Alley. (1926, May 17). Brainerd Dispatch MN, p. 5.

Home Brevities. (1908, Sept. 11). Lexington Advertiser MS, p. 1.

Home Brevities. (1909, May 14). Lexington Advertiser MS, p. 8.

Howdy, Folks! WIAR sends Greetings. (1922, Dec. 21). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 1.

Humboldt. (1886, Dec. 29). Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 1.

In The Literary World. (1910, Nov. 20). Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 34.

In The Round-Up. (1912, Aug. 31). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 4.

J.A. Rudy & Sons Department Store. (1922, July 23). [Advertisement.] Paducah News-Democrat KY, p. 3.

“Kentucky Jazz” to Give Program on Radio Tonight. (1922, Dec. 18). Paducah Evening Sun KY, pp. 1, 11.

Kentucky Kernals. (1909, April 28). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 4.

Kiwanians Given a Rare Treat Today. (1925, July 17). Kingsport Times TN, p. 3.

“Let Mellie Dunham Come Here,” Says “Uncle Jimmy,” Eager for Contest. (1926, Jan. 5). Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 12.

Listeners Pick Up Season’s Finest Music Program over Sun’s Broadcasting Station. (1922, Dec. 8). Paducah Evening Sun KY, pp. 1, 3.

Local and Personal Notes. (1909, Jan. 22). Aberdeen Weekly MS, p. 3.

Local News. (1886, Jan. 1). Hickman Courier KY, p. 3.

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Majestic. (1909, May 16). [Advertisement.] Montgomery Advertiser AL, p. 16.

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Market Publications Urge Use of Radio In Advertising. (1922, May 7). Daily Oklahoman, Oklahoma City OK, p. 50.

Melody from Field Show is Sent Thru Air by Sun Radio; Program Picked Up. (1922, Dec. 6). Paducah Evening Sun KY, pp. 1, 8.

Memorial Music of Elks’ Service Will Go into the Air Tonight from WIAR. (1922, Dec. 7). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 1.

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Moonlight Excursion. (1918, May 16). [Advertisement.] Hickman Courier KY, p. 8.

Musicale at Dresden. (1902, Jan. 18). Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 6.

Musicians, Entertainers and Invited officials to Attend WSM Opening. (1925, Sept. 27). Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 20.

Negro’s Fair Aug. 10 to be Largest Held. (1921, Aug. 6). Paducah News-Democrat KY, p. 6.

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Nichols, E. (1935, April 13). Colored Pontiac violinist was ante-bellum Tennessee slave. Bloomington Pantagraph IL, pp. 9, 11.

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Of a Local Nature. (1908, Oct. 23). Lexington Advertiser MS, p. 3.

Old-Time Fiddlers of 9 States Contest for Middle West Title. (1926, April 3). Joplin Globe MO, p. 2.

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Out-Of-Town-Notes. (1900, Sept. 10). Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 8.

Paducah-Made Products Find Outlet to Consumers Thru J.A. Rudy & Sons, Largest Store of Its Kind in District. (1931, May 4). Paducah Sun KY, p. 7.

Paducah Sends Radio Concert. (1922, July 16). Paducah News-Democrat KY, p. 9.

Paducahans in Radio Recital. (1922, Nov. 7). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 1.

Paxton, E.J. (1945, Nov. 5). Add Your Own Comment. Paducah Sun-Democrat KY, p. 1.

Paxton, E.J. (1947, March 27). Add Your Own Comment. Paducah Sun-Democrat KY, p. 1.

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Picnic. (1921, July 5). [Advertisement.] Paducah News-Democrat KY, p. 4.

Political Fun in Tennessee. (1886, Sept. 20). Pittsburgh Post PA, p. 2.

Powerful Radio Station Set Up by Youth Here. (1922, Nov. 7). Cairo Bulletin IL, p. 1.

Profilet, F.M. (1922, Aug. 27). Social and Personal. Cairo Bulletin IL, p. 4.

Program to Be Sent to Diners. (1922, Sept. 15). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 13.

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Radio Concert Pleases Many. (1922, July 28). Paducah News-Democrat KY, p. 10.

Radio for Firemen Given Test by Paducah Concert. (1922, Dec. 30). Cairo Bulletin IL, p. 3.

Radio is Heard Plainly at Broadway Services. (1922, Oct. 30). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 1.

Radio Phone is Yet Only a Fad. (1922, May 13). Washington Times DC, p. 16.

Radio Waves Carry Sun’s Program from Cold North to Cities in the Sunny South. (1922, Dec. 2). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 1.

River Ripplings. (1909, Sept. 13). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 9.

Rudy Station Now Sending Programs. (1922, Aug. 16). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 7.

Rudy Store to Open Free Radio. (1922, April 29). Paducah News-Democrat KY, p. 4.

Rudy’s Broadcasting Station Opens Tonight. (1922, July 27). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 1.

Rudy’s Fountain. (1922, Oct. 7). [Advertisement.] Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 10.

Rudy’s To Broadcast Radio Program Tonight. (1922, Sept. 9). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 12.

Russell, F.C. (1925, March 6). John Smith and his radio. Caruthersville Democrat-Argus MO, p. 8.

Sanderson, B. (1966, Nov. 2). Jazz fans agree that Nat Story’s music hath charm. Paducah Sun KY, p. 4.

Slogan Wanted to Carry Paducah on Radio Waves When Messages Flashed. (1922, Nov. 22). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 1.

Society. (1887, March 14). Dresden. Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 7.

Society With Our Neighbors. (1892, May 2). Union City. Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 5.

“Solemn Old Judge” is Now with WSM. (1925, Nov. 12). Racine Journal Times WI, p. 19.

Some Radiograms for Radio Bugs. (1922, Dec. 19). Wilson County Citizen, Fredonia KS, p. 1.

State Social News. (1901, April 22). Union City. Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 3.

State Social News. (1902, April 14). Union City. Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 5.

Stop, Look and Read. (1924, Oct. 1). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 12.

Sun Broadcasting Plant Nearly Ready, Aerial is Swung, Tests Come Next. (1922, Nov. 24). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 1.

Sun Radio is Putting Bluegrass on Broadway. (1922, Dec. 8). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 1.

Sun Will Run Broadcasting Plant of Own. (1922, Nov. 20). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 1.

Taylor, B. (July 22, 1899). Governor Taylor’s Love Letters To The Public. Grenada Sentinel MS, p. 6.

Teachers at Union City. (1899, June 17). Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 5.

“That Tired Feeling” Desirable in Announcer’s Voice—Many Too Rapid. (1925, Nov. 14). Sioux Falls Argus-Leader SD, p. 21.

The Conference of Chancellors. (1871, Oct. 21). Jackson Whig and Tribune TN, p. 1.

The Penitentiary Muddle. (1886, Feb. 23). Semi-Weekly South Kentuckian, Hopkinsville KY, p. 2.

The Rudy & Sons Radio. (1922, Oct. 1). [Advertisement.] Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 13.

The Sun’s Radio. (1922, Nov. 24). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 6.

The Tennessee Campaign Continues Warm. (1886, Oct. 19). Glens Falls Post-Star NY, p. 2.

The Weather. (1922, Dec. 8). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 1.

The Week in Society. (1914, Feb. 28). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 3.

They are Jolly Good Fellows. (1886, Sept. 15). Carlisle Sentinel PA, p.1.

Thursday Night, Nov. 5th. (1925, Nov. 4). [Advertisement.] Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 9.

Tilghman Orchestra, Playing Radio Broadcasting Debut, Sends Out Splendid Program. (1922, Nov. 29). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 1.

Today’s Radio. (1922, Dec. 3). Richmond Times Dispatch VA, p. 27.

Truck Radio Pleases Crowd. (1922, Aug. 17). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 9.

Using Bed Springs as Aerial, Philadelphia Fan “Gets” WIAR. (1922, Dec. 7). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 10.

Vocal Artists are on WIAR Program for Week; Stations Far Away Send Greetings. (1922, Dec. 12). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 1.

Warmly Welcomed. (1891, May 21). Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 2.

Weather. (1922, Dec. 9). Paducah News-Democrat KY, p. 1.

When You Wake Up on Christmas Morning, You Might Find a Radio Set in your Stocking. (1922, Dec. 22). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 1.

WIAR will Offer Music Treats to “Fans” this Week. (1922, Dec. 11). Paducah Evening Sun KY, p. 1.

Will Give a Concert. (1905, Oct. 6). Cairo Bulletin IL, p. 3.

Will Take College to Farm. (1925, Oct. 15). Caruthersville Journal MO, p. 2.

Wingfield, S. (1980, Aug. 6). Station Break? Not at PAD. Paducah Sun KY, p. 10.

Wired Wireless Newest Thing in Radio World. (1922, March 25). Cairo Bulletin IL, p. 1.

Want Blind Joe to Broadcast. (1926, Jan. 15). Paducah News-Democrat KY, p. 2.

WSM to Put on Barn Dances Tonight during Test Period. (1926, Jan. 30). Nashville Tennessean TN, p. 1.

Yaarab Temple’s Big Oriental Band Plans Tacky Party. (1925, Feb. 15). Atlanta Constitution GA, p. 48.