St. Louis Jazz: A History

INTRODUCTION

The early history of the music we call jazz is riddled with myths and false narratives that live on today. One of the things I want to accomplish with this book is to tell a coherent, true and fact-based story of jazz music in St. Louis all the way up to today. Here are some things that are said around St. Louis even today.

They say that jazz came up the Mississippi River to St. Louis and went to Chicago. Look at a map; the Mississippi goes to St. Paul, Minnesota, never a hotbed of jazz. The early jazz musicians moved around the country in trains, buses and cars.

They say that jazz broke out of New Orleans and came up the river to St. Louis in 1919, when Fate Marable brought Louis Armstrong and other New Orleans musicians to play on the steamer J.S. But Jelly Roll Morton was in St. Louis in 1914 and was living in Los Angeles in 1917. King Oliver was working in Chicago in 1918. How does this narrative fit with Fate Marable bringing the Paducah, Kentucky Jazz Band down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers into New Orleans in 1918?¹

They say that jazz is strictly an African American music. How does that fit with 32 percent of the nationally known early New Orleans trumpeters being white Italians? From the very beginning in St. Louis, black and white musicians were playing together out of the view of the authorities. In the 1920s, there were open band battles between black and white groups at establishments like Sauter’s Park and Marigold Gardens.²

They say that jazz musicians were the poorest of the poor, but biographies of all the major jazz musicians show that the vast majority were firmly middle class and had some music lessons as children. They did not pick up instruments and just start playing this complex music.

They say that the music on the excursion boats that plied the Mississippi River around St. Louis was jazz. Eyewitness accounts by the musicians indicated that the boat captains bought stock arrangements of the hits of the day and the musicians had to play them exactly as written with no improvisation. These riverboats were known as floating conservatories; all the musicians, black and white, who spent any time on them continued their careers as crack readers when they left the boats.³

They say that Dixieland jazz is traditional jazz, played just like King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton played it. But, research in the Tom Lord⁴ discography and in photos of early New Orleans bands shows that tubas were not used in small combos until the 1927 Louis Armstrong Hot Seven. Dixieland began in San Francisco at the same time as the musical revolution known as bebop. It can be looked upon as a counterrevolution to that style. All the Dixieland combos began to use tubas, but they borrowed heavily from the bebop drumming style.⁵

St. Louis jazz is the result of the hard work of hundreds of musicians, people of substance who remained here or left for greater venues without the need for these myths.

Chapter 1

RAGTIME, RIVERBOAT EXCURSIONS AND THE BLUES

St. Louis is somewhat unique because from 1895 until approximately 1920, it was a hotbed for two of the streams that coalesced into the music we call jazz: ragtime and blues. The places where these two music forms existed were, as was the custom of the Victorian era, known as vice districts or sporting districts. The authorities looked the other way from the drunkenness, prostitution, gambling and drug use rampant in these districts. The ragtime district, known as Chestnut Valley, stretched from the site of today’s Busch Stadium to east of Union Station. It was an entertainment area not only for the African Americans working the steamboats that went from New Orleans to St. Paul, but also for everybody else. The blues district, known as Deep Morgan, was, for a while, a separate district on Biddle Street located just north of where the Gateway Arch stands today [Tichenor Interview].

Several nationally known songs came from Chestnut Valley: Frankie and Johnny (about a lovers’ quarrel in a Targee Street saloon) and two songs sung by Mama Lou, a black entertainer at the well-known brothel known as the Castle, Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay (better known in the 1950s as The Howdy Doody Song) and There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight (Sophie Tucker’s theme song). According to Trebor Tichenor [Tichenor Interview], the moralists in St. Louis were constantly trying to shut down Chestnut Valley. A Catholic priest, Father Coffey, succeeded in getting a law passed forbidding piano playing in establishments where liquor was served. This was universally ignored, and Father Coffey was reassigned [Tichenor Interview].

We can make a good case that Tom Turpin, and not Scott Joplin, was the King of Ragtime in St. Louis. He published the first rag by an African American, Harlem Rag, in 1898. He was the one in charge.⁶ Turpin, a large man, played the piano at his Rosebud Bar standing up because it was set on blocks to accommodate his height. The Rosebud and the adjacent Hurrah Club were east of where Union Station stands today. The Hurrah Club was the gathering place for ragtime pianists such as Scott Hayden, Arthur Marshall, Joe Jordan and Louis Chauvin. Apparently, cutting contests—musical battles between local musicians and visiting musicians—happened at the Hurrah Club. These apparently led Turpin to sponsor ragtime piano contests at the Rosebud and later at the Booker T. Washington Theater, owned by his brother Charles, that later opened east of the Rosebud. The last contest was in 1916.

Scott Joplin apparently was in and out of St. Louis in the years 1885–94 and then moved, more or less permanently, to St. Louis in 1901 with his publisher, John Stark.⁷ Joplin became associated with Turpin and apparently attended Hurrah meetings. He was the subject of a 1901 article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch by the director of the St. Louis Choral Symphony Society, Alfred Ernst. This group was the predecessor of the St. Louis Symphony. There is no record of a Joplin performance in St. Louis, but he did record one piano roll, The Strenuous Life, in St. Louis in 1902. Joplin recorded eighteen other piano rolls in the years 1901 to 1907, the time he lived in St. Louis. Joplin also filed a copyright application for a ragtime opera, A Guest of Honor, in 1903. He assembled a company and toured the country that same year. No copy of the score has been found.

John Stark published a number of classic rags that he orchestrated for brass bands. These were known as the Red Backed Books and brought about a new interest in ragtime when Gunther Schuller made a recording of some of them in a brass band setting [Tichenor Interview].

Joplin left St. Louis in 1907 and moved to Chicago and then New York, trying to find support for his opera Tremonisha, completed in 1910 and published in 1911. This opera encompassed a number of musical styles but was never performed in its entirety in his lifetime. It was performed in 1972. Joplin was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1976. He died from complications of syphilis on April 1, 1917.⁸

To many St. Louisans, its twentieth-century culture can be summed up in four things: the 1904 World’s Fair, the St. Louis Cardinals, the Gateway Arch and Gaslight Square. An extraordinary amount of time is spent in the media on these four things. In this book, we will deal with two of them: the 1904 World’s Fair and Gaslight Square (in chapter 6). It is instructive to follow the city’s fear of low class ragtime in the Post-Dispatch in the months of the run-up to the fair. The January 28, 1904 edition of the newspaper had the headline No Ragtime—Will Take Away the Beauty of the Fair, said the authorities. However, as long as the practitioner was white and high class, it was all right to play ragtime at the fair. The Post-Dispatch of September 6, 1904, reported that New York socialite Dory Lyon put on a well-received ragtime show at the New York Pavilion. Another example of the power structure’s dislike of ragtime was found in an article in the Post-Dispatch on February 17, 1915, excoriating pianist and bandleader Gene Rodemich for disturbing his fiancée’s family by playing ragtime. The first mention of Rodemich was in the November 13, 1913 edition of the Post-Dispatch, where it was noted that he never played a song the same way twice.

Tom Turpin.

Scott Joplin. © Scott Joplin State Historical Site, St. Louis.

In addition to the fair, there was a midway, where other, less high class amusements could be found. A lingering legend in St. Louis is that Scott Joplin performed there. He did not, because he was in Chicago [Tichenor Interview]. But ragtime was heard on the midway at the Spanish Café, and a beer hall called Old St. Louis presented the ragtime piano duo of Sam Patterson and Louis Chauvin. A number of tunes were composed for the fair, including The Cascades (Joplin), St. Louis Rag (Turpin), On the Pike (James Scott) and St. Louis Tickle (Theron C. Bennet). Two men who never attended the fair, Andrew B. Sterling and Kerry Mills, wrote the best-known song of the fair. It was Meet Me in St. Louis, which was also the theme song of the 1944 film of the same name starring Judy Garland [Tichenor Interview].

By the time the World’s Fair was over, ragtime was in decline in St. Louis. Most of the musicians went to Chicago and other midwestern cities. The Rosebud Bar closed in 1906 [Tichenor Interview]. Scott Joplin moved to Chicago and then to New York in 1907. The Scott Joplin House in St. Louis, where Joplin lived from 1901 to 1903 at 2658 Delmar Boulevard, is a Missouri State Historic Site and is open to the public.

What happened to ragtime? Ragtime is still played by people all over the world. Stephanie Trick, born in St. Louis, is a well-known and very good practitioner of the style. But ragtime, like nearly everything else, began evolving into two styles by 1910 or so. The two styles were novelty piano (Kitten on the Keys, for example) and, more important, the stride piano style of the teens and 1920s that is the basis for the development of much of jazz [Tichenor Interview].

The musicians who stayed in St. Louis began working in the Deep Morgan area, north of where the Arch stands today, on Biddle Street. Musicians from the Mississippi Delta began migrating into the area. W.C. Handy, known as the Father of the Blues, was in and out of St. Louis, notably in 1893, as he stopped on his way to Chicago for the upcoming World’s Columbian Exposition there. Handy’s earliest compositions were marketed as rags [Tichenor Interview]. The first edition of the sheet music of St. Louis Blues advertised it as a rag. It has a structure of a rag with two twelve-bar blues choruses, followed by a sixteen-bar bridge with a Spanish rhythm known as a Habanera Rhythm and closes with the twelve-bar blues structure. The St. Louis Blues is now the city’s signature song and is the most recorded song in jazz. It has been recorded by jazz musicians a total of 2,188 times.⁹

Most people do not know that the first published blues was Baby Seals Blues, by Frank Baby Seals (a vaudeville performer) and arranged by Artie Matthews, the music director of the Booker T. Washington Theater at the time. It was published in August 1912.¹⁰ Handy’s better-known composition, Memphis Blues, was published two months later.

Things were happening on the riverfront other than freight moving up and down the Mississippi River into and out of St. Louis. Sometime before 1900, excursion steamers began taking customers on outings in the late spring, summer and early fall months. These excursions had bands playing the songs of the day. The excursions were racially segregated. Blacks were only allowed on the boats on Monday nights, a practice continued until 1969. By 1911, the Streckfus family was bringing freight and passengers to St. Louis from New Orleans, soon gaining a near monopoly on the Mississippi River steamboats. These steamboats were to have a lasting effect on jazz, bringing musicians into St. Louis and training them to be complete musicians on the floating conservatories they had become. Gene Rodemich’s orchestra was one of the bands heard on the riverboats.

It is a good time to introduce Jesse Johnson.¹¹ He got his start as a dance instructor on the Grey Eagle excursion boat in 1913 and was promoting dances and cruises in St. Louis from 1915. He was an entrepreneur, building many businesses until his death in 1945. His family’s businesses and promotions will be detailed in subsequent chapters of this book, along with an important event linked to the Johnson family that happened in Washington, D.C., in 2011.

Racial segregation of musicians and audiences led to the formation of two racially segregated unions at nearly the same time in 1896. A meeting with the labor organizer Samuel L. Gompers in Indianapolis with representatives from all the musicians’ organizations in the country resulted in the formation of musicians’ unions in the American Federation of Labor (AFL). In St. Louis, Local 2 represented