This transcript of the radio show is an approximation of what I said in the show. The real spoken parts may differ slightly.
And welcome, my dear listeners, to the show and today I'm gonna follow the great stars of the roaring twenties in the decade that followed. How did they survive the Great Depression? Did they manage to make a living out of the music, or have hard times destroyed their careers?
I'll start with one of the pioneers of the female blues - Ma Rainey. By the end of the twenties, vaudeville got out of fashion but she still earned enough to tour the country in a bus with her name on it. But Paramount ended her contract and she never recorded again. Her style got outdated and in 1933 she quit music. Apparently she still had some money to invest running three theatres in Columbus, GA. She died in '39 of a heart attack, in her mid-fifties.
She never recorded in the thirties. So here she is with her last recording from '28, in a duet with Papa Charlie Jackson, the Ma and Pa Poorhouse Blues.
01 - Ma Rainey & Papa Charlie Jackson - Ma and Pa Poorhouse Blues
02 - Bessie Smith - Take Me For A Buggy Ride
That was Bessie Smith with Take Me For A Buggy Ride on the Okeh and that was her very last session, done in November of 1933 and the band that played with her had Jack Teagarden in it, and Frankie Newton and Chu Berry with a very modern-sounding band, that is, for the day. Between '29 and this session Smith didn't record, but she did tour extensively. John Hammond produced this set, the man who scouted and produced many popular artists of the 20th century, but his account, that he found Bessie in an obscure joint in Philadelphia working as a hostess, that is false.
Bessie Smith unfortunately didn't survive the Great Depression - she died in 1937 from a horrible car accident near Clarksdale, MS. The hospital where she died now serves as a motel, but the room where she passed away now is a small museum devoted to the woman who had been advertised as the empress of the blues by her record label - Columbia.
Next Jelly Roll Morton, and he was of course one of the great pioneers of jazz in the twenties - and before. Along with a whole bunch of New Orleans musicians, he landed in Chicago making this city the jazz capital for a part of the decade. In the Windy City he had his greatest successes.
Later in the twenties, the center of jazz moved to New York and Morton moved with it, but he struggled to keep his success. He did play with greats of jazz but his records didn't sell anymore. In 1930 his record company, Victor, pulled the plug and didn't renew the contract. His band struggled financially, and after he moved to Washington D.C. to manage a bar, he got stabbed in the chest.
In '38 he was invited by Alan Lomax - the famous folk music historian - for interviews about the good old days in Storyville in New Orleans and for recordings of his sexually suggestive songs from the earliest 1900s as he'd done them in the whorehouses where he started his musical career as a young teenager.
From these takes, recorded in 1939, a song about Buddy Bolden, the New Orleans jazz pioneer of the years around the turn of the century. Jelly Roll Morton may always have said that he had invented jazz - Buddy Bolden comes much closer to that claim.
Here is Jelly Roll Morton with I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say.
03 - Jelly Roll Morton - I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say
04 - King Oliver - Crazy Bout My Baby
I'm Crazy Bout My Baby, recorded in 1931 by the band of King Oliver - and for sure he's one of the twenties greats that didn't make it at all in the Great Depression. Already in the late twenties he'd lost his job at the Savoy Ballroom when he tried to get a better wage for his band, and the Cotton Club also thought him too expensive - hiring Duke Ellington instead. When the Depression caused his bank to fail, he lost his savings and he struggled to keep his band alive.
Also a gum disease made it harder and harder for him to play the trumpet and in 1935 he had to quit music. While still on tour he stranded in Savannah, GA and he pawned his horn and suits and eventually found work as a janitor. Just three years later he died in deep poverty - too broke to afford medical treatment. His pupil Louis Armstrong attended the funeral after his body was sent to New York.
Oliver remains a great - for his compositions and his innovations on the cornet and trumpet, especially the use of all kinds of materials as a mute for his horn. It's said that Bubber Miley, the famous trumpeter of Duke Ellington, got inspired by King Oliver.
But of course his influence on that other, even much greater trumpeter, makes his mark on jazz everlasting. I'm talking about Louis Armstrong of course - it was Oliver who taught a young Armstrong to play the cornet, and who brought him to Chicago, the new hotbed for jazz. Armstrong always credited King Oliver to be his great mentor - even though their playing style was completely different.
Louis Armstrong did manage it through the thirties, be it with a lot of trouble with the mafia. In 1930 he moved to Los Angeles and played at the New Cotton Club for the still wealthy Hollywood clientele, and then tried a year in Chicago but there he got in troubles with the mob - eventually he had to go on tour in Europe to get rid of them, at least for a while.
Once back in the States he found his agent Johnny Collins to do poor management for him and he hired Joe Glaser to get him out of his everlasting troubles with the mob and all the legal problems he had encountered. Also, he got problems with his lips and fingers from his style of playing the trumpet and he had to focus more on vocal work.
Despite all these problems, Armstrong remained a top celebrity - be it a very hard working celebrity, he did more than 300 performances a year, for decades long. The revival of old-style jazz in the forties brought him the opportunity to play the music of his youth and get a following for it.
Here is Louis Armstrong as I don't like him, with a popular tune. It's this popular music that helped him get through the Great Depression. Listen to All Of Me.
05 - Louis Armstrong - All Of Me
06 - Duke Ellington - It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)
Maybe one of the most succesful musicians of the thrirties has been Duke Ellington. He was one of the 10 percent of musicians that didn't see his recording contract terminated, and he recorded classics such as It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing, Mood Indigo, Sophisticated Lady and Sentimental Mood. He could travel with his band in private railcars, with dining and sleeping accomodations, avoiding to have to travel in segretated train cars. In tours overseas he was treated a celebrity.
Sheer musical genius alone was not enough to make it through the thirties. His association with Irving Mills, his manager, now proved to be very fruitful, as well as the personal nature of Duke Ellington - he led his band not with disciplin, but with flair, psychology and humor. A neverending ambition and surrounding himself with the right people, it made that Duke Ellington never saw the hardships that most musicians had to suffer during the Great Depression.
You just heard him fronted by Ivie Anderson with perhaps his best known thirties hit, It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing.
Today I'm telling your about the great artists of the twenties, and how they fared in the Great Depression. Some saw only hardship, others were extremely succesful - and everything in between.
For Victoria Spivey, the Great Depression meant a slow-down on recording opportunities, but she found work in touring, in the movies and musical shows. She starred as Missy Rose in the all-black movie Hallelujah, and most notably in the revue Hellzapoppin'.
From 1931 here she is with the Nebraska Blues.
07 - Victoria Spivey - Nebraska Blues
08 - Earl 'Fatha' Hines - Oh! You Sweet Thing
Earl Hines with a recording for the Brunswick label from 1932 - an instrumental version of the popular classic Oh You Sweet Thing. Now Hines well survived the Great Depression leading the house band of the Grand Terrace in Chicago - he'd played before there, together with his close friend Louis Armstrong, when it was named the Sunset Cafe. By 1930 the joint was controlled by Al Capone, and he got a Bechstein grand piano to play on. With his band, at some point 28 members big, he was on national radio on a daily basis. And so a whole new generation of pianists got their inspiration from his radio broadcasts - or as Jay McShann said, when Fatha went off the air, I went to bed.
Al Capone had secured the deal and the band members' safety provided they would be like the three monkeys - hear nothing, see nothing, say nothing. In summer the band toured, including a tour through the Deep South, the first Black big band to do so. That proved to be a constant struggle to get things organized against the Jim Crow laws, the mentality of the police and the constant threat of white mobs. Finding places to eat and stay was a constant struggle, and in Alabama a bomb exploded under the band stage - no-one got hurt but according to Hines, that day wasn't the best performance of the band.
For the next one I go to the career of one of the great stars of the early twenties, Trixie Smith. In the acoustic era she recorded a good number of songs, enough to fill one-and-a-half CD of the Document series. Then, between '25 and '38, she didn't record at all. But she wasn't forgotten - during the second half of the twenties she starred in musical revues and cabaret, and in the thirties she played in five movies.
Then in 1938 she made a comeback on record, with re-recordings of a few of her twenties hits backed by a band that featured Sammy Price, Charlie Shavers and Sydney Bechet, and a year later a few more takes with Henry Red Allen and Barney Bigard. Now these records commercially went nowhere just a few years later, when she died, she was all but forgotten. But her Decca sides are superior quality and they feature a lot of re-issue and compilation albums.
Here she is with what's perhaps her best song from these sessions - her 1938 recording Trixie Blues.
09 - Trixie Smith - Trixie Blues
10 - Fletcher Henderson - Honeysuckle Rose
This is swing music, and mature swing music from 1933, of the band of Fletcher Henderson, the classic Honeysuckle Rose. The thirties brought Henderson him financial hardship, while the arranging work he done in this decade is generally seen als one of the leading forces in the making of swing music. The idea of breaking up the band in sections - a reed section, a trumpet section, a rhythm section - having them either call-and-response or the one playing riffs under the other's melodic work or improvisations, it's first seen in the arrangements of Henderson.
Henderson had a good ear for new talent but many of them left him for other, more succesful bands. Due to financial problems he had to disband his orchestra in 1934, and sell his arrangements to Benny Goodman. From 1935, he made many arrangements for Goodman - mainly because Benny Goodman needed new music on a weekly basis because of his weekly appearance in a radio show. In '39, Henderson joined Goodman's band, as a pianist and full-time arranger.
For the next twenties great, let's have a look at Clarence Williams. During the twenties he had recorded with about anyone of the greats of the decade - including Louis Armstrong, Bubber Miley, Tommy Ladnier, King Oliver, Henry Red Allen, Coleman Hawkins, and singer and his wife Eva Taylor.
By the thirties he more and more concentrated on producing and the business side of music and his sheet music publishing company, that he'd started in the early twenties. That proved to be very succesful - in 1943 he got 50,000 dollars for his catalog of more than 2000 songs when he sold it to Decca. Must be said, Williams put his name under many songs that weren't entirely his - but these days, that was pretty common.
During the first half of the thirties his musical output merely was of popular songs in a jug-and-washboard band setting - just what sold at the moment, for as far as records sold anyhow. Here he is with I Got Horses And Got Numbers On My Mind.
11 - Clarence Williams - I Got Horses And Got Numbers On My Mind
12 - Hokum Boys - Caught Us Doing It
The Hokum Boys with They Caught Us Doing It and as a concept the Hokum Boys or Famous Hokum Boys worked very well in the Depression years. And I say a concept, cause through the years it were different musicians recording using that name. Georgia Tom and Tampa Red first used the name with hits like It's Tight Like That and Selling That Stuff, and later Big Bill Broonzy adopted the name to play with a varying lineup like Washboard Sam, Black Bob, Casey Bill Weldon and a trumpeter that went by the name of Mr. Sheiks. Banjoist Bob Robinson seems to be the only one to play on the twenties and some of the thirties recordings under the name of Hokum Boys.
They were not only boys - a woman named Jane Lucas is present on several recordings for the ARC label, sometimes also billed as Hannah May or Kansas City Kitty. Now without any evidence, a number of blueswomen are mentioned as who this mysterious singer was - Mozelle Alderson, Victoria Spivey and her sister Addie Spivey.
As a genre, hokum did well in the thirties, with some very bawdy songs by Bo Carter and Lil Johnson, and titles like Please Warm My Weiner, The Duck's Yas-Yas-Yas, If It Don't Fit (Don't Force It) and (Hot Nuts) Get 'Em from the Peanut Man - with the unforgettable lyrics Come On Baby Let's Have Some Fun And Stick Your Hot Dog In My Bun.
For the next one I go to the succes of Fats Waller - the great stride pianist and comedian-singer. His 1926 recording contract with Victor lasted all of his life, and during the thirties he recorded many sides with an interracial group billed as Fats Waller and his Rhythm. Also, he succesfully toured England and Ireland and was on one of the very first television broadcasts of the BBC in September of 1938.
He made enough money out of it, to be the first African-American musicians to buy a house in the upscale Addisleigh Park in Queens, before Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald and many other jazz and sports greats, despite the racial restrictions for the neigborhood - it wasn't until 1948 before they were lifted after the Supreme Court ruled them out.
Here is Fats Waller and his Rhythm with I Got Rhythm.
13 - Fats Waller & His Rhythm - I Got Rhythm
And Fats Waller ends today's show, with I Got Rhythm, as an example of a musician who was succesful in the Great Depression. And economic circumstances may have been harsh, it brought us a very interesting era with great music, and especially jazz was well alive.
Today I did some more talking than usual, and I hope you bear with me, and you still like the stories. Now of course you can let me know and send e-mail to rockingdutchman@rocketmail.com. Feedback is greatly appreciated.
And all of today's show, on the website of this radio program you can find it back, just Google for the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman and it will show up first in the results. Once in, this was show 276 in that episodes list or watch for the title, surviving the depression.
That's all for today folks, and there will be another show next week. So don't get the blues, and tune in again here, on the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman!