December 19, 2018 • 31 mins
Bolden is often referred to as the first jazz performer, and his playing is legendary. But his life story, cluttered by lack of documentation and misinformation, played out tragically after his ascension to the apex of the New Orleans music scene.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So, a
couple of years back, when I was doing some research
for a project completely unrelated to the podcast, just kind
(00:22):
of side projects that I was working with friends, I
came across the story of Buddy Bolden and he immediately
went onto my list of future topics. And then recently,
as you may recall, because we aired the episode, we
went to New Orleans to do a live show at
the National World War Two Museum. And while we were there,
we timed it so that we kind of made a
(00:42):
little bit of vacation out of it, and one of
my best friends was there with me. Two of my
best friends were actually there with me, but this one
in particular, it was her birthday weekend and she absolutely
loves music and loves jazz, and she wanted to hit
all of the jazz spots that she could while we
were there. Uh, And I was reminded of Buddy's story,
so it kind of bubbled back up been to my consciousness,
and it seemed a good time to finally give him
(01:03):
a moment, and before we start, I feel like we
need to talk about him as a challenging topic for
historians because author Donald M. Marquis, who wrote really the
first and and only comprehensive biography of Bolden, noted early
on in his book that when he was researching Buddy's
history and his family history, it became really really apparent
(01:25):
that there were some problems. For example, the name Bolden
had been spelled innumerable different ways on various documents, so
birth certificates, death certificates, and wedding certificates for any one
person might show the last name with completely different spellings
on each. For example, one of Buddy's aunts was listed
with the last name Bolding on her marriage certificate, but
(01:47):
her signature on that same certificate clearly shows the spelling
of Bolden b O L D E N, So even
on that one document, UH, the names were inconsistent. And
this sort of disparity is all over the various records
that exist related to Buddy Bolden's life, even though there
aren't really that many records to begin with, UH, and
they also include things like age discrepancies and address discrepancies. UM,
(02:13):
it's kind of all over the place, and all of this,
as well as Buddy's charisma and talent as a performer,
has contributed to a number of falsehoods and a lot
of mythologizing over the years. So there will be a
couple of things that we point out along the way
as unverifiable. We do know when he was born, though
Charles Joseph Bolden was born on September six seven, we
(02:34):
don't really know when he got the nickname Buddy, though
his mom referred to him as Charles throughout his life.
He was Westmore and Alice Bolden's second child. Their first
child was a daughter who was christened Latta but went
by Lottie. She was born two years before Buddy was
and Westmore worked as a driver for a businessman named
William Walker, who had employed Buddy's grandfather Gustavus and grandmother
(02:58):
Francis as well, and it's been speculated that gust of
Us was born into slavery, although that isn't one of
those places where there is no definitive documentation. But gust
of Us and Francis and then Westmore and Alice lived
in servants quarters on Walker's property and they were employees there.
They were not enslaved by him. Westmore had moved his
(03:20):
family a few blocks away before Buddy was born, and
then moved back in eighteen seventy eight when Westmore's brother
Thomas moved out, and then they moved away again in
anticipation of their third child, Cora, who was born in
eighteen eighty Buddy's older sister, Lottie died she had encephalitis
since she died in eighteen eighty one at the age
of six. His father Westmore also died on December twenty three,
(03:44):
eighteen eighty three, at the age of thirty two. He
had come down with what was recorded as acute plural
pneumonia for several years after that. It's not totally clear
where Alice and the surviving two children lived, but in
eighteen eighty seven they moved into a home at First Street.
But he was ten at the time, and if you're
(04:04):
familiar with New Orleans, that's on what's the d block
of First Street today. In the eighteen eighties, the neighborhood
had a pretty diverse mix of people, but the residents
mostly were Irish and German, and Alice, despite being a
single mother, wanted all of her children in school rather
than working, so Buddy attended school at least into the
(04:25):
early eighteen nineties, although the records are once again a
little unclear there. Buddy as Charles Bolden did not appear
in a city directory separately from Alice until eighteen seven,
when he would have been twenty years old, and at
that point he was listed as a plasterer, although in
reality he was taking a variety of temp jobs to
make ends meet. While Bolden grew up in a city
(04:47):
that was just full of music, he didn't start taking
Cornett lessons until a little later. That was in the
mid eighteen nineties, from a neighbor named Manuel Hall, who
worked as a cook in the French Quarter and who
was close with Buddy's mother, Alice. Yeah, it appears that
Alice and Manuel probably were romantically linked at some point
(05:07):
and possibly for a long ongoing time. Sometimes he is
kind of referred to almost as a father figure in
Buddy Bolden's life, and it was with Manuel Hall that
Buddy first played in a band. He also joined up
with Charlie Galloway, a neighbor about eight years older than
he was, who had a barbershop. At this point, barbershops
were common meeting places for musicians, so much so that
(05:29):
part of the Buddy Bolden mythology that has been repeated
over the years spread the false information that he was
a barber, because surely he was spending all this time
in barbershops. He was not a barber. That is just
a location where people met. There was kind of an
ongoing shuffling going on at the time, and the bands
that Buddy was part of, some of them formed really
(05:50):
loosely just to play for a particular party or dance,
and then others went through ongoing reorganization as the members
disagreed on the sound of the style or just moved
on to other groups. Yeah. I feel like if anybody
ever played in uh non orchestra type bands in high school,
they know this dance all too well, of bands falling
(06:10):
apart and reforming and other people meeting up and playing
in a band for a night or two. But Buddy
and Galloway started playing together not long after Buddy had
picked up the cornet. It is believed that Buddy made
appearances with Galloway's band as early as eighteen ninety four,
so that was the year that he first started taking lessons,
and as Buddy began performing around the city. He got
(06:31):
really good, really fast, and he garnered a following for himself.
He always had a bevy of young women who were
happy to hang around near the bandstand and hold his things,
and Buddy definitely enjoyed this attention, and he was romantically
linked to a number of ladies in the second half
of the eighteen nineties, and one woman, Hattie Oliver, who
was older than Buddy, kept regular company with the musician.
(06:55):
In eighteen seven, Hattie and Buddy had a child, Charles
Joseph Bolden Jr. This wasn't the beginning of a family scenario, though,
Buddy and how He weren't married, and while he did
try to financially support them for a while, it didn't
really last. Hattie went by the name Hattie Bolden for
a while in a common law arrangement, but by nineteen
hundreds she was back to going by Hattie Oliver. By
(07:17):
nine hundred, also just six years after he first started
taking lessons with Manuel Hall, Buddy had built a pretty
significant name for himself on the New Orleans music scene.
He was doing things differently than musicians before him had.
He played differently, and he arranged songs differently, we're going
to talk about that a little bit more towards the
end of the episode. And while the people that he
(07:39):
played with had been a fluid group, things started to
get some consistency in terms of band members at the
turn of the century. Willie Cornish, who had come and
gone through Buddies Band before, came back in and played
the trombone. Jimmy Johnson played the bass and was the
youngest member of the band. He could often be seen
bicycling through the town on the way to gigs with
(07:59):
this bay saw on his back, which delights me. There
were two clarinet players, William Warner and on the C
clarinet and Frank Lewis on the B flat clarinet. Jefferson
Mumford played guitar and Cornelius Tillman became the regular drummer
after he and Henry Zino alternated in that position for
a while. Yeah, there is uh. I did not end
up including it in this episode just in terms of time.
(08:22):
It became a whole scope shift if we tried to
do it. But there is like one photograph of this band,
although Cornelius Tillman isn't in it, and it is one
of those sort of history mysteries. Will include a link
to a paper about it in our show notes where uh,
no one can decide how this photograph should be flipped,
because initially people saw it and thought, oh, that looks
(08:44):
like people are playing left handed. Uh, this must be wrong,
we'll flip it. And then they realized if they flipped it,
it looked like two other band members were playing left handed.
And this has been the source of much discussion and
analysis for years and years and years. But it's also
the possibility that it's just a posed picture where they
weren't holding their instruments naturally the way they would when
they were playing. Uh. So we'll link to that paper
(09:06):
because it's quite delightful. But in a moment, we're going
to talk about the area of New Orleans that is
very closely linked to Buddy's success. But first we're going
to pause for a word from one of the sponsors
that keeps this show going. Muddy Bolden's story goes hand
(09:27):
in hand with another story of New Orleans at the time,
and that is the red light or vice district known
as Storyville, and the city had several such districts going
back to the eighteen fifties, but Storyville, which formed in
eight was the last and the smallest of them. In
the so called busy season, which was tied to the
horse racing calendar, as many as three thousand sex workers
(09:49):
were working in Storyville's brothels, which were defined by a
city ordinance put forth by Alderman Sydney story that made
it illegal for vice businesses to operate outside the limits
of certain blocks. It's kind of an interesting thing because
it doesn't say if you're in this space you can
be doing these things. It just says if you're outside
this space, you can't be doing these things, which is
(10:10):
a weird way towards something like that. At one point,
near the end of the district's existence, and officer of
the Secretary of War's Commission of Training Camp Activities called
Storyville a Gibraltar of commercialized vice, twenty four blocks given
over to human degradation and lust. But despite the focus
on the seedy or lures of Storyville, it was actually
(10:32):
alcohol sales that turned over some of the highest profits
in the district. We actually have an episode in the
archive about Storyville, and Buddy Bolden gets to mention in
it if folks want to track that down in the archive.
Bolden and his band played all over New Orleans, just
to be clear, but his name was closely tied to
Storyville and it was a really rowdy area. There was
a unique kind of symbiosis between the red light district
(10:55):
and the music scene. The enticements of the neighborhood brought
people in, and musicians like Bolden playing in places like
the Odd Fellows and Masonic Hall gained a following and
then drew more people into the district. Yeah, kind of
each of the various industries going on there kept feeding
the others. And one of the most famous spots for
Bolden to play was the Union Sun's Hall, which had
been established in eighteen sixty six by a group of
(11:17):
free persons of color, and it was part of Black
Storyville since a lot of the Vice district would not
accept black patrons, and the Union Sons Hall also went
by other nicknames, including Kenne's Hall named I Believe for
a musician that the predated Buddy Bolden, and Funky Butt Hall,
which was tied very closely to Bolden. He had a
song with those words and the lyrics are in the name,
(11:40):
and sometimes the Saturday Night dances that were going on
at Union Suns would drag into the morning hours, so
much so that they had to be cut off so
that the hall could be rearranged quickly and used for
Sunday morning church services. What's interesting is that even while
Buddy was experimenting and improvising new ways to play old standards,
making in the brass more prominent and changing up the rhythms,
(12:02):
there are also accounts of his band playing places like
the Blue Ribbon Social Club, which was an organization for
teenage girls, and being perfect gentleman both in their personal
behavior and in the performances. They played appropriate dance music
like Waltz's and Quadrille's and nothing jazzy at all. Yeah,
there's a cute quote from somebody that I read where
(12:26):
they're describing it, and I think they say, none of
that jazzy stuff, And I don't know why that charmed me.
In nineteen o two, but he started seeing a woman
named Nora Bass, who he took to church for dates initially,
and the two moved in together that same year at
nineteen Philip Street, and they started living as a married couple,
even though they were not ever legally with this basically
(12:47):
a common law marriage established sort of a double life
for Buddy. Nora was not part of the music scene.
She was not particularly interested in the culture of Storyville.
But even away from the music scene, he had this
other duality going on because he split his nights between
his old family home, staying with his mother Alice, and
then the rest of the time staying with Nora. Buddy
(13:10):
and Nora had a daughter named Bernadine in nineteen o three,
but Buddy's second effort at family life seems to have
been a struggle, just like it was before with Hattie.
In nineteen o four, he was back to living with
his mother full time, at least according to a city directory,
although she had at that point moved across First Street
to another home, and Buddy's sister Cora, who had married
(13:31):
in nineteen o two and that marriage did not work out,
was also living back with their mother, Alice. But just
as his work and his fame were reaching the highest
heights of the New Orleans scene, things really started to
crumble for him. In nineteen o six, Buddy started to
exhibit signs of mental illness. At this point, people called
him King, and he keenly felt the pressure of being
(13:53):
called the King. He knew that he had to keep
coming up with new ideas to keep the audiences happy. Yeah,
there were there are stories of audiences just chanting King
Bolden over and over and over as they anticipated his
arrival on a stage, which is one of those things
that sounds like rock star amazing, but it also made
him feel really, really stressed because he wanted to maintain
(14:14):
that level. Buddy had been a heavy drinker from a
pretty young age, but that got a lot worse as
he grappled with the pressures that he felt, and what
had once seemed like mere drunkenness started to really morph
into more troubling behavior. He complained of headaches. He became
very paranoid. He was often found just mumbling to himself,
(14:36):
and the headaches got bad enough that they impeded his playing.
Uh said that he would play the wrong notes, and
then that would only make the situation worse because he
would realize that all of this pressure was stuff that
he could not meet if this headache was causing his
playing to suffer. Nora was still in his life at
this point, although they weren't really maintaining a full time marriage,
(14:56):
and she said at times that he seemed to be
afraid of his own hornet. He had always kept it
with him, and he worried that his position as the
as the music scenes most prominent innovator would be overthrown
by some other musician in terms of his immediate livelihood.
He started missing gigs and fighting with his band members. Yeah,
(15:17):
he had initially responded to this pressure by just booking
more and more gigs, like he was just going to
saturate the market. And then, of course that's impossible. When
you are stressed, the worst thing to do is make
your schedule even more intense. So it kind of kept
folding in on itself, this problem, and on Saturday, March
twenty three, nineteen o six, the police were called to
(15:38):
the Bolden home. Buddy had become delusional. He was convinced
that his mother, Alice, was trying to poison him, and
at the time, Norah's sister Dora and her mother Ida,
we're visiting the house and Buddy hit Ida. We think
will explain why there's a we think there in just
a moment with a water picture. Because the women were
afraid of more violent behavior, they called the police. Buddy
(16:01):
was arrested and he was booked at the twelfth Precinct
station that night. His charge is simply listed as insane.
The newspapers picked up the story, and this is the
only press coverage that Buddy ever got in his lifetime.
It ran as a brief news blurb and the New
Orleans Item and the Daily Picune. The two newspapers differ
(16:22):
on one key detail, though one item says that Buddy
struck his mother, the Piaune says that it was his
mother in law. Both agree that the wound was not serious.
Though later that year, most of Bolden's bandmates were no
longer playing with him. It is unclear if they got
frustrated with his behavior and walked out or if he
(16:42):
just got super angry and fired them, but those relationships
were severed. A series of musicians cycled through his group
on his gigs from that point on, including several that
really had poor reputations on the music scene, and we're
likely just taking advantage of this unstable situation for their
own benefit. Stories from this time in Buddy's life all
(17:02):
paint a picture of a man who was at times disoriented,
referring in conversations to people no one seemed to know
short changing bandmates on their payouts and clearly losing touch
with reality. On September three, six, Buddy, like every other
musician in New Orleans, was booked to march in the
Labor Day Parade, but he walked off the parade route.
(17:23):
There have been several different stories as to whether he
was part of some kind of altercation or whether he
just left and was and felt like he was unable
to complete the route in the very hot and humid weather.
But after that day, his mental state started declining really quickly.
On Saturday night September eight, so just a few days later,
his mother called the police again. His booking record at
(17:46):
four am Sunday morning once again lists insanity as the
reason he was arrested, and then, for reasons unknown, his
given address, which his mother gave the police, was not
his home, but a nearby vacant lot that was situation
did across the street from the home of his close
friend Lewis Jones. There's been speculation that she and his
friend Lewis both felt like they didn't know what to
(18:07):
do with him, and they were trying to maybe like
just get him out of their lives in sort of
a passive way. But we don't know. Buddy was released
after this arrest, but he never played his cornet again.
The next several months were spent drinking and hanging around
his mother's house, occasionally lapsing into angry and violent behavior.
He was arrested for insanity again on March seven. Was
(18:31):
mother Alice and sister Cora couldn't manage him anymore, and
on April four, after almost a month in jail, he
was examined by a doctor and committed to the Jackson
Insane Asylum. His declaration of insanity review and paperwork to
list him as judicially committed, though weren't completed for another month.
The cause of insanity was listed simply as alcohol, and
(18:54):
he made the trip to Jackson on June five. His
years and treatment are not entire really well documented. Some
of those documents probably existed and have gone missing, but
he was sort of treated in this weird catch all
category that black men were frequently lumped into. The treatment
was kind of along the lines of how they would
treat manic depressives at the time. That is no longer
(19:16):
a term that would be used, but it was basically like,
we don't know, they seemed violent, we're going to kind
of give them this non individualized and kind of unspecific
course of treatment. It's actually not until in nineteen examination records,
so again, that is almost twenty years after he was
committed to the asylum that the diagnosis of dementia precox
(19:38):
paranoid type appears. That terminology is outdated now. It was
used for a while interchangeably with the term schizophrenia, and
then it was supplanted by the use of the word
schizophrenia completely at one point. We will talk more about
Buddy's time in Jackson in just a moment, but first
will pause to take another quick sponsor break. Initially, Alice
(20:06):
and Coral Bolden visited Buddy in the asylum at fairly
regular intervals, and at one point they even thought that
he might be well enough to return home, although his
doctors cautioned against it. But over time, Buddy became less
and less responsive, and eventually he didn't recognize his mother
or sister, and the Bolden's eventually stopped visiting. They would
(20:26):
instead write letters to the hospital staff asking after Buddy's wellness,
and they would receive reassuring, although not too reassuring replies.
These missives generally stated that Buddy was in good health,
but that he showed no improvement in regards to his
mental state. In seven, Buddy's daughter Bernadine, who was twenty
four at the time and hadn't had contact with him
(20:48):
since she was four, wrote to the hospital from Evanston, Illinois,
and she asked about her father's condition. Bernadine's mother, Nora,
hadn't maintained a relationship with the Bolden so she didn't
really know what her father's status was, and so the
hospital wrote her back and said that he was not improving.
I feel like that's a whole story. I would be
(21:09):
very interested to hear, like at what point did she
decide she wanted to reach out and like how did
she end up in Illinois? And we don't really have
those pieces of the puzzle. Uh. There is one really
bittersweet aspect of Bolden's time in the asylum. So in
the nineteen twenties, and music therapy program was started there
by a doctor E. M. Richards, who was himself a musician,
(21:29):
and there was a jazz band that formed with some
of the black patients, although Buddy was not one of them,
but on occasion, according to staff accounts, Buddy would just
walk up to the bandstand and grab a trumpet or cornet,
depending on what was there, and play, but almost no
one realized that they were in the presence of a
former bandstand. King. Buddy's mother, Alice Bolden, died on August
(21:51):
eleven one, and when Cora wrote their usual letter to
the asylum asking after her brother, she included this news
and the letter the hospital just responded to let her
knew that her brother was having heart trouble. Bud He
died on November four in Parker General Hospital, which is
part of the same property as the asylum. His cause
(22:13):
of death was cerebral arterial sclerosis. No death notice ran
in the paper, and the city that had celebrated him
as King Bolden at one time had no idea that
he had died. Today, we don't know where Buddy Bolden
is buried exactly. He was buried in Whole Cemetery in
a pauper's grave on city owned land. His sister, Cora
(22:33):
had been either unable or unwilling to pay the burial
fee of five dollars. She also wasn't able to keep
up with the payments that were needed for maintenance of
the grave site. So after two years, his body was
exhumed and reburied at a greater depth to make room
for a fresh grave on top of his. Yeah, that
cemetery has since become very overgrown. There's a general sense
(22:53):
of it's kind of somewhere right around this area, but
we really don't know, and there are likely several more
burials on top of it in addition to that one
that happened a couple of years later. Buddy's brief but
intense time as a New Orleans musical celebrity is much
discussed by historians as the point where Dixie Land jazz
was born. But this discussion also gets a little bit
(23:14):
tricky because we have no recordings of him playing. We
don't know exactly what he sounded like, and so everything
is an interpretation of descriptions that other people have given,
and sometimes those accounts contradict one another because their subjective.
One thing that I noticed that was interesting reading some
of those is like some people would be like, he
(23:35):
had amazing tone, and other people would be like, he
didn't have tone, but he had really good rhythm, And
like there were just these literally completely contradicting accounts of
what he sounded like. There has been speculation that Bolden
and an early incarnation of his band made a cylinder
recording sometime before, but if they did this, that recording
has been lost and it has eluded historian searches, of
(23:57):
which there have been many. Because of a mythical nature
of Buddy's work and the lack of documentation of it,
there are ongoing disagreements about what did and didn't originate
with him. If you've ever watched the kin Burns jazz
documentary series went, Marcellist attributes what's called a big four beat,
which is a syncopated pattern that accents the second fourth
(24:18):
beat of a march to Bolden. But that beat might
have started any number of places, including after Buddy was
no longer playing regularly, and it's unlikely a definitive origin
point that anybody will ever be able to conclusively prove. Yeah,
if you wanna, um, you know, read some online arguments,
(24:39):
go and just search around the internet for like that
footage and watch all of the comments be about that's
not true when Marcellas doesn't know what he's talking about. Uh,
it's pretty interesting, but basically, really again, it's that thing
where he's he's mythological in nature at this point, and
you could say things weird things that he invented and
we don't know, but there's also every possibility that that
(25:01):
he did do that. And even though Buddy hadn't started
learning Cornett until he was a teen, as we mentioned,
which is late for a kid in New Orleans at
the time, he had an incredible ear and he could
pick up a song just by hearing it and then
kind of playing around with it on his cornet briefly
to make sure he had it worked out. Whether he
was able to read music is another hotly debated point,
(25:21):
but he was a skilled improviser. Sometimes he would maybe
forget a segment of a song while playing and he
could just fake his way through it, or he would
just fake his way through songs that he maybe just
didn't really know all that well. To begin with that
main biographer who's written about Bolden that I mentioned earlier,
Donald M. Marquee, warrant in his book that this skill,
when people talk about it, should not be equated with
(25:42):
the improvisational jazz of today. It was more of a
way of embellishing a known melody and setting it to
a different beat to create something New He also wasn't
just playing his own thing. He was playing all kinds
of music almost anywhere he could to establish himself as
a musician. Hot music, the place where Bolden was really innovating,
(26:03):
combined the brass band marches that were common in New
Orleans with blues and ragtime, and this is where Dixieland
jazz begins. But it's important to contextualize it as happening
in the same dance halls where waltzes and quadrilles were
also being played, and by musicians who could cover all
of that territory. Yes, sometimes I think if you read
(26:24):
sort of a glossy blurb version of it, it sounds
like he's only this rebel that's out playing his own
versions of things. And really he was accomplished at covering
all of the bases that he might be required to.
After Bolden's death, the ideas that he pioneered, both in
the sounds, songs and arrangements, as well as the style
of bands continued to evolve in Louisiana and beyond. String
(26:46):
bands and orchestras started to give way to smaller jazz
ensembles like the ones that Buddy had put together, and
new Orleans quickly established itself as the birthplace of Dixie
Land jazz, as well as a place where the music
form evolved and took other shapes. But He's life has
been featured in a lot of works over the years.
The novel Coming Through Slaughter, published in nineteen seventy six
(27:07):
by Michael and Dachi, features a fictionalized version of Bolden's life.
A biopic called Bolden with an exclamation Point was filmed
in and is still listed us in post production on IMDb.
They have also been theatrical productions where he's featured as
a character and he makes cameos and a number of
pieces of fiction. On September six, n which would have
(27:30):
been Buddy's hundred and nineteenth birthday, he finally got a
New Orleans jazz funeral, and that was attended by his
granddaughter and great granddaughter. Six years later, the City Council
of New Orleans named a block of Tulu Street Buddy
Bolden Place. Oh, this is one of those things where
I think about We've talked about it on the show before,
how our knowledge of mental health treatment and diagnosis has
(27:54):
evolved a great deal. But it's one of those places
where I personally feel slightly cheated, similar to how we have.
We talked in our Dwight Fry episode about how if
he had only sought medical treatment, he could have had
potentially a much longer acting career and given us heaven
only knows what kind of amazing performances. Similarly, but he
was only thirty when he was sent to the asylum. Like,
(28:15):
think of the music he could have played had he
actually gotten reasonable treatment for his mental illness um and
maybe taking better care of his body along the way. Uh. So,
I'll just feel selfish in wanting to travel back in
time and fix those problems. Uh. I have way more
upbeat listener mail since this ends on kind of a
(28:36):
sad place. There are two pieces of listener mail. They
are both related to our recent episode on the straw
Hat Riots. Uh. The first is from our listener Michael,
and he writes, Hi, Holly and Tracy. I've been listening
to your show for many years now. My wife and
I very much enjoyed listening to your episodes about China's
greatly Forward as we traveled from Taiwan to London by
(28:57):
train via Beijing and the Trans Siberian Rail itself a
great subject for a future podcast. That sounds like an
amazing trip. I most recently listened to your episode about
the straw hat riot. I now live in western Massachusetts,
but I grew up in a small town called Luton
that was the center of the hat trade in England.
Plaid straw was such an important fixture in the town
that it features on the town crest in the form
(29:19):
of a straw beehive and a wheat sheaf. The local
football team, that is what we would call soccer in America,
is nicknamed the Hatters, and there's a whole museum dedicated
to the hat trade. In the museum, they have a
number of interesting exhibits, including the remains of the town
hall clock that burnt down during the Peace Day riots.
But my favorite is a policeman's hat made of local
(29:39):
straw that does not seem to offer the bobby much protection.
Thank you for your shows, and I can't wait to
listen to next week's installment. And he sent a really
cool picture of this hat. I like that that kind
of just verifies what we've talked about a little bit
in that episode that there were entire communities, particularly in
Great Britain, that really like ran on the straw hat trade.
Are other email is from our listener Steve also about
(30:01):
the straw hat riots uh, and he mentions his grandfather
Max I'm gonna paraphrase a little bit who grew up
in New York's Jewish Lower East Side, UH, and would
often tell Steve stories about when he was growing up
and how he got into fights all the time. And
he said he often bragged about grabbing straw hats off
men's heads and then running away with them. And I
never knew this was a common thing until I heard
(30:22):
your podcast. But you omitted something important from your discussion.
I think the hat snatching was very much a class issue,
lower class kids snatching boaters off of middle and upper
class men. Lots of the hat snatchers were living hand
to mouse, and it must have felt a little bit
like justice to see the richer men suffer. UH. That's
an interesting point of view on it. I had not
really thought about that, and it wasn't really discussed in
(30:44):
any of the news articles from the time that I
looked at. But it is an interesting thought. It's one
of those instances of the thing that's conjuring to mind
is not historical in any way. But but the topsy
turvy day in the movie The Hutchback of Notre Dame
by Disney, where you know, all of the lower class
(31:05):
people get to be high falutint for a day in
that example, and there are instances of that in various
social structures, so it's possible. Uh. If you would like
to write to us, you can do so at History
podcast at how stuff works dot com. We can also
be found across the spectrum of social media as Missed
in History. You can also find us online at missed
in History dot com, where all of the episodes of
(31:26):
the show that have ever existed are, including the ones
the Tracy and I are on, which have little show
notes and some some reference notes. UH. If you would
like to subscribe, we highly encourage you to do that.
You can do that on Apple Podcasts, the I Heart
Radio app, or wherever it is that you listen. For
(31:48):
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
staff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So, a
couple of years back, when I was doing some research
for a project completely unrelated to the podcast, just kind
(00:22):
of side projects that I was working with friends, I
came across the story of Buddy Bolden and he immediately
went onto my list of future topics. And then recently,
as you may recall, because we aired the episode, we
went to New Orleans to do a live show at
the National World War Two Museum. And while we were there,
we timed it so that we kind of made a
(00:42):
little bit of vacation out of it, and one of
my best friends was there with me. Two of my
best friends were actually there with me, but this one
in particular, it was her birthday weekend and she absolutely
loves music and loves jazz, and she wanted to hit
all of the jazz spots that she could while we
were there. Uh, And I was reminded of Buddy's story,
so it kind of bubbled back up been to my consciousness,
and it seemed a good time to finally give him
(01:03):
a moment, and before we start, I feel like we
need to talk about him as a challenging topic for
historians because author Donald M. Marquis, who wrote really the
first and and only comprehensive biography of Bolden, noted early
on in his book that when he was researching Buddy's
history and his family history, it became really really apparent
(01:25):
that there were some problems. For example, the name Bolden
had been spelled innumerable different ways on various documents, so
birth certificates, death certificates, and wedding certificates for any one
person might show the last name with completely different spellings
on each. For example, one of Buddy's aunts was listed
with the last name Bolding on her marriage certificate, but
(01:47):
her signature on that same certificate clearly shows the spelling
of Bolden b O L D E N, So even
on that one document, UH, the names were inconsistent. And
this sort of disparity is all over the various records
that exist related to Buddy Bolden's life, even though there
aren't really that many records to begin with, UH, and
they also include things like age discrepancies and address discrepancies. UM,
(02:13):
it's kind of all over the place, and all of this,
as well as Buddy's charisma and talent as a performer,
has contributed to a number of falsehoods and a lot
of mythologizing over the years. So there will be a
couple of things that we point out along the way
as unverifiable. We do know when he was born, though
Charles Joseph Bolden was born on September six seven, we
(02:34):
don't really know when he got the nickname Buddy, though
his mom referred to him as Charles throughout his life.
He was Westmore and Alice Bolden's second child. Their first
child was a daughter who was christened Latta but went
by Lottie. She was born two years before Buddy was
and Westmore worked as a driver for a businessman named
William Walker, who had employed Buddy's grandfather Gustavus and grandmother
(02:58):
Francis as well, and it's been speculated that gust of
Us was born into slavery, although that isn't one of
those places where there is no definitive documentation. But gust
of Us and Francis and then Westmore and Alice lived
in servants quarters on Walker's property and they were employees there.
They were not enslaved by him. Westmore had moved his
(03:20):
family a few blocks away before Buddy was born, and
then moved back in eighteen seventy eight when Westmore's brother
Thomas moved out, and then they moved away again in
anticipation of their third child, Cora, who was born in
eighteen eighty Buddy's older sister, Lottie died she had encephalitis
since she died in eighteen eighty one at the age
of six. His father Westmore also died on December twenty three,
(03:44):
eighteen eighty three, at the age of thirty two. He
had come down with what was recorded as acute plural
pneumonia for several years after that. It's not totally clear
where Alice and the surviving two children lived, but in
eighteen eighty seven they moved into a home at First Street.
But he was ten at the time, and if you're
(04:04):
familiar with New Orleans, that's on what's the d block
of First Street today. In the eighteen eighties, the neighborhood
had a pretty diverse mix of people, but the residents
mostly were Irish and German, and Alice, despite being a
single mother, wanted all of her children in school rather
than working, so Buddy attended school at least into the
(04:25):
early eighteen nineties, although the records are once again a
little unclear there. Buddy as Charles Bolden did not appear
in a city directory separately from Alice until eighteen seven,
when he would have been twenty years old, and at
that point he was listed as a plasterer, although in
reality he was taking a variety of temp jobs to
make ends meet. While Bolden grew up in a city
(04:47):
that was just full of music, he didn't start taking
Cornett lessons until a little later. That was in the
mid eighteen nineties, from a neighbor named Manuel Hall, who
worked as a cook in the French Quarter and who
was close with Buddy's mother, Alice. Yeah, it appears that
Alice and Manuel probably were romantically linked at some point
(05:07):
and possibly for a long ongoing time. Sometimes he is
kind of referred to almost as a father figure in
Buddy Bolden's life, and it was with Manuel Hall that
Buddy first played in a band. He also joined up
with Charlie Galloway, a neighbor about eight years older than
he was, who had a barbershop. At this point, barbershops
were common meeting places for musicians, so much so that
(05:29):
part of the Buddy Bolden mythology that has been repeated
over the years spread the false information that he was
a barber, because surely he was spending all this time
in barbershops. He was not a barber. That is just
a location where people met. There was kind of an
ongoing shuffling going on at the time, and the bands
that Buddy was part of, some of them formed really
(05:50):
loosely just to play for a particular party or dance,
and then others went through ongoing reorganization as the members
disagreed on the sound of the style or just moved
on to other groups. Yeah. I feel like if anybody
ever played in uh non orchestra type bands in high school,
they know this dance all too well, of bands falling
(06:10):
apart and reforming and other people meeting up and playing
in a band for a night or two. But Buddy
and Galloway started playing together not long after Buddy had
picked up the cornet. It is believed that Buddy made
appearances with Galloway's band as early as eighteen ninety four,
so that was the year that he first started taking lessons,
and as Buddy began performing around the city. He got
(06:31):
really good, really fast, and he garnered a following for himself.
He always had a bevy of young women who were
happy to hang around near the bandstand and hold his things,
and Buddy definitely enjoyed this attention, and he was romantically
linked to a number of ladies in the second half
of the eighteen nineties, and one woman, Hattie Oliver, who
was older than Buddy, kept regular company with the musician.
(06:55):
In eighteen seven, Hattie and Buddy had a child, Charles
Joseph Bolden Jr. This wasn't the beginning of a family scenario, though,
Buddy and how He weren't married, and while he did
try to financially support them for a while, it didn't
really last. Hattie went by the name Hattie Bolden for
a while in a common law arrangement, but by nineteen
hundreds she was back to going by Hattie Oliver. By
(07:17):
nine hundred, also just six years after he first started
taking lessons with Manuel Hall, Buddy had built a pretty
significant name for himself on the New Orleans music scene.
He was doing things differently than musicians before him had.
He played differently, and he arranged songs differently, we're going
to talk about that a little bit more towards the
end of the episode. And while the people that he
(07:39):
played with had been a fluid group, things started to
get some consistency in terms of band members at the
turn of the century. Willie Cornish, who had come and
gone through Buddies Band before, came back in and played
the trombone. Jimmy Johnson played the bass and was the
youngest member of the band. He could often be seen
bicycling through the town on the way to gigs with
(07:59):
this bay saw on his back, which delights me. There
were two clarinet players, William Warner and on the C
clarinet and Frank Lewis on the B flat clarinet. Jefferson
Mumford played guitar and Cornelius Tillman became the regular drummer
after he and Henry Zino alternated in that position for
a while. Yeah, there is uh. I did not end
up including it in this episode just in terms of time.
(08:22):
It became a whole scope shift if we tried to
do it. But there is like one photograph of this band,
although Cornelius Tillman isn't in it, and it is one
of those sort of history mysteries. Will include a link
to a paper about it in our show notes where uh,
no one can decide how this photograph should be flipped,
because initially people saw it and thought, oh, that looks
(08:44):
like people are playing left handed. Uh, this must be wrong,
we'll flip it. And then they realized if they flipped it,
it looked like two other band members were playing left handed.
And this has been the source of much discussion and
analysis for years and years and years. But it's also
the possibility that it's just a posed picture where they
weren't holding their instruments naturally the way they would when
they were playing. Uh. So we'll link to that paper
(09:06):
because it's quite delightful. But in a moment, we're going
to talk about the area of New Orleans that is
very closely linked to Buddy's success. But first we're going
to pause for a word from one of the sponsors
that keeps this show going. Muddy Bolden's story goes hand
(09:27):
in hand with another story of New Orleans at the time,
and that is the red light or vice district known
as Storyville, and the city had several such districts going
back to the eighteen fifties, but Storyville, which formed in
eight was the last and the smallest of them. In
the so called busy season, which was tied to the
horse racing calendar, as many as three thousand sex workers
(09:49):
were working in Storyville's brothels, which were defined by a
city ordinance put forth by Alderman Sydney story that made
it illegal for vice businesses to operate outside the limits
of certain blocks. It's kind of an interesting thing because
it doesn't say if you're in this space you can
be doing these things. It just says if you're outside
this space, you can't be doing these things, which is
(10:10):
a weird way towards something like that. At one point,
near the end of the district's existence, and officer of
the Secretary of War's Commission of Training Camp Activities called
Storyville a Gibraltar of commercialized vice, twenty four blocks given
over to human degradation and lust. But despite the focus
on the seedy or lures of Storyville, it was actually
(10:32):
alcohol sales that turned over some of the highest profits
in the district. We actually have an episode in the
archive about Storyville, and Buddy Bolden gets to mention in
it if folks want to track that down in the archive.
Bolden and his band played all over New Orleans, just
to be clear, but his name was closely tied to
Storyville and it was a really rowdy area. There was
a unique kind of symbiosis between the red light district
(10:55):
and the music scene. The enticements of the neighborhood brought
people in, and musicians like Bolden playing in places like
the Odd Fellows and Masonic Hall gained a following and
then drew more people into the district. Yeah, kind of
each of the various industries going on there kept feeding
the others. And one of the most famous spots for
Bolden to play was the Union Sun's Hall, which had
been established in eighteen sixty six by a group of
(11:17):
free persons of color, and it was part of Black
Storyville since a lot of the Vice district would not
accept black patrons, and the Union Sons Hall also went
by other nicknames, including Kenne's Hall named I Believe for
a musician that the predated Buddy Bolden, and Funky Butt Hall,
which was tied very closely to Bolden. He had a
song with those words and the lyrics are in the name,
(11:40):
and sometimes the Saturday Night dances that were going on
at Union Suns would drag into the morning hours, so
much so that they had to be cut off so
that the hall could be rearranged quickly and used for
Sunday morning church services. What's interesting is that even while
Buddy was experimenting and improvising new ways to play old standards,
making in the brass more prominent and changing up the rhythms,
(12:02):
there are also accounts of his band playing places like
the Blue Ribbon Social Club, which was an organization for
teenage girls, and being perfect gentleman both in their personal
behavior and in the performances. They played appropriate dance music
like Waltz's and Quadrille's and nothing jazzy at all. Yeah,
there's a cute quote from somebody that I read where
(12:26):
they're describing it, and I think they say, none of
that jazzy stuff, And I don't know why that charmed me.
In nineteen o two, but he started seeing a woman
named Nora Bass, who he took to church for dates initially,
and the two moved in together that same year at
nineteen Philip Street, and they started living as a married couple,
even though they were not ever legally with this basically
(12:47):
a common law marriage established sort of a double life
for Buddy. Nora was not part of the music scene.
She was not particularly interested in the culture of Storyville.
But even away from the music scene, he had this
other duality going on because he split his nights between
his old family home, staying with his mother Alice, and
then the rest of the time staying with Nora. Buddy
(13:10):
and Nora had a daughter named Bernadine in nineteen o three,
but Buddy's second effort at family life seems to have
been a struggle, just like it was before with Hattie.
In nineteen o four, he was back to living with
his mother full time, at least according to a city directory,
although she had at that point moved across First Street
to another home, and Buddy's sister Cora, who had married
(13:31):
in nineteen o two and that marriage did not work out,
was also living back with their mother, Alice. But just
as his work and his fame were reaching the highest
heights of the New Orleans scene, things really started to
crumble for him. In nineteen o six, Buddy started to
exhibit signs of mental illness. At this point, people called
him King, and he keenly felt the pressure of being
(13:53):
called the King. He knew that he had to keep
coming up with new ideas to keep the audiences happy. Yeah,
there were there are stories of audiences just chanting King
Bolden over and over and over as they anticipated his
arrival on a stage, which is one of those things
that sounds like rock star amazing, but it also made
him feel really, really stressed because he wanted to maintain
(14:14):
that level. Buddy had been a heavy drinker from a
pretty young age, but that got a lot worse as
he grappled with the pressures that he felt, and what
had once seemed like mere drunkenness started to really morph
into more troubling behavior. He complained of headaches. He became
very paranoid. He was often found just mumbling to himself,
(14:36):
and the headaches got bad enough that they impeded his playing.
Uh said that he would play the wrong notes, and
then that would only make the situation worse because he
would realize that all of this pressure was stuff that
he could not meet if this headache was causing his
playing to suffer. Nora was still in his life at
this point, although they weren't really maintaining a full time marriage,
(14:56):
and she said at times that he seemed to be
afraid of his own hornet. He had always kept it
with him, and he worried that his position as the
as the music scenes most prominent innovator would be overthrown
by some other musician in terms of his immediate livelihood.
He started missing gigs and fighting with his band members. Yeah,
(15:17):
he had initially responded to this pressure by just booking
more and more gigs, like he was just going to
saturate the market. And then, of course that's impossible. When
you are stressed, the worst thing to do is make
your schedule even more intense. So it kind of kept
folding in on itself, this problem, and on Saturday, March
twenty three, nineteen o six, the police were called to
(15:38):
the Bolden home. Buddy had become delusional. He was convinced
that his mother, Alice, was trying to poison him, and
at the time, Norah's sister Dora and her mother Ida,
we're visiting the house and Buddy hit Ida. We think
will explain why there's a we think there in just
a moment with a water picture. Because the women were
afraid of more violent behavior, they called the police. Buddy
(16:01):
was arrested and he was booked at the twelfth Precinct
station that night. His charge is simply listed as insane.
The newspapers picked up the story, and this is the
only press coverage that Buddy ever got in his lifetime.
It ran as a brief news blurb and the New
Orleans Item and the Daily Picune. The two newspapers differ
(16:22):
on one key detail, though one item says that Buddy
struck his mother, the Piaune says that it was his
mother in law. Both agree that the wound was not serious.
Though later that year, most of Bolden's bandmates were no
longer playing with him. It is unclear if they got
frustrated with his behavior and walked out or if he
(16:42):
just got super angry and fired them, but those relationships
were severed. A series of musicians cycled through his group
on his gigs from that point on, including several that
really had poor reputations on the music scene, and we're
likely just taking advantage of this unstable situation for their
own benefit. Stories from this time in Buddy's life all
(17:02):
paint a picture of a man who was at times disoriented,
referring in conversations to people no one seemed to know
short changing bandmates on their payouts and clearly losing touch
with reality. On September three, six, Buddy, like every other
musician in New Orleans, was booked to march in the
Labor Day Parade, but he walked off the parade route.
(17:23):
There have been several different stories as to whether he
was part of some kind of altercation or whether he
just left and was and felt like he was unable
to complete the route in the very hot and humid weather.
But after that day, his mental state started declining really quickly.
On Saturday night September eight, so just a few days later,
his mother called the police again. His booking record at
(17:46):
four am Sunday morning once again lists insanity as the
reason he was arrested, and then, for reasons unknown, his
given address, which his mother gave the police, was not
his home, but a nearby vacant lot that was situation
did across the street from the home of his close
friend Lewis Jones. There's been speculation that she and his
friend Lewis both felt like they didn't know what to
(18:07):
do with him, and they were trying to maybe like
just get him out of their lives in sort of
a passive way. But we don't know. Buddy was released
after this arrest, but he never played his cornet again.
The next several months were spent drinking and hanging around
his mother's house, occasionally lapsing into angry and violent behavior.
He was arrested for insanity again on March seven. Was
(18:31):
mother Alice and sister Cora couldn't manage him anymore, and
on April four, after almost a month in jail, he
was examined by a doctor and committed to the Jackson
Insane Asylum. His declaration of insanity review and paperwork to
list him as judicially committed, though weren't completed for another month.
The cause of insanity was listed simply as alcohol, and
(18:54):
he made the trip to Jackson on June five. His
years and treatment are not entire really well documented. Some
of those documents probably existed and have gone missing, but
he was sort of treated in this weird catch all
category that black men were frequently lumped into. The treatment
was kind of along the lines of how they would
treat manic depressives at the time. That is no longer
(19:16):
a term that would be used, but it was basically like,
we don't know, they seemed violent, we're going to kind
of give them this non individualized and kind of unspecific
course of treatment. It's actually not until in nineteen examination records,
so again, that is almost twenty years after he was
committed to the asylum that the diagnosis of dementia precox
(19:38):
paranoid type appears. That terminology is outdated now. It was
used for a while interchangeably with the term schizophrenia, and
then it was supplanted by the use of the word
schizophrenia completely at one point. We will talk more about
Buddy's time in Jackson in just a moment, but first
will pause to take another quick sponsor break. Initially, Alice
(20:06):
and Coral Bolden visited Buddy in the asylum at fairly
regular intervals, and at one point they even thought that
he might be well enough to return home, although his
doctors cautioned against it. But over time, Buddy became less
and less responsive, and eventually he didn't recognize his mother
or sister, and the Bolden's eventually stopped visiting. They would
(20:26):
instead write letters to the hospital staff asking after Buddy's wellness,
and they would receive reassuring, although not too reassuring replies.
These missives generally stated that Buddy was in good health,
but that he showed no improvement in regards to his
mental state. In seven, Buddy's daughter Bernadine, who was twenty
four at the time and hadn't had contact with him
(20:48):
since she was four, wrote to the hospital from Evanston, Illinois,
and she asked about her father's condition. Bernadine's mother, Nora,
hadn't maintained a relationship with the Bolden so she didn't
really know what her father's status was, and so the
hospital wrote her back and said that he was not improving.
I feel like that's a whole story. I would be
(21:09):
very interested to hear, like at what point did she
decide she wanted to reach out and like how did
she end up in Illinois? And we don't really have
those pieces of the puzzle. Uh. There is one really
bittersweet aspect of Bolden's time in the asylum. So in
the nineteen twenties, and music therapy program was started there
by a doctor E. M. Richards, who was himself a musician,
(21:29):
and there was a jazz band that formed with some
of the black patients, although Buddy was not one of them,
but on occasion, according to staff accounts, Buddy would just
walk up to the bandstand and grab a trumpet or cornet,
depending on what was there, and play, but almost no
one realized that they were in the presence of a
former bandstand. King. Buddy's mother, Alice Bolden, died on August
(21:51):
eleven one, and when Cora wrote their usual letter to
the asylum asking after her brother, she included this news
and the letter the hospital just responded to let her
knew that her brother was having heart trouble. Bud He
died on November four in Parker General Hospital, which is
part of the same property as the asylum. His cause
(22:13):
of death was cerebral arterial sclerosis. No death notice ran
in the paper, and the city that had celebrated him
as King Bolden at one time had no idea that
he had died. Today, we don't know where Buddy Bolden
is buried exactly. He was buried in Whole Cemetery in
a pauper's grave on city owned land. His sister, Cora
(22:33):
had been either unable or unwilling to pay the burial
fee of five dollars. She also wasn't able to keep
up with the payments that were needed for maintenance of
the grave site. So after two years, his body was
exhumed and reburied at a greater depth to make room
for a fresh grave on top of his. Yeah, that
cemetery has since become very overgrown. There's a general sense
(22:53):
of it's kind of somewhere right around this area, but
we really don't know, and there are likely several more
burials on top of it in addition to that one
that happened a couple of years later. Buddy's brief but
intense time as a New Orleans musical celebrity is much
discussed by historians as the point where Dixie Land jazz
was born. But this discussion also gets a little bit
(23:14):
tricky because we have no recordings of him playing. We
don't know exactly what he sounded like, and so everything
is an interpretation of descriptions that other people have given,
and sometimes those accounts contradict one another because their subjective.
One thing that I noticed that was interesting reading some
of those is like some people would be like, he
(23:35):
had amazing tone, and other people would be like, he
didn't have tone, but he had really good rhythm, And
like there were just these literally completely contradicting accounts of
what he sounded like. There has been speculation that Bolden
and an early incarnation of his band made a cylinder
recording sometime before, but if they did this, that recording
has been lost and it has eluded historian searches, of
(23:57):
which there have been many. Because of a mythical nature
of Buddy's work and the lack of documentation of it,
there are ongoing disagreements about what did and didn't originate
with him. If you've ever watched the kin Burns jazz
documentary series went, Marcellist attributes what's called a big four beat,
which is a syncopated pattern that accents the second fourth
(24:18):
beat of a march to Bolden. But that beat might
have started any number of places, including after Buddy was
no longer playing regularly, and it's unlikely a definitive origin
point that anybody will ever be able to conclusively prove. Yeah,
if you wanna, um, you know, read some online arguments,
(24:39):
go and just search around the internet for like that
footage and watch all of the comments be about that's
not true when Marcellas doesn't know what he's talking about. Uh,
it's pretty interesting, but basically, really again, it's that thing
where he's he's mythological in nature at this point, and
you could say things weird things that he invented and
we don't know, but there's also every possibility that that
(25:01):
he did do that. And even though Buddy hadn't started
learning Cornett until he was a teen, as we mentioned,
which is late for a kid in New Orleans at
the time, he had an incredible ear and he could
pick up a song just by hearing it and then
kind of playing around with it on his cornet briefly
to make sure he had it worked out. Whether he
was able to read music is another hotly debated point,
(25:21):
but he was a skilled improviser. Sometimes he would maybe
forget a segment of a song while playing and he
could just fake his way through it, or he would
just fake his way through songs that he maybe just
didn't really know all that well. To begin with that
main biographer who's written about Bolden that I mentioned earlier,
Donald M. Marquee, warrant in his book that this skill,
when people talk about it, should not be equated with
(25:42):
the improvisational jazz of today. It was more of a
way of embellishing a known melody and setting it to
a different beat to create something New He also wasn't
just playing his own thing. He was playing all kinds
of music almost anywhere he could to establish himself as
a musician. Hot music, the place where Bolden was really innovating,
(26:03):
combined the brass band marches that were common in New
Orleans with blues and ragtime, and this is where Dixieland
jazz begins. But it's important to contextualize it as happening
in the same dance halls where waltzes and quadrilles were
also being played, and by musicians who could cover all
of that territory. Yes, sometimes I think if you read
(26:24):
sort of a glossy blurb version of it, it sounds
like he's only this rebel that's out playing his own
versions of things. And really he was accomplished at covering
all of the bases that he might be required to.
After Bolden's death, the ideas that he pioneered, both in
the sounds, songs and arrangements, as well as the style
of bands continued to evolve in Louisiana and beyond. String
(26:46):
bands and orchestras started to give way to smaller jazz
ensembles like the ones that Buddy had put together, and
new Orleans quickly established itself as the birthplace of Dixie
Land jazz, as well as a place where the music
form evolved and took other shapes. But He's life has
been featured in a lot of works over the years.
The novel Coming Through Slaughter, published in nineteen seventy six
(27:07):
by Michael and Dachi, features a fictionalized version of Bolden's life.
A biopic called Bolden with an exclamation Point was filmed
in and is still listed us in post production on IMDb.
They have also been theatrical productions where he's featured as
a character and he makes cameos and a number of
pieces of fiction. On September six, n which would have
(27:30):
been Buddy's hundred and nineteenth birthday, he finally got a
New Orleans jazz funeral, and that was attended by his
granddaughter and great granddaughter. Six years later, the City Council
of New Orleans named a block of Tulu Street Buddy
Bolden Place. Oh, this is one of those things where
I think about We've talked about it on the show before,
how our knowledge of mental health treatment and diagnosis has
(27:54):
evolved a great deal. But it's one of those places
where I personally feel slightly cheated, similar to how we have.
We talked in our Dwight Fry episode about how if
he had only sought medical treatment, he could have had
potentially a much longer acting career and given us heaven
only knows what kind of amazing performances. Similarly, but he
was only thirty when he was sent to the asylum. Like,
(28:15):
think of the music he could have played had he
actually gotten reasonable treatment for his mental illness um and
maybe taking better care of his body along the way. Uh. So,
I'll just feel selfish in wanting to travel back in
time and fix those problems. Uh. I have way more
upbeat listener mail since this ends on kind of a
(28:36):
sad place. There are two pieces of listener mail. They
are both related to our recent episode on the straw
Hat Riots. Uh. The first is from our listener Michael,
and he writes, Hi, Holly and Tracy. I've been listening
to your show for many years now. My wife and
I very much enjoyed listening to your episodes about China's
greatly Forward as we traveled from Taiwan to London by
(28:57):
train via Beijing and the Trans Siberian Rail itself a
great subject for a future podcast. That sounds like an
amazing trip. I most recently listened to your episode about
the straw hat riot. I now live in western Massachusetts,
but I grew up in a small town called Luton
that was the center of the hat trade in England.
Plaid straw was such an important fixture in the town
that it features on the town crest in the form
(29:19):
of a straw beehive and a wheat sheaf. The local
football team, that is what we would call soccer in America,
is nicknamed the Hatters, and there's a whole museum dedicated
to the hat trade. In the museum, they have a
number of interesting exhibits, including the remains of the town
hall clock that burnt down during the Peace Day riots.
But my favorite is a policeman's hat made of local
(29:39):
straw that does not seem to offer the bobby much protection.
Thank you for your shows, and I can't wait to
listen to next week's installment. And he sent a really
cool picture of this hat. I like that that kind
of just verifies what we've talked about a little bit
in that episode that there were entire communities, particularly in
Great Britain, that really like ran on the straw hat trade.
Are other email is from our listener Steve also about
(30:01):
the straw hat riots uh, and he mentions his grandfather
Max I'm gonna paraphrase a little bit who grew up
in New York's Jewish Lower East Side, UH, and would
often tell Steve stories about when he was growing up
and how he got into fights all the time. And
he said he often bragged about grabbing straw hats off
men's heads and then running away with them. And I
never knew this was a common thing until I heard
(30:22):
your podcast. But you omitted something important from your discussion.
I think the hat snatching was very much a class issue,
lower class kids snatching boaters off of middle and upper
class men. Lots of the hat snatchers were living hand
to mouse, and it must have felt a little bit
like justice to see the richer men suffer. UH. That's
an interesting point of view on it. I had not
really thought about that, and it wasn't really discussed in
(30:44):
any of the news articles from the time that I
looked at. But it is an interesting thought. It's one
of those instances of the thing that's conjuring to mind
is not historical in any way. But but the topsy
turvy day in the movie The Hutchback of Notre Dame
by Disney, where you know, all of the lower class
(31:05):
people get to be high falutint for a day in
that example, and there are instances of that in various
social structures, so it's possible. Uh. If you would like
to write to us, you can do so at History
podcast at how stuff works dot com. We can also
be found across the spectrum of social media as Missed
in History. You can also find us online at missed
in History dot com, where all of the episodes of
(31:26):
the show that have ever existed are, including the ones
the Tracy and I are on, which have little show
notes and some some reference notes. UH. If you would
like to subscribe, we highly encourage you to do that.
You can do that on Apple Podcasts, the I Heart
Radio app, or wherever it is that you listen. For
(31:48):
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
staff works dot com.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.