SYMHC Classics: Buddy Bolden and the Birth of Jazz

This 2018 episode covers Buddy Bolden, often referred to as the first jazz performer. 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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. This year, twenty twenty three is being marked
as the fiftieth anniversary of hip hop, and we've selected
Today's Saturday Classic as a nod to that theme. One
of hip hop's many precursors is jazz, and a key
figure in the development of jazz was New Orleans musician
Buddy Bolden, whose career as a musician was brief but

(00:25):
just incredibly influential and groundbreaking. And there are some sad
elements to this story. Buddy Bolden dealt with serious symptoms
of mental illness at a time when diagnoses were vague
and there really weren't many effective treatments, and in black
men in particular, mental illnesses were often viewed through a
lens of racist stereotypes. More recent research has also suggested

(00:48):
another possible cause of his symptoms. An article published in
twenty twenty in the magazine sixty four Parishes, which is
a project of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, argues
the bold and symptoms may have been a result of
the nyasin deficiency known as pelagra, which was widespread in
poorer communities in the early twentieth century. This episode originally

(01:10):
came out December nineteenth, twenty eighteen. So enjoy Welcome to
Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm

(01:31):
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 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

(01:52):
do a live show at the National World War II Museum,
and while we were there, we timed it so that
we kind of made a little bit of vacation out
of it, and one of my best friends was there
with me too. 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, and I was

(02:13):
reminded of Buddy's story, so it kind of bubbled back
up into my consciousness and it seemed a good time
to finally give him 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 only comprehensive biography of Bolden,

(02:34):
noted early on in his book that when he was
researching Buddy's history and his family history, it became really
really apparent 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

(02:56):
spellings on each. For example, one of Buddy's aunts was
listed with the last name bolding on her marriage certificate,
but her signature on that same certificate clearly shows the
spelling of Bolden bolde n So even on that one document,
the names were inconsistent. And this sort of disparity is
all over the various records that exist related to Buddy

(03:19):
Bolden's life, even though there aren't really that many records
to begin with, and they also include things like age
discrepancies and address discrepancies. 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

(03:40):
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 sixth, eighteen seventy seven, we don't really know when
he got the nickname Buddy, though his mom referred to
him as Charles throughout his life. He was Wesmore and
Alice Bolden's second child. Their first child was a daughter

(04:02):
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 Francis as well, and
it's been speculated that Gustavus was born into slavery, although
that is one of those places where there is no
definitive documentation. But Gustavus and Francis and then Westmore and

(04:27):
Alice lived in servants quarters on Walker's property and they
were employees there, they were not enslaved by him. Westmore
had moved his family a few blocks away before Buddy
was born, and then moved back in eighteen seventy eight
when west Moore's brother Thomas moved out, and then they
moved away again in anticipation of their third child, Cora,

(04:48):
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, Wes Moore, also
died on December twenty third of eighteen eighty three at
the age of thirty two. He had come down with
what was recorded as acute plural pneumonia. For several years

(05:09):
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 three eighty five First Street.
But he was ten at the time, and if you're
familiar with New Orleans, that's on what's the twenty three
hundred block of First Street today. In the eighteen eighties,
the neighborhood had a pretty diverse mix of people, but

(05:29):
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 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

(05:51):
eighteen ninety 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 ten
jobs to make ends meet. While Bolden grew up in
a city that was just full of music, he didn't
start taking cornette lessons until a little later. That was
in the mid eighteen nineties from a neighbor named Manuel Hall,

(06:12):
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 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

(06:33):
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 barber shop. At this point,
barber shops were common meeting places for musicians, so much
so that 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

(06:55):
this time in barber shops. 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 loosely just to play for a particular
party or dance, and then others went through ongoing reorganization
as the members disagreed on the sound, with the style,
or just moved on to other groups. Yeah. I feel

(07:17):
like if anybody ever played in non orchestra type bands
in high school, they know this dance all too well,
of bands falling 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 Cornett. It is believed that

(07:38):
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 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,

(08:00):
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. In eighteen ninety seven, Hattie and Buddy
had a child, Charles Joseph Bolden Junior. This wasn't the
beginning of a family scenario, though, Buddy and Hattie weren't married,

(08:21):
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 hundred she was back to going by
Hattie Oliver. By nineteen 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

(08:42):
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 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

(09:03):
come and gone through Buddy's band before, came back in
eighteen ninety nine 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 his bass on his back,
which delights me. There were two clarinet players, William Warner
and on the cea clarinet and Frank Lewis on the

(09:23):
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 a
I did not end up including it in this episode,
just in terms of time. 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,

(09:48):
and it is one of those sort of history mysteries.
Will include a link to a paper about it in
our show notes where no one can decide how this
photograph should be flipped, because initially people saw it and thought, oh,
that looks like people are playing left handed. 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

(10:10):
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. So we'll link to
that paper 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 are going to pause for a word from one

(10:31):
of the sponsors that keeps this show going. Muddy Bolden's
story goes hand 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

(10:53):
several such districts going back to the eighteen fifties, but Storyville,
which formed in eighteen ninety seven, 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 were working in Storyville's brothels,
which were defined by a city ordinance put forth by
Alderman Sidney story that made it illegal for vice businesses

(11:16):
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 a weird way to word
something like that. At one point, near the end of
the district's existence, and officer of the Secretary of War's

(11:37):
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 CD or
lures of Storyville, it was actually alcohol sales that turned
over some of the highest profits in the district. We
actually have an episode in the archive about Storyville and

(11:58):
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 and the music scene.
The enticements of the neighborhood brought people in, and musicians

(12:19):
like Bolden playing in places like the Odd Fellows in
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 Sons Hall, which had been established in eighteen
sixty six by a group of free persons of color,
and it was part of Black Storyville since a lot

(12:40):
of the Vice district would not accept black patrons, and
the Union Sons Hall also went by other nicknames, including
Kenna's Hall, named I Believe for a musician that predated
Buddy Bolden, and Funky Butt Hall, which was tied very
closely to Bolden. He had a song with those words
and the lyrics or in the name, And sometimes the

(13:00):
Saturday night dances that were going on at Union Sun's
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 the brass
more prominent and changing up the rhythms, there are also

(13:22):
accounts of his band playing places like the Blue Ribbon
Social Club, which was an organization for teenage girls, and
being perfect gentlemen, both in their personal behavior and in
the performances. They played appropriate dance music like waltzes and
quadrilles and nothing jazzy at all. Yeah, there's a cute

(13:42):
quote from somebody that I read where they're describing it.
I think they say none of that jazzy stuff, And
I don't know why that charmed me. In nineteen oh two,
Buddy 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 twenty seven nineteen Philip Street,
and they started living as a married couple, even though

(14:04):
they were not ever legally wed. This basically 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, Buddy had this other duality
going on because he split his nights between his old
family homes, staying with his mother Alice, and then the

(14:26):
rest of the time staying with Nora. Buddy and Nora
had a daughter named Bernadine in nineteen oh three, but
Buddy's second effort at family life seems to have been
a struggle, just like it was before with Hattie. In
nineteen oh 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

(14:47):
to another home, and Buddy's sister Cora, who had married
in nineteen oh 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 seen, things really started to
crumble for him. In nineteen oh six, Buddy started to
exhibit signs of mental illness. At this point, people called

(15:09):
him King, and he keenly felt the pressure of being
called the King. He knew that he had to keep
coming up with new ideas to keep the audiences happy. Yeah,
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 rockstar amazing, but it also made him feel really,

(15:31):
really stressed because he wanted to maintain 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

(15:52):
often found just mumbling to himself, and the headaches got
bad enough that they impeded his playing. It said that
he would play the wrong note, 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

(16:12):
weren't really maintaining a full time marriage, and she said
at times that he seemed to be afraid of his
own cornet. He had always kept it with him, and
he worried that his position 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

(16:34):
fighting with his band members. Yeah, he had initially responded
to this pressure by just booking more and more gigs.
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 third of nineteen oh six,

(16:56):
the police were called to the Bolden home. Buddy had
become delusional. He was convinced that his mother, Alice, was
trying to poison him, and at the time, Nora's sister
Dora and her mother Ida were visiting the house and
Buddy hit Ida, we think we'll explain why there's all
we think there in just a moment with a water pitcher.
Because the women were afraid of more violent behavior, they

(17:18):
had called the police. Buddy was arrested and he was
booked at the twelfth Precinct station that night. His charge
is simply listed as insane. The newspaper has 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 on one key detail,

(17:42):
though one item says that Buddy struck his mother, the
Pickiune 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 just got super angry
and fired them, but those relationships were severed. A series

(18:07):
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 were likely just taking advantage
of this unstable situation for their own benefit. Stories from
this time in Buddy's life all paint a picture of
a man who was at times disoriented, referring in conversations
to people no one seemed to know, shortchanging bandmates on

(18:30):
their payouts, and clearly losing touch with reality. On September third,
nineteen oh 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. There's been several different
stories as to whether he was part of some kind
of altercation or whether he just left and was felt

(18:50):
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 night
September eighth, so just a few days later, his mother
called the police again. His booking record at four am
Sunday morning once again lists insanity as the reason he
was arrested, and then for reasons unknown, his given address,

(19:13):
which his mother gave the police, was not his home,
but a nearby vacant lot that was situated 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 do with him,
and they were trying to maybe 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

(19:35):
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 thirteenth, nineteen oh seven. His mother,
Alice and sister Cora couldn't manage him anymore, and on
April fourth, after almost a month in jail, he was

(19:57):
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 he
made the trip to Jackson on June fifth. His years
in treatment are not entirely well documented. Some of those

(20:20):
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 a term
that would be used, but it was basically like, we
don't know, they seemed violent, We're going to kind of

(20:41):
give them this non individualized and kind of unspecific course
of treatment. It's actually not until a nineteen twenty five
examination records, so again that is almost twenty years after
he was committed to the asylum that the diagnosis of
dementia praecox paranoid type appears. That terminology is outdated now.

(21:02):
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. Initially, Alice and Cora
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,

(21:25):
and eventually he didn't recognize his mother or sister, and
the Boldens eventually stopped visiting. They would instead write letters
to the hospital staff asking after Buddy's wellness, and they
would receive reassuring although not two reassuring replies. These missives
generally stated that Buddy was in good health, but that
he showed no improvement in regards to his mental state.

(21:47):
In nineteen twenty seven, Buddy's daughter Bernadine, who was twenty
four at the time and hadn't had contact with him
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 Boldens, so she didn't
really know what her father's status was until the hospital

(22:09):
wrote her back and said that he was not improving.
I feel like that's a whole story. I would be
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. There is one really bittersweet
aspect of Bolden's time in the asylum. So in the
nineteen twenties, a music therapy program was started there by

(22:30):
a doctor E. M. Richards, who was himself a musician,
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 cornett,
depending on what was there, and play, but almost no
one realized that they were in the presence of a

(22:52):
former bandstand. King. Buddy's mother, Alice Bolden, died on August eleventh,
nineteen thirty 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. Buddy
died on November fourth, nineteen thirty one, in Parker General Hospital,

(23:14):
which is part of the same property as the asylum.
His cause 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 Holt
Cemetery and a pauper's grave on city owned land. His sister,

(23:37):
Cora 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

(23:58):
sense 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 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

(24:19):
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 they're subjective.
One thing that I noticed that was interesting reading some
of those is like some people would be like, he

(24:39):
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 eighteen ninety eight, but if they did this,
that recording has been lost and it has eluded historian searches,

(25:02):
of which there have been many. Because of the 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 Ken Burns Jazz
documentary series, when Marsalis attributes what's called a big four beat,
which is a syncopated pattern that accents the second fourth

(25:22):
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, you know, read some online arguments, go

(25:44):
and just search around the internet for like that footage
and watch all of the comments be about that's not true.
What Marsalis doesn't know, what he's talking about. It's pretty interesting,
but basically, really again, it's that thing where he's mythological
in nature at this point, and you could say any
things were things that he invanted and we don't know,
but there's also every possibility that he did do that.

(26:07):
And even though Buddy hadn't started learning Cornett until he
was a teen, as we mentioned, which was 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 cornette briefly to make sure he
had it worked out. Whether he was able to read
music is another hotly debated point, but he was a
skilled improviser. Sometimes he would maybe forget a segment of

(26:31):
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 Warrnton
his book, that this skill, when people talk about it,
should not be equated with the improvisational jazz of today.
It was more of a way of an embellishing and

(26:52):
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 Balden was really innovating, combined the brass band
marches that were common in New Orleans with blues and ragtime,

(27:14):
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. Yeah, sometimes
I think if you read sort of a glossy blurb
version of it, it sounds like he's only this rebel
that's outplaying his own versions of things. And really he

(27:36):
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 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

(27:59):
the birthplace of Yixilian jazz, as well as a place
where the music form evolved and took other shapes. Buddy's
life has been featured in a lot of works over
the years. The novel Coming Through Slaughter, published in nineteen
seventy six by Michael Mdacci, features a fictionalized version of
Bolden's life. A biopic called Bolden with an exclamation Point

(28:20):
was filmed in twenty fifteen and is still listed us
in post production on IMDb. There 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 sixth,
nineteen ninety six, which would have been Buddies one hundred
and nineteenth birthday, he finally got a New Orleans jazz funeral,
and that was attended by his granddaughter and great granddaughter.

(28:43):
Six years later, the City Council of New Orleans named
a block of Tulou Street Buddy Bolden Place. Oh all right,
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 evolved a
great deal, but it's it's one of those places where
I personally feel slightly cheated, similar to how we talked

(29:05):
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, think
of the music he could have played had he actually
gotten reasonable treatment for his mental illness and maybe taken

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better care of his body along the way. So I'll
just feel selfish in wanting to travel back in time
and fix those problems. Thanks so much for joining us
on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL

(29:48):
or something similar over the course of the show that
could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History
Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all
over so social media at missed in History, and you
can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,
the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else. You listen to podcasts.

(30:12):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
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