On Listening to My Dad’s Old Jazz Albums

1. Riverside History of Classic Jazz (1956)

Volume 1 includes Congo tribal music, street cries of Charleston, and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Ragtime (Volume 2) includes music by Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton.  The back jacket reads, “It stretches over many years and much geography: from the work songs and Negro church music that preceded jazz; through ragtime and the early blues; through the great formative years of New Orleans jazz.” This album seems to have aged well, with one Amazon reviewer saying, “Listen to this and you will understand where jazz comes from, what jazz is and how it does what it does.” Given the album’s release date, I imagine this was one of the first albums my dad bought, which would make sense, as it seems most focused on the origins of jazz. This album is one of my favorites, and I wonder what my dad thought of it as he listened to Congo tribal music and the other early songs that connected to the music of enslaved persons as they worked in the fields.

Did he understand that jazz and blues came from an articulation of that oppression, an oppression that our ancestors participated in?

2. The History of Jazz: N’Orleans Origins, Volume 1 (1957)

The album cover is of a collage with a painting of a thin Black man in denim overalls and a red shirt and cap (signaling his working-class background) holding a trombone, looking outside the album’s frame. Around him are smaller paintings of a funeral dirge band, a man sitting on a bed, his hands covering his bowed face as a woman stands behind him, arms crossed; a steamboat; and a horse-drawn wagon carrying jazz players blowing their horns. This album has singing, exuberant “primitive music” from Mt. Zion Church Choir and iconic early blues musicians, including Leadbelly. I wonder how much of these images fed into stereotypes of the time and how much they revealed to my dad a musical culture and way of life?

On the back cover, Downbeat writer Dave Dexter writes, “In the beginning, the South conceived and cradled the infant. From the simple church hymns, work songs, party music, and the sorrowful dirges of the American Negro, there evolved the chesty, viral adult called jazz.” Dexter, like the other music critics who write of jazz on these albums, is White. Dexter writes, “Jazz may or may not have its roots in Africa, and the Caribbean, as some claim. The question is academic anyway; no one can deny that the music is wholly American.” Dexter’s analysis is of its time and place but his hedging of “may or may not” have its roots in Africa, minimizes the conditions of how this “American” (i.e., Black) music began and its connection to slavery.

            Dexter’s question and answer is not academic. Or rather, if he claims the music is “wholly American,” does he understand that to be wholly American is to be broken? As James Baldwin says of (White) Americans in his 1961 essay “The New Lost Generation,” “Europeans refer to Americans as children in the same way that American Negroes refer to them as children, and for the same reason: they mean that Americans have so little experience—experience referring not to what happens, but to who—that they have no key to the experience of others.”

             I imagine that my dad listened to these albums as a way to understand the what—the history of jazz while avoiding the who—the “who” who were people our ancestors had enslaved, the “who” who see White people like my father, like me, as children who refuse to listen.

3. Mardi Gras in Dixieland

The cover’s lurid giant yellow and green costumes with oversized heads, plastered painted lips, and grotesque upturned eyes that reminded me as a child of demonic clowns. Beneath the artificial heads, White men’s faces poke out of cutouts, carrying over-large wooden forks and spoons. One of faces under the costume looks more like a child than a man. If there were liner notes or a narrative to this album, they have long since disappeared. Because the music is for Mardi Gras, the music is playful, clean, but the cover of the White men in costumes in the dark gives me a sinister feeling that I can’t shake. 

My parents went to New Orleans for their honeymoon in 1961, but strangely, my mom says they didn’t see any live music while they were there. Why did my dad want to bring my mother to New Orleans for their honeymoon, but then not take her to live performances of the music he loved? I wonder if he had wanted to see Dixieland jazz on their honeymoon, but because my mom was not interested, decided not to. Or perhaps this was a secret test, to see if he could shed his old bachelor self, just as he had quit smoking as he promised he would on the day they married.

                But when I look at this album cover, I’m reminded again how ominous everything looks. The oversized heads, the White men hiding behind them, waving their large utensils like weapons. The lurid grins on the masks presented to the public and the pale small men hiding behind them. Perhaps my dad let go of that part of himself because he wanted to protect my mom and us from a world he didn’t want us to know.

4. Dixieland From St. Louis with Sammy Garner and the Mound City Six (1958)

According to legendary music critic Nat Hentoff, Sammy Gardner was a St. Louis clarinetist who formed the Mound City Six band in the late 1940s. While regionally successful with a popular local TV series, the band chose not to leave St. Louis for bigger cities. Hentoff quotes Raymond Scott, the musical director of Everest Records, the label the album is recorded on. “I like the way they play because the intensity of their love for the music is carried over into their instruments.” As St. Louis was one of the cities that benefitted from the Great Migration, it’s not surprising that even an all-White band would embrace music whose origins are from the South. During his bachelor years, my dad lived in St. Louis for a while, and I imagine he bought this album when he lived there, possibly even seeing them live. My mom told me when he was single he took dance lessons on a ship in St. Louis, where he learned the waltz, two step, the box, polka, and the jitterbug, perhaps because he enjoyed dancing, but also as a way to meet women. After they married and had relocated to Florissant, Missouri, just outside St. Louis, my parents would go to that ship and dance, enjoying their newlywed life in the years before I was born. 

On the back of the album, Hentoff writes, “Perhaps the most immediately accessible and enjoyable form of jazz for someone new to the music is Dixieland.” As a self-taught student of the origins of jazz, I wonder, if my dad, as a self-taught student of the origins of jazz, had remained a bachelor for the next few years or fell in love with a different type of woman, if he would have continued his studies beyond the accessible Dixieland to the more challenging and contemporary forms of the day like Bebop. I doubt it. Even in his coolest bachelor period, my dad seemed somewhat conservative in his musical tastes, preferring to look back than engage with contemporary music. 

But he would only look back so far and so deep. I have to remind myself that when my dad lived in St. Louis, before and during the early years of their marriage, that he listened and danced to music that came from people who were legally not allowed into the spaces he inhabited. That he could enjoy this music of joy and pain without having to face the people who suffered for it. He could experience their pain mediated through albums, and join White bands and critics. He did not have to think much about how he’d arrived here, a descendent of enslavers, a recipient of the GI Bill, and of those who had not. 

He never had to look Black people in the eye.

5. Jazz Begins, Parade Music by the Young Tuxedo Brass Band (December 1958)

On the front: a brass band walks on a wide dirt street alongside barefoot women, children, and a few men dressed in vibrant pinks and light oranges dancing and laughing. On the back of the album are younger men, dressed again colorfully, one with an umbrella doing the second line, the group of musicians following the casket. The faces show joy in a country-like landscape. There are no White people in the frame. 

The songs are traditional melodies of going to (side one) and returning from (side two) the cemetery and include written and improvised music. According to the album’s copy, the tradition of funeral parade music went back to 18th century when enslaved people were allowed to bury the dead. “Brass bands represent a continuity from the 19th century when ancestors of several of the bands members played in groups that pre-dated even the original Tuxedo.” According to the website Funeral Wise, “the music and dancing celebrated the release from earthly life, which had, in the past, included the release from slavery.” The music then is a celebration of release as much as a mourning of death.

In 2007, when my father knew he would soon die from cancer, he gathered his grown children visiting from Virginia, Turkey, and South Korea, to discuss his funeral arrangements. He wanted to be cremated unless anyone had an objection to it. He didn’t want us to dwell on sad stories at his service but wanted instead happier ones. One of his last requests before he died was that “In the Sweet By and By” be played at his funeral. By the time he made that request, my dad was on morphine to dull the pain of his cancer eating away at his body. Hospice workers had told my mom that my dad’s death was probably a matter of days. He was asleep much more than he was awake. He’d stopped eating and was barely taking in water. I imagine that he remembered the song from his childhood, as it must have been sung at the funerals he’d attended at the Southern Baptist church in Possum Valley, Arkansas. I expect the famous chorus appealed to him:

“In the Sweet by in by /We shall meet on that beautiful shore.”

What does the subconscious carry, what tensions in our own life are just unresolved conflicts inherited from our ancestors? Just as my dad was drawn to the music of the formally enslaved, I wonder if he also chose that song to be sung at his funeral because it is a standard dirge played at New Orleans’ jazz funerals.

And while my dad’s funeral at the Clemmons Moravian church he was a member of had little in common with the street processions of the jazz funerals of New Orleans, my dad, who had told me he was ready to die, was certainly ready for his release.

6. The Legend of Bessie Smith (1958) sung by Ronnie Gilbert

Ronnie Gilbert was part of a folk band called The Weavers, which originally included Pete Seeger. While they were popular in the early 1950s, the band was blacklisted by the FBI during the McCarthy era. After the band disbanded, Gilbert, a White Jewish woman, embarked on a solo career, which included recording her only jazz album. Bessie Smith was a native of Chattanooga, Tennessee, where I moved right before my dad’s death in 2007. Years later, when I was writing a novel set in Chattanooga, I listened to her music on repeat. 

             Bessie Smith is the only singer I have my own memories of that aren’t tangled with grief over my dad. In this sense, my connection with this album isn’t as removed as it is from the other albums. This connection is not only based on my nostalgia for a fantasy of my dad in a time from before I was born but is also related to my direct experience with her music. 

              I wonder why my dad would buy an album of Bessie Smith songs sung by a White woman, rather than by Bessie Smith herself. I imagine that he may have wanted his experience with the music of the descendants of the enslaved to be mediated by White people—White critics, White musicians, White singers. For to engage directly with the pain our ancestors inflicted was something he was not prepared to do.

And here the two types of nostalgia converge. One, my nostalgia to know this person, my bachelor dad, a person I can imagine only from the artifacts he left behind. It is similar to my dad’s nostalgia for Dixieland jazz, which came from a time from before he was born, a time he could only learn about from the albums he listened to. The other nostalgia is my desire to connect to grief: the grief of the loss of my dad, the grief expressed as joy in those second lines following a casket, the grief of those forcibly enslaved, separated from their people and their land. 

The grief in those albums my dad played, the voices asking us to listen.