1920 (12 page)

Had she been able to survive fourteen more years, to the nice, round, virtually impossible number of 100, she would not have felt her life's struggles so sharply.

BY THE WINTER OF
1920, American women had massed into an irresistible force and knew well their strength. It was just a matter of time, and not much more of it at that. Stanton, Mott, Stone, and Anthony would have been amazed that so equitable a request had taken so long to be recognized. A “founding document” of its own, it had proven much more controversial than the original of those papers.

Still, one of the problems faced by the early leaders of the movement, the indifference, or even opposition, of so many females toward voting, existed well into the twentieth century. As John Milton Cooper, Jr. writes in
Pivotal Decades: The United States, 1900–1920
, “Both the organized women's movement and the colleges drew from economically better-off, native-born whites, usually from the cities and larger towns of the Northeast and Midwest. Their concerns struck little response among poorer women, particularly blacks, newly arrived immigrants, and farm wives and daughters in the South and West.”

For the accomplishments of their own lifetimes, Stanton, Mott, Stone, and Anthony must be credited, as much as any women alive in 1920, for bringing about the Nineteenth Amendment. Ironically, though, when it finally passed that summer after a brutally corrupt campaign in Tennessee, women would have no choice but to join their husbands and other male voters in dismissing from office the first—and up to the time of this writing, only—female to serve as “president” in the history of the United States.

A
COLD FEBRUARY TURNED INTO A
March that started out even worse. In the Northeast, snowfalls made highways and railroad lines impassable, and eighty-mile-an-hour winds knocked down trees and the poles that suspended electrical wires; as they fell, they blocked the frozen streets, stranding thousands at home in Maine and Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire. Pedestrians in New York were blown off balance as they walked, even though the canyon walls of skyscrapers should have protected them. As far south as Washington, D.C., temperatures sank to levels that most people had never felt before.

But springtime finally made its appearance in 1920, earlier in New Orleans than in New England, of course, and that was when the crowds started getting bigger again at the clubs where Louis Armstrong led his band by playing a beat-up old five-dollar cornet he had bought in a pawnshop. He did not make much money yet. He did not live on the right side of town yet. He did not even live in the right town. But he was closing in on all of those goals.

“We were
all
poor,” he later wrote of those days. “The privies [the toilets] were out in a big yard, one side for the men and one side for the women.” His neighbors were “churchpeople, thieves, prostitutes, and lots of children. There were bars, honky-tonks, and saloons.” And there was one night in particular, young Louis recalled, when “a woman hollered out into the yard to her daughter. She said (real loud), ‘You, Marandy, you'd better come into this house, you laying out there with nothing on top of you but that thin nigger.' Marandy said, ‘Yassum.'”

The blues
had
to be born in a place like New Orleans. “Chastized as the devil's music” by the pure of heart but weak of knowledge, it was, in fact, just the opposite. “Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation” asked an article in the
Ladies' Home Journal
, then proceeded to answer in the righteous, but erroneous, affirmative.

In his definitive
The History of Jazz
, Ted Gioia relates that jazz did not begin in New Orleans's red-light district, the infamous Storyville, but in the city's Baptist churches. Says banjoist Johnny St. Cyr, “Those Baptist rhythms were similar to the jazz rhythms, and the singing was very much on the blues side.” And trombonist Kid Ory, who would later figure importantly in Armstrong's life, believes that “[Buddy] Bolden [believed by some to have been America's first real jazz instrumentalist], got most of his tunes from the Holy Roller Church, the Baptist church on Jackson and Franklin. I know that he used to go to that church, but not for religion, he went there to get ideas on music.”

But like children leaving home to see the wider world, in the early twentieth century jazz became a passenger riding the rails, the music too undertaking a journey, finding its way to bigger cities where African-Americans were living the lowdown life, and to the occasional small town where poverty was so plentiful, it might as well have been a crop. For instance, cotton, the picking of which was sufficiently onerous that only blacks would do it, and for pennies a day and still end up owing the boss for food and other supplies; the picking of which would soon find itself with not nearly enough hands.

As for Louis, he had his eyes on Chicago, where the real tunes were being played these days. The best musicians were heading there, including many from New Orleans. In baseball terms, the Crescent City was the minor leagues—Triple-A ball, the top of the rung, but still the minors.

Chicago was the majors. It was bigger, more diverse, a more expansive environment for the new music than its birthplace, in large part because blacks were freer in the North than in the South and their music could not help but reflect the lack of restrictions. Jazzmen were pouring in not only from New Orleans, but from the Mississippi Delta, the cotton fields of Alabama—from points all over the South. Anyone could sit in with anyone else at any club at any time—the more the merrier, yes; but of greater importance, the more who played the music, the better for both its evolution and its spread. As Southern musicians settled near Lake Michigan and joined in the party, jazz started to become a new kind of music, separating from its roots in the blues with something distinct and previously unknown resulting from the process, something purely American but a product created purely by American outsiders, by Americans whose dreams hadn't come true and never would, not unless they told the tale of their sorrows and joys with just the right notes, just the right beat, just the right feeling. And even then there were no guarantees.

Louis Armstrong, though, had some magic in him. He was only eighteen at the time in 1920 but was the year's boy wonder, already becoming a jazz master, even without musicians of Chicago caliber sitting in to influence him, urge him on. Always a prodigy, Armstrong was remodeling jazz into something that he could play like no one else. The influences on him could not have been more varied than just a neighborhood Baptist church. As Lucy Moore points out, they included the rhythms and melodies that were in the very air of New Orleans: “the mournful energy of the freed slaves' blues; the calypso rhythms of the West Indies; the syncopated beat of plantation banjo music, known as ragtime; the mysticism of Negro spirituals, the lyricism and sophistication of the Creole tradition; and the local love of marching brass bands—fused on the streets into an entirely new type of music.”

But Armstrong's was the newest of all. Biographer Laurence Bergreen writes that his subject was his own inspiration, his own source of encouragement. “Satchmo,” short for “Satchel Mouth,” a tribute to the size of his opening,

“entered just a fraction behind the melody,” as he told [his second wife] Lil, and then caught up to the other musicians
and finally got out in front of them. … Sure, it was “wrong” by the standards of classical music, but in jazz, with its relaxed tempos and polyphony, the technique added tension to the music, as the ear waited for the soloist to enter. In Louis's hands, this was more than just a gimmick; he used it to imply notes that carried as much musical meaning as the actual notes. His horn engaged the ear and the mind, making the listener hear things that were only suggested, never stated. Eventually, he learned to alternate between the melody and his variations on it, until the melody gradually disappeared behind the notes suggesting it, and the ear supplied what his horn left out. His method was rebellious, yet it conformed to a ruthless inner logic. He embroidered and invented tunes within the tune, rhythms within the rhythm.

The result was that he “transformed whatever piece he happened to be playing into an extension of his psyche,” and, as it turned out, his psyche would soon become the national rage.

But when?

Patience, he told himself; patience. He might have been but a teenager in the spring of 1920, but already the cats knew about him in Chicago; some had heard him in his hometown, and their amazement quickly turned to the more solid foundation of respect. They not only spread the word about him up North, but belted out their own versions of Louis's licks.

It would just be a matter of time until he got the right offer and joined them. He knew it. What he did not know was that two more years of waiting were ahead, although he would later say he had not minded. He already
was
New Orleans, in most of the ways that mattered, was already leading the way in Chicago—and that wasn't bad for someone his age.

When Kid Ory headed North from the bayou in 1920, his departure opened up the Southern throne for Louis. But before the Kid left, in a rite of passage, he gave his successor some advice. The Kid told Satchmo to “‘put a new piece together. Words and music. Even put in a little dance.' The song,” Bergreen continues, “was an unashamedly filthy thing called, variously, ‘Keep Off Katie's Head' or ‘Take Your Finger Outta Katie's Ass.'
When Louis sang this to a packed house at Pete Lala's one night, ‘Man it was like a sporting event. All the guys crowded around and they like to carry me up on their shoulders.'”

The cornetist Joe Oliver was nicknamed “King,” and that was precisely his rank in the Chicago blues scene. It was he who had summoned Ory to join him, and in 1922 he would call for Louis, waiting those extra two years, perhaps, because he wanted more time at the top. Once Louis came to Chicago, the city would eventually be his every bit as much as New Orleans was now, and the King knew it. It would be a momentous event, a transfer of power. The King was in no hurry.

But like Ory, Oliver would be gracious. It was the music that mattered, after all, the music more than the man, and both Oliver and Ory could see that the music was about to belong almost solely to Satchmo. An entire generation and more would grow up trying to copy his sound. To a man, they would fail. No one can copy a legend. From Terry Teachout, another Armstrong biographer:

He really did perform with everyone from Leonard Bernstein to Johnny Cash. He really did end his shows (some of them, anyway) by playing 250 or more high Cs capped with a high F. He wrote the finest of all jazz autobiographies—without a collaborator. The ranks of his admirers included Kingsley Amis, Tallulah Bankhead, Jackson Pollock, Jean Renoir, and Le Corbusier (“He is mathematics, equilibrium on a tightrope. He is Shakespearean!”). Virgil Thomson called him “a master of musical art.” Stuart Davis, whose abstract paintings were full of jazz-inspired images, cited him as a “model of greatness.” Is it any wonder, then, that so many musicians longed to play the way he played and sing the way he sang? It was no accident that they usually referred to Armstrong not as “Satchmo,” his own favorite nickname, but as “Pops.” He was the father figure of jazz, and what his children wanted was to
be
him, or at least come as close as they possibly could.

But Armstrong was not merely different, an exception among exceptions. Most other men and women of his race lived a different life, a life that
remained the same from cradle to grave—and such a short, hard period of time it seemed. It was the blues that they lived, never able to play it. It was the blues that they lived; they would never make it to jazz. For Armstrong and a fortunate few others, it was the music to which they would devote their lives in willing servitude—not the white massah, no more of the white massah standing in cotton fields with a whip in one hand and a cooling drink in the other. But he was about to become a rarity, just like old-fashioned church music once the jazzmen got hold of it.

ACCORDING TO GOVERNMENT FIGURES,
111,888 men and women of African descent in the United States made their way northward in 1920. But they were just the latest in a much larger number of internal immigrants. As James R. Green tells us, “The black population in Northern cities grew by 35 percent between 1910 and 1920 and topped 100,000 in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago. In other industrial cities, this population multiplied dramatically, by over 600 percent in Detroit and over 300 percent in Cleveland. The number of blacks working in manufacturing increased by 40 percent in the same decade, while black employment in agriculture dropped by 25 percent.”

African-Americans were escaping from conditions they found intolerable, assuming that their lives could only be better at the top of the country than they had been at the bottom. In the South, everything from public toilets to hospitals, from parks to schools, was segregated, and those who dared step across the lines of racial separation faced reprisals from the law and, worse, from the Ku Klux Klan, which was in places a law unto itself. It has been claimed that the Klan gained more than a million members during the twenties, a number that is probably much too high. Nonetheless, it
is
true that as African-Americans departed from the legally sanctioned racism of the South for hopes of welcome in the North, the Klan was close behind, making a migration of its own, determined not to let the black man escape its own particular brand of justice.