Kansas City Lightning (15 page)

The road to Kansas City probably begins with the popular nineteenth-century Philadelphia bandleader Frank Johnson, whose career predicted the vistas of later Negro big bands and represented the combination of the sophisticated and the primal that would be central both to jazz and
to ragtime, its immediate predecessor. Johnson embodied large cultural shifts that were taking place in America in his time, as African dispositions were absorbed into the context of public joy. Much attention has been paid to the loss of specific tribal traditions that marked this era, but that was less important than the set of attitudes that replaced those traditions. As Eileen Southern has documented in
The Music of Black Americans
, Negroes were influencing dance rhythms in America as early as the late eighteenth century, through their reinterpretations of the popular music of the time. As this writer observed in the anthology
Considering Genius
:

One of those musicians was Frank Johnson, who led marching bands up and down the East Coast in the early nineteenth century. By 1819, Southern notes, Frank Johnson's Colored Band was observed “distorting a sentimental, simple, and beautiful song, into a reel, a jig, or country-dance.” Johnson was a prototypical jazz musician, rearranging familiar music around surprising new rhythms. Like the golden age Negro jazz bands that played for dances across America in the first half of the twentieth century, Johnson and his band traveled the country—as far south as Richmond, Virginia, where one planter wrote of his ensemble, “who ever heard better dance music than this?” In 1838 he even toured England, receiving a silver bugle for his efforts when he played a Buckingham Palace command performance for Queen Victoria. Clearly those in power, down south or abroad, didn't allow their own bigotry to prevent them from having some dancing fun, or from getting the chance to hear a superior performer work his hard-earned skills and disciplined charisma on familiar instruments.

One hundred years would pass between Frank Johnson's success and the Kansas City swing scene that young Charlie Parker wanted so badly to join. In between came a parade of Negroes in American show business, emerging from rural and urban communities where local and traveling performers heard music inspired by belief in God, by the need for rhythms to get people through monotonous work, and by the desire to tell tales of love, blood, sex, blunder, mystery, disaster, and wonder. As soon as the Civil War ended, with the Confederate weeping and the Union rejoicing at Appomattox, the country started to win the west in earnest, and Negroes redoubled their efforts to develop a rich body of original music, dance, and humor—much of which reached its audience through the crucible of minstrelsy.

Those with a flair for performance and a will to invent, as well as an attraction to chance and adventure, took advantage of the thrilling mobility that their new physical freedom allowed. In the eyes of the law, at least, Negroes were no longer like children; they did not need to be taken care of; they did not need to be protected. To those who went into show business, the options seemed suddenly limitless. If they could not handle something, they could learn how; if they couldn't do that, it was still nobody's business what they did. They were as ready to take their lumps as any free person was. If one stumbled, that was too bad—but not bad enough for him to step away from the choices that came whenever one could make them. The right to fail was a fresh choice and one that they did not take for anything less than what it was. Being able to choose
yes
or
no
,
up
or
down
, was what it was all about. It was the ethos that mortared the bricks of the music they played and the way they chose to live, with an abiding respect for human individuality.

Before the South fell, a few minstrel shows featuring black performers had roamed the country, though none lasted very long. Only two Negroes are thought to have performed in the very popular burnt-cork revues: one was a dwarf, and the other was William Henry Lane, known as Master Juba. Juba was the greatest vernacular American dancer of his age, proving his superiority when he defeated John Diamond in an 1845 competition that presaged the dance band battles that came to prominence in the late 1920s. Juba introduced percussive patterns to the rhythm of the jig that might have been the first
professional
examples of Negro innovation in American dance. When he traveled to London in 1848, one dance critic wrote that he had never seen such

Juba set precedents both for black show business and for the attitudes that
would later make jazz what it was: a music ever in pursuit of vigor, variety, elasticity, mutation of movement, and potency of pattern. A music, that is, inclined to infinite plasticity.

Like Juba, the new black show-business people who emerged in the wake of Appomattox had moved beyond the slave condition of prized livestock that provided entertainment: they were
paid
. Audiences could see and hear
them
sing and dance. Though they used the convention of blackface, it was clear to all who paid more than superficial attention that their creative energy was coming directly from the authentic source—the same source the white minstrels themselves consistently recognized. The Negro minstrels took great pride in what they did, and for good reason. The material they performed was almost always their own; they took care with their own self-presentation, crafting individual costumes that conveyed their personalities; and they used their roles to create personal reputations. They wanted to be the best entertainers in the world.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the most ambitious of these performers were setting their sights higher: they wanted to become some of the best artists in the world.

THE WORK OF
the Negro band and private instructors, so important after the Civil War, brought a new emphasis on tone and discipline into music departments and homes. When Negro musicians were well taught, however, they were as often as not removed from the aesthetic bite and the sarcasm of the street life, where ribald satire, as well as the terrors and hurts of life lived hard and fast, found their ways into rhythm and tune. But the unexpected amalgamation of these two attitudes—the discipline of instruction and the salty posture of the streets—led to the creation of ragtime.

Ragtime was a turn-of-the-century craze that went national, then spread through the Western world. At heart it was an extension of Frank Johnson's habit of turning those lovely airs into reels, country dances, and jigs. Initially a sophisticated piano music, ragtime was first performed in honky-tonk situations where Negroes as low as snakes in wagon tracks were
the rule—pimps, hustlers, whores, gamblers, thugs, and murderers, either primped up bright and gaudy or as soiled on the outside as they were in their lowdown, froggy-bottom souls—and the music that emerged in their midst was a remarkable combination of high and low. The very fact that ragtime was first played on the piano means that it was a city music, not a collection of rural tunes performed on banjos or guitars by folk musicians.

The ragtime masters brought folk elements to celebratory, high-minded refinement by taking tunes they heard in the street and mixing them with the formal elements they had learned from private teachers and in schools. Another element in the mix was the era's marching band tradition—a part of street culture that was as respectable as it was popular—and the pioneers of ragtime borrowed both the exuberance of march music and the form's traditional three- to four-part structure. Since many of the original ragtime pieces were premiered in the red-light districts, and since the music lent itself naturally to the steps of the cakewalk, it's no surprise that much of the music was marked by a bittersweet joy. Gloom is bad for business and doesn't do much for courtship in the mobile environment of the dance hall.

There's another reason the music was so joyous: it was created in recognition of freedom. Ragtime represented people doing what they wanted with everything they liked and understood. The jaunty rhythm, syncopated and moving fresh ideas about the beat into piano music—the left hand a drum, the right a lyric, breakaway dancer—was not only fine for cakewalking, it was the contemporary myth in action. Slavery was behind Negroes; the cities were ahead, on the horizon, open to them in ways they hadn't been for their chattel forebears. The implications of this newfound freedom of choice were not overlooked or misunderstood by a people for whom choice had been the least available aspect of their experience. And black people in show business drew on that sense of liberation, every chance they could get, to define and direct what they did.

To the musicians, the prospect of available travel was a revelation. Even if the cars on the trains were segregated, that fact was secondary to the excitement of seeing one town after another, smelling the air affected by nature and local industry, hearing the accents of speech as they shifted from one place to another, coming to know the delicious specifics of recipes and seasoning in home cooking,
and recognizing the characters of various towns, counties, and states as expressed in the tunes, jokes, and tales. They noticed the ways each town lived one way during the sun's reign and another when the moon, the clouds, and the stars took over.

For these musicians, there were palpable dreams as well as good times to be had, private property, apartments, fine clothes, and pay—any salary at all, but enough to wish for with all one's might. One has only to look at the photographs of Scott Joplin and the others who wrote the music—at the confidence and mischief in their faces as they pose around a banner heralding their social club, suits and ties pressed, shoes gleaming, heads under derbies cocked at the angle of aristocracy—to see the sweetness of city life as they experienced it.

Like the upbeat movie musicals and screwball comedies of the 1930s, ragtime was welcomed by a public that recognized its national spirit acted out in the music's tartly elegant melodies and banjo syncopations—which had risen from slavery through the minstrel shows—creating that enjoyable tension between the steady and the unpredictable that is so essential to the American soul. It also offered the same kind of antidote to resigned dejection that the popular art of the Depression did. Ragtime was “the gayest, most exciting, most infectiously lilting music ever heard,” as Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis wrote in
They All Played Ragtime
. “When the first instrumental ragtime sheet music appeared in 1897, no costly, high-powered promotion was needed to put the music across . . . and within a year it seemed as if it had always been here. [It] was as healthily overt, as brimful of energy, as the barefoot American boy.”

Beneath that energy, though, there was piquancy and pathos. Ragtime was much more than an audible happy pill; at its best, it conveyed messages about standing up to life, taking its indifferent or intended blows, and learning to move forward with the indispensable grace of vitality. In it we hear the realization of folk potential, technical skill, and the technology of the day—the development of material from an oral culture into an art that was thoroughly conceived, arranged, and transcribed for the sheet music that was increasingly being printed, distributed, and stacked up in living-room piano benches across the country. It became a music for home entertainment in the time before radio, in the days
when American music was more like a democracy that was enjoying a high level of active participation.

At the forefront of ragtime was Scott Joplin, born in Texarkana, Texas, in 1868. Joplin, who had shown talent from childhood, took instruction from a German teacher before going out on the road as a teenager, making his living in one bawdy situation after another, picking up every kind of song and fragment of melody or rhythm that was out there, working what he could into his nightly repertoire, and storing away the rest. Joplin's travels foreshadow the life of professional musicians up through the 1950s: “His whole orbit of saloons, honkytonks, pool halls, poor restaurants, and the Forty-niner Camps—the traveling tent shows depicting the California gold-rush life and featuring the cancan dancer and the roulette wheel—was a world near the soil,” Blesh and Janis observe, a world where “Civil War songs, plantation melodies, jigs and reels, country dances, ballads, hollers, and work songs were still current coin.”