Ridiculous? No! (a month of rare photos)

Every day this month, I’m posting to Instagram photos and memorabilia from Birmingham, Alabama’s extraordinary — and, for the most part, unknown — jazz history, the subject of my current book-in-progress. I’ve been cracking away at this book for a few years and am getting ready at last to try to find it a good home for publication. (Wish me luck.) In the meantime, consider these photos a preview of much more to come. Here are the first five days of Instagram posts; to see the rest, please follow along on Instagram or Facebook. Let me know your faves as the month unfolds.

Dec. 31: Every day for the month of January, I’ll be posting a photo, or some other memorabilia, from the history of Birmingham jazz. I’m starting a day early, with this one: a matchbook from Harlem’s Ubangi Club, where the ‘Bama State Collegians landed their breakout New York gig. The Collegians were a bunch of musicians out of Birmingham who enrolled for college at Alabama State in Montgomery. Their band helped the school survive the Depression as they traveled the South and beyond, raising money and recruiting new students for the college. Soon after the Ubangi gig—where they backed the cross dressing, outrageous and raunchy Gladys Bentley—the Collegians cut their ties to Alabama State and became the Erskine Hawkins Orchestra, one of the most popular bands of the swing era. Many more images and history to come, all through January. Stay tuned.

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Jan. 1: Every day this month, I’m posting a photo from the history of Birmingham jazz. Here’s Ivory “Pops” Williams, grandfather to Birmingham’s historic jazz community. Regarded as the city’s first jazz musician, Pops (born in 1885) served as a crucial link between Birmingham and the larger world of music. He played with W.C. Handy, Bessie Smith, and the celebrated circus bandmaster, P.G. Lowery; he led the house band at Birmingham’s Hippodrome Theater; he co-founded the city’s first musicians union for African Americans (after being denied entry in the white local); and he served as mentor to Fess Whatley, Birmingham’s once legendary “Maker of Musicians.” Pops played violin, upright bass, tenor banjo, mandolin, cello, trumpet, trombone, and drums, and he was a great advocate for the use of stringed instruments—in classical music, in jazz, and in the classrooms of Birmingham’s segregated black schools. Like many musicians of his era, he played for the silent movies and, once sound came in and put him out of a job, he refused for the rest of his life to enter a movie theater. In the ‘40s her played the upright bass in Sun Ra’s Birmingham band; in the ‘50s and ‘60s he played with local bandleader Frank Adams at the Woodland Club and other local venues. He died in 1987, at the age of 102. He’s pictured here — courtesy the @alabamajazzhall of Fame — with his violin and two of his many dogs.

pops williams grave

Jan. 2: Every day this month I’m posting a photo from the history of Birmingham jazz. Here’s the grave of Ivory “Pops” Williams, who I wrote about yesterday, Birmingham’s first jazz musician and the grandfather to a fertile music community. Pops grew up with the city of Birmingham, witnessed the birth and development of jazz, and became a patriarch in his community. He lived to be 102. The words on his headstone (sadly, the stone is now broken): “His friends were his world.”

fess whatley grab

Jan. 3: This is John T. “Fess” Whatley, the legendary “Maker of Musicians,” the man at the center of the city’s jazz tradition. From 1917 to 1964, Fess led the band at Industrial High School (renamed A.H. Parker High School in the ‘40s), and his band room trained scores of professional musicians. Whatley’s students played in all the major black bands of the swing era—Ellington’s, Basie’s, Louis Armstrong’s, Cab Calloway’s, and more—and Birmingham gained a reputation among the nation’s top bandleaders as a reliable reservoir of talent. Fess also led the city’s first jazz band, the Jazz Demons, and for decades he provided music for the majority of the city’s elite “society” dances, both black and white. Stay tuned every day this month for more from Birmingham’s unsung jazz history.

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Jan. 4: Ridiculous? No! Every day this month I’m posting a photo from the history of Birmingham jazz. Huntington “Big Joe” Alexander was a powerful tenor sax player who left Birmingham to study at the Detroit Conservatory of Music and landed, in the mid-1950s, in Cleveland, where he became an icon in the local scene. Mostly forgotten today, he was a member of Sonny Blount’s (Sun Ra’s) innovative Birmingham band in the 1940s (it was Sun Ra who moved him from the alto sax to the tenor, to give him a “bigger” sound), and he’s considered a likely early influence on John Coltrane, with whom he played as members of Gay Crosse’s Good Humor Six. This standing $500 reward for any sax player who could “outblow” him drew many competitors to Rip’s Shangri La in Cleveland, where Big Joe played a long-running gig, but no challenger every succeeded in taking the money. Joe recorded his only album as bandleader, “Blue Jubilee,” in 1960. He died in 1970, at the age of 41, after a struggle with a debilitating heart condition. A jazz funeral was held in his honor.

Remember to follow my radio show, The Lost Child, on Instagram and/or Facebook for more photos, all this month. For all other sorts of updates — and for new writing, musings and music, plus occasional drawings — keep following this blog.

Also, please know you can support the next book by supporting the last book: Doc: The Story of a Birmingham Jazz Man was just issued in paperback by the University of Alabama Press. At $19.99, it’s a cool $15 cheaper than it used to be, which is great. And it contains personal reflections on all the musicians listed above: Doc Adams played with Fess Whatley, Sun Ra, Pops Williams, Erskine Hawkins, and Big Joe Alexander (his cousin). You can get the book online or, better yet, from your local book dealer. If you’re in Birmingham, join us for the paperback release party next Thursday night (January 10) at the Little Professor Bookcenter.

Happy new year. See you soon.

Found Family Photos

Before I knew her, my grandmother, Eloise McKerrall Mathews, had been a dancer. During a recent trip to my parents’ house in Montgomery, we found this box of very old photos — including these great ones of a young Eloise in some of her dancing costumes and poses. None of us remembers having seen these photos before.

We also found these newspaper clippings from April of 1909, details of a “Baby Opera” at Montgomery’s Grand Theatre. My grandmother, age 3, appeared with her brother Jack, age 4, and her cousin Carolyn, also 3. Someone has labeled this by hand: “First appearance in public.”

According to the lengthy(!) write-up in the Montgomery Advertiser, Eloise and Carolyn were dressed as “May Dolls” and Jack as a clown. The girls sang a tune called “School Days,” and the three of them together performed the “A. B. C. of the U. S. A.” For an encore they sang “Eat, Drink and Be Merry for Tomorrow You May Die.”

The Advertiser reports that throughout the night “There were on the stage all sorts of babies, dressed alike in every act.” In one scene, Eloise and Jack appeared as minister and maid of honor in a “Lilliputian wedding.” That’s my grandmother, in the middle, on the broom:

Speaking of lost-and-found photos, all the month of January I’ll be posting to Instagram daily photos from the fascinating history of Birmingham jazz. Follow @lostchildradio for some great images and anecdotes from the last hundred years; and follow this blog, if you’re not already, for occasional updates.

Happy New Year, everybody.

Book of Ancestors: Juliette Hampton Morgan

Juliette Hampton Morgan, the latest in my Book of Ancestors (a work in progress):

Juliette Hampton Morgan

Morgan is one of the many unsung heroes from behind the scenes of the Civil Rights Movement. Her story is inspiring and utterly tragic, her life one of the heartbreaking casualties of the era.

She grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, like me, but a couple of generations before I came along. For high school research papers, I spent time in the downtown library that’s named in her honor; I’d never noticed the library’s name, and I certainly never knew the story behind it.

There’s more fine print on this portrait than on most of my Book of Ancestors tributes; I wanted to get as much of this story on the page as I could fit, since there’s so much here to tell, so much that might otherwise be overlooked. So, here’s that fine print, in case you had trouble making it out, above:

Juliette Hampton Morgan (1914-1957): Montgomery Librarian & A Champion Of Justice * “One feels that history is being made in Montgomery these days…” – Letter to the editor, Montgomery Advertiser, Dec. 12, 1955. * A granddaughter of the Confederacy, born into Montgomery’s social elite – as an advocate for racial justice, she was vilified, shunned, and harassed. Morgan frequently protested injustice in letters to the editors of Alabama newspapers, she attended & organized interracial prayer meetings in Montgomery, and she argued for anti-lunching legislation, the elimination of the poll tax, and the end of segregation – all while friends & family abandoned her. “The cuts from old friends, the ringing telephone with anonymous voices, I know how it feels when butterflies in your stomach turn to buzzards.” In July of 1957, a cross was burned on her lawn; the next day she resigned from the library. That night, she took her own life. Today, the Montgomery central branch library is named in her honor. “The angels laid her away; may she rest forever in power.”

… And still, for lack of space, plenty more details had to be left out. There’s this: that white citizens of Montgomery demanded the library fire Morgan for her outspoken politics; and when the library refused — a notable stance, for that time and place — angry citizens burned their library cards in protest.

Think of that.

And there’s this: that Morgan suffered from panic attacks all her life and as a result couldn’t drive a car. Otherwise a woman of her social position wouldn’t have found herself relying daily on public transportation. But it was on those Montgomery buses, in the years leading up to that landmark boycott, that Morgan’s social consciousness found its essential cause. More than once, when she saw a black passenger mistreated, Morgan pulled the bus’s emergency brake and brought its wheels screaming to a halt. In one letter to the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, she took care to single out by name the few white drivers who treated their black passengers well (Mr. Alton Courtney, Mr. Eliot I. Newman); then she turned her pen angrily toward the others, those drivers who hurled slurs and insults and took their black patrons’ money, then sent them to the back entrance of the bus, only to shut their doors and speed away.

She compared the protestors in Montgomery to Thoreau and to Gandhi.

Some old friends declared her insane.

One night during the boycott, Martin Luther King spoke to a meeting of the Council of Human Relations in Montgomery. Juliette Morgan sat that night with Virginia Durr: another white woman, another descendent of privilege, and another outspoken advocate for change. A member of the racist White Citizens Council infiltrated the meeting, and Morgan recognized the man.

“You know,” she told Durr, “I feel like somebody is pointing a gun at me.”

Dr. King remembered Morgan in Stride Toward Freedom, his account of the boycott. “Miss Juliette Morgan,” he wrote, “sensitive and frail, did not long survive the rejection and condemnation of the white community.” Because here’s, tragically, what happened in the end. For a while Morgan stayed her pen – the library said they’d stand by her, but finally asked her to lay low with the letters – until in 1957 she wrote the editor of the Tuscaloosa News. Attempts to integrate the University of Alabama, her own alma mater, had erupted in violence from the local white community. The News publicly editor denounced the violence, and Morgan commended his stance in a private letter — which, with her permission, he printed in the paper.

In Montgomery, the sky fell. Since the library wouldn’t fire her, the city of Montgomery reduced the library’s funding, by exactly Morgan’s salary. Things started happening fast, and the story veered to its gut-wrenching end. The Klan burned its cross in Morgan’s yard. Morgan resigned from the job she loved. Then she took her own life.

In 1963, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Pete Seeger brought to Carnegie Hall in New York a program of the songs that he’d learned and sung in the mass meetings and marches down South. As he led the audience through “We Shall Overcome,” he introduced the final verse like this:

“The best verse,” he said,

was made up down in Montgomery, Alabama.
It says, “We are not afraid.”
And here you and I up here,
like every human being in the world,
We have been afraid.
But you still sing it!
We are not afraid.
We are not afraid.

In that last, best verse, the familiar someday of the refrain becomes, powerfully, today — “We are not afraid, to-day” — and somehow in the singing the singer is transformed. Because in belting it out that we’re unafraid, in pretending aloud that we’re fearless, we gain power. We become what we say we are, for at least as long as we’re singing.

When I learned about Juliette Morgan, this verse — born in Montgomery, like her — came to my mind. Morgan’s story’s end is heartbreaking, because finally that fear caught up with her, the consequences of her courage became too much for her to bear.

But the end of her story will never change this: that her courage along the way was profound, her example a lesson for us all.

Because there’s no bravery whatsoever in not being afraid. Real bravery means being terribly afraid, and acting anyway like you’re not. Because courage isn’t the absence of fear; it’s how you live in fear’s presence.

My heart breaks that Juliette Hampton Morgan didn’t make it through. But I’m grateful for what she did, and for who she was, while she was here.

Note: Most of what I’ve learned so far about Juliette Hampton Morgan comes from her entry in the Encyclopedia of Alabama or from this article in the Montgomery Advertiser, which quotes one of her letters to the editor in full. The exchange with Virginia Durr appears in Durr’s autobiography, Outside the Magic Circle, and the MLK quote appears in Stride Toward Freedom. After writing the paragraphs above, I ordered a copy of Morgan’s biography, Journey Toward Justice, by Mary Stanton. I’m about thirty pages in, and it’s a fascinating read.