Now Available: MAGIC CITY

Good news!

I’m thrilled to announce the publication of my book Magic City: How the Birmingham Jazz Tradition Shaped the Sound of America.

Officially the book is out on November 28, but pre-orders have already begun trickling out to mailboxes and stores. Please take a moment to order a copy, anywhere you get your books. (As always, I recommend your local independent bookstore, or else this good company: bookshop.org.)

If you happen to live in Birmingham, Alabama, please join us for the book release party at the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame on Saturday, Dec. 2. I’ll also be speaking at a public event hosted by the Birmingham Historical Society on Dec. 3. In the meantime, I’m lining up some book events for the new year, here in Alabama and beyond; if you’d like to host an event in your town, please just shoot me a message: burgin@southernmusicresearch.org.

Here’s a synopsis from the publisher:

Magic City is the story of one of American music’s essential unsung places: Birmingham, Alabama, birthplace of a distinctive and influential jazz heritage. In a telling replete with colorful characters, iconic artists, and unheralded masters, Burgin Mathews reveals how Birmingham was the cradle and training ground for such luminaries as big band leader Erskine Hawkins, cosmic outsider Sun Ra, and a long list of sidemen, soloists, and arrangers. He also celebrates the contributions of local educators, club owners, and civic leaders who nurtured a vital culture of Black expression in one of the country’s most notoriously segregated cities. In Birmingham, jazz was more than entertainment: long before the city emerged as a focal point in the national civil rights movement, its homegrown jazz heroes helped set the stage, crafting a unique tradition of independence, innovation, achievement, and empowerment.

Blending deep archival research and original interviews with living elders of the Birmingham scene, Mathews elevates the stories of figures like John T. “Fess” Whatley, the pioneering teacher-bandleader who emphasized instrumental training as a means of upward mobility and community pride. Along the way, he takes readers into the high school band rooms, fraternal ballrooms, vaudeville houses, and circus tent shows that shaped a musical movement, revealing a community of players whose influence spread throughout the world.

While I’m here, I’ll acknowledge that this website and blog have been dormant for quite a long time now. I started the site in 2016, largely with the purpose of documenting the development of this book-in-progress. (In 2016, the book had already been five years in progress — so this thing has been quite a while in the making.) A lot has happened since I last posted anything here: for one thing, I started a nonprofit, the Southern Music Research Center, which officially launched this April with the debut of our website, a growing online archive full of rescued recordings, oral histories, rare photos, and other artifacts from a wide range of music communities and traditions. I hope you’ll take some time to explore our archival collections at southernmusicresearch.org. Among other things, you’ll find lots of material there related to my research on Birmingham jazz: photos, newspaper ads, recordings, interviews, funeral programs, magazines, ephemera, and more.

Basically, there’s a lot to celebrate and to explore. I hope you’ll check out the site, and the book. Let me know what you think, and thanks.

— Burgin

Finally, a beginning.

So,

I’ve been working on this one book for the last few years, and most of the time it seems like it’s never going to end. Some chapters and sentences have undergone ten and twenty and almost certainly thirty drafts, and when I reread them for the hundred-and-fiftieth time all I see is “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” I imagine a curious Glory leafing through the huge stacks of pages that are scattered around our house and discovering with horror the same familiar text repeated ad infinitum. (Don’t worry, The Shining analogy ends there, but it’s enough already to be terrible: the discovery that our hero has long forgotten how to write anything at all, has lost his mind in the process, and has spent all this damn time doing nothing — all of that is horror enough.)

Much to most of the book exists by now in draft form, but I’ve put off writing the intro(!) all this time, painfully aware that I don’t have a book — and can’t sell a book, either — until I have a beginning.

And then today, when I least expected it, a breakthrough!

I don’t want to give too much of it away: but the first two paragraphs of this thing will take place in Tuxedo Junction, Alabama, in the summer of 1985. And the next two paragraphs will take place at — of all places — Birmingham’s The Nick, in the summer of 1988.

After that, and a few more introductory remarks, the book proceeds as planned all along: rewinding to the close of the 19th century and proceeding forward to the close of the 20th.

The new opening scenes make explicit, too, the most essential of the book’s themes: more even than music or race or Birmingham or education or segregation or jazz or any other thing that this book is also about, it’s above all a book about home: about what “home” means, and doesn’t mean, and might mean.

I couldn’t be happier to have finally found my beginning.

Stay tuned;

and thanks.

— Burgin

Table(s) of Contents

I said when I started this blog that one big purpose of the site was to complement my book in progress, my history of Birmingham jazz. I promised to share updates and outtakes, excerpts and footnotes, and to shed some light on the daily(ish) struggle of getting this thing onto paper, and (eventually) out to the world.

I haven’t posted a word about the book since then, so I thought I’d finally get to it today—and a table of contents seemed like a good, simple place to start. Sooner or later I’ll tell you more about why I’m writing this book, why I think the story’s so important, and what the overall gist of it is. In short, for now, it’s the story of how the unlikely city of Birmingham, Alabama helped shape the world of jazz—and of how jazz helped shape the city of Birmingham.

It’s a story that, for the most part, just hasn’t been told—at least not widely. People here in Birmingham don’t know it; neither do jazz lovers elsewhere. The book covers more or less a full century, revealing how the music programs of the city’s segregated black schools became a training ground for legions of jazz sidemen, arrangers, and a few notable bandleaders. I explore how a unique tradition of jazz musicianship helped generations of local players craft identities and experiences that transcended the limitations of the Jim Crow South—and examine how Birmingham players contributed actively, if largely from the sidelines, to the national culture of jazz. At the heart of the book is the swing era of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, but we see also how Birmingham helped beget bebop—and how one Magic Citizen, the iconoclastic, otherworldly Sun Ra, pushed jazz to its furthest limits, even as he drew from his own Birmingham roots.

My working table of contents follows. The chapter titles may be a little cryptic on their own; my notes in the margins add a little bit of detail, but a table of contents is inherently a sort of tease. All but two of these chapters exist in some form now, though some are further along than others. The book title you see here—Magic City Bounce and Swing—is one I intend to discard once I finally find something better. I’ve been brainstorming for a few years now and for the life of me can’t come up with a title I like. I’ve searched song lyrics and quotes for the right phrase, and I keep coming up with nothing. I invite your title suggestions in the comments.

table-of-contents

While we’re on the subject, an aside:

I spend a lot of time making lists of things, and the lists I’ve always enjoyed making most seem to be tables of contents. When I was a kid I was always making little books and filling them with stories, and always kicking them off on page one with a handy table of contents. I recently came across a little blank book my mom brought me home from the drugstore once, which I filled with two tiny novels: “Who’s Who?” and “The Christmas Mess.” It’s signed and dated 1988, so I guess I was eleven. It’s a pretty ambitious work, and it starts, of course, with a table of contents. For “Who’s Who” the TOC reads:

Wadsworth – 1
Spies – 9
The Switch – 17
Problems – 23
Vampire Bob – 41
Trouble – 47
The Plan – 53
Goodbye, Spies – 59
Pop’s Diary – 63

Who wouldn’t want to read on, after that promise of things to come?

By seventh grade I was filling up notebooks and floppy discs with more tables of contents for more books I wanted to write or was secretly writing. In seventh and eighth grade I discovered real, written comedy: somehow before the internet ever happened, I’d managed to get my hands on copies of Monty Python’s two original Flying Circus books, published in the ‘70s, and Steve Martin’s absurdist collection Cruel Shoes, as well as The Complete Prose of Woody Allen, a compendium of Without Feathers and Getting Even and Side Effects. (I remember the Woody Allen book was on the sale table at Walden Books at the Montgomery Mall for $7.99 in a massive hardback, and I got a beat-up little blue and tan copy of Cruel Shoes at Montgomery’s one used-book store (that’s where I got Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory, too—see a previous post about that). I don’t know where I got the Monty Python books, maybe from a Signals catalogue or something similarly nerdy.)

Needless to say, my tables of contents reflected what I was writing, which reflected what I was reading: so in those days it was short, absurdist sketches and and silly comic essays. Every time I produced a few new pieces, I’d rearrange it all with a new table of contents.

In high school I discovered seriousness and poetry and I wrote many more tables of contents, outlining both my current writings and my future, unwritten—but carefully outlined—ambitions.

There were other tables, to be sure, in the years that followed. But jumping ahead to the table at hand:

Frank “Doc” Adams and I published our book Doc in 2012, and some months before it was done I wrote out my first table of contents for the book I’m writing now, the book outlined above. I’ve tweaked and rewritten this table of contents a million times. The contents and sequence have changed very little since I first charted it out: as the project has grown some chapters have split into half, or into three, but the overall flow sticks close to my initial conception. Sometimes I have to remind myself that rewriting the table of contents in my notebook, with minor adjustments, does not constitute writing, does not make a day’s work. Sadly, frankly, it’s on some days all I can do. Its’ tempting to let list-making stand in for true creative productivity; I remind myself often to resist the urge.

I might add this uncomfortable confession: that writing this book for so long I finally appreciate—I mean really appreciate—The Shining, a movie I’ve always loved but never before thought relatable. It’s not a happy revelation. I image Glory, horror-stricken, flipping through pages and pages of what I’ve written so far and discovering it’s all the same thing, over and over again. The same table of contents, the same chapters, the same sentences, revealing in their endless repetition my descent into madness. All work and no play… My own stomach sinks when I pick up my latest print-out: haven’t I typed out and held these words in my hands a thousand times already? I flip through my notebooks and find uncountable iterations of the same basic sequence and titles: Introduction; Roots; An Industrial Education …

I do make progress, though, little by little. And I stand proudly by my table—as the contents themselves slowly catch up to its promise.

(In the meantime, please: somebody send me a title.)