The Game Changer

by A. G. Lafley

  I Remember

  Clyde Bernhardt, taken on his eightieth birthday, July 11, 1985. (Photo by Dennis Chalkin Studios, New York City.)

  I Remember

  Eighty Years of Black Entertainment, Big Bands, and the Blues

  An autobiography by jazz trombonist and blues singer Clyde E. B. Bernhardt as told to Sheldon Harris

  Copyright © 1986 by Clyde Bernhardt and Sheldon Harris

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Bernhardt, Clyde E. B.

  I remember.

  Bibliography: p.

  Includes index.

  1. Bernhardt, Clyde E. B.2. Jazz musicians—United States—Biography. I. Harris, Sheldon. II. Title.

  ML419.B298A3 1985 788′.2′0924 [B] 85-26355

  ISBN 0-8122-8018-0 (alk. paper)

  ISBN 0-8122-1223-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  Contents

  Illustrations

  Foreword by John F. Szwed

  Preface by Sheldon Harris

  Introduction and Acknowledgments

  1. The Beginning

  2. Troubled Times

  3. The Influential Years, 1916–1923

  4. Bill Eady and His Ellwood Syncopators, 1923–1924

  5. Tillie Vennie’s Orchestra, 1925–1926

  6. Odie Cromwell’s Wolverine Syncopators, 1926

  7. Charles C. Grear’s Original Midnite Ramblers, 1927

  8. Henry P. McClane’s Society Orchestra, 1928

  9. Herbert Cowens’ Orchestra, 1928

  10. Richard Cheatham’s Orchestra, 1928

  11. The Whitman Sisters’ Show, 1928–1929

  12. Dinah and His Orchestra, 1929

  13. Honey Brown’s Orchestra (Willie Wilkins’ Band), 1929–1930

  14. Ray Parker’s Orchestra, 1930–1931

  15. King Oliver’s New Orleans Creole Jazz Band, 1931

  16. Marion Hardy and His Alabamians, 1931–1932

  17. Billy Fowler and His Society Orchestra, 1932–1933

  18. Ira Coffey and His Walkathonians, 1933–1934

  19. Vernon Andrade and His Society Orchestra, 1934–1937

  20. Edgar Hayes’ Orchestra, 1937–1942

  21. Jay McShann’s Kansas City Orchestra, 1942–1943

  22. Cecil X. Scott’s Orchestra, 1943–1944

  23. Luis Russell’s Orchestra, 1944

  24. Claude Hopkins’ Orchestra, 1944

  25. The Bascomb Brothers’ Orchestra, 1945

  26. The Blue Blazers, 1946–1948

  27. Luis Russell’s Orchestra, 1948–1951

  28. Joe Garland’s Society Orchestra, 1952–1970

  29. Hayes Alvis and His Pioneers of Jazz, 1972

  30. The Harlem Blues and Jazz Band, 1972–1979

  31. The Legends of Jazz, 1979–1986

  Coda

  Discography

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  Illustrations

  Clyde Bernhardt on his eightieth birthday, July 11, 1985.

  1. A family reunion in Allentown, Pa., May 1, 1948.

  2. Mama bought this house from Sears, Roebuck in 1905.

  3. I used to shine shoes on the streets of Albemarle, N.C., 1915.

  4. This is the tree that my Papa died under, New London, N.C., Oct. 27, 1915.

  5. Mr. and Mrs. Rufus G. Kluttz in Gold Hill, N.C., 1914.

  6. The great blues singer Madame Gertrude Rainey.

  7. This is how Badin, N.C., looked in 1919 when I used to deliver telegrams.

  8. William “Bill” Eady.

  9. Tillie and her Toilers at the State Theater, Harrisburg, Pa., Jan. 1927.

  10. Odie Cromwell.

  11. Grear’s Original Midnite Ramblers at the Oasis Ballroom, Michigan City, Ind., July 1927.

  12. Henry McClane.

  13. The Lafayette Theater in Harlem.

  14A–B. Two advertisements for the famous Whitman Sisters’ show.

  15. Clyde Bernhardt, May 1929, St. Louis, Mo.

  16. Rare photo of the famous Whitman Sisters’ company.

  17. Honey Brown’s orchestra at the Bamboo Inn, New York City, 1929.

  18. Bandleader Ray Parker had a good reading band.

  19. King Oliver and his New Orleans Creole Jazz Band, New York, Mar. 1931.

  20. Bandleader Billy Fowler.

  21. Advertisement for Billy Fowler’s orchestra.

  22. Ira Coffey and his Walkathonians, Camden, N.J., 1933.

  23. Clyde Bernhardt in 1934.

  24. Bandleader Vernon Andrade.

  25. The great Edgar Hayes band of 1937.

  26. The Edgar Hayes orchestra in Copenhagen, Denmark, Mar. 1938.

  27A–B. Both sides of musical program used by Edgar Hayes’ orchestra.

  28. Bill Robinson, the greatest of all black tap dancers.

  29. Jay McShann.

  30. Clyde Bernhardt, Minneapolis, Minn., July 15, 1943.

  31. Cecil Scott’s orchestra at the Ubangi Club, New York City, Dec. 24, 1943.

  32. Luis Russell.

  33. Newspaper publicity for the Club Plantation, St. Louis, Mo., Aug. 1944.

  34. Claude Hopkins.

  35. Dud Bascomb and his orchestra at the Savoy Ballroom, Jan. 1945.

  36. In 1946 my Blue Blazers worked the Greymore, Portland, Me.

  37. Publicity photo of Clyde Bernhardt taken in New York City, Sept. 18, 1946.

  38. Advertisement for Smalls Paradise, May 31, 1947.

  39. Clyde Bernhardt, Baltimore, Md., Feb. 18, 1949.

  40. Hayes Alvis.

  41. Jay Cole and Dr. Albert Vollmer.

  42. The Harlem Blues and Jazz Band in rehearsal, 1975.

  43. The legendary Princess White at the age of ninety-four.

  44. The Harlem Blues and Jazz Band at the Pizza Express Jazz Club, London, England, May 16, 1977.

  45. Program cover for the Stuttgart Jazz Society, June 1978.

  46. Barry Martyn and his Legends of Jazz, Helsinki, Finland, Nov. 6, 1983.

  47. The greatest thrill of my life was to greet President Ronald Reagan at the White House.

  48. Clyde Bernhardt and book collaborator Sheldon Harris.

  Foreword

  The autobiographies of jazz musicians are few in number, and where they exist, often hard to find. A true fugitive literature. But their scarcity is surely not an indicator of their lack of interest or merit, for some (such as Sidney Bechet’s Treat It Gentle, Charles Mingus’s Beneath the Underdog, and Mezz Mezzrow’s Really the Blues) were warmly received in literary circles when they first appeared. And the European and American publics have always been fascinated by the role of artist-outsider, especially where they perceive the underworld to be involved. Books and films like Dorothy Baker’s Young Man With a Horn have something of the status of contemporary folk epics, and turn up in new manifestations with every generation—most recently in Josef Skvorecky’s novels of wartime Czech jazz life, The Bass Saxophone and The Cowards. Their fugitiveness is better explained by the fact that jazz musicians, especially black jazz musicians (like black athletes), normally choose to speak through their own strengths: their arts. But when they do get coaxed into writing the result is almost always quite remarkable, and the basis for concerns much larger than those they describe.

  In the West the idea of the universality of the black experience is a subtext of the work of Twain, Melville, Mailer, and a surprising number of writers in American literature. In part, this was one of many escape routes for late nineteenth and twentieth century artists from industrialization and the rise of the middle class. But there was also a special attraction in the life and manner of the black jazz musician, the double alienation of artist and color. Whatever it might be as an oc
cupation, it was perhaps the first truly nonmechanical metaphor for the twentieth century. Not since the English Gentleman, with his modality of poise and authority, has such an image so dominated the world. Some abstraction or other of the lives of jazz musicians and their followers now gives shape to the mores of street punks and media executives; it informs the muscles of professional dancers as well as the timing of stand-up comics; and it feeds the languages and moves of fashion designers, basketball players, soldiers, and teenagers. Now, whether one has heard of Charlie Parker or not, one inherits a notion of cool, an idea of well-etched individuality, a certain angle of descent.

  Given the lack of documentation of the music, jazz autobiographies might justify their existence by being merely lists of names and places, as evocations of artistic periods; but fortunately they are also characteral accounts, sprinkled with underplayed tragedies and lightly articulated triumphs. Survival stories is what they are, and if they are often written in a peculiarly cool middle distance from the richness of the events they witness, that too is part of the story. As one critic said of bassist Red Callender’s autobiography, Unfinished Dream, in jazz, the survivor’s secret is to remain incurious.

  Other writers are often drawn to jazz writing, for there is a unique aesthetic strength to the musicians’ autobiographies. Jason Berry makes a case for the existence of a genre which he calls jazz literature, a body of prose grounded in the music of Afro-American speech, a writing as heavily speech-inflected as black music itself, rooted as it is ultimately in West African tonal languages. The prose cadences of Jelly Roll Morton’s autobiography (published as Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll) were revealed to be more than rhetorically musical when the world finally heard the recorded Library of Congress interviews on which Lomax had based the book: Morton had quite literally played his autobiography, seated at a piano, foot tapping, his speech measured by accompanying chords. Similarly, Bunk Johnson’s brief but eloquent life history came out in antiphonal structure, his statements repeated, call-and-response fashion, signaling the music itself by analogy. And the great Sidney Bechet overlapped his phrases in subtle waves of text which evoked the improvised polyphony of New Orleans jazz. In all jazz autobiographies it is possible to hear independent voices, for in the rules of Afro-American aesthetic discourse, every person’s sound should be distinctive, whether on a horn or on paper; every tub should rest, one might say, on its own bottom.

  From such roots, jazz literature grows outward to tangle in other orally structured writing of the twentieth century: Jean Toomer’s Cane, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, LeRoi Jones, and, by extension, Faulkner and Kerouac.

  Clyde Bernhardt’s voice is in this root tradition, and mimes the clarity and precision he brought to his playing. But what he gives us most of all is a memory uniquely unclouded by fashion and change. Bernhardt, like many other musicians of his generation, was a sort of interior immigrant, with experiences that resonate with those who came from Europe and elsewhere. Stalking the landscape in search of a vocation, scuffling on the band trails, he managed to find a way to make a career in jazz stretch over virtually its entire history. From this he offers up a vision of music that is almost epic in scope, reaching from turn-of-the-century small town musicianship and regional styles to global influences; from the warm networks of kin and friends to the exigencies of racial etiquette in Nazi Germany. He describes rural dances in the South; house rent parties in New York City, and the early days of recording and broadcasting; life in the pit bands, Harlem fashion, in the 1920’s, prohibition and the mob. He conjures up long forgotton bands like that of Edgar Hayes, and presents fresh, pre-bebop sketches of the young Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.

  Among his most affecting portraits are those of King Oliver and Ma Rainey. Oliver the band leader is chiefly known to us through the eyes of his young protege, Louis Armstrong, and so we have come to think of him as an avuncular burgher. But from Bernhardt we get a glimpse of the gritty side of the man, and a sense of what it took to lead a successful black band in America during the early 1900’s. With Ma Rainey we see a detailed account of the texture of travelling tent shows, with their exotic dancers, chorus lines and flash performances. Throughout, there is an odd sense of reverse deja vu, what with singers wearing glowing white gloves and country comics sporting too-short trousers with exposed white sox, a la Michael Jackson of the 1980’s; and the stop-and-go dance instruction songs of Ma Rainey echo down to today in the Go-Go bands of the District of Columbia.

  Clyde Bernhardt is writing of the past, but almost never indulges himself in exercises in crypto-memory: if he raises the dead, it’s only to serve the living, not to pontificate nostalgically. He knows where things belong historically, and he tells us without odious distinctions. This, plus the fineness of detail, the fullness of description, and the pleasure in drawing connections in Afro-American traditions—we’re not likely to ever see the equal of this for jazz again.

  John Szwed

  Yale University

  Preface

  Without a doubt, Clyde Bernhardt is an exceptional man.

  During the preparation of my earlier book, Blues Who’s Who: A Biographical Dictionary of Blues Singers, I interviewed many singers, musicians, and other performers. Some were fine talkers, some raconteurs. There were those who generally had good recall and those who chose their words carefully and cautiously, while a few played fast and loose with the facts or were simply outright fabricators.

  Of all those I spoke with over the years, no one matched Clyde Bernhardt for meticulous attention to detail and an overriding concern for accuracy.

  I Remember is a document that was long in coming. Clyde spent years laboriously writing his eighty-year life story in longhand before typing it himself. It was at this point he sought my help to develop his memoirs into a finished work. For almost two more years I probed, prodded, and pried out further experiences: long, detailed taped interviews at my home; countless telephone calls at all hours to delve further; questions on the way to the airport as he was flying off to another gig. Then I organized it all into a clear and concise story that might appeal to the nonmusical reader as well as the aficionado.

  Clyde is a unique storyteller, and so I have tried to retain the language and the flavor and spirit of his remembrances. No one who has heard him speak at length would ever consider adapting his words to a more conventional style. His story is told just as he recalled it, expressing himself in his own way.

  I was constantly impressed by his consuming interest in his fellow man. To me, it is an indication of high respect for his associates and friends and the many others whom at some time in his colorful life he had the good fortune to meet.

  But most striking is the extent of his recall. During the many years of preparation of this work, not once did Clyde refer to any notes, scrapbooks, or other source material. This book is a tribute to the power of the human mind: it is entirely from his remarkable memory. Asked a question, he would relate names, places, and conversations just as if the event had taken place that very morning. Pressed for a specific year, he would casually mention a date perhaps more than half a century ago, often adding the month and day of the week. On the rare occasion when he could not supply a complete answer or simply did not know, he apologized for his apparent lack of perfection.

  As a skeptical writer in oral history, I occasionally repeated a question of some months previous—one requiring detailed facts. I would ask it out of sequence, assuming the abruptness might elicit a different response, or at least a conflicting fact. But no, the answer was always as before, often embellished with added stories of even further interest. There seems to be no bottom to the well called Clyde Bernhardt.

  While much of what this man has experienced has never been reported, some of his notable performances have been. Diligent research, sometimes digging back fifty or more years into public records, always confirmed his information.

  This is by no means an analytical book, for that is not who or what Clyde
is. While he candidly recalls the times, the famous, infamous, and obscure, he leaves the deeper meanings of art and influence to the historians.

  Clyde Bernhardt holds an enviable reputation as a solid, reliable, hard-working New York musician and singer who can be depended upon to do the job he is asked to do. And do it well.

  I also know him to be a sensitive and honorable person who meets his days with the resolve of a God-fearing man who is constantly being tested. His determination and drive to make something of himself, growing up in rural America and developing through the many flowering eras of jazz and blues, is the essence of this story. It is also about success and failure, fears and insecurities, dreams and ambitions. And faith. Lots of faith. The result is a fascinating tale—sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic. Even startling.

  The portrait of Clyde Bernhardt that emerges from these pages is one of a black man struggling within the socioeconomic frailties of an American musical culture. This work is a contribution to us all.

  Sheldon Harris

  Introduction and Acknowledgments

  Hello. My name is Clyde Edric Barron Bernhardt. I been part of music long before my first professional job on Halloween Night, 1923, in Elwood City, Pennsylvania. Now I am past eighty, still playing my horn and singing my blues. And enjoying every single minute of it.

  I remember so clearly the funny blackface minstrel shows I watched in 1909 and 1910, the brass bands, the blues singers, ragtime bands, the early black (and white, too) stage shows, circuses, and carnivals. Some had black entertainers and musicians I recall as being very, very good.

  My memory goes back to the famous singers I knew or saw: Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Princess White, Mamie Smith, and a few the history books don’t remember. I heard Bessie, whose husband was a first cousin to the wife of my uncle, sing in North Carolina in 1918.

  I worked with Bill Robinson, the famous Whitman Sisters, Pigmeat Markham, Lil Green, Pearl Bailey, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie, among others. I been in many orchestras, both black and white—jazz, swing, dance, and society bands such as Marion Hardy’s Alabamians, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, Jay McShann, Vernon Andrade, Edgar Hayes, Fats Waller, Luis Russell, Claude Hopkins, and so many others. I also had my own groups, made recordings, been on radio and television, sang and played on international tours, shows, and concerts.