The Game Changer

by A. G. Lafley

  Man, I never knew winter could be so cold as a winter in Columbus. That’s one cold town. And when all those big, black rats starting looking for warmth, coming in our house and eating Mama’s chicken right off the table, I tell you I was scared. One night I awoke to find my forehead all covered with blood where some old rat bit me. Didn’t want no part of that town after that. No sir.

  It was May of 1923 that I left for Pittsburgh. Told Mama I would check out the jobs and let her know if it was worth coming out. I found a place to stay with Mr. Glenn Spears. He just started talking to me one day on Wylie Avenue. Reminded me of my late father, and I took a liking to him and his whole family. They welcomed me in as their own.

  I got a job at the Jones & Laughlin Steel Mill, doing lazy things again. When I tried to do more then I was supposed to do, the other workers didn’t take to that. I got hollered at many times for being too busy.

  Bands were all over Pittsburgh. At the Royal Garden Dance Hall, Lois B. Deppe and his Symphonium Serenaders had the seventeen-year-old sensation Earl Hines on piano; Vance Dixon on clarinet; Thornton Brown, trumpet; Harry Williams, drums—sorry I can’t call the rest of the players, but it was ten hot pieces in all, the best I ever heard. Sometimes they didn’t let me in the hall, so I stood under the lamppost on the corner and listened hard.

  Many times I be standing out there for hours and a crowd gather. Talking. Laughing. Coming and going. Everybody having a good time. I appreciated they was interested in the music as I was until Keg-o’-Nails, the big black cop, come slapping his billy club in his palm.

  “Gimme this corner,” he shout. “Gimme this corner! Get your old whore asses outta here ’fore I run ya all in.”

  See, I was a green, small-town boy that didn’t know what was happening. The cop never bothered me, because I always wore my Jones & Laughlin badge so he knew I was a working boy. Loafing wasn’t allowed in that town, at any hour. By anybody.

  After hearing one of those hot bands I go back to Mr. Spears’ place and practice my lessons. Felt I was getting rusty because I couldn’t find any teacher, but I did what I could. Kept at it. At about eighteen years of age, my only interest was music—there wasn’t much else on my mind.

  I was in Pittsburgh about two months when I wrote Mama and told her not to come. So she went back to Harrisburg and said I should meet her there.

  I thought it a good idea if I stopped off a while at my aunt and uncle’s home in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania. Most of their children all played instruments and I wanted to be around young musicians for a while. I needed some encouragement.

  On a chance stopover like that, my musical career began.

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

  It was after Labor Day in September of 1923 that I arrived in Ellwood City. I stayed with my Uncle John Eady and his wife, Laura, who was the younger sister of my mother. They had five children. It was their son Bill’s six-piece family band called the Ellwood Syncopators that played dances all around the area.

  I insisted on paying for my keep, so I got a day job working in the steel mill over in Koppel, about three miles from Ellwood City—I had to cross the Beaver River in a trolley car to get there.

  At night I practiced my trombone down in Uncle John’s basement. Sometimes I would mute my horn so none of the good musicians upstairs could hear me. And I practiced and practiced.

  Bill Eady wasn’t much interested in me or my horn as I hoped. “You can’t play nothin’,” was all he would say.

  But Uncle John came to the head of the stairs and listened real hard. “Clyde, you learning to play now. Keep practicing, keep at it, boy.”

  Many times he told me if I was going to depend on music alone, I should get a regular day job and save every penny I could rake and scrape for the bad times.

  “Because,” he said, “the music business is sometimes slow and you might not be doing nothin’ for a while. If you have a steady pay day, you never have to worry about no money comin’ in when you laying off music.”

  It was a little over a month later that he came down the cellar. “Clyde, you sound good enough to be playing in Bill’s band.”

  I didn’t believe him. I knew the Ellwood Syncopators was far advanced over me. Some of them guys been playing back in 1913 and I only started taking lessons in 1922.

  On Halloween night in October, the band had a job coming up at the Ellwood City High School. Bill came to my room the night before. Didn’t seem too enthusiastic.

  “Papa says I should use you at the dance tomorrow,” he mumbled. “Pay you three dollars if you wanna come.”

  I thought if he wanted me, I would try.

  Bill played tenor banjo and mandolin and also sang in a nice tenor and baritone voice when he wanted. His brother Linwood, my twin first cousin, played violin; sister Geneva was on piano (sometimes her sister Dorothy filled in for her); Bill Davis was the drummer that later married Dorothy; Jimmy Good, trumpet; and his brother Billy, alto and C-melody sax.

  Right, William “Bill” Eady, who gave me my first band job in 1923 with the Ellwood Syncopators. His son Johnny is on left, and a cousin, Geraldine Leftwick, is center. (Photo taken in New Brighton, Pa., 1968.)

  I walked in the high school that night and saw kids all running about, laughing, and talking to one another. Dressed so nice. I began to get excited but wasn’t nervous.

  “Which one of the Eady boys are you?” somebody asked.

  I was beginning to feel like part of the band. When we started to play, the young kids seemed to enjoy our songs and applauded loud after each number. Nobody in the band read music too much but we all had good ears, made up our harmony as we felt it. I been hearing the latest trombone players on records, musicians such as Herbert Flemming in Johnny Dunn’s Original Jazz Hounds, Miff Mole with the famous Memphis Five, Dope Andrews with Mamie Smith’s Jazz Hounds.

  We did numbers like Mister Gallagher and Mister Shean; Yes, We Have No Bananas; Barney Google; It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’; and other popular syncopated tunes.

  The thrill of playing in public was so great, it seemed like a dream, more then reality. Of course I didn’t have the tone I got later, but I knew how to fill in and find the key. After that night, Bill took me on three more jobs the next week at double my pay.

  The excitement wore off quickly. I knew inside myself I was still a amateur and had to work harder if I wanted to play with the better musicians in Harrisburg. That Eady band was strictly country. None of the boys ever became known outside Pennsylvania, although they did get plenty jobs down in Newcastle, Beaver Falls, and Butler.

  Bill once tried to get connected in New York, stayed about a month and had to come back. Couldn’t make it.

  When I got laid off my day job in March of 1924, I returned to Pittsburgh to stay with the Spears family again. I got my old job back at the Jones & Laughlin Steel Mill.

  It was just like before—pick up a few bricks over here and put them down over there. I hustled and tried to do my best, but the foreman tease me, say I was doing too much for a damn runt.

  I kept practicing my horn every night but was getting discouraged because I couldn’t find another music teacher.

  I was out listening to the dance bands and shows almost every night. I remember hearing A.J. Piron and his Creole Orchestra. He had a New Orleans style that was different from the others I been hearing, but still real hot.

  Ma Rainey and her revue was at the Elmore Theater in May. She remembered when I ran errands for her back in Badin. Told me she was now making records.

  “Honey,” she said, “I thought they overlooked this old lady. But I had faith in the Lord.”

  I thought her show was good, but not as good as in 1917.

  Bessie Smith was at the Lincoln Theater backed by Irving Johns, on piano, who sat right up on stage with her. She was very popular now behind her big-selling records but would only sing two songs and then wave off. Never did get to hear her sing Down Hearted Blues, and that’s what everyb
ody wanted.

  In a few months I took a leave of absence and went to stay with my cousins Charles and Birdie Atkins in Duquesne, about twelve miles east of Pittsburgh. Never returned to Jones & Laughlin, but found another job in Duquesne at the Carnegie Steel Mill paying fifty cents a hour.

  My cousins was older then me. Charles was nice, but Birdie (they called her Bird) was a big pain.

  The moment I walked in, she started to giving me a hard time. “You think you gonna be a musician?”

  “Yes I do.”

  “You ain’t never gonna learn to play nothin’,” she say.

  But cousin Charles stood up for me. “Why’n hell don’t you leave the boy alone, Bird?”

  “’Cause he too dumb, that’s why. He ain’t gonna go no further then right now.”

  Whenever I practiced and ran my scales, she stick her fuzzy head in the door and imitate me: “Toot-toot, toot-toot, toot-toot.” Whatever sound I made, she mug it. “Tooooooot-tooooooot!”

  It was not funny and she was always getting on my nerves. Sometimes blood relatives ain’t as good as your friends.

  I finally went back to Harrisburg where my mother was doing domestic work for some rich old white lady. I wasn’t home but five weeks when we all went up to Philadelphia to take care of the white lady’s big house. I found a job in a second-class white barber shop sweeping hair off the floor and shining shoes again. Paid twelve dollars a week.

  While I was there, I was lucky to find Professor Aaron Harris, a trombone teacher that had his own music studio on Broad Street, near Bainbridge. A smooth, dignified brownskin, he wore glasses and had black curly hair with just a edge of gray. Wore a little mustache and looked and talked like a distinguished college professor. I turned nineteen, and none of his students was any older then me.

  I liked him because he took a interest in me. “When you get older,” he told me, “you are going to play in fine bands and meet colored society. You are going to be popular because you talk properly and do not use profanity. And you always act like a little gentleman.”

  I wanted to be with respectable, God-fearing people, but I sure was not particular about going out in society. I knew a whole lot of them was nothing but phonies, putting up a front. I found that out myself when I saw a lot of boys, with mothers and fathers to pay their way, going to college and still not have a change of clothes. I was only a shoeshine boy but able to save enough money to buy four good suits. Many times I loaned my clothes to some of them flashy college guys that needed them.

  “God has blessed us,” my mother used to say. “We are getting along better then some of the school teachers around here.”

  Bessie Smith’s sister, Viola, had a restaurant called Viola’s Place across from the Standard Theater on South Street. Bessie put up the money for it. I used to go in there, but most of the time Viola had no food to serve. Not even a pot of beans. I would get up and go down the street to eat. One time I was standing in front of the Standard, and Bessie came riding up in a taxi. It was lunch time and Viola be sitting out front resting herself. Not a customer in sight. I tell you, there was cussing and hollering coming out of that place for at least a hour. Bessie closed it not long after.

  This was also the time I saw the famous Whitman Sisters’ show at the Standard. Mattie Dorsey was singing hard-core blues and the band sounded real good. Comedians, dancers, pretty girls, pretty dresses—the Whitmans had one of the top shows on the circuit.

  I asked Professor Harris if I would ever be good enough to play on a sensational show like that. He said it took lots of study, lots of practice. Be able to read fast and play in different keys. And have good tone.

  “Work hard, son,” he said, “and if you want it, you can do it.”

  Later that year we were all back in Harrisburg because Mama’s day work was getting hard to find. One day I walked in Grunden’s Drug Store on Sixth and Boas Street, and Doctor Grunden saw my trombone and thought I was playing in Tillie Vennie’s orchestra. Told him I didn’t play good enough to work in her band but was looking for a music teacher. Sent me over to Mr. Meredith Germer, a German-American musician that was playing at the Majestic Theater, down on Walnut Street. He was not a jazz musician but a concert artist. Later he worked in John Philip Sousa’s Brass Band.

  He showed me how to get lip vibrato and that’s a hard study. Puts beauty in there when you take a solo or add grace notes. Not the easiest thing to learn and one has to keep practicing until he gets it under control and then do it every day after he gets it, in order to keep it. Many professional jazz trombonists never learned that—they shake their slide to get vibrato—but he showed me how.

  He also taught me proper breathing and playing techniques, so I would not tire myself out. Showed me how to play syncopation and syncopated notes in common and cut time. That all been in my head, but when I saw it on paper, I didn’t know how to bring it out. Taught me to read faster, like they did in the good dance orchestras.

  I bought some orchestrations of the latest dance music and practiced the trombone parts, then played it for Mr. Germer, very slow of course. Told me I was progressing better then his other students.

  “I’m going to prepare you,” he said, “that when you leave Harrisburg, you will not have to come back.”

  That was just what I wanted. Mr. Meredith Germer was the best teacher I ever had.

  Once a week I went to the music store to buy the latest band records and listen carefully. Play them over and over, especially the trombone and other brass parts. Sometimes I even try to play along.

  The biggest black politician in Harrisburg was Mr. Theodore Frye. He was a Republican and also the supervisor of black workers for the city street-cleaning gang. All blacks that worked for the city were considered to have good-paying jobs—and nobody ever had to worry about layoffs when they worked for Mr. Frye. I took a day job with him for nineteen dollars a week, gave Mama nine dollars, and kept the balance for myself.

  I swept the streets every day with a big, stiff broom. Up this street, down the other. And not just the curb but everywhere. There was a whole mess of horses in that town and we was always busy. Behind our gang the boys followed in a hack—a old horse pulling a older wagon. I sweep the manure from all over to make little piles and the boys in back load it.

  Bill Bentley, the only white in our gang because he said he got along better with coloreds, always smoked this corn-cob pipe. We tease him, say he worked with us because we got to pile the better quality manure that he sneaked for his pipe. We laughed a lot, but it was long, hard work.

  So I kept cleaning streets by day and practicing my lessons at night. And listening to my records, of course.

  5. Tillie Vennie’s Orchestra, 1925–1926

  By April of 1925, Mr. Germer told me I was playing stronger, with a fairly good tone. Said I could learn faster if I sat in with other musicians—maybe work with a local dance orchestra.

  My first thought was Tillie Vennie. I kept remembering that her father, Joe Vennie, told me back in 1922 someday I might be good enough to play in his daughter’s orchestra.

  Tillie had the best band in Harrisburg. That woman could play some piano. The only one I knew to compete with her was Earl Hines–and I wouldn’t put him over her. She had offers to go to New York time after time but never left. That’s because she was born under the sign of Cancer, and when Cancer people get to doing what they like, they hard people to move. I should know, I’m one too.

  Tillie and her family were living over at 1304 Wallace Street in Harrisburg. She was glad to hear I was improving in my music and I had worked in a band in Ellwood City.

  When I reminded her what her late papa said, she agreed to let me sit in for rehearsals and offered to help me whenever she could.

  Most of her men were older then me and considered professionals, so I knew I had much to learn. She used different musicians at different times: Jim Jackson, a young bass player that was near my age; Jack Potter on banjo; Joe Fisher, drums; Charles Lamb the saxo
phone player; and Tillie’s two brothers, Paul and John, on trumpets. Allen Deamus was her regular trombonist.

  If Paul Vennie hadn’t let whiskey get the best of him, he might of been famous. Mamie Smith came through Harrisburg once in 1922. She was hot as a pistol, and if you got with her, you were on top. Coleman Hawkins was working with her along with George Bell on jazz violin.

  She was looking to pick up some musicians and got Paul Vennie and Lonnie Poston. Lonnie was Tillie’s trombone at that time. After rehearsal, the band thought these guys were better then the ones that left. So they went on the road with Mamie Smith–Paul was nineteen and Poston was a little older–but their parents said they was too young and had them come back after only two months. If they stayed on, they be in the history books today. Poston died in 1925 and Paul took to drink.

  After I began sitting in at rehearsals with Tillie’s established band, Mr. Germer started teaching me to double tongue—told me it would come in handy when I had to play fast numbers. I practiced that and sometimes triple tongue too but never had any real fast pieces at Tillie’s rehearsals.

  Sometimes I hung out at Marshall’s Drug Store on the corner of Cowden and Boas. Budd Marshall used to tease me when I walked in carrying my big horn.

  “How yawl getting along on that old trambone?” he say mockingly, mispronouncing the word. “Your teacher telling you a damn lie. You ain’t never gonna learn to play that old trambone.”

  And everybody laugh. I didn’t take kindly to that teasing, but I was shy and tried to laugh along.

  Soon, everybody in town started to calling me Tram. That name hung on me for years, and I’m known by it in Harrisburg to this very day.

  I remember I had another one of my strange dreams just about this time. It was so clear and real. I saw this distinguished white man sitting on our front room sofa. Told me his name was John Evergreen and kept saying how nice the house looked and was pleased. He got up and started looking around.