Tiger Rag

by Nicholas Christopher

  And he did. Bolden was buried in a potter’s field called Holt Cemetery, beside an abandoned railroad depot. Before the undertaker lowered the pine box, Cornish took up his trombone and played “Ride On, King,” a spiritual Bolden was partial to. Then, after Alice and Cora left, and it was just him and Bella and the two boys filling in the grave, Cornish let loose and played “Careless Love,” the low slow blues Bolden wrote for that girl Ella who ended up working at Mrs. Vance’s sporting house after he was sent away.

  He near lost his mind for her, Cornish said to Bella as they walked home along the river.

  Lost it before that, honey, all by himself.

  The following night, in Rayne, Louisiana, one hundred fifty miles west of New Orleans and halfway to Texas, the Black Eagles threw themselves a party at Durand’s Saloon to celebrate an upcoming tour of Mexico. They were a successful band. Their leader was the cornetist Evan Thomas. He had risen fast in hard times. His father was a white man he never knew, his mother a black prostitute on Lafayette Street. He was handsome, something of a dandy. That night he was feeling especially ebullient. He had the band play an extended set for a packed house. He had just hired a new cornetist, Bunk Johnson, who at forty-two was an old-time New Orleans musician. Bunk had led bands of his own, and made good money, but those days were behind him. Flat broke, he felt lucky to be joining the Black Eagles. Most of their jobs were in western Louisiana and Texas, never in New Orleans. Bunk was still lying about having played with Buddy Bolden in 1896 (when he was eleven years old) and tutored Louis Armstrong in 1903 (when Armstrong was three). Bad-tempered and fast-talking, as a bandleader Bunk had become notorious for reneging on engagements and shortchanging musicians. Blackballed by the best clubs, he had been reckless enough to double-cross a Mardi Gras krewe, who promptly put out a contract on him, and he had to flee New Orleans altogether. Evan Thomas didn’t care about any of this: like King Oliver before him, he wanted to expand his band with a second cornet—a bigger sound—and he knew Bunk could still blow his horn.

  It was a lively crowd and the band put on a good show. Whiskey was flowing, and at ten o’clock the barkeepers broke out six kegs of Jax beer. Drinks on me, Thomas shouted, and a cheer went up. Getting off work, girls drifted in from the sporting houses, followed by a wave of crashers. These included the members of a rival band, the Pyramid Brass, and the Black Eagles’ former manager, Mickey Vincent. There was a double dose of bad blood between Mickey Vincent and Evan Thomas: Thomas had caught Vincent skimming, and Vincent had learned that Thomas was sleeping with his wife.

  Among the few white men in the crowd was a bearded stranger wearing a brown duster, a Stetson, and cowboy boots. He entered flanked by a pair of large black men in raincoats. He was darkly tanned, with deep crow’s-feet and dusty gray hair. He walked with a limp. Plenty of Texans passed through Rayne, but this man was from Provo, Utah. He had arrived there penniless from St. Louis over twenty years before, ragged and badly beaten, his left leg fractured, his jaw broken. For the next fifteen years, nursing his resentments, he scratched out a living as a field hand and truck driver. At the age of forty, he gambled his meager savings on a prospecting stake in the Uinta Mountains, and for the first time in his life caught some luck, sharing in a massive silver lode with ten other miners. Even divided that many times, the spoils were huge. In addition to his share of the mine, he bought a hotel and a cannery. He built himself a big house on a nine-hundred-acre ranch. For a while, he enjoyed his prosperity. But rather than cooling those old resentments, each passing year fueled his desire to settle scores. He was in Rayne that night to settle the biggest of them.

  As the music grew louder and the crowd rowdier, he drank rye at a table in the rear and never took his eyes off the band. By midnight, five of the beer kegs were empty. Tempers were flaring. Scuffles were breaking out—over women, money, insults real and imagined. Things escalated when some jostling by the bar turned ugly. Knives flashed. Chairs were thrown. The Pyramid Brass drummer clubbed the Black Eagles guitarist, and someone in turn sucker-punched him. One of the barkeepers was slashed ear to ear. Another was cut up with a broken bottle. A girl spattered with blood tried to climb out a window.

  The man in the duster couldn’t believe his luck. He had expected to wait half the night for an opening. Now he could take care of his business in the open and no one would blink. He and his companions muscled their way through the crowd to the stage. He was only interested in one of the Black Eagles, and even when they were just a few feet apart, he saw that Bunk Johnson didn’t recognize him.

  Remember me? he shouted at Bunk.

  Bunk shook his head apprehensively and clutched his cornet close. He had made far more enemies than he could remember.

  My name is Myron Guideau. He slipped his hand into his pocket. Last time we met I was hog-tied in a freight car.

  Bunk’s eyes lit up with recognition, but it was too late: Guideau whipped the pistol from his pocket and smashed Bunk in the mouth and his teeth flew out like corn in a cloud of blood.

  Goddamn you, Bunk cried, choking, and dropped to his knees.

  One of Guideau’s men snatched away his cornet and crushed it under his boot. As Guideau headed for the door, he realized he might have gotten away with shooting Bunk, as he had originally planned. But this was better, he thought: without teeth, Bunk wouldn’t be able to play worth shit, and for him that would be worse than death. At that moment, Guideau had also learned something about himself: he wasn’t his uncle. He wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man, and he sure as hell wouldn’t shoot him in the back. When he hit this bastard who had jumped him in the dark, he was looking right into his eyes.

  In fact, Guideau might not have gotten away with shooting Bunk. Moments later a shot rang out and Mickey Vincent settled his own score, putting a bullet into Evan Thomas’s heart. Now there was a lot of screaming, and people swarmed the exits. Before Myron Guideau lost himself in the crowd, he saw three policemen rush in the rear door and drag Mickey Vincent away.

  Spitting blood, Bunk Johnson was on all fours, scrambling to gather up his teeth. He realized at once—just as Guideau hoped he would—that he couldn’t play the cornet anymore.

  Two months later, Bunk got a job as a field hand for the Magnolia Fruit Company in New Iberia. For the next ten years, he worked long hours for low wages. Cutting sugarcane, packing rice, driving a truck for the Louisiana Hot Sauce Company. His lone respite, courtesy of President Roosevelt, was giving trumpet lessons in local schools for the WPA. He and his wife and children lived in a ramshackle cottage. He seldom picked up a cornet unless he was drinking, alone, at night. He would press the mouthpiece to his lips and close his eyes and finger the valves without blowing. But even when he hit each note correctly, and could hear the music in his head, it didn’t sound good.

  NEW YORK CITY—DECEMBER 22, 4:05 P.M.

  Emmett Browne poured Ruby and Devon tea and relit his pipe. They had listened without interruption to the story he spun. While Ruby remained fidgety, preoccupied, Devon immediately felt drawn to these long-gone musicians and their music, not because of her grandfather’s career, but her own—if she could call it that. Some of this music had vanished forever, some had survived and evolved; that Buddy Bolden’s had apparently exerted its influence by way of secondhand descriptions, rather than actual recordings, amazed her. She was more curious than ever to learn what information Emmett Browne had wanted from her grandmother.

  “During the Depression,” Browne continued, “Willie Cornish gave trombone and trumpet lessons to children. He tuned pianos. On occasion he played in a parade. That was his greatest pleasure. In 1939 he suffered a stroke. He was sixty-four years old. Bill Russell, the jazz historian, told me Cornish’s left arm was nearly paralyzed, but he refused to give up the trombone. He rigged a sling that enabled him to support the instrument while he fingered the valves. In a music collection I bought at an auction in St. Louis, I discovered a cache of letters written to Sidney Bechet’s brother, Leonard. Except for the
previous owner, I know of no one else who has read them. One was a long letter from Cornish, dated February 1940. The moment I started reading it, I knew I had struck gold. It was the link I needed: a concrete, eyewitness report about the Bolden cylinder. Cornish wrote that he had traveled to New York and visited various record companies to pitch the cylinder—Decca, Columbia, Bluebird. Now that Bolden was dead, Cornish felt a new urgency. But none of these record people were interested in Buddy Bolden. Most had never heard of him. One asked what he could be expected to do with a single cut. When he offered sixty dollars for the world rights, Cornish stood up and walked out. He was still convinced he was holding a valuable commodity, of historical importance, and he wanted real money for it, to honor Bolden’s memory. And also to help his wife Bella when he was gone. In the letter, he stressed to Leonard Bechet that he would’ve helped Bolden’s family, too, but Alice and Cora had died, and Nora and Bernedine had left New Orleans in 1909 and disappeared up north. He didn’t know of any other relatives. Cornish ended the letter on a touching note. He wrote how honored he felt when he listened to the latest jazz—Hawkins, Ellington, Waller—and heard just how much the Bolden Band had shaped this new generation of musicians. The proof of it was in that Edison cylinder.

  “In January 1942, there was a parade for local army recruits shipping out to the war. Ten bands were marching through New Orleans. Cornish’s old friend Alphonse Picou had become wealthy in his old age investing in a string of bars and restaurants, but he never stopped playing music. He invited Cornish to play along with his New Tuxedo Band during the parade. In a taped interview with Bill Russell, Picou recounted how he ordered two of his young musicians to walk on either side of Cornish and watch out for him. As they turned onto South Rampart from Julia Street, playing ‘Limehouse Blues,’ Cornish suffered another stroke and was taken to the Veterans Hospital at Alexandria. Now his left side was entirely paralyzed. Upbeat all his life, he grew bitter and depressed. He made Bella promise that no music would be played at his funeral. It was the only promise she ever broke. Willie Cornish died on January 12, 1942. At the cemetery, Picou played a spirited version of ‘Perdido Street Blues,’ because for most of their marriage, Willie and Bella had lived at 1423 Perdido.

  “Cornish was the last member of the Bolden Band to go,” Browne concluded, tapping the ashes from his pipe. “Bella lived on his veteran’s pension and conducted the girls’ choir at the First Baptist Church. For the next seven years, until her own health began to fail, she kept the Bolden cylinder under wraps, just as she had promised Willie she would.”

  NEW YORK CITY—JULY 28, 1949

  Sammy LeMond walked out of Pennsylvania Station on a steamy summer night and hailed a taxi. It was one A.M., but he had barely slept during the twenty-hour trip from New Orleans. Smoking and sipping rum, he had sat in the bar car of the Gulfstream Special gazing out at the dark countryside, the trees in silhouette, the occasional lights of distant towns whirling by. He was a tall, handsome man, twenty-six years old, with a broad forehead and a thinly clipped mustache. His father was Creole, originally from Trinidad, and his mother was Jamaican. He had her beautiful black skin and his father’s pale eyes. LeMond’s tan suit was well cut and his blue shirt crisp despite the heat.

  LeMond was a trumpet player. He had been in New Orleans for a week, playing three gigs at the Crystal Palace, one of the best clubs in town, with Red Lanier’s Iberian Band. Red wanted him to move back to New Orleans and join the band full time, but LeMond had settled in New York for good after the war. He played swing and bebop, but always revered the early New Orleans jazz. And he worked with some of the best bands in both cities: Ben Webster, Johnny Hodges, Cab Calloway’s orchestra at the Cotton Club. Eventually he formed a band of his own, the Eclipse Sextet, and achieved some real fame.

  The highlight of his recent trip to New Orleans had been an invitation to dine at the home of Dr. Leonard Bechet. LeMond had first met Leonard in 1945 while visiting his brother Sidney backstage at the Domino Club on Lennox Avenue. Max Roach and Ray Brown were there, and Sidney was pouring his favorite champagne, a prewar Dom Pérignon, which he had brought back from Paris by the case. Sidney was barrel-chested and boisterous, but Leonard was quiet, observing and listening. At first, he took notice of Sammy LeMond, an up-and-comer, only because his brother—no easy critic—admired the kid’s style, his passion for the music and its roots. “He’s a real musicianer,” Sidney had said, and that was his ultimate compliment. In subsequent meetings, Leonard came to like LeMond personally as well as professionally, to respect his character as well as his musicianship.

  It was those qualities that Leonard had in mind when he invited LeMond to New Orleans. Also the fact that LeMond’s father, like Leonard’s, had been a craftsman, a tailor, with a shop on Esplanade Avenue and a nice house in the same Creole neighborhood as the Bechets.

  Leonard had told LeMond to come by his dental office before dinner. And so, as evening fell, Sammy LeMond climbed the same oak stairs to the third floor of 3166 Marais Street that Bunk Johnson and Bella Cornish had climbed two years earlier, four hours apart, on a rainy March afternoon.

  Bunk arrived at two o’clock to be fitted for dentures. By 1947 Leonard was one of the two remaining friends in New Orleans that Bunk could count on. They had known each other for over thirty years, from the days when Leonard started the Silver Bells Brass with Sidney on clarinet, their brother Joe on guitar, and Bunk on cornet. When Sidney became famous, the band broke up. Bunk joined the Eagle Band and Leonard began his dental apprenticeship. Bunk’s other remaining friend was Bill Russell, who had taken up a collection to pay for his dental work. The donors were mostly younger musicians on the West Coast who had heard of Bunk but never met him, and thus never been antagonized by him. Bill wanted Bunk to join a revival band he was organizing to record authentic New Orleans jazz from the days of King Bolden. Like everyone else, Russell believed Bunk’s lies about playing with Bolden. Now Bunk went so far as to assert that, even after all those years, he could emulate Bolden’s style note for note. I can educate people, he said, who cannot hear King Bolden directly, since of course he never did record nothing. Bunk was so confident of the job Russell promised him that he gave notice at the Louisiana Hot Sauce plant and swore he would never drive a truck again.

  While working on Bunk’s teeth under the examining light, Leonard saw how leathery the sun had left his face and neck. His hands were rough, too, and scarred from his days cutting sugarcane.

  When the dentures were in, Leonard gave Bunk his standard lecture. Take care of your remaining teeth or the dentures won’t hold. I’ve always watched out for Sidney’s teeth. The only musician I know who took care of his own since he was a boy is Louis Armstrong—a miracle when you consider his childhood. His teeth are straight and white as piano keys. He gets them cleaned every three months. He’ll die with those teeth in his head. Other horn men? Forget it. King Oliver: first thing that went was his teeth. Buck Clayton, the same. Even Bix Beiderbecke, who grew up white and well-to-do. Bix had a single false tooth in front he used to stick in when he played. Couldn’t play a note without it. Then he’d take it out. You should be all right now. Just don’t let anyone belt you again.

  I’ll kill that fella if I ever see him.

  You ain’t never gonna see him. And you’re too old now to kill anybody but yourself.

  Bunk stood up to leave.

  Stay a moment, Bunk, Leonard said. I need to ask you something. It’s gonna take you way back, to when you and Sidney were playing in the Eagle Band.

  That’s maybe too long, Bunk said lightly, lifting his Panama hat off the coatrack.

  It’s about Buddy Bolden. Some Edison cylinders his band cut.

  Bunk just looked at him now.

  You told Sidney and me you had one of them.

  I must’ve been drunk.

  You were. You also told us you threw the cylinder into the river.

  What?

  I’d like to know: did that happen?

/>   Did what happen?

  Come on, Bunk. I helped you out today. Now you help me.

  Bunk shook his head and looked away. I don’t know nothing about it. If I told you that, it was just drunk talk. Stupid talk. We were kids.

  Leonard knew then that it must be true.

  Why are you asking me this now? Bunk said, putting on his hat. Bolden—he must be long dead.

  You know he is.

  So?

  Everyone in his band is dead. That’s got nothing to do with it.

  I was in his band. And we never cut no cylinder.

  All right, then, Leonard said, showing him to the door. Willie Cornish was in the band and he told me otherwise. His widow is coming to see me.

  When did Willie die?

  January. He’d been sickly.

  I’m sorry to hear it. She’s coming about her teeth?

  No. I need to see her about some business.

  And what’s it got to do with me?

  Not a thing. Goodbye, Bunk. Take care of those teeth.

  At quarter to six, Bella Cornish got off the Number 5 trolley on LaSalle Street and walked the short distance to Leonard’s office. She carried a blue umbrella and walked with a cane. Her hair was white and her shoulders stooped, but some of her youthful beauty still shone through the wrinkles and shadows of her face. You could see she had been a spry, spirited woman. But by the late forties, unable to get by on her own, she had moved out to Gentilly to live with her daughter Charlene. The doctor said she was doing all right, and Charlene was encouraging, but Bella knew her heart was growing weaker. She could feel it when she climbed stairs or woke short of breath in the night. Sometimes when that really scared her, she called out to Willie, and it was taking her longer now to remember he was gone.

  As her condition worsened, Bella wanted to make sure she honored her pledge to Willie and passed the Bolden cylinder on to someone they both trusted. Willie had told her he intended to approach Leonard Bechet again when the circumstances were right. Willie wanted the cylinder to stay in the hands of musicians or their kin—the only people he trusted. Bella sent Leonard a letter to that effect, and he responded immediately, inviting her to meet with him. He had been searching for her in vain in New Orleans for over a year. Jazz had become wildly popular, and Bolden’s name was frequently invoked by critics and musicians alike. Leonard had come to regret his rebuff of Willie Cornish in Chicago twenty-five years earlier. He wished he had shown more faith in Willie’s judgment. Now Leonard felt an increased urgency because, like Bella, he too was gravely ill, recently diagnosed with stomach cancer. The cylinder might not be in his hands for long, but he knew he was in a better position than Bella to find a young, trustworthy caretaker. Someone who would cherish the cylinder the way Willie Cornish had, and if the opportunity arose, put it before the public in the proper way.