Founded by the French (as La Nouvelle-Orléans) in 1718, New Orleans is a city with a colourful, confusing and occasionally violent history. In 1722, it became the capital of French Louisiana, but over the next 180 years, the area was first surrendered to the Spanish Empire before being handed back to France and finally, in 1803, being sold by Napoleon to the United States for a total of 68 million Francs.
New Orleans quickly became the largest port, as well as the biggest and most important city, in the South, exporting most of the country’s cotton as well as other products to Europe and New England. Unfortunately all of this new wealth and trade had an unpleasant consequence: by the middle of the century there were over 50 slave markets dotted around the city. Hot and humid, the ‘Big Easy’ grew rapidly with the arrival of American, African, French and Creole people, attracted to the business opportunities (legal and otherwise) to be had. Refugees fleeing from the revolution in Haiti brought slaves with them and massively increased the city’s French-speaking population.
As well as being prosperous, New Orleans was also one of the most dangerous cities to live in. Devastating fires in 1788 and 1784 saw the majority of the city’s original wooden buildings razed to the ground. Relationships between the different races were often tense (spurred on by the State of Louisiana’s attempt to enforce strict racial segregation), and race riots, marches by white supremacists and mob lynchings happened all too frequently. Despite this, with a large, educated coloured population that had long interacted with the whites, racial attitudes were relatively liberal for the Deep South. Regrettably, this liberal attitude did not carry through to all aspects of life: the Territorial Convention of 1805 imposed harsh sodomy laws, with a mandatory life sentence for indulging in ‘the abominable and detestable crime against nature’; however, before the end of the century this penalty was reduced to a maximum of ten years in prison.
The progressive Sidney Story noted the success of port cities in European countries that had legalised prostitution, and it was he that penned City Ordinance 13,485 – the guidelines that would legalise vice and would have to be followed by the people plying their trade in The District. These guidelines were adopted on 6 July 1897 and, by limiting prostitution to one area of town where authorities could monitor the practice, within three years Storyville had become the number one revenue centre of New Orleans. For 25¢, you could buy a copy of the Blue Book, a directory listing houses of ill repute as well as the names and addresses of the women who worked there. Black and white brothels existed side by side, although perversely black men were barred from using either by law, and dozens of restaurants and saloons opened up to cater for the huge influx of sex tourists. The great and good of other cities were shocked at the goings-on in New Orleans, so much so that in 1913 the National Commission for the Suppression of Vice, backed financially by John D. Rockefeller, sent a crew to Storyville to make a film about a good girl from New York’s fall from grace, which was screened around the country as a warning to others not to follow the lead of this modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.
By 1910 The District housed 200 brothels with 2,000 women, and there was at least one house – run by an effeminate man known as ‘Big Nelly’ – which provided boys rather than girls for entertainment. The bars, bordellos, honky-tonks and dives of Storyville offered more than sex: the better – and more expensive – establishments would hire a piano player or a small band to accompany dances and provide amusement for their guests. Houses like Lulu White’s Mahogany Hall, on the notorious Basin Street, were grand buildings with ornate fireplaces, coloured tilework, sweeping staircases and expensive drapes. Paintings in gold frames adorned the walls of the elegant parlours filled with velvet-covered chairs. Black, white and Creole musicians rubbed shoulders and a newly emergent style of music, which by 1915 had been christened jazz, flourished. Buddy Bolden (considered to be the first bandleader to play jazz), Jelly Roll Morton, Pops Foster and many others got their first break in Storyville, as did a young man by the name of Tony Jackson, one of the most accomplished musicians working in that part of town. As New Orleans banjo player Johnny St. Cyr told music historian Alan Lomax, ‘Really the best pianist we had was Tony Jackson’.1
Jackson (born Antonio Junius Jackson and alternately referred to as Tony or Toney) had been born into poverty in New Orleans on 5 June, 1876 (according to his sister Ida) – or was it October 1882 (as claimed in the 1910 census), or perhaps it was 25 October 1884, the date that appears on his draft card and which he signed to confirm it. Trumpeter Bunk Johnson, in a letter to noted jazz historian Roy J. Carew, was adamant it was the former: ‘I think he is a few years older than me. I was born December 27, 1879.’2 Yet Bunk Johnson’s memory was, at best, unreliable: author Donald M. Marquis has proved quite convincingly that Bunk added a decade onto his own age, and that he was actually born in December 1889, making the date that the infant Jackson drew his first breath much more likely to be 1882.3
Whatever his true birth date may have been, Jackson was the sixth child of a freed slave and one of a pair of sickly twins: his brother, Prince Albert, died when Jackson was just 14 months old. An epileptic since birth, legend has it that at around 10 years of age he constructed his own keyboard instrument out of junk found in the backyard and taught himself to play. Jazz historian Bill Edwards (writing at www.ragpiano.com) adds, ‘within a short time an arrangement was worked out with a neighbor exchanging dishwashing duties for time on the neighbor’s old reed organ,’ however his sister Ida claimed, ‘Tony never had any lessons. He taught his own self with the help of God.’4 One thing is certain: by the age of 13, he had landed his first job playing piano at a honky-tonk: just two years later he was already considered one of the best – and consequently most sought-after – entertainers in Storyville.
Described (by Tim Samuelson in the 2008 book Out and Proud in Chicago) as the ‘musical bridge between the multicultural sounds of his native New Orleans and the emerging syncopated music of his adopted Chicago,’ before he became the toast of Storyville, Jackson and his family had been living in a small apartment at 3920 Magazine Street. That apartment was a couple of miles from Storyville but less than ten minutes’ walk from one of his earliest regular gigs: Bunk Johnson recalled that ‘Tony Jackson started playing piano by ear in Adam Oliver’s tonk on the corner of Amelia and Tchoupitoulas. That was between 1892 and 1893.’5 Again, this date is probably out by a few years: Bunk claimed that he and Tony played together in Adam Oliver’s band in 1894, but this has never been substantiated. If they did appear together, it was probably around 1904.
Around the same time, a young boy, barely in his teens, could be heard playing piano in a local brothel. Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, later to find fame as Jelly Roll Morton, was overawed by Jackson – and why wouldn’t he be? There was no one to touch him. Morton looked up to Jackson (who was the best part of a decade older than him) and is quoted as saying that he was the only pianist better than he was. For a man as prone to self-aggrandisement as Morton (this is the same man that claimed to have single-handedly ‘invented’ jazz), that’s quite something. Jackson became mentor, tutor and surrogate father to young Ferd (as he was known to his friends), and their friendship was untouched by the racial, sexual and religious taboos of the time. Jackson was black, the child of a slave family, and openly, almost defiantly homosexual; Morton was a Creole-born Catholic and fiercely heterosexual. If he had not already been thrown out of the family home for playing ‘the Devil’s music’, there can be no doubt that his God-fearing relatives would have ensured that he had nothing to do with a ne’er-do-well like Jackson.
It would not take long for Jackson and Jelly Roll Morton to become favourites with the patrons of Storyville, and the pair were employed by the better-class white houses; according to Bunk Johnson, Morton and Jackson were the only black players able to work the white-run brothels. They dressed well and were paid well, too. Jackson, who could pick up almost any tune by ear, was known as ‘Professor’, an honorary title given to the bes
t of Storyville’s piano players. ‘Tony Jackson played at Gypsy Schaeffer’s,’ Morton told Alan Lomax:
Walk into Gypsy Schaeffer’s and, right away, the bell would ring upstairs and all the girls would walk into the parlor, dressed in their fine evening gowns and ask the customer if he would care to drink wine. They would call for the “professor” and, while champagne was being served all around, Tony would play a couple numbers. If a naked dance was desired, Tony would dig up one of his fast speed tunes and one of the girls would dance on a little narrow stage, completely nude. Yes, they danced absolutely stripped, but in New Orleans the naked dance was a real art.6
Schaeffer’s house, on Conti Street, had a raised step (or banquette) in front, and it was standing there that Roy J. Carew first heard Tony Jackson play. Writing in Jazz Journal magazine (in March 1952) Carew recalled:
The piano was in the front parlour next to the street, and consequently a sidewalk listener could receive the full benefit of Tony’s performance, which always seemed to me to be perfect. I didn’t go inside, where I could watch as well as listen … those establishments were strictly business places. The house provided entertainment, but always at a substantial price, and patrons were expected to spend freely. So I took my fill of listening from the banquette. Some time later, however, I was pleasantly surprised while passing the corner of Franklin and Bienville Streets, to hear Tony performing in the café on that corner, lately identified as Frank Early’s Café. This was my opportunity, for it was a café for white patrons, so I strolled in, bought a drink at the bar, and took a seat at the little table close to the platform where Tony was playing the piano.
Legend has it that Tony wrote an early draft of his biggest hit, ‘Pretty Baby’, at Frank Early’s, and he was famed locally for the obscene variations on, and parodies of, popular songs that he would improvise at the piano.
Jackson’s standing on the local circuit increased, and in 1904 he was chosen to accompany the Whitman Sisters New Orleans Troubadours on their national tour. A high-class vaudeville show, it is said that ‘the singing of Tony Jackson and Baby Alice Whitman usually brought down the house’.7
Carew remembered how most people thought Jackson was ugly ‘largely because his rather weak chin accentuated the prominence of his lips. At that time, around 1905, he already had the little tuft of prematurely grey hair in his forelock. But Tony’s lack of beauty was immediately forgotten in his flawless performance, and his happy, friendly disposition. He was a happy-go-lucky person, and his actions seemed to evidence the fact.’8 It seems that most people remembered him as ‘happy-go-lucky’ with ‘not a care in the world,’ but as Al Rose put it in his definitive book Storyville, New Orleans, Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red-light District:
Oh, to be an epileptic, alcoholic, homosexual Negro genius in the Deep South of the United States of America! How could you have a care? Anyone would be happy, naturally, being among the piano virtuosi of his era, permitted to play only in saloons and whorehouses, for pimps and prostitutes and their customers. How could he be anything but “happy-go-lucky”? Tony Jackson discovered early in life that a young man of such beginnings as his, such “advantages,” had to try to please everybody simply to survive.9
Life certainly was not easy for a black male homosexual at a time when same-sex attraction was considered either criminal or a mental illness.
After hours, Jackson and his friends used to congregate at The Frenchman’s saloon, a known haven for cross-dressers where a number of musicians went. Every inch the flamboyant showman, a prostitute named Carrie recalled that ‘all them dicty [a slang word meaning well-dressed or pretentious] people used to hang by the Frenchman’s to hear that fruit Tony Jackson best of anybody. He play pretty, I give them that.’10 Composer Clarence Williams backed this up: ‘at that time everybody followed the great Tony Jackson. About Tony, you know he was an effeminate man – you know. We all copied him. He was so original and a great instrumentalist. I know I copied Tony.’11 Clarinettist George Baguet remembered how Tony would ‘start playin’ a Cakewalk [a dance that had been popular with slaves and which found its way into minstrel shows], then he’d kick over the piano stool and dance a Cakewalk – and never stop playin’ the piano – and playin’, man! Nobody played like him!’ Jackson’s exhibitionist style presaged the piano pyrotechnics of Liberace, Jerry Lee Lewis and Keith Emerson by decades.
It is Morton that we have to rely on for much of what we know today about Tony Jackson, and specifically the series of interviews he gave to Alan Lomax in 1938, which were later edited for the book Mister Jelly Roll:
All these men were hard to beat, but when Tony Jackson walked in, any one of them would get up from the piano stool. If he didn’t, somebody was liable to say, “Get up from that piano. You hurting its feelings. Let Tony play”. Tony was real dark and not a bit good-looking but he had a beautiful disposition. He was the outstanding favorite of New Orleans, and I have never known any pianists to come from any section of the world that could leave New Orleans victorious. Tony was considered among all who knew him the greatest single-handed entertainer in the world. His memory seemed like something nobody’s ever heard of in the music world. There was no tune that would ever come up from any opera, from any show of any kind or anything that was wrote on any paper that Tony couldn’t play from memory. He had such a beautiful voice and a marvellous range. His voice on an opera tune was exactly as an opera singer. His range on a blues would be just exactly like a blues singer.12
Carew recalled how ‘his repertoire included all types of music, anything a customer might ask for: ragtime songs, waltz songs, march songs, ballads, semi-classics … and he executed them all in his matchless style; he even sang duets, taking each part with equal facility. His voice was of an exceptional quality, clear and vibrant, of good timbre and wide range.’13
Jackson was tiring of playing bordellos in Storyville. He was earning good money, the tips were often huge (Morton boasted of earning up to $100 a night in tips alone) and he was easily able to support his family, yet he wanted more. Morton told Lomax that Jackson decided to move to Chicago because ‘he liked the freedom there,’ and on the original recordings (which still exist in the Library of Congress), Morton and Lomax joke about Jackson’s sexuality. When Morton reveals that ‘Tony happened to be one of those gentlemen that a lot of people call them a lady or a sissy or something like that, but he was very good and very much admired,’ Lomax counters this with ‘so was he … was he a fairy?’ Morton, laughing, replies, ‘I guess he was either a ferry or a steamboat, one or the other, I guess it’s a ferry because that’s what you pay a nickel for’.14 The inference is clear: Tony Jackson’s sexual favours were available to those with money in their pockets and could be bought for a lot less than the hookers he played piano for.
No one can seem to agree on when exactly Jackson moved to Chicago; however, his influence on the city’s music scene, and on every jazz pianist that came after him, is undeniable. He helped to lay the foundation for Chicago’s reputation as a jazz capital, and other musicians – including Morton – soon followed him there. Jackson found acceptance in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighbourhood, where the LGBT community flourished in the pre-war years. As well as enjoying the freedom that his new home afforded him, he found plenty of work amongst Bronzeville’s cabarets, theatres and cafes – and would have no doubt have taken advantage of the opportunity to socialise with other gay men. Black men and women were more than simply tolerated in Bronzeville, where prostitution, interracial relations and visible same-sex couples were the norm. ‘Chicago was segregated: the South Side was black and the North Side was white. It’s still a lot like that, but back then it was even more strict,’15 says historian St. Sukie de la Croix. ‘Right up until the 1960s, the black gay community and the white gay community were completely separate entities. The only blacks that appeared in the bars on the North Side were drag queens and piano players. All the bars were run by the Mafia. Bronzeville w
as entirely black: that’s where all the black clubs were. It was a great place, and white people were welcome there, but black people could not go to the North Side’.
Jackson lived in an apartment on the ground floor of 4111 South Wabash Avenue, Chicago, where he was joined by two of his sisters, a brother-in-law, a nephew and two nieces (according to his draft card, issued in 1918, the whole family later moved to 4045 South State Street). He tickled the ivories at venues including the Elite Café on Chicago’s South State Street (there were two Elite Cafés, both on State Street; Tony played at both) – often as part of a three-piece band with Oliver Perry (violin) and percussionist Charles Gillian backing singer Sallie Lee Johnson – and at Russell & Dago’s Grand Buffet: an advertisement for Russell & Dago’s features a photograph of ‘Toney’ above the statement, ‘Mr. Jackson is one of the best entertainers in the city, and is well liked. He is a good card.’ He quickly earned himself a reputation, not only for his playing but also for his manner: writer Columbus Bragg referred to him as ‘that spoiled and petted Black Paderewski,’ although he grudgingly admitted that Tony was ‘unequalled on the piano’.16 That part of State Street was known as the Stroll, and Jackson was the king of the Stroll: ‘Tony Jackson received an ovation, then played the piano dexterously and just took four bows and then had to do it all over again to please the feverish anxiety of that distinct clientele that patronise the Grand Theatre’.17
At a bordello known as Dago Frank’s, he met the singer Alberta Hunter, herself a lesbian who – although she had a brief marriage in 1919 – lived for many years with her partner Lottie Tyler. It was Hunter that revealed that Tony wrote ‘Pretty Baby’ for a ‘tall, skinny fellow,’ and it was her performances that helped popularise the song. ‘Everybody would go to hear Tony Jackson after hours,’ she revealed. ‘Tony was just marvellous – a fine musician, spectacular, but still soft. He could write a song in two minutes and was one of the greatest accompanists I’ve ever listened to. Tony Jackson was a prince of a fellow, and he would always pack them in. There would be so many people around the piano trying to learn his style that sometimes he could hardly move his hands – and he never played any song the same way twice.’18 One of his other compositions, ‘I’ve Got Elgin Movements in my Hips with Twenty Years’ Guarantee’, was plagiarised by a number of performers (Cleo Gibson’s 1929 recording ‘I’ve Got Ford Engine Movements in my Hips, Ten Thousand Miles Guarantee’, for example) but, unfortunately, Tony’s original – which he would sing in a high register, imitating a woman – was never recorded. A third song composed around this time, ‘We’ve Got Him’, was written for the now-forgotten female vaudeville duo Brown and Wallace.
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