Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  Sometime in the fall of 1926, Percy Venable wrote a comic tune for a new Sunset review, and he gave it the title Big Butter and Egg Man from the West. The song featured Armstrong as singer and trumpeter. Armstrong recorded it with the Hot Five on November 16. Though the other Hot Five musicians were not working at the Sunset, the two principals in the recording, Armstrong and vocalist Mae Alix, were the two for whom the piece was written. In the case of Cornet Chop Suey, Armstrong composed a display piece for himself that later found a home in the Dreamland Café and the Vendome Theater. With Heebie Jeebies, the local success of the Hot Five recording caused the Dreamland, Vendome, and Sunset to find a place for an established hit. With Big Butter and Egg Man from the West we can be certain, for the first time, of a sequence in which a piece found its way onto a Hot Five recording after it was worked out in a cabaret. That sequence helps explain the success of Armstrong’s famous and beloved trumpet solo.

  Revues helped cabarets like the Sunset and Plantation distinguish themselves from less elite venues. Instead of a stream of unrelated performances, vaudeville style, a revue tied together the various acts with a little theme, the various performers appearing and reappearing in different roles. The organization of choreography and music was very loose, with everything coming to a climax in the finale, performed by the entire cast. A master of ceremonies told jokes and moved things along. Trumpeter Natty Dominique remembered the Sunset having four shows per night, with three shorter periods of social dancing in between the shows and one intermission per evening. “Jobs like the Plantation and the Sunset wore a trumpet player out,” explained Preston Jackson. Oliver prolonged the use of his steadily deteriorating chops by having Bob Shoffner play the shows at the Plantation, while he came in only for the featured part of the social dance segment.

  Light classics were often worked into revues, and since there was a new show every four weeks or so, the musicians had to be able to read. Stock arrangements were used, but musical arrangers were sometimes hired, too; Dave Peyton arranged for the Plantation, for example, and he wrote difficult music. The reading demands tripped up more than a few of the New Orleanians. Drummer Paul Barbarin played for social dancing at the Plantation, but he couldn’t keep up with the revue, so George Smith was brought in. At the Sunset Dickerson was meticulous and issued penalties for wrong notes. “What are you carrying that union card for if you can’t read music?” he’d bark at an erring musician. “Get rid of it!”

  The Sunset hired Venable to run their revues in early 1925 and he stayed on until March 1927. It was Venable’s job to select the music, teach the chorus girls their routines, and coordinate everything with the music director. Rehearsals were squeezed into the busy seven-day-a-week performing schedule. “Opening night could be a real madhouse, the scariest thing you could want to see,” remembered Hines. Venable was greatly admired. “One of the greatest producers I’ve ever seen,” remembered Budd Johnson, “just like Ziegfeld would put on something, you know.”

  The best source for details of what a revue at the Sunset was like is the magazine Heebie Jeebies (and its continuation as the Light and Heebie Jeebies). The February 19, 1927, issue described a new revue called Sunset Gaieties, a “series of variety sketches with single numbers supported by a chorus of ten ‘Dancing Dimpled Darlings.’” From the moment conductor Earl Hines’s baton “is first lifted until he wearily lets it drop four hours later, a fast pace is maintained which is contagious to both performers and patrons.” The reviewer felt this was the Sunset’s best show in two years, and he listed the goodies in this order: pretty girls, Class A dancing, good singing, striking and novel costumes. Carmen Lopez, “pretty and naïve,” opened the show and introduced the entertainers. She was followed by Dotty McClendon, “a beautiful longhaired girl,” singing I’d Love to Have Somebody to Love Me. Singer Slick White was well received, and so were dancers Chick Johnson, Sammy Vanderhurst, and Georgie Staten, the latter a “midget dancer.” But the true stars of the evening were Buck and Bubbles and the “pachydermatous mistress of the splits,” Mae Alix, with her gorgeous gowns. Buck and Bubbles performed for 45 minutes. The band, Louis Armstrong and His Stompers, got a mention at the end of the review, which drew attention not to Armstrong’s stunning solos but to a number that they danced by themselves “in a spot which is probably the most humorous of the entire production.” (This was probably the fat-thin-fat-thin Charleston routine mentioned earlier.)

  In spite of this lack of musical notice, it is clear that the surge of interest in jazz at 35th and Calumet was lifting Dickerson’s band and Armstrong into a spotlight not customarily directed at musicians. Peyton, whose job it was to write about music, confirmed this in July 1926: “the cause of the large nightly crowds [at the Sunset] is Carroll Dickerson’s orchestra.” Another (unidentified) reviewer explained that there was no doubt about who the star of the orchestra was: “With all due respect to Carroll and his ability, personality, etc., it must be stated as a fact that Louie is a million dollar asset to the band and many patrons who come there from all over town just to watch and listen to this marvel ‘toot his tooter.’” When Venable decided to feature him in Big Butter and Egg Man from the West in the fall of 1926, he was responding to a six-month run of success that had begun the previous April.

  Big Butter and Egg Man became Armstrong’s next big hit, and he continued to perform it as late as 1933. The trumpet solo stands today as one of his most admired achievements of the 1920s. Its canonic status in jazz history is very high. Martin Williams included it on his important anthology Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, and jazz scholar Gunther Schuller believed that “no composer, not even a Mozart or a Schubert, composed anything more natural and simply inspired” than the first eight-bar phrase.

  My hunch is that Venable wrote Big Butter and Egg Man to fill the finale spot in his new revue. In July 1927 (as noted in Chapter 5) he placed Heebie Jeebies in that position for a revue called Jazzmania, with dancer Kid Lips and the entire cast complementing Armstrong. Big Butter and Egg Man features a duet for two singers, a woman and a man, who banter back and forth through their megaphones about the woman’s need for a big butter and egg man (a more familiar term today would be sugar daddy) and the man’s interest in meeting that need. To the comic duet Venable added Armstrong’s trumpet and perhaps also the dance team Brown and McGraw. The natural place for such a full flush of cabaret variety would be the spectacle of the finale. The combined effect, delivered with humor, pep, variety, and a stunning density of eccentric tricks, must have been impressive. Big Butter and Egg Man was performed every night, seven days a week, for the duration of the revue. These are the conditions that led to the creation of Armstrong’s famous solo, which musicians flocked to hear, memorizing every note.

  The phrase “big butter and egg man” was one of those slang terms that help define an era. The concept was all about reckless spending and conspicuous consumption as a means to define personal success. The phrase was made famous by legendary nightclub hostess Texas Guinan at the El Fey Club in Manhattan, just a few blocks from the Roseland Ballroom, where Armstrong had worked with Henderson. Guinan liked to single out wealthy men in the audience and taunt them into spending sprees. After one man gave out $50 bills to the dancers and bought everyone in the house a drink, she called him to center stage and introduced him: “Folks, here’s a live one, a buyer, a good guy, a sport of the old school—encourage him!” In the logic of the roaring twenties, everybody won in this scenario: the big man benefited from the attention and enhancement of his status, his date benefited from the riches wasted on her, and the cabaret and its employees skipped away with a pile of money. A genuine big butter and egg man could put out as much as $1,000 in a single night.

  Venable’s clever idea, then, was to write a comic finale that celebrated cabaret culture. Tex Guinan invited the big butter and egg man to center stage because he was indeed at the center of the whole cabaret enterprise. He was a model for other cabaret patrons. More than a few w
ho walked through the Sunset’s front door were buying a little piece of this concept, even if they couldn’t match the standards of the biggest spender in their midst. This was the scene Venable playfully invoked in his new song.

  Danny Barker said that Mae Alix was a “superstar” in Chicago. She certainly performed a lot in the most expensive venues, not just in Chicago but in New York City, too. Earl Hines remembered Armstrong being smitten by her and choking on his lines during the first performance of their duet. According to Hines, Alix “used to put her arms around him, look at him, and sing, ‘I need a big butter and egg man,’ he would stand there and almost melt, and everybody in the band would get up and shout, ‘Hold it Louis! Hold it!’”

  On the recording, Armstrong boasts about his high-note playing, which had become an easily identifiable marker of his greatness. He jokes that he will buy “all the pretty things” she thinks she needs, “as long as I can keep this cornet up to my mouth.” The skit includes an unspoken racial dimension, for part of the humor came from having the dark-skinned cornetist acting the part of a big butter and egg man, who was, unquestionably, white in the popular imagination. It was a cross-racial role that derived instant humor from the dramatic play of opposites, just like his cross-dressing skit at the Vendome and just like his performance at the Sunset, also in the fall of 1926, of Venable’s song Irish Black Bottom Stomp—“Well I was born in Ireland,” he sang with a little chuckle. Having the white-looking Alix and the dark-skinned Armstrong act out courtship roles took the racial fun to a more risqué level.

  Kid Lips, five-foot master of the backward, skating knee drop, helped fill out the Heebie Jeebies finale in Venable’s July revue, and the husband-and-wife dance team known as Brown and McGraw was called upon to put Big Butter and Egg Man from the West into rapid motion. This was at least the second appearance for Herbert Brown and Naomi McGraw at the Sunset. Hines described this couple from New Orleans: “she was very cute and he was a handsome little fellow … they were both short but he had sharp uniforms and she was well developed and always wore a pretty dress.” Like virtually all cabaret dancers, they spiced up their act with comedy and singing.

  The problem with researching dance in the 1920s is severe lack of documentation. Imagine how crippled our understanding of music would be if we did not have the vast legacy of commercial recordings: that is precisely the situation we face in studying African-American cabaret dancers. There is no video footage that would reveal with precision what the dancing of Buck and Bubbles, Kid Lips, and Brown and McGraw was actually like. Verbal descriptions are helpful, and so is later video, but style was changing rapidly, with as much competitive innovation in professional dancing as there was in jazz.

  In spite of these obstacles, musicologist Brian Harker has demonstrated how thoroughly mixed dance and music were at the cabarets, and he has done so with special focus on Armstrong, Brown and McGraw, and Big Butter. Brown was an innovative tap dancer who worked on rhythmic variety and flash as a way to distinguish himself from traditional tap, exemplified by the famous Bill Bojangles Robinson. Like Armstrong and other entertainers, he was pushing the limits of speed. Brown and McGraw packed their routines with an impressive density of activity. Variety described “a million twists and turns, grimaces and floor fol-de-rol plus the time step, which clicks all the way.” The duo was promoted as the world’s greatest eccentric dancers, with emphasis on rhythmic complexity.61 All of this suggests compatibility with the trumpet style Armstrong was working out in 1926.

  The background for kinetic-sonic synergy in the cabarets was the African-American vernacular tradition of the Deep South. Little is known about the early experience of Brown and McGraw in New Orleans, but we know that Armstrong was raised in an environment that took for granted the complete synthesis of music with movement of the body. It was almost impossible to conceive of one without the other. That was how he was taught in church, where bodies swayed in synchrony with congregational singing, on the streets, where the second line performed a kind of ring shout behind funky marching bands, and in dance halls. Even when people gathered close to the bandstand in Chicago to listen to the jazz concert king, they must have articulated their engagement with at least some slight movement of the body.

  It’s not surprising, then, to discover musical-kinetic synergy at the highest professional levels. Of course, professional dancing was always accompanied by music, typically by drummers who made creative use of various accessories. The task demanded perfect timing and strong concentration. “Shows are the hardest thing to play, especially for toe dances,” explained Pops Foster. “They’re counting beats all the time, and the musicians got to be following the music very close… . If he misses, the whole thing looks silly.” The dancers set the tempo and the musicians followed, playing softly enough that the taps could be heard.

  In the mid-1920s a tradition of trumpet players accompanying professional dance acts was gaining a little bit of momentum. The key event happened on Broadway in the fall of 1924, with the great dancer-comedian Johnny Hudgins accompanied by none other than Joe Smith, Armstrong’s New York rival. Hudgins pantomimed a song, moving his lips but not making a sound, while Smith played wah-wah trumpet. The pantomime was followed straight away by a coordinated dance, Smith matching a note to every one of Hudgins’s steps. At the Sunset, Armstrong stepped off the bandstand to do something similar with Brown and McGraw, and he used Venable’s Big Butter and Egg Man from the West.

  Earl Hines said that Brown and McGraw “had a riff they used that later became very popular with big bands. It used to go bomp-bomp-bomp-bu-bomp, bomp-bomp-bomp-bu-bomp, and Louis used to take his trumpet and do it right with them.” “Every step they made I put the notes to it,” explained Armstrong. His quick mind and nimble fingers had found a new outlet, the effect similar to the surprisingly synchronized cornet breaks with Oliver at Lincoln Gardens. Armstrong “made Brown and McGraw one of the most famous dance acts in Chicago at that time,” according to Doc Cheatham. The act was so successful that when the two dancers left the Sunset to tour, they had an arranger write out what Armstrong was playing so that another trumpet player could take his place, wherever they went.62 “Louis gained a lot of popularity from doing that thing with Brown and McGraw,” remembered Hines, and then he added, “of course that was his heart,” making it clear that Armstrong’s professional standard at this time, as later, was to pour everything he had into every performance.

  Bubber Miley and Roger Pryor Dodge, 1931 (Roger Pryor Dodge Collection, courtesy of Pryor Dodge)

  Like Heebie Jeebies before and like Ain’t Misbehavin’ a few years later, Big Butter was a comic vocal. These were his three biggest hits of the 1920s. Today we value his eccentric trumpet solos much more than his singing from this period, but for mainstream taste of the time jazz instrumentalists were small potatoes compared with singers.63 Nevertheless, it is also clear that the trumpet chorus on Big Butter played a role in his growing popularity. From now on, choruses like this would become more and more central to his identity as an entertainer. Big Butter and Egg Man from the West was the first recording he made that features him in a vocal and also includes a trumpet solo that he performed regularly—indeed, it was probably the first time this happened for any musician during this period. Venable combined the two in his revue, and this must have seemed like a fairly obvious thing to try in the fall of 1926.

  One clear inference from this set of circumstances bears emphasis: the famous trumpet solo from the November recording was not improvised. Commentators have marveled at the miracle of Armstrong improvising melodic gems that rival the best of Mozart and Schubert, but in fact he was just as much a planning composer as those two were.

  The first phase of Armstrong’s modern achievement, which reaches a crystallized moment of excellence with this solo, is all about the insertion of a composed chorus into a preexistent piece. Cornet Chop Suey was conceived differently: it was written out on paper in a reach for the rewards of sheet-music publication.
Nevertheless, it was an important step along the way, for it shows him working out carefully made choruses, which is precisely what he did with Big Butter. Now the final product is simply kept in his head, with no intention of notation. The strong advantage to that was the ability to make performer-centered details of melodic nuance, including eccentric rhythm and blues phrasing, part of the conception. His expanding sense of melodic style could now be based even more directly on the orally based vernacular of New Orleans.

  In New Orleans, too, solos and collective improvisation were planned, rehearsed, and improved over time, while no one thought of notation.64 “Even back in the old days it was like that,” Armstrong said in a 1966 interview, “when everybody was supposed to be improvising. Who knows who’s improvising?”

  His solo for Chimes Blues conforms to current notions of a melodic lead, with none of the excitement and richness of the fixed and variable model. Cornet Chop Suey represents a step in that direction within the limitation of what can be notated; the challenge he faced is evident in the mistakes in rhythmic notation in the lead sheet that was mailed to Washington, D.C., for copyright. In the second half of the 1920s, he inserted non-notated choruses into composed pieces. Notating them for copyright was no longer part of the plan. They simply had too much of the dense and varied complexity that he had been experimenting with since his departure from Oliver and was now bringing under control. If notating Cornet Chop Suey was a struggle, he just would have chuckled at the idea of notating his solo for Big Butter and Egg Man.