Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  The familiar primitivist package was decked out with unprecedented glamour and excitement. James Weldon Johnson wrote about whites “attempting to throw off the crusts and layers of inhibitions laid on by sophisticated civilization; striving to yield to the feel and experience of abandon; seeking to recapture a state of primitive joy in life and living; trying to work their way back into that jungle which was the original Garden of Eden; in a word, doing their best to pass for colored.” “You go sort of primitive up there,” acknowledged Durante, “with bands moaning blues like nobody’s business, slim, bare-thighed brown-skin gals tossing their torsos, and the Negro melody artists bearing down something terrible on the minor notes. The average colored man you see along the streets in Harlem doesn’t know any more about these dumps than the old maid in North Forks, South Dakota.” Those bare-thighed gals were light brown, of course, café au lait, close to white standards of beauty, but slightly dark and exotic.

  It was the familiar mix of controlling black people and desiring them at the same time. Relative to Chicago the whole scene was cranked up a couple of notches, with more money, more patronage, more competition, more hired creativity, more business savvy. “The whole set was like a sleepy-time down South during slavery,” remembered Cab Calloway, who was at the Cotton Club for many years, “and the idea was to make whites who came feel like they were being catered to and entertained by black slaves.” Black music was heard as a natural sonic production coming from a place of no inhibition. It was for putting aside restraints, sinking into the body, getting in touch with the primordial id. Everything happened late at night, after the Broadway stages emptied out, when less adventurous New Yorkers were asleep.

  Connie’s Inn was a basement club on Seventh Avenue at 131st Street, second in prestige only to the Cotton Club. In June 1929 the owner needed the regular house band, led by Leroy Smith, for a new Broadway show that he was sponsoring downtown, so he hired Armstrong and his friends to replace them. In front of the club grew the Tree of Hope, a talisman that entertainers touched to improve their chances of landing gigs, and next door was the Lafayette Theater.

  With its steep cover charge ($2.50) and intimate atmosphere, Connie’s had something special. It went after the best entertainers and paid them well. It usually ran two shows per evening, one at midnight and the other at 2:00 a.m. Policies were not always consistent, but few African Americans were able to make it through the door.106 Locals gathered in the alley behind the building to listen through a window and in the rib joint above to feel vibrations through the floor.

  Connie’s Inn (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations)

  The assignment for the Dickerson group was to play for the floor show and for social dancing, the format familiar from the Chicago cabarets. Dancer Louise Cook stood out in Armstrong’s memories of summer 1929. One reviewer described Cook as “a lady made entirely of rubber” who performed the kind of dance that “grandfather used to sneak off and see at the county fair”; Mezzrow said her dance was a “Salome routine.” Immerman purchased a set of tunable tom-toms to help drummer Zutty Singleton accompany her sinuous moves. Cook’s act always elicited demands for encores.107 Italian-American sculptor Antonio Salemme, who produced renowned busts of Ethel Waters and Paul Robeson in the 1920s, asked Cook to pose for him in September, claiming that hers was “the most perfect form he has seen among Negro women.”

  One number for the social dance period of the evening was Indian Cradle Song, which Armstrong characterized as a slow fox trot. Singleton’s tom-toms were featured in the introduction. The recording Armstrong made in May 1930 preserves a beautifully designed trumpet solo, intricate and rich, confirming that this was a solo he played often and improved over time, getting it just right in the tradition of the special chorus. The solo is not particularly well known, but it can easily stand alongside his great solos from the late 1920s.

  The crowds of slumming whites included a good number of musicians who studied the riffs, warmed themselves by the fire, and asked to sit in. On a Sunday night in late July some of them rented out Connie’s for a banquet in Armstrong’s honor, presenting him with a gold wristwatch inscribed “To Louis Armstrong, the World’s Greatest Cornetist, from the Musicians of New York.”

  Connie Immerman and his brother George took an active role running their club. Connie, described by one musician as “a little fat guy,” had designed his latest revue, Tan Town Topics, with Broadway in mind. After a trial run, he took the show to the Hudson Theater on West 44th Street and changed its name to Hot Chocolates. Direct connections to Broadway were another thing that distinguished the elite black and tans in New York City from those in Chicago. The Cotton Club and Connie’s each put together two floor shows a year with the goal of transforming them into successful Broadway hits in a chase after big financial rewards. Armstrong walked right into this fully developed scene like a champion and made his mark.

  “All-colored” shows on Broadway did not pay performers as much as the elite cabarets or big-time vaudeville, but the potential boost in reputation was enough to entice the performers to sign up anyway. Black composers James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, and Eubie Blake went back and forth between the cabarets and Broadway, as did white composers like Jimmy McHugh. The mutually reinforcing publicity of the cabarets and theaters generated one big swell of “Nubian” excitement, as white marketing liked to put it.

  When Rudolf Fisher lamented the rush of whites that had ruined his favorite places of African-American sociability in Harlem, he blamed the whole mess on the 1921 Broadway success of Shuffle Along. “Shuffle Along was a honey of a show,” remembered Langston Hughes, “swift, bright, funny, rollicking, and gay, with a dozen danceable, singable tunes.” The show was conceived by a fortuitous combination of two sets of partners, the songwriting team Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, and the comedy team Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles. At the 63rd Street Music Hall (22 West 63rd Street), Shuffle Along revived the tradition of all-black casts on Broadway that had started decades earlier but since faded. The talent-filled cast included blackface comedians Miller and Lyles; singers Florence Mills, Adelaide Hall, and Paul Robeson; the future choir director Hall Johnson (playing viola in the orchestra); and the future composer William Grant Still (oboe). Sixteen-year-old Josephine Baker made the most out of her place as “end girl” in the dancing chorus, taking advantage of the little solo spot allotted to this position in exits and, as Blake remembered, “doing all the steps the rest were doing, but funnier.” The narrative was very loose, like all Broadway shows at this time, with lots of room for specialty acts, one after the other, in a dazzling flow of variety and exciting ensembles. “Just enough plot,” according to Billboard, “to be easily remembered and afford some good comedy.”

  Shuffle Along’s combination of low ticket prices, low salaries, recycled costumes, and first-rate entertainment produced profits. The show ran for 504 performances in New York City, followed by three years of national tours. The musical hit was I’m Just Wild About Harry. Blake claimed that his melodies helped usher in a new style on Broadway, replacing “mushy, sobby, sentimental love songs” with “lively, jazzy” tunes. From now on the typical song mix on Broadway would include uptempo jazz-ragtime alongside ballads and comedy songs. Musicians in the orchestra memorized their parts, since white audiences expected black musicians to be illiterate.

  Shuffle Along was packed with stereotypical black stage humor, much of it derived from minstrelsy, even including two minor characters named Uncle Tom and Old Black Joe. One highlight was a choreographed comic fight, with Miller and Lyles portraying two mayoral candidates; this scene became a favorite of Fiorello LaGuardia. Representations of black humor and black music were both important, but what made Shuffle sizzle with heated blackness was the dancing. The prominence of dance was signaled by the very title of the show, a nod to minstrel stereotypes and also a point of humor: any onstage sh
uffling was of the parody type. Most of the dancing was fast, peppy, versatile, eccentric, and varied. Tommy Woods twisted acrobatically across the stage in perfect rhythm, tap dancer Charlie Davis astonished audiences with his speed, and the lovely chorus girls were amazing. Blake explained how traditional white offerings on Broadway had beautiful girls in beautiful clothes who would “just walk around and kick a little”; in contrast, “our girls were beautiful and they danced! There had never been anything like it.” Dancing was usually mentioned first and most often in white reviews of not just Shuffle Along but virtually all “Colored Broadway” productions during the 1920s.

  Black patrons were admitted but not encouraged. Theater critics for black newspapers found it difficult to get complementary tickets so that they could write reviews.108 A reviewer for the Interstate Tattler called all-black shows on Broadway “o’fay revues”; they “leave me flat, peeved and irritable,” she confessed. Shuffle Along launched so many imitations that a song was composed to make fun of the situation. It’s Getting Dark on Old Broadway (1922) was based on a pun that was just too good to pass up, as the sudden popularity of all-black casts threw a different set of meanings into the nickname the “Great White Way”: “Pretty choc’late babies Shake and shimmie ev’rywhere Real darktown entertainers hold the stage.” More than a few white performers must have felt a touch of the same anxiety that was driving the white musicians’ union in Chicago toward exclusionary practices.

  The primitivist conventions of the cabarets were represented on black Broadway, but with considerable modification. Theaters had elevated stages, of course, with distance between stage and seats and with less expensive admission, thus opening the event to a broader swath of the public. In contrast to a place like the Sunset or Connie’s, whites did not go to theaters to try out the Charleston with one of the chorines or flirt with sexual transgression. The entertainment was pitched for a mainstream audience, and representation of the African-American vernacular varied. The contrast between dancing and music makes this clear.

  For while the music was designed to be catchy and danceable, its contribution to the effect of “real darktown” entertainment was limited. An interviewer once asked Sissle and Blake if they made concessions to white taste when they wrote and performed for Broadway. Blake’s answer was decisive and perhaps unexpected: “You see, Sissle went to white schools,” he said, “and he had a different slant on a lyric than the average Negro person. I wrote waltzes. The reason I did that is because I was exposed to them; these were great writers, Victor Herbert, Franz Lehár, Leslie Stuart.” Sissle and Blake did not have to adapt to white taste because that was how they had been trained. The majority of white patrons at the 63rd Street Music Hall must have felt that the music was black enough, though dissenting voices occasionally popped up. In Bamville, a 1924 follow-up to Shuffle Along, was attacked by a white critic who complained of “too much ‘art’ and not enough Africa … even in the music of that gifted melodist, Eubie Blake. He might now be a Professor Blake, Doctor of Music Blake, for all the real Blakiness of his music in the first act… . No feeling within you that Victor Herbert couldn’t have composed it on a bet.”

  This concession to white musical style was a key element of all-black productions on Broadway. The burden of carrying the energy of the black vernacular was assigned to dancing, which, compared to black vernacular music, was much easier for mainstream whites to relate to. Eubie Blake, James P. Johnson, and Fats Waller all understood that. Broadway audiences—and by extension audiences throughout the country—were pleased to have a doctor of music setting the tunes that sprang the light-brown-thighed bodies into vigorous, seductive motion across the stage.

  Following the success of Shuffle Along, Liza brought the Charleston dance to Broadway in 1922. Runnin’ Wild, with music by James P. Johnson and lyrics by Cecil Mack, carried the Charleston to greater popularity in 1923, aided by Johnson’s tune of the same name. “Jimmy Johnson had the band lay out while he, the bass, and the drums went along with the whole chorus singing and patting ‘Charleston—Charleston—that dance from Carolina,’” remembered Perry Bradford, “as Josephine Baker was twirling her sexy body and twisting those gorgeous legs to that African beat.” The year 1923 also welcomed Dinah, with tunes (only one survives) composed by Tim Brymn and Sidney Bechet. “Too much attention has been paid to the feet and not enough to the head,” complained a reviewer of Dinah in the Defender.

  Lew Leslie was the central figure who connected cabaret floor shows to Broadway. He became so closely associated with all-black shows that many people were shocked when they first heard he was white. Black entertainers like Florence Mills were loyal to him, and in turn he made Mills famous. But he preferred to use whites behind the scenes, including composers J. Russell Robinson and the team of Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh. “The two greatest Negro songs now sung were written by white men—Ol’ Man River and That’s Why Darkies Were Born,” explained Leslie, in defense of his hiring practices.

  With Blackbirds of 1928 Leslie hit it big, to the tune of 518 performances at the Liberty Theater. The whole country got to know I Can’t Give You Anything but Love by Fields and McHugh. Earl “Snakehips” Tucker, weaving his undulating pelvis across the stage, was a dance sensation. But the true standout was Bill Bojangles Robinson in his Broadway debut. After Blackbirds of 1928 had gathered only lukewarm reception for three weeks, Leslie hired Robinson as an “extra attraction” inserted late in the show. Praise for Robinson’s stair dance was instant, universal, and dramatic, with at least seven newspapers heralding him as the greatest of all dancers. If Leslie’s earlier productions had established Florence Mills as the queen of black female entertainers—when she died suddenly in 1927, an estimated 150,000 people lined the streets for her funeral—Blackbirds of 1928 did something similar for Robinson. Blackbirds of 1928 had been developed at the Cotton Club, where Fields and McHugh were regularly employed, and it was the model for Immerman’s Hot Chocolates.

  Immerman hired Andy Razaf and Fats Waller to write the music and Leonard Harper, who had worked on Shuffle Along, to stage and produce his new revue. Hot Chocolates started as Tan Town Topics at Connie’s in late February 1929, and by June 3 it was ready for the Windsor Theater in the Bronx. Immerman tried unsuccessfully to lure Bojangles Robinson, Snakehips Tucker, and Ethel Waters. On June 20 the production opened at the Hudson Theater with a cast of 85.

  “It is distinctly a dancing show,” wrote Variety in its review of the Hudson premiere. The male chorus line, named the “Bon Bon Buddies,” eclipsed the female line, a rare feat.109 The girls nevertheless used “every muscle of their bodies as well as their hands, ears and heads in wild flurries of maddening dance routines.” Louise Cook did her “phallic dance” in a set piece called the Goddess of Rain with a specially made backdrop, leaving “her audience either speechless or hysterical, depending upon its temperament.” (This was one of the songs that Cab Calloway sang when he joined the show in September.) Baby Cox, described by the Defender as a “little dark-skinned girl with remarkable talent,” pleased the crowd with her cross-dressing routine, hooking up with the petite Madeline Belt. In Hot Chocolates, Cox, who is known to jazz fans today for her performances with the Ellington Orchestra, “not only dances but sings and tosses across the footlights a personality that makes her a wow,” reported the Interstate Tattler. The handsome Paul Meers, stripped to the waist, led his equally beautiful and slender wife, Thelma, in a graceful adagio routine.

  “The dancing does it,” insisted the Tattler, which agreed with most other newpapers that the eccentric Jazzlips Richardson, “tap dancer, adagio dancer, contortionist, and capable of making his lips do incredible things,” stood out above all others. “Blacker than a rent collectors’ heart,” Richardson performed his “unbelievably acrobatic dance.” “I don’t believe yet that he did everything I saw him do with that one pair of rather large feet,” wrote a reviewer. Like so many of these performers, Richardson combined comedy with dance. “Jazzlips
Richardson and his demented feet and old frock coat throw themselves about with such abandon as to quiver the chair beneath you,” reported the Evening Graphic.

  Humor was also prominent in the risqué skits and songs assigned to Edith Wilson, who did her job a bit too well for Broadway taste. The lewd double entendres of her first number, Pool Room Papa, caused it to be scratched after the Hudson Theater debut. Her second number, Traffic in Harlem, featured her as an automobile. Her third comic number was (What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue, which she sang from a bed; the bed was removed after the first night, judged to be too suggestive.

  “The show in the Hudson does not go in for music very heavily,” complained the Amsterdam News. “There is a song called Ain’t Misbehavin’ on which much reliance is placed.” Mezz Mezzrow said that Waller taught Ain’t Misbehavin’ to Armstrong at Waller’s apartment, before it was performed on stage. This is plausible, since, seven years later, Armstrong wrote about first hearing the song, being impressed by it, “woodshedding it until I could play all around it,” cherishing it because it was “one of those songs you could cut loose and swing with,” and being ready to go when he first offered it to the public. Ain’t Misbehavin’ was sung by so many performers in Hot Chocolates that Variety called it “virtually the theme number of the show.” Armstrong’s woodshedding paid off: Connie Immerman sent him downtown to the Hudson in time for the premiere, while the rest of the Dickerson musicians stayed behind at 135th Street. Unable to snag Bojangles Robinson, Snakehips Tucker, or Ethel Waters, Immerman must have been hoping for a boost from the magnetizing newcomer, the kind that Robinson had given Lew Leslie as a late addition to Blackbirds of 1928.

  At the Hudson Armstrong sang Ain’t Misbehavin’ from the pit at the end of intermission, just before the beginning of the second act.110 We know about a few similar offerings from earlier Broadway productions. In 1924–25, his rival Joe Smith came out of the pit to play wah-wah effects with a coconut in the Sissle-Blake show In Bamville as patrons were leaving the theater. People hung around so long, listening and jamming up the exits, that Smith’s act had to be canceled. Another one of Armstrong’s rivals, Johnny Dunn, did something similar with Blackbirds of 1928 when it toured Europe. Bessie Smith was brought in for one week of How Come in Philadelphia, in 1923, before the show went to Broadway, also to sing between acts.