by Linda Dahl
IT WAS ON August 25th of 1928, remembered John with his precise recall, that he accepted an offer to join a band called the Dark Clouds of Joy, led by trumpet player Terrence “T” Holder. Dance bands were growing in popularity all around the Southwest and Midwest, and especially in the oil-boom Oklahoma territories, where the Dark Clouds were based.
“Another band, led by Alphonse Trent, came through town, and his men recommended me for Fats Walls’s job—he was lead alto—after Walls had handed in his resignation to Holder,” remembered John. “Then I bargained up my pay to $60 a week,” he added proudly. “I said to friends, ‘That’s more than both me and Mary are making here in Memphis.’ At that time, Andy Kirk, the oldest guy in the band, was the tuba player and he was earning $55; the rest of the guys, $40. I told Mary, ‘I’ll go out for a month and see if I like it. If I don’t, I’ll come on back.’
“I caught the train from Memphis to Oklahoma City. The band was playing at the amusement park, their summer gig. I was so enthused; that was the first big band I’d ever been in and I liked it so much and I fit in so well. And they were paying me the highest. After I saw I was really set with “T” Holder’s band and they were satisfied with my playing, I wired Mary and told her drive the car, come on up to Oklahoma City. The band was traveling as a stage attraction in Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, with a TOBA show, and after that, we were based in Oklahoma for about a year.”
During John’s trial period with the Dark Clouds, Mary fulfilled the bookings made for the Memphis band, some of them with Jimmie Lunceford taking John’s place as lead alto. She also took whatever other engagements she could get on her own, jobs that she never told John about so she could salt away her own “loot.” “I had begun to keep my money,” Mary wrote, adding meaningfully, “This John did not like too much and was not always too nice about.”
On her own, she was again at the mercy of the unsavory, and even dangerous, individuals who have always peopled nightlife. “If you’ve never met a tough southern underworld character, just thank God,” she wrote, recalling one racist club owner who refused to pay her and her band when they filled in for another group who couldn’t make it. “He refused to honor our contract, saying, ‘I can get all the niggers I want on Beale Street for two dollars a dozen.’ I couldn’t talk, I was so angry, but when I returned to the boys and told them, they told me to forget it, that we were in Mississippi. I refused to listen and they split, leaving me there alone. But I wouldn’t leave until I had collected our loot. His wife, who already had a black eye, pleaded with me to leave, saying he’d kill me. But I guess a little of my stepfather had rubbed off on me. I began to cry, jumping up and down, almost screaming. ‘He’s gonna give me my money!’ He finally gave in and paid most of what he owed.”
Then there was what Mary politely called a “bad night club,” a roadhouse-brothel on the outskirts of Memphis where Mary was hired to play piano in the parlor. To get there, she had to ride to the end of the city’s trolley line, then wait for a car to take her the rest of the way, driven by a young man—a “Jack Dempsey look-alike,” as Mary put it—who worked for Mrs. Singleton, the owner of the joint.
“Never in my life had I ever heard so many ‘nigger, nigger, niggers.’ No one had explained the conditions in the South to me. On our way to the club in the car, we passed an old Negro man on a bridge and someone yelled, ‘There’s a nigger, run over him, he’s too old to live anyway!’ I was with too many people and too far out in the woods, so kept quiet, counted to ten very fast, and thought of a beautiful composition.
“Of course I had to eat in the kitchen at the gig, with the colored help. I didn’t mind, they’d cooked my favorite dish of yams and marshmallows. I waited until I was back home and let loose on the white driver, who told me then, ‘The South always holds neck parties when your kind gets out of line.’ And I wouldn’t go back to work until Mrs. Singleton called my motherin-law and said, ‘Polly, make Mary come back to work, they like her out here.’ I was a big hit. I suggested getting a male pianist, but Singleton let me know immediately that a young female pianist appealed to her customers most. Well, I went back to the job after I got a raise and presents. But what I hated about that job was, I was expected to entertain in more ways than one. I still have cards with the addresses on them, for dates. They were laid nicely on the piano.
“Well, I still didn’t get it. The clientele consisted of barrel-bellied, loud-mouthed, third-grade readers whose preoccupation was gambling and girls. A rich, big fat redheaded, freckle-faced plantation owner came up to Memphis from Mississippi with this little nurse. Every night he’d give me $5 each time I played his requests. Around the third night his girlfriend tried to take him away, saying, ‘You like nigger girls?’ And Singleton came up, very excited, telling me to go home at once and stay home a couple of days. When I returned to the job, she told me that this sick man had paid the cook $50 to kidnap me and bring me to his farm in Mississippi. After this, I did not stay on the job very long, because I had heard many tales about black women being kidnapped and taken to Mississippi across state lines, out of the reach of Tennessee authorities. And when their parents had gone to get them, they were shot at the gate.”
In fact, as preposterous as that might sound to today’s more gently raised generation, “white” slavery was every bit as real as the lynch mob, or “necktie party,” as the driver of the car had warned Mary.
It surely must have come as a relief when John wired Mary to come out to Oklahoma that fall of 1928. Mary packed up the car, their aging Chevy that looked like “a red bathtub,” with her possessions, her motherin-law Polly Williams, and a friend of Polly’s, Mrs. Buchanan. It can be blazingly hot in the Panhandle during Indian summer. “We left at four in the morning, since there was not much traffic on the road until around eight or nine. The roads were gravel, turtleback, and there were holes everywhere. I must have had over ten flats, the carburetor was not working, and I don’t know what-all wasn’t wrong with this old Chevy. We stopped so many times. It’s a good thing that Roland and a mechanic friend taught me how to fix cars. I’d drive twenty-five or fifty miles and would have to stop to let the car cool off. We were just miserable—the sun, the sand in our eyes and shoes and mouth when another car passed us. But I made Oklahoma. John sent his mother back to Memphis and I guess the other lady went to the hospital.”
Exhausted as she was, Mary made sure to be at the band rehearsal the very next morning. “Holder’s boys rehearsed two days a week, beginning at 11 A.M. I was in the hall by nine. I thought them the handsomest bunch of intellectuals I had seen so far. They looked like collegians—all had beautiful brown complexions and wore sharp beige suits to match. Going out, they sported yellow raincoats with the instrument each man played illustrated on the back. Most came from good families and their manners were perfect. As I suspected, the music was out of the ordinary. They were all reading like mad. It was smooth showmanship coupled with musical ability.”
Not that she saw a future for herself with the band: they had a pianist. Perhaps she thought of starting her own little combo, or working as a single around Memphis. For the time being, she may have thought she could be content with being the wife of the highest-paid member of the band, and with hovering in the background.
Chapter Four
Nite Life
1929–1931
THE DARK CLOUDS of Joy liked Terrence “T” Holder—he was said to have been an excellent musician. But when he either gambled away the payroll at Christmastime of 1928 or absconded with it to Texas to woo back his estranged wife (depending on whom you talked to), the band revolted. Being left flat broke was particularly galling to the band because they were doing well, booked into long engagements in Oklahoma City and Tulsa dancehalls by the biggest promoter in those parts, a man named Falkenberg. The band members got together and on New Year’s Day 1929 voted “T” Holder out.
That they were able to fire their leader was, of course, highly unusual. But this band was a rarity
, what John Williams and Claude “Fiddler” Williams, both Clouds veterans, called a commonwealth band, or, in Gunther Schuller’s term, a cooperative. Interestingly, the popular white band called the Casa Loma Orchestra was organized along similar lines, although with more sophistication. (One of its saxophone players, Glen Gray, was its president, and the rest of the band served as board of directors and stockholders.) “I remember reading that with the Casa Lomas, they would share out the money, a salary, and put aside something in the bank every week,” said John, who soon became the road manager, responsible for overseeing finances, among other jobs. “So this one guy when he leaves the band after years, he has $10,000 savings. Now our band couldn’t do like that—save money. But we played percentage dances where we’d get, say, 10% of the take, and we automatically split up the money except for a little more for Andy and so on.”
For its new leader the band voted in Andy Kirk, a handsome light-skinned musician whose wife, Mary, was also a pianist in the stride style. Kirk was seven years older than John Williams and had been with the Clouds since ’26. Like Jimmie Lunceford, Kirk had gotten his musical education in Denver from Wilberforce J. Whiteman, the city’s superintendent of schools and the father of Paul Whiteman, the most famous bandleader of the twenties. As leader, Andy Kirk was the man who became well-known to the public and later to interviewers, and deservedly so. But his second-in-command, road manager John Williams, also had an important role: “I would call the four numbers to a set, I stomped all the tempos. Andy stood out there and watched my foot come down. Say we were going to play 4/4 time, he’s watching my foot and when I come down on four, he come down with his baton. He wasn’t even leading the band. I led the band.”
But never openly. Although Kirk, Williams, and Mary pointedly avoided the question of color, all were aware that one’s skin shade held enormous importance in black society. Mary, who had felt the sting of prejudice from her light-skinned, “blue-veined” neighbors as a little girl, observes this when she mentions casually, “Most all the boys were the same complexion ’cept John Williams and Marion Jackson, the dark-skinned brothers.” “Well, John was black as you could get,” notes Peter O’Brien. “Very dark. And that would be a real no-no then. Look at Lunceford, cherubic and light. Duke Ellington’s light. And Andy was light-skinned and had high polish.” Of course color consciousness mattered in other realms as well, notably on the stage. And the few “black” actresses to secure glamorous roles in Hollywood—Fredi Washington, Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge—were all pale, although, to their credit, they fought the caste system. Darker-skinned beauties had virtually no place on the screen except as maids and “mammy” character actresses. But John Williams, who grew up when Jim Crow was the norm, sidestepped the issue of color when explaining why he was passed over as leader of the band. “They voted in Andy because he was a gentleman,” he insisted. “Andy didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke, he was well liked. I hadn’t been there hardly no time at all and the guys were just learning me. They didn’t know what kind of disposition I had, and I didn’t want to become leader.” Fair enough.
“Later, guys wanted me to take over the band, because I was good about keeping guys together, whether they were making money or not,” John went on. “I was always the type of guy that had connections. People liked me and would help me do things.”
One of the first things Andy Kirk did was change the name of the band. At first he wanted it to be “Andy Kirk’s Orchestra,” but the band nixed that. They wanted to retain the “Clouds of Joy.” “But Andy didn’t like the ‘Dark,’ and he took it out—they could see we were dark anyway,” John said drily. The band played as it had under Holder. “We had that easygoing Western swing and we played mostly for whites. Now when you played for blacks, it didn’t make no difference what the tune was, as long as you had the tempo there. But while we were playing for whites, they wanted all the latest numbers. The hit numbers from all the Broadway shows—No, No, Nanette was a popular one then. Every month, we would go to the music store and buy the stock orchestrations for 50 cents, usually by a popular orchestrator of the day named Archie Bleyer.”
Dancehalls like the Winter Garden in Oklahoma City and the Crystal Palace in Tulsa, where the band played for the winter and summer seasons respectively, had an oil-boom, movie-Western flavor, featuring what they called “jitney” dances, with “tencents-a-dance girls” waiting behind ropes to be picked by paying partners. The customer got a very short whirl of a two-step or waltz or foxtrot for his money. “The idea,” Mary wrote, “was to get the dancers off the floor as quickly as possible. Two 32-bar choruses was an arrangement.” Andy Kirk elaborated: “To get around that, we’d make up an introduction that served as a bridge for the next chorus following, and we’d always make up a different ending for the same number. These things helped make it more interesting.” This was basic training for many bands, where the rudiments, primitive though they were, were established for arranging early jazz music: solo space was sparse, leading to a compact, compressed approach to playing. And when such bands made records, they were all too familiar with the time constraint of three minutes for 78-rpm discs.
Mary listened to the band avidly, inspired rather than intimidated by the fact that the musicians were well trained while she could barely read a note of music. “This was the most exciting thing in my life, seeing the guys get together, making up their arrangements and novelties. They’d call a rehearsal and nobody would prepare an arrangement. They’d do it while they were there. In one corner somebody would be playing cards or talking and Andy would say ‘Okay, rhythm section first.’ And after that the trumpets and the saxophones.… They could play like Guy Lombardo and they could swing like Count Basie. It was the most amazing band I’ve ever been with in my life. They could play so many different styles. They could play for proms and then go on to an all-black dance and be just as good, swinging.”
With solid bookings and a stable new leader, the future looked promising for the Clouds of Joy. But Mary became restive with little to do in the raw and ugly boom towns. Only the year before, a huge gusher had erupted in the middle of a backyard. Now, as everyone in Oklahoma City tried to cash in, a forest of derricks and pumps was installed without regard for safety. Gigantic fires fed by underground pools of oil often burned out of control, filling the air with the stench of oil and devastating entire streets, and when it rained, the unpaved roads became seas of red mud. Mary developed a lifelong habit of driving off by herself in the car to some pretty spot where she would be alone, just looking, dozing, and thinking about music.
Despite the rawness and pollution, there was money and vitality in Oklahoma, plenty of work for everyone, including musicians. This combination of full pockets and a frontier mentality fostered an easing of racial segregation—looser than in places like Memphis and the East—that made it easier for black and white musicians to mix. Trombonist Jack Teagarden, who would become a lifelong friend a bit later, was playing opposite the Clouds of Joy at the Winter Garden; and his sister Norma, who, Mary said, “played piano crazy for a woman,” was also gigging in Oklahoma.
Mary settled uneasily into the role of a band wife. When they weren’t playing the cities, the Clouds traveled the circuit of small towns from Little Rock to Dallas, which the musicians called “Indian Territory.” Mary traveled with the band, but as John’s spouse; John had talked her up to Andy Kirk, but Kirk was satisfied with Marion “Jack” Jackson, especially his ability to read music, and had no plans of replacing him with a female ear pianist. When the band settled in Tulsa in the summer of ’29, she and John got a room above an undertaker. Sometimes she cut hair or did manicures to make a little money, but she preferred being a chauffeur. “To break the monotony,” Mary wrote, “I got permission to drive for the undertaker. Apart from driving the car, I had no way of passing the time. I couldn’t see myself getting ahead in music and the life was getting me down fast.” She was, however, beginning to pinch-hit for the Clouds—when Jackson was late, or
“if they got stuck and weren’t going over big, I’d sit in and play. This was very exciting for me.”
But it was not enough, clearly. She hated having to live in what she called “bombed out Negro areas,” stuck in a loveless marriage. John was out every night, rolling dice and hanging with his friends, especially with his lifelong buddy, clarinetist Johnny Harrington; yet he warned Mary to stay away from some of the hard-partying band wives she’d been going out with. “My friend Mabel Durham, the trombonist Allen Durham’s wife, asked why I didn’t go out with the wives anymore. I told her that my husband John did not want me around because of their heavy drinking. A couple of the wives got together with me and told me the real reason. He didn’t want me to know that he was jiving around with a secretary and had promised to marry her due to the fact that she was giving him money. He stood her off for quite awhile and finally said I wouldn’t give him a divorce. Being a hot-tempered native, she thought that if she got rid of me, she’d have more of a chance with John as far as marriage. So she was stalking me to catch up and do me in.” Nothing came of that, except to drive a greater wedge between Mary and John. “I couldn’t have cared less about what he was doing. I feared John more than I loved him and had begun to dislike him intensely.” He still kept her to a budget of a dollar a day, and she now had no work of her own to supplement an allowance she considered “ridiculous. I went on with the dull life of being a housewife with no money.”