by Linda Dahl
Another breach between Mary and John was the taste she had acquired for marijuana, or “reefer,” as musicians used to call it. Kansas City was a major railroad hub of the nation, distributing drugs along with corn and wheat, so it was easily available in the nightclubs there. “You know, Mary tried to drink to keep up with the crowd but she could not drink,” emphasized Henrietta Randolph, wife of trumpeter Irving “Mouse” Randolph, who was in the band in the mid-thirties. “We’d get together on Mondays, the day off, to play cards and drink hot corn liquor and doctor it with Coca-Cola. Others could drink it, but Mary would fall out. I remember once she fell off a stool.”
Pot, on the other hand, agreed with her. “Pha Terrell [the smooth vocalist with the Clouds] joined the group then and he turned her on to reefer,” said John Williams. “I became one of the squares as far as she was concerned,” he added, grinning. (The band even recorded a song by Earl Thompson about reefer, or “jive,” in 1936 titled “All the Jive Is Gone.”) “I liked a taste of whiskey and she liked her little thing, and we went off our separate ways.”
Mary told a couple of stories about her experiences with reefer, recalling how once in about 1937 she, Pha Terrell, and saxophonist Dick Wilson smoked some very strong pot when they were on the road in Texas and ended up sitting on tombstones all night, too high to move. Another time, she and Terrell went with Jack Teagarden to meet his mother, stopping first to smoke some “jive.” When Mrs. Teagarden started singing opera, they could not contain themselves. Giggling and falling over with laughter, the three dashed outside and ran around the house, angering Jack’s disapproving sister, Norma, who was also there.
WHEN BEN WEBSTER, who was to become Mary’s great early love, joined the Clouds (in the summer of 1932, according to band member Mouse Randolph, but a little later according to others), Mary was involved with Johnny Harrington. But Webster’s great talent replaced him in her affections. “My weakness in life was my loving someone whom I thought great on his instrument,” she wrote. “When Ben played I loved him so much! I told my husband John, and he said someone would kill me someday for being so frank.” Webster, of course, already knew John and Mary from the Kansas City scene, and he and John had gone to the same high school in the twenties, when John was boarding with his aunt and uncle. Webster was a year older than Mary, already a “Peck’s bad boy” well on his way to earning a later nickname, “the Brute,” for his transformation from gentle to wild when he drank too much. John Williams called him “a terrible Jekyll and Hyde.” Perhaps on account of a relatively careful, even pampered, upbringing by a clutch of female relations, Webster was immediately attracted to the vital street life swirling around him. After studying piano, he switched in 1928 to saxophone. When he declared he was going to be a professional musician, he disappointed his family, as John Williams and Doc Cheatham had done, by failing to follow a respectable career path. But Webster went his way, joined the Young family band (where he became a close friend of young Lester, his brother Lee, and sister Mary), and then played in the band led by Blanche Calloway, before returning to Kansas City and a job with the Clouds in 1932.
“From the moment I met him I was fascinated because he was always up to something,” Mary wrote about Webster’s restless personality. “Then, too, I liked his tenor. If he felt overanxious, Ben would play roughly, distorting a style which was already full of vitality. Sometimes John Williams yelled at him on the stand to stop experimenting and play. But after being around with the guys awhile Ben became less boisterous, which made me like him better. We used to walk for miles together and he always took me to jam sessions.”
At first, she wrote, she went out with Webster “to counteract my love for the married guy.” Her marriage had accustomed her to men running strings of girls—and Webster was no different. “All the time Ben and I were together, he’d see another girl and tell me about a desire to be with her and I’d tell him I’d see him later. I wouldn’t say anything. It seemed I was happy if he was. Sometimes while playing on the stand, I’d even point out someone good to him. I never was jealous of him, because of being around guys all my life. I knew they always felt they still loved their wives even if they cheated once in a while.”
Webster, however, applied a different standard to her. “Ben and I went everywhere together. One night we were in Kansas City and I was supposed to meet Ben,” said Mary. “He saw me walking down the street with Johnny [Harrington] and he really slapped me around and threatened Johnny. I was afraid to go home. I hadn’t told my husband that I liked Ben yet. My married lover couldn’t understand me and one day he said he felt like killing me, that I didn’t care for anyone. I couldn’t respond, I had nothing to say.”
But she was by now madly in love with Ben, and broke off her liaison with Harrington. “He [Webster] stayed with us two or three years—longer than he’d stuck with anyone,” she wrote almost wistfully. “Then Ben left the band and Lester Young replaced him. As sensational as Lester was, I could think only of Ben. I lost 25 pounds. I couldn’t eat; I didn’t realize how much I’d miss him. I got mail from him often and sometimes money. I had told John I loved him.”
The love affair was not over: Webster wanted Mary to join him in New York. She wavered. When the Clouds of Joy went to New York in ’37, she stayed with him at the Dewey Square Hotel, according to tenor saxophonist Harold Arnold. She also told John she wanted them to live apart for a year, and after that, Webster would take care of the divorce. Still exerting what little control he had over her, John put his foot down: if she left, it had to be permanent. And he talked frankly with her about “the Brute’s” unsavory reputation, which did give her pause.
But for her, whatever the failings of the man, there was the music. “Ben Webster was the type of guy that could put so much in one bar—he could do more with one bar than any other man could do,” Mary said, paying him her highest artistic compliment. It appears he even collaborated with her to some extent on a composition that would become one of her best known, the ambitious and luminous “Walkin’ and Swingin’.” John Williams remembered driving Mary to Ben Webster’s house to work on “Walkin’ ” while Webster was with the band. The melody of the piece was inspired by a pop tune called “The Moon Is Low” (which was recorded by the Arnold Ross Quintet, featuring saxophonist Benny Carter). But with or without input from Ben Webster, it is Mary’s overarching conception and her writing that made “Walkin’ and Swingin’ ” so popular with musicians. “I needed a fourth saxophone, but during that period you had only three,” Mary explained. “As I didn’t have a fourth, I used a trumpet with a hat—a wah-wah thing—for the eighth notes. This was an innovation for the time; musicians loved it.” And they loved the second chorus, a witty, winding 8-bar road of melody. Mary’s arrangement for Kirk brought her five dollars, her then standard fee from the band. She earned considerably more from the more prosperous white bands, providing another arrangement for the Casa Loma Orchestra for fifty dollars, and others recorded by Gene Krupa’s band in ’38 and Les Brown’s band in ’40. That second chorus went on to inspire quite a few modern-jazz tunes, including one by Thelonious Monk (discussed in chapter 11).
If during the Depression the work of writing and arranging music for a jazz orchestra was ill paid, Mary didn’t care a great deal. Like a playwright with a resident company, she had her own troupe to realize her ideas. And although in 1935 no one in the band could know it, the Clouds of Joy were at last on the brink of success, though the major changes in their fortunes would not all be for the good, as it turned out. Mary in particular was poised to begin a highly creative period and to gain high status and visibility in the next era of dance-crazy popular music.
Chapter Six
Silk Stockings
1936–1941
IN 1971, EXACTLY four decades after Mary joined the Clouds of Joy, she and an entourage that included a teenaged son of her attorney took a cross-country train (Mary was afraid of flying) from New York to California, where she was hailed at the
Monterey Jazz Festival as a “rediscovery.” But as young Matthew Bliss found out, she had never been forgotten by some. “We were stuck in the train for three days,” he recalls. “But Mary loved it. She got the star treatment the whole way from the old Pullman guys. They couldn’t do enough for her.”
Stardom within the black community came to her after the Clouds of Joy began to record again in 1936, especially after their hit “Until the Real Thing Comes Along.” As the year opened, the band’s recording prospects were still dim. The idea of making records had gone dormant in the Depression; the future, many thought, lay in live radio broadcasts—where the listening was free and advertising paid the expenses. The Clouds had certainly proved how an audience could be enlarged through radio, with their broadcasts from the Blossom Heath Club in Oklahoma. Fans, said Kirk, had written hundreds of enthusiastic letters to the station.
Late in 1935, Kirk pushed to get a recording contract again (probably at the urging of Joe Glaser, the canny agent who was involved peripherally with the band at the time). He persuaded Jack Kapp to hear the band in New York, and pointed to their recent success at the Oklahoma club. Kapp was in a buying mood. He’d left Brunswick, and with a partner he had bought the American rights to the English-owned Decca label and was aggressively signing up musicians. Besides Kirk and other artists brought over from Brunswick, such as Bing Crosby, Guy Lombardo, Fletcher Henderson, the Casa Lomas, and the Mills Brothers, there were Louis Armstrong and the recently discovered Bill Basie. Kapp had made a very smart move. Since the general public could ill afford the 75-cent recordings of competitors RCA and Columbia, he would sell his for 35 cents. To keep costs down, Kapp used inexpensive materials (including cut-rate songs and recycled tunes) and primitive equipment. The strategy worked, and Decca maneuvered a number of artists into commercial success.
The Clouds recorded thirteen tunes for Kapp in March of 1936. Just as she had a large hand in the first records for Kapp at Brunswick in 1929, Mary contributed a quantity of material—seven new, or newly arranged, tunes for the date (including an extensively redone “Froggy Bottom”); and as usual, she had a hand in arranging the rest of the tunes. Her performances were fine and inventive, especially on “Moten Swing,” “Lotta Sax Appeal,” and “Bearcat Shuffle.” But it was her composing that put her in the front rank of jazz writers of the swing era—and pushed the Clouds of Joy to success. The jazz sides Mary wrote throughout her Decca tenure, until 1942, are savored as collector’s items today.
To write for the sessions, Mary holed up at the Dewey Square Hotel in Harlem. “For nights I could not leave my room, having my meals brought in to me. And at 7 A.M., I was up again for another session.” She added, “I was supposed to get $75 per arrangement—but I didn’t. I think I got instead the money for a dress I liked in a shop window on Broadway—$69.75. I was beginning to think they weren’t worth much, for no one ever wanted to pay much for them. But I knew Andy couldn’t afford to pay a professional arranger. And I was dumb to the business. I got silk stockings for my payment for all those arrangements I did, and that’s about it.” Unfortunately, too, virtually none of her compositions were even copyrighted, with the result that she could not claim composer royalties.
She was writing for a very different band from the one recorded in 1921–31: smoother, cleaner, tighter-sounding, with seasoned craftsmen and one new outstanding soloist, saxophonist Dick Wilson. The brass and reed sections were tighter, the rhythm section improved. In fact, only five old-timers remained: Mary, John Williams, “Big Jim” Lawson on lead trumpet, Johnny Harrington on clarinet, and Andy Kirk. Earl Thompson, a.k.a. Merle Boatley, was a good trumpet player who had replaced Mouse Randolph in ’33 or ’34, and he added several arrangements. Trombonist Henry Wells gave more weight to the brass, and Earl “Buddy” Miller, who came in on alto saxophone, freed up John Williams to concentrate on other reeds, especially baritone sax, adding comparable weight to that section. The gifted, handsome, hard-drinking, Chu Berry–inspired Dick Wilson was the latest in a string of terrific saxophonists: Ben Webster in 1932 and 1933; Lester Young until late 1935 (when he joined the Count Basie Orchestra, a happier fit); Buddy Tate until 1936. Wilson was a wonderful foil for Mary’s virtuosity, swinging hard with a gruff undercurrent, yet with a delightful lyric touch. To appreciate how the band had matured, one has only to contrast the group’s somewhat jerky rhythm on the first recording of “Messa Stomp” with the 1936 version, which features the crisp drumming of Ben Thigpen, solid string bass underpinning of Booker Collins, and Mary’s buoyant piano. “Cloudy” had evolved from a simple layout in which the brass and piano were barely audible in the background, to a much lusher instrumental, with a vocal added—and a more confident-sounding piano. (The final chorus of the first “Cloudy,” which opened and closed with a hair-raisingly weird full-band chord, was dropped in the 1936 version.) And “Froggy Bottom,” considerably refurbished, had become in Mary’s hands a shining example of Kansas City swing, with characteristic short, punchy piano and tuneful section riffs.
But the band had little time to establish their honed jazz-based identity on records. As Gunther Schuller observes about “Until the Real Thing Comes Along,” “By 1937 and thereafter, as a result of an immensely popular recording by the band’s singer, Pha Terrell, its jazz playing days, while not exactly numbered, were certainly threatened.” The pressure was on for more commercial successes, few of which Mary had any involvement with except to play the piano. “She did not set the style for Andy Kirk,” emphasizes her later manager, Peter O’Brien. “She set the style only for the majority of the 25 pieces or so that are constantly reissued.” Still, even many of those non-jazz, strictly commercial sides had a relaxed yet buoyant, danceable appeal: as a name for the Andy Kirk band, “Clouds” was exactly right, especially until 1937, when it was still a “small” big band of twelve pieces with a more intimate feel than later, when it expanded to fifteen and more.
After their first recording for Decca in March, the band recorded fourteen more tunes—eleven of them written or cowritten, and in most cases arranged, by Mary. One can hear how well she had absorbed the interplay of brass and reeds that Don Redman brought to the fore for Fletcher Henderson’s band. Since then, she had also fallen under the influence of Eddie Durham (related to the Clouds’ Allen Durham), a trombonist and guitarist and arranger who joined Count Basie’s band in 1937. “Durham helped me quite a bit with sounds,” wrote Mary. “He’d arrange a popular tune giving all the instruments different notes, extending a seventh chord to an eleventh or thirteenth. All of the arrangers knew by heart each note an instrument should make and when there was a mistake.”
Mary, too, had begun to reach out for broader harmonies. Especially at that early phase of her writing, her experiments were not always appreciated. “If I passed out an arrangement to the band that was wrong, the guys would laugh. But they’d give me a chance. Musicians like something different when they’re playing the same tunes every night, and they knew that I was going to feed ’em something different.” (Take, as one example, the odd “growls” in the second chorus of her tune “Little Joe from Chicago.”) Whitney Balliett has pointed to her “odd, beautifully constructed background harmonies,” which he said “had an almost schoolmarm purpose and unfailingly pointed up both the tunes and the frequent solos.” And jazz editor Barry Ulanov, who knew Mary very well, emphasizes another of her talents: “One of the difficulties about jazz is that it’s very hard to notate it, but Duke Ellington could and so could Mary. Very few other people have been able to put on paper the feeling of jazz. There are always technical problems, and the rhythm is the most serious: you have to have such a tricky system of dots after notes in order to get the slight changes between values of ordinary eighth, quarter and sixteenth notes. She had discovered, because of her particular genius, a way to articulate on paper a jazz pattern—how to accent a measure. And that’s why her best stuff is among the best in jazz.” “It was a terrific feeling to hear what I had written, to
be able to hear what my mind was saying and transform it into music,” Mary said simply. “In experimenting, you don’t know what it’s going to sound like.”
Thrifty in her thinking, if she found a congenial phrase, she handily extended or embellished it. If the second chorus of “Walkin’ and Swingin’ ” was inspired at least partly by something that Ben Webster blew, another of her great swing tunes, called “Steppin’ Pretty,” used a riff melody by Earl Thompson. “A Mellow Bit of Rhythm” was inspired by saxophonist Herman Walder’s playing, and “(Keep It) In the Groove,” which gives cocomposer credit to Dick Wilson, derived in all probability from a solo he played—as was the case with “Mary’s Special,” where the melodic lines in the first several choruses originated in a Lester Young solo. The same was true for the dreamy and evocative “Big Jim Blues,” deriving its inspiration from a phrase played by trumpeter “Big Jim” Lawson.
In “Steppin’ Pretty,” choruses of Kansas Citian melodic talk between brass and reeds are followed by a relaxed disquisition by Mary and a clarinet, before the tune ends on a lilting new riff. (Mary’s particular way of orchestrating clarinets became popular with other bandleaders, notably Glenn Miller of “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.”) “A Mellow Bit of Rhythm” features stride piano left-hand accents seguing into swing-era devices including, analyzed musicologist Erica Kaplan, “frequent unison playing and doubling at the octave, a technique that achieves a powerful sound capable of being thrown great distances, thus accommodating the large dance halls of the swing era.” And Mary’s playing was highly advanced within the swing-era tradition as well. Of “Keep It in the Groove,” a critic wrote, “Built on jam sessionlike riffs, Mary Lou’s arrangement swings the door open for soloists to do their thing. Note her leaping, hand-hammering solos. No wonder she was an influence on Monk and on the boppers as well as experimental jazz composers.”