by Mick Burns
My first piano teacher’s name was Annabel Jones. I studied with her until she died, when I was around eleven years old. I did my first piano recital when I was five—a tune called “Paper Ships” out of the John Thompson book 1. I studied together with my brother Louis; he’s five years my senior. Michael is seven years younger. After Miss Jones, I took lessons with Olivia Chariot Cook. She’s a traditional piano player, still living—she’s in her mid eighties. She also taught Louis and Michael.
When I was about twelve, I quit playing piano and switched to the clarinet. As a child, I suffered from asthma, and doctors will tell you, if you have any kind of respiratory problems, play a wind instrument—it strengthens the lungs. It’s the same reason Pete Fountain took up the clarinet.
My brother Louis gave me my first clarinet lesson—he figured it out from the method book. Then I started taking lessons from Mr. Carey Levigne. He played in a lot of local dance bands and taught in schools, teaching violin and all wind instruments. He had a studio called the Crescent City Music Studio, and among the teachers there were Edwin Hampton, who runs the St. Augustine High School band, Lloyd Harris, Laurence Winchester, Wellington McKissey, Miss Cook, and Willie Humphrey. By me having an interest in jazz, Mr. Levigne talked to Mr. Humphrey, and he agreed to work with me after my regular lessons.
That would be around 1964. until 1967— I studied with Willie all that time. I knew who Willie was, because I went to Craig School on St. Claude, in the Tremé. The original Caldonia bar was in the neighborhood, and I saw jazz funerals several times a week. On Saturdays, my father would bring me out to see jazz funerals, and on Sundays to see the social club parades. So being in contact with Mr. Humphrey wasn’t a culture shock. But contrary to what you might think, Willie worked with me on technical exercises more than he did on jazz. He had played in the navy band, and he got me to bring Sousa march books that we were using at school.
He always told me that the technique was just as important as anything else. A lot of my technical skills originate from him and Mr. Levigne. People sometimes tell me I have a lot of technique, and I guess that’s true, because I majored in music—I was first at school at Bell Junior High, and the musical director was Donald Richardson, and then to John McDonough Senior High, which is right across from the musician’s union on Esplanade.
Mr. Levigne and Mr. Humphrey encouraged me to listen to records and to pick up ideas and melodies from them. Mr. Levigne brought in transcriptions that he made of Benny Goodman solos; I would sit and read those when we had extra time on Saturdays.
I listened to every clarinet player I could find. My favorites from the old school include Omer Simeon, Willie Humphrey, Cornbread Thomas—I don’t think there’s a clarinet player I don’t like.
The first professional job I did, Cornbread was there. I told him, “Well, I’ve got some of your records at home.” He said, “It’s nice to see young musicians coming up. It may be your first job, but don’t worry—there’ll be many more, I’m sure of that.”
My first gig was with the Doc Paulin band, like everyone else who wanted to get started. I really wasn’t expecting to get paid, but somebody didn’t show up, so I got eight dollars for a two-hour parade for the Zulu social club, from one of the churches in the neighborhood. At the end of the job, Doc gave me the eight dollars and told me to be sure and leave my phone number because he would have more work for me.
I stayed with Doc for about a year, and then I met Gregg Stafford—he’s a year younger than me. At that time, he was playing with the Fairview band. He told me about that band when he saw that I was interested in the tradition, too. So he got me to come over there, and we rehearsed at Leroy Jones’s garage every Monday night, at 1316 St. Denis Street.
It was a big group at that time—we must have had about twenty-three kids. In the original band we had five clarinet players.
We didn’t read in rehearsals. I think Danny Barker maybe wrote tunes down for Leroy, and we just picked things up by ear. And by Gregg and I having been with Doc Paulin, we knew a couple of more tunes, which gave us an advantage. Tuba Fats Lacen came in, and a trombone player called Michael Myers, who unfortunately died in a tragic accident in 1976. Donald Gaspard and Branford Marsalis were among the clarinet players at one time. He was a lot more serious than most of those guys. Wynton Marsalis played trumpet with us for a while.
It was a good experience. I think we played together for about ten months, and then we started to get a lot of complaints from professional musicians about people hiring us—if we wanted to play we’d have to join the union. Danny was against us joining the union: I don’t know if he felt that some of us weren’t ready. He didn’t go into detail or explain it to us. I remember, one particular time, he got upset because Greg and I sat in with Andrew Morgan’s Young Tuxedo band at the Jazz Fest. It was like, “Those people don’t really want you. They’re trying to break the band up, but you’re over there playing with them anyway.”
What happened after that, I left the band and joined the union when I was twenty. The writing was on the wall, and the band was going to break up anyway. I didn’t have any guarantees of work or anything, but it happened that Harold Dejan knew that Danny was getting union pressure. He told me, “If you join the union, call me.” So he started to use me as an alternative when Emanuel Paul would be out with the Kid Thomas band. This was in 1972. After about two jobs, Harold took me on one side and said, “Do you think you could get away from school for about two weeks, next month?” My first tour of Europe, and I was only twenty years old.
Just before that trip, Andrew Morgan died, and Herman Sherman took over his band. They asked me to join them. So I was in the Olympia and the Young Tuxedo at the same time, which was the best of both worlds.
We went over in November, and our first stop was London. This particular band was Harold, Paul Crawford, myself Milton Batiste, Nowell Glass, Andrew Jefferson, Anderson Minor was the grand marshal, and Irving Eisen played tuba—he was originally from St. Louis and was playing on Bourbon Street at Your Father’s Moustache at the time. Alan Jaffe recommended him because Coby Brown couldn’t make it. It was a two-week trip—London, Paris, Copenhagen, Amsterdam.
Now, the Hurricane band started after Danny organized the second Fairview band. Michael White was in it; the Mimms brothers and Daryl Adams were there. Then Leroy ventured out on his own and started the Hurricane band. That band made one album, for Jules Cahn—he produced that album. He was a photographer; he died around five years ago. Gregg Stafford and I are actually on the album, but you don’t see our last names—it says Joseph Charles and Gregory Vaughan. It was so the union couldn’t say anything about us being on a nonunion recording. The song “Leroy Special” wasn’t written by Leroy Jones, as most people assume. It was by Leroy Robinet, but he wrote it for Leroy Jones.
The band didn’t last that long, the fantasy of playing on the street; we were all maturing, and Leroy went off to college at Loyola. We were at that age when we were spreading out, going to school. After about two years, we started to go our separate ways. Herman Sherman was running the Young Tuxedo by then, and he asked me to put pressure on Gregg Stafford to join the union because he needed a dependable trumpet player.
Only a handful of us were really dedicated to traditional music. I’ve been teaching in the school system for twenty-seven years, and I feel we don’t pass down enough of our traditions to our kids anymore. Almost the whole Creole tradition is going, the language and everything—it’s very, very rare.
The Eureka Brass Band was the greatest brass band I heard when I was a kid on the way up. I’ve heard—whether it’s true I don’t know—that the reason that band died out was because they wouldn’t let younger guys in. They got up in age, they couldn’t handle the parades anymore, and so they stopped taking them. You couldn’t blame them for taking it easy; they’d paid their dues, and they blazed a trail for me and Gregg and Leroy and all these guys to follow.
Anyway, after the Hurricane band, I was r
egular with the Young Tuxedo. Herman Sherman was a taskmaster—not fierce, not brutal, but he had certain disciplines that he wanted met. At the same time, he looked at Gregg and I like his own sons. He made me assistant leader before I had been in the band a year. We had Walter Payton on tuba, Frank Naundorf on trombone, Reginald Koeller, Fernandez [Albert Walters], Gregg and John Simmons on trumpets. Teddy Riley would come and go; later on we had Jack Willis for a long time, Emile Knox on bass drum, Lawrence Trotter on snare drum. Herman was always ready to listen to ideas for marketing the band. Gregg and I helped him—we had pictures made, we helped book jobs, took the pressure off him a bit.
We did the Hollywood Bowl, the Berlin Jazz Festival, we went to Chicago. Herman called the tunes. He and Ernest [“Doc”] Watson would get some great riffs going—they’d worked together in the Groovy Boys.
I got my degree in music education in 1975, and I went back to Bell Junior High, which I had attended as a student. I move around a lot—there weren’t any permanent jobs back then.
Technically, I’m still in the Young Tuxedo—I’ve been in the band for twenty-nine years now. Herman passed away in 1984, and a lot of people thought that, having been assistant leader of the band, I should have been the next one to take it on. But for whatever reason, Gregg Stafford took over, and that’s all I’m going to say about that. You talk to different members of the band, you’ll have different stories about what they thought and why, but I try to stay out of that. It’s a shame that we haven’t played much for the last six or seven years. Basically, you see the band at Jazz and Heritage Festival, maybe one or two other special events during a year. So it’s not totally dead, but it’s kind of moth balled.
I left the Olympia band after eight years—that was my own decision. I had recently married, there were kids on the way, and I had my music teaching. That was in about 1981. Doc Watson took my place in the Olympia. I was working for Bob French, and we were getting a lot of work at different clubs on Bourbon Street.
I did the One Mo’ Time show a couple of times. Then, in 1989, I started my police career. My oldest brother was a police officer, and one of my best friends also. I joined the resource division of the police department. We are all volunteers. We have the same training, police academy and all. I’m required to do twenty-four hours’ service every month. I love it—not as much as playing music, but I do love it. I’ve been on stage with some of the greatest musicians of all time, and the police work is like my way of saying thank you to New Orleans.
I’m running my own four-piece band now with my brother Michael, and I play with the eight-piece Creole band Eh, La-Bas. We do some old Creole songs, some New Orleans, R&B. We’re just about to do a new CD, and we’ve just come back from touring in Britain—seventeen one-nighters and twenty-eight hundred miles in twenty days. It was rough!
If I hadn’t been born in New Orleans, I probably wouldn’t have become a musician. I don’t think there’s another town in America, or probably the world, where you would get this much exposure to music at an early age. Every kid in my music classes has a relative who plays music. They all want to be involved.
You may be surprised to hear this, but I’m not like some of the other musicians you’ve interviewed—they’ll make it seem like music is their life. Even though my life is music, because I teach it and I play it and I love it, it’s not my total life. I’ve never let music come between me and my family or between me and the police department. Whatever I do at school or on the bandstand stays there when I walk away. I enjoy what I do, and I’m constantly reminding other musicians that we’re blessed to be able to do what we love and get paid for it. We’re the luckiest motherfuckers in the world!
Harry Sterling, Guitar
BORN: New Orleans, March 18, 1958
Danny Barker’s only guitar pupil; played tuba with the Fairview Baptist Church Brass Band; currently plays guitar with Big Al Carson’s Blues Masters
Interviewed at 3621 Burgundy Street, October 2002
Photo by Barry Martyn
My mother and father were Laura and Harrison Sterling. I am the last of five children. None of the others are musicians. Originally, I had planned to be a meteorologist. When Hurricane Betsy hit New Orleans in 1965, it was fascinating to me that something like that could rock my parent’s house. Watching the news, they showed radar pictures, although they were pretty crude back then. I got interested in the weather and how it moved. I would make makeshift maps of the United States, and when the weather came on TV, I would mark down what was going on. I was seven years old then.
When I was in elementary school, getting ready to go to junior high—this would be around the age of twelve—I was at my cousin’s house. We were playing ball in his front yard, and I heard the sound of a banjo—the sound just caught my attention. I was looking round and missing the ball. I said, “What’s that noise behind me?” He said, “That’s Cousin Danny”—that’s what he called him. I said, “We don’t have no cousin called Danny, not that I know of”
Anyway, he brought me over there to meet him. I was fascinated at the way his fingers moved up and down the neck—he had switched to guitar by then. I was mesmerized. He was practicing, and he and Miss Louise were getting ready to rehearse. She was in the kitchen cooking. When we got to the back door, this big raspy voice comes out of the house, and there’s this lady standing there.
I had never heard a woman with a voice that deep before, so she kind of scared me. She called, “Danny, Ray and his cousin Harry are here.” So we go in the front and we sit down. I’m not saying anything—Ray’s doing all the talking. I’m just looking at Danny and thinking, “I’ve got to do that.”
Two days before my twelfth birthday, it had been on my mind for about a week. I knew I had to go back around there and talk to this man about learning the guitar. I mustered up enough courage to go into their yard and stand at the back door. And this scary woman with this big raspy voice called, “Danny, it’s Ray’s cousin Harry.” She had remembered my name!
He said, “What can I do for you?” I said, “I want to talk to you.” So we went into the front room, and I asked where his guitar was. He said, “It’s in the back. What can I do for you?” And I told him I wanted to learn to play. He said, “Are you sure you want to?” I said, “Oh yeah.” It was fixed in my mind. He asked me if I owned a guitar. I said I didn’t, my parents couldn’t afford one. He kind of put his head down, and he told me that the guitar was a very wonderful instrument, but it takes a lot of practice and a lot of patience to learn. He explained about how a guitar was strung and what the frets were for. I was absorbing all of it, and I had a smile on my face.
Then he shouts, “Louise! Make this boy a sandwich!”
I’m like, “I don’t want a sandwich. I want to learn to play the guitar.” Anyway, Miss Louise comes out the back with this sandwich—ham and cheese, on toast, lettuce, and tomato, pickles, potato chips, and a Coke!
I thought, “Well, I can’t insult these people by not eating it.” While I’m eating the sandwich, Danny Barker comes out the back with this little acoustic guitar and this chord book with fingering charts in it. He explained as well as he could that each dot represents your finger, and the strings go down, and the frets go across.
He put my fingers on the guitar, and it sounded terrible. He asked me if my parents were home. I told him my mother was home, but my father was out at the church. He asked me where I lived, and I told him right around the corner, on St. Denis, 1265, and I gave him my phone number. Leroy Jones lived just down the street from me. By now, my finger was beginning to hurt terribly, but I didn’t care.
Afterwards, I was walking down the street, wondering how I was going to explain to my mother how come I had this guitar. I went in the house, and she gave me this “report-card day” look: “What is that? Where did you get it?” I told her I had got it from Danny Barker, and she said, “What? Blue Lou Barker’s husband?” I said, “Who’s Blue Lou Barker?” Then I found out that was Miss Louise with
the raspy voice.
I told her, “Mr. Barker says for you to call him.” So she talked to him on the phone. He said, “I’m not charging you a cent. You can’t afford a guitar, and I understand. I have quite a few of them, so this one won’t be missed. I’m going to teach your boy to play, keep his mind occupied and keep him off the streets.”
This was basically his main premise—he didn’t want me hanging out on the corner. But hanging out on the corner wasn’t part of my parent’s plan for me anyway. Six o’clock was dinner. You had to be inside, washed up, and ready to sit down and eat. My mother said to me, “I’m not going to tell you when to practice. You’re on your own. Go get your lessons from Mr. Barker. If this is what you choose to do, that’s OK.” But I had made that choice the first day I saw Danny Barker play.
They had to tell me to stop practicing: “Boy, put that guitar up and go to bed. It’s time to give it a rest.” I was just trying to get a sound on the guitar that was clear. After about two weeks, I got the first chord to sound like it should. Danny was really pleased about that. So then he started showing me more chords, and the more difficult they got, the more my fingers hurt. I can’t tell you—I put the guitar down for one day, and when I went to pick it up, it was agony. I complained about the pain, but Mr. Barker told me that this comes with the territory. If you play the trumpet, your lips are going to hurt; if you play drums, you’re gonna get cramps in your wrists.
Danny was fabulous to me—he never raised his voice. When it came down to him making a point about something, he was very, very stern about doing the right thing. He was like a second father. I spent a lot of time by his house, to learn, and what he taught me, the things he said, he meant. He said that being a musician is a terrible thing—there will be days that you’re not going to eat, days that you’re not gonna work, days that people won’t want to hear you play. I understood that sometimes you might starve. But every time I went by his house, he would ask if I was sure I wanted to be a musician. After about two and a half years, he stopped asking me.