by Mick Burns
***
The police would walk the beat in the Tremé. They were all white. They mostly got on OK with the people, but maybe two or three of them didn’t. They were, you know, a little more stiffer than the others. They would walk the beat, and when they got to the corner, they would hit that nightstick, and that let you know that they were around. But some of them got along without a stick. Just doing their job. When we played dice on the corner, we used to have to run from them. They’d creep up on you at the corner to make you run. Then they’d pick up the monej and split. Playing dice was legal, but not on the sidewalk. Sometimes they’d throw the nightstick at you.
I remember once on Barracks and St. Claude, someone took the nightstick and handcuffed the damn policeman. He heard no more about that. But the policeman lost his job. It was like, “If you can whip my butt you can go free, but if I win, you’re going to have a butt whipped and you’re going to jail.”
I was mischievous—I wasn’t bad. Some of those boys I came up with were real bad boys. They’d drop out of school, start doing the wrong things. They’d wind up at what they called doing their “college”—they’d be locked up in jail. They didn’t do like it is now, you know, shooting. They would fight—I’ve seen a fellow bust me in the head with a Jax beer bottle—it hurt, too. Go by the drugstore, get them to shave around the cut, put a little iodine or Mercurochrome on it, put a patch. Then I went right back to the barroom—the one that busted my head was in there. But it was over with. His eye was puffed up, I had a patch on my head, but it was over with. But now, someone just can’t stand to be a loser.
The square right on Galvez near Banks, they called that Nanny Goat Square. There was a whole lot of fights that they would meet at Nanny Goat Square. They would say, “I’ll meet you in the square,” and they would give them a time. Cabbage Alley was around Perdido Street. They had a lot of musicians down there—it was almost like a [red light] district—fast women. Near the battlefield. They had a whole lot of pimps, too, in there.
When I was young I liked to go dancing to Sidney Desvigne and Herb Leary. I remember he had a big old bus—on the back it was light blue and dark blue. We’d go to a dance and do the Trucking, the Suzie Q, and when it came to waltzing—you can’t touch me for waltzing. But these days, you can’t get a youngster… if you gave them a thousand dollars, they can’t waltz. Me, Papoose, a fellow by the name of Chin, we all used to go to the dances. I used to like the kind of music that Sidney Desvigne played, real sentimental. He’d play the hell out of that song called “In the Mood.” And then, after he started getting away, he went to the coast—that’s when Dave Bartholomew came in. At the Famous Door after World War II, that’s where Sharkey Bonano used to perform.
I used to dance in the street, for nickels and dimes—me and this fellow called Bird, we’d be dancing on Bourbon Street. When we got to St. Philip, where we would turn to come back to the Tremé, we would sit on a step and count the money.
We would go to dances at the San Jacinto Club. The Autocrat Club, it was a question of complexion—they’d hold a paper bag up, and if you was darker than the bag, they wouldn’t let you in. The guy that ran it, he was kind of passe á blanc. And Edwin “Beansie” Fauria had something to do with it. There was a girl in the neighborhood-name was Doris, pretty girl, spoke real well—she took me there. She told them, “If you don’t let him in here I’m going to call my father. My daddy is a big-time judge. I’ll get him to come down here.” Her father was nothing but a riverfront worker!
They were all mixed people in the Tremé. Ursuline Street, from the river to Bayou St. John, there was white both sides. From the French Quarter, St. Philip had black and white next door to one another. And all them houses from Rampart had slave quarters to the back, generally two rooms, with an outhouse in between. They got along with no trouble.
We didn’t have a segregation problem in the Tremé area. We would sit down together in the house and eat. You didn’t have all that robbing in those days. In that neighborhood, they had real feelings for one another; they loved one another. So there wasn’t no hard times. The white would look out for the black, the black would raise the white kids. I’ve seen a sister nurse a black child on that side and a white child on this.
The barrooms had a wagon to go and get ice. It came from the icehouse on St. Peter between Claiborne and Robertson. On Marais and Dumaine, they had a sawmill there; the name was Lafitte. On St. Peter Street there was a lumberyard. My brother Norman, he had a goat. It wouldpull this little wagon round to pick up ice or to get charcoal for the furnace. One day he went over by my grandmother, and when he came back, he looked for the goat. But someone had ate it! Norman did some crying.
The Baby Dolls were my momma, my aunt, and the older women in the Tremé area. They came out masked at Carnival. They had the Baby Dolls, they had the Dirty Dozen, they had the Million Dollar Dolls. The night before Carnival, they would be drinking, playing the guitar, costuming for the Dirty Dozen. They got their name from the way they would mask. Some would take mustard and put it on the back of their leg, put a diaper on. Baby Dolls would wear a nice hat, short dresses. They’d wear the leg stockings, put paper money in there. But if you reached for the woman’s leg, then you’re in trouble. People lined up to see us come by; the Baby Dolls would dance and play tambourines.
***
When we started out, we played kazoos—that was what we had. I played the banjo. My oldest sister carried the bass line; she would bass into a gallon jug. You had the lead, you had harmonies—I would blow real high. I had a brother called Aitken—he could play so many riffs. That was the original Dirty Dozen Kazoo Band. We played at the Jazz Fest, with Alan Jaffe on bass horn. Got a big crowd round us.
When I was in school, I was on snare drum. And the fellow that played the bass drum, he was absent—he was ill. It was a real big old antique bass drum. I thought, “I can’t tote that big old drum.” I let that drum roll from upstairs downstairs, trying to break it.
I made my first set of drums: I made the foot pedal with an inner tube for a spring. The bass drum was a washtub, I beat it to tune it. And I used a slop bucket. The first band I played with was the Olympia. The first band I played out of town with was the Crescent City, with Dalton Rousseau, the trumpet player. The grand marshal was Anderson Minor.
I worked with Tuba Fats—to me, he’s one of the finest tuba players you got. I’m the one that got him into the Olympia Band. Harold Dejan’s related to my oldest sister-in-law.
When I was younger, I would go over by the Palace Theater—it was what they called vaudeville. Harold Dejan was performing there. I had a sister-in-law, she used to sing over there. Harold played saxophone on the vaudeville night. Anyone, black and white, could go to the Palace Theater—you could sit anywhere. It was on Dauphine, one block before Canal. It cost eighteen cents to get in. We used to go by the Gypsy Tea Room too.
Benny Jones is the one that put the Dirty Dozen Brass Band together. He couldn’t travel like they wanted, because of his family. So he put my son to play drums with them. Then he started the Tremé Brass Band, which is a good band. See, the way Benny and I play with the Tremé band, we listen to the crowd—we have something to give the older ones: give them a chance to get up and dance, remember the time they first heard that number. If you’re playing and nobody’s interested, that’s depressing to me. What the hell to play to make them get up? They sitting like they’re in church.
Nowadays, the tempos are faster, and I find the young bands of today play school music. I could play with those young bands; I’ve played with the Rebirth. I have to play my music. The youngsters get their music from school and reading the music. The band teacher gets a hold of a tune that he would like, so he sits there and writes it, and they move it to a tempo where they can march with it. Sometimes it’s not clear; in other words, it’s not snappy. They play this number called “Casanova”—that’s not a traditional song. You can’t play that traditional—it should be mostly vocal. Everyt
hing is choppy. But the youngsters like it, and the dancing is different.
Tremé Brass Band at Freddie Kohlman’s funeral, 1990 (Frederick Shepherd, Revert Andrews, Butch Gomez, Lionel Batiste Snr., Kerwin James) Photo by Bill Dickens
Of all the bands going today, the Tremé flays the most traditional. I’ve flayed with the Algiers band, and they flay traditional too. When I was coming up, my favorite bass drum flayer was Emile Knox. And you had Willie Parker, I remember him. There was Earl Palmer—he was good—and John Boudreaux.
Michael White, he tries to keef that old-time thing going. I had a gig with him. So he tells me the dress code, and I say “I know, it’s black and white.” Well, we met up at Tulane, sitting round waiting. So I took the cap off. Michael says to me, “Uncle, your cap.” I say, “Yeah, give me the hat band to Put on it.” He said, “No—will you take your pins off the hat?” Man, I have some fins on that hat—I had to take them all off. I haven’t had time to put them all back on yet.
I miss New Orleans when I’m away. I remember once—we were overseas for Carnival. Everybody sitting around saying, “Man, I wonder what this one is doing. I wonder what’s happening.” One of the guys called home—the phone just rang, nobody answered. We said, “Man, your wife ain’t home, she’s out there somewhere.” And it got to him.
When I go on the street now, I’m looking for a combination of things: the music, the money, and the girls. When you get up in age, everything slows up. I may not be able to do that long walking like I used to. So far, my legs are fine.
A Note on the Baby Dolls
The masking traditions carried on by Lionel Batiste’s family go back in history almost as far as jazz itself. Beatrice Hill, who claimed to be “the first Baby Doll,” recalled: “Liberty and Perdido was red hot back in 1912 when that idea started. And we decided to call ourselves the Million Dollar Baby Dolls…. I remember one nigger trying to tear my stockings open to get at my money till my man hit him over the head with a chair.”24
Austin Leslie, interviewed for the Tremé Oral History Project, agreed the Baby Dolls were not to be messed with: “Then they had the Baby Dolls: all those women dressed like little babies, in hot pink and sky blue. You fool with them, they’d cut you too.”25
It was indeed a colorful scene, as George Guesnon described it in a 1959 interview: “Gilbert Young took me to the Humming Bird Cabaret on Bienville and Marais on St. Joseph’s night 1927, and what I saw there I ain’t never saw before. It was the Baby Dolls. All those whores with their asses out, kicking high their pretty legs in the fancy lace stockings, filled with fifty and one hundred dollar bills. All them bitches were just having themselves a ball, you know?”26
These were no ordinary goings-on. “If a girl’s dress wasn’t way below the knee, people would knock her head off,” explained Henry “Booker T” Glass. “The members of the Baby Dolls Club wore short dresses on Carnival Parades, but they also wore masks.”27
As Earl Palmer (born 1924) recollected, “The Baby Dolls were women that masqueraded as little baby girls. It just started as a comedic gesture, these great big fat women in baby doll outfits, bonnets tied under their chins, and little socks, and sometimes they wore a diaper. Thighs this big sticking out of their tiny bloomers. Some of them got a little nasty sometimes. But we’re talking about the days when they wasn’t allowed to do anything real nasty, as opposed to now, when they show their pussies on Bourbon Street. The Baby Dolls wouldn’t dare do that.”28
Mac Rebennack (Dr. John) also recalls the Baby Dolls when he was growing up in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the tradition seems to have evolved:
One of the gangs was made up of all the whores and pimps from Perdido Street; their parade was called Gangster Molls and Baby Dolls. Everyone in this group dressed as outlandishly as possible. The women wore eye-popping dresses; the ones who looked highest priced wore ultra-sharp women’s suits, but with see-through bras underneath. Others wore slit miniskirts showing lace panties, stiletto heels, and flowing low-cut blouses….
They were ridiculous and funny all at the same time. They’d come busting out of their dives during Mardi Gras, their dresses and suits lined with satin and glitter, real sharp-looking and hilarious. They’d march down the greens, that broad strip of grass that separates one side of the street from the other, cutting up, shakin’ the bacon and carrying on, and everyone would back off to let them start high-steppin.’ And you had best back off, too, because they took their kicks seriously.29
Jerry Brock believes he saw the last parade of the Baby Dolls:
I remember 1981, when I went out with the Kazoo Band and Baby Dolls. That was the last year they paraded. They invited me along. We met at Felicia’s house. She was one of the Baby Dolls—she lived on Orleans Street. We had a big breakfast—eggs, pork chops, gumbo, biscuits. There were about twenty-five to thirty of us.
Everybody was prepared—making sure their costumes were right, making sure their instruments were as out of tune as possible. Then everybody got on their knees and said a prayer that God would keep them safe on Mardi Gras Day.
Then we hit the door. It was one of the most surreal things I’ve ever witnessed. It was like a Fellini experience. We sang all those bawdy songs, with a crowd of fifty or so joining in. Songs like “The Pecker Song,” about a man that played with his pecker so much that his pecker wouldn’t peck no more. I was just flabbergasted. We’d turn a corner, pull up in front of somebody’s house, and there’d be a barren card table with a single bottle of whiskey on it. Everybody knew that it was for them, and a friend was honoring them on Mardi Gras. There might be a few finger sandwiches too.
So they’d hang around for a little bit, play a song or two, and then on to the next stop. We were supposed to stop masking by six o’clock, but we went on until around four in the morning. We went back to Felicia’s house, had a good meal, and hit the street again.
Jerry Brock, Historian, Broadcaster, and Filmmaker
BORN: Texas, September 4, 1955
Interviewed at the Croissant d’Or Café, Ursuline Street, October 2002
I’ve always tried to be behind the scenes and supportive of the music and the New Orleans culture. I came here in 1976, to contribute to starting WWOZ radio; my brother Walter and I were both community radio activists.
I had been involved with Lorenzo Milam in a station called KCHU in Dallas, Texas. He gave us a choice of locations; we had already been involved in setting up new radio stations in Tampa, Florida, and Tulsa, Oklahoma. We chose New Orleans because it was in the South, where we were from. We knew of the music of Louis Armstrong, Fats Domino, Sidney Bechet, and Jelly Roll Morton; both my brother and I, from a very young age, were fanatics for literature and music of all kinds. The astounding thing, once we arrived in New Orleans, was that we had no idea that this musical tradition was a continuum of a much earlier tradition, with the people. It just hit us like a ton of bricks.
Within the first two weeks of being here, we’d met everybody. It floored us that this was a living, breathing culture that exists on a neighborhood-to-neighborhood basis. The original programming plans for WWOZ had been much more eclectic until we realized that no one was broadcasting to this community. The only time you heard any New Orleans music on the radio or TV back then was a little bit during Mardi Gras, and that was it. We realized there was a void to be filled.
We were hanging out with Professor Longhair, James Booker, and Huey “Piano” Smith, the Lastie family, all these other beautiful people. And Danny Barker had a big influence on me personally. In many ways, he was like a father figure to me.
Walter and I used to always joke that if we were to dedicate the programming of WWOZ to Garden District architecture, we’d never have problems raising money. But we realized that the important thing was to dedicate it to New Orleans music culture. At that time, the majority of that culture was being done by working-class people, as far as economics go.
When Danny saw the work we were putting into the project, he just
opened his arms to us. Being the intellectual cat that he was, he really understood the struggle that we went through. The City of New Orleans and the archdiocese took us to federal court and tried to stop the radio station. Essentially 9 0.7 FM, where WWOZ exists on the dial, was the last frequency of any consequence. Their public statement was that they wanted to use that frequency for teaching students at the Notre Dame Seminary—religious broadcasting techniques and practices.
Lorenzo Milam was the founder of noncommercial radio in America—he lives in San Diego now. He’d been identified by the extreme right in America as the Antichrist. In 1973 he wrote what became known as the “Petition against God.” He had spent all his time and energy and money building commercial radio, and he saw that religious broadcasting had the support and the wherewithal to open all these radio stations. They were taking up all the noncommercial frequencies that were available. He made a petition to the FCC [Federal Communication Commission] requesting a ninety-day freeze on allotting any new permits, to determine whether there should be a whole new frequency band for religious broadcasts. To this day, the FCC has never officially accepted the petition, but people are still organizing in communities to defeat it. My brother and I were identified with Lorenzo Milam, so once we got here, the Catholic Church wanted to stop us. They saw us being a part of this man who was against religious broadcasting. So that’s the unstated reason why they took us to federal court.
The music doesn’t have the depth it once had. Even though New Orleans is still considered one of the most musical cities in the world, it’s only a fraction of what was here, when you really look at the thousands of jazz artists who emerged out of this community in the early part of the century. What happened here was a renaissance which has affected popular music all over the world since it occurred.