Steve Waksman is Professor of Music and Sylvia Dlugasch Bauman Professor of American Studies at Smith College. His publications include the books Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (1999) and This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (2009). Currently, he is writing a new book on the cultural history of live music and performance in the U.S., tentatively titled, Live Music in America: A History, 1850-2000.
“I Heard Buddy Bolden Say: Social Clubs and Musical Rivalries in New Orleans”
“I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say/Funky butt, funky butt, take it away.” With those lines Buddy Bolden staked his claim as the leading musical figure of black New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century. Bolden’s status as a near-mythic ur-figure in jazz history is of long standing; oral histories with New Orleans musicians are full of references to his influence and legacy, and jazz historians have treated him as a figurehead of black musical authenticity whose mental illness and early death also make him an icon of tragic-heroic proportions. During his career though, his stature did not go unchallenged. From across town came a call of a different sort, emanating from the upwardly mobile precincts of middle-class black and Creole social clubs: “Kill it kid for it is nothing but a chinch/Walk in to it for it is a lead pipe cinch/For that 3 o’clock Quadrille it all the go/When ever it is played by the old boy Robichaux.” John Robichaux led a more refined sort of dance band, the kind that would be defamed by jazz historians and critics as they established “hot” jazz as the most righteous form and cast “sweet” jazz to the inauthentic outskirts. Drawing upon a compelling set of promotional posters dated from 1900 to the early 1910s that were found amidst John Robichaux’s sheet music collection at the Hogan Jazz Archive, I seek to recast the rivalry between Buddy Bolden and John Robichaux in less Manichean terms. These posters give us insight into the social world of more polite New Orleans dance music rarely considered in standard jazz historical narratives. Combined with oral histories and other sources they suggest that the music and the values of Bolden and Robichaux did not exist in stark opposition but instead constituted a sort of call and response that contributed to the making of early New Orleans jazz.