Shadow of the Demimonde

At the age of fourteen, Louis Armstrong of New Orleans was a potent combination of streetwise youth and naïve back-alley urchin with a song in his heart. Already, young Louis had survived the Waif’s Home for Boys, an orphanage for wayward children of color, where he’d been sent for firing a .38 caliber pistol into the sky on New Year’s Eve, 1913. He meant no harm, but possession of the weapon—his stepfather’s—was a violation of the penal codes, so off he went. Louis made the most of the Waif’s Home. It was there, in the school band, that he began to play the cornet in earnest. With a determination and discipline that had heretofore not been present in his life, he learned to hit the high notes and hold it there; he perfected his embouchure; and under the tutelage of a serious instructor, he began to develop a voice on the horn—his own voice—that he would perfect in the years ahead. By the time Louis returned to New Orleans after eighteen months at the Waif’s Home, he was ready to reconfigure his existence in the city, on the planet, and in this universe through the performance and power of music.

And what music it was! In the last decade, roughly from the turn of the twentieth century, New Orleans had been in the throes of a musical revolution. Few had seen it coming, though in retrospect it was a development that almost seemed preordained. Given the city’s unique cultural inheritance under French, then Spanish, and then American rule, a melting pot of musical flavors had been bubbling for some time. Like the churning waters of the Gulf as the tides enter the mouth of the mighty Mississippi, music in New Orleans was a confluence of rhythms. It wasn’t so much a melding of styles as it was the intermingling of powerful forces, a commingling of sources whose collective flow was irrefutable.

It came from the plantations.

Legendary bassist Pops Foster, whose mother was part Cherokee, was born and raised on a plantation near the town of McCall, in Ascension Parish, in south Louisiana. It was on the McCall plantation, in the early years of the new century, that Pops and other children of former slaves began playing a new kind of music on instruments that were often homemade. Pops Foster’s first bass was made by his brother, Willie.

[Willie] put a two-by-four through the hollow of a flour barrel and nailed it on. We used some kind of wood for a bridge and carved some tuning pegs to stick on the two-by-four. Down on the two-by-four we bounded some nails in to tie the strings to. We couldn’t afford regular strings so we used twine. It had three strings: we’d twist three pieces of twine together for the lowest, then two, then one for the highest. For two or three days we’d rub the twine with wax and rosin before we’d put them on the bass. The first bow was a bent stick with sewing machine thread tied on it. After a while we got a regular bow without any hair on it. For hair we caught a neighbor’s horse and cut the hair off his tail, but it didn’t work, and we went back to the sewing machine thread. My daddy made us use the bow on it, no plucking.

Pops learned to play the bass using this homemade instrument. Later, his uncle bought him a used cello for $1.50. Pops and his siblings practiced around the plantation. Sometimes they were hired to play at lawn parties and fish frys. In the fields, they played quadrilles, polkas, rags, lancers, and classical variations they’d heard emanating from the boss man’s phonograph. Eventually, friends and fellow musicians came from New Orleans full of excitement about what they were hearing there. Some brought back techniques, sounds, melodies, and musical flights of fancy that were incorporated into what was being played in the fields. A generation was intoxicated; clearly, New Orleans was the place. Budding musicians—including Pops Foster—became part of the flow to the big city in search of musical nirvana.

It came from the funeral parades.

New Orleans was known for its many social clubs and associations, some of which had bands that played at community affairs and, most notably, funeral processions that passed through the city’s streets on a regular basis. These bands were often exuberant, even during solemn occasions such as a funeral. They emphasized brass instruments—cornets, clarinets, saxophones, trombones, and tubas—which could be played while walking; and percussion, which became the primary purview of “the second line,” funeral followers who were not part of the immediate family. Quite often the music on these occasions was semi-improvisational. The players would take a well-known song—say, “When the Saints Go Marching In” (which was itself a melding of popular Negro spirituals)—and take it through endless variations to sustain the tune throughout the course of the procession.

The funeral parades were serious musical displays, and many musicians—especially those who were canny showmen as well as brilliant players—emerged as stars. Cornet player Buddy Bolden, most notably, lit up the sky with his virtuosity and became the first great jazz legend in New Orleans. Young Louis Armstrong first saw and heard Buddy Bolden play at Funky Butt Hall, and like so many others, he was enraptured by the spirit of the music in ways that altered the trajectory of his life.

It came from the bordellos.

Prostitution had existed in New Orleans almost from the beginning. The cultural tradition of fancy bordellos was brought to the region by the French, who established the convention of a madam, or matron, who presided over the establishment. The best houses had a well-appointed foyer with lace curtains, Oriental carpets, mirrors, and furniture imported from Europe. Here pimps, johns, and ladies of the evening met, drank champagne, and smoked fine cigars while awaiting the main event in a room upstairs or down the hall. New Orleans had dozens of high-class bordellos, and they all had solo piano players—or sometimes a player piano—and occasionally a singer. The style of the day was a jaunty form of music known as ragtime, and it would formulate one of the major tributaries that led to the creation of modern jazz.

In the bordellos, the pianists were known as “professors,” and many would become musical deities in their own right. Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, better known as Jelly Roll Morton, did well for himself as Professor Jelly Roll playing at some of the best sporting houses in town. It was here, expanding on the parameters of ragtime, that Morton learned about music and about life.

Those years I worked for all the houses, even Emma Johnson’s Circus House, where the guests got everything from soup to nuts. They did a lot of uncultured things there that probably couldn’t be mentioned, and the irony part of it, they always picked the youngest and most beautiful girls to do them right before the eyes of everybody . . . A screen was put up between me and the tricks they were doing for the guests, but I cut a slit in the screen, as I had come to be a sport now myself and wanted to see what everybody else was seeing.

It came from Africa.

On Sundays in what was once known as Congo Square (now part of Louis Armstrong Park), Blacks gathered to play the drums, chant, sing, and dance. These gatherings involved a near direct transference of rhythm patterns and dance movements from Africa, where rhythmic music has always been as much a spiritual undertaking as a social one. This tradition of drum circles in Congo Square continued throughout much of the nineteenth century, right up until the birth of jazz as the city’s popular musical form. The renowned Creole reed player Sidney Bechet, born in New Orleans in 1897, eventually found fame and a livelihood on a world stage, but he never forgot his roots.

My grandfather, that’s about the furthest I can remember back. Sundays when the slaves would meet—that was their free day—he beat out rhythms on the drums in the square—Congo Square they called it . . . He was a musician. No one had to explain notes or feeling or rhythms to him. It was all there inside him, something he was always sure of.

Congo Square was a place of profound cultural expression, and it was also where, on the other days of the week, slave trading took place. Thus, in New Orleans, music and slave commerce were inexorably intertwined; the ground on which the roots of jazz found fertile soil was also a locale of capitalist exploitation and sorrow. Eventually, this bitter reality would become the emotional foundation of the blues, another musical form whose folkloric impetus comes from the African continent.

The kind of vocal blues made famous by Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and many others was not indigenous to New Orleans; the blues singing tradition mostly came from the Delta. But the harmonic and emotional content of this music became the soulful core of jazz in the Crescent City. In later years, when people made note of a certain New Orleans sound or New Orleans style of jazz, they were, knowingly or not, referring directly to those elements of the blues that found their way into the bloodstream of the new music.

Little Louis

Back o’ Town was a Black slum neighborhood in the city renowned for its legacy of poor sanitation and municipal neglect. During the city’s periodic epidemics of yellow fever throughout the nineteenth century, Back o’ Town was hit hard. In such a densely populated area, the disease spread easily, and many people became feverish; unable to hold down food, they succumbed to diarrhea and nausea. Quickly, they wasted away and died a horrible death. (From dust they came and to dust they returned.) This tradition of pestilence and institutional dereliction of duty in what passed for city services continued into the new century. Local inhabitants were proud of their neighborhood, which was as commercially active as any Black neighborhood in the city. But inhabitants often found themselves on the losing end of battles with rats, stray dogs, cockroaches, water bugs, and assorted vermin drawn by horse manure and other effluvia that piled up in the streets. The other problem was flooding. Located between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, Back o’ Town was frequently underwater due to poor drainage.

It was in this neighborhood that Louis Armstrong, born August 4, 1901, was first introduced to the world. As a child, he accepted the good with the bad. The physical environment of Back o’ Town was a mess, but this was also a vibrant red light district teeming with humanity.

Little Louis, as he was known to his family and friends, had a hungry curiosity and an open heart almost from the beginning. As a kid, Armstrong was compelled to navigate an environment that was rambunctious and sometimes threatening. James Alley, the little street where Armstrong’s home was located, ran through a part of the neighborhood known as the Battlefield. In a memoir published in 1954, Armstrong remembered:

[They called it the Battlefield] because the toughest characters in town used to live there and would shoot and fight so much. In that one block between Gravier and Perdido Streets more people were crowded than you ever saw in your life. There were church people, gamblers, hustlers, cheap pimps, thieves, prostitutes and lots of children. There were bars, honky-tonks and saloons, and lots of women walking the streets for tricks to take to their “pads,” as they called their rooms . . . [My mother] told me that the night I was born there was a great big shooting scrape in the Alley, and the two guys killed each other.

Little Louis’s parents split when he was a child; there is no record that they were ever married. The future jazz legend was raised in Back o’ Town primarily by his grandmother. He later moved in with his mother, whom he worshipped to the point that he was ridiculed as a “momma’s boy” by other kids in the neighborhood. This led to a fistfight, which Armstrong claims to have won, but he would later admit he was not a fighter by nature. He was a fun-loving kid with a big smile who was popular with the many streetwalkers, pimps, and working-class citizens who populated his neighborhood.

In the middle of the fifth grade, Armstrong dropped out of school. His mother hardly noticed. When she wasn’t working as a domestic for a white family in the Garden District, she was turning tricks with men she brought home. Louis and his sister referred to these men euphemistically as “stepfathers.” “All I had to do was turn my back and a new ‘pappy’ would appear,” Armstrong wrote in his memoir, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (published in 1954). “Some of them were fine guys, but others were low lives.” Young Louis took to the streets and got by on charm and sincerity. He got a job selling newspapers in the neighborhood and fell in with an older crowd of boys.

When we were not selling newspapers we shot dice for pennies or played a little coon can or blackjack. I got to be a pretty slick player and I could hold my own with the other kids. Some nights I would come home with my pockets loaded with pennies, nickels, dimes, and even quarters. Mother, sister, and I would have enough money to go shopping. Now and then I even bought mother a new dress, and occasionally I got myself a pair of short pants in one of the shops on Rampart Street.

Little Louis soaked up the sights and sounds of the city. He sought out the music, which was prevalent in the saloons and honky-tonks, which, technically, he was prohibited from entering due to his age. But the music often spilled out into the street, and Armstrong saw the effect it had on people. Before he’d ever even touched a cornet, he was drawn to the sound of that instrument and paid careful attention to the great players he heard: Bolden, Bunk Johnson, and especially Joe “King” Oliver, who would one day become a significant mentor to the aspiring young musician.

At the time, Armstrong could not afford any kind of instrument, much less a cornet. But he and his closest friends had been bit by the bug, so they formed an impromptu vocal quartet that strolled the streets singing harmonies and songs for spare change. Armstrong and his friends didn’t know it, but they were engaged in an early twentieth-century version of an American tradition that would continue, in updated forms, for the next hundred years. Whether it be doo-wop singers harmonizing on a street corner in the Bronx or rappers spitting out lyrics in a park in South Central L.A., it was an organic way for new vocal traditions to take shape and give birth to entirely new musical forms.

We began by walking down Rampart Street between Perdido and Gravier. The lead singer and the tenor walked together in front followed by the baritone and the bass [Armstrong was a tenor]. Singing at random we wandered through the streets until someone called to us to sing a few songs. Afterwards we would pass our hats and at the end of the night we would divvy up. Most of the time we would draw down a nice little taste. Then I would make a bee line for home and dump my share into mama’s lap.

In the honky-tonks and saloons, Armstrong noticed something right away: The best musicians—Joe Oliver, for example—played in the clubs that were frequented by a certain breed of clientele. The term used back then to describe the gamblers, pimps, and “players” of distinction was “sporting men”; later generations would refer to this breed as “gangsters.” They had a certain style, and they had power. In fact, many of them seemed to own the very honky-tonks where the best musicians plied their trade. Armstrong was too young to fully comprehend the stratified layers of this world, but he sensed instinctively that succeeding in this adult realm of music involved learning the lay of the land. It was a task he would spend nearly the rest of his life seeking to master.

By the time he returned from the Waif’s Home for Boys, Armstrong had set his sights on a life in music. Thanks to his time at the orphanage, he could play the cornet with the skills of an adult, and he had begun to develop talents as a performer. People loved to watch this young kid play his horn. By the age of fourteen, he had established a reputation locally as a musical prodigy.

One night, a friend named “Cocaine” Buddy Martin told him about a gig at a local honky-tonk in the city’s red light district. “The boss man’s name is Andrew Pons,” said Cocaine Buddy. “He is one of the biggest operators in the red light district, and he ain’t scared of nobody. He wants a good cornet player . . . All you have to do is put on your long pants and play the blues for the whores that hustle all night. They come in with a big stack of money in their stockings for their pimps. When you play the blues they will call you sweet names and buy you drinks and give you tips.”

It all sounded good to Little Louis. He went to work at Andrew Pons’s honky-tonk and established a following there.

Armstrong was with Pons late one night closing up the honky-tonk when he noticed a gaggle of rough-looking characters across the street. The men were Black, and they seemed to be looking in the direction of Pons’s saloon with hostile intent.

Louis knew that Pons was enmeshed in some kind of dispute with a rival businessman in the district named Joe Segretto. Rumor had it that Segretto was affiliated with the Matranga family. Everybody in New Orleans knew about the Matrangas. On the street, their name was often whispered. The mafia had been entrenched in New Orleans for decades, and the Matrangas were the premier mafia faction in the city. They were respected in some quarters, feared in others. There had been many murders attributed to mafia wars in the city. Even Little Louis, who had been away at the Waif’s Home in recent years, knew that you did not want to be on the wrong side of the Matrangas. If you were running a honky-tonk or dancehall in the district, it was not unlikely that you would have to deal with the mafia. Andrew Pons knew this, but he refused to go along.

Armstrong noticed one of the men across the street raise his arm and—bang. He fired off a shot in the direction of Andrew Pons and Armstrong. Louis felt the bullet whiz past his head, and he froze.

“Well I’ll be goddamned,” said Pons, as the men across the street fired more shots, “those Black bastards are shooting at me.”

Pons whipped out a revolver and returned fire. The other gunmen ran, and Pons chased after them, a volley of shots back and forth ringing out into the dark night.

Armstrong had not moved. A flock of bystanders ran up to him and asked, “Were you hit? Are you hurt?”

Turning his head slightly to look at the concerned citizens, Louis said nothing. Then he fainted.

I thought the first shot had hit me . . . When I came to I could still hear the shots coming from Howard and Perdido and the cries of the colored boys. They were no match for [Pons]: he was shooting well and he wounded each of them. When he stopped shooting he walked back to his saloon raging mad and swearing to himself.

Louis had not been hit. He went home that night, happy to be alive. As he noted in his memoir, “I continued to work in [Pons’s] honky-tonk, but I was always on the alert, thinking something would jump off any minute.”

To Armstrong, the incident became a cautionary tale. It had not escaped his notice that the gunmen were Black, likely hired shooters for the Matranga family. This was disturbing, the mafia contracting out jobs to local hoodlums. Somehow, to Louis, this seemed unfair. How were you supposed to know who your enemies were if you couldn’t tell by the color of their skin? Among other things, this suggested to Little Louis that the world was a more complicated place than he had imagined. And also more dangerous. He very easily could have died. “It was days before I got over the shock,” he noted.

From this point onward, Armstrong realized there was something he would need if he were to have the long career in jazz about which he dreamed.

Protection.

Kingdom of Jass

It wasn’t until 1917 that the word “jazz” entered the nomenclature of the city of New Orleans through the local press, and even then it was initially spelled “jass” in the newspapers. By then, this style of music had been cooking for at least two decades. No one had been able to assign a name to this ongoing musical fermentation because it was in such a vibrant state of transformation. Fans of the music weren’t sure if what they heard one week was related to what they had heard the week before. The music was building upon itself, adding new chord changes, patterns of syncopation, instrumentation (the trumpet hadn’t even entered the picture yet), accents, and shadings on a near daily basis. For a phenomenon like this to take place, with musicians regularly listening to and influencing one another, a certain locality to exhibit the music and somehow turn it into a viable commercial venture was required. Thus was born a district so notorious that many, to this day, refer to it as the most legendary red light district that ever was.

Storyville, as the district became known, was not designed specifically to showcase this new musical form that was rising from the gutters to emanate from street corners, parks, basements, rooftops, and honky-tonks. That, as it turned out, was a happy accident. The district was created primarily as a way to contain and control vice in the city. The most ubiquitous endeavor in this regard was prostitution.

By the late nineteenth century, whorehouses of many levels and varieties were commonplace in New Orleans, and they were spread throughout the city. This created problems for the city’s businessmen and promoters. Wrote Al Rose in Storyville, New Orleans, his definitive history of the district: “The financial stability and social welfare of the city were seriously threatened by the wide dispersal of harlotry. Specifically, real estate values were seriously disrupted by the unpredictability of the ‘moral’ development of neighborhoods. A man might purchase a home for his family on a quiet street today and find himself neighbor to a brothel tomorrow.”

Not everyone in the city liked the idea of a centralized vice district. The tight sixteen-block radius that comprised Storyville had, in fact, been created as a compromise with reformers, who would have preferred to see prostitution completely outlawed in the city. But the world’s oldest profession was so deeply entrenched in New Orleans, such a significant aspect of the city’s history and culture, that it was an irrefutable fact of life. The man who led the charge to stamp out prostitution and other forms of vice was an alderman named Sidney Story. As a compromise, Story was the one who put forth the ordinance in 1897 that led to the creation of a district. He did so reluctantly as a means to, as he put it, “lessen the blight” of vice throughout the city. For his troubles, his detractors forever after referred to the district as “Storyville.” Much to Story’s consternation, the name stuck.

Along with everything else, the alderman hated jazz, which he saw as a musical component of the city’s criminal underworld.

The district, located in the northern reaches of the French Quarter, was already home to many honky-tonks, dancehalls, and bordellos. The creation of Storyville did not involve constructing new buildings or altering the city landscape in any way. What was new was that, within the district, prostitution was now allowed. The de facto legalization of this previously illegal practice inevitably gave rise to new levels of permissiveness in the area. Gambling parlors and drug dens became commonplace, and the district’s honky-tonks and saloons became the central breeding ground for a new class of criminal hustler in the city.

For such an environment to thrive, organization was required. No one was yet using the term “organized crime,” but everyone understood that for a district such as Storyville to reach its maximum commercial potential, it needed a potentate, or boss, who could bestow power, secure the necessary city licenses to run a business in the area, and settle disputes. There were few people who had the kind of skills and reputation to serve in this capacity. The man who eventually filled the role was Thomas Charles Anderson.

Anderson was born on November 22, 1858, and raised in the neighborhood known as the Irish Channel. He was the son of Irish and Scottish immigrants, and his beginnings were humble. Born in harsh poverty, from early on in life he showed a proclivity toward social interaction as a means of advancement. His first known job, as a preteen, was selling copies of the Daily Picayune newspaper on street corners. This was the same job through which Little Louis Armstrong set out into the social universe. These two men, Anderson and Armstrong, born in poverty in separate parts of the city, would come to play an essential role in setting a course for the relationship between jazz and the underworld—not only in New Orleans, but, by extension, all around the United States.

Anderson was ambitious: By the time he was a teenager, he had advanced to serving as an errand boy for the brothels in his neighborhood. These were not the grandiose bordellos of Storyville and the French Quarter but rather chippie joints patronized primarily by Irish immigrants who had been lured to New Orleans to dig the city’s system of levees and canals. The women who worked in these establishments required opium and cocaine to smooth the edges of their day; young Tom Anderson made regular runs to the local pharmacy to obtain these items, both of which could be legally purchased at the time in specified doses.

As a hustler on the make, Anderson rubbed elbows with some shady characters, but he also cultivated a parallel existence. He knew Irish cops whom he met in front of the city’s main courthouse while peddling newspapers. They liked the young kid with his mop of reddish-brown hair and sociable manner, especially when he played a role in the arrest and conviction of a local thief. Having witnessed an act of petty thievery on Basin Street, Anderson pointed out the thief’s hiding place for the cops and even agreed to testify in court. He received a small financial reward for his services but, more important, established himself as a friend of the system.

By the late nineteenth century, Anderson had begun his legitimate career path as a bookkeeper for an oil company. But a young man with his drive and ambition was not destined to serve as a mere employee for someone else. Together with a partner, he became the proprietor of his own small oil company, which sold everything from salad oil to axel grease and whose motto was “The Only Independent Oil Company Not Controlled by Trusts or Monopolies.”

By now Anderson was a man about town. He greased his hair and parted it in the middle, and he sported a luxurious handlebar mustache, which was de rigueur among the city’s sporting men. He married early (at age twenty-two), had a child, and then lost his wife to typhoid fever. Now a widower, he put his child in an orphanage and began what would become a lifelong pursuit: the seduction and conquest of some of the city’s most renowned madams.

The manner by which Anderson elevated himself to become boss of the city’s underworld was a classic tale. It was a pattern that would play out in many U.S. cities in the early twentieth century. In some ways, it is the story of the mob itself: how organized crime evolved to become such a force in modern urban America.

The use of the term “mob boss” is believed to have originated in New York City, in the infamous Five Points district, but it was based on a phenomenon that was unfolding in a number of American cities. It all started with what became known on the street as a “mob primary.”

An aspiring political leader would stand on a soapbox or overturned milk crate and orate about the events of the day. Eventually, if all went well, he would attract a following that would become the basis for his running as an alderman or other candidate for public office. This person was often a saloonkeeper who was willing to offer a free drink, a sandwich, a cellar mattress on which to sleep, or all of the above, in exchange for the pledge of a vote. The type of person to most benefit from this sort of handout was usually a rough character—a bum, a homeless person, a thief, or a gangster. Thus, the mob boss, or mobster, became the leader of a less than savory constituency that was, nonetheless, powerful enough to sway local elections.

The arrangement worked both ways. By aligning himself with a rising and powerful mob boss, the street hoodlum was now also a mobster. He was “connected,” part of a system in which he now had a vested interest. Ostensibly, he would now have the kind of protection, or “juice,” that was necessary for him to operate a vice business, such as a house of prostitution, gambling den, burglary ring, or any manner of quasi-criminal enterprise popular throughout the underworld.

This symbiotic connection between the upperworld of politics and business and the underworld of vice and crime would become the foundation for organized crime in America. It also became the nexus of interests that launched the career of Tom Anderson.

In 1892, Anderson opened a restaurant and bar strategically situated at 12 Rampart Street, at the entrance to what would soon be known as Storyville. The place was called Anderson’s, and it would become a structure as familiar as any in Storyville. Located directly across from the Rampart Street train station, the bar was literally the first thing a person saw when they disembarked, and Anderson’s became known as “the gateway to Storyville.” It was the first saloon/cabaret in the United States to be illuminated by electric lights. With more than one hundred light bulbs in the ceiling, plus an electric lighted sign outside, Anderson’s was a monument to Thomas Edison and a promise of things to come: vice and politics arm in arm under the brilliant, man-made radiance of American ingenuity.

For Big Tom, the bar was the culmination of all the relationships and alliances he had cultivated as a street hustler, businessman, and backroom politician. The bar was an immediate success. Anderson’s sold plenty of beer, rye, and whiskey, and it became a central gathering place for the mob in New Orleans. Pimps, mafiosi, off-duty cops, political figures, and others who walked the fine line between the upperworld and the underworld became its favored clientele. And then there was the music. According to Sidney Bechet:

[Anderson] had practically everything there, card rooms, bar, a hop room—and he had music. Sometimes you’d hear accordion, guitar, mandolin, sometimes bass, maybe a violin; other times you’d hear someone singing there. It wasn’t a whorehouse but you’d hear whorehouse music there.

Over the following decade, Tom Anderson’s influence and base of power continued to grow. He acquired a financial interest in a lavish bordello at 172 Customhouse (Iberville) Street operated by one of the most renowned madams in town, Josie Arlington. It was rumored that they were lovers. Anderson opened two more saloons, one called Anderson’s Annex (later renamed the Arlington Annex in honor of Josie), and the Astoria Club, on South Rampart Street in the city’s Negro section, soon to be known as Black Storyville. If all this wasn’t enough, in 1904, after Storyville had been in existence for seven years, Anderson was elected a representative of the Fourth Ward in the state legislature. He became a ranking member of the Ways and Means Committee and a member of the Committee on City Affairs. In the Fourth Ward, which included Storyville, his power was ubiquitous. Many began referring to Storyville as “Anderson County.”

Big Tom was no absentee landlord. He loved to socialize, and his establishments became important showcases for “jass,” or jazz, in its crucial period of incubation as a national art form.

By 1910, there were more than sixty honky-tonks, dancehalls, or private clubs that showcased live music in the district. The musicians were almost exclusively Black, but the clientele was mixed race. From the beginning, jazz became identified as race-mixing music, an unusual development, perhaps unprecedented, where Blacks and whites came together to celebrate what was an authentically African American form of expression. The clubs were all owned by white men. And the type of men who owned the clubs were often associated with vice—prostitution, gambling, opium and cocaine, unfettered drinking, and whatever else could be used to help turn a profit.

The music, and what it represented, was not loved by everyone. In polite society—meaning white society—jazz was sometimes characterized as a threat. An editorial in the Times-Picayune, dated June 17, 1917, was unequivocal in its disdain.

Why is the jass music, and, therefore, the jass band? As well ask why is the dime novel or the grease-dripping doughnut. All are manifestation of a low streak in man’s tastes that has not yet come out in civilization’s wash. Indeed, one might go further, and say that jass music is the indecent story syncopated and counterpointed. Like the improper anecdote, also, in its youth, it was listened to behind closed doors and drawn curtains, but, like all vice, it grew bolder until it dared decent surroundings, and there was tolerated because of its oddity . . . It behooves us to be last to accept this atrocity in polite society, and where it has crept in we should make it a point of civic honor to suppress it. Its musical value is nil, and its possibilities of harm are great.

The naysayers could do little to impede the popularity of the music. The more polite society sought to stigmatize the culture of jazz, the more popular it became among people looking for that rare item: an authentic experience that was not being dictated to them by government fiat, the church pulpit, a judge’s bench, or some other mechanism of social control. To those who loved the music, jazz was real. For others, it represented that most American of prospects: a business opportunity.

Jelly Roll Blues

In 1910, Tom Anderson opened a new bordello adjacent to Arlington’s Annex; it was run by Hilma Burt, one of the district’s more ambitious madams. According to master pianist Jelly Roll Morton, “Hilma Burt’s was on the corner of Customhouse and Basin Street, next door to Tom Anderson’s Saloon—Tom Anderson was the king of the district and ran the Louisiana legislature, and Hilma Burt was supposed to be his old lady.”

Burt was indeed Anderson’s “old lady” (mistress)—one of many, perhaps, but enough of a main squeeze that he outfitted her with one of the swankiest bordellos on Basin Street. Noted Morton:

Hers was no doubt one of the best paying places in the city and I thought I had a very bad night when I made under a hundred dollars. Very often a man would come into the house and hand you a twenty- or forty- or a fifty-dollar note, just like a match. Beer sold for a dollar a bottle. Wine from five to ten . . . Wine flowed much more than water—the kind of wine I’m speaking about I don’t mean sauterne or nothing like that, I mean champagne, such as Cliquot and Mumm’s Extra Dry . . . I’m telling you this tenderloin district was like something that nobody ever seen before or since.

Born on October 20, 1890, as Ferdinand LaMothe, Jelly Roll Morton came from Creole stock. He claimed to have a French lineage in New Orleans going back four decades, but Morton had the reputation of being a fabulist. He didn’t need to embellish: According to the public record, and those who knew Morton, his life and personality were the stuff of legend. In 1938, when the musical anthropologist Alan Lomax tracked down and interviewed a mostly forgotten Jelly Roll Morton about his life and career for the U.S. Library of Congress, Morton claimed to have invented jazz. It was a provocative statement that stirred up much resentment and led many to view the pianist as an egoist, but the fact is that Morton, as much as anyone, could lay claim to such a bold assertion.

Aside from his musical contributions as the first composer of recognizable tunes that became some of the most prominent early jazz standards (“King Porter Stomp,” “Doctor Jazz,” “Original Jelly Roll Blues,” to name a few), Jelly Roll cut quite a figure. Though he was slight in stature—reed thin, like a bantamweight boxer—Morton made sure he was noticed when he entered a room. He wore embroidered ties, tailored suits (he claimed to own dozens of them), a diamond-encrusted cravat, and a silk hanky in his breast pocket. His complexion was café au lait, on the lighter side, which made him employable in many of the whorehouses where dark-skinned musicians were not allowed. He conked his hair or slicked it back in the upwardly mobile Negro style of the day. Embedded in his front tooth was a half-carat diamond that sparkled every time he smiled. His teeth were otherwise scraggly and sharp, like a ferret’s. When Jelly Roll entered an establishment, he had the look of an elegant wharf rat.

At the same time he was emerging on the scene as a brilliant musical force, Morton staked his claim among the city’s sporting men. The nickname Jelly Roll came from his supposed popularity with women, “Jelly Roll” being a slang term for “vagina.” (The more accurate street translation might be “pussy.”) Said Johnny St. Cyr, one of the district’s most popular banjo/guitar players, “Jelly lived a pretty fast life. In fact, most of those fellows round the district did. They were all half-way pimps anyway.”

In his memoir, Morton freely concedes that he was a pimp. In the district, a pimp was known as a “P.I.” Jazz pianists, apparently, were prone to a life as procurers, as they could keep an eye on their stable of girls while playing at a bordello. Equal to Morton’s reputation as a P.I. was his notoriety as a pool hustler and a gambler. Paul Barbarin, a New Orleans drummer, said that Morton was “mostly a gambler . . . He’d lose maybe four or five hundred dollars” a night, and that proved to be his “downfall—easy come, easy go.” Danny Barker, renowned musician and chronicler of early New Orleans jazz, noted that Morton “took on the lifestyle of the notorious night people of the underworld.” Pianist Earl “Fatha” Hines, who got to know Jelly Roll later in Chicago, said that in the early days of jazz, “you had to act bad whether you were bad or not,” meaning you had to carry yourself like a gangster. “Jelly Roll Morton found that out long before I did,” said Hines, “and that’s why he carried a gun and talked loud.”

Morton was not the only musician to carry a pistol; many did. But unlike most others, his was not solely for protection against robbers and ruffians. Once, during a rehearsal with his band, Morton became frustrated when his trombonist, Zue Robertson, refused to play the melody of one of his tunes the way he wanted it. After trying to convince Robertson through verbal means, Morton chose another way. He took a large pistol from his pocket and placed it on top of the piano. On the next take, Robertson played the melody note for note as Jelly Roll wanted it.

Morton’s persona as a hoodlum and pimp was unusual: The story of jazz and the underworld is most often a case of gangsters and mobsters influencing the business of jazz from above as club owners, managers, record label owners, et cetera. Morton’s personal proclivities suggest another aspect: hoodlums who rose from the streets to become practitioners of the music.

In his historic interviews with Alan Lomax (later adapted into the book Mister Jelly Roll), Morton describes his introduction to jazz in New Orleans in a way suggesting that gangsterism—and the violence associated with it—was part of the equation from the start. According to Morton, the jazz parades, in particular, sometimes devolved into armed combat, which he describes as if they were something out of Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York:

It’s a funny thing that the second line marched at the head of the parade, but that’s the way it had to be in New Orleans. They were our protection. You see, whenever a parade would go to another district the enemy would be waiting at the dividing line. If the parade crossed the line, it meant a fight, a terrible fight. The first day I marched a fellow was cut, must have been a hundred times. Blood was gushing out of him same as from one of the gushers in Yellowstone Park, but he never did stop fighting . . . And about that time the broomsticks and brick-bats would start to fly, the razors would come into play and the seven shooters—which was a little bit of a .22 that shot seven times—would begin popping . . . Sometimes it would require a couple of ambulances to come around and pick up the people that was maybe cut or shot occasionally.

Morton understood that to play jazz in the streets, the bordellos, and the clubs was not for sissies. Between the late-night clientele in the district who might be drunk or stoned, and the volatile nature of race mixing in clubs and bordellos where the patrons were white and the performers were Black, the possibilities of “misunderstandings” and/or confrontations were ever present.

Even so, Jelly Roll Morton insisted on going his own way. Other musicians sometimes preferred playing in clubs that were “connected”—that is, mobbed up or owned by underworld figures. To some, these clubs were safer; they were protected. But Morton didn’t see it that way. Later in life, he complained about being “robbed of three million dollars” by mobster club owners, as well as agents, managers, and other vultures. For this reason, he preferred to remain independent. Which also had its drawbacks.

In the mid-1910s, Morton left New Orleans and ventured out on a tour that took him to the West Coast, from Los Angeles to Tacoma to Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia. Serving as one of jazz’s first unofficial ambassadors, he spread the gospel far and wide. Eventually, he wound up in Washington D.C., where he opened a club of his own called the Jungle Inn. The co-owner of the club was a woman named Cordelia, and Morton’s wife, Mabel, worked behind the bar. There was one night that Mabel would never forget:

This Cordelia, she never would back up Ferd [short for “Ferdinand,” that is, Jelly Roll]. He had put a cover charge on the Jungle Inn to keep the riff-raff and the roughnecks out of the place, but she would let them come in anyhow even when they wouldn’t take their hats off . . . One night one of those riff-raff got to acting rowdy and Ferd called him out. The fellow then used some bad language. Ferd slapped him. Then he sat down at the piano and began to play and the fellow slipped up behind him and stabbed him. Stabbed him the first time in the head and, when Ferd turned, he stabbed him just above the heart. Then Ferd grabbed him and they went down.

I was back of the bar mixing a Pink Lady when I heard the scuffle. When I came out from behind the bar I couldn’t hardly tell which was which, they were so covered with blood. The blood was just gushing out of Ferd like out of a stuck beef. I took the heavy glass ashtray and I struck this young man hard as I could in the head. Then we pulled Ferd away—Ferd was on top by then—and Ferd grabbed an iron pipe and was going to kill him, but Cordelia grabbed Ferd and the fellow got away.

The assailant escaped and was never charged. Morton was rushed to the hospital. He survived the injuries, but, according to Mabel, there were physical repercussions that lasted a lifetime.

It is possible—likely, even—that if the Jungle Inn had been a mob club, an encounter like the assault on Morton never would have happened. There would have been bouncers on hand—though in many cases public knowledge that a club was connected and/or protected by the mob was enough to keep it safe. Morton had long preferred to not be under the thumb of “the syndicate,” or any other controlling interest that might rip him off. In terms of security, this meant flying without a net. He learned the hard way: a sneak attack from a maniac with a long blade. Go your own way at your own risk.