Magic City: How the Birmingham Jazz Tradition Shaped the Sound of America

By Burgin Mathews

Magic City is the story of one of American music's essential unsung places: Birmingham, Alabama, birthplace of a distinctive and influential jazz heritage. In a telling replete with colorful characters, iconic artists, and unheralded masters, Burgin Mathews reveals how Birmingham was the cradle and training ground for such luminaries as big band leader Erskine Hawkins, cosmic outsider Sun Ra, and a long list of sidemen, soloists, and arrangers. He also celebrates the contributions of local educators, club owners, and civic leaders who nurtured a vital culture of Black expression in one of the country's most notoriously segregated cities. In Birmingham, jazz was more than entertainment: long before the city emerged as a focal point in the national civil rights movement, its homegrown jazz heroes helped set the stage, crafting a unique tradition of independence, innovation, achievement, and empowerment.

Blending deep archival research and original interviews with living elders of the Birmingham scene, Mathews elevates the stories of figures like John T. "Fess" Whatley, the pioneering teacher-bandleader who emphasized instrumental training as a means of upward mobility and community pride. Along the way, he takes readers into the high school band rooms, fraternal ballrooms, vaudeville houses, and circus tent shows that shaped a musical movement, revealing a community of players whose influence spread throughout the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781469676890

Burgin Mathews

Burgin Mathews is a writer, a radio host, and the founding director of the nonprofit Southern Music Research Center.

Book preview

MAGIC CITY

MAGIC CITY

HOW THE BIRMINGHAM JAZZ TRADITION SHAPED THE SOUND OF AMERICA

BURGIN MATHEWS

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

CHAPEL HILL

This book was published with the assistance of the Fred W. Morrison Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2023 Burgin Mathews

All rights reserved

Set in Chaparral and Transat

by codeMantra

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover illustration: Clockwise from center: Sun Ra in a 1973 publicity photo; Erskine Hawkins, courtesy Birmingham Public Library Archives; John T. Fess Whatley, courtesy Birmingham Public Library Archives; Ethel Harper, publicity photo from the collections of the North Jersey History and Genealogy Center, the Morristown and Morris Township Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mathews, Burgin, author.

Title: Magic City : how the Birmingham jazz tradition shaped the sound of America / Burgin Mathews.

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023029861 | ISBN 9781469676876 (cloth) | ISBN 9781469676883 (paperback) | ISBN 9781469676890 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Jazz—Alabama—Birmingham—History and criticism. | BISAC: MUSIC / Ethnomusicology | HISTORY / United States / State & Local / South (AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV)

Classification: LCC ML3508.8.B57 M37 2023 | DDC 781.6509761/78—dc23/eng/20230627

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029861

For Glory

CONTENTS

Introduction

PART I

1. Beginnings

2. An Industrial Education

3. Maker of Musicians

4. Smithfield

5. Fourth Avenue Stomp

6. Famous Rhythm

7. A City Apart

8. The Great Wide World

9. Erskine

10. Collegians

11. Efflorescence

12. The Magic Citizen

PART II

13. Arrival

14. Up from Down South

15. Blue Rhythm Fantasy

16. Dance the Night Away

17. The Road

18. War

19. Teddy’s Hill, Billie’s Guy

20. If It’s in You

21. Swing on Trial

PART III

22. Down South in Birmingham

23. Heritage and Home

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Frank Doc Adams

Ivory Pops Williams

Industrial High School shoe shop

Industrial High School cooking class

Industrial High School band

John T. Fess Whatley

Fess Whatley’s Jazz Demons

Prince Hall Masons

Knights of Pythias of North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia

Fred Longshaw Orchestra

Fess Whatley and Cadillac

Teddy Hill

Erskine Hawkins

Mary Alice Clarke

Herman Poole Sonny Blount’s (Sun Ra’s) graduating class

Bama State Collegians at the Ubangi Club

Teddy Hill Orchestra

Avery Parrish and Erskine Hawkins at Birmingham’s Masonic Temple

Private Alton Davenport conducts Fort Benning Reception Center Band

Bebop pioneers at Minton’s

Joe Guy and Billie Holiday

Sonny Blount (Sun Ra) and the Ripple Rhythm Four

Ethel Harper publicity photos

Birmingham musicians Chuck Clarke, Mary Alice Clarke Stollenwerck, Joe Guy, and Jesse Evans

Patrick Cather sits in with the Frank Adams band

Birmingham Heritage Band

Sun Ra at Birmingham’s City Stages, 1989

Erskine Hawkins at Function at the Junction, 1987

MAGIC CITY

INTRODUCTION

In July 1985, Erskine Hawkins came home to Tuxedo Junction, the place where he had first heard jazz.¹ Just north of Birmingham, Alabama, surrounded by steel mills and smoke, the Junction had once been a flourishing dance spot for the local Black community, a block of bandstands and nightclubs that had dazzled young Hawkins many years before. He had become a trumpeter and bandleader, one of the high-note heroes of American swing, celebrated in the 1930s and 1940s as the Twentieth Century Gabriel. Now, for Hawkins’s seventy-first birthday, Tuxedo Junction welcomed him home for an outdoor concert in celebration of his legacy. Afternoon rains erupted but the faithful remained, cramming into a sweltering school gymnasium, setting up metal folding chairs, spreading out all over the floor, and fanning themselves with wilted programs. Backed by local musicians, a few longtime bandmates, and some of his oldest hometown friends, Hawkins blew his way through his greatest hits, a repertoire that stretched back half a century. The climax, of course, was Tuxedo Junction, the tune that had made famous both Hawkins himself and this little spot on the map. He had played it by now all over the country, in bright-lit cities and dusty small towns, had blasted it far and wide over the airwaves and set it multiple times to wax. The tune’s infectious, unmistakable groove had sent a generation of dancers across New York’s swankiest ballroom floors and had rallied American GIs on their way to take down the Nazis. In recent years, Hawkins had settled into a cushy permanent gig at a Catskills resort, entertaining each night’s crowd with that signature theme and evoking in the gray-headed vacationers nostalgia for bygone years. But today Tuxedo Junction had come home, and the local crowd savored every note. Verna Chambers—a retired schoolteacher, eighty-two years old—could not keep from dancing, and the room cheered her on as she gyrated and bounced all over the basketball court.

Honey, she said, when I hear that music, I have to get up and move.

Hawkins struggled to put into words his feelings for the Junction. It’s hard for me to explain, he confessed. It means everything to me. The place itself taught me my music. And I’ll never forget it. All through the performance he was beaming, a man wholeheartedly in his element. He cracked jokes with the crowd and broke into a few dance steps of his own. And he vowed to come back each year for his birthday.

Home, he said, is home.

But home can be a complicated thing.

Jazz iconoclast Sun Ra came back to Birmingham in February 1988.² He had booked a show at the Nick, a grimy rock and roll dive tucked into the shadow of a highway overpass. Like Hawkins, Sun Ra had grown up in Birmingham. But unlike Tuxedo Junction’s most celebrated son, he never quite claimed it as his own.

He had really come, he said, from Saturn.

The crowd that turned out to see Sun Ra that night at the Nick was unlike the hometown crowd that had clamored for Hawkins three years before. Sun Ra was greeted with enthusiasm but met by no old friends or family, no lifelong fans who remembered the band he had led in town four decades before. The fans who did gather were younger, they were white, and they were, every one, a stranger to him. Many belonged to Birmingham’s bohemian crowd: long-haired artists, poets, and record-store junkies, Southside radicals and self-proclaimed weirdos. Others had come to the Nick from sheer curiosity, unsure of just what to expect. As the show got underway, a few gasped aloud.

The performance opened with a wild explosion of sound—an onslaught of horns, percussion, and strings—furiously wrought by Sun Ra’s band, the Arkestra, billed that night as the Cosmo Jet Set Love Adventure. As the chaos reached a crescendo, Sun Ra strode through the room, eliciting from the crowd rambunctious, intoxicated applause. He was outfitted in a sparkling silver gown with flowing rainbow sleeves; he wore a bright red goatee and an elaborate homemade headpiece that suggested both ancient Egypt and a science-fiction future; and he moved back and forth dramatically, waving his arms like some kind of mystic conjurer. After the initial barrage of sound, he took his place behind the keyboards and launched into an ecstatic, swinging rendition of one of the band’s signature tunes, an original anthem called This World Is Not My Home. The song borrowed its name and central idea from an old gospel standard—This world is not my home, the old lyrics went, I’m just a-passing through / My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue—but it shifted that earlier song’s heavenward glance toward the dark infinity of the cosmos. Sun Ra half-crooned, half-chanted the lyrics, his bandmates echoing each phrase behind him. This world! he proclaimed,

Is not my home!

My home!

Is someplace else!

Just where that someplace was, Sun Ra made clear—In outer space! he shouted—and he invited the Nick’s ragtag crowd to go there with him.

Erskine Hawkins and Sun Ra seemed to have come from different worlds entirely. Everything about them—their music, their wardrobes, their worldviews, their fans—suggested the gulf between them. But both were born (or, Sun Ra would say, arrived) in Birmingham in 1914, both died (departed) in 1993, and between those bookends their lives were full of intersections and parallels. Both were reared in the band rooms of the city’s segregated Black schools, played their first gigs at the same local venues, entertained dancers at the same society dances, performed alongside many of the same musicians. Both enrolled after high school in teacher training colleges but abandoned the path of the classroom to make music, leaving Alabama for long careers as bandleaders and maintaining for decades big ensembles of loyal musicians. They would pay tribute to their hometown in landmark compositions—Hawkins with Tuxedo Junction and Sun Ra with his sprawling, experimental The Magic City—and would allude to the place they had left in other tunes throughout their careers. Late in life, they returned to the city of their youth with increasing frequency: Hawkins made good on his promise to come home each year for his birthday, and Sun Ra’s performance at the Nick was only the first of several now-legendary local shows. In the end, both their bodies were laid to rest in Birmingham’s Elmwood Cemetery, buried in the same red earth.

Histories of jazz tend to map a predictable geography, one in which a handful of places loom large: New Orleans, Chicago, Kansas City, New York. But since the very beginnings of jazz, local communities of players developed their own variations on the music, their own repertoires, conventions, and traditions, their own homegrown heroes and scenes. For much of the twentieth century, the city of Birmingham was home to one of the music’s most essential unsung communities, a thriving network of musicians whose lives helped shape the culture and sound of jazz as we know it. Nurtured in the social institutions of the city’s Black middle class, these musicians carved out a distinctive identity, forging an active tradition at home and sending out ripples all over the world.

At the center of it all was the man they called Fess: John T. Fess Whatley, the larger-than-life high school printing instructor and bandleader who retooled the restrictions of the Jim Crow classroom to craft a far-reaching culture of ambition and achievement. Thanks in large part to Whatley, Birmingham’s jazz tradition was linked inextricably to the segregated Black schools, whose innovative approach to music instruction churned out a teeming army of professional players. Creatively adapting Booker T. Washington’s philosophy of industrial education to the purposes of instrumental music training, Whatley turned his city into a deep wellspring of professional talent, all while promoting an ideology of self-determination and community pride. His rigorous training in reading and arranging music, in instrumental versatility, in professional discipline and personal principle became the basis of a homegrown tradition—and provided vital means to survival and empowerment in an oppressive, often dangerous society.

Music also provided access to the world outside. To make their careers, many local players left home, taking their Birmingham training on the road and into the nation’s jazz capitals. Birmingham musicians tended to exert their influence from the margins, behind the scenes, or in the shadows—as sidemen, arrangers, businessmen, mentors, and teachers—and perhaps for these reasons, the city’s influence has long been overlooked; but as early as the mid-1920s, a steady stream of homegrown talent had already joined the tide of the larger Great Migration, fanning out across the country in search of opportunity. The city’s musicians backed Bessie Smith on stage and on record and helped populate the bands of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, and Billie Holiday. When the country went to war, they took leadership roles in the army, navy, and air force bands that crafted the soundtrack for the cause. Others helped usher in the birth of bop or went on to push the music to its furthest-out, most adventurous extremes.

The musicians carried the city with them everywhere they went: no matter where they traveled, their mutual roots made for a kind of portable community, a permanent sense of family and home reconstituted anyplace two players might meet on the road. Musicians looked out for each other. They helped each other find jobs, make connections, and score places to stay or play. They created a network that stretched across the country.

Others stayed at home. They made music on nights and on weekends while working other jobs, most often as teachers. Many became bandmasters and music directors in local schools, passing their tradition to new generations. They became constants in the city’s Black community: they were civic leaders, role models, pillars. Their music would play an essential role in the development of the city’s Black community, contributing to a culture of racial and regional pride and helping define Black Birmingham’s sense of identity and possibility. Indeed, if Birmingham helped make the world of jazz, so too did jazz help to make Birmingham; without each other, neither the city nor the music would have been the same.

It is not for its music that Birmingham is typically known. In 1963, the city emerged as a central battleground in the country’s civil rights struggle, and its image ever since has been locked in time, defined by the events (and iconic black-and-white photographs) of that year. Martin Luther King Jr. penned his famous letter from the Birmingham jail that April, declaring the place the most thoroughly segregated city in America. In May, hundreds of schoolchildren marched and sang in the streets, faced down fire hoses and police dogs, and crowded the same city jail past capacity. In September, a Klansman’s bomb blew a vicious hole in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young girls. Through a long season of conflict and courage, the Black people of Birmingham would change the course of the nation’s history—their protests would lead directly to the passage of the Civil Rights Act, declaring segregation illegal—and, ever since, oppressed people all over the world have looked to the city and its legacy for models of resistance.

But Birmingham’s quest for freedom did not spring fully formed from the climactic events of the civil rights era—and a portrait of the city that begins and ends in 1963 obscures not only the much longer path to civil rights but, just as essential, deep local traditions of Black joy, excellence, exuberance, and art. Decades before the modern movement took shape, a vibrant, independent, and forward-looking Black community took root in Birmingham. Its members built a rich web of churches, social clubs, fraternal organizations, and schools; established an active, self-contained commercial and entertainment district; and nurtured tight-knit families and proud residential communities. They advocated for progress, solidarity, and uplift. They threw parties and hosted dances. The city’s jazz musicians helped make this world, stylizing and reflecting back to it its own values and ambitions, projecting vital images of Black success in the heart of the segregated South.

During the swing years, especially, musicians set out in their teens and soon returned—sometimes only months later—as heroes, playing the city’s ballrooms and stages and fueling the dreams of countless young hometown admirers. With their fresh tuxedoes, their glistening conks and golden horns, their customized tour buses and cross-country radio broadcasts, their names emblazoned on big-city marquees and roll-called in the pages of the country’s leading Black papers, these Birmingham celebrities were possibility made manifest, the living embodiments of sophistication, success, and style. They were proof that a Black man could overcome in this world after all, proof the horizon was not so unreachable as it seemed. Sun Ra would in time declare himself an emissary from another universe entirely, proclaiming to the inhabitants of this sad planet that there were greater, freer, stranger worlds than we had ever known down here. But Sun Ra only exaggerated and spun into myth what he had seen musicians do, since his youth, on Birmingham’s Fourth Avenue. It was a profound truth he had discovered, early on: that the members of a Black big band were, every one of them, messengers and prophets from other planes of experience.

Sometimes, Sun Ra liked to say, music becomes more than music.³

Certainly, it had always been that way in Birmingham.

The story that follows reveals a long-neglected but vital music community and, through it, explores key forces and phenomena whose influence on the development of jazz, nationwide, are often overlooked or underplayed. Magic City foregrounds the contributions of public educators, society dance orchestras, circus sideshows, musicians’ unions, fraternal lodges, southern Black colleges, and street parades. It presents a musical ethos devoted more to discipline than to freedom, a tradition more of communal than individual expression and identity. It is a story that grows from the deepest South and, like so much of American culture, from there branches outward in every direction.

Like a lot of migration stories, this one comes full circle, returning in the end to the place where it started. For much of the twentieth century, Birmingham musicians rode their music into the cities of the North or hit the open road, living on buses or circling the globe; but if some musicians left the South for good, many others had come back home by the century’s end, settling down, raising families, passing their music on to young players. This book roughly follows that trajectory. Part 1 examines the contexts, personalities, and places that built a distinctive Birmingham heritage; part 2 follows a few of the bearers of that heritage into the larger world, as they navigate—and help define—the wider culture of jazz; part 3 comes home, as a circle of veteran players seeks to preserve and perpetuate a waning tradition, explicitly promoting their city’s music as key to a better Birmingham, one capable of transcending its legacy of racial injustice and division.

Readers should remember that for every Birmingham-bred musician sketched in these pages, dozens more traced their own epic journeys through the dance halls and nightclubs of the country, logging innumerable touring hours and lending their sounds to countless recording and jam sessions. Names that appear here once or twice represent unique legacies of their own; other deserving artists are absent altogether, their stories left for others to tell. A few key players who first appear near the end of this book’s chronology—notably Cleve Eaton and Arthur Doyle—deserve much deeper dives, even books of their own. Rather than log an exhaustive, definitive catalog of Birmingham musicians, I have tried to get at the larger community heritage by sketching the careers of a few essential and illuminating personas, fleshing out the contexts in which they lived and made music.

Special attention is due to the Erskine Hawkins Orchestra, a band full of Birmingham players, including (besides Hawkins himself) brothers Paul and Dud Bascomb, Haywood Henry, Sammy Lowe, and pianist Avery Parrish, creator of the enduring standard After Hours. The Birmingham tradition’s clearest personifications and ultimate ambassadors, these musicians in their collective, decades-spanning journey offer unique insights into the history of jazz. And while the life and music of Sun Ra—originally Herman Poole Sonny Blount—has inspired the detailed attention of scholars and fans, few have reckoned with the ways in which the city of his arrival actively nourished his own musical and philosophical sensibilities, establishing themes he would pursue for the rest of his life. Also overlooked or misunderstood has been the nature of Sun Ra’s ongoing, lifelong relationship with the city.

Other key figures are the drummer Jo Jones, a giant of the genre whose rhythms remade the soul and sizzle of swing; his mentor Wilson Driver, a forgotten pioneer of jazz music’s earliest days; and bandleader and businessman Teddy Hill, who fostered a new breed of talent and—as longtime manager of Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem—set the stage for the bebop revolution. Like so much in the culture of jazz, the tradition begun in Birmingham band rooms was decidedly male, a brotherhood (deliberately and exclusively) shaped by interconnected conventions of gender and class. The story of singer Ethel Harper, however, reveals one woman’s unrelenting drive—amid controversy, compromise, and challenge—to carve out an independent space in a field dominated by men. There are tragedies here, too, and broken potentials, as the life of bebopper Joe Guy makes clear. But the cliché of the tortured, tragic jazz hero finds little room in these pages; the Birmingham story is one more of adventure than adversity.

I was a stranger to this story when, in the summer of 2008, I first set foot in the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, a museum and performing arts center on Birmingham’s historic Fourth Avenue North. The tour guide was Dr. Frank Doc Adams, one of the last surviving elders of the community tradition and a tireless champion of its history. Born in 1928, Adams had played as a teenager in the Birmingham bands of both Fess Whatley and Sun Ra; after attending Howard University and picking up jobs with Duke Ellington and others, he returned to Birmingham, where he served for decades as a beloved and influential music educator and led his own local band. In 1978 he was inducted to the then-new Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, for which he later served as executive director and then as director emeritus of education and community outreach. He was, besides all this, a consummate storyteller—warm, engaging, hilarious, and insightful—and thus a natural tour guide. The day we met, Adams walked me (his morning’s sole visitor) through two floors of exhibits, unspooling an extraordinary history that he illustrated with personal anecdotes and, on his saxophone, elegant instrumental asides.

A year later, Adams and I sat down with a tape recorder in his office at the hall of fame. I had requested an interview, proposing a magazine article but mostly seeking an excuse to soak some more in his company. That meeting led to another the next week, and another the week after that, then another and another, and by the time we finished eighteen months of weekly interviews, our article had become a book, Doc, an oral autobiography drawn from our hundreds of pages of transcripts. Even after the book was published, in 2012, we continued to meet almost as often as before, sometimes with the recorder still running (Doc could always find more to tell), sometimes to plot new projects, from school presentations to radio broadcasts to a series of Sun Ra tribute shows. Though the larger Birmingham jazz story had served as a backdrop to the book Doc and I had created, it became clear that there was much more of that story still demanding to be told. Before his death in 2014 at the age of eighty-six, Doc Adams read and offered his notes on some of the earliest, roughest drafts of this book (it was he who insisted this was an adventure story, above all). In the years since, I have turned frequently to his original voice and vision, his inspiration, insight, and interpretations—and to all those mountains of transcripts and tapes—as I have continued to work my way through this history.

Dr. Frank Doc Adams with his students at the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, 2012. Photo courtesy Jessica Latten.

The rest of the world may not have recognized Birmingham’s significance as one of the birthplaces of jazz, but the musicians themselves knew they belonged to something big, and a few were determined to set the record straight. Magic City is indebted to a few especially dogged preservationists and flame keepers: Frank Adams, my friend and mentor; J. L. Lowe, who developed both the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame and the Birmingham Heritage Band in an effort to honor the community legacy; his brother, Sammy, trumpeter and arranger for the Erskine Hawkins Orchestra, who set down his life in a thick, unpublished manuscript; Tommy Stewart, a former Bama State Collegian and a passionate chronicler of that group’s long history; and Jothan Callins, a son of Tuxedo Junction and cofounder of the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, a trumpeter, bassist, educator, and ethnomusicologist whose 1982 dissertation on Birmingham’s jazz roots helped preserve a faded past.⁴

Through the efforts of these and other witnesses, we can uncover a secret, century-spanning history of jazz, an untold story of how a single, unlikely community changed the shape, soul, and sound of American music.

It begins with the birth of the city.

PART I

1

BEGINNINGS

The city of Birmingham seemed to erupt out of nowhere, an industrial boomtown in the depths of the agrarian South. It began as a monument to what was called the New South, a region refashioned in the wake of civil war to better meet the needs of the future. To the city’s founders, its potential seemed limitless. Jones Valley, where Birmingham was built, was uniquely equipped for the new economy: the region boasted rich deposits of limestone, iron ore, and coal, the three ingredients essential to the making of steel. The arrival in 1870 of two intersecting railroad lines made the spot ripe for development, and a year later, the city incorporated. Migrant laborers, Black and white, arrived to fill the new steel mills and mines. The population swelled. Touting this sudden, remarkable growth, local boosters declared the place the Magic City.¹

Central to all this growth was the influx of African Americans from all over the state. In 1870, Birmingham’s Jefferson County was home to 2,500 Black residents, roughly 20 percent of the total population. By 1900, the number had shot to 56,917, some 40 percent of the county’s inhabitants. Birmingham and the smaller mining and mill communities that grew up around it drew a new class of laborers who exchanged grueling and dangerous work for the lowest possible wages. Years later, Jothan Callins would describe the contributions of Birmingham’s Black workers to the city’s earliest development: They wielded axes, sledge hammers, spades, hoes, shucked and husked, loaded and unloaded ships, rowed boats, dug ditches, lined railroad tracks, picked crops, poured steel, and mined the ore. They raised families and put down roots. In the new century they would build their own businesses, banks, social clubs, churches, and schools.²

They also made music. Out of Birmingham’s Black community emerged a rich tradition of musicianship and, in the century to come, a powerful jazz heritage. In the dance halls and the schools, in stage shows and street parades, Birmingham musicians would help shape the culture of the city. And all over the country, in big bands and nightclubs, over the airwaves and on records, they would help shape the world of jazz.

From the beginning, there was money in Birmingham for hardworking musicians, a living sometimes more substantial than could be eked out of the plants, mills, and mines. The city’s earliest musicians, Black and white, found employment in a nightlife culture well known for its lawlessness. On Second Avenue North, around Fifteenth and Sixteenth Streets, was the Scratch Ankle District, home to gambling houses and boardinghouses, crowded bordellos and raucous saloons. A culture of drink, gambling, dance, and sex thrived in places whose names made a poetry of vice: the Rabbit’s Foot Saloon, the Slide-Off, the Hole in the Wall, the Bucket of Blood, Bear Mash, Dry Branch, Buzzard’s Roost, Pigeon’s Roost, the Big Four, the Gambribrus. Segregation did not yet dictate all arenas of social life in Birmingham; Black and white workers intermingled, after their shifts, in many of the city’s dives. Music was always in demand. A solo player might pound the piano, strum a guitar, saw a fiddle, or pick the banjo. A cappella vocal groups harmonized on pop songs. There were string bands and brass bands and little combos made up of whatever instruments were available: a cornet and a drum, perhaps, or a mandolin, string bass, and rusted trombone. Musicians played a mix of sounds: marching band staples, parlor songs, country dance tunes, and the earliest blues. Popular by the turn of the century were pianists and combos steeped in the new sensation of ragtime, the syncopated dance sound that prefigured the growth of jazz.³

Vaudeville singer and comedian Coot Grant grew up in one of Birmingham’s honky-tonks; her father ran the place, and it left its stamp on her memory. I guess I was kind of smart for my age, she said, because when I was eight years old—that would be 1901—I had already cut a peephole in the wall so I could watch the dancers in the back room. . . . They did everything, Grant said of her father’s customers, recalling the dances of the day: I remember the Slow Drag, of course, that was very popular—hanging on each other and just barely moving. Then they did the Fanny Bump, Buzzard Lope, Fish Tail, Eagle Rock, Itch, Shimmy, Squat, Grind, Mooche, Funky Butt, and a million others. And I watched and imitated all of them. One dancer stood out in Grant’s memory, six decades later: a tall, powerful woman named Sue who worked in the mills pulling coke from a furnace—a man’s job. . . . When Sue arrived at my father’s tonk, people would yell ‘Here come Big Sue! Do the Funky Butt, Baby!’ As soon as she got high and happy, that’s what she’d do, pulling up her skirts and grinding her rear end like an alligator crawling up a bank.⁴

Later generations of Birmingham musicians would hone their crafts in venues more refined—by the 1920s the city’s jazz scene would be shaped by the genteel soirees of the social elite—but in Birmingham’s earliest years, musicians found work where they could. In the late 1880s, the Magic City earned a less congratulatory nickname, Bad Birmingham, and by the turn of the century it could claim a higher murder rate than any American city its size. Local reformers and churches railed against the saloons, where prostitution, crime, and deadly violence flourished. Certainly, the mixing of the races, both socially and sexually, confirmed for many whites the undesirability of the spots. More than once, music was caught up in debates over the city’s reform. At least one group of reformers argued, unsuccessfully, for outlawing music in the saloons. Cutting the social feature from these places, they hoped, would make them less-appealing destinations: simply abolish entertainment, and the drinking and crime would dry up, too. On one occasion, the Anti-Saloon League held a downtown parade in its push for Prohibition. The leaguers hired a ragtime band for the event, but opponents of Prohibition also showed up with a band of their own, and the two groups squared off in the street, each side doing its best to drown out the other.⁵

The papers failed to record which band outplayed which, the temperance group’s or the drinkers’. But the saloons stayed open.

Before the advent of radio or record, music traveled by way of itinerant musicians, mobile performers who picked up songs and styles and scattered them wherever they went. One early wanderer into Birmingham was William Christopher Handy, a native of Florence, Alabama, still in his teens and just beginning a long career in music. His stay in the city was brief, but his activities there resonated for years. The influence ran both ways: W. C. Handy could trace his own interest in the trumpet to a Birmingham player who had passed, a few years before, through Florence, performing with a Baptist choir and inspiring Handy to get his own hands on a horn.⁶

Handy arrived in Birmingham in 1892 with plans of becoming a teacher, but he quickly found he could make more money ($1.85 a day) at a pipe works in the neighboring town of Bessemer. There he started his first brass band, teaching the players to read and play music. After that, a small string orchestra approached him, asking him to serve as both music teacher and leader. The gig was a good one. Folks around Bessemer began calling me Professor, Handy later wrote, and I began to cut a figure in local society. He charmed the girls, singing and accompanying himself on guitar, and he played trumpet for an area church. Everything was fine until the Panic of 1893 slammed local industry: his pay was cut to a daily wage of ninety cents’ credit at the pipe works’ commissary, his schedule reduced to three days a week. He left the pipe works, returned from Bessemer to Birmingham, exhausted his savings, and began to walk the streets aimlessly.⁷

He continued to take aspiring musicians under his wing, training them to read music and organizing them into little ensembles. One night in a saloon he overheard a vocal quartet, introduced himself, and offered to teach the singers some arrangements, working up a mix of popular, sentimental, and comic novelty tunes. He printed business cards for the group and set his sights on something big: the World’s Columbian Exposition, slated to open in Chicago in the fall of 1892. Handy and his latest act left Birmingham with just twenty cents in the treasury, hopping trains and singing for their supper at stops along the way; but when they reached Chicago, their plans unraveled. The Fair, they discovered, had been postponed for a year. They drifted to St. Louis, but a depression was on and work was scarce. The quartet disbanded.⁸

Handy continued to pursue music however he could—in military brass bands and with a traveling minstrel show; as a solo performer, music instructor, bandleader, and composer. In time he would become the first publisher of original blues compositions, the creator of The Memphis Blues, St. Louis Blues, and other standards of American popular music. Eventually he would be touted as a full-fledged musical celebrity, an icon of Black professional success, and the avuncular, near-saintly Father of the Blues.

Back in Birmingham, it was one of Handy’s protégés, a multi-instrumentalist named Ivory Williams, who would pick up where Handy left off, fostering the birth and development of a thriving music scene. Unlike Handy, Williams would not become a star, but his quieter legacy was nonetheless profound. In jazz, nicknames carry a special weight of authority, and Pops Williams, grandfather to a unique tradition, could not have been better named.

Ivory Pops Williams, grandfather of the Birmingham jazz community, pictured late in life, at home with his violin and his dogs. Courtesy the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame.

Jothan Callins called him the primary perpetuator for the development of jazz in Birmingham, a one-man vanguard for training and developing young musicians. Pops Williams laid the groundwork for everything that followed. He initiated a system of musical apprenticeship, mentoring younger musicians and helping establish formal music instruction in the schools; he oversaw the rise in jazz professionalism in Birmingham, setting standards not only of musicianship but of punctuality, dress, and union membership. He helped build an active network of musicians, one that connected local players to one another and to musicians across the country. Through his wide-ranging travel and his far-flung connections, Williams served as vital link between Birmingham and the rest of the world.⁹

He lived into his second century and in the last decades of his life was revered by many, especially musicians, for his depth of experience and insight. He was a living history, his friend Frank Adams said, "because he was there." For Birmingham musicians reared in the swing years or later, Pops was a link to earlier eras, to the days before jazz was born. He toured with circus bands and medicine shows and played Mississippi steamboats and vaudeville tents. In the 1910s and 1920s, he provided violin accompaniment for the silent movies; like a lot of musicians in those days, he lost his job when sound came in, and he took the loss personally, the new technology a betrayal. Though he lived into the 1980s, he refused all his life to go back to the movies.¹⁰

Pops’s specialty was the stringed instruments—he played violin, upright bass, tenor banjo, mandolin, and cello—but he was proficient also on trumpet, trombone, piano, and drums. He played classical music, marches, ragtime, blues, and jazz, and he insisted younger players develop an appreciation not only for brass bands and hot music but also for symphonic music and string arrangements. He learned to read music early on and would always be a stickler for the printed score. He was, besides musician, an odd-job man, undertaker, house-painter, and barber—and, Frank Adams recalled, sort of a bootleg doctor, concocting and prescribing herbal and home remedies for any number of ailments. He had a quick sense of humor, smiled all the time, and called everybody Hon, male and female alike.

Williams continued making music into his nineties, when finally he hung up his last violin, his hands too unsteady to play. Still, he remained a cherished presence in the community he had helped create. In 1985, director Sandy Jaffe produced a documentary film about the local jazz tradition, Jazz in the Magic City, and in it Pops can be seen, ancient but spry, reminiscing over a century of music. As the film ends, a friend, the music teacher George Hudson, leans over Williams’s shoulder and shouts into an ear all but deaf, How old are you, Pops?

One hundred, the old man answers. He stretches out his index finger and crooks it into a wriggling hook. Reaching for another. He speaks in short sentence bursts and cracks a sly grin. Think I’ll make it?¹¹

He made it to May of 1987—just a few months shy of his one hundred and second birthday.

Williams was born around 1885, outside of Tuscaloosa, Alabama.¹² His parents meant for him to be a preacher and sent him to a seminary to study—but, he later said, I liked the music better than I did the preaching. His father had had some early training in music but gave it up when he joined the church; a brother briefly fooled with their father’s old trumpet, but his interest faded, too, and the instrument found its way to Ivory’s more receptive hands.¹³

He spent his childhood between Tuscaloosa County and his grandmother’s home in the new city of Birmingham. Details on Williams’s family history are scarce, but he cited Native American blood in his veins and proudly remembered his grandmother as a woman of real social standing: she had been a free Negro in the days before emancipation, had bought her own property and owned her own home. Birmingham itself was only eight years Ivory’s senior, and the city and the boy would grow up together.

Barely a teenager, Williams played bass fiddle in a quartet of musicians his age; soon they were joined on cornet by W. C. Handy, who gave them some musical training, helping expand their repertoire and polish their sound. After Handy left Birmingham, he and Williams stayed in touch for decades. Once Handy settled in Memphis, he brought Williams up from time to time to play in his bands—most notably to perform on the luxury steamboats that cruised up and down the Mississippi from Memphis to New Orleans. Through Handy, Williams met Bessie Smith, whom he also considered a friend.¹⁴

In Birmingham, Williams made music for all sorts of occasions. He learned to play some ragtime piano; he formed a duo with a drummer, George Earl; he led his own combo. On some weekends he might pick up as many as four or five house parties, and the gigs provided steady income. Anything more than two or three dollars, he said, was considered good; a high-paying engagement might bring in as much as ten. City parks offered additional work, and during the holidays—on the Fourth of July and through the Christmas season, especially—the parks brimmed with festivity. During these times, Williams recalled, people in the community would donate a hog, goat, or calf to be barbecued. Everyone was invited, Black and white alike, to eat, drink, and have a good time. It was not until the close of the nineteenth century that legal segregation, in Birmingham and across the South, began officially to restrict the mingling of the races. The city’s first park opened in 1874 and others quickly followed, all of them providing recreation for anyone who wanted it. Two decades passed before the city, in an effort to keep the most popular neighborhoods exclusively white, began to designate separate Negro parks, all of them positioned outside the city limits. Under the new social order, green spaces like the Colored Attraction Park (nicknamed Traction Park) would develop into crucial sites for Black recreation, music making, and community building.¹⁵

It was not just the parks: segregation would soon pervade all aspects of life. In 1896, Plessy