Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [13]
The place where this emerging musical form thrived was Storyville, the tenderloin district, where in 1902 alongside its two hundred brothels and eight hundred saloons were eighty-five jazz clubs. “Lights of all colors were glittering and glaring, music was pouring into the streets from every house,” remembered the pianist Jelly Roll Morton. As a mixed-race Creole, he played in brothels in downtown Storyville, stone-built mansions in which white whores wore fine gowns and diamonds in mirror-lined rooms and might make $100 a night. Uptown, where Armstrong played, was the black area, poorer and rougher but full of life, where the girls charged fifty cents. Apart from the prostitutes and their madams, Storyville was populated by men—pimps, crooked policemen, punters and musicians.
Alcohol flowed but if someone wanted cocaine or opium, Chinatown or a lax drugstore was never more than a few blocks away. In 1914 the United States Government banned the non-medical use of cocaine and opiates, and criminalized hard-drug users, but cocaine, heroin and morphine were still relatively easily obtainable, either by prescription or from illegal importers.
Storyville brought musicians like Armstrong and Morton money, respect and autonomy that they could have earned in no other way. When the district was closed down by the police in 1917, as Jelly Roll observed, the madams could find new premises but the jazzmen were forced on to the streets. Most headed for Chicago, where by the mid-1920s there were over ten thousand nightclubs and bars playing music. New York, with its five hundred dance-halls and eight hundred cabarets, many in Harlem, was another target for aspiring black musicians. Armstrong first left New Orleans in 1919, to play his trumpet on showboats on the Mississippi, returned home in 1921 and left again, this time for good, in 1922. In New Orleans as a boy he had run errands for bandleader Joe “King” Oliver’s wife; now Oliver gave him his first place on a Chicago stage.
The quality of the music staggered Armstrong, who had believed New Orleans was the capital of jazz: the musicians around him in Chicago were so inspiring, “I was scared to go eat because I might miss one of those good notes.” Success came quickly. In 1923 and 1924 Armstrong spent some time in New York, playing in Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra and making his recording debut.
Bessie Smith, “the Empress of the Blues,” also made her first record in 1923. “Downhearted Blues” sold 780,000 copies in six months. “She looked like anything but a singer…tall and fat and scared to death,” said Frank Walker, who supervised her first session at Columbia Records. But as soon as he heard her hypnotic voice, utterly original and self-assured, his doubts about her appearance vanished. “I had never heard anything like the torture and torment she put into the music of her people. It was the blues, and she meant it.”
Smith came from Chattanooga, Tennessee, and at seventeen had begun touring with Fats Chapelle’s Rabbit Foot Minstrels, where the great blues singer Ma Rainey took her under her wing. Together they barnstormed through the gin mills, brothels and honky-tonks of the Deep South. By the time she was twenty-four, Bessie had earned her first solo spot in a revue called Liberty Belles.
Her star quality was unmistakable. “She was the blues from the time she got up in the morning until she went to bed at night.” But it was typical of Smith that she didn’t think of her songs or performances as an art form: they were just something she did. When the poet Langston Hughes, meeting Bessie after a show in Baltimore in the mid-1920s, asked her about the artistry of her music, she replied