Buddy Bolden
JAZZ 101
buddy bolden’s blues legacy
they said i’m crazy
but they still play my crazy
blue black shit today
we came from farm land, cane field and cotton country, outta rice paddies and satsuma groves, following the river both down and up to the city to try to set up home where a newly emancipated man could live at least halfway free and a woman didn’t have to be some man’s mule just to raise her family.
we brought with us the profound sense of betrayal as the retreat of federal troops was masked by the hoods of nightriders, fellows whose daylight faces we all knew. the hard hoofs of horses announcing the flaming torches flung through the paneless windows of our one-room rural homes. the no work for smart negroes and very low pay if you were dumb enough to accept what little was offered.
we had fought the civil war. we had survived the bewilderment of emancipation and now when we should be free we woke in the mornings and found ourselves harvesting strange fruit. we were the blacks with the blues. the unlettered ex-slaves whose agrarian skills offered no protection in the hinterlands and no employment in the cities. but caught between the busted rock of reconstruction’s repeal and the hard space of being put back into a semi-slavery place, we had no choice but to move on down the line. thus we came to the crescent seeking at least a shot.
everywhere we touched down we created settlements. st. rose, luling, boutte, kenner—the first mayor was a negro. carrollton—we built parks and celebrated with sunday picnics, and on into uptown new orleans creating all those neighborhoods: black pearl (aka “niggertown”), hollygrove, zion city, gerttown and what we now know as central city.
no matter how hard big easy bore down on us, urban exploitation was still a bunch better than constantly falling behind on the ledger at the general store, owing more and more every year, barely enough to get by. in the summertime chewing sugar cane for supper and maybe catching a catfish for sunday dinner. in the winter time making turtle soup to last the week if you could catch a turtle and always beans and beans, and more beans. somehow, even though we still had beans and beans and more beans and rice, it just seemed that red beans and rice was nice, nicer in new orleans than it ever was in the country and besides there was plenty fishing in new orleans too, in the canals, in the river, in the lake, in the bayou, in fact, more fishing here than in the country. so although the city never really rolled out a welcome mat, our people nevertheless still managed to make ourselves at home.
we found some work on the streets and in the quarter, but mostly made work cooking, carrying and constructing shit. some of us groomed horses, a healthy portion of us worked the docks. we eked out a living, gradually doing better and better. and it was us country-born, farm-come-to-city black folk who indelibly changed the sound of new orleans, who brought the blues a blowing: loud, hard, and without pretense, subtlety or any genuflecting to high society, these blues that were just happy to have a good time and were equally unashamed to show the tears of pain those country years contained, how the hard times hurted we simple, unassuming people who both prayed and cursed as hard as we worked, we who were not afraid of a good fight and never hesitant about enjoying a good time each and every opportunity we got to grab a feather or two out of the tail of that ever-elusive bird of paradise.
we were the fabled blues people who brought to the music a vision no one else was low enough to the ground to see. and no one should romanticize us. we were hungry, we were illiterate, disease-ridden, and totally unprepared for urban life, moreover often we were live-for-today-damn-tomorrow merciless in the matter-of-fact way we accepted and played the dirty, limited hands that life dealt us.
ours was a brutal beauty. a social order where no child remained innocent past the age of four. where the sweet bird of youth had flown, long gone well before twenty-five arrived. where somebody calling your mama a whore was just an accurate description of one of the major lines of work. where your daddy could have been any one of five men you saw for a couple of days through a keyhole when you were supposed to be sleep, but were up trying to peep what it was that grown folks did that kids were not supposed to do.
our people brought an unsophisticated, raw sound that cut through all pretensions and gutsily stripped time down to the naked function at the junction of hard-working folks careening into saturday nite let’s get it on. and of course by any standard of social decorum, we were uncouth and so was our blues, but it was this blues produced by we blues people that turned-out the music floating around new orleans, tricked it into something the world would soon (or eventually) celebrate first as jass (with two “s’s” as in “show your ass”) and then as jazz (with two “z’s” as in “razzle, dazzle” keep up with us if you can).
it was our don’t give a shuck about which way is up as long as we have a moment to get down.
our red is my favorite color morning, noon and night.
our play it loud motherfuckers let me know you deep up in there.
our this ain’t no job and you ain’t no boss so you can’t tell me shit about when to start, when to stop, or how nasty i get.
our if i drop dead in the morning ‘cause i done partied all nite then just go ahead and dance at my funeral pretty baby.
our i’d rather play it wrong my way than right the white way cause they way may be correct but it sure ain’t right.
it was this attitude, these blues, which turned new orleans music into something worth spreading all over the world. and it was we who were the roux in the nouveau gumbo now celebrated as crescent city culture.
it was our crude but oh so potent elixir that raised the ante on the making of music, it was our brazen red-hot, blue sound and the way the first creators acted when they screwed up their lips to produce the untutored slightly tortured host of notes which made the cascade of ragtime rhythms sound tame. we simple but complex characters who have been consistently overlooked, undervalued, and our social background scarcely mentioned in all the books (where do they think we uptown blacks came from and what do they think we brought with us?); we who were persecuted by the authorities worse than negroes singing john brown’s body lies a smoldering in the grave at intermission during a klan rally; it was us black heartbeats and our defiant music that made the difference.
and, yes, we had to be more than a little crazy to challenge the aural status quo the way we did, so, it is no surprise that buddy bolden, the preeminent horn player cut from this cloth, was an insane black man whose ascendency to the throne just made it easier for the odorous forces of the “status crow” (as caribbean scholar/poet kamau braithwaite calls it) to pluck bolden from the top of the heap and heave him into a mental institution and keep him there for almost thirty years, wasting away until he died.
they may have silenced our first king but they could never silence our sound. and regardless of what anyone says or does, nearly a hundred years later, no matter whether they admit it or not, know it or not, like it or not, it is the bold sound of black buddy conjuring some raw, funky blues in the night, layering his tone on whatever was a given song’s ultimate source. this neo-african gris-gris is the sonic tattoo marking the beginning and making up the essence of the music we now call jazz.
—kalamu ya salaam