Creole Trombone: Kid Ory and the Early Years of Jazz

CREOLE TROMBONE

AMERICAN MADE MUSIC SERIES

Advisory Board

David Evans, General Editor

Barry Jean Ancelet

Edward A. Berlin

Joyce J. Bolden

Rob Bowman

Susan C. Cook

Curtis Ellison

William Ferris

John Edward Hasse

Kip Lornell

Bill Malone

Eddie S. Meadows

Manuel H. Peña

Wayne D. Shirley

Robert Walser

CREOLE TROMBONE

Kid Ory and the Early Years of Jazz

John McCusker

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Material from Slide Man, Kid Ory’s Autobiography versions, copyright by Elan/Daniel Kegan; used by his permission.

Ory musical compositions copyright by Elan/Saniel Kegan; used by his permission.

Copyright © 2012 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2012

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McCusker, John (John P.), 1963–

Creole trombone : Kid Ory and the early years of jazz / John McCusker.

p. cm. — (American made music series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61703-626-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

— ISBN 978-1-61703-627-9 (ebook)

1. Ory, Kid, 1886–1973. 2. Jazz musicians—Biography.

3. Trombonists—Biography. I. Title.

ML419.O77M33 2012

781.65092—dc23

                                                [B]                                                2012005303

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

To Johanna M. Schindler (1956–2010)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Who Was Kid Ory?

CHAPTER 1.

1886–1896: Le Monde Creole en Campagne

CHAPTER 2.

ca. 1897–1900: Music

CHAPTER 3.

1900–1904: Orphan

CHAPTER 4.

1905–1907: Walking with the King

CHAPTER 5.

1908–1910: Kid

CHAPTER 6.

1910–1916: New Orleans

CHAPTER 7.

1917–1919: Creole Jazz

CHAPTER 8.

1919–1925: California

CHAPTER 9.

1925–1933: Chicago Sideman

CHAPTER 10.

1933–1973: Epilogue

APPENDIX I

Autobiography

APPENDIX II

Autobiography

APPENDIX III

Selected Discography

APPENDIX IV

Lost Compositions

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the result of inspiration and support from a variety of sources over a fifteen-year period.

Foremost is the support of my family. Ian, Katie, and Ellen McCusker, 22, 17, 15, have endured seemingly endless treks through graveyards, archives, and libraries while I dogged the Ory story. Their mother and my wife and soulmate of twenty-five years, Johanna M. Schindler, looked after them while I jetted off to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Honolulu seeking to unearth new pieces to the Ory puzzle. She shared in my enthusiasm and cheered on my latest discoveries. She knew I had doubts about my abilities as a writer. It was her tireless encouragement that saw me through my phobias. I could not have written this book without her bottomless well of love, friendship, and understanding. We lost Johanna unexpectedly in 2010 and our lives are forever diminished. This book is dedicated to her life and memory.

The original inspiration for the project came from Dr. Bruce Boyd Raeburn of the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University. In 1995 Dr. Raeburn told me that a comprehensive book on Kid Ory was in order and that I might be the person to do it. He has been a reliable sounding board for my research and has provided me with reams of information to support my efforts. Another inspirational figure has been Lynn Abbott, also of the Hogan Jazz Archive, who suggested parallel research to use in buttressing my arguments and who took me to task on ready conclusions. I think the world of both these men and am honored to consider them my mentors.

The late Tad Jones was, at the time of his death, researching an in-depth biography of Louis Armstrong’s life in New Orleans. It was Tad who discovered Louis’s real birthday. Since we both researched some of the same material, he from Louis’s point of view, I from Ory’s, he was a valuable sounding board for my research and theories. He was a good friend too and I miss him very much.

Others who offered support and inspiration along the way include Joseph H. McCusker III, Ruth McCusker, Alma Freeman Williams, Sybil Morial, Marc Morial, Jacques Morial, Lorraine Dedeaux and the descendants of Annie Ory, Harold Ory, Rudolph Dinvaut, Joy Lodrigues, Randy DeSoto, Sybil Ory Levet, Danny Barker, Dr. Jack Stewart, Steven A. Werkow, Hal Smith, Sue Fischer, Lolis Eric Elie, Christer Fellows, Sid Bailey, Daniel C. Meyer, Trevor Herbert, Gene Anderson, Dr. Larry Gushee, Alexandra Johnson, Natalie Pompilio, Albert Pud Brown, Floyd Levin, Donald M. Marquis, Peter Gerler, Louise G. Bill, Percy Humphrey, Dr. Richard B. Allen, Renee Lapeyrolerie, Bill Carter, George Probert, Paul Harris, T. Brian Wood, Bill and Chris Stotesbury, George Avakian, Stephan Sargent, Robert Parker, Will Allen, Tom Saunders, Sue Hall, Nina Buck, Julie Ahrend, Barry Martyn, Wendi Schneider, Bridget O’Brian, Susan Feeney, Nan Powers Varoga, Craig Gill, the Ken Colyer Trust, the Swedish Bunk Johnson Society, the Kid Ory Society, the DART Society, and the staff of the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

This book almost became a victim of Hurricane Katrina. When the Federal levees failed on August 29, 2005, our home filled with eight feet of water, destroying everything we owned. Emotionally wrecked by losing my home and possessions, and haunted by the pictures I made for the Times-Picayune during the first horrible week after the storm, the farthest thing from my mind was writing a biography of Kid Ory.

Thankfully for this project, I had boxed a decade’s worth of research notes and most of my Ory collection, including his trumpet and clarinet, and squirreled them away in the photo studio at the Times-Picayune before the storm made landfall. When we abandoned the building on the day after Katrina, I was not sure if this book would ever be written. Thankfully, in October 2005 when the building reopened, the boxes were found safely where I had left them.

Eventually, writing became a sort of therapy for me, a way to assert my fragile sanity against the weight of living in post-Katrina New Orleans. I turned to it again after Johanna died as a way of maintaining some continuity in the face of an uncertain future.

So hopefully you hold not only a biography of a great jazzman, but also a testament to my recovery.

CREOLE TROMBONE

INTRODUCTION

WHO WAS KID ORY?

In 1994 I led a history tour of jazz sites in New Orleans. Trombonist and educator Dave Ruffner, a member of the tour group from California, thought I gave Kid Ory the short shrift. He said Ory was more than just a sideman on the records of Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, and Jelly Roll Morton. He believed Ory to be bridge between the earliest jazz pioneers, like Buddy Bolden, whom Ory knew, and the ultimate jazzman Louis Armstrong, who got his start in Ory’s New Orleans band. Further, said Ruffner, recent scholarship on Ory suggested his reported December 25, 1886, birthday was suspect. Peeved, I went to Dr. Bruce Boyd Raeburn at the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University. To my surprise he sided with Ruffner and said that Ory was indeed a major, if overlooked, figure in jazz history. And there was indeed a controversy of sorts about his birthday. In his 1989 article Johnny Dodds in New Orleans, Gene Anderson of the University of Richmond makes a convincing argument that Ory was actually born in 1889. Anderson’s article was the first real scholarship on the Ory band even though the essay was not specifically about him. Raeburn said the ground was ripe for an Ory biography.

Taking this as a challenge, I sought out Ory’s baptismal certificate in his hometown of LaPlace, Louisiana. Having worked there as a photojournalist for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, I was well acquainted with the area and knew which church Ory would have attended. I found the baptismal certificate confirming his Christmas 1886 birthday and was hooked.

Since 1995 I have researched Ory’s life and those of the people around him. In 1999 I presented some of my findings to Ory’s daughter, Babette, who in turn entrusted me with Ory’s unpublished autobiography.

The autobiography is far from a cohesive document. It is composed mostly of loose pages recalling a memorable story or event. The documents indicate the autobiography was dictated beginning in 1950 by Ory to Barbara GaNung, who was then his mistress. GaNung would later become Ory’s second wife and Babette’s mother. This dictated material produced what I call Version I of the autobiography. Unfortunately, the document is in Gregg shorthand and I have been unable to find anyone to transcribe it. Version I was translated by GaNung to prose on the typewriter, resulting in what I call Version II. GaNung eventually rewrote some of these stories along with other material to produce Version III, which is an attempt at a cohesive narrative.

The problem with Version III is that its events could not have happened in the order GaNung presents. In the end the stories are real, but the narrative timeline is artificial. Once I realized this, I was freed from the confusion the document had created for other Ory enthusiasts lucky enough to read it, including the late Floyd Levin. Working in New Orleans and St. John the Baptist Parish, I was able to find vital statistical, sacramental, and public records to place Ory’s stories in a reliable timeline. For example, I was able to date a story about Ory building a house for his sister once I found a notation in the 1903 St. John the Baptist Parish property tax records.

Babette has been a source of unbridled enthusiasm for the project. Despite many trying times, she has kept her father’s collection together. Once I met Babette I had materials at my disposal that included everything from a picture of Ory’s father to the saxophone on which he composed Muskrat Ramble. Holding Ory’s instruments and going through his music library, most of which was written out by Arthur Bud Scott, was climactic. It also encouraged me to dig deeper. Researching Ory’s early life, particularly his genealogy, was uncharted territory.

A disclosure: I am neither a musicologist nor a trained historian. I have worked as a journalist in New Orleans for twenty-five years, and I went after the Kid Ory story the way I would any other. I looked at what he said and what others said about him. What I found was the story of a pioneering New Orleans musician bearing witness to the dawn of jazz.

The record finds Ory to be an oracle of those days. Yet, his story is one that has not been explored in a cohesive way like those of Louis Armstrong and Buddy Bolden. So much has been written about Armstrong that his tale has become the stuff of celebrity. Bolden’s story is near mythic. Ory is neither celebrity nor myth. He was a flesh-and-blood jazzman who, fortune would have it, was widely interviewed. Further, his autobiography contains many stories not found in interviews. These serve as Ory’s primary voice in this telling of his story. Whenever possible, I try to get out of the way and let him speak.

The purpose of this book is to tell the story of a jazz musician arriving on the scene at the same time as the music itself. The man and the music came up together, reached maturity together and, ultimately, faded from the scene together. The tale covers the years between 1900 and 1933 and that is what the majority of this book is about. Ory’s remembrances carry the story only to this point, and it would have been difficult to fill the remaining years without his voice. Further, while the tale of his career revival in the forties is interesting and covered to some degree, it is far less so than the earlier period and frankly less relevant to the historical question: Who was Kid Ory?

CHAPTER 1

1886–1896

LE MONDE CREOLE EN CAMPAGNE

The Woodland Plantation was a sprawling 1,882-acre sugar cane farm twenty-five miles upriver from New Orleans in a tiny St. John the Baptist Parish hamlet called LaPlace. Its main house—a raised, elongated cottage with a modest tin roof, cistern, and two stained-glass dormer windows—was built in 1839. About two dozen buildings, many of which had been slave quarters, ran along a dirt road behind the main house.¹ It was there on a cold Christmas morning in 1886 that Edward Kid Ory was born. Ory’s family lived about a half mile behind the main house across the cane fields, next to the massive multi-story sugar mill where his father worked.

At least two sets of railroad tracks ran through the plantation between the main house and the mill. One ran to other places like New Orleans and Baton Rouge. The other, a spur line, curved through the fields back to the sugar mill. The overland route was the River Road, an often-murky thoroughfare that followed the Mississippi downriver southeast to New Orleans and upriver northwest to Baton Rouge. Most folks called it simply the road.

In the nineteenth century most of the population of St. John Parish lived close to the river on the plantations and farms daisy-chained along its banks. An earthen levee hemmed the waters in, providing some small protection from the spring floods that were responsible for the rich soil that made farming possible. The fields fanned out like thinly cut pie slices originating at the water’s edge: large wedge to the river, thin to the swamp.

The Woodland was part of the village of LaPlace, which was little more than a few homesteads, some rental property, and a store. Further upriver was Reserve, which had more of a town feel, including stores, social clubs, and the only Catholic church for miles, St. Peter’s. The church was about five miles from the Woodland sugar house, so the Ory family would have needed transportation to get there. They would have traveled down the red dirt road that crossed the railroad tracks until they arrived at the River Road. From there they would have headed upriver, winding and turning with the river until reaching the simple wooden church. Built in 1867, it sat some distance off the road, allowing parking space for dozens of buggies. Out back, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, was the cemetery that took over as the burial location for east bank Catholics who previously would have been buried across the river in Edgard at the St. John the Baptist Church.

Father Etienne Badoil was the Ory family’s priest from the founding of St. Peter’s until his death in 1905. He baptized most of the Ory kids. He was out in the community and could often be found playing euchre, a card game, at the Planters and Merchants Social Club hall down the road from St. Peter’s.² Other than the Latin he spoke during mass, he always conversed in French, as did most of his parishioners.

Across the river from Reserve is Edgard, comprised largely of the parish courthouse, St. John the Baptist Church, the Caire Store, and a few other businesses. Apart from a couple of villages up and downriver, the rest of the parish was sugarcane fields and swamp.

The majority of the population of St. John the Baptist Parish was of African ancestry, though one would never get this impression from the names on the 1860 census. A puny document compared to its postwar counterparts, the census lists white planters and a few free blacks. The 1870 count, the first after the Civil War and Emancipation, would present a very different view. The nameless masses that had been noted merely as numbers on the 1860 slave census had become a political majority.³ With the support of occupying federal forces, which arrived in 1862 with the fall of New Orleans, and the disenfranchisement of white voters, St. John voters elected black officials. Even after the troops withdrew in 1877, black politicians like Sheriff John Webre held on to power. For the better part of a generation former slaves enjoyed, if not a radically changed life, the promise of one and the assurance that the American democracy might at last embrace them as full citizens.

But, for the most part, the everyday lives of people of color were largely unchanged from the days of slavery. White men still held the property of the parish and black laborers did most of the back-breaking work. Many still lived on plantations in much the same manner as before. On the 1880 census, long lists of black families—who are generally noted as tenant farmers and laborers—often follow the names of major landowners.

The agricultural economy based on slavery was gone, and some wondered if crops could be produced at a profit in the South without a free labor source. Many large landowners whose money was tied up in slaves prior to the war lost a big chunk of their capital with Emancipation. They had land, little money, and loans outstanding. As late as 1869, few fields in the parish had crops in the ground apart from what was needed to eat.⁴ Through foreclosures and auctions many small farmers, who owned few or no slaves before the war, took over former plantation lands. Other owners tried to hang on to their land by letting it out to sharecropping.

Sugarcane had been the number one cash crop in antebellum St. John, and planting slowly increased after the war. By the time Ory arrived, production levels were outstripping those of the prewar period, though the method of growing and harvesting had changed very little.

Late summer and early fall marked the busiest time in the parish. It was called grinding season, a reference to the process that yielded molasses, cane syrup, and sugar from the freshly cut stalks. The process began out in the fields, where laborers grasped the cane by the stalk with the left hand while swinging a machete, sharply and precisely, with the right. The field hands expended just enough effort to cut the cane cleanly, no more. Inexperienced hands learned quickly how to conserve their energy for those long summer days under the searing Louisiana sun. The cane was then loaded onto trailers that traveled along the cane rows and hauled to the sugar mill. There the sticky sweet juice was ground from the cane stalks and cooked until it crystallized. The process gives off a sweet (to some, sickly) aroma that can be smelled a mile away. The leftover stalks, reduced to a stinky pulp called baggasse, were piled up in mounds around the sugarhouse.

People living nearby would have smelled little else. For the Orys, who lived in the middle of a cane field across the dirt road from this industrial operation, the odors were accompanied by a cacophony. The roar of boiling caldrons of crystallizing cane juice, the hammering shut of barrels, and the clang and boom of uncoupling railroad cars would have filled Ory’s ears with a din not usually associated with such a rural setting.

His father, Ozeme Ory (1850–1901), was known to his friends as John. He was white, a child of the plantation and once slave-owning Ory family of St. John the Baptist Parish. In 1850, Ozeme and his extended family lived in a tiny village called Terre Haute on the east bank of the Mississippi River near Reserve. The family had been there for several generations.⁵

The patriarch of the family was Nikolas Ory (1705–ca. 1775) who came to America from the Alsace-Lorraine region of France in 1736. Nikolas settled in Berwick Township, York County, Pennsylvania, until around 1750, when he moved to Frederick County, Maryland, with his wife Anna Strasbach and their children. Anna died there in the 1750s, and Nikolas later married Christine Michel, a native of German-held Lorraine born in 1728. Nikolas and Christine had several more children.⁶

The Orys’ decision to move to Louisiana was rooted in the migration of the Acadians from British-controlled Canadian territories in the aftermath of 1763 Treaty of Paris, which ended the French and Indian War. After France ceded Canada and Nova Scotia to Britain, the French Catholic Acadians were forced out, and many came to French-speaking, Spanish-controlled Louisiana. There they were welcomed by Spanish authorities, such as Governor Antonio de Ulloa, who liked the idea of having colonists with anti-English sentiments. Other Acadian communities in exile, including the one in Frederick County, Maryland, heard favorable reports from their countrymen in Louisiana and soon joined their people there. The Orys and other German Catholics threw in their lot with the Acadians and relocated to Louisiana as well.⁷ They set sail in January 1769 aboard the schooner Britannia with 100 passengers, including 56 Germans, 32 Acadians, and 12 British sailors. Sailing in a heavy fog, the ship missed the mouth of the Mississippi River and went on to Galveston, arriving in February 1769. There, a perplexed Spanish Authority, apparently unaware of Governor Ulloa’s feeling on the matter, held them in detention. They had trouble understanding why a group of Germans would relocate to Louisiana. That they were traveling on a British ship whose passenger roster included a group of soldiers contributed to Spanish suspicions that they were spies. Their property was seized and they were detained until September, when they at last received permission to head to Louisiana, where they eventually settled in an established German Catholic colony. St. John and part of St. Charles Parish became known as the German Coast.

As early as 1724, there were 330 Germans farming upriver from New Orleans. In the generations between Nikolas Ory and Edward Kid Ory, the German language gave way to French. German surnames such as Heidel, Zehringer, and Traeger became Haydel, Zeringue, and Tregre. French-speaking census takers and bureaucrats who wrote down subjective spellings of German names on population rolls helped eradicate the German language, and over time the settlers married into French families, becoming Creoles like the French around them. In many cases, the German language disappeared in a generation.⁸

By the early fall of 1850, when Ozeme was born, the Orys were a prominent and successful family. Ozeme’s parents, Edmond Ory (1811–1853) and Marie Irene Tregre (c. 1816–1853), were first cousins who had grown up as neighbors in Terre Haute. They married around 1834 and had the first of their seven children in 1835. Edmond was a planter in partnership with his older brother, Omer. The pair bought property together, grew sugarcane, and thrived. Edmond and his family lived with his wife’s grandmother, Margarethe Vicknair Ory, and mother Marie Ory Tregre. Ozeme, the youngest of seven children, would never get to know his parents. They died when he was three.⁹ Their deaths coincided with a devastating yellow fever epidemic that killed about seven thousand people in New Orleans. The fever eventually spread to the outlying areas and proved just as deadly there, wiping out entire families.

The Orys’ movable property, including a steam engine and a sugar mill, was liquidated and the children were divided among Edmond’s siblings and friends. Each was to receive several thousand dollars in inheritance, a sum that grew when Ozeme’s great-grandmother Margarethe Vicknair Ory died in 1856. Responding to a petition from Omer Ory, the court made Evariste Triche, a neighbor, the guardian of three-year-old Ozeme. Triche owned a plantation, which included nearly two hundred acres and twenty slaves and had children about Ozeme’s age. The Triches lived in Terre Haute no later than 1870, when they appear on the parish property tax records downriver near LaPlace.¹⁰

Apart from a few items in the 1860s, little is certain about Ozeme’s childhood. All of his siblings owned property at one time or another; he did not. He is not on the 1860 census (though the Triches are), and he did not fight in the Civil War (though his brother Edmond did). In summer 1867 Ozeme stood as godfather for the baptism of brother Edmond Ory’s daughter Marie. A year and a half later, Edmond became Ozeme’s new guardian though Ozeme continued living with the Triches.¹¹

According to the 1870 census, twenty-year-old Ozeme was a journeyman. Benjamin Triche was also listed as a journeyman. The man listed