10 LONG-PLAYING MYTHS VERSUS THE FACTS

Napoleon declared that history is a fable agreed upon. Henry Ford said history is bunk. The world of jazz, no more or less than other areas in the documentation of the arts, has been subjected to certain persistent myths, agreed upon in some instances or argued about in others. In any event, it seems appropriate to deal with several of the more widely circulated misapprehensions, some of them due to critical errors, others corrected by the critics but still misunderstood by the public.

Myth 1: Louis Armstrong enjoyed one of the greatest triumphs of his career when he toured the Soviet Union.

Fact: This could well have happened--but it never did. There were negotiations at one time to send Satchmo on a State Department tour that would have included the U.S.S.R., but the deal fell through, possibly, it is speculated, because he might have been too successful, causing riots and inspiring pro-American sentiment. The first Soviet tour in modern times was led by Benny Goodman; later Earl Hines, Duke Ellington, Thad Jones/Mel Lewis and a few others toured there successfully.

Myth 2: Charlie Christian was the first electric guitarist on record.

Fact: He was certainly the best known and has been called the founding father, but Eddie Durham, a trombonist in the Jimmie Lunceford and Count Basie bands, doubled on electric guitar and led a small Basie contingent in two record sessions on which he played several electric guitar solos, in March and September of 1938. Christian did not record until October, 1939, on a Benny Goodman sextet date.

Nor was Durham the first. According to Cary Ginell, a country music expert, fiddle bands in Texas and Louisiana were the first to employ amplified instruments. “The first was Bob Dunn,” says Ginell. “He attached a crude pickup to his steel guitar at a January, 1935, recording session with Milton Brown and His Brownies for Decca. In September, 1935, Jim Boyd of Roy Newman’s band amplified his guitar on ‘Hot Dog Stomp,’ the first real recorded example of a real amplified guitar. Other steel guitarists such as Leon McAuliffe, Carl Rainwater and Lefty Perkins all made records using amplified instruments before Eddie Durham.

“Les Paul acknowledged that the first amplified guitar he heard on record was by the Light Crust Doughboys guitarist Zeke Campbell. Please allow the country musicians their place in history.”

Myth 3: Lionel Hampton was the first recorded jazz vibraphonist.

Fact: We all owe a tremendous debt to Lionel Hampton for bringing the instrument to the forefront. He played it on Louis Armstrong’s record of “Memories of You” in October, 1930. Bob Conselman, another drummer who doubled, played vibes briefly on a Benny Goodman trio record called “Jazz Holiday” in January, 1928. Don Redman, the multi-instrumentalist, played vibes on a date with McKinney’s Cotton Pickers in November, 1928.

Myth 4: Benny Goodman was the first to break the color line in jazz.

Fact: In Count Basie’s autobiography, “Good Morning Blues” (Random House), he recalls a meeting in Harlem with Sonny Greer, later renowned as Duke Ellington’s drummer. “Since I had last seen him in New Jersey, Sonny had been on the road with Wilmer Gardner, a band of white musicians.” This was in 1924 or 1925. There were also many record sessions involving racially mixed groups, but the Goodman Trio (with Teddy Wilson and Gene Krupa) and Quartet (Lionel Hampton added) became the first famous interracial units to face the public, in 1936.

Myth 5: The first American jazz festival took place at Newport, R.I., in 1954.

Fact: The first jazz festivals took place in 1948-49 in Nice and Paris; the first American event billed as a jazz festival was in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in 1951, with groups leds by Sonny Greer and others.

Myth 6: The first great jazz composer-arranger was Jelly Roll Morton.

Fact: There is a judgmental element here, yet in Morton’s own time it was widely agreed upon that there was nothing modest about him but his talent. Duke Ellington (who rarely had a negative word about anyone), Mary Lou Williams, John Hammond and countless others agreed that Morton was a minor figure; since his death, however, the myth has been so sedulously reinforced by critics (and by a few authoritative musicians, such as Gunther Schuller) that it is now accepted as gospel.

Don Redman, unlike Morton, has not been the subject of books and endless scholarly essays, yet he might well have claimed the title assigned to Morton by so many experts. A child prodigy who played in a band in 1906 at the age of 6, Redman spent much of his adolescence studying every instrument in the orchestra as well as harmony, theory and composition. He became the first musician to write almost all the music for the first great jazz orchestra (Fletcher Henderson’s, starting in 1923); the first black composer to contribute substantially to the library of a white band (Paul Whiteman’s); musical director of one of the great black bands, McKinney’s Cotton Pickers from 1927-31, and leader of his own superb orchestra from 1931-40.

Redman’s “Chant of the Weed,” his radio theme (he had the first black band to earn a sponsored radio series) was years ahead of its time in its use of harmony. He was the composer of such jazz standards as “Cherry,” “Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good to You” and “Save It, Pretty Mama” (one of several numbers he recorded as alto saxophonist and arranger on a classic Louis Armstrong date in 1928). He was a splendid alto saxophonist and an intimate singer of unusual charm. He died in 1964.

So distinguished are Redman’s credits that it is absurd to mention Jelly Roll Morton in the same breath. More than any other artist, he reinforces, for me, the truth of Napoleon’s and Henry Ford’s statements.

Myth 7: Bessie Smith died because she was refused admittance to a white hospital.

Fact: Given conditions in the South in 1937, this very well could have happened. The myth was started by a story under John Hammond’s byline in Down Beat and was reinforced in 1960 by Edward Albee’s play “The Death of Bessie Smith.”

Hammond recanted his story and, as Chris Albertson observed in his biography “Bessie” (Stein & Day), it was generally acknowledged that Smith was taken directly after the automobile accident to a black hospital in Clarksdale, Miss., where she died due to loss of blood.

Dr. Hugh Smith, who arrived on the scene moments after the accident, said: “The Bessie Smith ambulance could not have gone to a white hospital. . . . Down in the Deep South cotton country, no colored ambulance driver, or white driver, would even have thought of putting a colored person off in a hospital for white folks. In Clarksdale, in 1937, there were two hospitals, one white and one colored, and they weren’t half a mile apart.”

Myth 8: Duke Ellington’s compositions included “Caravan,” “Perdido” and “Take the ‘A’ Train.”

Fact: Juan Tizol, Ellington’s valve trombonist, composed “Caravan,” with Duke as co-writer. Tizol was listed as sole composer on “Perdido,” and Billy Strayhorn was sole composer of “Take the ‘A’ Train,” though lyrics were added later by other writers (not Ellington).

Myth 9: Count Basie wrote his famous theme, “One O’Clock Jump.”

Fact: “Composed,” in the literal sense of put together, would be a better word. Basie did copyright the tune quite legally in 1938. The theme of the next-to-the-last chorus as the Basie band played it was first heard in almost identical form on a 1928 record by the Chocolate Dandies, a small band, credited to the pianist on the date, Fats Waller. Buster (Prof) Smith, the alto saxophonist who left Basie just before the orchestra moved on to New York and world renown, told his story in the July 11, 1956, issue of Down Beat:

“Basie always liked to fool around in different keys every night. One night he was playing along in F . . . then he took that modulation in D flat. He looked at me and said, ‘Set something, Prof,’ so I started playing that saxophone riff. Lips (Page) set something for the brass, and pretty soon we had it going.

“It was my tune, but I only wrote one part for it--that was a saxophone part for Jack Washington, because the fourth harmony was hard to hear. After Lips and I left the band, Jack taught the new guys their parts. When they recorded it later in New York, they put Count’s name on it, and when it became popular, Buck Clayton wrote the arrangement down. I heard other bands playing it and tried to copyright it, but I found it already had been.”

In other words, “One O’Clock Jump” was a “head” (non-written) arrangement built piece by piece, the main elements being Basie’s own key modulation, Smith’s sax riff, and the old Chocolate Dandies strain by Waller.

Myth 10: Thelonious Monk’s middle name was Sphere.

Fact: Having goofed in the earliest version of my “Encyclopedia of Jazz” (wrongly stating that he was born with that name in New York in 1920), I obtained a copy of his birth certificate. It stated that Thelius (sic) Monk was born Oct. 10, 1917, in Rocky Mount, N.C. Nowhere was there any mention of the name Sphere.

To sum it all up, history would seem to be just what Napoleon said it was. As Fats Waller himself might have commented, “One never knows, do one?”