E. Hawkins; Wrote ‘Tuxedo Junction’

Erskine Hawkins, who wrote a swing classic during the Big Band era but discovered that it took another orchestra leader to immortalize his merely popular “Tuxedo Junction,” has died.

He was 79 and died Thursday at his home in Willingboro, N.J., of heart failure, it was reported Saturday.

Heralded as “The Twentieth Century Gabriel” for the blazing trumpet high notes he formed--a sobriquet jazz critics disdained--Hawkins fronted one of the most talented and heralded bands of the 1930s and ‘40s. It stayed in residence nearly a decade at Harlem’s popular Savoy Ballroom.

Behind him were such accomplished musicians as the Bascomb brothers--Wilbur on trumpet and Paul on tenor saxophone; Avery Parrish, an outstanding blues pianist whose “After Hours” was another Hawkins bestseller; Jimmy Mitchelle, a saxman who also sang, and two exceptional vocalists, Ida James and Dolores Brown.

The nucleus of the group, like Hawkins, emerged from the Deep South in the mid-1930s from Alabama State Teachers College in Montgomery. They called themselves the ‘Bama State Collegians and moved to New York, where they became Erskine Hawkins Orchestra.

By 1939 their recordings on Vocalion and Bluebird and their broadcasts from the Savoy made them a popular part of the Big Band scene, and the band began to tour some, featured on stages with Hattie McDaniel and Lincoln Perry, known in films as Stepin Fetchit.

That was the year Hawkins also wrote and recorded “Tuxedo Junction” in honor of a suburb of Birmingham, Ala., near the steel mills where trains abounded. There at the end of the day workers would change from their grimy clothing into evening wear before catching a train to the city for a night on the town.

(The trumpet soloist on the recording was Wilbur Bascomb and not Hawkins, as many still believe.)

Although the tune became a signature song for the Hawkins band, it fell to Glenn Miller to bring it into the Top 10. (Both leaders recorded for Bluebird.)