Monday, May 9, 1927: Chicago
‘Pops’ And The Babe
Along with Duke Ellington’s Washingtonians, Fletcher Henderson is my other favorite colored band in New York City. Henderson’s band plays at the Roseland Ballroom, and when the Yankees are home, Benny Bengough and I go at least once a week to see them. Some of Fletch’s musicians hang out and play at a speakeasy called Plunkett’s — it’s also called The Trombone Club — located in a narrow building on West 53rd Street. It’s so narrow that the address is 205 1/2 W. 53rd.
A lot of jazzmen hang out there, both colored and white. Often when a band needs a player, because one of their regulars is sick or out of town, they’ll call up Plunkett’s, and Arthur at the bar will answer the phone and then shout out, “Phone call for a colored bass player!” or “Phone call for a white sax!” Then, if there’s a bass or a sax in the room, they’ll take the call, pay their bill and give Arthur a small tip, before heading out the door to their new gig.
Henderson’s band is full of Yankee fans. They’ve played in front of members of our team — at parties, concerts and events — and over the past season and a bit that I’ve been with the team, Benny Bengough and I have gotten to know Benny Morton, one of the musicians in his band, pretty well.
Morton is a trombonist, and a big Yankee fan. When he was in his teens, he played baseball professionally for a couple of the black teams here in New York. Benny really wanted to stay a baseball player, but then one day Fletch’s trombone player was sick and Benny was asked to fill in for him. That night there was a radio broadcast from Roseland and Benny’s mother heard him with the band, and when he came back home his mother was waiting up for him. She told him how special he sounded. And Benny thought, “Well, if I sound special, I should be a musician and not a ball player.” So he stopped playing baseball, but he still loves going to games and talking about the game any time his lips aren’t on a trombone or a girl.
Fletcher Henderson’s band is so good that Louis Armstrong, who had been tearing up Chicago with King Oliver and his Creole Jazz Band, came to New York and played with them for all of 1925, the year before I got to the Yankees. Armstrong brought with him a new sound, full of power, improvisation and super hot solos.
Roseland was packed every night Armstrong was there, and not just by the usual crowd. Every jazzman, no matter their color, went to the ballroom as often as they could to see “Pops” — as they all call Armstrong.
What makes Armstrong special? It’s not just his power — he’s as powerful with the trumpet as the Babe is with a bat — it’s his style. Pops’ trumpet can echo what the rest of the band’s playing — in a way nobody’s ever heard, or even could have imagined before him — while at the same time playing alongside them.
Jazzmen go to watch Pops blow his horn the way baseball players watch the Babe take batting practice. When Ruth steps into the cage, everyone stops what they’re doing, because no one wants to miss seeing the Babe hit a baseball further than anyone’s ever imagined was possible. Huggins told me Ruth’s the only man he’s ever seen have that effect on other ballplayers. Armstrong has that same effect on jazzmen.
Pops is the first jazz player, and the first colored I’ve ever heard called a genius. Bix Beiderbecke, the white cornet player who knows Pops, said it to me first at the Fire Party. I had to think about it for a couple of days. A colored guy being a genius.
Pops went back to Chicago at the end of ’25, and now he’s got his own band, headlining at the Sunset Cafe, a swell “black and tan” joint run by one of Capone’s boys, Joe Glaser. The joint fits over 500 and has a big dance floor, on which Pops and his band will often dance the “Charleston” with the patrons while they’re blasting the room. Being a Capone establishment, it’s also known for both violence and police raids. Pops’ piano player, Earl Hines, told me that when he hears the police sirens he runs straight toward them, so he can be sure to get a good seat in the paddy wagon.
Benny Bengough and I went to see Pops at the Sunset Cafe here in Chicago on Saturday night and we met up with Benny Morton, who’s in town for a month and has been sitting in with Pops’ band. Benny was there with two brothers, Johnny and Baby Dodds.
Baby Dodds is a drummer who first hooked up with Pops when they were in their teens, playing in a band on a Mississippi riverboat. Later they joined Baby’s older brother, Johnny, in King Oliver’s band.
Johnny Dodds is the best colored clarinetist in America. He’s also addicted to baseball, especially the White Sox. Pops says Johnny buys the afternoon and evening papers every day, takes out the box scores and hands the rest to whoever’s around. He’s at the ballpark all the time. He’s got a buddy at Comiskey Park on the grounds crew, Jimmy Yancey, who sneaks him in for free. Yancey’s a helluva a boogie-woogie piano player, and his style of playing is spreading throughout Chicago, thanks to all the colored rent parties.
I thought Johnny and Baby Dodds were at the Sunset just to see Pops play, but it turned out they were meeting him to record a new record after his show. Since Pops is also crazy about baseball, he invited Benny Bengough and me to come along to the recording.
And thus began one of the happiest nights of my life.
Pops finished up early, a little before 1:00 a.m. and then the six of us piled into his Buick. “Taking off!” hollered Pops in his sandpaper-trombone voice, as he lit up a thin cigarette, which pretty quickly got passed around the car.
Benny and I looked at each other and had the same thought: “If we turn this down, these boys are gonna think it’s because, ‘Goddamn white Yankees don’t want anything that’s touched n*gg*r lips!’” Consequently, neither one of us chose to offend our hosts.
Next thing we knew, we were coughing a lot and the Dodds brothers, Benny Morton and Pops were composing a new song in our honor: “Yankees Flying in ‘Da Air!”
“New York, Chicago, Cleveland.
Detroit and everywhere.
Dare’s Yankees! Dare’s Yankees!
Flying in da’ air!Boston and Washington.
Philly and St. Lou!
Dare’s Yankees in da’ air,
And they’s flyin’ over you!”
Baby Dodds had his sticks out, drumming on the inside of the roof. Johnny and Benny Morton pulled their instruments from their cases and were wailing and honking out of both sides of the car. And Pops was doing some crazy, syncopated singing with nonsense words that sounded like a trumpet part:
“Skee-bop. A-Doo-bop. Skit-dad-a-lee, Doppa-doo.
(Doppa-doo!!!)
Dare’s Yankees in da’ air, Lordy!
Flyin’ over you!”
“You cats sound ready to make some records!” hollered Pops, as he rolled through a red light.
Pops never calls anybody by their name — he’s just like Babe that way. Neither one of them can remember anybody’s name! It’s painful to watch, sometimes. Ruth and Waite Hoyt have been teammates for years — before the Yankees they were on the Red Sox together, they’re real friends, the Babe actually admires Hoyt — and yet I’ve heard him call Waite, “Walter.”
Ruth feels embarrassed about not remembering anyone’s name, but he just can’t seem to do it, that’s why he calls everyone “Keed,” meaning kid, and refers to two or more players standing together as “the boys.” Armstrong’s solution is to call everyone Pops, even though he’s a young man — that’s how he ended up with his nickname — and instead of calling the colored musicians “boys,” he calls a group of them “cats.” Pops invented that term, which almost all the jazz guys, black and white, now use.
Stopping at a green light, Armstrong turned around to get his second muggle back from Benny Bengough, who had been smoking it for quite a while.
“Hey! Pops! Pops! The light’s green!” shouted Baby Dodds.
“Shit!” yelled Johnny Dodds, “Ain’t nobody gonna be recordin’ nothin’ tonight, ‘cept the coroner recordin’ our dead black and ofay asses after you go and turn us into a traffic accident, Pops! Put your damn foot on the goddamn pedal, man!”
“Stay cool, Pops!” Armstrong laughed back at Dodds. “This flight is under control.” And with that we were off, once again flying through the streets of Chicago. I’m pretty sure we passed the same buildings more than once. Eventually, we landed at the Okeh Records studios at 1:30 a.m.
As we were walking into the building Pops started singing a song the other boys knew, called “Willie the Weeper”:
“Have you heard the story about Willie the Weeper?
Willie’s occupation was a chimney sweeper.
He had a dreamin’ habit, he had it kinda’ bad.
Listen, let me tell you ‘bout that dream he had.”
Apparently, Willie was a chimney sweep whose drug-addled dreams transported him first to the North Pole and then to Turkey — with scantily clad young girls dancing in both locales — and then, when Willie woke up, his one and only desire was to get back to his dreams, which meant more drugs. With Pops singing Willie’s story, we danced and shuffled our way through Okeh’s hallways and up the stairs. Baby Dodds was drumming his sticks against every wall, desk, lamp and door in the joint, and Johnny and Benny Morton’s instruments were once again wailing like police sirens.
“Now tell me, what would you do,
if you could have all your dreams come true?
There’s something tells me you’d lock your door
Like Willie the Weeper, and cry for more.”
“I’m not waking up from that dream!” shouted Benny Bengough.
And with that everyone just stopped in their tracks and stared at him, like he had pulled the plug on the night. Benny was so embarrassed, he looked like he’d run up to home plate late for an at-bat and suddenly realized he’d forgotten to put on his pants.
“Okay, ofay!” shouted Pops.
Everyone including Benny fell down laughing and coughing.
Inside the recording studio we were met by Pops’ wife, Lil’, who was playing piano on the recordings that night. She was joined by two members of Armstrong’s Sunset Band, Pete Briggs and Honore Dutrey, who had made it over from the club before us. Rounding out the group was Johnny St. Cyr, a banjo player who like Johnny Dodds was about 10 years older than the rest of us and has known Pops since Armstrong was “Little Louis,” a kid growing up in New Orleans.
The plan for the evening was to record two songs before sunrise, “Willie The Weeper” and another tune called, “Wild Man Blues.” Since Pops and the rest of our car were singing “Willie The Weeper” when we paraded into the room, they decided to start with that one. Both Bennys, Bengough and Morton, and I sat down on a couch at one end of the room while the band worked out the details of the song’s arrangement.
No one needed sheet music, but they rehearsed the song three times, each time making small changes, mostly to shave time as the machines could only make records that were less than three minutes long. Next they made two test recordings. Each time the recording engineer rang a bell before he started up his machines, and then a light came on in the studio to signal the band to start playing.
Each test was recorded on a wax disc that the engineer could play back on what he called Okeh’s “special reproducing machine.” The band listened to each recording, which they called a “take,” so they could hear how balanced they sounded. Then after each test they changed their positions a bit — some of them moving closer to their microphone, others moving further away — with Pops and Lil’ choreographing the moves.
Pops was extra excited because tonight was the first time he was in a studio with a microphone and an electric recording system — up until now all of their recordings had been made acoustically with the entire band playing into a big horn. Pops couldn’t get over how much better the electric recording tests sounded.
As long as I live, I will never forget the first take of “Willie the Weeper” that the Hot Seven, as they call themselves, played:
The band started off with a regular New Orleans sound, everyone playing as an ensemble. Then Pops took a relaxed lead before handing it off to Dutrey’s trombone. From there Johnny Dodds’s clarinet picked it up, and the music began to soar. Pops reached out and grabbed it back from him, just for a bit before handing to Lil’ who played a few bars on the piano. Then Johnny St. Cyr came in. I hadn’t noticed but St. Cyr had silently switched mid-song from playing his banjo to playing a guitar. And the way he played it didn’t sound at all like jazz. It was more like something a cowboy would play, simple and sweet. When St. Cyr was done, he handed the song back to Pops, and that’s when everything changed.
All of a sudden, “Willie The Weeper” became Louis Armstrong’s song.
It felt just like when the Babe turns our ball games into his own.
Pops calls it “swinging.” He invented that term, too. He plays with a beat that makes you want to snap your fingers, and he just carries everyone along with him.
Maybe it was the smoke from the muggles, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how much Pops and the Babe are alike: They both have taken something everybody wants to play — the two biggest games in town, baseball and jazz — and made them their own.
Before Babe came along, we all played baseball one way, hitting singles, hoping for doubles, slashing at the ball, looking to steal bases and force the other team into mistakes. But the Babe changed all that. Now it’s all about the home run. My mind drifted back to our game last month when we’d beaten the Red Sox easily, 5–2 at the Stadium. I thought again about how, even though the two teams had combined for seven runs, the crowd had gone home disappointed because no one had hit a homer. That is Ruth’s doing. He’s not only changed the way the game is played, he’s changed the way it’s watched:
Tension in the ballpark among the fans now builds differently, the whole pace is different, the whole timing of the game is different — and because of that, I suddenly realized, in our minds our actual sense of time itself is different! And this is what’s really crazy, our sense of time is different even after we leave the ballpark!
Pops is doing the same thing to jazz, and I was watching it happen, up close in that recording studio in Chicago at 3:00 a.m. Pops has made jazz as much about solos as Ruth has made baseball about home runs.
Pops is the show the way the Babe is the show. He’s the Sultan of Swing! And the way Pops makes music “swing” has changed not just the way jazz is being played but the way we’re all listening to music. Just like the Babe, Pops is changing our sense of time. And now that everyone’s suddenly got a radio, the whole country is going to be experiencing it!
Pops and the Babe are changing the world!
As I sat on the couch in that recording studio filled with music and smoke, my head was spinning full of thoughts of time. And during each new take Pops and the band played of “Willie the Weeper” and then “Wild Man Blues,” I heard his music in a way that I’d never heard music before.
At one point I tried my hardest to explain all of my thoughts to Benny Bengough. His response was to point out that his sense of time was still based on his watch, which now said 4:25 a.m., and that we’d better get back to our hotel and sneak into our rooms without Huggins finding out.
- 1927 Yankees
- Lil’ Armstrong
- LOUIS ‘POPS’ Armstrong
- BENNY Bengough
- Pete Briggs
- Johnny Dodds
- Warren “Baby” Dodds
- Honore Durtrey
- Duke Ellington
- Joe Glaser
- Fletcher Henderson
- The Hot Seven
- BENNY Morton
- King Oliver
- King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band
- BABE Ruth
- Johnny St. Cyr
- The Washingtonians
- Jimmy Yancey
- “The Fire Party”
- “Wild Man Blues” (Listen on Spotify)
- “Willie the Weeper” (Listen on Spotify)
- April 16, 1927: “Yanks Are Outhit, But Down Red Sox”. New York Times article and Box Score.
“Andrew Rube Foster and the Ride to Kankakee”
Rube Foster was as valuable a player as any man but Babe Ruth. He was as smart a manager as any man, even John McGraw. And he had as much control over his league as Judge Landis does over Major League Baseball.
But then something happened.
