I found it quite disillusioning that Geoffrey C. Ward, in his “Matters of Fact” column (June/July issue), could veer so far from the actual facts. It seems hardly possible, a full twentyfour years after the publication of my book, The Story of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, that even a careless student of history could echo all the previously printed misconceptions about the first jazz recording.
It is ridiculous to assert so positively that “[Nick] La Rocca and his friends had learned [jazz music] by listening to … the early cornet master Freddie Keppard, after whom La Rocca had patterned much of his playing.” La Rocca had never even heard of Keppard until the Esquire gang of racketeers began to fabricate the mythology of jazz around 1936.
As for the first jazz recording, the files of the Victor Talking Machine Company will reveal that Keppard actually did record in 1917, and that the test record was rejected as “unsuitable for recording.” There was no racial prejudice involved, and in fact, in 1916, when the Original Dixieland Jazz Band arrived in New York City, all the top Broadway jobs were held by Negro ragtime orchestras. The ODJB, with its radical new sound, literally drove those groups off Broadway, because the black musicians could not figure out how to play it. They were quickly replaced by white musicians such as Jimmy Durante, Ted Lewis, Vincent Lopez, and Earl Fuller, all of whom put together five-piece “jass” bands.
Just who is Mr. Ward to proclaim that the first jazz record, “Livery Stable Blues” was “really [not] very good”? It was a masterpiece of counterpoint, which is a key ingredient of lasting jazz.
The reason that Martin Williams, the “cultural historian” (to use Mr. Ward’s description) of the Smithsonian, conveniently discarded the first jazz record from his collection of “classic jazz” is that it was produced by white musicians. If there was ever any real prejudice in the jazz world, it was against the Italian-American musicians of New Orleans, who have not been given a fair accounting.
H. O. Brunn Buffalo, N. Y.
Geoffrey Ward replies: I had not read Mr. Brunn’s book before writing the column that so annoyed him. Now I have. It seems to me to be a work of canted hagiography, aimed at proving that Nick La Rocca and his four young friends “created” Dixieland jazz, and that when the author’s hero suffered a nervous breakdown in 1925 and left the group, “jazz was dead, from the standpoint of a purist.” Nowhere in his book does Brunn discuss which black bands La Rocca might or might not have heard while living in New Orleans, for in Brunn’s New Orleans such bands evidently did not exist. When he lists the musical traditions upon which he believes the ODJB drew—Irish, Italian, French, and German among them—black music and black musicians are not included. I think it is safe to say that this is not a widely held view of the origins of jazz.
The date of the lost test recording Brunn mentions—“Take ‘Em Down” by a “Creole Jazz Band”—was December 1918, nearly a year after La Rocca and his group recorded “Livery Stable Blues,” and jazz historians are not unanimous in thinking Freddie Keppard was on hand even then; among the doubters is Professor Larry Gushee, the author of the encyclopedic liner notes for the Smithsonian’s album The Legendary Freddie Keppard. In any case, I did not say “racial prejudice” kept Keppard from recording first. According to the traditional story the most likely cause for his fatal reluctance seems to have been professional paranoia, the same obsessive worry about being copied that led him to play in public with a handkerchief draped over the valves of his cornet so that potential rivals could not figure out his fingering. (My source for this detail is a published interview with another New Orleans cornetist whose music I commend to Mr. Brunn—Louis Armstrong.)
Libertarian Concerns
I enjoyed Frederick Allen’s “Saving the Statue” in the June/July issue, but in his account of the restoration of the Statue of Liberty, Mr. Allen did not comment on the torch viewing-area. Will it, and the right-arm access stairway, be reopened or will both areas remain closed to the public?
Kenneth M. Hoak Millersville, Pa.
Mr. Allen replies: Liberty’s right arm and torch balcony will not be reopened to the public. In the statue’s earliest years access was available, but only to visitors who obtained special permission from one of the statue’s administrative bodies. By 1916, if not earlier (archivists are uncertain), the arm was permanently closed to everyone except maintenance people. This was not due to fear that the arm might weaken but because of the inconvenience of the steep, narrow, almost ladderlike single staircase.
Libertarian Concerns
Did you know that Liberty almost wound up on the bottom of the Atlantic instead of on her pedestal? Or that the young French naval lieutenant who brought her safely through an ocean storm eventually became an American citizen?
Nineteen-year-old Rodolphe Victor de Drambour commanded the small steam-and-sail gunboat Isère that carried the dismembered statue to this country. Because none of the ship’s hatches were big enough to admit the cases, he cut a hole in the vessel’s side and shoved them in as best he could, with no means of proper stowage.
On the voyage the ship ran into a heavy storm. For seventy-two hours young Drambour never left the bridge as the wildly shifting cargo threatened to capsize the gunboat at any moment. Two days after his twentieth birthday he anchored safely off Sandy Hook. When or why he left France I do not know, but in 1936, at the time of Liberty’s fiftieth anniversary, he had long been a U. S. citizen and was living in the Bronx.
Jack W. Rudolph De Pere, Wis.
Libertarian Concerns
The article on the Statue of Liberty triggered memories. During the years from 1931 to 1935, my father was assigned to Fort Jay on Governors Island in New York Harbor, but we, along with a number of other families, were quartered on Bedloe’s Island (Fort Wood) at the foot of the statue. We took the excursion boat to school each day; supplies were delivered to the island by Army mules pulling a wagon. In the winter we used to hitch our sleds to the back of the wagons (forbidden, of course), and in the summer we would hang on to get slivers of ice when it was delivered.
Some of the best times were had in the winter when the bay was filled with broken ice and the excursion boat could not get through. We would be marooned for a day or two—once for three days. No school! My mother, who is now in her nineties, does not remember our life there as being fun, but it was a great place to be a child during the Depression.
D. F. Fuller Santa Clara, Calif.
Huck Finnish
I have a question for you after reading the June/July issue. In the article “One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn,” you give the year 1904 for the first Finnish translation of Twain’s novel, but then on page 84 you also list 1927 for the first Finnish translation. Which year is the correct one?
Erik Nelson Ventura, Calif.
The correct date is 1904.
Manhattan Playground
The June/July “Time Machine” states that the 1934 All-Star Game was hosted by the National League in the Polo Grounds in the Bronx. Wrong. The dear departed Polo Grounds were in Manhattan. Yankee Stadium, which sits almost directly across the Harlem River from the site of the Polo Grounds, is in the Bronx.
As an eleven- and twelve-year-old I had the opportunity to see the Mets play at the Polo Grounds several times before they were torn down to make way for high-rise housing. By the time I got to see a game there, whatever charm the place had was quickly disappearing within the dried-out wooden boards of its facade. But it was still a thrill, especially now as I look back on it, to have been in a park where so much baseball history took place. It was ancient, it was decrepit, it deserved to be put to rest. But the Polo Grounds had character; they were a far cry from the antiseptic, geometric, Astroturfed pleasure domes of today. But more important, the Polo Grounds were in Manhattan.
Robert V. Cancro East Brunswick, N.J.
A Penny for Lincoln
The New York Times may have disapproved when the government decided to put Lincoln on the penny (“The Time Machine,” August/September), but Carl Sandburg thought it was a stroke of genius. He wrote an editorial in the Milwaukee Daily News when the coin was issued in 1909: “The penny is strictly the coin of the common people. At Palm Beach, Newport, and Saratoga you will find nothing for sale for one cent. No ice cream cones at a penny a piece there.
” ‘Keep the change,’ says the rich man. ‘How many pennies do I get back?’ asks the poor man.
“Only the children of the poor know the joy of getting a penny for running around the corner to the grocery.
“The penny is the bargain counter coin. Only the common people walk out of their way to get something for nine cents reduced from ten cents. The penny is the coin used by those who are not sure of tomorrow, those who know that if they are going to have a dollar next week they must watch the pennies this week.
“Follow the travels of a penny and you find it stops at many cottages and few mansions.
“The common, homely face of Honest Abe looks good on the penny, the coin of the common folk from whom he came and to whom he belongs.”
