June 29, 2006 - Brass Bands & Jazz Funerals: Danny Barker’s New Orleans  Sample Audio

There has always been speculation about the early days of jazz in New Orleans. Stories and myths abound, but there is not much historical documentation. Nobody was paying much attention to jazz in the first two decades of the 20th century, except for the musicians who were busy making it—and the people who enjoyed listening to it. One of the most fascinating resources on the New Orleans music scene in the years between 1880 and 1920 are oral histories collected from musicians in the 1940s.

Native New Orleans guitarist and banjo player Danny Barker was a long-time sideman with Cab Calloway’s orchestra and a pioneering jazz researcher. In the 40s, when the first generation of jazz musicians was still alive, Danny returned to New Orleans and started his Jazzland Research Guild. He sent out questionnaires and interviewed the older generation of musicians. He talked with hundreds of musicians including clarinetist George Baquet, a member of the Imperial Brass Band, and Hamp Benson who recalled playing in Storyville in the early 1900s. Others remembered Lincoln Park as a focal point of New Orleans social and musical life. Buddy Bolden played for late night open-air dances, but there was music of every kind—

Lincoln Park catered to every kinda people. You had real Respectable, influential colored people -- school teachers, lawyers, the cream of the city's upper crust. They had social affairs in the main dance hall. Brass bands played; and elderly folks sat, listening or dancing to schottisches, quadrilles, one-steps and waltzes.

Danny Barker, The Last Days of Storyville

In his book, The Last Days of Storyville, Danny Barker collected reminiscences from the first generation of jazz musicians in New Orleans, and told their stories through a composite character he dubbed Dude Bottley. This week on Riverwalk Jazz Vernel Bagneris offers scenes of the Crescent City through the eyes of Dude Bottely as The Jim Cullum Jazz Band provides the musical backdrop with traditional New Orleans favorites “My Bucket's Got a Hole In It,” “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor,” and “Oh, Didn't He Ramble.”