The French Connection
Following are excerpts from the book, Bourbon Street Black: The New Orleans Black Jazzman (Danny Buerkle, Jack V. Barker)
Although we seem to romanticize the lives of famous jazz musicians from the past, the society and environment that they lived in was filled with many deviant and sin-ridden elements. The tumultuous beginnings of Jazz evolved from an environment of greed, prostitution, witchcraft, saint-worshipping Catholicism and racial cross-breeding.
New Orleans was settled in the 1720’s by Capuchin monks, Jesuits, and Ursuline nuns, as well as a German community. “Casket Girls” from the middle and upper-middle strata of French society, who got their name from the distinctive casket-shaped trunk (containing clothes and a small dowry) given them by the French government when they agreed to colonization with intent to marry, were under the supervision of the Ursuline nuns. This began the gradual stabilization of New Orleans’s colonization. At the same time the first arrival of Negro slaves came.
Pierre Cavagnial de Rigaud de Vaudreuil, governor of Louisiana, established banquets, balls, parades and promenades during the pre-Lenten days of the Catholic Church, which later led to the famous Mardi Gras celebrations. By the 1800’s, entertainment of all kinds continued to permeate the area, as New Orleans was practically over-run with music stores. Opera became a national standard in New Orleans at this time. On the other hand, “sin had also become highly organized, and in some cases institutionalized.” Whore-houses had become plentiful with the increased traffic from the North on the Mississippi River. Upper-class versions of this became common, as well.
More than 100 years before the Civil War, an action had been taken in the French colony known as the Code Noir. This Black Code of 1724 regulated the interaction between the growing number of slaves and their owners. “It provided for the manumission, or freeing, of slaves with the consent of the owner. Miscegenation, resulting from liaisons of female slaves and their white owners had occurred widely. Because they had developed strong emotional relationships in these unions many owners began either to free the women and their children outright, or to provide for their release in their will. As free persons, the women were able to own property, and in a large number of instances were given bequests which were substantial. This was the introduction of the Creole of Color into New Orleans life. By 1830, some of these gens de couleur had arrived at such a degree of wealth as to own cotton and sugar plantations with numerous slaves. They educated their children, as they had been educated, in France. Those who chose to remain there, attained, many of them, distinction in scientific and literary circles. In New Orleans they became musicians, merchants, and money and real estate brokers.” Music history is part of what our students in our music school Odessa Texas will learn on their musical journey.
In 1861, the situation changed drastically with the start of the Civil War. “A war that was supposed to clip the shackles from the black man had indirectly led to a new restricted class of Negros. The change was devastation for the Creole of Color; it required the laborious task of creating a new self-image. Creole artisans were soon completely out of the skilled trades. In many instances, what had once been an avocation or a hobby became the basis for a new and usually precarious occupation. Money brokers became laborers, and merchants were transformed into musicians. Because of the extraordinary development of classical music and opera, many musicians were able to get placed in the professional orchestras. The Creoles of Color, making their adjustment to new occupations, tried to capitalize on their educational background and training whenever possible.” We place an emphasis on quality musical education in our music school Odessa Texas.
There was, however, a divide between the well-educated Creoles of Color and the newly released black man, who introduced the un-refined music from the plantations. Over time, a synthesis began to form between the educated European musical influences with the raw ‘blues’ expressions of the slaves.
The whites would allow slaves and bond servants on their ‘free day’ to have dances in Congo Square to “release tension, and to discourage Voodoo. The bulk of activities at Congo Square involved Voodoo, with the music, dancing, and other performances being a cover for its practice. The whites were simply insensitive to its presence. New Orleans and much of the West Indies were…Catholic. What had not been realized was that the Negroes readily absorbed the Catholic Saints because they reinforced and duplicated their own older African gods. The two religions existed in harmony (at least from the black perspective) side by side. The whites were never really able to control Voodoo fully.”
Both the Civil and Spanish American War had dumped large numbers of used musical instruments into pawn shops when military and naval bands dissolved in New Orleans. The blacks, fresh off the plantation, gradually gained possession of many of these European instruments. They really didn’t have anyone to teach them or, especially to tell them the official limits of these horns, so they just blew them in their own way. Their tonalities, linked with their African rhythms, were combined to produce a new kind of music. Our music school Odessa Texas helps to immerse students in music that spans a wide demographic range.
“All these musicians played for different types of people. In fact, there was a caste system within the Negroes themselves. The Catholics like Creole music, which was refined, and the Protestants were closer to the blues shouting and spirituals and screaming to the skies and the Lord. All the bands had a particular section of society where they entertained.”
“In the late 1800’s, New Orleans was a festive, parading, music-loving town. Its Latin, French-Spanish Catholic atmosphere had unknowingly ministered to the black population in such a way as to preserve a strong African influence in its music. Finally, the events of the Civil War and their after-effects, were creating an uneasy symbiosis between the Creole of Color with his mastery of European music methods, and the burning soul of the black African.”
New Orleans, now a city of about 125,000 people, had also become the prostitution capital of America. In the district there were estimated to be between 1500 to 2200 registered prostitutes. “Elegant ‘sporting houses’ were well-run businesses, frequently involving hundreds of thousands of dollars of capital investment, often from respected landowners and merchants. The district of Storyville was primarily a collage of cabarets, whorehouses, cafes, cribs, honky-tonks, houses of assignation, ‘dance-schools,’ gambling joints, and clip-joints, all devoted to fleecing the adventurous sensualist of his money…All this required music, and lots of it.”
“For Creoles of Color, playing in Storyville meant a loss of status within their own community. Jelly Roll Morton’s grandmother kicked him out of the house when he was fifteen for playing in Storyville. She loved music, but said people who played in such places were bums.” Storyville, however, became the place that the black man and the tan musicians merged to create the environment which gave rise to musicians such as Joe Oliver (Louis Armstrong’s mentor), later named ‘King Oliver” as his later Creole Jazz Band was to captivate audiences in Chicago. It was in this environment that Jazz had come to life. We teach the beginnings of jazz in our music school Odessa Texas.
The Merger
Following are excerpts from the book, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll (Peter Guralnick)
Sam Phillips was not a musician, per se; however, he became the mentor of artists’ sounds and styles, as their recording engineer at Sun Records. He personally sparked what became a world-wide phenomenon we now know as ‘Rock ‘n Roll’. His initial goal as a radio engineer in Memphis was to give black artists a ‘voice’ for their music, but after a lack of consumer support for this, he began looking for white men with a ‘black’ sound. His first artists were Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, and Ike Turner, then he found (and honed the skills of) young men like Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis.
Sam Phillips grew up as a young boy on a farm about ten miles outside Florence, Alabama. “He couldn’t understand why all the little black boys and girls he worked and played with couldn’t go to the same little country school that he did; he registered the unfairness of the way in which people were arbitrarily set apart by the color of their skin, and he though, What if I had been born black? And he admired the way they dealt with adversity- he envied them their power of resilience…he kept his thoughts to himself and listened to the a cappella singing that came from the fields, testament as he saw it, whether sacred or secular, to an invincible human spirit and spirituality.”
Sam had also been experimenting with studio technology to produce the beginnings of what is now known at reverb and delay. “Sam had long been fascinated with echo…but he had never achieved what he wanted- to his ears, placing the vocalist or lead instrumentalist in a box, or placing a speaker in a resonant hallway or bathroom as many engineers did, created to cavernous an effect…It suddenly occurred to him that in the time it took the tape to move across the three heads of the machine, from record to erase to playback, ‘that would give me a [very] slight delay, [and if] I turned it on playback and fed it back into the board, I would have a controllable sound.’”
He was at a crossroads. “Lately he had been thinking more and more that the key lay in the connection between the races, in what they had in common far more than what kept them apart…the spiritual connection that he had always known to exist between black and white, the cultural heritage that they all shared ‘to bond this thing together. Not to copy each other but just- hey, this is all we’ve got and we’re going to give it to you.’”
“Over and over I hear Sam say, ‘If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars!”
“Elvis Pressley came into the studio on Saturday, June 26…Sam thought, one of the most introverted people who had ever come into the studio… ‘his insecurity was so markedly like that of black person.’ What Sam sensed was a breadth of knowledge, a passion for the music that didn’t come along every day.”
Sam kept working with him, but it seemed like each recording session was a dismal failure. Then one day, Elvis explained, “‘this song popped into my mind that I had heard years ago, and I started kidding around with [it].’ It was an up-tempo song called ‘That’s All Right, Mama,’ an old blues number by Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup. ‘All of a sudden,’ said Scotty, ‘Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and he started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them. Sam, I think had the door to the control booth open- I don’t know, he was either editing tape or doing something- and he stuck his head out and said, ‘What are you doing?’ And we said, ‘We don’t know.’ Well, back up,’ he said, ‘try to find a place to start, and do it again.’”
“The rest of the session went as if suddenly they had all been caught up in the same fever dream. They worked on the song. They worked hard on it, but without any of the laboriousness that had gone into the sessions up to this point…he got Scotty to cut out the conventional turnaround and cut down on all the stylistic flourishes that were mucking it up. “Simplify, simplify!’ was the watchword. Bill’s bass became more of an unadulterated rhythm instrument- it provided both a slap beat and a tonal beat at the same time- all the more important in the absence of drums.”
“We thought it was exciting, but what was it? It was just so completely different. But it just really flipped Sam.’ And the boy? By the end of the evening there is a different singer in the studio than the one who started out the night. For Elvis, clearly, everything has changed.”
“Elvis was named Most Promising C&W Artist in Billboard’s annual Disk Jockey Poll” and soon contracts were being made and money started to flow. “On November 18, with the $5,000 in hand, Sam put in a rush order at all three of his pressing plants for the new Johnny Cash…singles…The formal execution of the contract took place at the Sun studio, on November 21.
Rock was the merger between Blues and Country. In other words, it successfully merged folk white and folk black music into a new style that would forever change the world. Classical music’s French-derived foundation in New Orleans became inseparable from the early beginnings of Jazz. We teach the origins of Rock in our music school Odessa Texas.
Understanding Classical Music’s role and importance provides the student who desires to obtain the highest level of skillfulness in their craft to integrate successfully into our contemporary culture. In our music school Odessa Texas, we help students find the ability to navigate various styles of music successfully.