This episode explores the music at the center of the story historian Karen Cox is currently reconstructing about the Rhthym Club fire in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1940. Jazz music becomes a character in her story, illuminating not just the lives lost, but the movement and connections across space during the Great Migration.
Her playlist features:
“It’s Tight Like That” 1928, Jimmy Noone. You can hear piano, banjo, trumpet, clarinet, trombone. It follows that traditional jazz formula of highlighting individual instruments. He showcases the New Orleans sound – he was born on a plantation near New Orleans and played for a band in Storyville before headed to Chicago. It’s a Fox Trot.
“It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got that Swing)” composed by Duke Ellington, recorded in 1932 (he was working on the song in 1931 while in Chicago) A jazz standard, it foreshadowed the swing era that marked the 1930s. The original recording is a Fox Trot, but a fast one. Vocal by Ivie Anderson, who sang when Ellington performed. I didn’t notice this at first, but it’s recorded on Brunswick Records in Chicago (sometimes referred to as Brunswick Race Records)
“Marie,” (1937) written by Irving Berlin, recorded first by Tommy Dorsey. It was the last song to be played by Walter Barnes’ band in the Rhythm Club as people scrambled to try and save themselves. While it’s a song in which a man wonders if the woman he kissed will remember it and will surrender to his love. But one of the lyrics takes on a double meaning after the fire. What people will recall is tragedy and loss and trauma.
Marie, the dawn is breaking
Marie, you'll soon be waking
(Ooh, Marie)
To find you heart is aching
And tears will fall as you recall
(And tears will fall)
(I can’t help but think of the desperation inside of the Rhythm Club as it is playing.)
Part II: Suggest a pairing of songs that provide a contrast or set of perspectives on an idea or moment.
“When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” (Recorded in 1931) Louis Armstrong, It’s a migration story. It also plays on stereotypical plantation themes. Mammy and “darkies are singing” and while it won him white fans, it angered African Americans. The lyrics were changed in the 1950s. The line with the “darkies” becomes “the folks are crooning.” (This one might also have been in Part I)
Contrasted with Billie Holiday’s version of “Strange Fruit” (Recorded in 1939) which tells a completely different story about the South. She didn’t write it, of course, but her interpretation of the lyrics is what makes it so powerful:
Bonus:
Walter Barnes’s version of “It’s Tight Like That” (1929) Brunswick Records, is far more upbeat than Jimmy Noone’s version. Also one of the few Barnes recorded.
Ella Fitzgerald, because she’s Ella Fitzgerald and her interpretation of jazz lyrics is still the best to me. “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” (recorded in 1938) was her first hit song, while she sang lead for the Chick Webb orchestra. He discovered her at the Apollo amateur contest. In 1942, the First she performed “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” in her first ever screen role on Abbott and Costello’s Ride ‘Em Cowboy.
