Rubbing a N****** Head

by the late Jon Hendricks

​English Lords, when they came to America, when they got off the boat, the first thing they did was go to the Waldorf, put their clothes away, and go uptown to Harlem and listen to some jazz music and eat chicken and waffles. They loved it. They’re the ones that gave jazz the prominence it has today.

​I’m a distinguished professor of jazz at The University of Toledo. I teach my students, 250 per class, that America is the only country on earth that has no respect for its own culture. It has respect for every other culture in the world. Every city has a big art museum that costs at least a million or a million and a half a year to keep up. That’s French. Every city has billion-dollar companies to keep up. But that’s English.

​In other words, American culture was kept up by the cats in the Mafia. They were Sicilians who originally came from Africa to Sicily. Louis Armstrong said, “If it wasn’t for them Sicilians, there wouldn’t be no jazz in America.” The thing that was most interesting to me was that they loved the music because it was African, and they were from Sicily, which is 17 miles from Africa. They had heard the rhythm of the drums in their ancestral home. They were the ones who came to America and they supported us. They didn’t treat us like n*****s. They treated us like human beings. That’s the whole thing, and they gave us the best of what they had. The thing that made it possible was they were selling girls for sex and all kinds of drugs: cocaine, marijuana, alcohol.

​I worked for a branch of the mob that supported jazz in the Midwest. I was working at 12 years old with Art Tatum every night at an after-hours joint called the Waiter’s, Cook’s and Bellman’s Club in Toledo owned by the Mafia. Both Art and I were able to start our careers because these people existed. They gave us a chance to work there and grow in our work, because the more you do it the easier it becomes. At that club, they ran alcohol down from Detroit, which was “wet.” Ohio was “dry.”

​Art and I used to stand out in the hall, because we couldn’t go into the room where the customers were. The Mafia used to come by, park those big old Packard cars outside, come in and take off their overcoats and hats, hang them up, come past Art and me standing there, and rub my head. Rubbing a n*****s head was lucky for them.

​I met everybody coming through there, all the orchestra leaders: Duke Ellington, Jimmy Lunceford, Andy Kirk, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong. They all came through the club. I witnessed the whole sociological emergence of our cultural art form, I was in the middle of it while it was taking place. These musicians were beloved by the American public totally, and you had no problem selling them. The audience loved them.

​But America—I mean, White America—has been born like a jackass to the human being when they’ve dealt with their own musical contribution to the world, which is jazz. They still don’t handle it right. It was not been given the respect it deserved. It should have been much more respected than it was. They used the rhythmic parts and the musical parts to form a pop music of their own, instead of taking what we already had contributed.

​I thought it was time that someone told the story of Evolution of the Blues. The Mafia gave us the opportunity to play our music. They told us about what was going on in New Orleans and they told us a lot of things that we didn’t know. I put the @rhyme [CORRECT WORD?] together and made up the show.