HISTORY MIXTAPES - Jazz and the Rhythm Club Fire with Karen Cox

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.

Transcript

Kate Jewell: 0:06

Welcome to the History Mixtapes, a podcast about when music and history meet. I'm Katherine Rye Jewell, historian of the business and politics of culture and author of live from the underground, a history of college radio.

0:21

In this episode, we get a glimpse into what the process looks like when a historian tackles a project that has music at its center. I have been watching as historian Karen Cox has wrestled with a story of the tragic and often overlooked Rhythm Club Fire in 1940. We get to go along for the ride as she reconstructs us history in conversation with the music that was at its center.

Karen Cox: 0:47

I'm Karen Cox, Professor Emerita from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. I consider myself a historian of Southern culture. and now I'm working on something that, blends my love of jazz and Southern culture

1:04

To get started, I had to get more of a sense of how Karen approaches music and incorporates it into her own life before we dig into how music shapes the research and the story she is telling in this book project.

Kate Jewell: 1:19

What came first, the story of the Rhythm Club fire or your relationship with jazz?

Karen Cox: 1:25

It's totally jazz came first. I was listening to it a lot in the late 90s I was living in Washington, D. C., before I moved to Charlotte. While I was there, I took jazz vocal workshops with this couple and I'm sorry, I can't recall their names, but it was so wonderful. They were interracial couple. He played, piano and she was the singer. We would meet at, their home and they would take in maybe a half a dozen students or so, and we would learn 5 jazz songs and, there would be a recital at the end at a jazz club in D. C. When I was in that class, I learned so much. They were teaching us about the blues format, the jazz format of a song, teaching us about jazz as an interpretive art form and the vocalist as another, instrument in the band. I just learned so much doing that. And 1 of the recitals I have to tell you was at this place that just. closed recently in D. C. it was called Twins Jazz on U Street and they were Ethiopian sisters that owned this club and they served Ethiopian food and had their jazz club. That's where we performed. And when I was living in DC, I took opportunities to hear people, so I got to see Shirley Horn play at, Bohemian Caverns, which was a popular jazz club. I got to see Etta James when I was there. So the jazz came first and that's been there for me for many years. When I come across this topic, it initially is about a fire, but now, I've dug into it, I realized that the story is a big jazz story, but the jazz story related to the Great Migration. It's both a joyful thing and also a heartbreaking thing at the same time.

Kate Jewell: 3:28

Can you tell me a little bit about the story of the fire? What happens?

Karen Cox: 3:32

There was a place called the Rhythm Club in Natchez, Mississippi. It was a operated by a black social club about a dozen men who would bring in entertainment for the black community. It's kind of a rundown place, basically a fire trap. people would have said that even before it caught fire, but it's encased in corrugated metal. And, he boards up the exits and the guy that's the manager that night, and everything about it was leading to a fire. The boarded exits, the Spanish moss that decorates the ceiling, the petroleum based pesticide that he puts on to keep the bugs out. The fans that are blowing, There are groups of musicians traveling from the Midwest and there's Walter Barnes and his Royal Creolians, who had played there before. The place catches fire. Mostly young people are in the club the official account is 209 people die in that fire. The Red Cross says 212, but I happen to believe there's closer to 250. It was an enormous fire and the deadliest club fire in the history of the United States, and in 1940, the worst disaster that the Red Cross had to deal with that year terms of loss of life. It was a deadly event.

Kate Jewell: 4:49

That struck me as somebody who's in Boston my husband works in commercial construction and routinely Coconut Grove comes

Karen Cox: 4:56

yeah, yeah,

Kate Jewell: 4:57

this fire, I had never heard mentioned until you started talking about it.

Karen Cox: 5:03

First of all, I do believe that historical erasure begins almost immediately because of the race of the people who died. That's probably the most important reason. The northern press, which was really all white press, did not cover this story very much. The Black press is all over it. The Chicago Defenders all over it. And, New York, Amsterdam News and others, but it is a story that fades away quickly, except probably in the town of Natchez. Then it gets eclipsed by the story of the Coconut Grove fire. The same issues are at play. Bad exits, poorly marked or not enough exits that allow people to get out to safety. Some of those things are similar, but the big difference, is race. There are at least four books on the Coconut Grove Fire. Zero on this one. The memory is within the community itself. And it's not just in Natchez. There's an attempt to preserve memory through music. In Chicago, there are some blues songs written, including the song, the Death of Walter Barnes. And then there's, a few others. Later on Howlin Wolf records a song called, Natchez Burning. And that is actually probably the best known songs about the fire. But it's 1956 I think when it comes out. And then Richard, Wright, who was born near there and live there in Natchez briefly as a young child, his father still lives in Natchez and so I'm sure he was paying attention to this story closely. In 1958, he published a novel called The Long Dream. which got panned as just another Jim Crow story, like Black Boy Part 2, But at the center of that story is a club fire with details that had occurred in 1940. So there are memory pieces out there, and then there's a little museum that tries to preserve the history of it on the site. It's sadly, not in the history books. It's not in Mississippi history books. My advisor, Neil McMillan, wrote a book called Dark Journey, which won the Bancroft Prize and was about Afro Mississippians in the era of Jim Crow. Doesn't mention this fire. There's a book on Natchez called Race Against Time, Jack Davis. It was an award winning book and doesn't even mention the fire. I'm like, how could you not mention the fire? You're talking about race and you're like, and here's an event that wipes out almost a generation of young people. People drop the ball many times along the way on this story, which is why it's been lost to the larger popular memory.

Kate Jewell: 8:45

I think we're used to reading the silences in the sources and in the historiography, but in terms of, the silences in our regulatory infrastructure, the Coconut Grove looms so large because so many changes were made to building codes afterwards and rules about egress.

Karen Cox: 9:02

People in that just believe it was their fire that did that.

Kate Jewell: 9:06

So that is really interesting.

Karen Cox: 9:08

Yeah. Yeah,

Kate Jewell: 9:10

I was envisioning that there was this moment that was ignored, but in actuality, maybe there's like a silent legacy. So to get to the musical story, I gave you this challenge. Can you tell me about the process of putting this together? Where are you in the writing and thinking through this as a musical story? Where did you go first? What ultimately led to the first song you decided to put on this playlist?

Karen Cox: 9:36

I put together a Spotify list of music that Walter Barnes played. I started putting together this playlist that includes him Jimmy Noone, Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, and all the people that people would know. And I was using it to help me write. Except I became overwhelmed with the trauma of the story I had to set it aside. I broke down. I don't think people understand this. other than maybe historians of slavery or, abuse. I was talking to Kidada Williams about that because she writes about reconstruction and, the violence of that and I'm like, how do you do it? It's just like, if they can tolerate it, I can write this. I called my mother. That's how traumatized I was with it. And there's this feeling of, a personal approach to what I do that I owe these people something. Their story had been erased. I had researched so much of it and it just broke my heart that not only had this tragedy happened, but on top of the tragedy was the erasure. I thought, man, I'm letting these people down if I can't write this. I was in tears and I called my mother I said, I feel like I'm letting them down. she said, what about letting yourself down right now? It freed me. I thought, if I'm no good, I can't write this story. So I started to take a break. I'm off doing other things. I'd gone away to some gathering of scholars and I came back and in my email was the link to the application for the Black Metropolis Research Consortium fellowship in Chicago. It just hit me like a ton of bricks. It was meant for me. Because one of the things that I had gotten feedback on was this is too much of a Natchez story. The way I had conceived it. From a year ago to now, I have now got the fellowship. I have now been to Chicago. I have now taken the deep dive into the jazz archive. And now I feel like, oh, yeah, it's starting to become clear to me what the bigger story is. I'm so grateful for that. I'm very grateful to the Black Metropolis Research Consortium for that fellowship, because it's made such a difference. Now I can conceive of this project as really a migration story. The ebb and flow of the Great Migration and what that meant was, musicians had to return South; not everybody did migrate. I think about that. I was like, Oh, God, this has a long history, right? Thinking about these musicians, many of whom were from the deep South. They know who they're going to play for. They know who to contact. Probably know where to stay, and then you can see that ebb and flow.

Kate Jewell: 12:26

So who is Jimmy Noone? And why And It's Tight Like That?

Karen Cox: 12:49

Noone is from Louisiana. He's another migrant, right? He's one of the first people to record that song. I think it was written in 27. And I liked that it sounds like you can hear New Orleans in it. The song is a blues form but if you don't know what you're listening to you wouldn't know that It's the AAB form. And you can hear the different instruments. You can hear, the cornet or the trombone or the piano. Now, there is a vocal on this. But a lot of them is not it's more instrumental. This is about the different musicians and their different instruments that are being brought together to play these songs. It's also one of the first songs and one of the few songs that Walter Barnes, who's a central figure in my book, recorded. And I thought, wow, let's listen to this, that's another important point for people to understand about jazz or even blues. It's that the musicians themselves may not have composed the song, but they're interpreting the song. The song is interpreted by Jimmy Noone one way and Walter Barnes a different way completely. And I loved it.

Kate Jewell: 14:13

I think there's such an interesting symbolism to the idea of the ensemble and all of these different voices of the different instruments. You have this band leader who himself is moving and then every single individual in that band has their own movement, each of them coming from a place, moving to another, bringing those different sounds.

Karen Cox: 14:36

Absolutely, many of them are from the Deep South, but not all of them are. They're also from the Midwest, but they're 2nd generation migrants that still have a Southern connection, right? They still have the Southern roots. But yes, there are the movement of all these different musicians that land in Chicago. The thing about Walter Barnes and some other leaders is that he believed in the importance of learning to read music, which most of those musicians did not do. He's like, if we're going to, progress as jazz musicians, we got to be able to read the music and he kind of immersed himself in that and learned himself. It's almost like a professionalization of jazz in a way. One of the things that's oddly enough, and this has to do with post fire. When I'm looking at the list of the musicians and where they're from, there are two of them from Huntington, West Virginia, which is where I was born, and I'm like, wow, I never think of West Virginia as a place that had jazz. Then I start to look at, the band's travels and they do go into West Virginia. To me, it was like an eye opener too. It's like, oh, it wasn't just north South. It was East West.

Kate Jewell: 15:47

I had a similar eye opening moment. I had the honor of talking with a woman named Annye Anderson, who is, Robert Johnson's little sister.

Karen Cox: 15:57

oh, wow.

Kate Jewell: 15:58

There was a book that came out about her, it was a bit of an autobiography, called Brother Robert, in which she had the 3rd ever known photograph of him, the legendary blues musician, the subject of rock and roll mythology of the going down to the crossroads and still in his soul to the devil. But the photo that she had of him was not the mysterious photo of him with the guitar and the cigarette. It was him smiling like her older brother. and what was so interesting about not just, the fact that I'm now 2 degrees separated from Robert Johnson, which just kind of blows my mind, but that she lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. So she had moved from Mississippi, to Memphis, which is where she knew him. He was much older than her and he would come to town and visit And then he would go off and do his blues thing and then she eventually ends up in Massachusetts and becomes a teacher and was working in Boston public schools as an administrator and came to Fitchburg State and did a graduate certificate program to become an administrator. And now here she's like an alum of the university that I teach at and she lives in Amherst and was a leader in organic farming and, I think this moment of the 1920s, it's so arrested in our pop culture mind as these legendary figures that it can be easy to render them in one time and space and not as having all of this this movement. And she told me, she said, she's like, well, Fitchburg, Massachusetts was a blues town. I'm like, what are you talking about?

Karen Cox: 18:10

Yeah.

Kate Jewell: 18:11

Who goes to Fitchburg to play blues? She's like, no, it was, there was a whole blues circuit that went all through these mill towns throughout New England. And I'm like, there's a story that I need to investigate. I need to know more about this. Who's written about this? I don't know.

Karen Cox: 18:23

I mean, you know, you can go out in the weeds on this, but, Walter Barnes would talk about playing at, HBCUs, like big college football games or for a fraternity. Also Tuskegee had its own jazz band that would come to Chicago to perform. know, the migration sets off more than just movement for jobs, That's movement for music. And then that music, it's taken in all sorts of directions.

Kate Jewell: 18:48

I'm very curious as to what you were thinking about with the narrative arc these songs of starting with a song that Barnes heard and played. You noted that it's a foxtrot and your next song is also a foxtrot, but with a different sound. I'm looking at your list and seeing, we're now shifting to the audience and what the audience is doing, but it's also Duke Ellington.

Karen Cox: 19:28

This is one of the most iconic jazz songs ever, And Ellington is in Chicago for like a four week residency which he's the only one getting these, by the way. By then the Depression is already setting in and this was the thing jazz musicians in the 20s often relied on, oh, I could play here for three weeks or there. So he's there and he's writing the song and I'm just going to retell it as best I can. So Walter Barnes has the jazz column and he says, I wanted to go hear the Duke play at the Lincoln Tavern in Chicago and, went down there. And he relays this conversation. We don't know if it's true, of course, but he relays the conversation. He says, Walter I'm working on this new song, and I'd like for you and your boys, his orchestra to try it out sometime. Walter Barnes writes, something like, Dear Reader, it's probably one of the best he's ever written. It's a wow of a song. And the title of it is,"It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing." And I was like, Whoa, I just fell back when I read that. Because he's there at the creation. You can look in any jazz history or whatever, and they'll say Ellington wrote that song while he was at the Lincoln Tavern in Chicago I'm just blown away by that moment of jazz history that, I'm looking at this guy, but he's not operating at the same level as Ellington or Louis Armstrong, but he certainly wants to be included among them. but he kind of like he's given it his stamp of approval in his column.

Kate Jewell: 21:08

So this is, the early thirties. We're deep in the Depression. where is he at in his career at this point?

Karen Cox: 21:16

Walter Barnes is very young. He comes to Chicago in the mid twenties. He has a little group pretty early on, actually two women, a, a drummer and a piano player. And he plays the clarinet. And he's making his way pretty quickly. He has his orchestra together, and he, opens Chicago Stadium, his band is hired. He's playing in big ballrooms for white audiences, as well as on the South Side. his career is on the rise, right? And he records some music in 29, on this Brunswick label. And so that helps him. He's also playing in the Cotton Club of Chicago run by the Capone Brothers, you

Kate Jewell: 21:58

iconic

Karen Cox: 21:59

and then the, he becomes the music columnist for the Defender. So he's on this rise and then the Depression hits He's a hustler now. He's trying to uplift other musicians. He talks about this in his column. He's born in 1905, how old does that make him? 26, 26? Yeah, something like 26 years old. To have had this much success that quickly he recognizes that those, flush days of the 20s, aren't there anymore. There will be musicians who get those nice gigs, but it's not going to be him. And he decides to take his show on the road and what he called one night jumps. So that's where it begins. He goes on tour during the winter months. He usually spends the winter in Jacksonville, Florida, except they're not allowed in Miami, by the way. It's completely segregated. Miami does not allow Black bands to play in their clubs. And so he plays weaving in and out of the South, he might play Mardi Gras, go through Mississippi, because he's from Vicksburg, Mississippi, and then be back in the spring for Chicago in the Midwest. When you read these columns throughout the 30s, because he maintains this column, I'm exhausted at his schedule. He's very disciplined you read, these and it feels like he's wagging his finger at people because he's like, he's upset at people showing up late smoking on stage being drunk, whatever it might be. But he's still doing that in the spring of 1940 when he rolls into Natchez.

Kate Jewell: 24:20

and so, in this third song, we're going to the Rhythm Club fire.

Karen Cox: 24:24

The song is Marie and it was, it's probably mostly closely associated with Tommy Dorsey and, um, by all accounts of people who were in the club and survived, Marie was the last song that was played in the club. There were three songs. Honeysuckle Rose, Stardust, and then Marie. When the club catches fire, and it begins moving really quickly, and he he can stand in place and maybe he can get the musicians to play this song, Marie, in a slow way, to keep people calm, but he's shouting over the crowd at this point. It's already devolved into chaos and fear. And he's in there trying to place some music. And as a result, people think of him as a hero for having tried to calm the crowd. Even though people died and he himself perished in the fire. I chose that not only because it's the last song played, but the lyrics of the song, I mean, as me as a historian, I'm giving it this different interpretation, but it's about two young people and they've kissed and he, this man is wondering if she will remember him in the morning. Marie, the dawn is breaking. Marie, you'll soon be waking. Oh, Marie, to find your heart is aching and tears will fall as you recall." I think about people waking up to this awful tragedy in their community, and tears are falling as they are recalling their loved ones. It takes on this double meaning for me. I can't listen to the song without thinking about these people desperately trying to get out and save themselves. And of course. The trauma, the sorrow that happens in the aftermath of that.

Kate Jewell: 26:24

How long did it take for the fire to unfold?

Karen Cox: 26:28

Hardly any time at all. It was just like, imagine that, everything was almost set to go up in flames. The dry Spanish moss had been up there in the rafters for years, hanging down as decoration for months for sure. There's, the petroleum pesticide. And the exits are closed up. But people smoke and,clubs their lighting matches and whatever. It starts over the women's bathroom in the front. And then rolls across the ceiling, catching on to the Spanish moss and there are fans blowing all in on them. One of the, members of the Money Wasters Club, which is the social club that brought the group there runs across the street. And when I'm talking across the street, it's not that far at all There's a little gas station there. He calls the fire department, because this is not centralized, their local neighborhood fire departments. He says, by the time I turned around, it was blazing. red hot. The firemen get there pretty quickly. It's out within probably 15 minutes, but it's so intense. It's too much and the building itself actually standing after that because of the, probably the corrugated tin, it's kind of holding it. But the roof, of course, is burnt. They have to cut out a section of the building to pull the fire hoses in, but it's creating this steam bath, scalding people to death. In addition to the burns and the asphyxiation that happens. But it's quick. in like 15 minutes, maybe it's done, it's just done. One of the ironies is that the club sits in this area of town where there are 3 funeral homes within, like a stone's throw of each other, and they're completely overwhelmed with this, because this is not normal. It's a health issue. They have to get this done really quickly. And they're overwhelmed. Embalmers from other towns come in. They have to have pine boxes shipped in. Hire grave diggers from the WPA. Just think of all the things that this little town did not have, for something like that. So, yeah.

Kate Jewell: 28:41

What's the story that is told looking across these three songs in your mind?

Karen Cox: 28:47

There is a story of migration to Chicago, and then, the music begins and then it evolves into swing music. And then Marie, of course, is this song that brings us back down south at least within this tragedy, it does. It's a song that's being played in the clubs in Chicago, but it takes on a different meaning in the context of this ebb and flow of migration. Chicago is as much as it, like they wanted it to be everything it could be, and it was for a while, requires that they have to go back South and they're playing the music that they probably learned and played in Chicago, bringing it South. I didn't expect that question, but I guess that's the kind of way I'm thinking about it. And now that you've asked that, I was like, I may even give it more thought. But if I think about those 3 songs, I'm like, here's the promise. The 1st 1. here's the evolution of it and the expansion of it, it could be, the world of possibilities and then having to return, which is not what they would have wanted to do in order to survive. They would have wanted to continue to play or get the gigs in Harlem. Some of them did go to Europe, There were musicians that just said, no more to Chicago. We're going to London. We're going to Paris and have gigs, over there.

Kate Jewell: 30:06

Yeah, which in 1940 being closed off to them and, refocusing back on the South as that region is about to transform. Given the emotional weight of the story karen is reconstructing, the centrality of music to it. As wondering how she might approach the next part of the playlist. And part two, I asked my guests to suggest a pairing of songs to hint at attention or a comparison. And Karen suggests a deeply poignant, but central tension, not only to her story but to the story of the south within the nation.

Karen Cox: 30:44

I chose When It's Sleepy Time Down South, which is Louis Armstrong, actually one of his most well known songs. it actually romanticizes the South in a way that I think was appealing to white people. It didn't appeal necessarily to African Americans, but to the white audiences of Louis Armstrong, it surely did. It's a migration song. There's a conversation that takes place before the music starts. He meets a friend of his on the street, probably in Chicago, he talks about going back and getting red beans and rice, so there's a nod to New Orleans. It's telling a story of this romanticized South, and he plays into stereotypes through this song He'll use the word darkies. He talks about when Mammy's on her knees, it's sleeping time down south. Part of this is about, I the hustle and bustle of a place like Chicago contrasting with, this easy going South, except it's not so easy going, or he wouldn't have migrated to Chicago to begin with, but that's the story. And so I contrast that with Strange Fruit, Billie Holiday's interpretation of the song, which is about lynching in the South It basically calls out the other song The real South means African americans get lynched it's from a poem written by a Jewish man. I mean, he's, he's under a pseudonym named Lewis Allen, Abel Mirapol. It was a poem set to music, but it's Billie Holiday's interpretation of the lyrics that make it such a powerful song it's really associated with her. She, in the 1930s, in the jazz world, she is one of these, like, handful of people that have a good career, not like Walter Barnes. He's not able to. People would know, you know, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, right? Then you get to start to go down a little bit. I thought that was a good contrast because it presents two very different contrasting views of the South in that time.

Kate Jewell: 34:14

The superstars, the Taylor Swift of the day that exists at the top of this superstructure. But in many ways it resembles the kind of uneven structure of pop culture that we have now in which those at the very top can do great and they can make big fortunes and fame, but it rests on all these other laborers in the system. These musicians who are eking out a living

Karen Cox: 34:40

A lot of musicians are doing that. One of the things that really came through loud and clear when I was doing my research in Chicago and looking at jazz magazines from the twenties and thirties is how segregated jazz is. Even mediocre white men, do better than super talented black performers. Even the elite probably, aren't making what Paul Whiteman or Benny Goodman is making, and so, yeah, they're part of this. It's a combination of those things that it is business. But it's also about race.

Kate Jewell: 35:13

I'm imagining these were hard decisions. I gave you a couple bonus tracks. So what's your bonus at the end of the story here?

Karen Cox: 35:20

I put in Earl Hines, Chicago High Life. One of the things that I learned into my research was that Earl Hines Orchestra was the orchestra that was supposed to have been at the Rhythm Club that night.

Kate Jewell: 35:31

Mm

Karen Cox: 35:33

I thought, well, I want to listen to him and he's Has a really long career, very successful career, and he's very well respected. You know, people know who who Earl Hines is, at least in the jazz world, you know, and he's just this fantastic pianist and you can just hear his virtuosity on the piano in that song, but he has his own orchestra. And he kind of represents these, these musicians who go to Chicago and makes it, while he's doing better than Walter Barnes, but not as good as Duke Ellington. Hines has this very, very long career and, but in Chicago, and he's playing all over the South Side. He probably plays in some of the Gold Coast, they call it, in the clubs. But he's not Ellington. Ellington always rises above that somehow. And I, I just put that in there as a representation of his virtuosity, but also how he relates to the story I'm trying to tell. And then last was Ella Fitzgerald. Oh my God. I just love Ella Fitzgerald. I was listening to her today and this is her first hit song, A Tisket, A Tasket, and she sings it in a movie. She's discovered at the Apollo Theater. And she could just sing anything and I'd listen to it. She's that good. There's a reason she was one of those elite jazz performers. And she also has a relationship to this story and I'll tell you how. So about six weeks after the fire. Ella Fitzgerald was playing at a place called the New Rhythm Club in New Orleans. One of the things we haven't gotten into where it's like the mobsters that are running jazz clubs everywhere, and also in New Orleans. And the New Rhythm Club was run by this guy. I think his name was Tony Mancuso or something, and so he has a big club and she's the performer, and is a segregated club, so they can both get in there, but it's segregated. White people, of course, get the best seats of the house. Then there's a section off of the, in the back, or off the side, probably no seats, for the black audience to see. And they purchase tickets, but he oversells the tickets. These were like large venues, they might have held two thousand, but he sold four thousand, So what happens is that they really want to see her that like she's their musician. They think of that that way. Well, anyway It, there's a mob scene and they're crowding around her, and this story gets told in newspapers all around. She gets jostled around by the crowd and they tear her dress. And then in the midst of all this, because again, there's a problem with exits. In the midst of all this and this jostling and everything, and people are fighting, some woman in the crowd yells out, Remember Natchez.

Kate Jewell: 38:29

Whoa.

Karen Cox: 38:30

Yeah. So that's, where Ella comes in.

Kate Jewell: 38:42

So, how does this exercise of making the playlist as you're constructing the story and thinking through what this book is going to look like, Did this process help?

Karen Cox: 38:54

Well, I think it was actually an appropriate exercise to ask of me and for the project itself, because the music is bound up in the story and it's useful to think about the evolution of jazz from the 20s through 1940. It's good to think about different meanings of lyrics, as with the song Marie. I think that music creates feeling. It helps with the creative process of writing. It puts me in the time frame of the story. I think that we can all benefit from immersing ourselves in the music of the period that we write about for inspiration.

Kate Jewell: 39:34

Yeah, even if it's not the, the subject or the character, the primary source that you're reading.

Karen Cox: 39:40

Exactly. I'm like listening to a lot from that period it has nothing to do with this fire. It's just giving me the vibe, and I love that,

Kate Jewell: 39:48

feeds our, our musical souls as well as our historian souls.

Karen Cox: 39:52

does, I think so,

Kate Jewell: 39:54

Thank you so much for taking me on this musical journey.

Karen Cox: 39:56

Well, for inviting me to your podcast and I hope it was worth your time.

Kate Jewell: 40:01

Absolutely. Thank you for listening to this episode of history mix tapes. Stay tuned next month for another episode.