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4. Life on "Big Ninth" Street: The Emerging Blues Culture in Chattanooga
- University of Illinois Press
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4 Life on “Big Ninth” Street The Emerging Blues Culture in Chattanooga The streets of a city are the exhibition halls of its citizens. Walking through these public halls all phases and conditions of life may be seen and the character and civilization of its people judged. —Rev. Joseph E. Smith I take your East Ninth Street to my Heart, pay court on your Market Street of rubboard players and organ Grinders of Haitian colors rioting And old Zip Coon Dancers I want to hear Bessie Smith belt out I’m wild about that thing in Your Ivory Theater Chattanooga Coca-Cola’s homebase City on my mind. —Ishmael Reed, “Chattanooga” While the first of this chapter’s epigraphs, written in 1897 by the African American pastor of Chattanooga’s First Congregational church, refers to the streets of all urban landscapes, the second, a poem by the Chattanooga native Ishmael Reed, reveals that the greatest “exhibition hall” of Chattanooga in the early twentieth century was the vibrant Ninth Street. Stretching from the banks of the Tennessee River and the Union Railway lines through downtown to the edge of the famed National Cemetery, Ninth Street was a microcosm of the city’s commercial and social offerings as well its diverse population. On West Ninth Street, the impoverished African American residents of Blue Goose Hollow could cross paths with the elite white socialites of Cam- 82 blues empress in black chattanooga eron Hill as they all traveled into the heart of the city. Some blocks further down Ninth was the commercial district, where “bankers and brokers, merchants and manufacturers, lawyers and doctors, and yes even politicians [could meet] on common ground.”1 Around the bend in Ninth just past Union Station and the elegant Read House hotel, the heart of downtown black Chattanooga—East Ninth Street—came into sight. Although many of the commercial establishments of East Ninth catered to African American customers, a visitor could find Charles Zegelbaum’s jewelry store, C. J. McFarland ’s shop, and Shweidelson Brothers’ ladies’ tailors in the same block as the offices of the African American lawyer J. W. White and the black hairdresser J. T. Higgins.2 In the midst of this medley of shops, professional offices, restaurants, and boarding houses lay the saloons and theaters that brought some of the most popular musical fare of the period to the city. It was in the streets and sidewalks in front of these social establishments that an adolescent Bessie Smith made her first public performances and encountered a musical entertainment culture that contained elements of all the African American musical genres of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from worksongs to minstrelsy, “coon” songs to black vaudeville. Origins of Ninth Street The adventure offered on Ninth Street called to Chattanooga residents as early as 1900. The twentieth-century status of East Ninth Street as a vibrant hub of black life can be traced to the early years of the city’s development. Prior to the Civil War, the area had been primarily waterlogged land that contained a pond used by local women for washing clothes.3 After the Civil War and emancipation, freedpersons settled in the area and eventually purchased small plots of this land, largely because of its “undesirability” to the general white population. As the black population grew in size, the East Ninth area became a hub for the newly built African American churches, businesses, and professional offices of the late 1890s.4 As the twentieth century dawned, the area became a foundation of the downtown activities of African Americans and housed the institutions of the relatively self-sufficient community. It was the vast number of such institutions, including drug stores, physician’s offices, restaurants, boarding houses, and churches, that led several residents to later refer to East Ninth as the “Big Nine”—a street that predated and, in many black Chattanoogans’ eyes, rivaled Memphis’s Beale Street.5 Just as Beale Street had been home to the musical and recreational activities of Memphis blacks, East Ninth Street was a center of entertainment as [44.210.236.0] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:52 GMT) life on “big ninth” street 83 well as commerce for African Americans in Chattanooga. The area’s theaters, eating houses, and saloons hosted many of the nation’s traveling revues as well as aspiring local entertainers. Remarkably, the early boom period of Ninth Street (approximately 1900–17) coincided with a historical moment in which several African...