Before Seattle Rocked: A City and Its Music

Introduction

3 introduction f or generations the men in white coats—and the women in black dresses—were the very definition of “musician.” Music for these practitioners was not necessarily fun or artistically fulfilling. It was work. In theater pits and dance halls, taverns and opera houses, ballrooms and skating rinks, making music was a job. For much of the twentieth century, most of Seattle’s working musicians belonged to the union—specifically, the Musicians’ Association of Seattle, Local 76 of the American Federation of Musicians. The union dictated wage scales, work rules, and how many performers must be hired at the various classes of venues. Failure to obey the rules meant fines or expulsion. Venues deemed “unfair” by the union were boycotted, and support from sympathetic union brotherhoods—bartenders, stagehands, teamsters—made those boycotts effective. Working Seattle musicians acquired professional standing through simple cultural evolution. By the late nineteenth century, as society grew steadily more affluent and more artistically sensitive, music became a valuable commodity, and its practitioners came to recognize that they formed a distinct professional entity as worthy of substantive remuneration as their brothers in mine and factory. During the heyday of professional music in Seattle, it was by no means unusual for a well-placed union musician to make a living plying his or her craft. Of his six-night-a-week job at the Seattle Town and Country Club, trumpeter Don Smith exclaimed, “That job paid an actual, honest-to-goodness living wage. I bought a house, made 4 § introduction my car payments, and paid for the delivery of our first child on that one paycheck.”1 Seattle is a music town, and for many, that means rock and roll. The “Northwest sound” of the region’s early rock bands is universally acknowledged , and the fact that their city succored in her bosom Ray Charles, Jimi Hendrix, and Kurt Cobain fills Seattleites with proprietary pride. Fifty years of rock, however, were preceded by more than a hundred years of music that was equally exciting to its listeners and important to the community ’s evolution. More centuries of continuous native music preceded that. Seattle’s early industrial development made a vibrant musical life inevitable . Logging and coal mining created a strong demand for a large male labor force, and that labor force demanded food, shelter, and entertainment —lots of it. The latter was by no means subsidiary, and a hallmark of old Seattle was a lusty culture of saloons and sporting houses. To the young man lonely and hungry for both stimulation and a morale boost, music was at least as essential as beer and sex, and echoes of the cornet and the piano sustained the city’s workforce through its long, bone-wearying days in mill and shipyard. As people worked harder and more newcomers showed up, Seattle demanded bigger, fancier gathering places—and music to fill them. In the wake of railroad and gold-rush booms came hotels, restaurants, theaters, and legions of musicians. From the day of its birth, Seattle craved connection to the outside world. The early settlers assumed that this connection would come in the form of railroads and steamships, but it was another, subtler sort of connective tissue that took root first: music. Popular songbooks gave the first white settlers reassuring ties to their old homes; classical music encapsulated their children’s aspirations to gentility and cosmopolitanism; jazz gave African Americans a vehicle of affirmation and economic advancement; ethnic music eased the transition of émigrés from homeland to “melting pot”; and, before whites ever lived on Elliott Bay, song and drums connected native peoples with neighboring groups and the spirit world. There is a growing belief that music predates human speech and is one of the foundation stones of human civilization. Why, then, have we looked down on it for so long? The Puritans enjoyed singing and even dancing on occasion, but music was something to be indulged in sparingly, and chiefly in the service of God. Tunes that roused the sensual impulses filled us with uneasiness, even hostility. Music was a diversion, an idle use of precious introduction § 5 time, and certainly not a proper pursuit for a serious man. Said one early American to his son who had asked for a fiddle: “Be assured that if you be not excellent at [music], it’s worth nothing at all. And if you be excellent, it will take...