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I Remember ]azz • 157 don't know you can't play jazz on that junk, they ain't ready to listen to me." Raymond and Catherine came to visit me for an extended stay in Key Largo, where Raymond looked forward to keeping his fishing line in the water during every waking hour. Now, my dock was a fisherman's paradise. The water abounded with snapper, grouper, grunts, sharks, tarpon—about every known variety of southern fish. The first day we sat out there for many hours getting sunburned. I had caught a half-dozen or so nice pan fish—just enough for lunch. But Raymond just kept losing bait and not landing anything. When I examined the way he had rigged his line, it was obvious he had done it in a way that was sure not to catch a fish. He never expressed any curiosity about why / was catching 'em and he wasn't. Still, as the hours wore on, I thought I was detecting some signs of frustration in his mien. At last I told him he wasn't rigged properly and suggested that he might improve his luck by attaching it in accordance with conventional practice for these waters. I explained that these fish didn't act like the tchoupics and sac-a-lait of our native swamps. He shook his head and told me, "I like to fish like this." Spencer Williams September was still hot in 1880 New Orleans, though not as bad at Number 3 South Basin Street, because that was a wide, tree-lined boulevard. It was already known for its massive houses of ill-fame such as those presided over by Kate Townsend and Hattie Hamilton. Number 3, though, was a less pretentious structure, flimsily built of clapboard , in a complex of four such buildings. It was just a few steps from Canal Street, the city's main thoroughfare. The railway depot was just on the opposite side of Canal. Therefore the four brothels occupied an ideal location for their economic purposes. Single men, arriving by train, didn't have far to go—just across the street—to be accommodated. The proprietress of the establishment was a twenty-year-old black chippie whose name was Bessie V. Williams. On this particular fall afternoon, she was depressed because of the heat, because the living room was a mess, and because she was pregnant, a condition not conducive to potential prosperity in her line of work. "My God!" she said 158 • / Remember Jazz to herself, "If Loula hadn't come to New Orleans to help out, there's no telling how all this would resolve itself." Loula and Bessie had had the same mother back in Selma, Alabama, on the plantation where they'd grown up. In those days, where black girls were involved, nobody cared who their father was. Bessie said she couldn't properly remember what slavery was like. The son she gave birth to the next month, on October 14, to be precise, was Spencer Williams. Loula went on to international notoriety as Lulu White, proprietress of Mahogany Hall and New Orleans' whore queen. Spencer never tried to hide this part of his past, though as an adult he never told the truth if he could help it. When he did, it was hard to separate it from the lies. I knew him slightly in New York, years before he died and before events led me to undertake to write his biography. When I first met him in 1946, it was in a dressing room normally used by main-event prize fighters in Madison Square Garden. He was on the endless talent list performing for the Pittsburgh Courier Charities annual fund drive, and I was sharing emcee duties with such distinguished colleagues as Manhattan disc jockey Freddie Robbins and Harlem's Symphony Sid. This was a 24-hour marathon function , and our shift was on about two in the morning. I was sitting on a rub-down table with lyricistAndy Razaf ("Memories of You," "Ain't Misbehavin'," "Honeysuckle Rose"). Also present was a thin man I took to be a professional animal trainer, since he had a mean looking monster on a leash. This beast was Billie Holiday's boxer, which went everywhere she went. Billie cared not a tittle for the apprehension of persons into whose environment she had this feral canine herded. Also present were the super ragtime pianist Luckey Roberts and Dan Burley, the piano playing editor...

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