Doc: The Story of a Birmingham Jazz Man

12. Friends and Mentors

12 friends and mentors When I was first getting my band together, I needed a bass player. There weren’t too many bass players around, and I pushed Pops to play: Ivory “Pops” Williams. We hit it off right away. Pops was one of the most interesting characters I ever met. He was one of the very first jazz musicians in Birmingham—in fact, he was the one that brought Fess Whatley from Tuscaloosa, and he set up the first musicians union in Birmingham for blacks. Pops was an unusual fellow. And the thing about it was, he was a living history—because he was there. He took up the violin and he played in the early days of the silent movies; that was when they’d send the music to the theatre so you’d follow the music along with the movie. When they added the sound, Pops said he just lost his job—and he never went back to the movies. He held it against them. Even in the fifties, he never ventured back. He was well trained in the violin, and he goes back to W. C. Handy and those early ones—Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith—he was back in their day, right after the First World War, and he played with all of them. He thought of them as just being like him, like they were youngsters together: “Yeah, I knew W. C. Handy—oh yeah, I knew that boy.” Pops was in and out of the scene, and he took in more history than all of us put together. Another thing I found so impressive about Pops: he knew about all kinds of music. He was right there with Ma Rainey, but he could talk about symphonic music and everything, and he could play any instrument; he said we had nothing but trombones and trumpets down here, so we didn’t know the real sweetness of music. frienDS anD menTorS 191 Pops’s wife was Miss Ida. He loved Miss Ida, but when he was younger, they married one afternoon, and Pops took off on a road show—listen!—the night they got married, and he went all the way to California without his new bride. Pops said that two years he was away. One night he came back home, and he said he didn’t know what had happened to Miss Ida, because it had been two years. He went up on his porch where he lived—he owned his home—and knocked on the door. “Who is it?” “It’s Ivory.” The next thing he knew, a hand came out and grabbed him: “Come on in here!” His wife, Ida, was still there. He said he never went away again. Pops opened my mind up to a lot of things. He said that they used to play out at Traction Park; and he said, when “Tuxedo Junction” came out: “That’s Trigg’s song!” “Trigg’s song?” He said, “That boy took that song from Trigg! He used to play that at Traction Park.” Pops told me, and I came to know, that you identified a person by something that he plays: all the older musicians had their own songs. So this fellow Trigg was a trumpet player. You’d hear Ivory “Pops” Williams, 1970s. Courtesy of the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame. 192 chapTer 12 that tune, and you’d know it was Trigg. “That’s Trigg’s song.” He said, “I know it because he played it twenty years ago! That little lick that kicks off ‘Tuxedo Junction’—that was his signature. Where did those boys get that?” Pops said, “Everybody has a song. You got a song, I got a song.” Every player would have their favorite little lick. Like Louis Armstrong: when he started playing a tune, he’d go bup-bup-bup, and you’d know that’s Louis Armstrong. His signature. I had never thought about it, but I started listening: Cootie Williams had a song, all of them had one. I could hear Ben Webster on his saxophone and I could hear Paul Gonsalves, and they were both great players, but there were certain things that each one plays: not only a group of notes or figures that he would play, but his tonality. In fact, I was playing with Haywood Henry once, and he said, “I’m going to get out of...