- 209 Notes acknowledgments 1. “Early jazz” is a shorthand term frequently applied to jazz records made prior to the 1923 King Oliver Gennett recordings that featured a classic New Orleans lineup, including a youthful Louis Armstrong. 2. Len Kunstadt and Bob Colton, “In Retrospect: Wilbur Sweatman,” The Black Perspective In Music 16 no. 2 (Fall 1988): 227. introduction 1. Rainer Lotz, Black People: Entertainers of African Descent in Europe and Germany (Bonn, Germany: Birgit Lotz-Verlag, 1997). 2. Lawrence Gushee, Pioneers of Jazz: The Story of The Creole Band (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 3. Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889–1895 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), and Ragged But Right: Black Travelling Shows, “Coon Songs, ” and the Dark Pathway To Blues and Jazz (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007). 4. Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004). 5. Reid Badger, A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). chapter 1 1. Garvin Bushell, as told to Mark Tucker, Jazz From the Beginning (Oxford, UK: Bayou Press, 1988), 18. 2. Perry Bradford, Born with the Blues (New York: Oak Publications, 1965), 114. 3. Chicago Defender, October 17, 1925, 6. 4. Tom Fletcher, 100 Years of the Negro in Show Business (New York: Burdge, 1954), 152. 5. Bradford, Born With The Blues, 93. 6. Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973), 36. 7. Record Research (July 1961): 9. notes 210 8. Record Research 24 (Sept./Oct. 1959): 3. 9. Eubie Blake: Interview with Max Morath, Brooklyn, 1976. 10. Bradford, Born With The Blues, 114–15. chapter 2 1. The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, June 13, 1804. 2. Coleman Sweatman’s birthplace and parental origins are somewhat confused. Although the 1880 Federal census claims that he was born in Missouri ca. 1853 and that his parents originated in Virginia, his 1900 census entry claims that he was born in Kentucky in July 1859 and gives no details of where his parents were born. To complicate matters further, his 1880 census entry omits his forename! 3. Eubie Blake: Interview with Max Morath, Brooklyn, 1976. 4. Sol Smith Russell (1848–1902) was a well-known comic actor from the 1870s to 1890s. During the Civil War he served as a drummer boy in the Union army. After touring the Midwest he went to New York in 1871 and in 1874 became a member of actor-manager John Augustin Daly’s celebrated company, and toured with them throughout the United States and Europe. 5. Record Research 24 (Sept.-Oct. 1959): 3. 6. Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis, They All Played Ragtime: The True Story of an American Music (1950) (London, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1958), 149–50. 7. New York Tribune, August 20, 1893, quoted in Abbott and Seroff, Out of Sight, 287. 8. For more details of the Dahomean Village see Abbott and Seroff, Out of Sight, 285– 87, 289–92. chapter 3 1. Notable exceptions include the late Marshall Stearns’s pioneering book on the history of dancing to jazz, Jazz Dance, and, more recently, German author and researcher Rainer Lotz’s research into black performers in Europe and Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff’s two books on pre-jazz African American entertainment, Out of Sight and Ragged But Right). 2. “The Honey-suckle and the Bee,” Gramophone Concert Record G.C.-3273; “The Rainbow Coon (My Rainbow Coon*),” Gramophone Concert Record GC-3278, Zonophone X-43029*; “The Honeysuckle and the Bee,” Berliner 3244; “Just Because She Made Dem Goo-Goo Eyes,” Berliner 3245. 3. A detailed essay on the career of Belle Davis, along with a CD including her performance of “The Honeysuckle and the Bee,” can be found in Lotz, Black People, 65–87. 4. Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (1968; rpt. New York: Schirmer, 1979), 83. 5. “Mr. Sweatman is a native of Kansas City, MO, and began his musical career with the Original Smith Famous Pick Band.” Indianapolis Freeman, January 29, 1910. Also reported in “At The Chicago Theaters.” Indianapolis Freeman, October 8, 1910. 6. For an overview of Smith’s career, with particular emphasis on his Chicago years, [44.221.46.132] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:53 GMT) notes 211 readers are directed to “Major N. Clark...