Traveling Jazz Musicians and Debt Peonage

April 16, 1937. Chester Jones sat in a jail cell in Ruston, Louisiana, with his brothers Morgan and Charles, writing a letter to his mother in Birmingham, Alabama: "Dear Mother, We are here in the County jail an can't get out. The man called up and had us stopped so we been here in Jail since Monday. Morgan is still sick. They got us charged with steeling a horn and horn's is bull but the man got it out of pawn so when we left we took with us so that's what we are in here for."¹ "The man" was Dewey Helms, Chester's former employer in El Dorado, Arkansas. From Chester's point of view the only thing that could save him and his brothers would be if their mother convinced Mr. Hines, a white landowner associated with the Jones family, to "get in his car and come." "So see if you can get Mr. Hines to come get us. We can't do a thing. It no use trying to do anything unless he come after us," Chester pleaded.² Their mother did alert their white acquaintance, who in turn notified the FBI.

The letters from the brothers and the perspectives of Helms and the sheriff are all preserved in an FBI file. What emerges from this record is a time line of events that led to the brothers' captivity. Sometime in 1935 the Jones brothers left their home in Birmingham to find work as musicians. They met Helms and began performing in his nightclub in El Dorado, Arkansas. Slowly, Helms initiated the brothers into debt peonage by giving them advances on their pay. He bought their car from them but never paid them the full amount. When they required more money or talked of quitting, he reminded them of their debt. They began to pawn their instruments and other belongings. Helms claimed the instruments from the pawnbroker by explaining that the brothers owed him money. He instructed the broker to no longer do business with the Jones family. The brothers, in poor health and starving, tried to escape from Helms, who responded by filing charges against them. With a bench warrant out for their arrest, they were picked up by the sheriff and held until Helms arrived to claim them.

Charles summed up the situation in his own letter to their mother by writing, "The same man who put us in got us out and we gave him our tickets"—referring to their train tickets, which Helms claimed to pay a portion of the brothers' jail fines—"and he put the rest so as soon as we pay him back we are coming home now mother dont be worried for we are alright now. he knew that if we left he would not have nobody to play for him I am writing to keep you from worring about us." Charles justified the events by saying, "I guess every body got to have bad luck and I guess this is ours." His postscript suggested his frustration and possibly his anger about the situation: "We did not have no tril and they did not take our mane in Jail."³ The Louisiana sheriff was only too happy to release the brothers to Helms because he was the one who had brought the charge of grand theft against them. Also, he told the sheriff that his only intention was to have the three African American brothers work off their debt to him by playing jazz in his club, which seemed like a reasonable plan to the sheriff.

There in the Ruston, Louisiana, jail cell were three brothers, musicians all, who never made a recording or shaped American music culture. What they did do was experience the full brunt of white power. Yet their two years in debt peonage in the twentieth century appear to have no place in recent scholarship on musicians and musicianship. A review of this literature and a discussion of research methods are essential so that we can better understand how musicians like the Jones brothers expand our understanding of African...