Pioneers of the Blues Revival

Pete Whelan

PeteWhelan Interview I was born in New York City, May 17th, 1929. My father was an ex-millionaire’s son. They had lost their money in the crash of ’29. My mother was a budding painter. She studied at the Sorbonne and fell in love with a Russian count who was a cab driver, and her parents dragged her away from Paris and brought her back to Lock Haven, Pennsylvania . My parents met at a Florida resort. It was sort of a golf resort for the well-to-do. Where did you go to school? Well, I got thrown out of a Catholic boarding school at the age of twelve. But then I went to a school in New Hope, Pennsylvania, called Solebury School, which was a great school. Among the former graduates of Solebury was the jazz biographer and critic Fred Ramsey Junior. He was the editor of the first American book on jazz, called Jazzmen, and it included people like Bill Russell, who was a specialist in New Orleans jazz—no blues! Blues was not considered legitimate when that book was published in 1939. There were jazz collectors, but there were no blues collectors. Did you have any personal contact with Ramsey at all? When I was fourteen or fifteen I used to see him bicycling down the streets of New Hope. He used to live in that area. But he was sort of formidable looking; he was about six foot three and sort of a giant in a way. So I never was able to approach him, but later on, in the 1990s I did an interview with him for 78 Quarterly. At that point he was developing Alzheimer’s disease. I think he was in his mid- to late seventies at the time. He was very angry but kind of fascinating. He did have some information on the first jazzman in New Orleans, Buddy Pete Whelan. Courtesy Pete Whelan. 50 pete whel an Bolden, that had never been published before. I put all that in the interview in 78 Quarterly. He died shortlyafterthatofAlzheimer’s.He was writing a book about Buddy Bolden, but apparently he wasn’t. Did you have any reason to look up to him when you were a child at school? Oh, yeah! When I was fourteen I was subscribing to the Record Changer; everything about jazz seemed to appear in the Record Changer. There were columnists and Fred Ramsey had an occasional article. There were reviews by semi-famous critics, who were very impressive. But they didn’t review blues records; it was just jazz. How did you first begin to take an interest in music? Well, I began when I was eleven years old with the trumpet, and my way into blues came by way of jazz. I was basically interested in black New Orleans jazz and the later Chicago jazz of the 1920s, where it sort of reached its golden age under people like Johnny Dodds and Freddy Keppard and a bunch of others. But still, there was very little mention of blues; it wasn’t collected. In fact, there was one jazz collector, long since dead, who came across three complete runs of Paramount—that’s the great label. He wrote me and said that each big group of Paramounts he came across, he picked out all the jazz and left the blues behind. [laughs] The blues would have included people like Charley Patton, Son House, Skip James, Tommy Johnson, and all the great singers, most of them were on Paramount, so they were all left behind and probably dumped in the trash. And this went on for three different places! His name was Bill Love and he lived in Tennessee. What notable jazz players were out on Paramount? There was an earlier period. Now, the jazz run—I’m calling it a jazz run—was from around 1923 to about 1927, ’28, at which point Paramount recorded blues singers and very little jazz. But it was the other way around from that 1923 to 1928 period. Any blues that existed were from vaudeville, so-called vaudeville blues singers such as Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, and so on. So you might have trumpet players like Tommy Ladnier or Dewey Jackson? Ladnier, yes! Of course, Johnny Dodds, a great clarinetist, was on an awful lot of those jazz Paramounts, usually led by a female piano player named Lovie Austin. There were really standouts like Freddy Keppard’s Jazz Cardinals doing...