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- 165 Chapter 12 ThE sIlEnT yEArs in the 1940s and 1950s a worldwide awakening of interest in early jazz occurred , with many old players being dragged out of retirement to record (including several who should not have bothered), and a mini-industry grew up among writers anxious to tell the story of the birth of jazz “as it was”—which for the most part meant the story of New Orleans musicians. A few brave souls, such as Sam Charters and Len Kunstadt with their fine book Jazz: A History of the New York Scene, attempted to show that the development of jazz also took place outside of Louisiana and stressed the importance of pioneers such as James Reese Europe and Ford Dabney; but, on the whole, such efforts were cries in the wilderness.1 A few oldtime performers went into print to set the record straight, and one, Perry Bradford, wrote a bitter and vitriolic but highly entertaining, passionate, and occasionally informative book, Born with the Blues. Throughout this period Sweatman maintained a stony silence. The reasons for this were accurately assessed by Kunstadt and Bob Colton in a 1959 Record Research magazine feature on Sweatman: Many may ask why Sweatman has been so reticent, why he has not inundated countless tomes and magazines with his reminiscences of his more-than-sixty years in the music game. Wilbur is really too proud to give a direct answer, but we can read between the lines: he feels that he has been woefully neglected by our jazz authors, and also he has a low opinion of the “folk-lorist” treatment of the history of jazz.2 It is history’s loss that not only Wilbur Sweatman but hundreds of other musicians (some of whom were still performing), who were active in the the silent years 166 earliest days of the development of jazz, were ignored by writers and record producers. Reasons for their neglect were twofold: one, they did not adapt to subsequent trends in jazz development, which stressed the blues content of jazz; and two, they did not fit into the mantra-like view—still widely held—that only black New Orleans musicians were the “true” originators of jazz. Even a musician of the stature of pianist Eubie Blake found the 1950s a tough time, only making rare appearances in the recording studios and spending much of his time in studying music theory. For the majority of jazz fans and record producers, Blake was merely a name from a long-distant past—to the extent that a late-1940s reissue (on John Steiner’s resurrected Paramount label) of a blank-label Emerson test pressing of his 1921 masterpiece “Sounds of Africa” was credited as being performed by “Unknown Rag Pianist”! Probably as a response to the neglect shown by jazz writers toward his pioneering role in the development of ragtime and jazz, Sweatman started to write his autobiography using the vast quantity of material he had amassed over the years and aided by a razor-sharp memory of events and personalities he had known. Len Kunstadt was fortunate enough to be shown the ninety-odd pages of Sweatman’s draft that had been dictated to his secretary, and he enthused in the pages of Record Research about Sweatman’s reminiscences of Scott Joplin, Tony Jackson, Mike Bernard, Jelly Roll Morton, Freddie Keppard, and many, many more. Tucked away in his bedroom, in World War I army kit bags, Sweatman had kept checks paid to musicians, booking details, accounts records, and other important documents. However, after his death all of this material, including the autobiography and unpublished compositions by both Sweatman and Scott Joplin, was scrapped by his daughter, Barbara, who was unaware of their historical importance and value. Thus subsequent generations of jazz and ragtime enthusiasts and researchers have been robbed of what would have been an important firsthand account of a life spanning the most fertile period of African American music history. A car accident in the mid-1950s curtailed Sweatman’s playing career (as well as forcing him to stop smoking and drinking, according to Harrison Smith), but he continued his music publishing business and the handling of musicians’ estates from his office at 1674 Broadway. He and his arranger, the oldtime vaudevillian and multi-instrumentalist Sidney Easton, who had worked with W. C. Handy’s Band as early as 1914, whiled away the time catching up on the gossip from old friends and acquaintances from the days when...

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