Books: February 19, 1997
What They Did for Music
Two books look at the ups and downs of life as a jazz artist
Blue Rhythms: Six Lives in Rhythm and Blues
Chip Deffaa '73
University of Illinois Press, $29.95
Jazz Veterans: A Portrait Gallery
Text by Chip Deffaa '73
Photographs by Nancy Miller Elliott and John and Andreas Johnsen
Cypress House, $44.95
The story of rhythm and blues told by Chip Deffaa '73 and the six artists he interviews in Blue Rhythms is largely about being African-American in the 15 years after World War II. Though it is a story of considerable creativity and achievement, it is also one of humiliation and pain.
Each artist catalogues a personal variation on this theme. Getting a meal or finding a place to stay or even a rest room was a continual problem. Record companies often cut artists out of royalties, either by paying a low, flat recording fee, or by misreporting record sales and charging various recording costs to the artists' accounts.
Meanwhile, disk jockeys maintained the racial divisions of pop music by refusing to play music cut originally by black artists, while pushing copies of the same material "covered" by white artists. A notorious instance was the imitation by white pop singer Georgia Gibbs of LaVern Baker's hit "Tweedlee Dee." Writes Deffaa, "Gibbs's version followed the original so closely that her voice almost seemed to have been overdubbed onto Baker's Atlantic recording." Baker's "Tweedlee Dee" rose to number 14 on the pop charts, almost unprecedented for a rhythm and blues artist. But, pushed by white disk jockeys, Gibbs's clone rose to number two and stayed on the charts 19 weeks, having arrived there just two weeks after Baker's original.
The term rhythm and blues was itself a euphemism for race music, a category that included jazz, blues, and gospel marketed primarily to African-Americans.
The separatism embodied in such marketing mirrored the era's segregated society, but it did not reflect the reality of American music. As Deffaa points out, the music of whites and the music of blacks have always influenced, and been assimilated by, each other.
The artists profiled in Blue Rhythms list as their influences African-American forerunners such as Bessie Smith, Paul Robeson, and Ethel Waters. But Ruth Brown also cites white artists such as the Andrews Sisters, Hank Williams, Glenn Miller, and Vaughn Monroe. Little Jimmy Scott names Bing Crosby as his original idol, and LaVern Baker recalls her long friendship with the white pop singer Johnnie Ray, whom she coached in the style of Al Jolson. "That Baker, who is black, would be teaching Ray about Jolson, who was white, is a reminder that the issue of black performers influencing whites and vice versa is more complex than many writers have suggested. Influences go both ways," Deffaa writes.
Deffaa writes with compassion and profound respect for his subjects born of an obvious and long-standing love for their music. The six lives are not extraordinary, except as they have been lived onstage and in the public eye. For this reason, perhaps, there is a certain narrative flatness to the book, and a few stretches of the transcribed interviews could have used more judicious pruning.
Happily, the careers of most of the artists profiled have been on the upswing of late, in some cases after they had temporarily abandoned music for other occupations. Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker have enjoyed successful runs in the Broadway show Black and Blue. Little Jimmy Scott has signed a five-album contract with Warner Brothers Records. Floyd Dixon has a fan club and makes significant club and festival appearances.
Deffaa has also written the text for Jazz Veterans: A Portrait Gallery. The admirable thing about this book is the exposure it gives to under-recognized stylists, including Jabbo Smith, Vic Dickenson, and Wild Bill Davison. These are jazz players who have achieved what every jazz musician aspires to but few realize-a unique, instrumental voice-but who for various reasons remain in the shadows of more famous luminaries.
There is some good material here, but this book is, on the whole, not as well conceived as Blue Rhythms. More than a hundred artists are featured, but the accompanying photos seem haphazardly chosen and are often just snapshots.
The text is uneven, sometimes treating an artist's career in a comprehensive way but at other times indulging in the author's personal reminiscences, which aren't always germane or illuminating.
Included is a fine, poignant portrait by Nancy Miller Elliott of the elderly Sandy Williams, though taken at a time when Williams had long since ceased playing the trombone. But the picture of Jo Jones, the great drummer from the Count Basie band of the '30s and '40s, shows a grizzled, melancholy man near the end of his life. "By the time this photo was taken," Deffaa writes, "Jones wasn't working much anymore; he had gotten a reputation for being less than reliable, and even old friends were reluctant to risk hiring him." Why represent such an artist this way?
-Tom Artin '60 *68
Tom Artin makes his living as a jazz trombonist. He is the author of Earth Talk: Independent Voices on the Environment and The Allegory of Adventure, and the translator of Deng Xiaoping, Mindworks, and Geometry in Nature.
A Cousin Remembers Jackie
Jacqueline Bouvier:
An Intimate Memoir
John H. Davis '51
John Wiley & Sons, $24.95
John H. Davis '51 was born June 14, 1929, six weeks before his first cousin Jacqueline Lee Bouvier. All during their childhood the two spent summers together on their grandfather's estate in East Hampton, Long Island, along with the other grandchildren of John Vernou Bouvier. Now Davis has written his memories of the little Jacqueline he knew.
At Lasata, Grampy Jack's estate, the gardens were extensive and the lifestyle lavish. On special occasions the chauffeur cranked the ice-cream freezer to make peach ice cream that was served with chocolate sauce. The Bouvier cousins "imbibed [Lasata's] beauty for 15 years, and it formed our visual taste for the rest of our lives," Davis writes, and it "certainly contributed not a little to Jacqueline's celebrated sense of style."
Jackie's lessons in horseback riding began before she was three years old; she was soon winning ribbons in the Long Island horse shows and, by the time she was seven, in Madison Square Garden. Davis attributes her obsession with horses to her unhappy home life, made unendurable by the philandering of her father, Jack Bouvier, and her mother's bad temper. Janet Bouvier slapped and screamed at her daughters. Jackie's cousins teased her about her parents' fights, which took place everywhere, from the family cabana at the Maidstone Club to the riding ring at Lasata.
In 1936, when Jackie was seven, her parents separated; they later divorced. In spite of problems at home, Jackie continued to excel on horseback, and at ballet, and to make all A's. She was clearly the star of the Bouvier grandchildren, the favorite of her grandfather as well as her father.
After the divorce, Davis writes, Jack Bouvier's feelings for Jackie betrayed "a father's love for his daughter, the likes of which I have never witnessed in America." At Bouvier family gatherings "it was almost embarrassing to hear Jack extol Jacqueline's qualities." Davis hints at incestuous feelings, then draws back. But Jackie was Daddy's girl, and she admired him immensely.
Her outwardly golden life went on as she progressed through the Chapin School and Miss Porter's, as Debutante of the Year in 1947, and at Vassar.
Jackie hated Vassar, Davis says, and every weekend fled to New York, Washington, Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, where she occasionally visited Davis. Soon after she finished college (at Georgetown) she met a rich, young congressman named John Kennedy. The Bouvier family fortunes had declined precipitously, and friend and foe alike agree that Jackie wanted money badly.
Davis did not see much of Jackie after the "wedding of the year" in 1953. Confirmed Jackie-watchers will devour Davis's details about her early life.
-Ann Waldron
Books Received
The Burning Green (poetry)
John McKenna '57 and Nancy McKenna
Wipf & Stock Publishers, 790 E. 11th Ave., Eugene, OR 97407. $12 paper
Wagner's Ring: A Listener's
Companion & Concordance
J.K. Holman '66
Amadeus Press, 133 S.W. Second Ave., Suite 450, Portland, OR 97204-3527. $34.95
The Roses of Pieria (poetry)
Gordon Walmsley '71 and Grethe Bagge
Orders to Rhodos International Science and Art Publishers, Strandgade 36, DK-1401 Copenhagen, Denmark. $26 paper
The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century
Hal Foster '77 (art and
archaeology professor)
The MIT Press, $17.50 paper
Proversity: Getting Past Face Value and Finding the Soul of People
Lawrence Otis Graham '83
John Wiley & Sons, $19.95
Dreams, Sufism & Sainthood:
The Visionary Career of
Muhammad al-Zawâwî
Jonathan G. Katz *90
E.J.Brill, $103.25
Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1787-1799
Laura Mason *90
Cornell University Press, $39.95
Race Versus Class: The New Affirmative Action Debate
Carol M. Swain (associate professor of politics and public affairs), ed.
University Press of America, $29 paper