WALTER PAGE’S BLUE DEVILS and the legion of other bands barnstorming across the West were referred to as territorial bands in recognition of the vast areas they toured. Based in larger cities, some little more than dusty, over-grown frontier towns scattered across the plains, the bands staked out the western United States into immense territories. Bandleaders vigilantly pro-tected their turf against claim-jumpers. “You had your own territory to play in and you didn’t play anywhere else unless you got permission from the lead-ing band in that territory,” Ed Lewis explained. “Around Oklahoma City, Wichita, Kansas, and places like that, Walter Page’s Blue Devils was the lead-ing band. If Bennie Moten wanted to play dates in that territory, he had to get in touch with Walter Page.”1 Musical gunslingers, they settled territorial dis-putes in the spirit of the Wild West, shooting it out in battles of the bands.
Walter Page boasted, “I cut both George E. Lee and Jesse Stone. . . . I was boss of that territory.”2
During the 1920s and 1930s, well over one hundred bands worked the territories. Bassist Gene Ramey marveled at the number of bands based in Texas alone. “In those days, everywhere you looked there was bands,” Ramey recounted. “There must’ve been eight to ten bands in San Antonio, and we knew four or five in Houston. There must’ve been twenty bands in Dallas and Ft. Worth. . . . So, the bands spread out all over.”3 The bands varied in so-phistication from rugged musical rounders like Gene Coy’s Happy Black Aces, Boots and His Buddies, Ben Smith’s Blue Syncopators, and Edgar Battle’s Dixie Stompers, to sleek full-size orchestras such as the George Morrison Orchestra, the Alphonso Trent Orchestra, Jesse Stone’s Blues Serenaders, Walter Page’s Blue Devils, and T Holder’s Dark Clouds of Joy, which later became Andy Kirk and His Twelve Clouds of Joy. Sweeping across the range,
hell-bent for leather on dusty back roads, the bands played roadhouses, ho-tels, ballrooms, outdoor amusement parks, jitney dances, and in some cases on hastily built stages in open fields illuminated by automobile headlights.
Traveling caravan style in sedans, often with band members hanging on to fenders and doorposts for dear life, the territorial bands ranged north to Min-neapolis and the Dakotas, south to New Orleans, west to Denver, and east to Missouri. The bands deftly navigated the broad musical landscape. In the Dakotas, Nebraska, and other states in the northern leg of the territories ruled by Lawrence Welk, audiences demanded polkas, schottisches, and waltzes, refusing to dance to anything else. The roughnecks crowding the roadhouses strewn across Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas insisted on hoe-downs and stomp-down western style. Fans crowding the dance halls in New Orleans and Kansas City liked their music hot, preferring stomps, breakdowns, gut-bucket blues, and torrid jazz. Band members crafted custom arrangements for specific regions, establishing a tradition of orchestration. “We [the Blue Dev-ils] played waltzes and sweet music up in Saginaw [Michigan], [for] people up there,” alto saxophonist Buster Smith related. “Had some tunes that sounded like Guy Lombardo. Even in South Dakota, they liked sweet music and we had to play a lot of that. I had to write a whole repertoire of music to go along with it.”4 The heft of the multiple band books carried by the Blues Devils’
amazed bandleader Jesse Stone, a prolific composer and arranger in his own right. “They [the Blue Devils] were just sharper, cleaner, more powerful, and they had more material, which was an upset to us because we had five arrang-ers, including myself,” Stone noted. “How could anybody have more material than we had? We had a book about that thick, you know, all arrangements.
These guys came in with three books. Three books the same thickness.”5 Usually operating as “commonwealth bands,” members divided profits evenly after expenses and democratically voted on business decisions. Blue Devils’ vocalist Jimmy Rushing fondly recalled the communal spirit shared among band members. “We weren’t making money, but we were all friends,”
Rushing observed. “If one of the boys needed money—like his wife needed coal or had to pay the gas bill—we’d take the amount necessary out of the gross, give it to him, and send him home and split the leavings among the rest of us. Everybody was paid equal down to the leader.”6 Equally sharing good and bad times inspired fierce loyalty among band members. Count Basie, look-ing back on his career with the Blue Devils, proudly declared, “once a Blue Devil, always a Blue Devil.”7
Kansas City, ripe with plum jobs and immoderate nightlife, became a fa-vored stop on the territorial band circuit. Bennie Moten and George E. Lee, eager to establish their own circuit, readily swapped territories with Walter Page, Andy Kirk, and other bandleaders from the Southwest. This free flow of bands and musicians from the Southwest strengthened and enhanced Kan-sas City’s jazz tradition. The ranks of the Musicians Protective Union Local
627 swelled from 87 members in 1927 to 347 by May 1930.8 Moten and Lee refined and expanded their bands, adding top players from the Southwest.
New arrivals brought solo virtuosity, a tradition of musical arrangement al-lowing for a greater degree of orchestral sophistication along with a rhythmic shift from the 2/4 stomp-down style to a more fluid 4/4 rhythm, enriching Kansas City jazz style.
The influence of the territorial bands on the development of Kansas City Jazz began modestly with the arrival in 1923 of the George Morrison Orches-tra, a precursor to the territorial tradition.9 Hailing from Denver, Colorado, George Morrison fronted a concert band specializing in highly orchestrated popular tunes, classical, spirituals, blues, novelties, and camp songs. Band member Andy Kirk described the Morrison band as “a society band, but they had a beat and for that reason he was the leader in the field. There weren’t many Negroes in Denver then, only six thousand out of a total population of three hundred thousand,” Kirk added. “The best jobs in town were the coun-try club, the city amusement park and private lawn parties when the white people wanted live music for entertainment. We’d play the colored dances too, but there weren’t enough of them to keep you busy all the time.”10 A disciplinarian, Morrison held band members to lofty standards, requiring them to perform every day, for pay or charity. From early on, Morrison’s band spawned a string of polished, disciplined musicians including entertainer and vocalist Hattie McDaniels and future bandleaders Andy Kirk and Jimmie Lunceford.
Originally from Fayette, Missouri, George Morrison grew up in a large musical family.11 His father, the champion fiddler of Howard County, Mis-souri, died when Morrison was two years old. At first reluctant to follow in his father’s footsteps, Morrison shunned the violin in favor of the guitar. As a youth, Morrison studied with his mother, an accomplished pianist while play-ing in the family’s eight-piece strplay-ing orchestra. Just after the turn of the cen-tury, Morrison’s family moved to Boulder, Colorado, nestled on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, thirty miles north of Denver. Morrison sup-ported himself working odd jobs and performing with the Morrison Brothers Band in the rustic mining camps just to the west of Boulder. Tall and stocky with a round face, Morrison switched to violin while studying at the Univer-sity of Colorado. After graduation, he moved to Denver and led a string trio at the elegant Albany Hotel. Popular with the well-heeled set at the Albany, the group grew to eleven pieces during the next year. Branching out, the Morrison band toured regionally.
In 1919, the Morrison band launched a tour of the United States and En-gland. Well-received abroad, the band became one of the first American dance bands to play for English royalty. In 1920, while playing in New York at the Carlton Terrace Ballroom on 100th and Broadway, the Morrison band re-corded “Pip-Pip, Toot-Toot, Goodbye-ee,” “Royal Garden Blues,” and “I
Know Why” for the Columbia label. Working both sides of the street, Morrison recorded two test recordings for the Victor label: “Royal Garden Blues” and “Jean.” Victor declined to issue the tests, but Columbia released “I Know Why” by Morrison’s Jazz Orchestra backed by “Somehow,” featuring popular white bandleader Ted Lewis and his Jazz Band, a rare pairing on disc of an African American and white band.
In 1923, the Morrison band embarked on a second tour, billed as the “Great-est Negro Orch“Great-estra in the World.” The band’s May debut at Lincoln Hall created a stir among Kansas City dance fans, more accustomed to the crude stomp-down blues style of Moten and Lee. In April 1925, the Morrison band returned to Kansas City for an engagement at the Pantages Theater. While in town, Morrison presented a classical music program followed by dance music at the Labor Temple for fans in the 18th and Vine area.12 By popular demand, Morrison performed an encore engagement the following week at the Rialto Theater at 18th and Highland. Hattie McDaniels’s talent and per-sonality boosted the success of Morrison’s 1925 tour. A versatile entertainer with flawless comedic timing, McDaniels’s acclaim with the Morrison band launched her career that swiftly soared from vaudeville to Hollywood.13 Simi-larly, Andy Kirk rose from the ranks of the Morrison band to national acclaim on his own.
Had things worked out differently, Andy Kirk might never have emerged as a bandleader. Tall and dashing, but unassuming, he shunned the limelight and preferred to stay in the background, anchoring the rhythm section on bass horn. Originally from Newport, Kentucky, Kirk moved to Denver as a child to live with his aunt after the death of his mother.14 He learned to read music in grade school, singing in a choir directed by Wilberforce Whiteman, supervisor of music for the Denver school system and father of famed bandleader Paul Whiteman. Pursuing his interest in instrumental music, Kirk bought a tenor saxophone and taught himself how to play. Yearning for a bigger sound, Kirk then mastered the tuba and baritone saxophone.
During World War I, Kirk worked as a mail carrier while moonlighting with the Morrison band. In 1919, he left government service to become a full-time member of the Morrison organization. A jack of all trades, Kirk performed with the full band and led smaller Morrison-sponsored units for casual engagements. During the summer of 1925, Kirk fronted a Morrison auxiliary band at the fashionable Lantern Club in Estes Park, Colorado. Kirk left the Morrison band in early fall 1925, and joined Stewart Hall’s band at the Moonlight Ranch, a roadhouse on the outskirts of Denver. While working at the rough-and-tumble ranch, Kirk came into contact with the jazz bands just beginning to circulate through Denver. “There were a number of musicians who came through Denver on tour with bands like Fred Waring’s Pennsylva-nians, Ben Bernie’s band and those type of outfits, but I didn’t hear any real jazz until Gene Coy and His Happy Black Aces came through,” Kirk revealed.
“They had a real beat and upset the town. From that time on I kept my ear open for music like that. Then Jelly Roll Morton came through as a single and I liked his style. In fact, he influenced me a great deal rhythmically.”15
In 1926, Kirk moved to Chicago accompanied by alto saxophonist Alvin
“Fats” Wall, a fellow former member of the George Morrison Orchestra.
Kirk struggled to establish himself, but only managed to hustle up a few casuals with the Society Syncopators, a local dance band. With time on his hands, Kirk regularly attended the Vendome Theater, in the heart of the “Black Belt” on South State Street, absorbing the sophisticated style of the Erskine Tate Orchestra that featured Earl “Fatha” Hines and Louis Armstrong, fresh from the Dreamland Cafe. Unable to break into the Chicago scene, Wall left for Dallas to join a group being organized by T Holder, a talented trumpet soloist with a big open tone. Kirk shortly followed suit.
Terrence “T” Holder became well known for his ability to quickly assemble a band—a talent born from his unreliability and dubious business practices.
Holder’s financial shenanigans undermined his effectiveness as a leader, and caused his ouster from his own band on several occasions. Balding with a broad smashed nose and lantern jaw, Holder made his professional debut with Ida Cox at the Dreamland Theater in his hometown, Muskogee, Oklahoma.16 Cox’s music director Fletcher Henderson, forced to hastily patch together a band from local musicians, hired Holder sight unseen. Henderson found Holder not up to the task and soon dismissed him. Retreating to the woodshed, an undeterred Holder mastered the basics of music and polished his style.
During the mid-1920s, Holder joined the Alphonso Trent Orchestra, then the leading band in the territories. Based in the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas, the Trent band broadcast nightly over WFAA. With little competition on the airwaves, the broadcasts covered the Midwest as far north as Canada. These pioneering broadcasts, among the first regular broadcasts by an African Ameri-can band, readily established Trent’s reputation throughout the South and Midwest. Holder joined the band at the Adolphus as top soloist and business manager, responsible for distributing the payroll. Band members soon found their trust in Holder misplaced. Shortly after Holder took over as business manager, the owner of the Adolphus gave each band member a $25 a week raise. Instead of passing the money on to the rightful recipients, Holder kept the raise a secret and pocketed the money for his own use. When Holder bought a new Buick, Snub Mosely and other band members became suspi-cious of his sudden wealth. “We told Trent to go down and see what was happening, maybe the man gave us a raise,” Mosley explained. “Sure enough Trent spoke to him [the owner] and said, ‘it was about time for us to have a raise’ . . . and he [the owner] said, ‘I just gave you a raise about four or five months ago.’”17 The incident ended Holder’s job as business manager and prompted his departure from Trent. Having built up a following at the Adolphus, Holder formed his own band.
A booking agent christened Holder’s band the Dark Clouds of Joy, but Andy Kirk recalled the band’s early engagements as anything but heavenly.
“We were working every night in a blood-and-thunder place called the Ozarks,” Kirk divulged. “It was just outside of town, a typical roadhouse, lots of bloody fights every night.” A hard-swinging unit, Holder’s band featured crack soloists. “Outside of Alphonso Trent’s band ours [the Holder band] was the most popular in Texas at that time. We had some terrific men in that band,” Kirk added. “Big Jim [Lawson] and T on trumpets were two of the best jazzmen and the sweetest musicians I ever heard in my life, and when they used to play duets they’d break up any dance. Those two could play the prettiest waltzes too. . . . Eddie Durham’s cousin Allen was on trombone, and we had a terrific alto player, Alvin ‘Fats’ Wall.”18
In 1927, the Dark Clouds of Joy moved to Tulsa and joined the roster of the Southwest Amusement Corporation. The leading booking agency in the territories, Southwest operated the Winter Garden and Spring Lake Park in Oklahoma City, along with the Crystal City Park and Louvre Ballroom in Tulsa. The Dark Clouds of Joy worked steadily year round, switching venues every three months. At the Louvre, the band played for jitney dances, so called because each Friday night the management held a drawing for a new Ford, commonly known as a jitney. Men queued up to pay a nickel a dance, with the women milling around the ballroom. Since the men paid on a per-dance ba-sis, management encouraged the band to perform truncated versions of popular standards, waltzes, and two-steps. Kirk and other band members began writ-ing arrangements to make the music more interestwrit-ing. “Durwrit-ing those years we were just starting to write out arrangements, because playing for jitney dances as we were then, there wasn’t any call for them,” Kirk disclosed. “The idea then was to get the dancers on and off the floor. Two choruses was an arrangement then. To get around that, we’d make up an introduction that served as a bridge for the next chorus following, and we’d always make up a different ending for the same number.”19
With secure, long-term engagements and arrangers on staff to orchestrate the change, Holder expanded the band to full size.20 Vocalist Billy Massey, fair-skinned, dapper, and somewhat contrary, fronted the band, crooning bal-lads in the popular style of the day. Holder recruited Claude Williams, a trim, talented violinist and guitarist from Muskogee with a penchant for gambling.
A steady rhythm player and tireless improviser, Williams preferred the solo spotlight to marking time in the rhythm section. Saxophonist John Williams, who came aboard in late August 1928, brought the reed section up to three members. A dark-skinned, bespectacled rounder, Williams arrived from Mem-phis, where he led his own band that featured his teenage bride Mary Lou, a powerful, gifted pianist, then known as Mary.21 While John checked out the Holder band, Mary Lou stayed behind in Memphis to finish out the band’s commitments. An independent woman, experienced beyond her years, Mary Lou assumed the helm of her husband’s band without missing a beat.
MARY LOU WILLIAMS, the second daughter of an unwed mother, learned to fend for herself as a child growing up in Atlanta.22 During World War I, her family joined the great migration north, moving to Pittsburgh. A child prodigy with instant recall, she learned spirituals, marches, ragtime, blues, and jazz from phonograph records and the player piano in the parlor of her home.
While regularly entertaining at picnics and dances for neighbors and society, she became known as the “little piano girl of East Liberty.”23 Petite with large dreamy eyes, a shy smile and an independent streak, Williams began her pro-fessional career in her early teens, touring on the TOBA circuit with the Buzzin’
“Sparrow” Harris and His Hits and Bits revue. Mary Lou’s future husband, John Williams, joined the Harris Revue in Cincinnati. Confident and persua-sive, Williams wooed the reluctant Mary Lou, eventually winning her over.
John and Mary Lou became stranded in Kansas City in early August 1924, when Hits and Bits folded after wrapping up an engagement at the Lincoln Theater. Eager to get back on the vaudeville circuit, they put together a band and joined a revue led by the dance team of Seymour and Jeanette Jones tour-ing on the Keith-Orpheum wheel. On the road, Mary Lou met many jazz
John and Mary Lou became stranded in Kansas City in early August 1924, when Hits and Bits folded after wrapping up an engagement at the Lincoln Theater. Eager to get back on the vaudeville circuit, they put together a band and joined a revue led by the dance team of Seymour and Jeanette Jones tour-ing on the Keith-Orpheum wheel. On the road, Mary Lou met many jazz