of such displays. However, he did say that as Prohibition was coming to a close, “the mob began to shift into narcotics sales,” with even more impact on the wider community.29 (In this context, the escapades of Eubie Blake should be noted. His relations with women reflected the degradation of women that flowed from mob-controlled performance venues, as did the relations of others in this environment. Several of his lovers committed suicide as a direct result of their interactions with him, and others were beaten by their spouses, while Blake deplored same-sex coupling. According to an observer, “He hated for show business men, even straight ones, to hug him or kiss him.”)30
According to a biographer of Charlie Parker, Kansas City clubs featured “men in dresses … performing oral sex on other men…. Women had sex with other women. Some puffed cigars with their vaginas, others had sex with animals.”31
This gangster-dominated climate not only shaped patriarchy and degradation. Gene Ramey recalled an era when bandleaders left the musicians they had hired stranded and then bolted with their wages or gambled these dollars away. Or, when the time came to pay musicians, they would receive the equivalent of 50 cents, rather than the $1.50 promised. But even a bandleader like Basie could be cheated by a club owner, as evidenced by a time when he had patches in his pants and holes in his pockets, as he walked the “streets, trying to be a dignified beggar.” One time, Ramey and his fellow musicians had been stranded and were all jammed into one room.
But why did Kansas City, of all places, become a beacon for the new music? Gene Ramey arrived there on August 18, 1932, via the “hobo” route, that is, hitching rides undetected on trains, many of which were headed to this center of stockyards. He also played semi-pro basketball, and the sport was developed—if not invented in essence—in nearby Lawrence, Kansas. It quickly became popular among Negro men who saw this college town as a place to know. Another diversion was the fact, said Ramey, that marijuana grew wild along the highway headed to Omaha.32
Basie may have been bilked by club owners, but the musician Buster Smith asserts that the bandleader was not wholly innocent. He told the rotund pianist, “I don’t think you done me fair about that ‘One O’Clock Jump,’” the signature tune of his band as Basie pleaded, “Don’t sue me.” This was a turnabout in what Smith had thought was a mutually fruitful relationship. “He loved gin and I did too,” said Smith. “We were sipping on gin and I’m griping.” Undeterred, Smith also mentored Kansas City’s own Charlie Parker when the saxophonist turned up in New York City. “He hoboed it there,” said Smith. “He came up and slept in the bed in the daytime and my wife and I slept in the bed at night.”33
IT WAS NOT JUST KANSAS CITY that presented a danger to life and limb. Playing before Euro-American audiences in southern states such as Texas was bound to engender friction too. Once in the 1930s, bandleader Woody Herman was onstage in Texas when he was handed a note demanding that he “stop playing those nigger blues,” a crudity that underscored how bluntly Black artists were barred from profiting from their compositions.34 In the 1930s when the band of King Oliver arrived to play in Texas, one of the musicians recalled that “everyone rushed to see the boys get out of the bus,” but “when the driver put the lights on they were struck dumb because we were colored. We unpacked and went into the hall and started to play but no one came in, so the man giving the dance went out and asked [why] they didn’t come in, they remarked that they didn’t dance to colored music. We were then told to pack up and leave immediately and there were many cars which followed us out of town.”35 Presumably the musicians had not been in violation of a related social norm, that is, it was verboten to be driven by a man defined as “white.”36
Juan Tizol, a Puerto Rican trombonist born in 1900 who played with Ellington, had similar difficult experiences in the Southwest, which cried out for the development of a countervailing force. Once in Dallas, he recalled, “we were getting ready to play and there were a lot of people there and people started looking at me,” probably because he was of a lighter hue than his bandmates. Then he was asked rudely, “’What are you doing playing with those niggers?” At other times, he would be able to fetch food for the band from sites where darker-skinned musicians were banned. “I’d get some food and take it to them,” he said. “I used to do that all the time down South.”37
Further north, bassist turned agent and manager John Levy was performing in Cicero, Illinois, in 1937 when “ten gangsters with their women arrive[d],” and when he sought to depart one of these unsavory characters tapped him with a pistol and said no, he could not leave. Since Levy had become enmeshed in the numbers racket at the tender age of eighteen, he knew it would be unwise to disagree.38 This illicit business was a kind of lottery that generated substantial profits and thereby attracted the ravenous attention of better connected—mostly Italian-American—mobsters.
This mobster influence was particularly resonant near the Canadian border. Before Prohibition was repealed in 1933, gangsters accumulated great wealth by dint of organizing distilleries, manufacturing and selling lightning and corn whiskey. In Detroit, this was the province of the “Purple Gang.” However, in Paradise Valley, where Negroes were proliferating, powerful Black challengers were also flourishing. Formidable barriers prevailed, however, as these entrepreneurs often were ensnared by loan sharks at best and denied capital altogether at worst. It was not unknown for sharks to charge interest rates of 50 percent. One of these challengers, Sunnie Wilson, exhibited the potential of his socioeconomic stratum when he established a school for the Black poor so they could learn how to read and write. His friendships with boxer Joe Louis and Duke Ellington bolstered both to the advantage of their wider community.39
Wilson’s benevolence could not obscure the pervasive gangster influence that afflicted artists. Pianist Duke Anderson forgot to play at a gig for a gangster in Newark. “Right then and there,” he recalled, “I got the worst whippin’ I ever got in my life. They broke my jaw and wrist. Eventually, I went back to playin’ but from then on, I was scared stiff of anyone who looked like a gangster.”40 Anderson may have been “scared stiff” for quite a while since for a fifteen-year period beginning in the late 1920s there was a sprawling neighborhood known as Newark’s “Barbary Coast,” featuring what one scholar termed “high-class pimps, prostitutes, gamblers, numbers bankers and hustlers.” It was anchored by the “Kinney Club at Arlington and Augusta Streets,” Newark’s “version of New York’s infamous Cotton Club” and “one of Newark’s first black nightclubs”—though “three quarters of the customers at the Kinney Club were whites,” many of those being racketeers.
One of the key figures of that dissolute era was Herman Lubinsky, a man despised by Negro musicians since his unscrupulousness rivaled, and perhaps exceeded, that of Glaser and Irving Mills, notorious for bilking Duke Ellington and others. “It spoils my whole day to mention Herman Lubinsky” was the considered comment of musician Al Henderson. He was the “’worst thief in the world. He made millions on us [black musicians] and he wouldn’t pay you nothin.”’ He was a “wily, unethical shark,” according to scholar Barbara Kukla, driven by a passionate “desire to steal their songs and talents for a pittance…. Some musicians contend Lubinsky got them drunk”—later hooked on hard drugs—“then had them sign a contract for a few bucks.” Nate Brown argued with similar passion that “Lubinsky [put] me out of business…. He wanted me to sing the blues but said I didn’t sound Negroid enough.” Thus, one journalist is not far wrong in concluding that “there is no doubt everybody hated Herman Lubinsky.” Lubinsky capitalized on technology as he was a prime mover in installing jukeboxes at local clubs and taverns, which meant huge profits for gangsters like himself who owned and controlled these devices; thus, as Kukla put it, “mobsters either owned the taverns or the owners were so in debt to them they had to take the jukeboxes whether they wanted to or not.”41 It was inevitable that at a certain juncture African Americans would seek to develop their own organized crime factions, and it was virtually inexorable that they would be crushed by their competitors often employing the organs of the state.42
Further south in the “Garden State,” Abe Manley, who also had a hand in the numbers racket and, reputedly, took his poker seriously, administered his far-flung business