History’s great blues cities: New Orleans.

In the brothels of 1890s New Orleans, teenage pianists like Jelly Roll Morton entertained customers with an unnamed blend of ragtime, barrelhouse and honky tonk that later became known as blues and jazz. Any ragtime in the New Orleans air originated in Kentucky or St. Louis; barrelhouse and boogie woogie piano in Texas; and honky tonk in San Francisco. But the addition of brass to string bands – the dance orchestras of their day – was pure New Orleans.

From the mists of time. That’s Buddy Bolden, top, second left

The legendary Buddy Bolden is thought to be the first bandleader to blend ragtime with the rural folk music he’d heard on the plantations, and the first musician to improvise his horn-playing to sound like what we now call blues. This was around 1895 but, unfortunately, whatever recordings there were remain unknown. Driven on by acoustic rhythm guitarists like Charlie Galloway or Jefferson Mumford, bands like Bolden’s instigated the blues that became New Orleans jazz.

They played in dance venues thick with the stench of booze and sweat. So much so, the most famous of these was nicknamed Funky Butt Hall which, incidentally, was one of the first

Louis Armstrong

known mentions of that now common musical term, ‘funk’. Buddy Bolden was the
first in a long line of New Orleans horn greats, immediately followed by Joe
‘King’ Oliver, Bunk Johnson and Louis Armstrong, originally pronounced ‘Lewis’,
according to his mother, “because we weren’t French”.

Oliver, Armstrong, and Louisiana trombonist, Edward ‘Kid’ Ory, would take their New Orleans style of blues to Chicago. Between 1917 and 1923, racial prejudice caused an exodus of New Orleans musicians to New York, Kansas and, mainly, Chicago. In the North, they toned down their wild, primitive New Orleans sound, becoming smoother and more sophisticated, catering for the white audiences who flocked to see them. Eventually, their music lost much of its ‘bluesy’ sound as music headed into the 30s and the swing era. Even earlier than Buddy Bolden in New Orleans was the white drummer, Papa Jack Laine, whose Reliance Brass Band, a marching band, was the first

Jack Laine

to fuse European, Latin and African music. Laing was leading mixed-race bands as early as 1888, despite the Jim Crow racial segregation laws that soured music in New Orleans. Most of America’s early known blues and jazz players got their start with Jack Laine’s band in New Orleans, including Buddy Bolden and the members of the influential New Orleans white ensemble, the Original Dixieland Jass (later Jazz) Band. Louis Armstrong once said most of his early records were by the Original Dixieland Jass/Jazz Band, who almost singly-handedly popularised the word ‘jazz’.

As far as modern blues is concerned, perhaps the most influential of all the early musicians who came out of New Orleans was guitarist Lonnie Johnson. Born in 1899, by the end of World War One, Lonnie was in Europe entertaining Allied troops. He returned to New Orleans in 1919 to find his parents and ten siblings had died in theSpanish Flu epidemic that had swept the world. Generally credited with inventing guitar soloing (in reality this was Kentucky’s Sylvester Weaver, recorded in 1923) Johnson, nevertheless, I believe, is the most influential blues guitar player of all time. He was the first black guitarist to record with a

Lonnie Johnson in his later years

white guitarist, Eddie Lang, often described as the father of jazz guitar. On records released in the USA, Lang was billed as Blind Willie Dunn to disguise his Caucasian race although in Europe he was credited under his own name.