King Bolden and the earliest known African-American guitarists

UPDATED September 7, 2021.

BLUESMUSE29.

Until the 1890s, when mail order catalogues made them more affordable and improved roads and rail links made musical instruments more accessible, guitars were mainly a preserve of the American middle classes.

Most were much smaller than the guitars we know today, probably because they were mostly played by women. Perhaps that’s why they were (and still are) known as parlour or parlour guitars, because women played them to entertain guests, usually in the parlour. Even so, parlour guitars were also the guitars most early African-American players used in the days before their folk music became known as blues.

Buddy Bolden band c. 1903. That’s Jefferson Mumford on guitar.

But, as mentioned, very few African Americans could afford such instruments. Two exceptions could be found on the streets of New Orleans in the 1880s. Both guitarists were working barbers, the fall-back career of so many musicians in those early days. The ground-breaking guitar pair was Charlie Galloway, born in New Orleans around 1863,and Jefferson Mumford, born in the Crescent City in 1870. What style of music they played around 1885 is debatable but, by the 1890s, both were known to be working in New Orleans playing ragtime, blues’ direct forerunner.

Charlie Galloway, the elder of of the pair, was leading an African-American string band around 1895 when he decided to spice things up by adding a line of brass – an innovative step that inadvertently helped give birth to jazz. One of his new black recruits was a 19-year fellow Charlie, and yet another barber, a cornet player called Charlie Bolden. Young ‘Kid’ Bolden, nicknamed Buddy, proved so innovative and inspirational, he soon took over leadership of Galloway’s band. After changing its name to the Buddy Bolden band, it became the hottest outfit in New Orleans. Not that guitarist Charlie Galloway was forced out. He still had an important part to play. With guitar amplifiers not invented until the 1930s, it was then impossible for acoustic guitars to be heard over the rest of the band. What acoustic guitars could do, however, was lay down a solid rhythmic foundation over which the horns could improvise. And so, the chord-strumming rhythm guitarist was born, a feature still with us today. Explained, author Harry O. Brun in his 1960 book, The Story of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.

“It was he (the guitarist) who would shout out the chord changes on unfamiliar melodies or on modulations to a different key. It was through this frequent ‘calling out’ of chords by the guitarist that many New Orleans musicians of that day, otherwise totally ignorant of written music, came to recognize their chords by letter and number; and though they could not read music, they always knew the key in which they were playing.”

Charlie Galloway would eventually be replaced by that other guitarist from the 1880s, Jefferson Mumford, who was with Bolden during the glory years from 1897 to about 1905 when Kid Bolden got upgraded to King Bolden. As students of jazz and blues will know, Buddy Bolden was the rock star of his day, one of the first known to overindulge on booze, women, sex and drugs; and also the first musician known to go into a trance when playing. Aged just 29, he was committed to an insane asylum in 1907 where he died in 1931, unheralded and unrecorded.

On a more academic note, Wikipedia reports that Bolden is also credited with discovering or even inventing the so-called ‘Big Four’, a key rhythmic innovation on the marching band beat, which gave embryonic blues and jazz musicians much more room for individual improvisation. As the renowned New Orleans trumpeter, Wynton Marsalis, explains, “the Big Four was the first syncopated bass drum pattern to deviate from the standard on-the-beat march. The second half of the Big Four is the pattern commonly known as the habanera rhythm, one of the most basic rhythmic cellsin Afro-Latin and sub-Saharan African music”.

Remembered Duke Ellington in the 1950s, “Buddy Bolden was a suave, handsome and a debonair cat who the ladies loved. He had the biggest, fattest trumpet sound in town. He bent notes to the nth degree. He used to tune up in New Orleans and break glasses in Algiers.”

Another influential New Orleans figure in early ragtime, blues and jazz, Jelly Roll Morton, later immortalised Buddy Bolden in song. Jelly Roll wrote the song, ‘I Thought I heard Buddy Bolden Say’, as a fox trot in 1939; but it has always been known as ‘Buddy Bolden’s Blues’.You might recognise the track from Hugh Laurie’s 2011 album of New Orleans blues classics, ‘Let Them Talk’.

Find my untold history of the blues, America’s Gift in the USA at goo.gl/At5AZe

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