Saxophonist Gene Walker on The Beatles 1966 Tour

By John Fraim


While working with Chris Columbo, his friend King Curtis (Curtis Ousley) called saxophonist Gene Walker about going on a tour in August, 1965. They would be backing Brenda Holloway and Cannibal and the Headhunters and the Disco Dancers. And, they would be opening for this group from England with the unlikely name The Beatles. A phenomenon known as “Beatlemania” was infecting America.

Gene found the great saxophonist Jimmy Heath available to substitute for him in the Columbo Quintet and he flew to New York for the first performance of the tour at Shea Stadium on August 15. It was the first rock concert to be held at a major outdoor stadium and set records for both attendance and revenue with over 55,000 in attendance and $304,000 in revenue. At the time, it was the greatest gross in the history of show business.

The Beatles were transported to the roof of the World’s Fair by a Boeing Vertol 107-II helicopter and then taken by armored truck to the stadium. At the stadium there were 2,000 security personnel for crowd control. Beatlemania was at its highest mark at the Shea Concert and many teenagers and women were crying, screaming, and even fainting.

After the opening acts of Cannibal and the Headhunters, Brenda Holloway and the Disco Dancers, the King Curtis Band with Curtis and Gene on saxophones, went on stage as the intensity and noise level of the crowd rose higher and higher. They played their popular song of the time Soul Twist and a number of other songs before the Beatles took the stage. When they left the stage Gene watched the stage from the baseball dugout with another English group called The Rolling Stones. Like the Beatles, it was also their first trip to America. The crowd noise was so great that security guards covered their ears when the The Beatles entered the field. The sound was so deafening that even The Beatles could not hear much of anything.

The Vox Company that made the Beatles amplifiers had specially designed 100 watt amplifiers for this tour but they were not anywhere near loud enough and the Beatles had to use the house amplification system. John Lennon described the noise as “wild” and even more deafening when the Beatles performed. Not being able to hear each other or even themselves, the Beatles just played through a list of songs nervously, not knowing what kind of sound was being produced.

At the end of the show, during the number I’m Down, John Lennon felt the whole show was so ridiculous, he began playing the keyboard with his elbows while the rest of the group laughed hysterically. The Beatles section of the concert was extremely short by modern standards (just 30 minutes), but was the typical 1965 Beatles tour set list, with Ringo opting to sing Act Naturally instead of I Want To Hold Your Hand.

After Shea Staudim, Gene and King Curtis toured with the Beatles to Toronto, Atlanta, Houston, Chicago, Bloomington, Portland, San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Gene recalls that the girls were going crazy for the Beatles. In Toronto, Gene recalls that a number of girls were lying on the floor and the Red Cross was trying to revive them.

In Los Angeles he recalls, “We had a couple girls swim through the water at the Hollywood Bowl. They got up onstage and each grabbed a Beatle.” The sound at the Hollywood Bowl was literally deafening for Gene. “When all the girls would scream,” Gene recalls, “it was a paralyzing sound and I got nailed by it in the Hollywood Bowl.” Later, he went to an ear doctor and was told he lost some of his hearing at the same decimal of the crowd noise.

After the show at the Hollywood Bowl, Gene went over to the Whiskey A-Go-Go on Sunset Strip with King Curtis and the two of them played while standing on top of the booths in the club. On board the chartered tour jet, Gene became friends with Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney. He was impressed by McCartney’s musical genius. As he recalls, Lennon and Harrison would be struggling with an arrangement and McCartney would walk up and say, “Do it like this,” suggesting a couple chord changes that would solve the problem. When they were on the tour jet, King Curtis and Beatles Manager Brian Epstein, shot craps at a gambling table installed on the plane. King Curtis won a lot of money from Epstein.

On their trip up to Portland, two good friends of the Beatles were on the jet, Billy Preston and Joan Baez. While flying into Portland, one engine caught fire and there was a real concern about whether they could clear the surrounding mountains. When they finally touched down amid fire trucks and emergency vehicles, Gene recalls Brian Epstein pleading with everyone to “Let the boys off first.”

Interview With Bruce Woody, bassist

When my family came to Columbus, I went to Champion Junior High School, along with my sister, Mary Williams. I took violin lessons during those days. I fell for the magic of Stomp Gordon when we were in a Downtown juvenile detention center; that’s where they sent kids for fighting. Stomp and I wrestled together there and we had a man who coached us. I got out of the center first and, one day when Stomp was driving around town in an old Desoto, he saw me. The car was painted with Stomp’s musical advertising; you had to do that during those days.

I told him that I had been messing around with the guitar and he said, “If you get a bass, you can make seventy-five dollars a week playing.” That caught my ear really quickly so I set about finding a bass and, although I don’t remember where I found one, I remember that it was a good one; it just needed to be set up properly.

Before I went out on the road with Stomp, I played with a pair of dancers named Silk and Satin; the male dancer’s name was Claude Grant. My next job was on the road with Ida Clark and the Darktown Scandals; she made famous the song Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues. She had a bunch of teenagers in the band and we got no money; only five or ten dollars every once in a while.

One person on the show, a tremendous tap dancer named Ground Hog, should be documented. When he wasn’t dancing, he was the drummer and I didn’t know anything about playing bass, so he guided and kept me together. He was an African and he had one bad eye that seemed to wander. I was on tour with Ida Clark for three months and it seemed a very long time.

When I got home Stomp was ready for a bassist. On our first gig, we went to a popular spot in Dayton that all the musicians played (Note: According to Lester Bass, also a bassist, the likely spot was called Farm Dell, a barn located on Ruth Avenue, owned by the McLin Family, several generations of funeral directors and politicians. The business was a country club for active democrats and Elks Lodge members. The entertainers and bands included the top names in the business; Dizzy Gillespie, Paul Gaiden, Tiny Bradshaw, Lucky Milender, Buddy Johnson and Snookem Russell).

Some of our publicity photos have us pictured in tiger skin coats and we would even wear those things in July and August. They were really heavy and I would sweat and soak that coat so much that you could put a cigarette out on it and it wouldn’t burn.

I left Stomp Gordon’s Band because of misunderstandings that I don’t want to discuss; I just want to remember the good times, because we had so much fun. And the women.....! I met a woman named Marion in Minnesota and she was so good to me that I stayed in Minneapolis and the band went on, ending up in Anchorage, where he met Billie Holiday (December, 1954).

I got a call from Stomp from Green Bay, Wisconsin, as they were working their way back to Columbus. I remember it being at a time when snow on the ground was up to my waist; I had never seen anything like it before. His bass player wasn’t familiar with the show, so he asked me to come and join them.

That engagement was star time for me; I wasn’t really a bass player, I was a clown. I walked in and, since I knew all the material, I tore the place up. I walked around for a couple of weeks with my chest stuck out, but eventually it caught up to me and my ego got deflated. I remember the girls in Green Bay.

I eventually married and the settled, slowed down lifestyle was the best thing for me. I married a woman with children, and a daughter that I had with a relationship in Florida, eventually found me and became a good part of my life. I have a granddaughter that I enjoy.

The place that we made our name in Columbus was called the Musical Bar on Parsons Avenue in the Southend.

Note: Bruce Woody passed away June 19, 2008.

Edith Clark, pianist, Flytown resident

Edith Clark was a pianist and singer who I met once in the 1980s, doing a stint at the legendary piano bar called the Dell, on Parsons Avenue. I found her photo in the archives of the Columbus Call-Post, a Cleveland based Black newspaper chain that continues to serve Ohioans.  



I interned at the Call-Post in the early eighties and a book that Edith had written came into my possession, through my friend and fellow journalist Charles Briggs. In The Way, The Gifts and The Power, published in 1971 by New York's Vantage Press, Inc., Edith created an autobiographical character named Isobel Grant, who grew up in a community in Columbus called Flytown. Now known as the Arena District, the area was also the community where musicians Hank Marr and Ronnie Kirk, as well as Edith, grew up in the twenties and thirties.



Here is the narrative that begins on page thirty-six of The Way, The Gifts and The Power, describing the community in the 1920s;



"Flytown was a community singular unto itself. It nestled around the Ohio State Penitentiary, a stones throw from where the Olentangy and Scioto Rivers merge, a hop, skip and jump from the geographical center of Columbus. Bordering Long Street on the south, Flytown meandered along the edge of Front Street past Naughten, Maple and Vine, crossed the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks at Spruce, skirted down Goodale Street past the park, followed the street car line past Neil Avenue, cut through Henry Street to Buttles, then up to an undefined line which eventually ended at the Olentangy River to the West.



A railroad spur track ran behind Michigan Avenue to serve the many factories which lined the river; the Indianapolis Paper Stock Company, the Pipe factory, the Wire Works. The factory that made molds edged a big vacant lot where my father, Carl, and his cronies played baseball for barrels of beer. 

Past the mold company there was a small open field where the kids played and men kept their dump wagons. There was the Paste factory, the Piano company, the Vault company, the derrick makers, the stove factory, and on up towards First Avenue, the Oleo makers and the beer company. On Michigan Avenue, proper, there stretched the lumber company.



Carl was working for the Power and Light Company downtown when he mashed his thumb on the job and, taking pride in his male invincibility, ignored the soreness until it festered into gangrene and he lost part of his left arm, almost up to the elbow, in order to save himself from dying due to blood poisoning. 

With the money that he received as compensation for the lost of a limb, Carl and Reba, my mother, paid cash for a house further down Michigan Avenue.

By this time the bootlegging and highjacking Italians were becoming affluent enough to leave Flytown and move across the river into a newly developed suburb which began at Goodale Street. Our family was the first colored family on that block. Reba took great pride in jerking the "For Sale" sign as a symbol of an answer to some White neighbor who called to inform them that the house was not for rent; it was for sale.



Carnivals and medicine shows often set up on the baseball field on the corner of Poplar and Michigan in the summer time and the neighborhood reveled in the novelty of the show put on by the medicine man. The Godman Guild was the heart, the hub, the center around which revolved the community of Flytown. It taught the residents laws and ordinances, showed them the way wherein they must walk and brought their causes to the rulers of the city.



Long before the nation would be confronted with the same problem, the Godman Guild met and found solutions, faced squarely and honestly the needs of the neighborhood and welded the transplanted souls into a solid acknowledgment of pride in themselves and their community. The pillars of society of Flytown were as high-minded and respectable, virtuous and God-fearing as any people in any neighborhood; for their children they had the same goals as any human being in the nation."



Thanks to Edith Clark, we have a glimpse of Flytown, a community that ceased to exist in the 1960s when urban renewal and highway construction brought progress to the near Northside of Columbus.

Interview with Bobby Alston, trumpeter

I’m a third generation trumpeter, born in 1945 and my father, Bunky Alston, gave me the horn when I was three. I played in school orchestras, junior and senior high school. I was about fourteen when I started in Raleigh Randolph’s band. I had to join Local 589 because Raleigh was the union secretary and I wasn’t supposed to be playing but I got a job.

My dad played trumpet at all of the joints with Percy Lowery’s Orchestra in the 1930s; he started when he was three or four. My grandfather worked on the railroad and the roundhouse was at Twentieth Street and Leonard Ave. The quickest way home was through the alleys and he found a trumpet in a trash can.

Grandad had six kids, three boys and three girls, and he told the boys, “Whoever can play it can have it.” My Uncle Harvey was the oldest, he got the first shot at it, Uncle Cory tried it but couldn't play it. My dad picked it up and got a sound out of it and never put it down.

In the 1930s and 40s, he was playing a similar style to Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge and later, Dizzy Gillespie. Louis got upset because my dad had a gravely voice and did all of his songs. Louis later became friends with my dad.

My father was the number one trumpeter in Columbus and during those days there was someone in Columbus on every instrument that no one in New York could mess with. There was someone here during the thirties who could handle anything you brought in from anywhere. Musicians were a dime a dozen; there used to be a lot of competition and your reputation would be at stake every time you hit the band stand.

The first real group I was in was the House Rockers or the Wallace Brothers and it was ten pieces, five pieces of rhythm and five singers. I was with them for three years, then I hit the streets and was with the Sheraton Hotel circuit.

The first time I met Rahsaan Kirk was at the Jazz Workshop in Boston in 1965 and we stayed friends until he died; he came to see me a week before his passing in December, 1977. He knew he was going to die so he had some inspirational things that he wanted to say about keeping the faith.

He was passing his mantle on to cats that he knew. And in 1973 we had a set for him at Club 905 with Don Patterson on organ and Darrell Redmond on drums.

I was in Ted Turner’s East High School Band in the early 1960s. We had Fred Thomas, drums, Lee Savory, trumpet, Nate Fitzgerald, tenor saxophone, Craig McMullins, guitar. That band won the Ohio State championship in 1963 and we traveled the state giving clinics and showing bands how we won.

We were doing Quincy Jones arrangements and I was student director of the band. I was leaning towards Gerald Wilson’s compositions that were very modern. We had a group that would meet at the Beatty Center as a jazz club and that’s when I met pianist Bobby Pierce.

During the time I was at East High School I won two scholarships to the National Stage Band Clinic in East Lansing, Michigan, a summer camp for musicians and Stan Kenton was the founder of it. I got a chance to study with Donald Byrd, Louis Gasca and Marvin Stamm. I learned a lot about playing the instrument from Marvin Stamm, who was a senior at North Texas State.

Back in Columbus I hung out at Mellman’s Club 502 on Leonard Avenue and I saw Horace Silver, Chico Hamilton and Cannonball Adderley. When you went to the top jazz club in town you put on your best three piece suit to go to the 502, the Club Regal or Club Cadillac. The music was right and people looked their best.

I was too young to go into those places but my uncle Harvey Alston was the top black policeman in Columbus and as long as I stayed out of trouble it was OK to visit the jazz clubs. I played my horn and went home.

I played Club 502 with Esther Phillips and Dionne Warwick, who had a hit with Walk On By and Anyone Who Had a Heart. But Esther had a nasty attitude and we quit; she thought she was Dina Washington.

Organist Jack McDuff, out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was looking for a horn section in 1970 and I got the reference but had no money. I called Billy Hopkins, Sammy Hopkins’ son, who was a good friend and had a regular job. We went to Cleveland, I sat in with McDuff and we turned the place out and I got the gig. We went on to record and album together.

Nancy Wilson, jazz vocalist

On February 20, 1937, Nancy Wilson was the first of six children born to Olden and Lillian Ryan Wilson in Chillicothe, Ohio. Nancy's father would buy records to listen to at home and at an early age Nancy heard recordings from Billy Eckstine, Nat Cole and Jimmy Scott with Lionel Hampton's Big Band. Nancy says, "The juke joint down on the block had a great jukebox and there I heard Dinah Washington, Ruth Brown, LaVerne Baker and Little Esther Phillips".

Nancy became aware of her talent while singing in church choirs, imitating singers as a young child and performing in her grandmother's house during summer visits. By the age of four, she knew she would eventually become a singer.

At the age of fifteen, while a student at West High School in Columbus, she won a talent contest sponsored by local television station WTVN. The prize was an appearance on a twice-a-week television show, Skyline Melodies, which she ended up hosting. She also worked clubs on the east side and north side of Columbus, Ohio, from the age of fifteen until she graduated from high school, at age seventeen.

Unsure of her future as an entertainer, she entered Central State University in Xenia, Ohio, to pursue teaching. She spent one year in college before dropping out to follow her original ambitions. She was singing with Rusty Bryant's Carolyn Club in 1956. She toured with them throughout Canada and the Midwest in the late 1950s and while with Bryant and pianist Hank Marr, Nancy made her first recordings.

When Nancy met Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, he suggested that she should move to New York City, believing that the big city would be the venue in which her career could bloom. In 1959, she relocated to New York with a goal of obtaining John Levy as her manager and Capitol Records as her label. Within four weeks of her arrival in New York she got her first big break, singing four nights a week and working as a secretary during the day. John Levy sent demos to Capitol Records and they signed her in 1960.

Nancy’s debut single, Guess Who I Saw Today, was so successful that between April 1960 and July 1962 Capitol Records released five Nancy Wilson albums. Her first album, Like in Love, displayed her talent, with the hit R&B song, Save your Love for Me. Adderley suggested that she should steer away from her original pop style and gear her music toward jazz and ballads.

In 1962, they collaborated and produced an album, Nancy Wilson/Cannonball, which propelled her to national prominence. Between March, 1964 and June, 1965, four of Wilson's albums hit the Top Ten on Billboard's Top LPs chart. In 1963, Tell Me The Truth became her first truly major hit, leading up to her performance at the Coconut Grove in 1964, the turning point of her career and garnering critical acclaim from coast to coast.

In 1964 Nancy released what became her most successful hit on the Billboard Hot 100 with (You Don't Know) How Glad I Am which peaked at number eleven. She successfully juggled her personal life and her career and nearly fifty years later she is still a grand dame of jazz vocals.

In November 1998, both of her parents died; she calls this year the most difficult year of her life. In March 2008, she was hospitalized for lung complications, recovered and claimed to be doing well. In the same year, her husband, Wiley Burton, died after suffering from renal cancer.

Delores Grettavon Williams Howard, my mom

At 2:00 a.m., on the morning of Wednesday, September 6th, 1950, one month after the Korean War began, George R. Howard, 25, from Walnut Cove, N.C. and recent graduate of Bluefield State Teacher’s College, with his friend, Arthur Froe, driving, took his young wife, Delores, a recent freshmen at Bluefield State, from their home in the coal fields of Gary, West Virginia. Their destination was Stevens Clinic, in Welsh, West Virginia, six miles away.

According to my grandfather, Robert F. Williams, Cleveland Ohio, “Your father came back from the hospital and said ‘it's a boy!’” Grandad says that Delores was like all young moms, enjoying the great feeling of the gift of a child. At thirty-seven, he says that he surely felt young being a grandfather. The boy was named Arnett Douglas Howard, after a brother of George’s that died in childbirth.

Our family lived in the coal mining village of Gary, West Virginia, where my maternal grandfather, Robert Fulton Williams and his parents, George Wesley Williams and Fannie Kate Hairston Williams had been since 1915. Fannie had died in 1928.

Myrtle Hairston, my maternal grandmother, did not desire motherhood and my grandfather raise my mother, with the help of John and Nan Harrison, Myrtle’s brother and sister-in-law. I only saw Myrtle once; at my mother's funeral in 1963.

My parents met at Bluefield State, a historical black college in West Virginia. He was a young veteran from World War two from North Carolina; she a freshmen, eight years younger. He graduated with a degree in chemistry, with aspirations of going on to Meharry Medical College in Nashville. However, with my mother's pregnancy, there was a need to marry and provide for my little hungry mouth. They married on February 25th, 1950, four days after mom's seventeenth birthday.

The Howard's moved to 175 Chicago Avenue, Columbus, Ohio in 1951 and the second baby, Gerald was born in June 22nd to 1952. After an extensive job search, George began a thirty-three year career as an industrial chemist with Westinghouse Appliance Division on Columbus's West side in 1953. After the twins, Keith and Kevin, made their appearance on September 17th, 1955, Delores began employment with General Motor’s Delco plant.

When I was six or seven, a Christmas gift for Gerald and I were ice skates. Mom took us to Franklin Park several times during cold winters to try them out; she had a pair also. I remember getting scrapes on my ankles from skin chafing against skate leather, but I have a vivid picture of being on ice with my mom.

I also have first memories of accompanying her to the beauty shop on Mount Vernon Avenue, the heartbeat of Columbus's Negro business during the mid 1950's. And there are recollections of women, gossip, hot steel combs resting over flames and the aromatic bouquet of smoldering hair being style; the decorous rituals of African women through the ages.

The first Church our family became aligned with in Columbus was St. Paul A.M.E. on Long Street. The Howard's desire to raise their four boys away from Columbus's poverty plagued West side and after their evacuation when floodwaters ravage “The Bottoms” in January, 1959, they were even more determined to escape to a higher ground. The family purchased an acre in a new development in Union County, Ohio, Frazier Estates and spent the summer of 1959 constructing their dream home.

My father labored over nearly every inch of our new home, contracting excavators to dig the basement, assisting a work associate who laid the foundation block. When the house was under roof and hardwood floor was being laid, he gave me my first job as his assistant. I apprentice in the building trades at age eight and some of the most treasured memories where the home cooked meals that Mom would remove from our picnic basket on Saturday or Sunday.

The Howard’s and their four boys moved into 8564 Frazier Road, Plain City, Ohio, on November 9th, 1959, next door to the Thomas Crumps and their four girls, who had preceded our move by one month. Frazier Estates was to grow into a neighborhood of twenty-four homes occupied by African-American families.

Soon after moving to Union County, our family joined Allen Chapel A.M.E. Church in Marysville, Ohio. Delores sang with the choir, George supervised the Sunday schools and we boys first tinkled on the church’s piano. I do remember very clearly as summer's day in 1960 when she came home hauling a used, upright piano in a rented trailer attached to her Chevy. We unloaded the huge instrument and installed it in the recreation room of our new house.

Within an hour of the piano being attached by eight hands, I had composed a blues tune. She started Gerald and I on lessons with Mary Liggins, wife of our minister, Reverend Tom Liggins. Mrs. Liggins says Mom traded piano lessons for church work and Mrs. Liggins instructed us from a book by John Thompson entitled Teaching Little Fingers to Play.

Within months, our home was filled with not only a piano, but drums, a guitar, bugle, xylophone, whistles, bells, percussion instruments and Mom's prized reel recorder, where we first heard George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.

The Howard house soon became a magnet for musical instruments; a bugle from Billy Leftwich, a guitar and field from Uncle Al Turner, a classic drum set from Mrs. Cornetta Palmer whose late husband, Pete, played with 1930's jazz bands. We had a home reel tape recorder that was mom's pride and it was from that recorder that we learned to love George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

Delores had drive. She was a church leader at Allen Chapel A.M.E. Church in Marysville, Ohio. Hearing her sing in the choir on a Sunday was a treat for all. I remember a Sunday in 1962 when an afternoon program featured a young Columbus attorney, Robert Duncan, who she had met during a governor's campaign that brought James A. Rhodes into office in 1963.

Bob Duncan became a landmark federal justice and Jim Rhodes became governor of the century in Ohio. I vaguely remember that she was appointed to a state office by Governor Rhodes after his inaugural in 1963.

My mother, Delores, who planted of the seeds of music in her four boys died in the early spring of 1963. I was twelve and one Sunday April, 7th, when we return home from Sunday services at Allen Chapel, my brothers Kevin and Gerald raise the garage door and saw mom’s arms dangling out of the door of her Chevy parked inside. She had stayed home from church many mornings during the previous months, suffering from depression that we children knew little about. Her self-asphyxiation was the end of a difficult time for her.

Hoyt Locke aka Doctor Bop, radioman

I was a youngster of six years old, the oldest of four brothers and I was laying in bed one night, listening to WCOL-AM. The voice I heard was of Hoyt Locke and he said, “This is Dr. Bop on the sceeeene, with a stack of shellac and my record machine. A little country boy from across the track, so down with it baby that I’ll never go back.”

Now, let’s make clear that Hoyt Locke was not the first deejay playing rhythm and blues/rock and roll on Columbus airwaves; that distinction comes to WVKO’s Eddie Saunders, who in 1955 was Jumpin’ Jive at Five-O-Five. But Dr. Bop was the first to create a rock and roll culture in Central Ohio.

Locke and his brother, Edgar, came to WCOL-AM in 1956, as clients for Bop Records, located at 474 E. Main Street. They were at the studios creating fifteen minute infomercials, when the announcer got up an left, leaving the the station without a voice. The studio engineer asked Hoyt to take over and the fifteen minutes became a six hour, all night broadcast.

The first paid advertising for Dr. Bop was City Service Gasoline, at Garfield and Mt. Vernon Avenues, purchasing three months worth of air time. Soon it was followed by City Gas, Certified Oil, the Beverly Drive-Ins, Buckeye Potato Chips and other locally owned business.

Dr. Bop was flamboyant, controversial and his race wasn’t hidden. He refered to his “silver foxes”, young White women who followed his show. He stayed with WCOL until 1959 and in 1960, he went to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to star in radio there.

Locke was born in Chattanoga, Tennessee, March 11, 1912 and his family moved to Barthman Avenue on Columbus’ Southside. He attended Reeb Avenue Elementary School and he passed away a month shy of sixty-four on February, 24, 1976. But, according to the book Life is a Jukebox, by former WCOL announcer Rick Minerd, Dr. Bop popularized rock and roll/rhythm and blues among Whites and created an identity for WCOL that made it the number one station for the next several years.

Rahsaan Roland Ronald Kirk, reed specialist, visionary

Rahsaan Roland Ronald Kirk was born August 7, 1936 in an area of Columbus called Flytown and grew to be a world renowned musician, specializing in reed instruments. Sightless from birth, he played tenor saxophone, flute, stritch, manzello, nose flute and he thought about music constantly, banging, plucking and blowing on anything that would make a sound from age five.

He is the subject of a book entitled Bright Moments, by John Kruth and I have read the book twice, enjoying a new picture of the book upon each reading. Ronnie was his first name, but in a dream he envisioned himself being called Rahsaan. His playmates were musicians; Hank Marr, Gene Walker and Bruce Woode. Here is an excerpt from the book;

“One of the first people to open me to music when I was about three or four years old was a gentleman in my family named Elijah Broderick. He played a beautiful piano, very original to me at the time. It still sounds original in my ear today. I associate it with the stride was of piano playing. His left hand was very dominant. He didn’t listen to Fat Waller or anyone. It was what you would call a natural gig. He played his stuff on the black keys. Now, that’s not to say he was hung up on 'blacknuss.' It was just something that happened.

One Saturday morning when I was about five or six years old, we came back from this rummage sale and my mother gave me this paper bag. I could feel this object in it. I took it out and it was an old, beat up bugle! She said she paid fifty cent for it.

The next Sunday, after I got the bugle, my uncle came down and started playing the piano and I went and got the bugle. I don’t remember what we were playing but whatever it was, it really left an impression on me.”

Rahsaan became a multi-instrumentalist, acquiring the ability to play the tenor saxophone, stritch and manzello but to play them at the same time. He began playing two horns at aged seventeen in the Boyd Moore Band and advanced his playing with Bruce Woode and the Chips. Although he was thought as a novelty, he was to develop his technique, “ I hope when the era comes that people are playing two and three horns, they point back to me,” says Rahsaan.

I have a film of the 1972 Montreux Jazz Festival, when Rahsaan is at his peak with his reed playing. Or should I say reed playing and cacophony. In an hour Rahsaan raised to his lips and blew tenor sax, stritch, a siren-like whistle, clarinet, flute, nose flute, pitch pipe, manzello and a shell. Close by he employed a foot cymbal and a gong. Chaos ruled the stage.

I saw Rahsaan on three ocassions and I regret not seeing him a fourth, when he appeared in Columbus for two weeks at a nightclub. I first saw a speaking engagement at the Ohio State University Student Union, a performance at the Ohio Valley Jazz Festival and after he had a stroke, I saw him at Gilly’s Nightclub in Dayton.

Rahsaan was likely the greatest musician who played three instruments. And he lived a lifetime in forty-one years, dying on December 4, 1977.

Pianist Stomp Gordon’s Scrapbook

Arnett Howard Finds Gold In His Basement:
Pianist Stomp Gordon’s Scrapbook
Dec. 11,1997


The world has its stories of discovered treasures, the collector who finds a rare master painting beneath the ruins of another. Discoveries have been made in libraries of rare signed first editions that become worth millions overnight.

My discovery is not going to make for my retirement but will be exciting to a handful of friends in a close circle of Columbus jazz lovers. In my basement today, I discovered the scrapbook of a legendary pianist, Archie “Stomp” Gordon.

In the 1980’s, I have vague memories of a woman coming to my apartment in German Village, telling me that she had retrieved a very tattered scrapbook from the trash and asking me if I wanted it. I looked at a page or two of this very ragged book, closed it and told the person that I didn’t think the book had much value because of its condition, yellowed news print and torn, water stained pages. I think I gave her fifty dollars, not for the book but for cab fare home since the disabled woman with a small son didn’t drive.

The book was put into a box, onto a shelve, moved from an apartment to my new home, replaced on a shelf and forgotten. Today I started hunting for a piece of tee shirt art that I’ve also moved around for ten years. Hoping to create a 1998 sweat shirt design with the art, I decided to hunt for it in my storage.

I’m about to embark on a research project for the Ohio Historical Society to document the legacy of our state’s jazz entertainers. My eyes are open for many of the artifacts that I gathered in the early 1980’s as I archived Columbus’ Black entertainers and as I opened this box my soul was about to be filled.

When I interviewed “Old Boss”, H. Raleigh Randolph, in 1980, he introduced me to some wonderful promo pictures of Archie “Stomp” Gordon, a pianist who grew up on Columbus’ South side. Old Boss was quite proud of his mentoring friendship with Stomp, a gifted teenager who was leading his band of neighborhood kids on professional bookings, not only in Columbus, but throughout Central Ohio.I remember stories my father shared with me of Stomp playing at my parent’s alma mater, Bluefield West Virginia State Teacher’s College in the late 1940’s.

One saga came from Hall of Fame saxophonist Rusty “Night Train” Bryant, who at age eleven begged Stomp to let him join the band of jazzy rascals. Stomp told Rusty to get a saxophone, learn how to play and he’d let him into the band. Reports have it that Rusty got his sax from his father and proceeded to become one of America’s best known saxophonists due to his rocking hit, All Night Long.

Rusty remembered a night when Stomp Gordon’s teenagers took the interurban train to London, Ohio, to play a dance. After the dance was over, the group went back to the train station, but the last train had departed; so they were forced to bed down on the platform to await the next morning’s train.

One Christmas holiday in the early 1980’s I met Bruce Woode, bassist with Gordon. I remember riding about the streets of Columbus with him and friends as he was visiting from his home in New Jersey. He was a warm and friendly personality, eager to share with his curious young friend the days in the 1950’s when Stomp Gordon was riding the hit parade and playing the best showrooms trying to entertain and integrate America.

Bruce clearly recalled during our evening together a night when the band was tearing up a colored nightclub in New Jersey. The group was known for the wild high jinks in their act. Stomp would play a high piano standing up and the novelty of his name lie in his ability to kick off his shoes, socks and tickle the ivories with his toes. Bruce would lay his bass violin on the floor and play it. They wore animal skin dinner jackets in their wild show that Jimmy Crum would envy.

Bruce remembered a conspicuous group of white teens who were out of place in this club but eating up every trick that Stomp’s band was using to entertain. Bruce told me that he was certain that this group of white teenagers became Bill Haley and the Comets and they used all of the gimmicks that they saw that night as they became America’s icons of the new rock and roll movement.

Tony Vance was one of my neighbors in German Village (South Columbus, Ohio) and a saxophonist in Stomp’s early team of musical adolescents. Some of the Black jazz men referred to Tony’s nickname as “No Blow,” but whether he was a questionable talent or not he was on the scene with Gordon and shared slides with me of his photos of the early band. No one onstage looks over fifteen including the leader whose name was hand painted on the music stands.

So I was feeling groggy this morning when I came across the scrapbook which had not seen light since it came into my possession nearly ten years earlier. Stapled inside the cover was, no doubt, the enlargement that Stomp purchased when his high school senior pictures were developed. The sepia toned color print is of a brown eyed, handsome man in a gray suit with wide lapels, white shirt, patterned tie and white handkerchief in his breast pocket. The edges of the photo are wrecked, cracked from dryness and Stomp has a staple in his forehead. But the photo clearly shows that the young star was probably the best dressed senior that graduated from Columbus South High School that year, probably 1950.

The next stapled picture in the nearly ruined book composed of string and construction paper was of a smiling, mature white woman, who resembles baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, a jazz patron, known for befriending Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk. In truth is was the woman who became the mother of Gordon's children. She remains nameless.

The next artifact in the book is probably in the best condition. The center of the art board is hand lettered “Stomp Gordon and His Orchestra,” and the sepia photos that surround the lettering are four action shots of the mini-orchestra. The saxophonist is the legendary Hiawatha, Bruce Woode is holding his string bass at shoulder level, Chick Glenn has his drumsticks high and Stomp has his hands held high in a mock attack of the piano.

The newspaper clippings contained here are long yellowed but very readable and the first is identified from the Philadelphia Daily News, February 26, 1953. It is a twenty photo feature, “Around The Clubs” promoting the week’s entertainers including stars Danny Thomas at the Latin Casino, pioneer Negro actor Mantan Moreland at the Town Tavern, jazz clarinetist Buddy DeFranco at the Blue Note, Buddy Greco at the Rendezvous and Stomp Gordon at the Butler Cafe.

The next clipping must have been Stomp’s favorite promo picture, he is perched on a very high stool, mouth open wide, hands high and bare feet flailing at the piano keys. The caption reads, “Look at him, old Toe Stomping Gordon wailing away up at Butler’s cafe. This mad man, who plays piano with his toes, is making his first East coast appearance... is in such great demand that he is here for only one week.”

Another black and white photo is in superb condition of the five performers boarding a Delta airliner and posed with huge smiles. The photo is embossed “Pierce’s Studio, Columbus, Ohio,” so the boarding is likely at Port Columbus.

The next item is pasted to construction paper and there is likely information hiding on the other side. The Joe Glaser Agency promotion flyer says “Now Available...King of Bop and Boogie. The character who stomped his way to fame with his All Star Combo. Hottest Music In Town.. in person Stomp Gordon, one ton of torrid rhythm.” A head shot of the leader is pasted on a cartoon of white hands playing an upright piano. Glaser was also agent-manager who directed Louis Armstrong’s career.

The next very yellowed articles document an appearance at 1042 Club by nationally loved jazz singer Billie Holiday, “America’s No. 1 Song Stylist”. Billie had lost her New York cabaret performing license due to felony drug charges and the 1042 Club was located as far from the Big Apple as possible; Anchorage, Alaska. “The other group is the Stomp Gordon Combo. Gordon, it will be recalled, he is the pianist who plays with his feet.” Admission was $2.50, with a $7.50 minimum, includes setup and 1/2 pint of your favorite whiskey or drink.

The fore mention promo picture of Toe Stomping Gordon is pasted on the next leaf with two of his sidemen clear, Hiawatha and Bruce. At the bottom the glossy reads “Decca recording Artist, Associated Booking Corp., New York, Chicago, Hollywood.”

The Gordon Orchestra traveled the roads of America in a 1955 Plymouth station wagon, Ohio license number E 12391 and Stomp seemed to pride himself in a growing collection of traffic violations. Municipal notices that appeared in his archives were from Wildwood, New Jersey (driveway); Philadelphia; Niagara Falls, New York (in alley); Montreal; Atlantic City; Atlanta (wrong way one way street); Goshen, New Jersey (speeding); (Green Bay (overtime parking); St./ Louis (parked contrary to legal signs); and Columbus.

He addressed a February 22, 1953, letter to the Early Family in Columbus, “Hello Drake, Marvin, Nickademus, Bob, Louis and Leola. Hi sweet heart! Here is a ticket to add to my scrap book. Please Please save everything I send you.

I am going to start putting you on my payroll. I am going to send you $10.00 each 9th day of the month to cover all of my postage that you send to me, OK? I will write more next time. Please hold all mail until I send for it. Stomp Gordon.”

The next page has clippings from the Washington Daily News, February 19, 1953, entitled “Tips On Tables” under a byline by Ray Keziah. “On first glance he looks like the Wildman From Borneo. I had just sat down to catch the Blue Mirror’s Seven Star Holiday Revue...and it happened Stomp Gordon and his Combo made their entrance. Dig this... Stomp’s musical attire consists of zoot pants, a zebra length drape coat with waist-length flowing yellow handkerchief and a head of hair that would make Charles Antell cry.

And Stomp’s music is just as wild as his outfit. On one jam session they paraded ‘round the room on the tables, under the tables and almost climbed up the wall.”

Dated September 11, 1954, is the Alaska Spotlight from Anchorage and it documents Stomp’s complaint of racial discrimination. According to Stomp, who is alleging to be “a graduate and former football great of the Ohio State University, ... upon arriving at the Last Chance his party was told by the girl at the door ‘colored people aren’t admitted.’ However, the manager, upon hearing the statement rushed forward and exclaimed, ‘ Oh no, that’s not the reason; you have no reservations.’

The article cited race riots occurring with ‘Negro servicemen who had been refused admission and it alluded to the possibility that Gordon might file charges against the club in violation of the Alaska Civil Rights Act.

Also on the page was a totally blank check No. 0025 from the High-Town Office of The Ohio National Bank of Columbus on the account of Stomp Gordon and His Orchestra, 745 Fifth Avenue, New York, 22, N.Y., Phone Plaza 9-4600. Another check is written to Jerome Early for No dollars and twenty-five cents. Stomp Gordon, 241 Barthman Avenue on Columbus’ South end. There was once a record shop serving Downtown Columbus called Early’s Record’s, located on West Town Street, near Lazarus Department Store and I wonder if it’s the same Early.

There is another George Pierce Photo in the book. The featured four musicians include Boyd Moore on bass, Charlie Johnson (Springfield) on drums, an unidentified pianist and Eva Gee, vocalist.

The next page has a mixture of clippings, photos and fibs to commemorate the end of his run at the 1042 Club in Anchorage on New Year’s Eve, 1954. “His next booking is at the Latin Quarter in Paris, France, January 4th.” I wonder if he took the Plymouth across the Atlantic. October 9, 1954, Stomp received correspondence in Alaska from Cleveland d’Entremant pushing a French song entitled “Que Diriez Vous (What Would You Say?),” probably in anticipation of his auto trip to Paris

Another snapshot features Stomp and Hiawatha in Atlantic City in a novelty photo, another has Stomp behind a piano in August, 1955. Two envelopes are postmarked Philadelphia and Louisville when Liberty postage was three cents. The addressees are Mrs. Ida Early and Shirley Early, Stomp’s girlfriend, both 742 E. Spring Street, Columbus, 3, Ohio and the envelopes bear two different printings from “The Stomp Gordon Fan Club.”

The business sized envelope features a notice printed in red ink, “Mr. Postman, Please guard this real gone letter with your life. Dig man!!! If necessary call out the police, the National Guards, or the F.B.I. But by all means protect this letter with your life otherwise 100,000,000,000,000 Teens and Twenties will have your head. Daddy-O. The reason????? This letter contains that New dance Sensation of the year called The Grind.” I met Stomp’s daughter, Sheila Kidd, in the early 1980’s and she let me record some very scratchy 45 rpm records and one title was “The Grind.”

The next page features family pictures of Stomp. In two of the snaps dated November, 1955, he is with a pretty young woman identified by pianist Bobby Shaw as Shirley. Stomp holds the tiny infant with the look of a new father. The picture that is captioned “Maestro Gordon” appears as if it had been taken in the early 1940’s with a vintage delivery truck in the background behind a fourteen year old Stomp.

The scrapbook holds promo glossy of the band trumpeter Billy Brooks and school photos from two young women appear next. Both are bright, smiling, very fair complexion, but neither resemble Stomp who had a medium to dark brown hue to his skin. Bobby Shaw says that the youngest girl is Stomp’s daughter, Felicia, who was killed in an auto accident.

The next promo photo of Boyd Moore and his Orchestra identifies two former faces, singer Eva Gee and drummer Eddie Littlejohn. A browning and tattered print is a club shot of the Stomp Gordon Band with clear looks at Bruce Woode, bass, Stomp nearly obscured by the piano and Hiawatha behind his tenor sax, but the drummer is a face that I’ve never seen .

Headlines on a newspaper clipping read “Gleason getting Surprise Package In Stomp Gordon.” Gleason’s Musical Bar was likely on Woodland Avenue in Detroit, since one of the acts appearing on the show was Choker Campbell’s Orchestra, which became the tour orchestra behind the Motortown Review in the mid 1960’s. “Gordon plays good music, but his real strength lies in his clowning and showmanship. He takes off his shoes and socks and knocks out the blues with his toes...people go for it.” A snapshot from the nightclub has five men seated and four that I can identify are Sylvester Birch, blues legend Charles Brown, Stomp and youthful saxophonist Carl Sally on his left..

According to the next receipt, dated October 28, 1950, Stomp paid a stiff $80.00 fine to the Portsmouth, Ohio, Local of the American Federation of Musicians. A newspaper chart of best selling records had his recordings Oooh Yes and Please Don’t Pass Me By, in the top five of Rhythm and Blues charts behind Louis Jordan and a sensational Sister Rosetta Tharp who had three of the five songs.

The results of a 1950’s Downbeat national jazz poll was the subject of a large clipping and Stomp received a number of votes behind Dave Brubeck as instrumental combo and Oscar Peterson as pianist. I recognized a page from the Chicago based Jet, a Negro weekly magazine, as it cited “Feet Piano Players,” Stomp and Bernice Rouse Knighten.

Another advertisement features the Gleason’s lineup of Gordon, Choker Campbell and Good Time Charles Brown, blues legend. A loose item in the scrapbook is a retirement congratulations, dated July 18, 1978. The letter, on Ohio Department of Transportation letterhead, thanks Jerome S. Early for his efforts of twenty five years.

One of the last items is a very ominous looking photo of a bare chested man lying in bed next to a telephone. If this is Stomp, he doesn’t look well. The hand drawn musical manuscript that is the last artifact in the volume is entitled Good Night Little Girl. “Good night, little girl. I hope you make it home all right. With each glass of wine your kisses are more fine...”

I carefully close the ragged scrapbook to seek my own Musician’s Scrapbook. I was looking for a clipping from the Ohio State Journal dated Tuesday, January 21, 1958 that closes the book on Stomp Gordon. “Archie A. “Stomp” Gordon, a 26 year-old Columbus musician, was found dead in a parked car on New York's City’s Madison Avenue late Sunday night. The body was not identified until early Monday morning.”

Police found the piano player slumped over the wheel of his station wagon... the body was taken to Bellevue Morgue where it was identified by one of the members of the five-piece orchestra he had taken to New York. New York medical examiners said an autopsy disclosed Gordon died of pneumonia and a liver ailment.”

It is unknown when or how but it has been said Stomp picked up a heroin habit. “Horse” was the rage of jazzy players during the 1940’s and 50’s when Charlie Parker was influencing the scene with his revolutionary sax playing and other bad habits. It is said that Stomp at the time of his death was carrying the legacy of being the Fats Waller of his generation, making his music wild fun and pushing entertainment far past its boundaries.

Well, I’ve discovered Stomp again and since he left his scrapbook and traffic tickets to me for safe keeping, I’d like bring him back onstage once again for people to enjoy. “Whomp, bebop, boom, bam. I’m a killer diller, yes I am!”

An Interview With Rusty Bryant, saxophonist, recording artist

My father, Herman Bryant, had a funeral band and the rehearsals would take place in the casket room which was the largest room in the funeral home. I would sit there in the space, watch them practice and I became so familiar with the each instrument that I knew what each instrument was doing.

One night the tuba player didn’t show for rehearsal and my father called The Waltz She Save For Me. I walked out in my little pajamas with the flap in the back, walked under the tuba and started to play The Waltz She Saved For Me. The mouthpiece almost covered my nose, but I played that song; I was four years old at the time.

I remember what inspired me to play was Lionel Hampton , who came through the Palace Theater with Arnett Cobb and the other saxophonist was Johnny Griffin. Johnny was close to our age and they didn’t have a coat to fit him. His coat was so long you couldn’t even see his fingers, but he could play.

Me and a boy named Leroy Cobb lived in a double and we both were learning how to play saxophone. I went and got my alto and went into the bathroom on one side of the double and Leroy went to the other side of the double and all night long it sounded like we were calling cats, just skreeching, trying to copy Johnny Griffin all night long.

I think I had my horn about a week before I was playing professionally and I joined Stomp Gordon’s band. I hadn’t even seen a saxophone before I started on the road with a band... I took to it like a duck to water.

And the saxophone belonged to my father, Herman. He had a saxophone behind the couch and I took it out and that’s how Paul Cousar took to playing. I showed him a scale and, boom, he took off. The first time he ever touched a saxophone was in my living room at Long and Ohio Avenues.

That was on a Monday and that weekend I went to Nelsonville, Ohio with Stomp Gordon for our first job. I was thirteen years old and I’ve been on the road playing ever since.

Norris Turney, Harry Ross, Wendell Hawkins and I were all up there playing. This cat came in and Norris didn’t even know he was in town. We had finished the set; it must have been ten or eleven o’clock. Tommy Lucas took out his horn; he was the alto saxophone player from the Glen Gray Band.

So the rhythm section got up and Tommy Lucas started making his horn talk. Norris went and got his horn and wasn’t nothing but two horns up there. They both had chairs sitting side by side. And after they finished this number, one of the jam tunes of the day. They finished that tune, everyone applauded and they started into Cherokee. And man, those two got to battling; that was a classic battle, more saxophone than I ever heard at that time.

Pretty soon, I looked around and it was time for the club to close. And these two weren’t finished with each other yet. They didn’t even put their horns in the cases, got into cars and went over to the Poor Lover’s Ballroom at Mt. Vernon and Champion Avenues, where Sammy Hopkins Band used to play. The joint was closed and the man was just counting the cash.

The crowd and all were following those cats who went through the door, went to the stage, got back on the piano and took up the song where they finished at the bridge. When they finished that song, it must have been five or six o’clock in the morning. They battled four and two measures on that song; they did everything you could do. Norris Turney and Tommy Lucas engaged in one of the most classic saxophone battles that there ever has been around here. Saxophonist Jimmy Allen can tell you about that one.

I was just a youngster at the time. I’ve had plenty of those battles at the time I was twenty, twenty-five years old. I was out signing autographs at the Seneca Hotel on Broad Street, radioman Spook Beckman was with me. There was a prom at the hotel that night and Nancy Wilson was part of the trio that was playing at the prom. It was very clear amongst the three voices tht I heard that night which one was ringing through and I could hear a lot of potential. I talked to her after they finished singing and together we went to her father, Olden Wilson, and asked for permission for her to come out onto the road and start her career.

After we had her on the road for three or four years of training, I called Cannonball Adderley to get a second opinion. Her concurred and we talked to manager John Levy and that’s how she got started.

I was playing with organist Hank Marr, we went through Cincinnati and we were looking for a guitarist, finding Wilbert Longmire. Hank agreed that Wilbert would be dynamite. The rest is history.

Things were a lot different fory years ago, it doesn’t seem that long. There’s more of a chance for the young musicians to have a shot at the big time than there was in the days when Hank and I were coming along. Music is like being a farmer, owning so many acres of corn or what have you. You have to been able to take your commodity to the marketplace; you can’t sit back and expect the marketplace to come to you. The competition is really extensive and a musician has to start very early at being a businessman was well as a performer.

Music is an offspring of the time and a lot of what you hear is a very confused, angry sound, due to the times we’re living in. If I am without music, I am without a great portion of my life. I love music very much. This was planned before I was born; God knew how I would feel about music. That’s why he gave it to me.

I knew that the sound and feeling of music was a lifelong heritage for me.

Note: Rusty Bryant passed on March 25, 1991, due to complications of diabetes.

My Pal, Dimitrius Roberts

Dimitrius Roberts and I met and bonded in 1999, when he was four or five. I came by the Childhood League center to play one afternoon and I saw this little guy, who looked like a miniature Arnett Howard. He pointed up at the band, as to say, "Look, mom, trumpets and saxophones.

Later we led a mardi gras parade around the yard and naturally, I went out, took his little hand and we marched around the grounds. Afterward, as we sat, I took his hand and used it to play some songs, Yankee Doodle Dandy, etc. We finished our concert, but he definitely made an impression on me.

Early in the next year, I took a spring ski vacation to France. When we returned home to Columbus, I had a phone message for me from Lisa Courtice, Childhood League executive director. "Dimitrius has died and we're going to have a memorial service for him tomorrow." So in the shock of having someone so young pass away, I dedicated the rest of my day to immortalizing him in a New Orleans-style, second line song.

My Pal Dimitrius

Chrs. My pal Dimitrius, he sure is curious.
I think it’s marvelous, I’m really envious.
He simply is a plus, my pal Dimitrius.

A1. Marching’ to the river early in the day
I’ll take my horn and my protege’.
Dimitrius, we’ll get harmonious,
Play loud and boisterous. Me and Dimitrius

A2. He’s got a nickel and I’ve got a dime.
We’ll make people dance in the summertime.
The two of us, we will be devious
Bordering on riotous. Quite loud and furious!

A3. With trumpets on the left and drums on the right
Parading into heavenly sunlight.
Just glorious. I’m talking’ thunderous.
Heaven is prosperous, with my pal Dimitrius.

My pal Dimetrius, he sure is curious.
I think it’s marvelous. I’m really envious.
He simply is a plus, my pal Dimitrius.

I came to the memorial, they saved the song for last and we had a mardi gras parade in his honor. It is ten years later, I see his grandmother periodically and we reminisce about Dimitrius.

Ellen Barksdale, pianist, gospel musician

Arnett and Ellen Barksdale

Ellen “Mom” Barksdale celebrated her ninety-second birthday in late March, 2009 and she fooled everyone who can’t believe her age. She was a faithful member of congregation that has supported Shiloh Baptist Church since 1869. She was also one of my links to the music teachers of the last century.

She began taking piano lessons in 1924 at age nine and her longtime teacher was Helen Carter Moses, who had a studio in her home on Columbus’ Hilltop. Ellen remembers that Black families lived on Highland or Wheatland in those days and Mrs. Moses owned and drove a Ford Model T.

Mom Barksdale says that she not only studied with Mrs. Moses until she was twenty, but she became her chief instructor when the Carter School of Music relocated to Spring Street and Hamilton Ave. Each Sunday morning Mrs. Moses aimed the Ford towards Shiloh, where she was not only organist but director of the gospel choir. She also founded, with E. L. Rockhold, The Music Lovers Guild, a fifty-two member chorus founded in 1934.

In time Mom Barksdale took over leadership of the choir and continued for thirty years. She remembered some of the other piano teachers who taught the children of Columbus. In 1920 J. Cleveland Lemons taught and founded the Columbus Chapter of the National Association of Negro Musicians (NANM), who presented opera singer Marian Anderson in 1924.

Another noted teacher was Mamie Artist, who was a member of Parker’s Popular Players and founder of the Columbus Choral Club in 1922. Other outstanding instructors were Margarite Coleman and Ara Warren Arnold.

Mom Barksdale and I started playing piano and trumpet duets together during the 1980s, at the invitation of Rev. Harold Pinkston, pastor of Good Shepard Baptist Church, Columbus. We have performed together at church services, community concerts, birthday celebrations, anniversary parties. For several years we made regular visit to her good friend Helen Ramsuer at Lutheran Village, entertaining the luncheon audience with religious favorites. We have also recorded a number of songs together that have appeared on two of my compact discs, as well as two compact disc featuring her.

Mom Barksdale was inducted into the Columbus Senior Musicians Hall of Fame in 1999. She completed the cycle of life in June, 2009.

Robert F. Williams, our grandfather

Arnett, Robert Williams and Kevin Howard

Robert Fulton Williams, the father of Delores G. Williams Howard and maternal grandfather of the Howard Brothers, was born, March 1, 1913 in Martinsville, Virginia. He said that his memories of life began when he heard the noise of a coal tipper when he was two years old. “My family was traveling from Martinsville to Gary, West Virginia to find work in the coal mines and I was awakened by the loud, rough sounds of that machine grinding up coal. That’s the first event I can remember, however I have remembered everything since.”

His mother, Fannie Kate Hairston Williams, had a brother who worked in the mines in Gary. The family, George Wesley Williams, father, Willie Mae, daughter and Robert, lived with their relatives until George found a house. The Williams were among many Negro families that were trading the hard life, working on farms, for the harder but steadier paychecks that were offered by the booming coal industry/steel/railroad industries. They joined immigrant families from Europe, who were being met at Ellis Island in New York to supply labor for industry, raise gardens, hogs, chickens and children. He said that his family was never hungry.

During the days surrounding WWI, Gary mines were owned by U.S. Steel. In addition to coal mining, there were coke ovens that turned the coal into coke, sent to the steel mills of Pennsylvania and Ohio. U.S. Steel was a major American company and it was a boom time with lots of jobs. Before the rise of the United Mine Workers Union (UMW), miners were industrial slaves, trapped into hard jobs. "A typical day started at six am., workers ate their meals underground and since it was more important for the companies to get the coal out of the ground than the men, sometimes it would be nine-thirty pm. before we climbed out of the shaft. John L. Lewis and the UMW came along, negotiated and organized conditions for miners that we’d never dreamed of."

Because of the UMW contract bidding, mine workers were able to get eight hour work days, vacations, better wages, health care benefits and, for the first time, miners retired with pensions and could afford a reasonable life. "These were benefits that we had never even dreamed of,” he said. "Mining towns of the early twentieth century surrounded company owned houses and stores. Company doctors delivered babies in houses that had no water or electricity, until the 1920’s."

His first recollections of school surrounded following his sister, Willie Mae, to school, refusing to leave and since he knew how to read at age four, the teacher let him stay. Although Willie Mae was four years older, she was not a motivated student and Robert reached the ninth grade before her, thus winning a bicycle from his father, who challenged the siblings.

Robert was bright, studious and a fast learner. However his mother, Fannie died in 1928, when her was fifteen and he was left without a parent to push educational invitations after his graduation in 1930. Instead of going to college, he jot a job in the mines, spending twenty-three hard working years, before retiring in 1952.

In 1932, at the height of the U.S. Depression, he left Gary to find a job at an active mine in Amonate, Virginia. There he met, married and had a daughter with Myrtle Hairston, three years younger. The couple stayed together for three years before separating and Robert took his daughter, Delores, as his responsibility. He got help from his in-laws, John and Nannie Hairston, in raising Delores. He says that they had lots of fun together and loved the same Gary Colored Schools that her father had graduated from twenty years earlier.

Delores did go to Bluefield State Teacher’s College, where, in her first year, she met, George Howard, a senior in chemistry and WWII veteran. They married, February 25, 1950. Robert’s first grandson, Arnett (me), was born in September, 1950 and the newlyweds moved to Columbus, Ohio in 1951.

Robert retired from the mines in 1952 and moved to the West Virginia state capital, Charleston. He collected his miner’s benefits and worked part time custodial and home maintenance jobs. His joy was traveling to Columbus to visit his daughter and four grandson’s.

I first remember my grandfather’s friendship when he would take me back to Charleston when I was six. His eyesight had dimmed, due to his decades in dark, coal mines and his first lessons to me were about reading road maps, highway signs, traffic lights. I think that his lessons were the best instructions in life; have the vision to see things down the road.

Throughout the 1950’s and ‘60’s, our travels together included trips to Cleveland to visit Aunt Millie Booker, whose husband Reverend Tom Booker, had established the Cleveland Church of Christ in the 1920’s. They lived at Central Avenue and Twenty-Fifth Street in Cleveland’s Roaring Thirds community of Black citizens. At Aunt Millie’s, I remember sleeping on a straw mattress and the timeless collection of ceramics and glass objects that all African-American women collect and store on shelves and behind glass.

One trip that we made together to the city during the summer of 1966, occurred on the day that the Hough riots started. That summer, Bobby Hebb had a hit with the song, Sunny and the city howled with the wails of police and fire emergency vehicles, along with Ohio National Guard troops. Windows were smashed, shots fired, buildings burned and races engaged in death clashes for nearly a week in east side neighborhoods, as I wandered the curious streets of Kinsman Avenue and Shaker Heights, alone.

Before he permanently moved to Cleveland in 1965, Grandad had lived with us in Plain City, Ohio; a surrogate to replace my mother who died in 1963. We had a household like the television show My Three Sons; six men of three generations breaking the roles of a traditional family. Grandad got us up and off to school, he reinforced with a firm, but gently hand, the lessons that we had started to learn about cooking, house cleaning, laundry and manners.

On our many trips home from the laundromat in Plain City, he would be agreeable to letting me take my first turns behind the wheel of his 1957 Plymouth Savoy Coupe. I was twelve and beginning a lifetime of love with autos and travel. I once loosely calculated that I have traveled to visit Grandad in Cleveland between three and five hundred times in thirty-five years of driving.

He remarried in 1969 to Gracie (Annette) Brack, bought a Jaguar sedan in 1981 and I have driven them to Virginia and Tennessee for family reunions and events. One of his regular travel rituals was attending the annual reunions for his alma mater, Gary District High School, whose classes meet around the U.S. each July. Another can’t miss trip for The Williams’ is the annual Frazier/Creole Funk Pig Roast and Family Day, held each Labor Day since 1984 at the Howard Family homestead in Plain City. We have traveled to visit my brother Kevin in Seattle, Washington, my brother Keith’s family (Carol, Kalahni, Maya and Aliyah) in Long Beach, California and brother Gerald and family (Norma Rodriguez , Tina, Edean Cassa) in Atlanta. Grandad and Annette have also visited Puerto Rico to visited Norma’s family.

“Your world is only as big as the places that you have been and the things that you have seen,” a cliche that I have heard echo from my grandad’s lips my entire life. He always liked to read about politics and he can remember an age when most African-Americans were aligned with the Republican Party, in respect to Abraham Lincoln, remembered as the Great Emancipator. His life was never greatly impacted by racial strife, but recalls that coal mine bath houses were segregated and Black miners and soldiers didn’t get job advancements they deserved due to the social limitations of the times.

He says that American Blacks joined the Democratic ranks in support of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, whose four term administration paid off by opening WPA works, and later, defense jobs to Negro workers. Grandad did work as a precinct committeeman in Cleveland’s twenty-first voting district in 1971, when the city elected Carl Stokes, America’s first Black mayor of a major city. The following years resulted in city council seats and elective offices being equalized racially.


Grandad recognizes that even though he’s never owned a home, he has lived a reasonable life. “I raised a daughter who succeeded; her children have been offspring that have had a disciplined, well-bred upbringing. I have been proud of them as community minded leaders and successes in business and the arts.” And he says, “I’m glad that my grandsons and great-grand children are my friends too. When I finally pass on, I want them to shed very few tears and just say that ‘We’re gonna miss him.’”

Robert Williams completed his life cycle August 26, 2005 at ninety-two years of age. However he lives in his grandsons.

Henry “Hank” Marr: Jazz Musician, Educator, Recording Artist

Ramsey Lewis, Nancy Wilson and Hank Marr in Chicago, IL.


By Pete Fallico, 1995, www.doodlinlounge.com

Henry “Hank” Marr was born on January 30, 1927, in a section of Columbus known then as Flytown. He remembers sneaking off to the neighbors', where he could practice on their piano, playing the chords he would pick up from listening to music on the radio. "My stepmother could never find me," recalls Hank. "She eventually asked my dad to buy a piano, and at great sacrifice, he did."

Hank often jammed with his friend Ronnie Kirk (later known as Rahsaan Roland Kirk) in a nearby garage. "I developed a very good ear, but it wasn't until after I got out of the service and worked in Tampa, Florida and played professionally in a band then called Charlie Brantley and the Honey Dippers and later came back to Ohio State, that I formally had any training with music." Hank described himself as a diamond in the rough in those days. "I didn't know anything about classical music or any of the technical aspects of the music," admits Hank. "But a couple of teachers got their heads together and said there's something there. They saw some talent."

Hank began performing with the Sammy Hopkins Trio and soon joined Rusty Bryant's band. His keyboard playing would soon expand to the Hammond organ as he was caught up in the tremendous interest stirred up first by "Wild" Bill Davis and ultimately by Jimmy Smith. "I had heard 'Wild' Bill Davis, fortunately, just before I was getting ready to go overseas. I think it was Birdland," recalls Hank. "About that time, he had put together his arrangement of 'April in Paris."'

In the mid-fifties, Hank and Rusty traveled to Atlantic City, only to run into the eye of the organ hurricane created by Jimmy Smith's exciting new sound. The Hank Marr Trio was soon formed with Wilbert Longmire on guitar and Hank on the increasingly popular Hammond B-3 organ. After he signed on with Shaw Artists, he continued to look to Jimmy Smith for inspiration. "I caught up with him where we could because we sort of followed one another or preceded one another on certain engagements. Then we were playing all the organ rooms, and I would casually just go up and ask him things."

At Grace Daniel's Little Belmont Club in Atlantic City, Hank would run into "Wild" Bill Davis. "They had the revolving bands," remembers Hank. "The music would never stop. Bill would be playin' his theme song. Then I'd come on, pick it up, and it just went on and on." Bill Davis' influence remained with Hank. "I learned an awful lot from 'Wild' Bill Davis about how to play the organ to get a 'locked-hand' sound."

Hank joined King Records in about 1961 and recorded seven albums for them. "I think at that time Bill Doggett was perhaps leaving King Records," says Hank. "They wanted a new organ artist to follow along in that tradition, and I think this is what they expected of me. I wasn't allowed to do things like Jimmy Smith." Later a manager named Bubbles Holloway suggested that Hank seek a new identity on the organ. Hank found himself departing from the Jimmy Smith sound and taking on a more orchestral sound. "I tried to find a combination of stops that would simulate a big band or maybe a saxophone section--a softer sound--or I'd pull them all out when I wanted to get a bright, brilliant sound."

Hank's career expanded through the sixties and seventies. He worked as TV star George Kirby's musical director and played coast to coast, making numerous television appearances. Of more importance, however, has been his devotion and dedication to music education. For the past twelve years, Hank has taught at Ohio State University and is now an associate professor in the Jazz studies program. "I'm back teaching here in the classrooms where I matriculated," reminisces Hank "and it is indeed fascinating."

Hank maintains a positive attitude towards the future of Jazz and the young players who hold it in their hands. "I'm very optimistic about it, and I think with some work and cooperation with our government, we'll be able to turn this thing around."

Hank has also contributed to the Jamey Aebersold play-along catalog with an unprecedented Hammond organ accompaniment record or CD for students everywhere. "It's a great feeling of accomplishment when you have students who are becoming an extension of you," says Hank. "I don't think you can have a better tribute made to you and to your profession than to have students carrying your legacy."

On August 12, 1990, the City of Columbus honored Hank with Marvelous Hank Marr Day. Awards came from dignitaries ranging from the governor to the mayor. More recently, Hank was given the Continuing Legacy Award at the first Columbus Music Awards Ceremony. As he puts it, "It's great that they let you smell the flowers while you're still here." Hank Marr's spirit inspires music lovers of all ages. "I stay young and like to think young by playing happy music and being expressive and showing that optimism in how I perform the music."

Note: Hank Marr passed in Columbus’ Grant Hospital, March 16, 2005, after a brief bout with cardiac illness. His life celebration was held at Shiloh Baptist Church, where friends, family and fellow musicians shout to the joy of his life’s victory.

A Conversation With Earl Hood

March, 1980

“I was born on the Westside of Columbus, September 20, 1896, and my dad, Charles I. Hood, was in the grocery business with one of the three largest stores in Columbus. His place was at 171 S. High St., where the City Center Mall is, across from National City Bank and Lazarus Department Store.

Both sides of my family have been in Central Ohio for over one hundred seventy years, my grandfather originally coming from Georgia when he was small. I get a kick out of letting people who think every Black comes from Mississippi, Virginia or Georgia know that my family was here when they came. And I don’t hesitate to tell them.

I never went to college and I only went to high school for three months. There was a panic in 1908 that wiped out lots of businesses and Dad took sick right after that with malaria and typhoid fever. He never recovered, died in 1912 and at fifteen years old I had to come out of school and take care of my mother, which I did for the next forty-two years. I learned the hard way, went to night school and listened, instead of talked. Anything that I have learned has come from listening and trying to develop an attentive mind.

When I was young you could go anyplace you wanted. The social club I belonged to, La Legro, entertained at the Busy Bee at Gay and High Streets. It was one of the finest restaurants in Downtown Columbus and we never had any problems. During the years of the first world war, we had an influx of colored and whites as the city became a center for war work. That’s when Columbus became segregated; prior to that colored lived anywhere.

I remember when I went to work for the Franklin County Courthouse, the first day of May 1918. There wasn’t a man in the office, other than the chief deputy and the auditor, who spoke to me for three months. It made me no difference; I got a raise the second week I was there and if they wanted to give me the silent treatment, OK with me. I did my work.

Finally one fellow, Prosper Bonarx, came in and said, ‘Jack Kaiser is a neighbor of mine and he wanted us to be friends.’ Kaiser was the auditor of the Ohio National Bank and I knew him well. Bonarx became the first man at work who spoke to me.

I was trained as a violinist and my first musical job was with Thomas Howard on Fourth Street at the Masonic Temple. Howard was a pioneer music booker, who played bass fiddle and booked a few groups that were very good units. Charlie Parker was another pioneer booker who enjoyed a very good reputation. He had a first class barbershop at Gay and High, where he also had his booking office.

Parker had four or five units out playing all the time and he had a pretty regular thing at the Kaiserhoff Hotel on the corner of Gay and Wall Alley, northwest of High Street. He played violin and sang with his group that included Sanford Smith on piano, Brownie Clark on drums and Ollie Scott on saxophone.

His groups were three or four piece combinations and one great group was led for three or four years at the Hotel Hollenden in Cleveland by pianist Sammy Stewart played piano in another group and as many as thirty five of his groups played in hotels and amusement parks around the Midwest. Parker’s Popular Players were known everywhere.

Stapleton Wright brought the first saxophone into the United States from the Spanish American War and Wright’s Saxophone Orchestra was a pretty successful unit. They stayed on the road in Michigan, West Virginia and Pennsylvania, where they were popular at Penn State University.

The college would have bands from all over the country twice a year and Fred Waring was the campus bandleader. He worshiped Stape Wright and Wright taught him the theme song that became Waring’s signature with the internationally famed Pennsylvanians, Sleep.

Another musician that worked with Parker was Carl Kinney, whose stage name was “Battleaxe” and he played at the Wintergarden in the Southern Hotel. He was the first drummer to start throwing sticks and when Vernon and Irene Castle came here to perform they saw Battleaxe and took him right to New York City.

Battleaxe won a competition at Madison Square Garden in the early 1920’s that made him “World Champion Drummer.” He played with the top musicians in New York and came back to Columbus where he died in 1969.

Another violinist that I came up with is worth remembering, Floyd Hickman. He had a violin orchestra and played at the Pier Ballroom in Detroit. Another Parker musician was Jimmie Perkins, who became personal drummer for Ethel Waters.

Sam Stewart was the pianist led the best Parker band . The five pieces included the Robbins Brothers, Rennan and Millard, on various instruments, Paul Jordan on violin, Lawrence Dixon on cello and banjo.They were classically trained and during the years that they spent at the Hotel Hollenden they trained with top teachers in Cleveland.

They came back to Columbus when the Deshler-Wallick Hotel opened in 1918 and performed evening concerts. The lobby was crowded every evening and they performed nothing but classics during the dinner hours. But after 9 p.m. they added more musicians and played for dancing; they were such fine musicians.

Sam wanted to break away from Parker; so in 1918 he and I collaborated to form Sammy Stewart’s Singing Syncopators. We played at the Southern Hotel and the Secore in Toledo. When bands contracted for jobs in those days it wasn’t for a week or two, it was for a year.

But that was when I was working for Franklin County, so when the band left town, I could only join them on vacations. The band spent the year 1922 in Detroit at the Ritz Supper Club and left Detroit for Chicago. I joined them at the Sunset Cafe on the Southside playing bass in that terrific band.

They were a symphonic jazz band, mixing concert and show material. There was a superb hot trumpeter named Eugene Hutt who soloed with that group. Louis Armstrong came to sit in, but he couldn’t cut the music. He was a speller and you couldn’t spell there because they’d put on a classic number like Rhapsody In Blue or The William Tell Overture.

The band eventually came back to Columbus and opened the Ogden (Lincoln) Theater, Thanksgiving, 1928. They went on to New York City in 1930 and made stars out of Chu Berry and Big Sid Catlett.

I used to lead a band at Indianola Park, on the Northside, right at the end of the interurban line. Percy and Eugene Lowery were in that band and Percy later led his own bands, before become a lawyer and the first Black member of Ohio’s Parole Board. There was also a great trombonist in that group, Archie Hall, who had played during WWI with the great James Reese Europe’s Harlem Hellfighters.

I worked at Valley Dale Ballroom before the Peppe Family owned it and brought a Springfield group called McKinney’s Cottonpickers to Columbus for the first time. Jimmy Peppe bought Valley Dale and he had an orchestra who would alternate with mine at a dance hall in Marion called the Millerdome.

Jimmy Peppe gave me a chance there and I made good on it. He became a successful booker, moved his office to New York and took the Sammy Kaye Band out of Ohio University. He made a top band out of them and turned the Dale over to his brother Lou Peppe. (Note: one of the three Peppe Brothers was legendary OSU swim coach Mike Peppe)

I don’t want to boast, but because of some of the top notch players that I had in my band, the Pittsburgh Courier ranked us among the top ten Negro orchestras for years. Saxophonist Joe Thomas left my group to become a star with the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra and a Zanesville man named Sy Oliver used to write arrangements for me. He sat in my trumpet section on occasion before he went on to Tommy Dorsey, before leading his orchestra in New York’s Rainbow Room. My front man and director, Chet Nelson, placed second in a national competition for bandleaders in New York.

Have you every heard of Harry “Sweets” Edison? Well, Harry will tell you that I insisted that he learn to read music. I took Harry and his trumpet out of Columbus East High School and he left me to go with Count Basie. He also became Frank Sinatra’s right hand man.

I got to share the stage with some of the best during my years at Valley Dale. Kaye Kyser played there a summer before he went on to New York. Benny Goodman performed there with his great quartet, Artie Shaw brought Billie Holiday to Columbus.

The night Sinatra played there was something else; the girls just screamed and fainted something awful. But the biggest crowd, surprisingly, belonged to Guy Lombardo, the place was packed inside and out.

World War Two was hard on the music business, the draft plucked many of my best men and I ended up consolidating my band with Clarence Olden’s Dixie Rhythm Boys . Gas was being rationed and a trip to Valleydale became almost an unaffordable luxury.

But we held it together and made it a point to entertain the people to make sure that they’d return again. All my men worked day jobs and played at the Dale on Friday and Saturday nights.

We kept this up for years, I still had my job doing real estate identification for the county and I had a large insurance business going. It made for a rather full week with me laying out work on Friday and Saturday to keep three women at my insurance office going.

When New Year’s Eve, 1951, came I had had it with the music business. Asthma was putting me on the ropes and I still had six months on my Valley Dale contract so I turned the band over to Clarence Olden.

I’ve worked so many jobs for all these years that I could never fully retire. I gave my insurance business to my son, Charles and now the county and my household are my only responsibilities.”

(Note: Mr. Hood retired from 54 years service to Franklin County in 1986, died January 25, 1991, at aged 94, but he’s very much alive in me).