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!”