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.