Arnett Howard and his Creole Funk Band:1985-2003

I was working for Adrian McLymont at Universal Classic Cars when I started rehearsing Arnett Howard and His Creole Funk Band. I was tossing around names when my friend Chuck Davidson said, “Why don’t you just call it the Creole Funk Band?” He spoke with such conviction that I just said, “OK. Creole Funk, it is.”

Late April, 1985, at D.J. Prophet’s Neighborly Pub, now known as Union Station, marked the premier of Arnett Howard and his Creole Funk Band. The first crew was Donald Payne, bass, Kevin Turner, guitar, Gregg Pearson, drums and Ron Funderburg, percussion. Within the first year, inspired by a film that featured David Byrne and Talking Heads, I added Pat Funderburg, Debra Tucker and Marcia Daniels as vocalists.

I had left Universal Classic Cars to work at WBBY-FM, Jazz 104, in April, 1985, but by September of that year the evening schedule conflicts had made the band my priority. We played Union Station and the Short North Tavern to huge audiences. But the Short North soon ended in August and we filmed a television show for GTC-3 that December. The TV spot was growing fame fast for the band and in January, 1986, we were invited to substitute for the regular entertainment at Deibel’s Restaurant in German Village.

Saturday night at Deibel’s was usually Esther Craw’s accordion night, however when the Creole Funk Band hit the stage with its brand of New Orleans and Jamaican soul, folks forgot about Esther. We strolled through the audience in a Mardi Gras style and blew the roof off of the place. The management knew that they had to keep us coming back.

On February 6, 1986, the Creole Funk Band began playing Wednesdays at Deibel’s and for five and a half years, whenever we weren’t at Deibel’s, we were in New Orleans or Jamaica. The world would come to Deibel’s, people would bring guests from out of town, international groups would have their dinners there, school kids would have their birthday gatherings where they could dance and have good food and their parent could have some adult refreshments.

In December, 1986, Arnett Howard’s Creole Funk Band recorded its first cassette. Unfortunately, Pat, Debra and Marcia were done, victims of conflicting schedules. We managed to get them recorded and we began the New Year with almost a new lineup, Gregg on drums, Al Morgan, bass, Lance Ellison, guitar and Ron Hope, percussion. We recorded at new venues like Victory’s on High Street, The Hoster Brewing Company, the Avenue, Hoggy’s, The Patio, The Dell, Max and Erma’s, The Scoreboard Restaurant and plenty of public events and private parties. We were named People to Watch in 1987 by Columbus Monthly Magazine.

We made our first trip with the band to Jamaica, October, 1987, although it was nearly a disaster because when we arrived, the instruments that we had waiting for us were junk. The speakers were blown in two of the amps, the mixing board was missing channels. But the audience realized that despite the equipment, there was quality among the group. We traveled to Jamaica from 1987 to 2000, taking as many as thirty-two boxes of instruments with us.

The Creole Funk Band performed as many three hundred-twelve times in a year from 1988 to 2002. We performed at forty weddings each season and as many as seventy school performances. Beginning in November, 1988, we put out a monthly newsletter called The Creole Funk Gazette that would have news stories on the members of the band and upcoming events, along with our schedule.

I was missing a percussionist so in May, 1988 I added Capital University student Eric Paton to the group and he brought with him a tremendous saxophonist, Jeffrey Scot Wills. We did our first performance at the Lancaster Festival and recorded our third cassette there with Amerisound Recording. The Lancaster Festival has had us annually for twenty-three years since.

For the Lancaster crowd we performed a variety of musics, starting out with Word Up, a smash hit from the Atlanta group, Cameo, then The Right Stuff by New Kids on the Block. We went retro by doing You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’, but at the bridge, we launched into a reggae groove. The Funky Cold Medina and The Wild Thing were a pair of tunes by Ton Loc that we medleyed, then we went smooth jazz with Jeffrey Scot Wills performing Silhouette on soprano saxophone. Our biggest song was Hot, Hot, Hot, which we started doing the summer of 1987, inspired by Bahamian artist Arrow. We finished the set with a rousing version of The Jailhouse Rock.

NBC 4, WCMH-TV commissioned a jingle entitled Football Friday Nite in July, 1994, Al Morgan did the music, I wrote the lyrics while we waited to go on stage in Dayton. We recorded it one Tuesday after a show at the Scoreboard and it has run for eighteen years consecutively with new lyric for each season. Our video history, 1985-1994, came out also that same month.


We released our first compact disc, 10 For 10, in June, 1995, second, Arnett Howard’s Rocket 88’s, June, 1996, Kidding Around, June, 1997, fourth, Joyful Heart, Generous Spirit, 2001, fifth and last, Extended Family, June, 2002. Compact disc versions of our first three cassettes have had subsequent reissues.

Through the years I have changed musicians. On percussion I have had Ron Funderberg, Ron Hope, Chuck Palmer, Nathan Anders and Eric Paton, guitarists have included Kevin Turner, Victor Martin, Lance Ellison, Daris Atkins, Greg Herman and Kraig Phillips. Saxophonists have include Jeffrey Scot Wills, Keith Kimble and Kevin O’Neil, with bassists Donald Payne, Al Morgan, Robert Daniels and Manny Quintero. Drummers in the Creole Funk Band have include Gregg Pearson, Eric Paton, Jeff Peters, Chuck Palmer, Mark Lomax and Rahsaan “Rizzi” Bowers.

Rizzi became my drummer in October, 2000. He had played with Foley McCreary prior to joining us, but the Creole Funk Band was his first job that had a regular payday. He had a young family and was looking forward to the new year, but in May, 2001 he was wounded by a home invader. He lived for thirty-six days before dying of his wounds. The band acted as his pallbearers and he was laid to rest near another Rahsaan, Roland Kirk, in Evergreen Cemetery.

In 2002, I made the decision to end the Creole Funk Band at the conclusion of year. I had been using Capital University as my farm team and the group, much to my dismay, had become a jazz band, as opposed to a funk band. Combined with my exhaustion from eighteen summers of between two hundred fifty and three hundred concerts, I finally pulled the plug on January 3, 2003, when we performed at the second inauguration for Ohio Supreme Justice Evelyn Stratton at the Marriott North Hotel.

From D.J. Prophet’s to the Marriott North, eighteen summers and thousands of stops in between, Arnett Howard and His Creole Funk Band performed nearly 5000 times. Joyful music and a generous spirit, for sure!

Jambalya: November, 1984-February, 1985.

I journeyed to Los Angeles, California to strike it rich with my brother Keidi, in November, 1984. He had been there for most of the year and was living in Long Beach. The group was named Jambalya, a Creole Funk Bank, combining his love for Jamaican music and mine was for New Orleans.

I took two keyboards with me, along with my trumpet. We rehearsed, recorded and performed a couple of gigs a week, but the winter in California is just not the time to start a new band. I learned to stretch the few dollars I made by shopping for bread, tuna and noodles.

But I saw and enjoyed a lot of California. I went to flight museums and air bases in Compton and Chino. I spent Christmas with my wife Marge coming out to visit, but after ten weeks of little gain, I bid California farewell and returned to work as an auto mechanic in a Volvo-Mercedes shop in Columbus.

The Pacesetters:1981-84

The Pacesetters were formed during the winter/spring of 1981 by Quandoures “Q.D.” Williams, bass, Grayland Williams, drums, Larry "L.A." Almon, guitar, Arnett Howard, keyboards, trumpet and Skeemer Frye, deejay. We rehearsed at Joanie Frye’s home in Eastmoor. We were later joined by Pera Payne, vocals.

During the first season we played at Club Tropicana, 1317 East Livingston Avenue, off Lockbourne Road and drew tremendous crowds there. No one in the group wanted to sing and you couldn’t very well have a group without a singer, so I chose to sing lead. L. A. would sing I Love You Just the Way You Are.

We played at Charbert's in Downtown Columbus near the end of the year that I booked, but Q.D. booked himself and another band there for new years. There was little discussion about it; he had formed the Pacesetters, but Q.D. was the first one out.

In November, 1982, we were invited to play at the Short North Tavern in the near Northside of Columbus, when there was but one place with the Short North in its name. When we went for our first gig, we invited Jeannette Williams to be guest artist. I picked her up, she sang nine songs, three per set, I dropped her off and she was paid fifty dollars for the evening. The other four members of the band played the entire evening, then split one hundred-twenty five dollars with hard feelings about Ms. Williams.

But that first evening at the Short North Tavern was impressive. We did a New Orleans song called They All Asked For You and, like the great musician before us, Rusty Bryant, we walked the bar. I remember parading down through the crowd tooting on my trumpet with Jay Harmon on saxophone following, climbing on a barstool and walking down the length of the bar with Jay following. We were a hit.

Larry Almon lasted until 1983, before leaving and with Jay, Jeff Edelstein, bass and Chris Dawkins, drums, we continued until November, 1984, when The Pacesetters broke up. We played at Union Station and the Canabar, amongst other places and our repertoire include hits like Purple Rain and When Doves Cry by Prince.

A Musician's Scrapbook

In January, 1980, after working six years at the O.M. Scott and Sons Company in Marysville, Ohio, I left to start a project to document the Black music culture of Central Ohio. The working title was A Musician’s Scrapbook: The Illustrated History of Columbus’ Black Entertainers and the first person that I interviewed was Jimmy Carter, a pianist and organist who I had met at Clyde’s at Courthouse Square.

One evening at the club, when Jimmy was taking a break for his gig with the Frank Hooks Trio, we sat together and he told me stories about his beginnings in music. “I was sixteen and the first job that I had was playing at a burlesque club on Main Street. I was making twenty-five dollars a week and that was ten dollars a week more than my father was making. The sisters at Mt. Vernon A.M.E. Church were wondering how I could be allowed to work in a strip joint, but my family knew how much money I was pulling in.”

He laughed at comparing his salary with kids his age that were running paper routes. He finished by exclaiming, “If someone would ever write a book about those days in Columbus when no one had keys to their house and there was music on every corner, they’d have one hell of a book.” That was my inspiration.

When I showed up at Jimmy’s house the next week with my tape recorder and camera, the first picture that he shared with me was of the Rusty Bryant Quartet, with Jimmy Rogers on drums, Harry Ross, bass and Jimmy Carter sat behind the piano, circa 1951. He had several photos of he and drummer Eddie Nix playing with the Earl Hood Orchestra in 1940 at the Valley Dale Ballroom. After I finished recording our session, he said, “You’ve got to interview Earl Hood”, and he gave me his phone number.

Earl Hood was approaching his eighty-fourth birthday and in great health, when I called him for a visit. His musical biography was huge; be began playing violin professionally in 1910 with the Thomas Howard Orchestra at the Masonic Lodge in Downtown Columbus at he remembered his pay, four dollars. He played with Charlie Parker’s Popular Players, led by pianist Sammy Stewart and when Stewart formed his band, the Singing Syncopators in 1918, Earl went with them to the Southern Hotel.

Hood continued playing with Stewart after his father, Charles, died and he became the bread winner of the family. During the summers Earl would spend time with the band when Sammy ventured out to strike his musical gold mine. He told me about the contracts that Singing Syncopators would get to spend the year in the large hotels like Cleveland’s Hollenden, Toledo’s Secore, the Ritz Supper Club in Detroit, then the Entertainer’s Cafe and Sunset Cafe in Chicago.

Earl’s legacy in music grew in Columbus when he formed the Earl Hood Orchestra and became the house band at Valley Dale Ballroom from 1928 through 1950. Those were the peak years when swing music brought nearly every touring band to Valley Dale, whose owners were the Peppe Family, brothers Jimmy and Lou. Performers included Sammy Kaye, Kaye Kyser, Guy Lombardo, Benny Goodman, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Frank Sinatra, Artie Shaw, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, among others. Earl was one of the few Black men who was there throughout the era.

Others that I spoke with during these heady days were Bill Carter, Elaine Crockett, Raleigh Randolph, Eddie Nix, Milton “Doc” Payne, Sammy Hopkins and Bill Stewart, who had been a young member of Sammy Stewart’s band when they went to Chicago in 1924. “Sammy was the best pianist that I’ve ever seen. He could play two separate melodies simultaneously, he was a great arranger and his orchestra was made up of Columbus musicians who were first class gentlemen.”

Bill continued to play with Sammy in Chicago through 1928 and the the band returned to Columbus to open the Ogden Theater, built by Al Jackson. They opened the theater, later known as the Lincoln Theater, on Thanksgiving, 1928. In 1931, with Bill still playing saxophone and reed instruments, the Stewart Band went to the Lafayette Theater in New York City. They played all of the big spots in New York, but music progressed and the Sammy Stewart Band broke up in 1933.

I coined my visits with Central Ohio musicians “Traveling Through Time.” I got to travel with saxophonist Rusty Bryant to the years when Dot Records captured an evening in 1954 at the Carolyn Club when Rusty’s group, which included a young Hank Marr on piano, recorded Pink Champagne, the Castle Rock and All Night Long. I was with Hank on Leonard Avenue, when he and Rusty recorded a recorded Live at Club 502.

In September, 1982, we had a birthday party at Valley Dale Ballroom in honor of Earl Hood and the following year, in October, 1983, we welcomed Harry “Sweets” Edison back to honor his old band leader’s birthday with a concert. Sweets had left Columbus in the 1930s to become Count Basie’s star trumpeter and later gave Frank Sinatra a boost with his unique trumpet style.

I apprenticed as an entertainment writer with the Columbus Call-Post, culling photos from its vast collection of entertainment photos of little know musical personalities, like the the Selby-Barton Trio, Three Bs and a Honey, the Soul Techniques, Madame Rose Brown, the Four Mints and the Wallace Brothers. By the time I put together my musician’s scrapbook I had nearly one thousand photographs.

Candy Watkins took an interest in the collection that I was amassing and suggested that she write grants for the project. Others became involved, poets, writers and photographers and in September, 1990, the book entitled Listen For the Jazz: Keynotes in Columbus History debuted at the Hot Times Festival on the Near Eastside. By then Earl Hood was nearing his ninety-fourth birthday, but he got in his Buick and came to get his copy of the book and sign autographs.

Saxophonist Rusty Bryant, organist Eddie Beard, trumpeter Bobby Alston and violinist Earl Hood came to get their copies of Listen For the Jazz and to share their musical legacies with others, before they passed on the following year. Jimmy Carter didn’t live to see the publication, he died in 1983. But he was right, “We have one hell of a book.”

My Life As A Creole

Creole is a world describing “mixture.” In America, when we use the term, we are mindful of the French-speaking people of color that inhabit or are descendent of Louisiana, both European and African descent. The term is actually from the Spanish word “criollo,” believed to be a colonial corruption of criadillo (bred, brought up, reared). In my travels, I have found references to Jamaican Creole, Haitian Creole, Bahamian English, Sierra Leone Krio, Seychelles Creole and Cuban Criollos.

I adopted my Creole life from roots that I acquired when I met a band in San Francisco. My brother Kevin and I had first visited California to attend the Monterrey Jazz Festival in mid-September, 1975 and we spent our first Thursday night at a San Francisco concert hall, The Boarding House, where Bob Marley and the Wailers had played two weeks before. The Meters were performing there, prior to going south to play in Monterrey.

The Meters original membership was; Art Neville, keyboards, Cyrille Neville, congas, Joseph (Zigaboo) Modeliste, drums, Leo Nocentelli, guitar and George Porter, bass. They had become legend in the New Orleans recording studios, working with composer Allen Toussaint, recording many sessions for sixties hit recordings.

The funky melodies and rhythms that came off the Boarding House stage that Thursday evening drew me and Kevin out of our seats and into their second line as they paraded around the room. We partied with them on into their dressing room during the break and we saw them on Saturday afternoon at the jazz festival. I went home and found their album, “The Meters: Fire on the Bayou,” and learned every note on every song. My favorite became They All Asked For You, a traditional song passed down from their musical fathers in New Orleans parade bands.

I made my first trip to “The Big Easy” the following summer, 1976 to visit an adopted sister, Stephanie Winkfield LeDuff, who had married into a Creole family when she jumped the broom with Peter LeDuff. They lived in half of a “shotgun style” double on Lapeyrouse Street off of Gravier Street, downtown, and Peter’s grandmother, a French speaking matron, occupied the other half.

Peter’s parents, Ferd and Sis LeDuff had built a beautiful home Uptown New Orleans and they showed me so much Southern hospitality and love, that I just adopted myself into their family. We shopped at neighbood markets, toured the French Quarter, the St. Louis and Elysian Fields Cemeteries and ate authentic home-cooking in the kitchens of Creole homes. My soul was hooked for life.

January 1959: The Flood In the Bottoms

I was eight years old in January, 1959, living on Chicago Avenue and in the third grade at Chicago Avenue School. When the westside levee broke and the flood waters came, I remember my father George Howard, climbing into the crawl space above our ceiling about bed time and turning off the pilot light to our gas furnace. Our parents gave us the sense that we were in an emergency but were not panicked. All four Howard Boys crawled in bed together and body heat kept us warm.

Within a few hours, we were awakened and it was time to evacuate; the Ohio National Guard troop transporter was parked in our flooded street and military men were carrying neighbors in porch chairs to the covered military truck. Our first stop was Engine House Number Ten on West Broad Street and from there, our family was shuttled to the Navy/Marine Recruiting Center located on Sandusky Street at Dublin Road, in the same site that now stands Confluence Park Restaurant.

I remember hundreds of people overnighting there on wooden and canvas, folding cots. After breakfast, ten hours since we were evacuated in the middle of the January night, we contacted our family friends, Otto and Josephine Charles, who had an apartment on Clifton Avenue in East Columbus and spent several days with them, before returning back to the westside.

Flood waters had crept up to our front steps, but no closer and since we had no basement at 175 Chicago Avenue, we saw no flood damage. But our family purchased acreage in Plain City/Union County, built a new home and by November, 1959, we had fled the Bottoms and flooding for good.

Frazier Community's Annual Pigroast and Family Day

Since 1984, the Frazier Community, Plain City, Ohio and Arnett Howard’s Creole Funk Band have met on Labor Day for a Pigroast and Family Day. As many as seven hundred people have attended this annual celebration from all over the world.

The pigroast started in 1984 as a celebration party when Arnett graduated from the Columbus Area Leadership Program. Art Yoho, of Yoho Foods, contributed the pig, Arnett contributed the music, the Leadership Program made up the guest list, along with the members of the Frazier Community.

The event was enjoyed by all and next year’s event was planned, expanding the guest list to include all friends of Frazier Estates. Friends came from Plain City, Columbus, Cleveland, Boston, Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles and Munich, Germany, among other places.

There has been only one year that the event has not been held, due to drouth conditions in Plain City. For two years the pigroast was held at the Jerome Township Center in New California, but for the majority of the time the party have been held at the Charles and Virginia Davidson residence, the Eddie Abercrombie residence, the Howard/Bogart residence and the Arnold and Mevelyn Estis residence.

In 2011, the Frazier Community will be hosting its twenty-seventh Pigroast and Family Day. Photos through the years have been assembled and are on display at http://www.flickr.com/photos/59510425@N04/sets/72157625986802051/.

Fred and Howard's Studebaker Lark

Fred and Howard’s Studebaker

I was going through the New York Times last week (January 25, 2011) and I ran across an advertisement for a 1960 Studebaker Lark. The ad read, “The frumpy Lark nearly saved Studebaker, but few people saved Larks. It’s an ideal start to a collection of defunct brands. $10,000-$11,000.”

The photo of the plain automobile reminded me of a photo that I took back in 1996 of Fred Holdridge and Howard Burns in front of a Studebaker Lark that they owned. It was getting serviced at the German Village Shell station that was operated by the Vern Thacker family.

I don’t know the year of Fred and Howard’s pristine vehicle but I’m guessing that it was a 1960. According to a page on the Wikipedia website, “The Studebaker Lark is a "compact car" which was produced by Studebaker from 1959 to 1966. From its introduction in 1959 until 1962, the Lark was a product of the Studebaker-Packard Corporation. In mid-1962, the company dropped "Packard" from its name and reverted to its pre-1954 name, the Studebaker Corporation. In addition to being built in Studebaker's South Bend, Indiana, home plant, the Lark and its descendants were also built in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, from 1959-1966 by Studebaker of Canada Limited.”

Studebaker-Packard was a full-sized car and the Studebaker Company celebrated its one-hundredth year in 1952. But the company was losing money and the Lark was introduced as a compact that would save the company. It sold well for the years 1959 and 1960 and had two levels of trim; Fred and Howard’s was the Deluxe.

It seems obvious that Fred and Howard had their Lark painted, if not restored, by the looks of it’s exterior and chrome. If I rode in the car, it was not more than once. They would get new cars every couple of years and the Studebaker was just a whim for them, but I remember it sitting behind their German Village apartment until 2001.

The car was sold after Howard’s passing in 2001 and replaced with an electric Gem Car.

Josephine Charles and Fred Holdridge, RIP

Well all have a life span. Some long, some short, some happy and some tragic. We are now grieving an Ohio family who has lost five members of their family in two separate accidents over the Christmas holidays. Tragic.

But the bright moment in the passing of a loved one comes between the announcement of death and the memorial service and that is reliving the years that you had together. All of the joyful memories come flashing by.

Josephine Charles was my mother, Delores Williams Howard’s roommate at Bluefield State Teachers College in Bluefield, West Virginia in 1949-50. Josephine married Otto Charles and they moved to Clifton Apartments in Columbus, where they raised Nickie and Cedric Charles.

The Howard Family was caught in the flood of January, 1959, spending the first night in Fire Station Number Ten at Glenwood and West Broad and the second night at the Marine Reserve Center on Sandusky Boulevard. The Charles Family then took us in and we spent the next three days with them before finally returning back to “The Bottoms,” as the Lower Westside was then called.

Nickie Charles was Otto and Josephine’s oldest son and Cedric, the younger, was born developmentally disabled. Nickie was a superb drummer, playing in the Billy Cobham school of fusion drummers. Unfortunately, Nickie acquired a drug habit, shot and killed a taxi driver and he has been in Madison County prisons for nearly thirty years. Tragic.

Josephine has spent the years petitioning parole board, attempting to get Nickie’s freedom, but to no avail. Otto passed away three years ago and Nickie was unable to attend his fathers funeral. It’s not likely that he will attend this one.

Josephine and Otto enjoyed the Frazier Community’s Annual Pig Roast and Family Day, held each Labor Day since 1984. They would bring Cedric and the extended family and we would celebrate each year. I will miss Josephine, but like all of the family, she will still be there in spirit.

When you speak of Fred Holdridge, you talk about Howard Burns. Fred and Howard were the proprietors of Hausfrau Haven, the German Village general store. I started going to Hausfrau in 1974, when Doug Dailey, a dear friend, moved to Columbus Street and we would go there on Sunday mornings for the New York Times.

German Village celebrates gay life and Fred and Howard were the most senior and celebrated of all of the Village’s residents. The Village grew from a place where you could buy almost any place for $10,000 to $20,000, into a neighborhood where million dollar homes, beautiful gardens and a house tour takes place each summer in late June.

German Village had a very light side to it, as illustrated by Void Villities. It was a show to lampoon Upper Arlington’s Vaud Villities and the characters in the show had to have a display of their untalented side. So in 1994, in honor of Fred and Howard, I dressed as Billie Holiday and performed two songs in drag. Afterwards, still dressed, the crowd went to Lindy’s Restaurant, the nicest place in town and had dinner. Howard said that I was elegant.

Fred and Howard never got any Father’s Day cards, so Aaron Leventhal and I started sending them cards in 1990 from New Orleans. I would occassionally send them a riske photo of me and my girlfriend from Jamaica and Fred would carry it around in his wallet. We had a fiftieth anniversary breakfast for them for Father’s Day, 2001 and Fred pulled the photo of me and Susan out of his wallet.

Memories will keep flooding for the days until Fred is buried, for he has reached the end of his lifespan, like Howard did in November, 2001. However, love never ends.

Josephine and Fred, I love you. Rest easy.