SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

Contents

Preface.....................................................................viiAcknowledgments.............................................................ixIntroduction................................................................xiii1. Kansas City Childhood (1909-1927).......................................12. From Piano to Saxophone (1927-1931).....................................113. From Kansas City to New York (1931-1934)................................184. From Smack to Duke (1934-1940)..........................................305. Golden Years with Ellington (1940-1943).................................576. From Fifty-second Street to Kansas City (1943-1949).....................1007. From Kansas City to Monterey (1949-1959)................................1348. Last Years in the United States (1959-1964).............................1799. First Years in Europe (1964-1966).......................................21310. The Dutch Years (1966-1969)............................................23711. The Last Busy Years in Denmark (1969-1973).............................268Appendix: Ben Webster on CD, DVD, and VHS...................................323Notes.......................................................................327Index.......................................................................347

Chapter One

Kansas City, Missouri-to the jazz aficionado the name rings as romantic and sweet as New Orleans, Chicago, and New York. One imagines jam sessions and small, smoke-filled rooms, where jazz is played till early morning by legendary musicians like Bennie Moten, Andy Kirk, Count Basie, Lester Young, Mary Lou Williams, Dick Wilson-and Ben Webster.

The real Kansas City of the early twentieth century was more mundane. It was an enterprising town, situated where the Kansas River-also called Kaw River-meets the Missouri. It became a junction for Midwestern trade, traffic, finance, and industry. A small trading station in the 1820s, by 1860 the town had grown to forty-five hundred inhabitants, and when a railway bridge over the Missouri was completed in 1869, development intensified even more. By the end of that year, seven railroads led to Kansas City, a number that was to double over the next ten years. As a result, trade with livestock from Texas and grain from the North blossomed. The city's livestock market grew to become the country's second largest after Chicago, as did its meat industry. In the humid summer heat, a heady stench from the livestock markets and industrial chimneys clung to the city.

The grain market and flour production grew to become the nation's third largest. Work was plentiful, and the population exploded. The Kansas City of 1880 had a population of 55,000. By 1890 that number had multiplied to 132,000, to 164,000 in 1900, to 250,000 in 1910, and to 325,000 in 1920. By 1930, 400,000 people lived in the city. From 1910 to 1930, the black population stayed at a fairly constant 10 percent.

Around 1900, the black population, initially spread over the city, became concentrated in an area bordered by Independence Avenue to the north, Prospect Avenue to the east, Twenty-seventh Street to the south, and Oak Street to the west. Most blacks were employed as industrial workers, waiters, janitors, or assistants of some sort.

On March 27, 1909, at 12:02 P.M., at 2441 Highland Avenue, on the south side of the black ghetto, Mayme Barker gave birth to a boy baptized Benjamin Francis Webster.

In the early nineteenth century, one of Ben's great-grandmothers was brought as a slave from Guinea in West Africa to a Kentucky plantation. Her son fled from slavery and settled in Liberty, Missouri. He called himself Missourian Sall. His wife bore him four daughters, one named Alice, another Agnes. Alice married into the Barker family and gave birth to five children, among them one girl, Mayme, born in 1872. Mr. Barker died early and Alice remarried George Ruff, but had no more children.

Alice's sister Agnes (1864-1963) came to play an important part in Ben's and Mayme's lives, helping to raise Mayme and her sister Blanche, as Alice and George Ruff worked to make ends meet. Agnes Johnson was a woman of principle and strong will, a puritan with a good heart. When Blanche left home to marry Harley W. Robinson Sr., Mayme stayed on with Agnes in Kansas City and attended teacher's college, just as her older sister had.

When she was thirty-five, Mayme went to Chicago to take a course at the University of Chicago. At a party in Bob Mott's Pekin Temple at 2700 South State Street she met a tall, handsome man six years her senior. His name was Walter Webster. They were married on Sunday, September 17, 1907, in the hometown of the bride. The ceremony was held at West Point Baptist Church, and Mayme's eleven-year-old niece, Joyce Cockrell, was bridesmaid. The newly married couple moved to Chicago, where Walter was employed as a waiter on the Pullman Company's dining cars.

The marriage was a disaster. Reality proved to be much less poetic than Walter's promises had been. They lived in a one-room apartment on the southeast side of the Windy City's Black Belt, where they shared utilities with three other families. What was worse, the mild-tempered Mayme soon discovered that Walter was a crude, violent, and alcoholic womanizer. In September 1908, a visiting family member found Mayme pregnant, undernourished, and weak. Agnes decided to intervene. In January 1909 she arrived in Chicago, and through her resolution and authority managed to take Mayme back home to Kansas City, where she once again moved into the house on Highland Avenue.

Mayme and Walter were not yet officially divorced when Ben was born, which is why he was given his father's name. Mayme took back her maiden name after the divorce. Shortly after Ben's birth, the three of them moved to a two-story house at 1222 Woodland Avenue close to the corner of Twelfth Street, and after summer vacation Mayme resumed teaching. Agnes presumably gave up her job to raise Ben until he was old enough for school.

Ben was spoiled equally by his mother, whom he called "Mayme," and by Agnes, whom he called "Mom." He always got his way: "I was pretty lucky when I was a kid, very lucky. I should say fortunate," he recalled later in life. "If I wanted a bicycle, my mother would buy it for me. If I wanted a wagon, she would buy it, and if I wanted skates, my mother would buy that for me." Apparently the family had no financial worries; pianist Mary Lou Williams, later Ben's girlfriend and lifelong friend, recounts that Ben "came from a very wealthy, wonderful family of doctors and lawyers and teachers," and that he always dressed in the most expensive clothes.

Spoiling Ben might have been one way of keeping peace in the household. His temper was known to fluctuate from one extreme to the other. "Mayme, his mother, was a very intelligent, quiet, lovely person of high morals," Joyce Cockrell remembered. "And his father was earthy, and he had a high temper, so that was responsible for him [Ben] being a dual personality. Ben could be just as lovely and sweet as he possibly could be, but if you made him angry, he could be violent and almost brutal."

While Ben was still a small boy, Mayme married Frank W. Love, an army officer six years her senior, but Ben never developed a close relationship with his stepfather, nor with his biological father, whom he allegedly visited for the first and only time in Chicago in January 1932.

Not much is known of his father's family, except what Ben himself told. He saw his paternal grandfather only once, when he was still a small child. He recalled lying in bed when suddenly a man appeared in the doorway with hair down to his shoulders. "That was my grandpa," Ben recalled. "It was the only time we saw each other. He was a Cherokee. Back then, it was unheard of for us blacks and redskins to be together, if it was a decent family, which we were." In the nineteenth century, it wasn't uncommon for runaway slaves to be accepted into Native American societies, and even to live with or marry into the tribe. Both minorities stood on the bottom rung of the ladder to acceptance in American society and shared a mutual interest in sticking together. Many other well-known black jazz musicians also had Native American ancestors, among them bassist Oscar Pettiford, pianists Horace Silver and John Lewis, saxophonists Benny Golson and Earle Warren, trumpeters Doc Cheatham, Harry "Sweets" Edison, and Art Farmer, trombonists Kid Ory, Eddie Durham, and Trummy Young, and drummer Ed Thigpen.

Mom-Ben's great-aunt Agnes-was an enterprising and proud woman, actively interested in politics and religion. She arranged meetings against racism, and participated in demonstrations for women's suffrage. She was a member of the Allen Chapel, an African Methodist Episcopal church. The family attended service regularly with her, and this is where Ben discovered Methodist sermons and songs, with their rich African American oral traditions. The AMEC was probably a conscious choice of Mom's, since it fit in better with her assimilation of white, middle-class values than did the Baptist Church. Mayme and Mom raised Ben to be proud of his race and impressed upon him principles of decent behavior, a code of dress, punctuality, a good work ethic, self-discipline, and the ability to defend his views. They intended for Ben to grow up to be a respectable and successful man.

Although Ben didn't attend church much in adult life, he retained a religious view in his own quiet way, as did many other musicians of his generation. "Ben Webster was kind of an introvert, always respectful when he was sober," said pianist Jimmy Rowles, who knew Ben for thirty-five years. "He would never say anything like 'Jesus Christ' or 'Goddammit.' He would use 'MF' a lot. But he would never allow anybody to say 'Jesus Christ' or 'Goddammit' in his apartment or in his presence. Whenever they did it, he was ready." Tenor saxophonist Don Byas found out just how far Ben would go when Ben picked him up and threw him across the White Rose bar in New York because he was saying "Lord" this and "God" that.

Mom taught music at school, and she played the piano at home. Ben showed signs of a marked musicality at an early age, but it was Joyce Cockrell, who lived on the second floor for a while, who discovered his talent. "I was taking piano lessons, and Ben would annoy me all the time," she recalled.

Sometimes he even walked across the piano keys to keep me from playing. So I said to myself that the best thing to do is to start teaching him how to play the piano so he wouldn't annoy me. So I learned him how to play C, B, D, F, you know, and for some reason he had a keen ear for music. He listened to the radio, and he came back and picked the right notes. I said, "That's fine," so that's the way he really developed his ear. I taught him to play the piano for a couple of years, but Mayme did not know that I was teaching him. So when he would come home and he would bang on the piano she said, "Well, I better have to do something for this boy, because he shall not play by ear." So she started him to take violin lessons.

When Ben began taking violin lessons with a teacher called Charles Watts, he was attending Attucks Elementary School, in the farthest southeastern corner of the black neighborhood, which made it possible for Mom, who had found employment there at about the same time, to escort him.

Ben didn't enjoy violin lessons; he would have preferred continuing on the piano. "When I was quite young, I had to study violin," he told an interviewer. "My mother, she wanted me to be a little Lord Fauntleroy, with that big Buster Brown collar, and take violin lessons. But I hated that thing. I had to take my violin lessons, and all my friends, every time I'd go-he [the teacher] lived two and a half, three blocks from our house-they'd call, 'Sissy with the violin! Sissy with the violin!' ... My mother, God bless her, said, 'Practice, practice!' ... As soon as she'd left the house to go and teach school, I was at that piano." Ben had perfect pitch, which must have made it easy for him to play the violin, despite his dislike for the instrument. "Sometimes I think back," he said, "and maybe I was tone conscious even then, because I would never get the sound of that violin."

Pete Johnson lived at 1215 Woodland Avenue; he was five years Ben's senior and would later become one of the major boogie-woogie pianists. When Ben met him, he was a drummer in several orchestras and didn't play piano professionally until 1926. Johnson remembered Ben's visits and recalled that he "lived on the other side of the same street where I lived in Kansas City and before he became a very good tenor man he played piano and used to come over to my home to ask me to teach him bass on the piano. I guess he was more sure of his right than of his left."

In 1921 Ben left Attucks for Lincoln High School, and around the same time he smashed the violin on Joyce's piano in a fit of rage, and thus five years of violin lessons came to an end.

At Lincoln High Ben's interest in music increased. He found a new violin and joined the school band, where he played with two Ashby brothers, whose younger brother Harold, born in 1925, would play with Ben later in life. One of Ben's classmates at Lincoln High was the slightly older John Williams, who would later play with Ben in Andy Kirk's orchestra.

But when Ben was in his teens, it was another future member of Andy Kirk's orchestra, pianist Mary Lou Williams (ne Scruggs), who was of the greatest importance to Ben. They first met some time after 1925, when she arrived in Kansas City with the Syncopators, in which her future husband, saxophonist John Williams, played. Certainly it was at a time when Ben was still concerned with improving his piano skills, because he remembered that "Mary Lou Williams taught me quite a bit about the piano, too."

In his teenage years, Ben and his friends began exploring their neighborhood, and there is no doubt that he felt attracted to the many possibilities and temptations surrounding him. After the Volstead Act was passed in 1920-a law that prohibited sale and manufacture of intoxicating liquors-nightlife in Kansas City exploded. The town council, with its close gangster affiliations under the leadership of Tom Pendergast, happily looked the other way in matters concerning prohibition. The town was always full of visiting businessmen and tradespeople with money in their pockets, looking to be entertained. Bars, cabarets, and nightclubs offering music and other forms of entertainment shot up all over town, not least in the black section, which housed the Subway Club, the Sunset Club, the Novelty Club, the Reno Club, Lucille's Band Box, the Cherry Blossom, the Lone Star, Elk's Rest, and Amos and Andy. Ben lived right in the middle of all these temptations. He began to frequent the Sunset Club around the corner, not only for the music supplied by his friend Pete Johnson, but also to play pool, a game for which he discovered a natural talent. He spent a lot of time in a pool hall on the corner of Twelfth and Paseo, which was owned by one of his uncles. The seasoned players taught him so well that he eventually became capable of challenging even the sharpest pool sharks. When he was low on pocket money, he would take a little from his mother's purse to start him up at the pool hall.

It must have been quite a culture shock for Ben, but he quickly learned to appreciate the freewheeling life in the cabarets and bars, among the offbeat-and sometimes dubious-characters. It was a welcome challenge, and a contrast to the puritan matriarchal life at home. However, he had some brutal experiences as well: In a notebook, he later wrote of seeing a man shot and beaten by the police on Fifteenth or Sixteenth Street. The man survived and fled, zigzagging his way down the street. The same notebook discloses that Ben and his cronies enjoyed hanging out at Lee's Drug Store, and that he heard James P. Johnson perform in town in 1925.

Ben hid his impressionable and sensitive mind-in part responsible for shaping the fine musician in him-behind a blunt and macho mask that fit in better with the harsh surroundings. He learned the language and behavior of the street, but he never quite forgot his decent upbringing. Without his mother's knowledge, he was already drinking, and later told his Danish lady friend Birgit Nordtorp that he "once had a bottle of booze stowed away in the clothes closet. One day, when secretly sneaking over to take a sip, Mom called from the kitchen, 'Are you going to share that with me, Ben!'" Another childhood memory was seeing cowboys drive cattle toward the markets and slaughterhouses. You knew they were coming long before you could see them, because the cattle stamped up great clouds of dust that filled the air in Kansas City. "There was dust all over," he remembered.

According to Mary Lou Williams, Ben was wild at the time, and before long he was forced to change schools. "He was called Little Peck's Bad Boy because they couldn't keep him in college. He'd been sent to several colleges. One day Ben was telling us a story. He said the girls were dressing in the dormitory and he was peeping through the window and fell through the window. He has a cut on his arm now."

The geography and chronology of Ben's high school years are somewhat uncertain. Joyce Cockrell said that he "graduated from Sumner High School, K.C., Kansas & then from Western University in Quenemo, Kansas June 2, 1927, also was awarded the Major Letters for positions in football of guard & tackle on Varsity squad.... He was sent to Wilberforce University in Ohio, and stayed two years."

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Excerpted from SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER MEby Frank Bchmann-Mller Copyright © 2006 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
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