DEVIL AT THE CONFLUENCE

The St. Louis Palladium.

2012-01-17T20:18:00.000-08:00

This is very cool! Famous St Louis architectural photographer Peter Wilson came along one day to the Palladium building and set up a tripod for a couple of shots while we talked about the history and the Club Plantation. He was so casual about what he was doing, that I suspected that he was just snapping reference shots. Then last week he sent me this -

Wow. What a beautiful shot!

This isn't what I saw that day. When I was standing on the sidewalk across from the building, I could find no other view of the structure other than a straightforward composition. Also, it was getting dark early and I assumed there wouldn't be much light to work with. So I am very impressed. Wilson's image really creates an exciting scenery out of the blank shuttered building. No trick floodlights, the photograph shows the natural condition of the building. And in his artwork I can see the antique elegance of the old building - something I now know that Wilson was capturing, but I didn't see while standing in the cold late afternoon on Delmar.

Mr. Wilson's website is here: peterwilsonphotography.com

And this is cool too! Andrew Torch is a fellow artist and proprietor of Andy's Toys. He mentioned to me one day that he had a poster of a montage of St Louis-related ephemera that showed tickets to the St. Louis Palladium Roller Skating Rink. So I rushed over and got a couple of pictures of them.

Looks to me like it's from the 1930s.

Thanks Andy! Go see his store at 9620 Gravois in St. Louis, it's got all the cool stuff your mom threw away when you went away to school.

The St Louis St Paul.

2011-09-29T12:35:00.000-07:00

The book, Devil At The Confluence, concerns the incredible stories of over a hundred important musicians from St. Louis who had never been profiled before. Although these musicians were neglected in music history they represent important claims of St. Louis contributions to American culture. And like the recorded blues of St. Louis, the local foods have never really been investigated either. There are the famous local inventions of Iced Tea, Ice Cream, Toasted Ravioli and Gooey Butter Cake, but this essay is an attempt to end speculation with facts concerning the rarely honored St. Paul sandwich. Because just like St. Louis music, other historically important cultural inventions from St Louis have been neglected and ignored for too long.

These new facts about the St. Paul were stumbled upon while researching for the book. It’s bothersome that many St. Louis historical facts and artifacts have been appropriated by other areas and even more bothersome that it seems that the facts were conceded without argument. Some of these claims may seem unimportant such as the creation of Planters Punch or the Tom Collins cocktails, while others are nationally significant cultural traditions such as beer and hotdogs at baseball games. And somewhere in that wide span of cultural importance falls the St. Paul sandwich.

Wiki (and please, kids never, ever confuse Wikis for real research) states that:

“The St. Paul Sandwich is a type of sandwich found in Chinese restaurants in St. Louis. The sandwich consists of an egg foo young patty served with lettuce, pickle slices, mayonnaise and tomatoes between two slices of soft commercial white bread, such as Wonder Bread.”

But Wiki is not the place to look for missing answers to unsolved mysteries. The crowd-sourced and unverified soft-database says:

“The origin of the sandwich is unclear”

followed by this Wiki-wishy-washiness:

“It was invented in St. Louis, Missouri and is usually only available in Chinese restaurants in the St. Louis metropolitan area.”

The St. Louis St. Paul sandwich was featured in a 2002 PBS documentary called “Sandwiches That You Will Like” but the question of the history of the item was answered with a shrug. In the companion book of the documentary, “American Sandwich: Great Eats From All 50 States.” it says that sources (unnamed) claim that the sandwich dates as far back as the 1960s and another source (unnamed) says the early 1940s.

So no one knows the history about the sandwich, yet the sandwich can only be found in St. Louis? Well that’s enough to claim it as a local invention. Really, if this was Chicago that would be enough and it would be up to somebody else to try and prove that it wasn’t. In fact, that’s the way it is for nearly every historical claim to American foods like hot dogs, pizza or pretzels. There just isn’t a lot of documentation on this kinda stuff, so being the only place that has it means it comes from there. This shouldn’t be a mystery.

Or could it be that St. Louis doesn’t want to claim it? Like the gooey butter and fried brains crowd draws a line in the saturated fat and refuses the St. Paul? Or maybe it’s like St. Louis’ unclaimed rights to American music history, a victim of that local inferiority-complex thing - a belief that new or important creativity must have come from somewhere else.

Or maybe it’s not as bad as all that. In the last few years there seems to be a change for the better in St. Louis. There is a new local pride. And the St. Paul sandwich has benefited from it.

In 2009, after Playboy magazine listed the St. Paul Sandwich as one of its top ten sandwiches, but noted that the sandwich might not have St. Louis roots, Joe Bonwich defended the city’s claim in his comments in STLToday:

“This is a one-source legend dating to a 2006 article by Malcom Gay in the RFT, in which Park Chop Suey's owner claims that a former owner of the restaurant, who was from St. Paul, Minn., invented the thing. But there's no corroborating evidence, and the way it's worded, it sounds like the sandwich was invented in St. Paul and migrated here.”

Thank you, Mr Bonwich!

Alone, the sandwich may not be as big of a tourism draw as perhaps the Cheesesteak is for Philly, but maybe it can be. Lunch Encounter, a blog by Washington, DC-based food writer Lisa Cherkasky apparently thinks so:

“Just one more compelling reason to get your sandwich eating self to St Louis, the St Paul Sandwich.”

Thank you Lisa, bring them in. And then she muses about the source of the dish by showing some impressive knowledge of local history:

“I wonder, does it have anything to do with Chinese railroad workers? I would say, after doing a tiny bit of research, yes. In 2007 there were 700 Chinese restaurants in St Louis. That would point, one would reason, to a long history of Chinese-American culture. When you sit in Busch Stadium watching St. Louis Cardinals games, you may never imagine this location was once China Town. The first wave of Chinese came to St. Louis in 1869 when many of them lost their jobs as railroad construction workers. At the peak period, the Mid-Pacific Railroad Company hired over 10,000 Chinese laborers. When the westward railroad construction was completed, many became unemployed. Many of them chose to come to St. Louis that was then the 4th largest city in the United States.”

St Louis' Chinatown was without firm and clear borders just like the many other immigrant areas of the city. The area of Busch Stadium at that same time was also known as Tamaletown, with a large number of Mexican immigrants. In Devil At The Confluence there is an early picture of the headquarters of African-American music, the Deluxe Music Shop and visible next door to it is Wo Hop Chop Suey. Different nationalities and races mixed block-by-block in the city at the turn of the century. And that fact about the confluence city is perhaps most significant to the cultural invention of the St Paul sandwich as noted by none other than frontman for the local alt-country/roots rock band, the Bottle Rockets, Brian Henneman.

“I wouldn't be one bit surprised to find out the St. Paul sandwich originated from the cross pollination of African American culture, and the plethora of local Chinese restaurants.”

And there it is. There is the significant uniqueness of St Louis' cultural history - the merging of styles in a location suited for the creative blending. A common ground that isn't north or south, or east or west, or country or urban. There's a strand of the unifiying thread found across the cultural and creative aspects of the city of the confluence.

So here we add the evidence found during our research. The first image is a photograph from sometime around the turn of the century. Two men stand in front of a typical restaurant on a street in St. Louis, on the wall is posted the menu.

The second image shows the wall menu in the photograph enlarged and enhanced. The second item in the SANDWICHES column on the left reads: “Try our ST. PAUL”

The next images are St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper articles. From 1922, the Man On The Sandbox editorial column reads: “Our idea of a civic short order lunch is a St. Paul sandwich on Milwaukee rye.”

From 1918, the Sport Salad column makes reference to a St. Paul sandwich, “which is composed principally of ham and eggs.”

Both of these St. Louis editorials are making esoteric comments on matters of the day that are not known so it’s hard to understand what exactly these comments mean, but they are surely joking about something.

And from a 1916 column replying with answers to unprinted reader’s questions, “John” is told the ingredients for a “St. Paul sandwich: Scramble eggs in a bowl; chop ham fine; add onion and parsley.”

It was at the 1904 Worlds Fair in St. Louis that so many exhibitions tried very hard to show off new inventions and recipes and at least four versions of the Club Sandwich appeared there. This might have been the debut of the American sandwich formula of “meat + Mayonnaise + lettuce + tomato.”

So the history of the St. Paul sandwich has been an established St. Louis restaurant item now for at least one hundred years. It seems very likely that the various Asian, African and European immigrants in the densely populated city was the unique combination of factors that contributed to the creation of the Americanized Egg Foo Yung sandwich with the Catholic name - the Saint Louis Saint Paul.

2011-09-14T15:50:00.000-07:00

A beautiful coffee-table book with original illustrations, vintage advertising and rare photographs detailing the chronological story of what the St. Louis blues are, who the St. Louis blues musicians were, and how their careers began in St. Louis.

Included with the book is a special compact disc of recordings by St Louis legends from Delmark Records. Devil At The Confluence is the only comprehensive book ever published on the history of the blues music of St. Louis.

Devil At The Confluence, The PreWar Blues Of St. Louis, Missouri is available at the St. Louis independent bookstores

Left Bank Books (Central West End and Downtown),

The Illustrated Art Museum in Crestwood Artspace,

Subterranean Books (University City),

The Archive on Cherokee Street,

Pudd'nhead Books,

BB'S Jazz Blues and Soups,

and Chesterfiled Arts.

Information and news is also posted on Facebook. Be a friend of the Devil:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/DEVIL-AT-THE-CONFLUENCE/97550257185

The Palladium and the Marathon craze

2011-08-17T16:19:00.000-07:00

A marathon dance in 1910 in St Louis ended when it was called a draw and three prizes were awarded to three couples. As organizer of the benefit, Annie Jackson made the call. She was worried that the police would interfere if the marathon became too strenuous on the couples. Already that summer, marathons had been raided by police in San Francisco and Brooklyn and Annie didn't want any such trouble at her event. Also, the public attendance for the week had been exceptional so she could easily afford to pay each couple the $25 prize. That wasn't how the marathon dances craze of the later Jazz Age usually went. Typically, these things were 24/7, no-mercy, last-man-standing kind of endurance contests. The same themes of reality TV like Survivor, Idol and Dancing with the Stars, the dance marathon was the beginning of the stuff of American pop culture. Horace McCoy's book, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? was made into a movie in the 1970s and it portrays the character, the hype and the seedy scenes of the marathon spectacle very vividly.

The Palladium building off Grand at Delmar and Enright was built as a Roller Skating rink in 1914 and a newspaper article told of Gene Rodemich's early St Louis Jazz band performing there. Music was changing from the Ragtime fad to the Jazz fad and the spectator sport of Roller Derby was evolving around the Rollerskating fad. On these roller skating rinks, the Marathon Dance Derby or "Walkathon" fad began.

Reliable information available about the Marathon craze is scarce and most of what is available assumes that it occurred only during the depression. But it was in at least two other cities besides St. Louis by 1910 and the last one in St. Louis was held at the end of the 1930s.

By 1950, the Club Plantation had seen it's best days. The club's old crowd had settled down to make baby-boom babies and didn't come out much anymore. The new younger crowd with their new music were making some new place crowded, like the beatniks over in the Gaslight Square area or the lounge crooners at the Chase Hotel.

Historically, St. Louis culture has a unique creative technique in finding the future trends - it takes the best of the past and brings it forward. So it doesn't seem strange that the Club Plantation's owner, Tony Scarpelli, had an idea to bring back some business to his place by bringing back the Marathon. He ran an ad in the entertainment trade journals for a revival of an authentic old-time Walkathon Derby in the authentic, historic Palladium building.

It's not known if his Walkathon revival ever happened. Shortly thereafter the Club Plantation was gone and Tony had gone into other business. But maybe years later, he saw the movie They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

And maybe years later, Tony saw the end of the 1970s when the younger crowd and their new music called Disco were dancing on Rollerskates in Roller Rinks.

More History of The Palladium / St Louis Club Plantation

2011-07-19T16:34:00.000-07:00

This post continues with the history of the Palladium Building/Club Plantation, and reveals the ownership and managers behind the famous St Louis nightclub. Like the stories and musicians in the book,

Devil At The Confluence, this information has never been published before. Currently, the Palladium building may be sold and demolished like so many other lost historic landmarks, so this series of stories are being gathered and posted as quickly as possible so the important history of this legendary nightspot is available while the structure still stands. The inadequate historical record and disinterest for preservation of cultural landmarks by the alderman and governance of the city of St Louis does not reflect the pride that the citizens have of their city. But there is a new attitude of appreciation and preservation in the citizenry and it outnumbers the old. Even though the current office holders do not reflect that yet.

Al Capone may be one of America's most well-known gangsters and a symbol of lawlessness in Chicago, yet his crimes are proudly exhibited in Chicago's History Museum. There is no museum in St. Louis for the prohibition era gangsters of the city. While that may be due to, well let's just say, an overly-sensitive inhibition concerning all facets of its history, the true fact why the Mob bosses in the Lou aren't well known is a testament to how much better they were than Capone. Afterall, surely the main job of a good Mob boss is to keep everyone in the city from knowing you're the Mob boss.

The St. Louis gangster, Tony Scarpelli owned the Club Plantation. The club operated as a set-ups nightclub, meaning they sold food and provided ice, soft drinks, and glasses and the customers brought their own liquor. This way they could stay open later than the 1 o'clock curfew for taverns. A liquor law work-around.

St. Louis has a long-held distaste for liquor laws. First, because beer and wine are a part of the traditions and culture for the St Louis German, Irish and Italian immigrants, and second, because of the great brewing industry that employed many of the citizens. There's also a long tradition of organized crime in St. Louis as well, including mobsters Dinty Colbeck and Buster Wortman, whose careers were also principally, well let's just say, in the liquor and spirits trade. So St Louis had Jazz Age prohibition entertainment and nightlife as vibrant as Chicago, Los Angeles or Las Vegas, and they also had the same kind of prohibition trouble.

But the Club Plantation's Tony Scarpelli was, it appears, nothing more than a minor hood with only minor liquor law violations on his record. But dig a bit deeper and you might find that his rap sheet included armed robbery and a file with the FBI. Most of the people in the city probably didn't know about that. Sure, there was talk around but that was just rumor. Now Tony's younger brother Jimmy's rap sheet included bootlegging, robbery, gambling and a murder charge, so his involvement with the nightclub was kept on the QT. There was a lot about the Club Plantation that was on the QT. So maybe Tony was just good at, well let's just say, keeping his nose clean.

More history of the Palladium Building, St Louis, Missouri

2011-06-28T16:09:00.000-07:00

The book, Devil At The Confluence, proves that St. Louis was a more important center for American music than has traditionally been thought. One of the reasons that history disregards St. Louis' influence is because the many stories about the city had not been preserved or celebrated. Likewise, the stories and the importance of the historic Club Plantation has nearly been forgotten as well, and the building is now in danger of being demolished. Since the purpose of creating the book was an effort to establish the stories before they were lost forever, it feels like a responsibility now to post the stories of the Club Plantation for the same reasons.

This story is a great example of St Louis' influence and inspiration to American cultural history. Traditional music history has long assumed that the Mississippi river was responsible for the city's reputation as a cultural center, but it's the people and the local culture - not the river, roads or train tracks that make St. Louis a great city.

In 1946, songwriter Bobby Troup left Pennslyvania on a road trip on US Highway 40 to come to the St. Louis Club Plantation where Louis Armstrong was performing to a SRO sellout crowd. Traveling with his wife, he planned his roadtrip to eventually get to Los Angeles. Enthused partly about the new post-War freedom of auto and cross-country travel and partly to get to St. Louie to see the great Satchmo, Troup was inspired enroute to write the song he is most famous for: "(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66."

Next: Stories of the gangsters who were behind the historic Club Plantation.

The Palladium Building, St Louis, Missouri

2011-05-23T13:08:00.000-07:00

The Palladium Building on Enright Avenue just west of Grand is for sale. The building was built in 1914 as a rollerskating rink and ballroom. The Palladium was not the fanciest of the legendary St Louis dancehalls, but it was home for some of the greatest music in the city.

From the earliest days of the jazz age, the Palladium was a unique spot for entertainment. Gene Rodemich's St Louis jazz orchestra played a dance there in 1914 for the Sunshine Society's Benefit Ball. In the book, Devil At The Confluence, Rodemich's outfit is noted as the first recorded jazz group from St Louis. During World War II and just into the 1950s, the building was the famous Club Plantation, home of the very popular Jeter-Pillars recording orchestra.

The importance of this structure to St Louis music history is significant for the great local and national musicians who played there and the generations of people for whom this was the place to be on a Saturday night.

So we started discussing an effort to save this building and raise awarness of the important cultural history that St Lous has and how very few of the heirlooms remain. This video was created as an introduction to the discussion and to demonstrate what is already lost. Not regret nor complaint, but to create appreciation for St Louis historical treasures.

The Palladium Amusement Company built the building at 3618 Enright in 1914 and had a roller skating rink there until 1941. The Enright address is the skating rink’s front doors, on the north side of the building. The south side of the building, the 3600 block of Delmar, had no storefronts listed until 1940 when a warehouse for Dupont Paints was listed. The Club Plantation opened on Vandeventer and was there for about five years until it moved to the Palladium Building. The Vandeventer location soon became the site of a very popular and important music spot known as the West End Waiter’s club, just down the block from the West End Hotel. From 1947 to 1952, the Club Plantation is listed at 3617 Delmar, and 911 N. Vandeventer is the West End Waiters club.

At the Club Plantation, two extraordinary young musicians joined the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra, bassist Jimmy Blanton and guitarist Charlie Christian. Blanton was playing with the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra at the Club Plantation when Duke Ellington first heard him in 1939. After joining Ellington, Blanton, more than anyone else in jazz, made the string bass a solo instrument. In September of 1939, record producer John Hammond heard Christian playing with the Jeter-Pillars band and recommended him to Benny Goodman. The Jeter-Pillars Orchestra also saw in its ranks, Jimmy Forrest who recorded the hit single, "Night Train." By 1942, the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra became the most popular band in St. Louis and besides local radio shows on WIL and KMOX, the band was featured on the national radio program, The Fitch Bandwagon. Jeter and Pillars disbanded their orchestra in 1947.

Popular St. Louis bandleader, Eddie Johnson talked about his memories of the Club Plantation, “I had a band that was twelve pieces. I had a chance to work with all these top bands in the country, like McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, Fate Marable, Duke Ellington they would come here, to the Club Plantation, at 911 North Vandeventer. I opened the Plantation Club back in 1931, that's when I had a fellow called Tab Smith in my band.” Johnson also spoke of the Palladium building “And when the Plantation closed on Vandeventer, they moved up there and called it the Plantation.” And he recalled that he worked with the Mills Brothers there. In the interview, Johnson named a number of other St. Louis clubs from the 1930s, such as the Dance Box, the Chauffers' Club, the Finance Building. but none of those locations remain.

The Jeter-Pillars Orchestra backed many popular national talents when they came to town including Louis Jordan. The biographies of Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis talk of the Club Plantation and the St. Louis jazz bands of George Hudson and the visiting orchestra of Billy Eckstein’s. Davis was eighteen years old and sat in with Eckstein and local trumpet man Clark Terry was in Hudson’s band. Terry remembered the Plantation orchestras as having the best local talent and being known by the national superstars for their excellent musicianship.

“We played the Club Plantation and all the acts from Nat King Cole To Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, the Nicholas Brothers – all acts came to the Club Plantation because it was a very, very popular place. They brought their music and we would play their music better than anybody ever played it.” “They would hear the music played like they’d never heard it played before. They would go all over the country, “Man, you got to go out to St. Louis and have that George Hudson band play your music. You’ll never ever hear it played like that.” So that’s how the band got their reputation. It was a great band.”

Memphis Travel and Tourism Bureau runs ads in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that bills Memphis as the “Birthplace of Rock n' Roll.” Their preservation of Sun Records studio is commendable and Graceland draws tourists from all over the world of course, but it’s deplorable that they were permitted to run a false claim like that in Chuck Berry’s hometown paper. Not only did the father of rock n’ roll invent it in his home in St. Louis, but every good Memphis musician besides Elvis Presley, such as Ike Turner, Albert King, and Little Milton, left there to come here. A strong claim to the birth of rock and roll could be made for the Cosmopolitan Club in East St. Louis, but the Cosmopolitan is now gone. And rock-solid claims could be made about St. Louis’ contributions to America’s cultural legacy from ragtime to jazz through blues, rock n’ roll, swing, alternative and other trends of music.

Many of St. Louis’ cultural landmarks are gone. And these now-gone St. Louis landmarks were not of minor importance to American cultural history. These local sites were simply forgotten or unnoticed by the city. This is an unfortunate habit of St. Louis, and a bad habit not shared by other cities. And most assuredly, the value and benefits of such claims to historical treasures are not unnoticed by cities like Memphis or Chicago – who has capitalized on other treasures and honors neglected by St. Louis. The Bandstand is gone. The Jazzland, the Rosebud, the Arcadia, the West End Waiters club, the Elks Club and Club Riviera are gone. And now the Palladium is in danger of becoming a parking lot. The building is not in a questionable area, in fact it is comfortably in one of the most vibrant areas for entertainment in the city. It could easily be a gem of cultural history and a proud local treasure, a worthy landmark, and one of few remaining.

Another interesting fact about the block of Grand Blvd across from the Palladium and the old Club Plantation: In 1959, Chuck Berry opened a club called The Bandstand across Grand Blvd from the Palladium at 814 N. Grand Blvd between Delmar and Enright in the old Latin Quarters nightclub underneath the Chuck Wagon diner. So it can be added to the Palladium building’s history that it saw the transition from the swing music of the World War years to rhythm and blues to rock and roll and the greatest musicians of those decades.

The Palladium Building should be saved from becoming just another parking lot. It should be preserved as an heirloom for future generations to know the long and great legacy that they are a part of. A legacy that has come very, very close to being lost. It’s something very similar to an inferiority complex that St. Louis has that keeps her from bragging about her cultural importance and keeps her from defending her qualities and successes. She makes no argument when other cities make claims to her treasures and historic landmarks. Maybe it’s because she doesn’t realize how important these historical artifacts are. Maybe knowing the history and realizing the value will stop this downward spiral of low self-esteem and cultural neglect.

Review in the American Library Association's magazine, College & Research Libraries News.

2010-12-14T09:29:00.000-08:00

George M. Eberhart, senior editor of American Libraries and editor of AL Direct, wrote to say that Devil At The Confluence was "an excellent contribution to St. Louis history." Then in his review of the book in the December 2010 issue of College & Research Libraries News from the American Library Association, Eberhardt says that the book, "sets the record straight with a wealth of primary research."

"Belford, a professional illustrator, started out to make a series of portraits in honor of St. Louis blues and jazz musicians prior to World War II. When he found out how little research had been done on them compared to blues musicians further south, he launched a massive project to reestablish the city’s musical heritage. Here he sets the record straight with a wealth of primary research, noting that what became ragtime music was played in the city as early as 1888, and quoting St. Louis piano bluesman Stump Johnson on blues origins: 'St. Louis had some of the best blues singers that ever there was in the history of the blues. The levee at St. Louis was known throughout the country as the origination of blues.'”

Left Bank Books picks the Devil as favorite local book.

2010-12-06T18:14:00.000-08:00

STLTODAY's Book Blog asked local booksellers to pick their favorite books of 2010.

Thanks LEFT BANK BOOKS for picking Devil At The Confluence!

(But Left Bank's pick was dismissed because Devil At The Confluence was published in 2009.)

And then at the end the article laments why there are no favorite books that have appeal lasting beyond one season... (sigh.)

Please support St Louis' independent bookstores!

Left Bank Books, in the Central West End and Downtown St Louis.

Spanish Blues Music fans give the Devil a Shout out.

2010-11-24T12:16:00.000-08:00

There have been a number of requests for copies of the book, Devil At The Confluence, from Europe and other countries outside of the USA, and it has been proven to be difficult to fulfill many of those requests. But American music devotees overseas have managed to secure copies and the reviews have been overwhelmingly favorable. The book of St Louis' music history went to Spain and got a nice mention on the website, La Taberna del Blues, saying, "...ese libro mola, con sus ilustraciones antiguas y las fotos."

Some of the known locations where Devil At The Confluence is available are:

St Louis, Central West End:

LEFT BANK BOOKS - 399 N Euclid Ave, St. Louis, MO 63108

THE MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM - 5700 Lindell Blvd, St. Louis, MO 63112

St Louis, Delmar Loop:

SUBTERRANEAN BOOKS - 6275 Delmar Blvd, St Louis, MO 63130

St Louis, Webster Groves:

PUDDN'HEAD BOOKS - 37 S Old Orchard Ave, Webster Groves, MO 63119

St Louis, Crestwood:

THE ILLUSTRATED ART MUSEUM / CRESTWOOD ARTSPACE, www.stlciam.org

St Louis, Cherokee Street:

THE ARCHIVE - 3215 Cherokee St, St Louis, MO

Downtown St Louis:

BB'S JAZZ BLUES AND SOUPS - 700 S Broadway, St Louis, MO 63102

THE ST LOUIS BLUES SOCIETY, www.stlouisbluessociety.org

St Louis, Chesterfield:

CHESTERFIELD ARTS - 444 Chesterfield Center, Chesterfield, MO

New Orleans, Louisiana:

EUCLID RECORDS NOLA - 3401 Chartres St., New Orleans LA

Via the Web:

VIRGINIA PUBLISHING, www.stl-books.com

AMAZON.COM

and BORDERS BOOKS

St Louis folklore and ghosts from the research of Devil At The Confluence for Halloween.

2010-10-30T23:28:00.000-07:00

This week of Halloween there has been a story each day from the leftover research of the book. These are rewritten from reports made by witnesses. There are some very popular and often repeated unexplained incidents from St Louis' history, but these are the less well-known stories.

THE MCDOWELL MEDICAL COLLEGE

The old McDowell Medical College at Eighth and Gratiot was a large brick structure with two wings and an octagonal tower, three stories tall with sixteen foot ceilings. Joseph McDowell was an eccentric doctor* who built the college in 1847. Many in the city said that he was mad and there were many stories that seem to prove that he was.

It was true that he had cannons pointing out of the windows of the college. And it's likely true that the anatomical lab and the dissection room had human bodies preserved in alcohol-filled copper tanks. The autopsy and amputation procedures of a working hospital surely explain why body parts were found in waste pits and why several wagon loads of human bones were hauled out of the building. And lastly, it seems that it was true that when his 14 year old daughter died, he had her cadaver stored in a cask in a cave in Hannibal, Missouri.**

Those facts are certainly creepy and probably true, but up to where he pickled his daughter, it all seems perfectly logical for a doctor and a medical facility. So yes, he was unhinged and there were skeletons in his closet. But it's kind of hard to separate facts from superstitious fervor in the historical record of the McDowell Medical College because much of what was written about Dr. McDowell and the facility came out after the town had turned against him and his school. Sure, the neighbors seemed fine with cannons pointed at their houses and piles of bones and viscera filling the potholes around the block, but when accusations arose of body snatchings of the recently deceased from St. Louis cemeteries, well, then that crosses a line.

The questionable story that spurred the town into mob action in the later 1800s concerned a young waif who died of unknown causes and whose corpse was taken from the grave by McDowell and some students. It's said that a mob stormed the citadel but didn't find the doctor or the girl's body. They said that the old doctor was warned of the coming rabble by the ghost of his mother who told him where to hide himself and the frail corpse.

See there? All of the accounts of this St Louis legend seem like gossipy rhetoric with a touch of Mary Shelley, but then so do the facts. Nonetheless, fear and outrage swept the neighborhood.

Oddly, (if that still has any meaning here) there seems to have been little mention in the media and no official action by the city authorities, so the accuracy of the resurrectionist charges appear flimsy and could be discounted - except for a short paragraph in the school's 1868 catalog that was intended as a boast of the quality of the school's educational materials:

(Nice. Our great-great relatives' corporeal remains were "cheap and abundant.")

Furthermore, a convincing piece of evidence was found in the newspaper in 1895. It was decades later when a well-respected senior medical doctor confessed to the methods used by the McDowell medical school. He revealed that in the early 1850s stealthy disinterment and burking were indeed the Victorian ways of gathering school supplies in St Louis.

"There were some such laws but the supply of bodies for dissection was always short. And it was filled by private enterprise" he stated bluntly. "There was a great deal of grave-robbing in St Louis."

When old Doctor McDowell died in 1868, the building lay vacant for many years and wouldn't you know it, the townspeople living nearby Castle Private Enterprise began to say the old place was haunted. Well then the newspaper ran a series of outlandish articles that told of sensational hauntings in the Goth tower. Civic responsibility was one thing, but yellow journalism was a circulation booster. The first article of five described a midnight drama of sound effects in the tower beginning with a scream, then the trampling of many feet, the sound of "a soft body" being dragged and the slamming of a heavy chest lid. An explanatory narrative was supplied that told the tale of beautiful young Dora Wescott who died a pauper and her body was obtained by the college for dissection. As students were carving through the pallid corpse, the poor maiden awoke from her trance. She did not speak, only gasped and rose to a sitting position on the table. The article series included walk-ons by the local professional spiritualists and necromancers and each night the mob got bigger at the intersection near where Purina stands today.

The McDowell Medical school and tower was demolished within two years after the tabloid stories and when a reader wrote to ask if the stories were true, the paper's reply was, "We can only say in all truthfulness that the Dora Wescott yarn is as worthy of credibility as any story of the kind that has been published this year - Editor."

* I'm not making this up - Dr. McDowell got his medical degree from Transylvania University in Kentucky.

** Mark Twain wrote about the Hannibal cave with the girl's corpse.

Devil At The Confluence is available at LEFT BANK BOOKS, SUBTERRANEAN BOOKS, BORDERS, THE ILLUSTRATED ART MUSEUM / CRESTWOOD ARTSPACE, THE ARCHIVE- CHEROKEE, CHESTERFIELD ARTS, THE MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, BB'S JAZZ BLUES AND SOUPS, VIRGINIA PUBLISHING and Amazon.

Part 6 of St Louis folklore and ghosts from the research of Devil At The Confluence.

2010-10-30T00:30:00.001-07:00

This week of Halloween there will be a story each day from the leftover research of the book. These are rewritten from reports made by witnesses. There are some very popular and often repeated unexplained incidents from St Louis' history, but these are the less well-known stories.

Two very old areas of the city were the locations of numerous supernatural occurrences. Lafayette Park has a history dating back to the mid 1800s, and the suburb of Maplewood was the western edge of St Louis in those days.

LAFAYETTE PARK

The Lake

In 1888 a small boy drowned in the lake in Lafayette Park. The boy's mother was overtaken with grief and sat watch by the lake every night for many weeks. Some park visitors told of seeing a misty figure of a boy over the water and some said that they had seen the woman alone by the lake, talking as if in conversation with her child.

The Investigative Reporter

One evening in December, 1889, Charles Uhde sat down on a bench in Lafayette Park and fired a bullet into his head.

By the next night there were reports of an apparition in the park. George Wilson said he was chased by it late one night. The milkman driving up Mississippi Avenue said that he saw something white inside of the fence. Two boys entered the gates late at night on a dare and saw it coming across the grass. Uhde's ghost was the subject of many conversations and several neighborhood meetings held at the Park Methodist Church. A newspaper reporter was assigned to investigate the story and he went to the park late one evening. The garden was dark and empty and he sat on a bench and waited. He was a bit nervous but would not admit to himself that he was afraid. Wait, is this the bench that Uhde killed himself in? He moved to another one, even though that one was just as liable to be the one. So he stood up. No scenery is more suited for a ghost than Lafayette Park. There was a white shape moving in the bushes, but before he got too worked up about it, he realized that it was one of the swans. Satisfied that he had given sufficient opportunity to any spirits, the reporter went home to type up his story denouncing the sightings of ghosts in Lafayette Park.

MAPLEWOOD

The Ten Foot Lady

On Monday night, the first of June, 1910, two men walking along Manchester Avenue in Maplewood saw a seven or ten foot tall woman in a long white flowing robe. She turned and floated south on Sutton Avenue. The startled men followed for six blocks as she glided down the sidewalk many paces ahead of them. At the train tracks she stopped and seemed to be looking for a train to arrive. The men kept their distance while she paused for a good five minutes before turning down Greenwood Avenue. Scrambling across the tracks, they followed the figure to the far end of the road and lost sight of the specter where there are no street lamps. The entire police force and most of the townspeople spent Tuesday night vainly looking for the towering matron.

Urgent Call For The Undertaker

At 9 am one May morning in 1908, Mrs. Bernard Fleming of Maplewood answered a knock at her door and found her neighbor, Charles Ames, who asked to use her telephone. Of course he could, and Mrs. Fleming went back to her chores in the house. She heard him dial and ask for an embalmer to come to the Ames residence. The shock of such a call stunned Mrs. Fleming and by the time she got hold of her thoughts again, Mr. Ames had hung up the phone and left the house. She saw him stalking back to his house a few doors away. She was in a fit of worry for the Ames family and trying to remember if Mrs. Ames' elderly mother had been staying with them.

An hour or so later, a newspaper reporter knocked on Mrs. Fleming's door. He said that he had gathered all of the important information but wanted to get the reaction of the neighbors. What was her reaction when she heard the news? "And what news would that be?" Mrs. Fleming inquired. The reporter read his notes to her: "Despondent over the repeated failure of his newspaper, the Maplewood Mirror, editor and publisher Charles Ames drew a razor across his throat, severing his windpipe and carotid artery at 3 am last night."

Devil At The Confluence is available at Subterranean Books in the Loop.

Part 5 of St Louis folklore and ghosts from the research of Devil At The Confluence.

2010-10-29T09:40:00.001-07:00

In the book Devil At The Confluence, the stories behind the songs from St Louis are revealed. But not all stories had surviving songs for them and so for this week of Halloween there will be stories from the leftover research of the book.

The Ghost Of The St Louis Blues.

Jennie Sims lived at the first house on Linden Street at Twelfth, now Tucker Blvd. Her boyfriend was Alec Roal. On Thanksgiving night 1895, She and Alec had a quarrel and with the butcher knife used on the evening's turkey, Alec slaughtered Jennie inflicting wounds numbering more than a dozen. The following is most of the legible part of the newspaper story from the nights following the murder.

THE MURDERED GIRL'S WRAITH VISITS HER OLD ASSOCIATES IN BLEEDING SECTIONS.

A terrifying tale.

Twelfth and Linden will soon be a neighborhood that would meet the views of the most drastic of Connecticut reformers, for everybody with anything on his or her conscience, from craps to murder, is packing up to go away. Of course, it needs a ghost to get it right, and the ghost walks at 1201 Linden Street. This ghost is as discreet in death as she was indiscreet life, for she is scattered all over the place, and turns up in parts and sections here and there when folks least expect manifestations. Some of her has been seen in one place and other parts of her in others until she pervades society like measels. "She" is that poor girl, Jennie Sims, who was so cruelly murdered on the night following Thanksgiving Day by Alec Roal, now in the City jail, a candidate for the gallows. The focus about which the haunts seems to cluster is the house on Linden where the girl was butchered by the brute in the gray of that recent November morning. But Jennie defies all the rules laid down by the Society for Psychical Research in its book of etiquette for ghosts for she pulls off an appearance in two or three places simultaneously instead of haunting the one spot where she was done to death.

The witnesses are neither credible nor creditable, but they are, most of them, thinking very seriously of joining the church, as soon as the water is warm enough, and leading different lives.

It began with Pearl Wilbur who lives in a court behind Linden Street in a house that never should have been allowed outside of a novel by Dickens. It is a cluster of moldy stairways, creaky passages and dank cupboards. Pearl woke up the night after the Sims girl was murdered and saw lying on the floor of her room a bleeding leg. The blood kept pouring out of the severed limb until it seeped underneath a doorway and began to drip, drip down the stairs. She could hear each drop falling on each step and gathering into a pool until it reached a point where it could break bounds into the next fall. It was a leg cut off just above the knee and it had a woman's shoe and long stocking on it, so that Pearl knew it was Jennie's, who was even then lying dead in the corner house.

Pearl's experience narrated to sundry friends the next morning prepared everybody for further manifestations that next night, and it does not take much stage-setting or costly properties to get phantoms to go abroad in a community like this.

Mrs Bentley, who lives over the grocery store on Gay Street near Fourteenth, had been sitting up waiting for her son who was due home Saturday night and she went to sleep in her chair. It was about ten minutes past two when there was a thumping at the door that startled her and a human head came rolling and bouncing into the apartment without anybody with it, only just a torn and bleeding neck and throat. The head kept on rolling and rolling till it got by the corner of the room and round to the dresser, and it rolled up the side of the dresser, in defiance of all known laws of gravity, until it reached the shelf, where it rolled all over the supper that Mrs Bentley was saving for her son and began to bleed all over the food. Then Mrs Bentley fainted right there and when she came to they were throwing water in her face and asking her whatever was the matter - and there wasn't a sign of the head or the blood to be seen anywhere - and the provisions seemed unhurt, although she would not let her boy eat them, no, not for a thousand dollars.

Mrs. Cane, a very practical woman residing a city block to the west, was awoken late one night by Jennie's form. In exasperation Mrs. Cane said to the spirit: "God's sake Jennie, what you want to be walkin' way up here on Thirteenth street for? If you has to haunt something, whyn't you haunt the place you was killed at?"

Devil At The Confluence is available at The Archive on Cherokee Street.

Part 4 of St Louis folklore and ghosts from the research of Devil At The Confluence.

2010-10-28T13:15:00.000-07:00

In the book Devil At The Confluence the stories behind the songs from St Louis are revealed. But not all stories had surviving songs for them and so for this week of Halloween there will be a story from the leftover research of the book.

The Collins Street house

Described as an "ancient brick 2-story" in the 1880s, the house on Collins Street was less than a half century old. The second owners of the house were a young man and his wife and no one ever knew why she committed suicide a year after they moved in. The next family, a man and wife with two young children, were the first to report strange noises in the upper rooms. Dissatisfied for that or another reason, the family put the house up for sale and packed their belongings. On the day they were to leave, the wife took sick and died. The coroner's report found no cause for her death. Talk around the neighborhood of demons and ghosts and a series of tenants that never stayed in the house very long caused the rent to drop to $75 per month. Then $50 per month. Five or six years went by without occupation and the house began to show disrepair.

A man and wife with two grown daughters, a niece, nephew and servants took the bargain priced lease and it seemed for some time afterwards that the house was rid of the curse. The family was happy and life in 1866 St Louis was good. But at supper one night the noises began. The husband took his revolver with him when he went upstairs to investigate the rattling windows and slamming doors. Finding nothing and seeing no one, he headed for the door to the stairs. The door refused to open and it took much of his strength to get it slightly ajar. When partially opened, just enough to get his foot out, he felt an electrical shock go through him. He bolted through the door as it slammed at his heels and he ran down the stairs.

The next night his daughter was awoken at 11 o'clock by the sensation of a cold hand over her mouth. She could not hear her scream although she tried with all her might. In panic she tried again and again and eventually a scream was released as she bounded out of the bed and down the hall to her parents room. There she said that she thought she saw a white spirit form bending over her in her bed. The father returned her to her room with his lamp and made a search of the room to calm her. He was in the hall bidding her goodnight when he heard a mocking hollow laugh. The family gathered downstairs after that and stayed awake until morning when they packed and left the house.

Although necessary repairs were made, the next few years went without occupants because the house had become known as haunted to just about everyone in the city. But the new paint and repaired windows and the long uneventful period made it seem like the evil had moved on. Assuming that the hauntings were over and the rental price of $30 enticed a woman with five children and a servant girl. Within a month all five children took ill suddenly one night and died. This time the coroner found a cause of death: there were sufficient levels of arsenic in their systems. The police investigators went to question the servant but she could not be found.

The woman moved out and a period lapsed before a man his wife and four children moved in. The couple were awoken one morning having heard a groaning in the house. Doors and windows opened and shut while groans, voices and laughter echoed throughout the upper floors. This couple were not annoyed much by these occurrences that happened every other day or so and they might have stayed in the house if that was all the spooks were going to do to them. But one day the wife saw a figure of white in the mirror on the second floor. Only in the reflection could it be seen and the invisible hands forcibly grabbed hold of her and lifted her into another room. Her husband found her unconscious on the floor in the back of the house.

So many manifestations and six deaths within the house were proof to the neighbors of a great evil within the dwelling. Of course, most of the murders were caused by human hands but many believed that the spirits had possessed the killers. The house on Collins Street was well-known and talked about around the city. And the facts above were from the witnesses, the neighbors on Collins Street. The young bride's suicide, the couple chased out by the ghosts and taking the life of the woman before she could get away, the tormented families and the murder of the five children, these were the first-hand accounts. But there was another death that no one knew anything about. When the laborers were hired to repair and make changes to some rooms they made a grim discovery while cleaning out the basement. In the dirt of the stone wall cellar they found the body of a woman and a year old child. The identities of those remains were never determined.

It seems that it was a gamble to live in the Collins Street house. A chance that was only worth taking if the price was low and if the odds were in your favor. The odds work out to be a 1 in 3 chance that one would live to walk out of the house. Like every good ghost story, it's the irony in it that guarantees it a supernatural basis. And it's ironic that the Collins Street house is now a parking lot for a casino. A place where the odds are in the house's favor.

Devil At The Confluence is available at the Chesterfield Arts and The Illustrated Art Museum in Crestwood ArtSpace.

Part 3 of St Louis folklore and ghosts from the research of Devil At The Confluence.

2010-10-27T13:09:00.001-07:00

The blues area of St Louis centered around Morgan and Biddle Streets. This story occurred on Biddle before the turn of the century and was reported in the newspaper.

The Midnight Gambler

Biddle Street has many open areas and empty lots today, but in 1884 the street was crowded with old brick houses packed tightly and filled with people. Near the Eighteenth block of Biddle there was one such old brick house where an old man had lived. Old Dan was a well-known river gambler and the only friends he had were old time gamblers as well. He had died ten years before and the house remained vacant for most of those years.

A gentleman had called the newspaper with a story of a ghostly performance that he witnessed from his second floor window across Biddle from the old house. A reporter accepted his invitation to show him where the apparition was seen.

First, the reporter visited the family that was living in the house, but they said they knew nothing about it being haunted nor had they seen or heard anything unusual. So the reporter assured them that he gets many of these kinds of calls and they usually turn out to be wild imaginations or whiskey fueled dreams and he bid them goodnight. Across the street the reporter was greeted and led to the second floor window and by a quarter past ten, the moon was shining brightly. Then a figure in a stove pipe hat appeared trudging up the far side of the slanting roof. Removing the hat and setting it upon the tippling chimney, the figure seemed to set upon the shingles at the apex. Opera glasses were required to make out the actions of the shadow on the roof across the street. The hazy specter seemed to remove from its coat-tail pocket a deck of cards wrapped in a bandana or handkerchief, and continued through motions that seemed to be shuffling and dealing and placing money from a pocketbook on the table - the pantomime of a cardgame, although the opponent was not apparent.

"That's the way it goes every night," said the host. "They play there until after midnight. Pretty soon you'll see old Dan ring in a cold deck on the other fellow." During the play it was observed that the figure dropped a couple of cards in a casual movement of his arm and pull cards out from the back of his coat collar in the same sweep. Once he stuffed a whole hand under a shingle and pulled a complete set of five new ones out of his boot leg. There must have been some protests made by the unseen player because play halted occasionally and the figure gestured wildly.

At about ten minutes after night had reached its meridian the final hand was played. Dan took a single card on the draw and palmed it while pulling another card from his opposite sleeve. He pushed his pile of money and a pocket watch and chain to the center of the table and laid out his cards. But while clutching for the pot, he froze, staring across the table. In the next instant he was up and drawing a revolver from his hip. His forearm recoiled as if he fired. The gleam of the weapon and the lash of the discharge could be seen but no noise was heard. Sweeping the stakes into his hat he turned hurriedly and scrambled over the roof in the moonlight.

"And that's the way it ends every night" said the man across the street from the old gambler's house on Biddle Street.

Devil At The Confluence is available at the better bookstores including Border's books.

Part 2 of St Louis folklore and ghosts from the research of Devil At The Confluence.

2010-10-26T12:25:00.001-07:00

In the book, Devil At The Confluence, the stories behind the songs from St Louis are revealed. But not all stories had surviving songs for them and so for this week of Halloween there will be a story from the leftover research of the book. This story concerns a haunting event that occurred around the time of the "Frankie And Johnny" incident in old St Louis.

The Bloody Third

The Third District police station in the 1890s was famous for being the headquarters of law and order in the most dangerous area of St Louis: The Bloody Third. The district encompassed Kerry Patch, Wild Cat Chute and the saloon playgrounds for the roustabouts known as Robber's Roost and The Bucket Of Blood. The characters of the bad part of town included members of the notorious gangs like the Limehouse gang. In the later 1800s the old station building had seen many murderers and criminals of all sorts within its doors and the walls had stories that could make a serial killer squeamish. But one story was beyond all of the rest and was discussed only once and afterwards denied by everyone as bunk.

Station Clerk Officer Daly, reported that many nights after midnight the sound of rushing water could be heard followed by a rumbling sound that would rattle the old windows. The sound of water flooding the building was especially frightening for the incarcerated locked in their cells and the policemen on duty inside of the barred and secured quarters.

Strange voices and blood-curdling moans accompanying a dragging sound along the asphalt flooring would echo in the halls. Clerk Daley had confided this to a reporter. Other officers had heard the noises but scoffed away the idea that the station was haunted. But that was only what they would say on the record.

Daley had let slip the details of a story that was never discussed in the open. A story of a vow of vengeance that was made by one of the meanest criminals in the city. A notorious street tough who had spent more nights inside of a cell than he had spent outside of one. He had been brought in drunk and belligerent a couple of months before and locked up for the night. But this was not typical of the repeat offender, this time was without the usual tooth-and-nail combat with the arresting officers.

"Some day, maybe after I'm dead, I'll get revenge." he said as he was thrown into the cell ending his spree that night that typically would have involved someone getting carved up by his razor. The following morning when the turnkey came to awaken him, he was dead. And it was that following night that the noises began.

Other than the clerk's off-record conversation, no mention of these incidents were ever made. The station house was sold years later and no further reports of noises were made by the new tenants.

Devil At The Confluence is available from all the better St Louis bookstores including The Central West End and Downtown locations of Left Bank Books.

Antique St Louis folklore and ghosts from the research of Devil At The Confluence.

2010-10-25T14:01:00.000-07:00

The early blues music of America was primarily a folk music in that it was musical folklore. In the book Devil At The Confluence the stories and places behind the songs from St Louis are revealed. But not all stories had surviving songs for them and so for this week of Halloween this blog will publish a series of the folklore stories from the leftover research of the book.

The blues were called the Devil's music mainly by the folks who didn't like the music. And that made the folks who played it, enjoy it even more - knowing it was bothersome to the older generation or to the people who felt that it was beneath them. In St Louis, the taboo themes of ghosts, violence, death and other subjects were sometimes the subjects for songs.

These first posts are not songs but are St Louis legends concerning graveyards.

LOUIS JORDAN'S GRAVE

This story can only be qualified as trivia even though it concerns one of the biggest names in pre-rock and roll music. It was not included in the book because Louis Jordan is not a St Louisan and his career was after World War II, but it is a fact that his grave is in St Louis.

Louis Jordan was born in Arkansas in 1908. He was married five times and his fifth wife, Martha, was a showgirl from St Louis who he had met in New York when she was performing at a club there. Louis had performed in St Louis many times and was friends with many of the local musicians. In 1966 Louis and Martha were married and lived at his home in Los Angeles. He died in 1975, and his body was brought to St Louis to be buried in Martha's family grave in the county.

The quiet graveyard is outside of the city limits, marked with a nameless stone and fulfills Louis' promise made in 1941:

"I'm gonna move way out on the outskirts of town. I don't want nobody, oooh, always hangin' around."

STAGGERLEE'S GRAVEYARD DEAL

In his research of folklore of St Louis, Judge Nathan Young recorded the unwritten tale of Staggerlee who had traded his soul to the Devil in exchange for gambling luck. It happened very late one night when a young man named Lee Shelton walked past the old graveyard at Grand and Laclede Avenue. He had lost all of his money in a crap game and was disappointed with his life of bad luck.

Approaching the cemetery gate, a voice from out of the darkness asked, "What's your touble?"

Startled but not frightened, Staggerlee looked up at the figure of a man in a stetson hat just inside of the graveyard. The hat was very expensive looking and Staggerlee assumed the man to be wealthy. Stag was a natural born gambler and a hustler and was always looking for an easy mark. "I've got one more silver dollar left and I was looking for a game. I'm on a losing streak so if you have some dice this may be your lucky night."

"Perhaps." The dark shadow replied, "Or it could be a very lucky night for you."

The figure in the graveyard was the Devil of course, and the game turned out to be the legendary Faustian bargain for Staggerlee's soul. Ironically, the site where folklore says that Staggerlee surrendered his mortal soul and his moral integrity in exchange for unlimited good luck and worldly pleasures is now the property of St Louis University.

There were no notes from Mr Young's research, but the corner in the early 1900s was a ballpark for the St Louis Terriers baseball team. It seemed far-fetched that there was ever a graveyard there, but records exist showing that in the mid-1800s the ground had been a small German Methodist cemetery.

Devil At The Confluence is available from all the better St Louis bookstores and the Missouri History Museum as well as BB's Jazz, Blues and Soups.

2010-10-17T12:59:00.000-07:00

The book Devil At The Confluence profiles the musicians of St Louis and the songs they wrote about events in St Louis. Blues music's peak of popularity was the late 1920s and 1930s, and in the late summer and early fall of 1927, St Louis and its musicians had plenty of reasons to sing the blues.

On August 1, 1927 the Mississippi river flood crest reached the confluence of the Mississippi at St. Louis and pushed the river to a new record crest. The flood and the hardships caused by it inspired Charley Patton, Memphis Minnie and Blind Lemon Jefferson to make music about the event. St Louis bluesman Lonnie Johnson recorded “South Bound Water” within days of the flood, and later he recorded “Backwater Blues” and “Broken Levee Blues.” Bessie Mae Smith made “High Water Blues” as her response to the flood that year.

On the last days of September of that year a tornado struck St. Louis killing nearly a hundred people in the few minutes that it tore through the city and Johnson again recorded a song about the disaster within a week afterwards.

“St. Louis Cyclone Blues”

"I was sitting in my kitchen, looking way out across the sky, I was sitting in my kitchen, looking way out across the sky. I thought the world was ending. I started in to cry.

The wind was howling, the buildings beginning to fall, wind was howling, the buildings begin to fall. I seen that mean old twister coming, just like a cannonball.

The world was black as midnight, I never heard such a noise before, world was black as midnight, I never heard such a noise before. Sounded like a million lions, when they turn loose their roar.

Oh, people was screaming, and running every which away, people was screaming, and running every which away. Lord have mercy on our poor people! I fell down on my knees, I started in to pray.

The shack where we were living, she reeled and rocked but never fell, the shack where we were living, she reeled and rocked but never fell. Lord, Have mercy, how the cyclone spared us, nobody but the Lord can tell."

Four songs were released about the event including Reverend J. M. Gates' sermon titled “God’s Wrath In The St. Louis Cyclone,” Elzadie Robinson, who did a version of Lonnie’s “St. Louis Cyclone Blues” and St Louis' Luella Miller who described the plight of the survivors in her song, “Tornado Groan.”

“Lightning flashing, wind rambled round my door. Lightning flashing, wind rambled round my door.

Ever since that time, I haven’t seen my house no more.

It ruined my clothes, blowed my bed away. It ruined my clothes, blowed my bed away.

I ain’t got no place to lay my worried head.”

Thousands turned out for the Veiled Prophet parade in October of 1927 despite it being postponed because of the tragedy. One float was constructed to represent the city of St Louis rising from the ruins.

(Photo from usgennet.org)

Duncan and Brady

2010-10-12T19:45:00.000-07:00

There was an enthusiastic crowd at the Big Read event over the weekend and beautiful weather. I noted that the Virginia Publishing booth at the fair was less than a block from the site of Harry Duncan's hanging at the St Louis County courthouse over a hundred years ago.

In fact, it was 120 years and two days ago when Harry Duncan shot and killed Officer James Brady in St. Louis. The story is in the book, Devil At The Confluence and I discussed it with a number of the people who came to get a copy. The tale of the incident developed into a song and became an early country, or hillbilly standard. Here is the first recording of it:

"Been On The Job Too Long" by Wilmer Watts and the Lonely Eagles

from 1930 [at Juneberry78s.com]

Over the years there have been many songs that were created in St Louis and many of them became international standards. It's important to notice that some of the songs became jazz titles or blues or Tin Pan Alley classics or, like the ballad of Duncan and Brady, folk/country classics. St. Louis' music cannot be categorized within a single style or genre because St Louis has always been the city of confluence.

Devil At The Confluence is available at

LEFT BANK BOOKS

SUBTERRANEAN BOOKS

BORDERS

THE ILLUSTRATED ART MUSEUM

THE ARCHIVE

CHESTERFIELD ARTS

VIRGINIA PUBLISHING

and Amazon.

The 2010 Big Read

2010-10-05T21:56:00.000-07:00

Devil At The Confluence author Kevin Belford will be at the Virginia Publishing table this weekend at the St Louis Big Read festival in Clayton. Mo., October 9 from 9am to 4pm. The book festival is a free event with author readings, panel discussions, book signings, workshops, storytelling, and hands-on activities. Joining the Big Read will be the Greater St. Louis Book Fair with new and used books for sale.

The Big Read takes place on N. Central Ave. between Forsyth Blvd. and Maryland Ave. in Downtown Clayton, MO.

http://www.bigreadfestival.com/

The Riverfront Times Best of St Louis awards the Best Book by a Local Author to Devil at the Confluence by Kevin Belford.

2010-09-29T10:16:00.000-07:00

Best Book by a Local Author - Devil at the Confluence by Kevin Belford.

"Maybe St. Louis will finally get its due as the music town that it always was. And if you aren't aware that St. Louis was an influential music city, you're not alone. Our city's musical history has not been well documented — until now. Last year Kevin Belford published Devil at the Confluence, a masterfully illustrated and documented book about the history of St. Louis blues. A graphic artist by trade, Belford lovingly lays out each beautiful printed page like a work of art. The book is dense with anecdotes and history about the bluesmen and -women who made St. Louis their home. If you have the slightest interest in our city's musical legacy, get a copy of Devil at the Confluence — it is quite possibly one of the most beautiful history books you'll ever find."

Nat Hentoff gets the St Louis blues.

2010-09-16T12:08:00.000-07:00

Mr. Nat Hentoff is one of the founding fathers of jazz scholarship. He is a pioneer of jazz history, appreciation and journalism. (And for those stubborn "The blues aren't jazz" folks, Hentoff recorded sessions with Otis Spann, Memphis Slim and Lightnin’ Hopkins. So he's got major blues cred as well.) Hentoff knows all about, and is a part of, American jazz and blues music history. He was there. He was on the front lines as a correspondent. Starting out as associate editor of Down Beat magazine in the 1950s, he has published many books on jazz, biographies and novels, as well as a career of journalism and critique at the Washington Post, the Village Voice, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the New Republic, Commonweal, the Atlantic and more than 25 years on staff at the New Yorker.

When I began to dig up information on the original St Louis blues musicians, I found that many area artists were not included in the story of American music. In their time their music was very popular and their styles were influential but of the few names from the city that did get mentioned, they were not listed as St Louisans. The history of St Louis' arts had not been documented. The facts about the St Louis artists weren't available to music writers and fans and so the American music story was told without identifying them or their city.

Artists from places like New Orleans, Memphis, or Chicago were written about and categorized by the cities they lived in and those cities were credited with the art that their resident creatives made.

So that's what made me realize that a book had to be made. St Louis, the artists and the cultural achievements - and the familial bond between all of them - were unrecognized and unrepresented in history.

And now comes Mr Hentoff's insightful review of Devil At The Confluence in October's JazzTimes magazine where he says, "Never before have I learned so much about St. Louis’ powerful and influential role in the blues and American music."

Thank you, sir. It's both wonderful and amusing that he appreciates the book Devil At The Confluence as an heirloom that he is thinking of putting in his will, but most importantly, his appreciation is affirmation of what I realized about St Louis and why I created a book.

And it is something that St Louisans (and many visitors) understand: the cultural arts of the area are a part of a strong legacy that is vibrantly alive today with progressive creativity.

So often St Louisans wonder why the amazing talent that we have appreciated for generations and can be found in all corners of the city every day isn't recognized in the national arena.

Well, the book answers that question - it's because of the Devil at the Confluence.

And now, thanks to Mr Hentoff, that just might change.

Devil At The Confluence uncovers a forgotten era" Living St. Louis, KETC

2010-09-02T10:26:00.000-07:00

"Silvercloud's style and repertoire was in keeping with an older generation of St Louis blues artists whose names and achievements were largely forgotten."

Ruth Ezell.