The Devil at the Confluence 2024 Calendar - Available now!

Based upon the out-of-print and highly sought-after book,Devil At The Confluence (Copies available!), The Pre-War Blues Music of St. Louis, Missouri, the complete story of rag, jazz and blues music of St. Louis, new historical details have been added to this calendar to include St. Louis’ contributions to earliest americana and post-World War II styles of the American songbook.

 This 17" x 11” hanging wall calendar is printed on premium paper and features a classic black-and-white design. It's the perfect addition to any home or office, and makes a great gift for anyone who loves music, history, or St. Louis.

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It’s time for a repost of this classic St. Louis Halloween story from the late 1800s.

 The Ghost Of The St Louis Blues.

Jessie Simms lived at the first house on Linden Street at Twelfth, now Tucker Blvd. Her boyfriend was Alex Royal.  On Thanksgiving night 1895, She and Alex 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 the newspaper report 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, Jessie Simms, who was so cruelly murdered on the night following Thanksgiving Day by Alex Royal, 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 Jessie 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 Simms 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 Jessie'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 Jessie's form. In exasperation Mrs. Cane said to the spirit: "God's sake Jessie, 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?"

The St. Louis Tickle and the Funky Butt.

“What is the implication, a smell, a lack of hygiene, or worse? The name seems more suitable for a dirty joint in a bordello district” stated a letter to the Webster-Kirkwood Times newspaper about the St. Louis group, the Funky Butt Brass Band. Surely the writer was facetious using that Victorian reference for a whorehouse, and maybe they were being clever knowing that the statement itself has a history that goes back to when the song was written, a over a hundred years ago.


“The St. Louis Tickle” was a song known for many years along the Mississippi river in the late 19th century. It was a dirty ditty and in certain bible-belt Missouri towns just singing it could get you a night in jail.

Ragtime music expert, the late Trebor Tichenor, found that it was well known in rural Missouri as “Funky Butt” and the tune appeared in several early rags. It's there in the chorus of Scott Joplin's “Sarah Dear.”

Tichenor described the unexpurgated version of the song as “a notorious bit of musical low-life,” having heard old-timers tell that as children they would get their faces slapped if they were caught singing it. Jack Conroy grew up in Moberly, Missouri, and recalled only a few lines from when he was a boy:
"Fifteen nickels and a rusty dime,
Will buy a little funky butt any old time.”

In 1903, the Pierce City newspaper tells of Missouri's early music legend, Theron Catlen Bennett having success with his tunes in Chicago including the "Tickle." The Chicago publisher rushed it out as an instrumental rag two-step and it went over very well at the St. Louis World’s Fair and then swept the country as an early national popular hit. 

That’s American music history. But then Jelly Roll Morton came along.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 19 June 1904

A third of a century after “The St. Louis Tickle” was a hit song, Morton recorded a song he called “Buddy Bolden's Blues” for the United States Library of Congress and introducing it by saying that, “This tune was wrote about 1902, but, later on, was, I guess I'll have to say it, stolen by some author and published under the title of the 'St. Louis Tickle.' ”

Morton, the darling of New Orleans jazz fanatics, told this story about how a long time ago in New Orleans this great song was written by some mystery guy and then later another mystery guy used it as his song and then it was stolen from New Orleans by somebody and nobody knew this except Morton.

Right, well, there’s nothing that corroborates Morton’s story or his unknown music legends, yet his story is the story of the “Funky Butt / St. Louis Tickle” song, documented in the official archive of United States history and it’s taught as music history.

What is true is that this bawdy low-life song from Missouri and St. Louis has always offended somebody. And that also sort of sums up the St. Louis blues: there's always been plenty of folk who clean up by slapping foul-mouths and ridding the place of its offensive bordello airs.

Also:
Jelly Roll Morton made many dubious self-serving claims and most were never challenged. In many cases, original facts and information about early American music were forgotten in favor of stories Morton told in 1939. Check the blogpost SOAP SUDS.

Jelly Roll Morton didn't record this song and never said he did.

   In the midcentury revival of early jazz, record companies marketed discoveries like Leadbelly and rediscoveries like Jelly Roll Morton and they weren't much interested in establishing the factual history of American music. But the commercial music industry is where much of our knowledge of music history comes from, so like it or not, our music history is mostly the result of industry hype and  fan opinions. For example, an early 1920s recording of clever jazz that would probably have been ignored by jazz music intelligentsia became an expensive collectable when it was said to have been a recording by the great Jelly Roll Morton.

  The earliest recording companies understood St. Louis to be a proven producer of popular ballads and ragtime music and the Okeh label had established strong connections in St. Louis for scouting talent and facilities to record the great jazz and blues of the city. At one of these sessions a recording was made of the St. Louis Levee Band playing a song titled, Soap Suds by a composer named Martin. And that’s all that is known about this record.

  It's certain that all of the recordings for four days in in May, 1926 were by St. Louis musicians except for a traveling evangelist preacher named Charlie Butler and Julian Holloway, his piano player who happened to be in town at the time.

  Victoria Spivey, Cora Perkins, Frankie Half Pint Jackson, Ed Wood, (accompanied by De Lloyd Barnes, Pierce Gist,), Lonnie Johnson, Steadyroll Johnson, The Searcy Trio (Deloise Searcy, Clifford King, Edgar Green), Powell's Jazz Monarchs (William Calloway, Floyd Casey, Isaac Jefferson, George Lightfoot, Jimmy Powell), Trimp's Ambassador Bell Hops Orchestra (Freddie Laufketter, Vernon Brown, Art Gruner, Ernie Jung, George Pedigo, Nadel Patrick, Carl Maus,) Alma Rotter, the St. Louis Levee Band, Gebruder Peters, and A W Adams are St. Louis artists.

  After St. Louis, the Okeh recording team went to Chicago to make recordings there.

Jelly Roll's story

  Jelly Roll Morton visited St. Louis after leaving New Orleans and before going to the West coast in the early part of the century. He recorded a number of hits through the 1920s. During the years before and after the May 1926 St. Louis recording sessions, Morton was in Chicago making records. From 1923 to 1928 he was under contract with Melrose Brothers Publishing and except for one trip to Gennett Records in Indiana, all of Morton’s recordings from 1924 to 1927 were in Chicago. In 1930, he recorded a song that he titled Fickle Fay Creep. Some say it's similar to Soap Suds.

  Morton was long past his prime in 1938 when Alan Lomax at Smithsonian Folkways Records in Washington D.C. found him in a small club there and recorded him talking about and playing many of his songs. He also discussed his versions of other people's songs and credited the composers of the original songs, but he did not say Fickle Fay Creep was a cover or his version of any other song.

  Along with the renewed interest in his stories came opportunities for Morton. A fan named Roy J. Carew, partnered with Morton and established the Tempo-Music Publishing Company in the late 1930's to ensure copyright on all of Morton's works that might not have been registered or had lapsed.

  Carew worked on the Morton catalog and copyrights long after Morton died in 1941. The recording of Fickle Fay Creep, like most of Morton's songs, had been copyrighted when it was made, and Carew quietly copyrighted Soap Suds to Morton in 1949. Shortly afterward, Lomax’s book, Mister Jelly Roll was published which established the legend of Jelly Roll Morton as the "inventor of jazz."

Jazz History Research in the 1950s

  The early phonograph record industry had to invent the sales industry for their product in the first decades of the 20th century and promotion, hype and gimmicks were the new tools. Decades later in the 1950s, record collectors created a market for old 78 rpm records and the value for certain copies were mostly determined by rarity and the tastes of the collectors and the writers in magazines and newsletters devoted to jazz music. It was a different kind of marketing and promotion than the record labels used decades earlier but it worked in creating demand and market prices.

  Carew used these music fanzines to float his claim that the St. Louis Levee Band was actually Jelly Roll Morton.

  John Randolph replied to Carew in Jazz Report magazine that it was known around town that the
St. Louis Levee Band were members of Bennie Washington’s Six Aces. This information only appears in this rare issue of Jazz Report.

  So there's the story and it’s clear that Jelly Roll Morton had no involvement in the St. Louis recording session, the St. Louis Levee Band, or the song Soap Suds - and he never claimed that he did.

  Of course, Morton was very much aware of the important ragtime and jazz that was happening in
St. Louis. In the book, Conversation With The Blues by Paul Oliver, 1960, St. Louis ragtime legend Charles Thompson recalled one of Morton’s visits to the city:

"Jelly Roll Morton spent the winter here in St. Louis in 1911 before he went to New York and he was a very apt musician, very quick to catch up almost anything. I think when he went to New York he took all the ragtime player's music ... along with him."

  Morton’s cover versions of songs by the famous St. Louis musicians like Scott Joplin, Gene Rodemich, Artie Matthews and R Q Dickerson are all credited to the original artists on the record label. And some of Morton’s songs are tunes that he merely retitled like his cover of the old Missouri song, Funky Butt, that he called Buddy Bolden’s Blues. But Morton never claimed to have written the song Soap Suds or having made the recording. All the same, because of Carew’s copyright effort, Soap Suds is officially listed as a Morton creation - which thus made Soap Suds a cover version of the original song,  Fickle Fay Creep, even though Fickle Fay Creep was made four years after Soap Suds! Today, nearly all sources list the Soap Suds recording as Morton with unknown band members.

The Under-hyped St. Louis jazz.

  The true story is that a St. Louis band recorded Soap Suds. Morton had heard the tune when he was in St. Louis and recorded a song like it years later with the title, Fickle Fay Creep.  Certainly if Soap Suds was his, Morton would surely have his name on it or he would have claimed it as his in his later years.

  Jazz history seems to have followed the word of the record collectors on matters like this, but had research on the mystery record continued unhindered, the investigation could have looked for more information about the St. Louis Levee Band musicians and Bennie Washington’s Six Aces and maybe evidence of a song called Soap Suds in the music history of St. Louis.

  In the 1890’s there was an old fiddle tune known around the St. Louis area as Soap Suds Under the Fence (also as Soap Suds Over the Fence.)

  An 1896 article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch tells of a dance at Stolle's Hall (where Johnny would later cheat on poor Frankie) and the music that was played that night: reels, cotillions, mazourkas, and double-shuffles. And the song, Soap Suds under the Fence.

  This information shows that the Soap Suds song was not just a rural fiddle tune but it had been adapted to popular dance music. A metamorphosis such as this is a significant indication that Soap Suds was going through a process common to other great songs of American music and being adapted to current popular trends.

  Although it’s been over 100 years and it seems there would be few clues to be found, there was discovered a 1905 sheet music ad for a St. Louis department store that lists the local hit song, Soap Suds.

  These clues may or may not be the sources of the song that was played by the St. Louis Levee band in 1926, but they were never investigated. John Randolph’s information that the recording was by St. Louis artists was forgone. No interviews with Bennie Washington remain and the recording of Compton Avenue Blues in 1925 was the only recording his popular band had made as the Six Aces.

  American jazz history contains little knowledge of the legendary St. Louis talent pool of early jazz and blues musicians who worked in different combinations and under different names. For example, St. Louis’ Floyd Campbell and Bennie Washington were drummers who organized and led bands. Washington started his own band after leaving the group that became the Missourians. It appears that the St. Louis Levee Band cut Soap Suds after drummer Earl Martin took over the band and before they became part of Harvey Lankford's High Hatters. Martin also later worked with St. Louis bandleader George Hudson and one of the city’s great trumpet legends, Clark Terry.

  Morton's recordings and career were revived for those last few years of his life and after his death the prices on his records rose. St. Louis artists were regulars in the studios of all the major labels well before the 1920s and well after. The thirty or so St. Louis artists in these 1926 sessions were selected and sought by the Okeh record company due to their popularity and salability. Most were called back later for more hit selling records and some, like Lonnie Johnson and Victoria Spivey became superstars. But lacking the recording industry's branding and the secondhand collector's whims, most of the songs from those 1926 sessions sell for about $25 each, none over $100. Promotion and marketing can affect prices but we would like to believe that our appreciation of art is not subject to crass manipulation, yet a couple of years ago, a copy of the St. Louis Levee Band's record sold for $1,276.


  It seems wrong when commercial interests determine value but it isn't. But it does become harmful when it affects our understanding of our true history. And in this case it appears that it did because questions about the St. Louis Levee Band, the song, or the composer named Martin were not asked anymore after the answer was said to be Jelly Roll Morton.

  American music history is missing much of St. Louis’ music history because of the lack of preservation of the city's history. But perhaps what this investigation demonstrates most importantly is that true history is not completely lost yet but is waiting for us to realize it.


Kevin Belford, 2016.


Sources:

Discography of OKeh Records 1918-1934, Laird &Rust, Praeger, 2004.

Black Recording Artists 1877-1926 An Annotated Discography, Gibbs, McFarland, 2012.

Jelly Roll Morton discography, Albert J McCarthy, The Record Changer, May 1944.

Guides to Special Collections in the Music Division of the Library of Congress, Jelly Roll Morton Collection, 1992, : http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.music/eadmus.mu2005.wp.0027

Mister Jelly Roll, Jelly Roll Morton Inventor Of Jazz, Alan Lomax, Grosset &; Dunlap, 1950.

Jelly Roll Morton, Martin Williams, Barnes and Company, NY, 1962.

Transcript Of The 1938 Library Of Congress recordings of Jelly Roll Morton, Rounder Records, 1993.

The Preoccupations Of Mr. Lomax, Inventor Of The Inventor Of Jazz, Katy E. Martin, University of Kansas Dissertation, 2008.

A Preliminary Chronology of the Early Career of Ferd "Jelly Roll" Morton, Lawrence Gushee, American Music, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Winter, 1985), University of Illinois Press.

Jelly Roll Morton – Plagiarist?, Björn Englund; and
Further notes on Jelly Roll Morton: Jelly Roll and the Melrose Brothers, Englund and Berresford;
Vintage Jazz Mart, VJM 139, vjm.biz/165-morton

Jelly Roll Morton Music Roll Recordings; Roy J. Carew articles; Library of Congress Narrative; Monrovia Souns Studio, 1999, doctorjazz.com.

Jelly Roll discography, http://www.hot-club.asso.fr/enreg/collec/morton/titre.html

Conversation With The Blues, Paul Oliver, 1960.

Jazz Report, September 1953; February 1955.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 18, 1895; November, 15, 1905.

The Sedalia Democrat, October 12, 1926.

St. Louis Argus, 1915 - 1926, archive.org/details/stlouisargus

collectorsfrenzy.com/details/360292835479/Jelly_Roll_Mortons_St_Louis_Levee_Band_on_Okeh_8404


Notes:

In the book, City of Gabriels, (Owsley, Reedy Press, 2006,) it isn't noted where this information comes from but, Bennie Washington's name is “Benny” and the St. Louis Levee Band is called "The Old St. Louis Levee Band with Jelly Roll Martin (sic)."

Although Okeh company has no information of the group, the St. Louis Sheldon, in the educational downloads available to schools since 2009, claims that the St. Louis Levee Band was Jelly Roll Martin with the preacher and his piano man: "Note: spelled Jelly Roll Martin on record label. Charlie Butler (STL) Charlie Butler (vcl-1, speech-2) Julian Holloway."
www.sheldonconcerthall.org/.../GabrielsDiscograph...

The American epic story to be told.

Last summer I was consulted for the upcoming PBS / BBC documentary, American Epic.
http://www.americanepic.com

The project promises to be a story that's never been told about American music history and it seems to be specifically interested in the early days of music recording. St. Louis' Pokey LaFarge and the South City Three outfit are recording some music for it and it's got celebrities like T Bone Burnett, Robert Redford and Jack White behind it.

They contacted me to ask where a 1927 recording session by Okeh records might have taken place in St. Louis and they suggested that possible locations might have been a warehouse or a furniture or phonograph store, perhaps within walking distance from a train station.

It's very encouraging that they are interested in the overlooked music history of St. Louis because that is the big missing piece of the American music story. And their question underscores the fact that St. Louis' vital music history is still completely unknown to the rest of the world.

Their question assumes that recording music in St. Louis probably happened occasionally in a makeshift studio in a borrowed room close to where the train could drop off the traveling recording outfit, because that's the old story of how it happened in cities like Atlanta, Dallas, or Memphis. But that's not how it was in St. Louis.

By the 1920’s, St. Louis was in its third or fourth decade of pioneering and creating the music business - everything from talent scouting to product selling.

St. Louis performers and creators were making the first songs of the American songbook while St. Louis entrepreneurs were creating the field of distributing, marketing and retailing the hit records.

Some of the earliest commercial music recordings were cylinder recordings made of St. Louis singers in downtown studios before the turn of the century.

In the first decades of the 20th century the big stars of St. Louis ragtime like Tom Turpin were still producing America’s first popular music genre while Columbia and Brunswick Records were recording early St. Louis jazz.

The Mound City Blue Blowers sparked the public demand for hot jazz recordings while the legendary St. Louis women defined the blues singer genre. Then St. Louis expanded that category by recording a blues song with a male singer. And St. Louis was responsible for the guitarist-singer-songwriter prototype that eventually became the dominating style of American pop music.

 The Artophone company began in St. Louis in 1918 and partnered with Okeh and Paramount selling race and hillbilly records by mail order to the rural South. Their Herwin record label and St. Louis Music Company employed many of the local blues artists and one of their first big hits was St. Louis jazz legend Charlie Creath's Market Street Blues.

The recording studio would have been on the upper floor of their offices on Pine Street, not only a few blocks away from the train station, but also just a few blocks from where Scott Joplin launched ragtime, and where Tram and Bix sat in with jazz originators, and where Lonnie Johnson won the first blues contest.

It’s great that we have created far-reaching interest for the story of St. Louis’ music, but the city still has not invested in its unique and significant part of American music history. It’s the story that has been told - in the book Devil At The Confluence.

Kevin Belford, 2015.

Frankie was a good girl.

Frankie was a good girl.

Frankie Baker was not a prostitute and she didn't run a brothel.

And here we go again, ruining long-held myths for hundreds of elderly blues music fans.

Over the years, St. Louis' American music legends have turned blue.
Staggerlee has been recast as a pimp and Frankie Baker of the song Frankie And Johnnie has been described as a prostitute although neither characterization is true to the historical facts.

Frankie Baker who shot her lover Johnny, was a proper lady and her virtue had nothing to do with the story.

But that's the how the stories were altered as they became popular over the last century.
I don't know why that happened.
It seems some people just want their folk legends to be in the sex trade.

The song lyrics were quite clear about her, Frankie was a good girl. Ev'rybody knowed.
Yet over the years, other versions have mistreated and defamed our city's famous femme fatale of American balladry.

The popular song, (and folktale, movie, play and ballet,) dramatized the blues of a fallen woman mistreated by a no-good man.

Poor Frankie tried to move on with her life after the court found her innocent of murder.

She hoped the insults would stop but they didn't. So she moved out of town.
And then she moved to Oregon.
Nearly 40 years later, poor and aged, Frankie went to the courts again and sued (twice) to clear herself of the accusation of a, woman of unchaste character, a harlot, an adulteress, a person of lewd character.

 Baker contended that she was a respectable woman although she was being described as a, woman of easy virtue, and as a murderess in the consort of gamblers and notorious criminals.

She said that the public portrayal of her caused, scandal, infamy, shame and disgrace, and that the legend held her up as an, object of hatred, ridicule, shame and contempt.

Establishing that she was not a tramp was her only wish.

Frankie was betrayed first by her boyfriend and then in the St. Louis courthouse.

Tyrrell Williams, the Dean of Washington University's law school said that Frankie could not be harmed because the song was not about her. He testified under oath that he thought that maybe there might be an older "Frankie" song.
There is no evidence, no proof of that older song, but he said he had read about it.

Then in 1988, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, our hometown newspaper, characterized our hometown heroine as an opportunist trying to swindle money from Hollywood,
…Frankie Baker, went to the movie and saw green. She sued the movie company in 1938, complaining that it hadn't paid her a dime for what she called her story.

And as recently as 2013, St. Louis blues fans continued to slander her by writing that,
Baker ran a boarding house that probably, like many of the houses in the neighborhood, included a brothel.

Baker didn't have a boarding house.
Her occupation was not listed as Sporting as the prostitutes were called, it was Domestic, meaning she was a maid or a laundress.

One of her neighbors testified that, Frankie was a nice girl and behaved herself like a lady, and another said, There weren’t any sporting people lived there.

In the defamation trial, no one accused Frankie of immorality.
The defense was not arguing Frankie’s virtue, they sought to prove that the song wasn't about this Frankie Baker.

So now, after more than 100 years, the shaming of Frankie Baker needs to end.
And if righting this wrong ruins the song for some people, well then so be it.
She was not a courtesan, cyprian, or soiled dove and she didn't run a bawdy house of immoral purpose.
Poor Frankie was a good girl and everybody knowed.

For trustworthy information, Tim O'Neil is another very careful researcher and writer. 
His Look Back series at stltoday is always very good.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/a-look-back-frankie-shot-johnnie-in-st-louis-but/article_ab3fa666-bc1c-57dd-993f-8be9ba12cf9e.html

A memorial to St. Louis' jazz gentleman Clark Terry.

    "St. Louis is a jazz town - it was all around my neighborhood, and I heard it every day."

  St. Louis musicians rarely are described as such when tributes are written. Anecdotes of their life growing up in the city are sometimes left out and especially if the artist wasn't living in St. Louis when he passed. But Clark Terry always spoke highly of his hometown and had wonderful stories and lots of pride for St. Louis and its arts. As a memorial to Clark Terry who passed away yesterday, Devil At The Confluence presents Terry's words and stories of St. Louis.

  Born on South Broadway in 1920, Terry recalled when he heard St Louis' legendary Dewey Jackson band at Sauter's Park where the Skatium is today. Jackson's dynamic trumpet playing convinced Terry to become a musician. And Terry was influenced as well by the music in a sanctified church on Iron Street in Carondelet. He didn't attend the services, but he would sit out on the sidewalk and listen to the singing and shouting coming from inside. He began playing music with some friends in a street corner kazoo band and when he was sixteen he joined the Drum and Bugle Corps of the Tom Powell Post on Enright Avenue.

  The popular Jeter-Pillar's band was at the Club Plantation and Terry was looking for his break into show business. St. Louis' Sykes Smith gave him his shot by sneaking him in,
    "He'd have me come up the back stairs of the Club Plantation. He’d put a chair in the corner and I’d sit there, and when he had a solo he’d point to me, and he let me take his solos."

  Terry was also in George Hudson's band that replaced the Jeter-Pillars group at the Club Plantation. Hudson's group was well-known to the big stars touring across the country. Terry remembered when one of the biggest stars of the time, Ella Fitzgerald came to the Plantation. At six in the morning, after playing all night, Terry and his bandmates would play a game of softball. Fitzgerald tagged along.
    "She had a great voice and a great arm. She could throw your butt out at home plate from the outfield," recalled Terry.

  Dollar Bill and his Small Change was a legendary group in St. Louis jazz history, although they were never recorded. As a young trumpet player on his way up in the scene, Terry worked with Dollar Bill.
    "He was an old piano player, one of the old pros. He smoked and chewed on long cigars all the time. His slogan was, “I’m Dollar Bill from Compton Hill. I never worked, and I never will.”
One of Terry's greatest numbers is Mumbles, his impersonation of a legendary St. Louis blues singer he knew back home.

  Miles Davis was just a boy when Terry was a professional at clubs like Birdlong's, the Tune Town Ballroom, the Elks Club and the Barrel where Jimmy Forrest played. Davis always remembered the time he worked up the courage to approach Terry while on break, but Terry was more interested in the ladies on the dance floor and paid little attention to the pestering kid. It became a favorite gag for both of them to tell later in life.

  And when Terry told this story he confessed that it was what made him determined to teach and to make time for every student. In Seattle, Washington, while playing at the Palomar Theater with Count Basie, another young man approached Terry to learn from him and Terry kindly obliged. That first student was Quincy Jones. Mentoring became his focus and his pride. A Kennedy Center concert was delayed when Terry was missing from backstage at showtime. Stagehands were sent scurrying to find him. Someone heard trumpet playing in a stairwell and found Terry giving a quick scales lesson to a student who had asked him a question.

  Lionel Hampton, Count Basie and Duke Ellington took Terry away from St. Louis and eventually he was in the NBC band and on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

  Terry enjoyed returning to St. Louis, and spoke highly of his hometown and the local music that inspired him. He was very proud of his star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame at Blueberry Hill in the University City loop.

  Clark Terry's unique artistry, like his hometown's music legacy, are both largely under-appreciated. And this inadequate understanding of the city, its arts and the music that was born here is made obvious in an interview with Terry by the National Endowment for the Arts - Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program. Knowing only what he had read in books, the interviewer began talking about King Oliver and Louis Armstrong coming up the river on boats from New Orleans to bring jazz to St. Louis, but Terry interrupted him saying,
    "No, we had our own."
    "Charlie Creath, King of Cornet. Now he could play, man. He could swing. He could swing you into bad health, and all the cats wanted to swing like Charlie Creath. This is why all of the trumpet players, if you trace all the way down the line, who hung around there, had anything to do with that, like Joe Thomas, Ham Davis, Sweets Edison, Vertna Saunders, Harold Baker, Dewey Jackson, Sleepy Tomlin, Miles Davis. All of these cats had something that hinged back to Charlie Creath."

Rest in peace, Mr. Terry.
St. Louis is proud of you too.