Several nationally known songs came from Chestnut Valley: “Frankie and Johnny” (about a lovers’ quarrel in a Targee Street saloon) and two songs sung by “Mama Lou,” a black entertainer at the well-known brothel known as the Castle, “Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay” (better known in the 1950s as “The Howdy Doody Song”) and “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” (Sophie Tucker’s theme song). According to Trebor Tichenor [Tichenor Interview], the moralists in St. Louis were constantly trying to shut down Chestnut Valley. A Catholic priest, Father Coffey, succeeded in getting a law passed forbidding piano playing in establishments where liquor was served. This was universally ignored, and Father Coffey was reassigned [Tichenor Interview].

We can make a good case that Tom Turpin, and not Scott Joplin, was the “King of Ragtime” in St. Louis. He published the first rag by an African American, “Harlem Rag,” in 1898. He was the one in charge.⁶ Turpin, a large man, played the piano at his Rosebud Bar standing up because it was set on blocks to accommodate his height. The Rosebud and the adjacent Hurrah Club were east of where Union Station stands today. The Hurrah Club was the gathering place for ragtime pianists such as Scott Hayden, Arthur Marshall, Joe Jordan and Louis Chauvin. Apparently, “cutting contests”—musical battles between local musicians and visiting musicians—happened at the Hurrah Club. These apparently led Turpin to sponsor ragtime piano contests at the Rosebud and later at the Booker T. Washington Theater, owned by his brother Charles, that later opened east of the Rosebud. The last contest was in 1916.

Scott Joplin apparently was in and out of St. Louis in the years 1885–94 and then moved, more or less permanently, to St. Louis in 1901 with his publisher, John Stark.⁷ Joplin became associated with Turpin and apparently attended Hurrah meetings. He was the subject of a 1901 article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch by the director of the St. Louis Choral Symphony Society, Alfred Ernst. This group was the predecessor of the St. Louis Symphony. There is no record of a Joplin performance in St. Louis, but he did record one piano roll, “The Strenuous Life,” in St. Louis in 1902. Joplin recorded eighteen other piano rolls in the years 1901 to 1907, the time he lived in St. Louis. Joplin also filed a copyright application for a ragtime opera, A Guest of Honor, in 1903. He assembled a company and toured the country that same year. No copy of the score has been found.

John Stark published a number of classic rags that he orchestrated for brass bands. These were known as the Red Backed Books and brought about a new interest in ragtime when Gunther Schuller made a recording of some of them in a brass band setting [Tichenor Interview].

Joplin left St. Louis in 1907 and moved to Chicago and then New York, trying to find support for his opera Tremonisha, completed in 1910 and published in 1911. This opera encompassed a number of musical styles but was never performed in its entirety in his lifetime. It was performed in 1972. Joplin was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1976. He died from complications of syphilis on April 1, 1917.⁸

To many St. Louisans, its twentieth-century culture can be summed up in four things: the 1904 World’s Fair, the St. Louis Cardinals, the Gateway Arch and Gaslight Square. An extraordinary amount of time is spent in the media on these four things. In this book, we will deal with two of them: the 1904 World’s Fair and Gaslight Square (in chapter 6). It is instructive to follow the city’s fear of “low class” ragtime in the Post-Dispatch in the months of the run-up to the fair. The January 28, 1904 edition of the newspaper had the headline “No Ragtime—Will Take Away the Beauty of the Fair,” said the “authorities.” However, as long as the practitioner was white and “high class,” it was all right to play ragtime at the fair. The Post-Dispatch of September 6, 1904, reported that New York socialite Dory Lyon put on a well-received “ragtime show” at the New York Pavilion. Another example of the power structure’s dislike of ragtime was found in an article in the Post-Dispatch on February 17, 1915, excoriating pianist and bandleader Gene Rodemich for disturbing his fiancée’s family by playing ragtime. The first mention of Rodemich was in the November 13, 1913 edition of the Post-Dispatch, where it was noted that he never played a song the same way twice.

In addition to the fair, there was a midway, where other, less “high class” amusements could be found. A lingering legend in St. Louis is that Scott Joplin performed there. He did not, because he was in Chicago [Tichenor Interview]. But ragtime was heard on the midway at the Spanish Café, and a beer hall called Old St. Louis presented the ragtime piano duo of Sam Patterson and Louis Chauvin. A number of tunes were composed for the fair, including “The Cascades” (Joplin), “St. Louis Rag” (Turpin), “On the Pike” (James Scott) and “St. Louis Tickle” (Theron C. Bennet). Two men who never attended the fair, Andrew B. Sterling and “Kerry” Mills, wrote the best-known song of the fair. It was “Meet Me in St. Louis,” which was also the theme song of the 1944 film of the same name starring Judy Garland [Tichenor Interview].

By the time the World’s Fair was over, ragtime was in decline in St. Louis. Most of the musicians went to Chicago and other midwestern cities. The Rosebud Bar closed in 1906 [Tichenor Interview]. Scott Joplin moved to Chicago and then to New York in 1907. The Scott Joplin House in St. Louis, where Joplin lived from 1901 to 1903 at 2658 Delmar Boulevard, is a Missouri State Historic Site and is open to the public.

What happened to ragtime? Ragtime is still played by people all over the world. Stephanie Trick, born in St. Louis, is a well-known and very good practitioner of the style. But ragtime, like nearly everything else, began evolving into two styles by 1910 or so. The two styles were “novelty piano” (“Kitten on the Keys,” for example) and, more important, the “stride piano” style of the teens and 1920s that is the basis for the development of much of jazz [Tichenor Interview].

The musicians who stayed in St. Louis began working in the Deep Morgan area, north of where the Arch stands today, on Biddle Street. Musicians from the Mississippi Delta began migrating into the area. W.C. Handy, known as the “Father of the Blues,” was in and out of St. Louis, notably in 1893, as he stopped on his way to Chicago for the upcoming World’s Columbian Exposition there. Handy’s earliest compositions were marketed as rags [Tichenor Interview]. The first edition of the sheet music of “St. Louis Blues” advertised it as a rag. It has a structure of a rag with two twelve-bar blues choruses, followed by a sixteen-bar bridge with a Spanish rhythm known as a “Habanera Rhythm” and closes with the twelve-bar blues structure. The “St. Louis Blues” is now the city’s signature song and is the most recorded song in jazz. It has been recorded by jazz musicians a total of 2,188 times.⁹

Most people do not know that the first published blues was “Baby Seals Blues,” by Frank “Baby” Seals (a vaudeville performer) and arranged by Artie Matthews, the music director of the Booker T. Washington Theater at the time. It was published in August 1912.¹⁰ Handy’s better-known composition, “Memphis Blues,” was published two months later.

Things were happening on the riverfront other than freight moving up and down the Mississippi River into and out of St. Louis. Sometime before 1900, excursion steamers began taking customers on outings in the late spring, summer and early fall months. These excursions had bands playing the songs of the day. The excursions were racially segregated. Blacks were only allowed on the boats on Monday nights, a practice continued until 1969. By 1911, the Streckfus family was bringing freight and passengers to St. Louis from New Orleans, soon gaining a near monopoly on the Mississippi River steamboats. These steamboats were to have a lasting effect on jazz, bringing musicians into St. Louis and training them to be complete musicians on the “floating conservatories” they had become. Gene Rodemich’s orchestra was one of the bands heard on the riverboats.

It is a good time to introduce Jesse Johnson.¹¹ He got his start as a dance instructor on the Grey Eagle excursion boat in 1913 and was promoting dances and cruises in St. Louis from 1915. He was an entrepreneur, building many businesses until his death in 1945. His family’s businesses and promotions will be detailed in subsequent chapters of this book, along with an important event linked to the Johnson family that happened in Washington, D.C., in 2011.

Racial segregation of musicians and audiences led to the formation of two racially segregated unions at nearly the same time in 1896. A meeting with the labor organizer Samuel L. Gompers in Indianapolis with representatives from all the musicians’ organizations in the country resulted in the formation of musicians’ unions in the American Federation of Labor (AFL). In St. Louis, Local 2 represented white musicians who played in concert bands, the symphony and theater pit bands. Their black counterparts, represented by Local 44, played in small groups working in cabarets and at private parties and dances. The majority of customers on the riverboats, bawdy houses and circuses were white—both white and black segregated bands played for them. White musicians, however, did not play for black audiences. Both unions had the same work rules and wage scale.¹² This arrangement tenuously remained in place until the arrival of talking pictures. Every new technology brings disruption and displacement; the consequences of that particular technology shift will be discussed in chapter 3.

The Argus and the Palladium newspapers had advertisements for the black clubs and dance halls. Pythian Hall (at Lucas and Compton) was the major dance hall in the black community. Other establishments that employed black musicians were Bogg’s Café (on Lawton), the Garden Café (Cardinal and Lawton), the Rathskeller Garden (Laclede and Leonard) and the Chauffeur’s Club (on Pine). The major white dance hall was the Dreamland Ballroom (on Olive), with many mentions in the Post-Dispatch during this time. That establishment became the Arcadia Ballroom in 1925 and Tune Town in 1940 and burned to the ground in 1946.

Jelly Roll Morton was one of the more interesting musicians in jazz. He claimed to be the inventor of jazz and, among other things, was a con man. Morton came to St. Louis in 1914 and began to do well in “cutting contests” that were punctuated by his usual braggadocio. The St. Louis ragtime pianists tried to test Morton’s skill by putting difficult pieces in the classical piano repertoire before him to see if he could read them at sight. He barely missed a note, holding back the fact that he had learned the pieces as a child and memorized them. When he told the local players about the con job, he was banished from the Chestnut Valley scene and went to South St. Louis, where the Germans lived.¹³

In addition to steamboat excursions, there was a burgeoning vaudeville scene in St. Louis at the Booker T. Washington, Odeon, Columbia and other theaters. Musicians were also working in cabarets, the names of which have been lost to history. There were also white and black community bands and dance bands that performed in parks and at private parties.

The Booker T. Washington Theater was owned by Tom Turpin’s brother Charles. In 1916, a very surprising thing happened in racially segregated St. Louis. According to the Argus, the African American patrons of the Booker T. Washington Theater demanded more “high class acts,” even if those acts were white. Thus, vaudeville was desegregated in St. Louis in that year. That venue was the site of a very interesting interracial concert in 1926.

One of the vaudeville acts that regularly visited the white and African American theaters and cabarets was the Creole Band.¹⁴ It played in St. Louis and on the East Side six times from 1914 to 1917. This band was a pre-jazz band with the following personnel: New Orleans trumpet king Freddie Keppard, clarinetist George Baquet, trombonist Eddie Vincent, trumpeter Jimmy Paolo, guitarist Norwood Williams, bassist Bill Johnson and vocalist and dancer Henry Morgan Prince. Keppard had a productive career in Chicago in the 1920s, and Baquet recorded with Bessie Smith and Jelly Roll Morton. Bill Johnson had a long career with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, clarinetist Johnny Dodds and others. He lived to be one hundred years old.

Another one of the persistent legends in jazz is that Freddie Keppard recorded before the white Original Dixieland Jazz Band. The facts are that the Creole Band did record, but twenty-two months later. They made a test pressing for RCA Victor on December 2, 1918, that was never issued. By that time, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band had recorded thirty sides.¹⁵ The Post-Dispatch of April 16 and 17, 1917, contained ads for the first recordings by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.

Over the years, there have been migrations of African Americans from the South to Chicago. One of these migrations happened in 1917 after World War I. The Illinois Central Railroad bypassed St. Louis. But some of these people did move to St. Louis and East St. Louis, Illinois. The major East St. Louis industry was meatpacking. As African Americans began coming into that city, fears were expressed in the Post-Dispatch that these were strike breakers waiting for the next strike to happen. These fears whipped up mob violence on May 28 and 29 and July 1, 2 and 3. All contemporary accounts in the Post-Dispatch in the aftermath place the blame squarely on the police. African Americans were stoned to death, shot and lynched. A piece in the July 3, 1917 edition detailed the horror of the riot. In a front-page headline, the July 4, 1917 edition of the Argus called it a “national disgrace.” The black community in St. Louis has never forgotten the East St. Louis Race Riots that cost the lives of up to four hundred citizens and caused an estimated $400,000 in damage. They affected race relations in St. Louis for years to come.

Music making in this period in both white and black communities also took place in military-style community bands that served not only as entertainment but also as opportunities for instructing young musicians. The Argus listed the Harmony Club Band and Orchestra, the Blue and Harmony Band, the Odd Fellows Band, William Blue’s Concert Band and the Knights of Pythias Band. All were active in the period from 1910 to 1919. Most of the well-known musicians in and from St. Louis in the 1920s went through these bands. Most of the major St. Louis African ...