And because I'd listened to Joe all the time he was with Kid Ory I knew almost everything that band played, by ear anyway. I was pretty fast on my horn at that time, and I had a good ear. I could catch on real fast.
Kid Ory was so nice and kind, and he had so much patience, that first night with them was a pleasure instead of a drag. There just wasn't a thing for me to do except blow my head off. Mellow moments, I assure you.
After that first gig with the Kid I was in. I began to get real popular with the dance fans as well as the musicians. All the musicians came to hear us and they'd hire me to play in their bands on the nights I wasn't engaged by Kid Ory.
I was doing great, till the night I got the biggest scare of my life. I was taking the cornet player's place in the Silver Leaf Band, a very good band too. All the musicians in that band read the music of their parts. The clarinet player was Sam Dutrey, the brother of Honore Dutrey, the trombonist. Sam was one of the best clarinetists in town. (He also cut hair on the side.) He had an airy way about him that'd make one think he was stuck up, but he was really just a jolly, good-natured fellow and liked to joke a lot. But I didn't know that!
The night I was to fill in for the clarinet player, I went early to sort of compose myself, because since I was playing with a strange band I didn't want anything to go wrong if I could help it. Most of the band began straggling in one by one about fifteen minutes before hitting time. Sam Dutrey was the last to arrive. I had never seen him before in my life. So while we were warming up and getting in tune, Sam came up on the bandstand. He said good evening to the fellows in the band and then he looked directly at me.
"What the hell is this?" he roared. "Get offa here, boy!" He had a real voice.
I was real scared. "Yassuh," I said. I started to pack up my cornet.
Then one of the men said: "Leave the boy alone, Sam. He's working in Willie's place tonight." Then he introduced me to Sam.
Sam laughed and said: "I was only kidding, son."
"Yassuh," I still said.
The whole night went down with us, swinging up a mess. But still I had that funny feeling. Sometimes now I run into Sam Dutrey, and we almost laugh ourselves sick over that incident.
Sam and Honore both were tops on their instruments. Honore Dutrey had one of the finest tones there could be had out of a trombone. But he messed up his life while he was in the Navy. One day aboard ship he fell asleep in a powder magazine and gassed himself so badly he suffered from asthma for years afterward. It always bothered him something terrible blowing his trombone.
When I had the band in Chicago in 1926, playing for Joe Glaser, who's now my personal manager, Dutrey was the trombone player. He would do real fine on all the tunes except the Irish Medley, in which the brass had to stay in the upper register at the ending. That's when Dutrey would have to go behind the curtains and gush his atomizer into his nostrils. Then he would say, "Take 'em on down." Well, you never heard such fine strong trombone in all your life. Ill come back to Honore later.
There's lots of musicians I'll be mentioning, especially the ones I played with and had dealings with from time to time. All in all, I had a wonderful life playing with them. Lots of them were characters, and when I say "characters" I mean characters! I've played with some of the finest musicians in the world, jazz and classic. God bless them, all of them!
While I was playing just gigs with Kid Ory's band we all had jobs during the day. The war was still going full blast and the orders were: "Work or Fight." And since I was too young to fight, I kept on driving my coal cart. Outside the cornet, it seemed like the coal cart was the only job I enjoyed working. Maybe it was because of all those fine old-timers.
Kid Ory had some of the finest gigs, especially for the rich white folks. Whenever we'd play a swell place, such as the Country Club, we would get more money, and during the intermissions the people giving the dance would see that the band had a big delicious meal, the same as they ate. And by and by the drummer and I would get in with the colored waiters and have enough food to take home to Mayann and Mama Lucy.
The music-reading musicians like those in Robechaux's band thought that we in Kid Dry's band were good, but only good together. One day those big shots had a funeral to play, but most of them were working during the day and couldn't make it. So they engaged most of (Dry's boys, including me. The day of the funeral the musicians were congregating at the hall where the Lodge started their march, to go up to the dead brother's house. Kid Ory and I noticed all those stuck-up guys giving us lots of ice. They didn't feel we were good enough to play their marches.
I nudged Ory, as if to say, "You dig what I'm diggin'?"
Ory gave me a nod, as if to say yes, he digged.
We went up to the house playing a medium fast march. All the music they gave us we played, and a lot easier than they did. They still didn't say anything to us one way or the other.
Then they brought the body out of the house and we went on to the cemetery. We were playing those real slow funeral marches. After we reached the cemetery, and they lowered the body down six feet in the ground, and the drummer man rolled on the drums, they struck a ragtime march which required swinging from the band. And those old fossils just couldn't cut it. That's when we Ory boys took over and came in with flying colors.
We were having that good old experience, swing ing that whole band! It sounded so good!
The second line – the raggedy guys who follow parades and funerals to hear the music – they enjoyed what we played so much they made us take an encore. And that don't happen so much in street parades.
We went into the hall swinging the last number, Panama. I remembered how Joe Oliver used to swing that last chorus in the upper register, and I went on up there and got those notes, and the crowd went wild.
After that incident those stuck-up guys wouldn't let us alone. They patted us on the back and just wouldn't let us alone. They hired us several times afterward. After all, we'd proved to them that any learned musician can read music, but they can't all swing. It was a good lesson for them.
Several times later they asked us to join their band, but I had already given Celestin (another fine cornet player, and the leader of the Tuxedo Brass Band) my consent to join him and replace Sidney Desvigne, another real good and fancy cornet man. Personally I thought Celestin's Tuxedo Band was the hottest in town since the days of the Onward Brass Band with Emmanuel Perez and Joe Oliver holding down the cornet section. My, my, what a band! So after Joe Oliver went to Chicago, the Tuxedo Brass Band got all the funerals and parades.
More about Papa Celestin later.
The last time I saw Lady, the mule I used to drive, was November 11, 1918, the day the Armistice was signed, the day the United States and the rest of the Allies cut the German Kaiser and his army a brand 'noo one. At eleven o'clock that morning I was unloading coal at Fabacher's restaurant on St. Charles Street, one of the finest restaurants in town. I was carrying the coal inside and sweating like mad when I heard several automobiles going down St. Charles Street with great big tin cans tied to them, dragging on the ground and making all kinds of noise. After quite a few cars had passed I got kind of curious and asked somebody standing nearby, "What's all the fuss about?"
"They're celebratin' 'cause the war is over," he said to me.
When he said that, it seemed as though a bolt of lightning struck me all over.
I must have put about three more shovels of coal into the wheelbarrow to take inside, when all of a sudden a thought came to me. "The war is over. And here I am monkeyin' around with this mule. Huh!"