When we started going down the street toward home, which was not over a block away, it was about daybreak and there were only a few stragglers on the street. We were weaving badly as we walked and we pulled Mr. Gabe from one side of the sidewalk to the other as we lurched. Any of the passers-by who saw us must have thought Gabe was as drunk as Mayann and me. However, he was very good natured about the whole business.
"Son," Mayann said, "I am convinced that you know how to hold your liquor. Judging by what hap pened last night you can take care of yourself. I feel that I have found out just what I wanted to know. You can look out for yourself if anything happens to me."
I felt very proud of myself.
I have told about this night with mother in con nection with what I was saying about musicians who do not get drunk while they are working. Now I want to tell about a bad experience on the Saint Paul one summer night in an Iowa town. We had been going up and down the river for days giving one-nighters at every town at which we stopped. We reached this place in Iowa early in the day so we had a chance to go ashore and look around. This was unusual because we generally pulled out after each moonlight excursion and were sailing all day long.
On this particular day Baby Dodds ran into some old pals who took him to a house where there was loads of liquor. Baby forgot he had to work that night and he drank a good deal too much. Everybody who knew Baby knew that when he started drinking the best thing to do was to clear out. That is, if you liked him too much to want to hurt him.
That night he was not satisfied to reach the boat late. When he got to the bandstand he reeled over to the drums while the crowd of white folks watched. To try to cover things up leader Fate Marable immediately went into a number. We all of us blew like mad to try to hide Dodd's blunders. We did the best to help our boy out although he was dragging the tempo something awful. The boys were all mad as hell but they tried to make the best of a bad situation. Finally Baby got insulted and started calling us a gang of black bastards. This did not matter to us, but the customers heard it. That was another matter.
Fate called intermission which we usually spent on the power deck where you can watch the water as the boat rolls along. Fate called Baby and tried to talk to him. He thought it was far better for him to try to calm Baby down than to have a white man butt in. But he did not succeed. Baby began to get louder and to swear more. This is where I came in. I was a very dear friend of Baby, and I had had a lot of success with him in other scrimmages. I felt sure that as soon as I asked him to come with me and talk it over he would do so. Then I could at least protect him until the night's work was over.
Baby had just said that he was going to bust some one in the nose. I jumped in front of him.
"Look here, Baby, don't say that. You wouldn't hit anybody."
"You're damn right I would," he said.
"You wouldn't hit me, would'ja?" I said expecting him to say no.
Instead he said: "I'll hit you and I'll hit the boss."
Well sir, you could have bought me for a dime. I just took my little self off and sat down in a corner while Baby kept on raving and swearing like mad. Suddenly Captain Johnny, one of the Streckfus brothers and a huge brawny fellow, came over and asked Baby nicely to stop swearing. All the women and children aboard could hear him. To my surprise Baby told Captain Johnny where to go and what to do. "God help Baby!" I thought. Captain Johnny grabbed him by the neck with his two powerful hands and began to choke him until he was red in the face.
Baby had been bulldozing us plenty, but he was as tame as a lamb now. It was a gruesome sight. Everybody stood around in a cold sweat, but nobody said "Don't choke him any more" or ask for mercy. We were too tense and too sore at Baby to say a word. Baby sank to his knees and Captain Johnny released him as he passed out.
We had to go back to the bandstand and play without Dodds. Then Fate went to Captain Johnny and asked him to forgive the whole thing. Finally, thank God, the night was over. It was the worst and most painful drunken scene I had ever witnessed. Nowadays, however, Baby and I can laugh about it whenever we meet.
It was a useful experience for me to work on the boat with all those big-shots in music. From some of them I learned valuable methods of playing, from others I learned to guard against acquiring certain nasty traits. I was interested in their way of handling money. David Jones, for instance, starved himself the whole summer we worked on the Saint Paul. He saved every nickel and sent all his money to a farm down South where employees and relatives were raising cotton for him and getting away with as much of his money as they could, since he was not there to look after his own interests. Every day he would eat an apple instead of a good hot meal. What was the result? The boll weevils ate all of his cotton before the season was over. He did not even have a chance to go down and look his farm over before a telegram came saying everything had been shot to hell. After that David Jones used to stand at the boat rail during every intermission looking down at the water and thinking about all the jack he had lost. I often said to Fate Marable:
"Fate, keep an eye on David Jones. He's liable to jump in the water most any minute."
This incident taught me never to deprive my stomach. As a kid I had never believed in "cutting off my nose to spite my face," which is a true expression if there ever was one. I'll probably never be rich, but I will be a fat man. I never deprived myself of things I thought absolutely necessary, and there are a lot of things I never cared for, such as a flock of suits, for example. I have seen fellows with as many as twenty-five or thirty suits at one time. And what good does that do? The moths eat them up before they can get full use out of them. I have just the number of suits I need, including my uniforms. I have always believed in giving a hand to the underdog whenever I could, and as a rule I could. I will continue to do so as long as I live, and I expect to live a long, long time. Way past the hundred mark.
After the first trip to Saint Louis we went up river to Davenport, Iowa, where all the Streckfus boats put up for the winter. It was there that I met the almighty Bix Beiderbecke, the great cornet genius. Every musician in the world knew and admired Bix. He made the greatest reputation possible for himself, and we all respected him as though he had been a god. Whenever we saw him our faces shone with joy and happiness, but long periods would pass when we did not see him at all.
At the end of the first season on the Saint Paul we played our last engagement at Saint Louis for a moonlight excursion for colored people. The boat was crowded to the rafters. After we were under way a quarrel broke out and some bad men from uptown pulled guns. Wow! I never in all my life saw so many colored people running every which way. "This is going to be worse than the scare we had when the lad jumped overboard," I said to myself. Again the captain gave orders to us to keep playing, and again I started looking for an exit. It was real tough that night, but the boat finally landed safely, and very few were hurt.
After we were through playing we went uptown to our hotels. On our way we could hear guys on every corner bragging about the way they had raised hell on the boat. "My goodness," I thought, "that may be their idea of having fun, but it certainly isn't my idea of a good time."
At the Grand Central Hotel in St. Louis I was a very popular boy. Being the youngest fellow in Fate Marable's band and single too, all the maids made a lot of fuss over me. I thought I was hot stuff when the gals argued over me, saying "I saw him first" and "He's my man" and a lot of blah like that. I was too inter ested in my music to pay any attention to that sort of jive. To most of it anyway.