Masters of Louisiana Music:
James “King” Oliver

By Tom Morgan

Born:
December 19, 1885
Abend, Louisiana

Died:
April 10, 1938
Savannah, Georgia

Joseph Oliver was a Louisiana born trumpeter and bandleader who brought New Orleans jazz to Chicago and the world via his recordings. Through his prowess with the instrument, he reigned as “King” of all jazz trumpeters, for over ten years.

Joe Oliver’s fans were many and the descriptions of his playing are legendary. Long-lived blues woman Alberta Hunter described King Oliver as someone who “could play it as soft and sweet as the voice of Florence Mills.” Drummer Warren “Baby” Dodds said, “They all admired King Oliver’s style of playing. It was wonderful.” Jelly Roll Morton spoke of his sharp memory. “I used to play a piano chorus... and Oliver would take the thing and remember every note. You can’t find men like that today.”

Most sources say that Joe Oliver was born on a plantation in Abend, Louisiana on December 19, 1885. Some point to a May 11th birthday. Others say he was born on Dryades Street in the city. Not much is known about his parents. His mother made her living as a cook. His older step-sister Victoria Davis, cared for him after his mother died in 1900. Before he moved onto the cornet, his first instrument was the trombone. 1904 finds Oliver in the city substituting in the Onward Brass Band. Around this time Oliver was involved in an incident in which he lost the sight in his left eye. For the next ten years, Oliver honed his craft playing in brass bands, dance bands, and in various small groups in New Orleans bars and cabarets, usually filling in for trumpeters Manuel Perez or Bunk Johnson. At that point in the city, the two reigning Kings of the cornet were Perez and Freddie Keppard. Donaldsonville native pianist Richard M. Jones later remarked that “Joe had been afraid of Keppard and Perez... He didn’t have much confidence ... Practically overnight, he woke up and started playing. He was a good reader and a good technician. Anything you’d stick up, he’d wipe it right off.”

After 1910 Oliver worked regularly with Jones’ group before leading his own band at Pete Lala’s. It was at this club that Oliver’s reputation began to grow and it was the first time he began to be referred to as “King.” Richard M. Jones remembered the particular incident: “Freddie Keppard was playin’ in a spot across the street and was drawin’ all the crowds. I was sittin’ at the piano, and Joe Oliver came over to me and commanded in a nervous harsh voice, ‘Get in B-flat.’ He didn’t even mention a tune ... Joe walked out on the sidewalk, lifted his horn to his lips, and blew the most beautiful stuff I have ever heard. People started pouring out of the other spots along the street to see who was blowing all that horn. Before long, our place was full and Joe came in smiling, and he said, ‘Now, that _____ won’t bother me no more.’ From then on, our place was full every night.”

Although he was now recognized as one of the best trumpeters in the Crescent City and filled any job where a “red hot beat” was needed, Oliver continued to hone his craft. Mutt Carey remembered: “He used to practice very hard. I remember he once told me that it took him ten years to get a tone on his instrument... His ear was wonderful—that helped a lot.”

In 1916 Oliver joined up with trombonist Edward “Kid” Ory and formed the Kid Ory and King Oliver Band that was considered the best in New Orleans. This was the first time that Oliver’s title was used in a billing.

Oliver married his wife Stella some time during the teens. She was younger than Oliver with a daughter from a previous marriage. Stella moved back to New Orleans and was living here as late as 1957.

LEAVING FOR CHICAGO

Early in 1919, a fight broke out at a dance where Oliver was playing, and the police arrested Oliver’s band along with the fighters. Disgusted by his treatment in the city, Oliver soon left for Chicago to join clarinetist Lawrence Duhé’s band and also worked at the same time in a band led by legendary bassist Bill Johnson.

In 1921, Oliver took what would soon be called the Creole Serenaders and traveled west to perform in the San Francisco Bay Area for 15 months. Before heading back to Chicago, the band took a side trip to Los Angeles and performed at the Wayside Gardens with Jelly Roll Morton. Later Oliver appeared in an orchestra led by Jelly Roll Morton at the Grand Hotel. The Chicago Defender later wrote about Oliver’s appearance: “He set Los Angeles on fire. The public says he is the greatest that has ever been in Los Angeles.” The same week Oliver played at the Hiawatha Club and it was reported by the owner, Ragtime Billy Tucker that he paid him “the highest salary ever known to a cornet player for a night’s work.”

Upon Oliver’s return to the Lincoln Gardens in 1922, he called for his protégé, Louis Armstrong to come up to Chicago from New Orleans and join the group. Oliver had been grooming Armstrong for quite a while. He had recommended Armstrong to take his place in Kid Ory’s band when he left for Chicago three years prior. Louis had just finished a two-year gig on the Streckfus Riverboat St. Paul, honing his skills and improving his ability to read music. Everyone in Oliver’s band knew of Armstrong; the big question was whether Louis would play first trumpet or second. According to Baby Dodds, Oliver said, “It’s my band. What am I going to do, play second?”

Louis Armstrong always had fond memories of “Papa Joe” as he called him. “Joe gave me cornet lessons, and ... I ran errands for his wife.” In a later letter, Armstrong wrote: “Joe Oliver was my idol and my only love on trumpet until the day he died. No one has replaced him in my heart, trumpetly.” Oliver also greatly admired Louis; they remained friends for life. Louis remembered an incident at the Savoy in 1928 when Oliver came to hear him perform. “He stood there listening, with the tears coming right out of his eyes. It knocked me out.”

During his two-year stand at the Lincoln Gardens, King Oliver and the Creole Serenaders brought hot New Orleans style jazz to Chicago and later, via recordings, to the world. The Chicago dance hall was a large venue which could accommodate up to 1000 dancers. It started out at the beginning of the 20th-century as the Royal Gardens and became known as the Lincoln Gardens in 1921. The integrated club not only featured King Oliver’s band but other types of entertainment. Chicago musician Tommy Brookins remarked: “The place was always packed. People belonging to all classes of society attended....It was due to the fact that besides an orchestra without rival the Royal Gardens provided sensational attractions. There was a half-dozen acts of unusual class, acts like Ethel Waters... The review included at least sixty people: chorus girls and Creole dancers.”

There was also a rabid audience of young musicians eager to hear this new music and learn how to play like their idols. Musician Preston Jackson remarked that the band tried to make it as hard as possible for the musicians to steal their music. “The boys tore the tops off their music so that no one else could see what they were playing.” Baby Dodds said: “Sometimes they asked Joe what a certain number was called and he would say anything that came into his mind. That’s how some of the numbers got different names. Fellows working in other bands would give the numbers the names which Joe gave them, and it was all wrong.”

King Oliver did all he could to maintain his title. The bandstand was his stage and it was one arena where he would not allow himself to be outdone. His sidemen’s solos were shorter than his and no one had as many chances to solo as the King. Another way Oliver maintained his crown was to show his endurance by appearing at more than one club a night. Oliver’s “doubling” set a pattern which was then followed by other greats. Edmond Sounchon wrote that as opposed to his days in New Orleans, the Chicago Joe Oliver was a “star, a much more impressive figure now.. ‘King,’ the most important personage in the jazz world, surrounded by his own hand-picked galaxy of sidemen.”

Baby Dodds fondly remembered the work ethic in the group and their love for what they were doing. “We worked to make music, and we played music to make people like it. The Oliver band played for the comfort of the people. Not so they couldn’t hear, or so they had to put their fingers in their ears, nothing like that. Sometimes the band played so softly you could barely hear it, but still you knew the music was going. We played so soft that you could often hear the people’s feet dancing. The music was so soothing and then when we put a little jump into it the patrons just had to dance! ... Working with the Oliver band was a beautiful experience... We could play a four or five-hour dance without repeating a number.

“Virtually all the members of the Creole Serenaders had notable solo careers. Besides Oliver on cornet and Louis Armstrong on second cornet, Baby Dodds played drums, brother Johnny was on clarinet, Lil Hardin, (later Armstrong’s wife) was the pianist, Honore Dutrey was trombonist, and Bill Johnson played bass and banjo.

The band’s recordings in 1923 demonstrated the serious artistry of New Orleans collective improvisation or, as it became known, Dixieland music to a wider audience. The Creole Serenaders made over 30 recordings in that year and it was the horn duets of Oliver and Armstrong that propelled the records into instant jazz classics, in turn making them some of the most important jazz recordings ever made.

THE FIRST MUTE

Oliver invented and made much use of the wah-wah mute; he was also an innovator with his instrument. Fellow New Orleans trumpeter Mutt Carey remembered, “Joe Oliver was very strong. He was the greatest freak trumpet player I ever knew. he did most of his playing with cups, glasses, buckets and mutes. He was the best gutbucket man I ever heard. I called him freak because the sounds he made were not made by the valves but through these artificial devices.” Baby Dodds said: “He very seldom played open horn. He played mostly muted. He’d put his hand over the mouth of the trumpet and it would sound like a mouth organ. We used to call him ‘Harmonica.’ That’s where the wah-wah mutes came from but the others didn’t know how to use them.” In a letter towards the end of his life, Oliver wrote: “I am the guy who took a pop bottle and a rubber plunger and made the first mute ever used in a horn, but I didn’t know how to get the patent for it and some educated cat came along and made a fortune off of my ideas.”

Oliver had many sides. He was a man with an enormous appetite. A typical lunch might include a half-dozen hamburgers and a quart of milk. Once, after witnessing one of his lunches, a man bet Oliver that he couldn’t eat a dozen pies. Oliver took him up on it and proceeded to down 11 pies before cracking a smile as he finished off the twelfth. Clarence Williams said that Oliver had a penchant for po-boy sandwiches filled with butter and sugar and aptly named one of his compositions “Sugar Blues” for Oliver. Oliver, who weighed over 260 pounds at his heaviest, also loved to play pool and was quite good at the game. He rarely drank alcohol and was quiet but fun loving.

As a bandleader Oliver trusted no one and always acted as his own and agent and manager. He worked hard to get fair wages for his band but he was also stubborn at times. Unfortunately his refusal to compromise his own terms or his owns ideas cost the band many an engagement when they needed it badly. He was a strict disciplinarian with his sidemen on stage. At one point he used to place a pistol on his music stand when he began the evening music. Oliver said: “This is a matter of business, I mean I wants you to be a band man, and a band man only, and do all you can for the welfair [sic] of the band in the line of playing your best at all times.”

As a composer, King Oliver’s songwriting credits are impressive. Over 20 works were copyrighted by Oliver in his eight years as a recording artist. His best known compositions were “Snake Rag,” “Sugarfoot Stomp,” “Doctor Jazz” and “West End Blues.” Ironically, the best known were made famous by other artists as Louis Armstrong redefined jazz solos with his amazing intro in “West End Blues” and “Doctor Jazz” was adopted by Jelly Roll Morton who made it a constant in his repertoire. Interestingly, the 1920 composition “Royal Garden Blues” was credited to Clarence & Spencer Williams, though clarinetist Jimmie Noone claimed he and Oliver wrote it and sold it to Clarence Williams who then published it as his own work.

King Oliver was also considered a blues composer; two of his most important blues compositions are “Camp Meeting Blues” and “Working Man Blues.” Oliver understood the commercial side of the blues. In a letter to fellow cornetist Buddy Petit, he wrote: “If you got a real good blues, have someone write it just as you play them and send them to me, we can make some jack on them...It’s the originality that counts.”

In February of 1924 the Creole Serenaders disbanded. Drummer Warren “Baby” Dodds described the break up: “I was one of the guys mainly responsible for breaking up the outfit... I began to suspect that Oliver was cheating on us. When I first joined the band it was called ‘Our Band.’ After we commenced recording, and making so much money, Joe said it was his band... Next the royalties on the records we made ... got smaller and smaller. Nobody saw the royalty checks but Oliver. They were in his name and had to be cashed by him. We had an argument when some of us wanted to see the checks. Joe Oliver wouldn’t come up with the checks. In our minds that showed guilt ... and we decided to disband.”

Louis Armstrong and Lil Hardin decided to stay with the band a short while longer but Hardin told Louis that he would never be more than second trumpeter in an Oliver led group. In the summer of 1924, Armstrong left on a career path that would redefine jazz singing and jazz solos forever.

THE DIXIE SYNCOPATORS

February 1925 finds Oliver with a completely reorganized band now billed as the Dixie Syncopators that settled into a two-year gig at the Plantation Cafe. The ten-piece orchestra full of New Orleans musicians included Barney Bigard, Albert Nicholas, Kid Ory and Paul Barbarin. They performed many of the numbers that the Creole Serenaders had made famous.

By May of 1927, Oliver and his group made it to New York City and the Savoy Ballroom. After a series of one-nighters in the area, Oliver was offered a regular gig at a newly opened club that was going to feature nation-wide radio broadcasts. The Cotton Club would have been an incredible opportunity yet, amazingly, Oliver turned it down. He felt his name and the reputation of the band was worth much more than the club was willing to pay. Consequently, this opened the way for a young Duke Ellington to begin to make his name on his own road to stardom.

Oliver then took his group on an East coast tour before disbanding in the autumn of 1927. (It would be three years before Oliver would lead another touring group under his name.) For the next three years, Oliver led studio bands for recordings and had sessions with Clarence Williams, Lonnie Johnson and others. He occasionally formed groups for special appearances. In late 1928, Oliver got a new recording contract prominently featuring Oliver’s nephew, Dave Nelson, on trumpet.

Oliver’s recordings during this time are inconsistent. At times Oliver only leads the group while others play trumpet. King Oliver’s last recording was “Stealing Love” in September of 1930. His health had begun to fail; his teeth and gums were going bad, which made trumpet playing difficult if not impossible at times. If that wasn’t enough, the Great Depression struck him a crippling blow when he lost his life savings due to a Chicago bank collapse. Oliver attempted to fight back. For the next few years, he struggled to keep together a touring band. From February of 1934 to May of 1935, his group played a brutal string of one-nighters to black and white audiences. They toured small towns throughout the mid-Atlantic states, then went to the Deep South. Oliver came to Mobile and Biloxi during those tours, but there is no record of the band ever performing to the Crescent City.

In 1936, Oliver had the opportunity to play as a fill-in for Louis Armstrong in New Orleans. Amazingly Oliver demanded a fee higher than Louis’s and didn’t get the gig. By 1937, Oliver had lost all of his teeth, all of his band members had deserted him and he was left stranded in Spartanburg, South Carolina, with a broken down bus. According to a published interview with Frank Dilworth, Jr., a Savannah music promoter and businessman at that time, it was he who took a frantic call from Oliver. Dilworth remarked: “I knew that he had a name, and brought him to Savannah as much as anything else to play with locals in one of my bands.” But once Oliver and his vehicle had been towed to Savannah, Dilworth realized that Oliver was in much worse shape than he had imagined. He arranged for medical help and found him a room in a local boarding house. Oliver struggled but was unable to play anymore. He briefly ran a fruit stand and was an attendant in a local pool hall. During this time, he wrote a series of letters to his half-sister Victoria describing his fall on hard times. “If hours were home runs, I’d be richer than Babe Ruth.” He had a great desire to return to glory in New York but realized that his time was running out. On April 10, 1938, Oliver failed to show up for work; he had passed during the night of a cerebral hemorrhage. Oliver’s sister and Louis Armstrong were notified and his sister made arrangements, paying for his body to be brought to New York with assistance from an organization Louis Armstrong called “the Guild.” The funeral services were conducted by Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. and Oliver was buried in an unmarked grave in Woodlawn Cemetery.

“A BROKEN HEART”

Louis Armstrong recalled the last time he saw Oliver alive. He had come to Savannah to play for a dance. Down on his luck but uncomplaining, Oliver was delighted to see Louis’s band and shook hands with them all. Louis slipped him $150 and the rest of the band, knowing what Oliver meant to their leader, coughed up whatever they could spare. That evening, to their surprise, they spied “Papa Joe” backstage dressed to kill. “He was sharp like the old Joe Oliver of 1915,” recounted Louis. “He’d been to the pawnshop and gotten his fronts all back; you know his suits and all. ...He looked beautiful ... A little time after we left Savannah, the owner of the bar, an old fan, gave Joe a job as a flunky cleaning up—emptying those cuspidors like the ones he used to tap his foot on ...pretty soon, he died. Most people said it was a heart attack. I think it was a broken heart. That’s what killed Joe Oliver.”

Some have called Oliver’s life tragic. He consistently made bad business decisions at very crucial times. Yet Oliver was King and ruled on his instrument for a good many years in New Orleans, Chicago and, via his recordings, around the world. He was a victim of the Great Depression and the shift from the collective New Orleans style of jazz to swing. Jelly Roll Morton was in the same boat; however, a series of interviews at the end of his life at least gave him a forum to relive his past. Like Morton, Oliver never had a chance to go to Europe where they both would have found adoring fans even to this day. The greatest injustice in Oliver’s life was that he died just a few short years before the great jazz revival period when the world began to look back and celebrate early jazz musicians and their music.

In 1942, Hollywood filmed Syncopation, a biopic loosely based on Oliver’s life. In 2001, the African nation of Ghana issued a stamp in honor of Joe Oliver’s accomplishments and the Caribbean island nations of St. Vincent and the Grenadines included Oliver as one of six New Orleans musicians in their Jazz Roots series of stamps.

Joe “King” Oliver left us with a recording legacy that illustrates his prowess as a musician, band leader and composer. Jazz and its development as a world class music would not have been the same without him.

Selected CDs

King Oliver & His Orchestra
1929 - 1930
(JSP Records)

King Oliver’s Jazz Band
1923 - 1926
(Melodie Jazz Classic)

Selected Book

King Oliver
By Martin Williams
(Barnes)

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