Jazz On The River

The S.S. Capitol riverboat - Strekfus Line

I moved to Martha’s Vineyard the summer after graduating from college. I had been there once as a kid but experienced it with friends the previous summer, one of whom had a family house in West Tisbury and fell in love with the island. It’s a uniquely magical place in the summer when its year-round population swells tenfold. And I loved it after Labor Day, as late summer turned to fall and the island thinned out, making it feel like it was all my backyard and everyone, my friendly neighbor.

On a November day, as I was driving from Oak Bluffs to Vineyard Haven on Beach Road, a cold rain started to fall, and I saw a familiar figure hunched over, walking along the side of the road, slightly disheveled with a distinctive, hobbled gait. I had seen him walking on this stretch many times before, so I pulled over and offered him a ride. He made a powerful impression when our eyes met as he grunted something, expressing his appreciation, but neither of us felt like conversing. When I made it home and mentioned it in passing recollection of my day to Beth, my dear friend and owner of the house where I rented a room, she replied, “Well, you know who that is, don’t you?” I did not. I was shocked when she told me it was Shel Silverstein, but even twenty-plus years later, his photo on the back cover of “Where The Sidewalk Ends” confirmed it.

The easygoing joy of island life that summer gave way to a counterpoint of bleak hardship that winter. I was cold, broke, and alone. In a burst of hopeful resolution in early January, I mailed a cassette tape demo and promo photo to the Carnival Cruise Lines entertainment office. Somehow, I’d gotten the address and second-hand instructions on what to send—this was in the pre-website world, so that alone felt like an accomplishment. Early that March, I was off the island visiting friends in western Massachusetts when I got paged from a 305 number. I remember it was a Tuesday. I called the number back, and “Dave” at Carnival asked me if I could be in Miami on Saturday to join the eleven-piece show band on the Imagination if he got a plane ticket to me by Friday. “Ya, Dave, I can do that.”

I drove back to Wood’s Hole the following day, took the ferry, got my horns, and packed my stuff. On Thursday, I took the ferry back to Wood’s Hole and drove outside Boston to my parents’ house. I procured my father’s college tuxedo hanging in the guest room closet for as long as I could remember. It smelled faintly of mothballs but fit perfectly. I flew to Miami Saturday afternoon and spent the night in a hotel watching Marcus Camby and UMass Minutemen lose in the March Madness Final Four. On Sunday morning, I caught a shuttle to the Port of Miami and boarded the Imagination—my first ship gig.

Playing in the Carnival Imagination 11-piece show band

I laugh now, looking back at my sudden and complete immersion into American popular culture, which I mainly ignored through upbringing and choice up to that point in my life. The eleven-piece band I joined worked seven nights a week, several shows a night, playing dance sets of commercial arrangements from the big band era, variety shows accompanying singers, comedians, jugglers, and magicians, and choreographed production shows with dancers, singers, and acrobats—all pointing to Las Vegas as the north star. But even then, in the waning days of the twentieth century, the “fun ship” experience tapped a shared cultural mythology of grand steamship excursions on the Mississippi River. Our work week started with a small combo from the show band playing the “Dixie” set on the Promenade deck during the afternoon when a boat full of new passengers (“cones”) was boarding.

By 1907, when John Streckfus, the son of a German immigrant, had the idea of attracting passengers by featuring a hot ragtime band on his new excursion boat, national railroads had already supplanted steamships as the primary engine of American commerce. Entrepreneurial promoters in New Orleans saw steamboat excursions as an opportunity to bring the pageantry of the city’s street parades and the “hot dance music” to people living along the river rather than luring them to the Crescent City. Jazz traveled on this lazy river journey out of New Orleans for over thirty years—its heyday between the two world wars. Steam-driven boats—a relic from the previous century—selling harbor excursions in New Orleans began venturing upriver, bringing exotic new music—riverboat jazz—and creating an idealized, enduring mythology of American identity, strength, and unity.

On the cusp of the great migration, many talented and ambitious early New Orleans musicians joined large numbers of African Americans leaving the South, traveling north (and west) in search of greater economic opportunity and social freedom; their music spread into the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio River valleys—to Chicago, where it found its most welcoming and profitable home amongst nearly half a million new residents. Early jazz music and dancing were stimulating and responded to the period’s optimism and uneasy social transformation. Musicians who worked in riverboat bands before landing in Chicago included Warren “Baby” Dodds, Henry “Red” Allen, Zutty Singleton, Harold “Shorty” Baker, Earl Bostic, James Blanton, Clark Terry, and most famously, Louis Armstrong. Riverboat bands made strict musical demands of their musicians and introduced instrumentation, repertoire, and style changes to the small-ensemble New Orleans styles, making them more accessible to popular audiences.

'As a bandleader (on the Strekfus Line), Fate Marable shared the lessons from his mother with his musicians. Many of the musicians he hired played by ear, and he augmented their skills by teaching them to read music. He expected them all to learn how to play from sheet music on sight ... Members of Marable's bands were expected to be able to play a wide variety of music, from hot numbers to light classics, playing by memory or ear and from sheet music. Above all, they were expected to keep the dancers happy. Marable was a strict bandleader, demanding musical proficiency and rigid discipline from all his bandmembers, yet allowing them to develop their individual strong points.'

Pleasure cruises became associated with hot dance music in big cities like Memphis, St. Louis, Davenport, and smaller river towns. More Americans began listening and dancing to early jazz, contributing to and reflecting the significant social changes in the wake of war and massive demographic shifts. The music and dancing fused with century-old folklore of our mighty rivers and steam-powered riverboats, but also a troubled national identity. The riverboat experience promoted a whitewashed and romanticized exposition of Mississippi River lore, the South, the North, the Confederacy, and the Union—a commercialized adaptation of Tom Sawyer, Becky, and Huck Finn—concealing harsh social, political, and economic realities of black life and our nation’s trauma-laden history of inflicted racial identity. This fictionalized presentation of America’s recent past helped soothe a country unsettled by collective shadow, war, and social and economic change.

Fate Marable's band on the S.S. Capitol. L-R: Henry Kimball, Fate Marable, Boyd Atkins, Johnny St. Cyr, David Jones, Norman Mason, Louis Armstrong, Norman Brashear, and Warren “Baby” Dodds.

The post-World War II revival of “Dixieland” jazz re-packaged this mythology to a primarily white audience longing and nostalgic for a harmonious time and place that never existed—a consistent impulse in the American psyche. This persisted through the twentieth century—riverboat jazz imagery evoked a sense of revelry and adventure. Throughout American history, fantasized notions of freedom, vitality, and power have been tied to our means of transportation—horses, steamships, trains, and automobiles. The ship bands I played in were an increasingly unrecognizable, post-modern relic of this era—tapping into the last trickle of this stream of collective imagination. Carnival Cruise Lines stopped employing eleven-piece show bands several years ago. I am grateful for the experience, but I don’t miss wearing a tuxedo every night…

“The cultural history of Mississippi and Ohio excursion boats reveals that these large, antiquated, heavily symbolic vessels stimulated enchanting visions of graceful harmony with the forces of nature, illusions of masterful control over the river’s destructive power and over social and political currents that periodically disturbed the nation’s public life.”