Chick Webb’s amazing life in jazz — and his early death
Clinic opens to handle the front-line workers
My memory got me in trouble last week when I wrote that the great song stylist Ella Fitzgerald was married to the Baltimore-born band leader and drummer Chick Webb. I was wrong. He was married to Martha Loretta Ferguson, who was known as Sally.
Chick Webb was indeed a mentor to Ella Fitzgerald. Some sources, including his Baltimore family, say she was adopted by Webb because of her young age when she burst on the musical scene in the 1930s. Others dispute this and say he merely promoted her and guided her meteoric career.
Webb’s family still lives in Baltimore. I heard from his second cousin, Mary Williams, who related her family’s perspective.
She said Webb was born here and lived in East Baltimore on Ashland Avenue.
His father was William H. Webb, and his mother was Marie Johnson.
“We were very proud of him because of his handicap,” Williams said. “He was disabled because of a childhood fall. When he walked, the neighborhood children called him ‘Chicken,’ which was shortened to ‘Chick.’ His mother refused to use that name and always called him William. Today calling a disabled child by such a nickname would be considered bullying.”
He played the drums as a young man and was a self-taught musician. He was never a runaway and asked his mother’s permission to move to New York City. In Harlem, he organized a band and married, but had no children, she said.
Webb, who did not read music, memorized the band arrangements and engaged in a famous battle of the bands with rivals. Webb flourished musically in the 1930s, when radio stations broadcast his band and his fans loved his drumming.
“He discovered and became legal guardian to Ella Fitzgerald, the famous jazz singer,” Williams said. “My family members remembered when he returned to Baltimore as a star and played at the Hippodrome. The family could be not seated because of segregation. As a negro performer, he could play on the stage. His mother and aunts were not allowed in a seat. They stood backstage, at the edge of the stage, to see him perform.”
She said he played at New York’s Savoy Ballroom and contributed funds to various civil rights causes, including the Scottsboro Boys Defense Fund.
“He acquired fame but little fortune,” she said. “Chick had a desire to build a community center in his East Baltimore neighborhood.”
The Chick Webb Memorial Recreation Center remains on North Eden Street near Monument Street in East Baltimore.
Webb died in June 16, 1939, at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
His funeral was held at the family church, Baltimore’s Waters African Methodist Church on Aisquith Street near what later became the Oldtown Mall.
“Swing Yields Sway to Dirge at Chick Webb Funeral Rites,” said a headline in The Sun, June 21, 1939. The story said that many persons regarded Webb as the world’s finest drummer.
“There must have been 8,000 to 10,000 there at one time or another, pushing, straining, leaning out of windows straddling ridgepoles of brick houses. It was the largest funeral in recent memory,” the newspaper account said.
Ella Fitzgerald mourned the loss of her
mentor and was brave enough to sing at his funeral. She tried to get through the sentimental song, “My Buddy.” She sang two choruses and started sobbing, “sobbing without restraint,” the newspaper account said.
His own band was too emotional to play at the funeral. The choir sang, “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.”
“Here was the music which everyone knew and everyone joined in the singing, draining ever bit of emotion out of the endless verses,” the paper said. “Swing of the hottest beat — Chick was king of it.”
In Webb’s absence the band was renamed “Ella Fitzgerald and Her Famous Band.” She ran the band and later struck out on her own.
The Maryland Transit Administration launched a vaccine clinic Friday for its employees, and the state plans to set aside 500 vaccines per week for MTA drivers, mechanics, and other frontline workers, the agency’s head told state lawmakers Friday.
“We began vaccinating our employees a few weeks ago, and today marks the first day of our on-site clinic, with about 70 employees this morning being vaccinated on MTA property,” Administrator Kevin Quinn said. “This effort will continue throughout the next few weeks.”
Overall MTA ridership remains down about 60% as of early February, but bus ridership — which serves the one in three people in Baltimore without cars — has remained steady, and is down only 48%, Quinn told lawmakers during a virtual, joint hearing of House and Senate transportation subcommittees.
During the hearing, state Del. Marc Korman grilled the state transportation department’s chief financial officer about the MTA’s operational funding, asking why the state’s contribution to the fiscal 2022 budget fell an estimated $50 million to $67 million short of the levels mandated by state law.
“Is there a view that the law doesn’t have to be followed?” asked Korman, a Montgomery County Democrat and chairman of the House subcommittee.
“We certainly understand what funding mandates are,” responded Jaclyn Hartman, the chief financial officer. “The difficulty of this particular mandate was, given the dramatic revenue decline that came with COVID, as well as the dramatic decline in ridership ... providing an additional roughly $50 million in operating budget spending, at a time when ridership is significantly down ... there was not a good use of that money on the operating budget side.”
Korman noted that a commonly used process exists, under the Budget Reconciliation and Financing Act, to adjust budgets to comply with legal requirements and said he was “flabbergasted” by the state transportation department flouting the legislature’s mandate.
“I understand there are a lot of pressures,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean you just get to do whatever you want.”
The MTA used $260.5 million in federal relief aid to close a funding gap in fiscal year 2020, according to a Department of Legislative Services analysis. Bus operations account for 51% of the agency’s spending. The kerfuffle over the 2022 operating funds followed a letter this week to Gov. Larry Hogan from a transit advocacy group, raising alarm about a shift of state money out of the MTA’s 2020 and 2021 operating budgets upon receiving federal aid for transit.
Brian O’Malley, president of the Central Maryland Transportation Alliance, said in the letter that the move, which he previously called a “shell game,” had negated the federal aid’s effects.
Maryland cut its funding of the agency that runs buses, subway, light rail, mobility and MARC trains “much more than it cut state funding for the other modal administrations,” he wrote in the letter.
Amid fierce backlash in the fall, the Hogan administration reversed its plan to slash MTA bus service in the Baltimore region in 2021, instead reducing MARC train service, which had deeper and more sustained drops in ridership.
O’Malley said the cuts represented a 31% and 22% funding reduction in the 2020 and 2021 fiscal years, respectively. No other state transportation agency saw its share of state funding reduced more than 15% in fiscal 2020 or more than 11% in fiscal 2021, O’Malley wrote.
“As a result, Congress’ intent in sending aid for public transportation under the CARES Act was counteracted,” O’Malley wrote. “Now that Congress has passed another round of aid ... and it includes aid for state Departments of Transportation in addition to aid for public transportation, I am writing to request that you restore funding to the MDOT MTA.”
The request did not come up during the hearing. But with ridership still lagging amid the pandemic, capital funding to address maintenance and other needs should take precedence over operations funding, Maryland Transportation Secretary Greg Slater said.
“We feel it’s best to use [state] funds to not increase that operating funding, but be ready for that increase in operating when that ridership starts to come back,” Slater said.