San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
1921 flood washed away court date that could’ve silenced jazz legend
The September 1921 flood that brought death and devastation to San Antonio ended up being a good thing for a 17-year-old musician who would go on to be known as the father of jazz trombone.
The late San Antonio cornet player Jim Cullum Jr. recounted the story in an essay archived by Stanford University as part of its Riverwalk Jazz Collection.
There had been a ganglandstyle shooting at the Horn Palace
Inn in April of that year. The victim was Billy Keilman, the owner of the roadhouse and an ex-cop who somehow survived the attack by two gunmen.
While the rest of Cotton Bailey’s dance band dove for cover, young Jack Teagarden stood fixated on the action from the bandstand as if he were watching a movie. But reality hit hard when Teagarden was subpoenaed by the prosecution, then received messages that testifying would not be good for his health.
During Prohibition, San Antonio
was rightfully nicknamed “Little Chicago.”
When the sale of alcohol became illegal in 1920, Keilman moved the Horn Palace Inn (named after the deer head trophies that decorated the joint, not the hot brass sections that filled it) from 312 E. Houston St. to 3 miles outside the city limits. The outskirts, where booze was forbidden with a wink, was where the ’20s roared in San Antonio, then the most happening city in Texas.
Jazz was almost entirely a New
Orleans thing at the time, but its Texas sister city caught on early, which made it the place to be for a teenager intent on taking the trombone from the back of the band to front and center. In his hometown of Vernon, 10 miles south of the Oklahoma border, he was known as Weldon Teagarden, but on the way to that first gig in San Antonio he changed his name to the more star-worthy “Jack.”
He just wanted to play jazz, but there he was in 1921, stuck between a rock and Horn Palace, with his two choices being found in contempt of court for not showing up or possibly being rubbed out if he did.
And then, as the case was about to go to trial, the September rains came. The downpour started with a cloudburst over the Olmos Creek watershed and didn’t let up for 18 hours, beginning the evening of Friday, Sept. 9, creating a wall of water downtown that rose almost to the second floor of the Gunter Hotel. The courthouse was flooded, paperwork destroyed, and the Horn Palace Inn case was dismissed.
“Jack Teagarden was to become the greatest of all Texas jazzmen,” wrote Cullum, whose father, Jim Sr., occasionally played with Teagarden. “In addition to his virtuosity, he brought a depth of feeling or ‘soul’ which has seldom been equaled.”
Houston and beyond
A jubilant Teagarden packed up his Stanley Steamer automobile and headed to Houston, where he joined Peck’s Bad
Boys, which had a summer gig at a Galveston Bay resort. Led by the sensational piano player
John “Peck” Kelley — a fan of Vladimir Horowitz, but more commonly compared to jazz great Art Tatum — the band also included 18-year-old clarinetist Pee Wee Russell, who came down from St. Louis thinking he was the hottest young player in jazz.
He was jamming with Kelley when Teagarden came in, casually took his trombone off a coat rack and blew a phrase that almost made Russell faint.
“He’d never heard a hot trombone with that kind of sound and fluency, and so deeply favored by the blues,” Richard M.
Sudhalter wrote in his jazz history book “Lost Chords.”
Kelley preferred accomplished obscurity to all-consuming fame, so he refused to leave Houston for the jazz hot spots of New York and Chicago, and turned down offers to play with Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman and other hot swing bands. He made New York come to him, which John Hammond did in 1939 to write “Peck Kelley Is No Myth” for Down Beat magazine.
“If I was working with a top band,” Kelley said, “it would be rehearse, record, broadcast, play, rush, hurry, with no time to myself.”
That schedule suited Teagarden just fine, however, and he moved to New York City in 1927.
The 22-year-old with a Texas drawl played wherever he could and caused a fervor among even the most jaded jazzbos. As the jazz critic Leonard E. Guttridge wrote, Teagarden “emerged into the world whole, so completely adapted to his instrument that it sometimes appeared he and the trombone had been invented at the same time and had grown up together.”
It was Teagarden’s calling to take the trombone from vaudeville, where it was mainly used for comedic effect, to the jazz clubs and concert halls.
The great Fletcher Henderson, whose 1920s Orchestra, featuring Louis Armstrong and
Coleman Hawkins, started the swing craze, took Teagarden all over Harlem and “showed him off like he was a man from Mars,” according to Dave Oliphant’s “Texan Jazz.”
In that time of segregation, Teagarden couldn’t publicly perform with his musical kindreds, but he broke the studio color line in 1929 when he recorded “Knockin’ a Jug” with Armstrong.
In demand
Because his solos said a lot in short spaces, Teagarden was one of the most-recorded musicians of the ’20s and ’30s. An especially
memorable year was 1933, when “Big T” played on both the final recording of his hero Bessie Smith and the studio debut of Billie Holiday. Teagarden was part of that torch-passing in the short interim between his time in the Ben Pollack Orchestra and the five financially secure, yet musically unfulfilling years he spent with the very popular Paul Whiteman Orchestra during the Great Depression.
Teagarden was to the trombone what Armstrong was to the trumpet, so it was fitting the pair would tour the world together from 1947 to 1951 in the Louis Armstrong All-Stars. They also were both great singers, with Teagarden saying it all with his signature tune “I’ve Got the
Right to Sing the Blues.” He was also known for “Basin Street Blues,” “St. James Infirmary” and “Beale Street Blues.”
“What set Teagarden apart, in both his playing and singing, was a feel for melody,” said Austin trombonist Jon Blondell. “He brought vocalization to the trombone and sang it like he played it.”
In a 1958 interview, Teagarden credited spirituals he heard from a Black Pentecostal revival tent in a vacant lot next door to his house in Vernon with profoundly influencing him as a 7-yearold, a year away from his first trombone.
“The singing, which would build up to this climax (speaking in tongues,) was really terrific,” he said. “I’d sit on the picket fence we had and listen to it. And that music seemed as natural to me as anything.”
A musical family
Teagarden’s father, Charles, a gin mill mechanic and amateur cornetist, died from the Spanish flu in 1918, forcing his wife, Helen, and their four kids to relocate to Nebraska and then to Oklahoma, where they had relatives. In Oklahoma City, a 14year-old Teagarden had another revelatory musical experience, at an authentic Native American powwow on the edge of town.
“When they would sing those Indian chants, you know, that came naturally to me, too,” he told an interviewer, “I could embellish on that and play an Indian thing — just pick up my horn and play it to where you couldn’t tell the difference.”
Because of his black hair and high cheekbones, Teagarden was often thought to have Native American blood, but both his parents were German. Mother Helen was an accomplished piano player who taught her children to read music at an early age. All four became professional musicians of note, with trumpeter Charles (known as “Little T”) almost matching his older brother’s success.
In September 1963, the Teagarden family, even mother Helen, who shared the piano with her daughter Norma, would play together at the Monterrey Jazz Festival. Just like the old days in Vernon.
Less than four months later, Jack Teagarden, born in 1905 and reborn in 1921 on the way to his first club gig in San Antonio, died in his beloved New Orleans. The cause of death was pneumonia, with alcoholism a contributing factor. He was only 58, but he’d long ago made his mark.
Esteemed critic and historian Leonard Feather summed up the Teagarden legacy: “Always years ahead of his time, the possessor of a wholly individual sound both as instrumentalist and vocalist, Teagarden ranks with Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Coleman Hawkins, and a handful of others as one of the unquestioned titans in the history of jazz.”