Creole Trombone

Kid Ory and the Early Years of Jazz

John McCusker

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781628468175
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

Edward "Kid" Ory (1886-1973) was a trombonist, composer, recording artist, and early New Orleans jazz band leader. Creole Trombone tells his story from birth on a rural sugar cane plantation in a French-speaking, ethnically mixed family, to his emergence in New Orleans as the city's hottest band leader. The Ory band featured such future jazz stars as Louis Armstrong and King Oliver, and was widely considered New Orleans's top "hot" band. Ory's career took him from New Orleans to California, where he and his band created the first African American New Orleans jazz recordings ever made. In 1925 he moved to Chicago where he made records with Oliver, Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton that captured the spirit of the jazz age. His most famous composition from that period, "Muskrat Ramble, " is a jazz standard. Retired from music during the Depression, he returned in the 1940s and enjoyed a reignited career.Drawing on oral history and Ory's unpublished autobiography, Creole Trombone is a story that is told in large measure by Ory himself. The author reveals Ory's personality to the reader and shares remarkable stories of incredible innovations of the jazz pioneer. The book also features unpublished Ory compositions, photographs, and a selected discography of his most significant recordings.

CHAPTER 1

1886–1896
LE MONDE CREOLE EN CAMPAGNE

The Woodland Plantation was a sprawling 1,882-acre sugar cane farm twenty-five miles upriver from New Orleans in a tiny St. John the Baptist Parish hamlet called LaPlace. Its main house—a raised, elongated cottage with a modest tin roof, cistern, and two stained-glass dormer windows—was built in 1839. About two dozen buildings, many of which had been slave quarters, ran along a dirt road behind the main house.¹ It was there on a cold Christmas morning in 1886 that Edward “Kid” Ory was born. Ory’s family lived about a half mile behind the main house across the cane fields, next to the massive multi-story sugar mill where his father worked.

At least two sets of railroad tracks ran through the plantation between the main house and the mill. One ran to other places like New Orleans and Baton Rouge. The other, a spur line, curved through the fields back to the sugar mill. The overland route was the River Road, an often-murky thoroughfare that followed the Mississippi downriver southeast to New Orleans and upriver northwest to Baton Rouge. Most folks called it simply “the road.”

In the nineteenth century most of the population of St. John Parish lived close to the river on the plantations and farms daisy-chained along its banks. An earthen levee hemmed the waters in, providing some small protection from the spring floods that were responsible for the rich soil that made farming possible. The fields fanned out like thinly cut pie slices originating at the water’s edge: large wedge to the river, thin to the swamp.

The Woodland was part of the village of LaPlace, which was little more than a few homesteads, some rental property, and a store. Further upriver was Reserve, which had more of a town feel, including stores, social clubs, and the only Catholic church for miles, St. Peter’s. The church was about five miles from the Woodland sugar house, so the Ory family would have needed transportation to get there. They would have traveled down the red dirt road that crossed the railroad tracks until they arrived at the River Road. From there they would have headed upriver, winding and turning with the river until reaching the simple wooden church. Built in 1867, it sat some distance off the road, allowing parking space for dozens of buggies. Out back, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, was the cemetery that took over as the burial location for east bank Catholics who previously would have been buried across the river in Edgard at the St. John the Baptist Church.

Father Etienne Badoil was the Ory family’s priest from the founding of St. Peter’s until his death in 1905. He baptized most of the Ory kids. He was out in the community and could often be found playing euchre, a card game, at the Planters and Merchants Social Club hall down the road from St. Peter’s.² Other than the Latin he spoke during mass, he always conversed in French, as did most of his parishioners.

Across the river from Reserve is Edgard, comprised largely of the parish courthouse, St. John the Baptist Church, the Caire Store, and a few other businesses. Apart from a couple of villages up and downriver, the rest of the parish was sugarcane fields and swamp.

The majority of the population of St. John the Baptist Parish was of African ancestry, though one would never get this impression from the names on the 1860 census. A puny document compared to its postwar counterparts, the census lists white planters and a few free blacks. The 1870 count, the first after the Civil War and Emancipation, would present a very different view. The nameless masses that had been noted merely as numbers on the 1860 slave census had become a political majority.³ With the support of occupying federal forces, which arrived in 1862 with the fall of New Orleans, and the disenfranchisement of white voters, St. John voters elected black officials. Even after the troops withdrew in 1877, black politicians like Sheriff John Webre held on to power. For the better part of a generation former slaves enjoyed, if not a radically changed life, the promise of one and the assurance that the American democracy might at last embrace them as full citizens.

But, for the most part, the everyday lives of people of color were largely unchanged from the days of slavery. White men still held the property of the parish and black laborers did most of the back-breaking work. Many still lived on plantations in much the same manner as before. On the 1880 census, long lists of black families—who are generally noted as tenant farmers and laborers—often follow the names of major landowners.

The agricultural economy based on slavery was gone, and some wondered if crops could be produced at a profit in the South without a free labor source. Many large landowners whose money was tied up in slaves prior to the war lost a big chunk of their capital with Emancipation. They had land, little money, and loans outstanding. As late as 1869, few fields in the parish had crops in the ground apart from what was needed to eat.⁴ Through foreclosures and auctions many small farmers, who owned few or no slaves before the war, took over former plantation lands. Other owners tried to hang on to their land by letting it out to sharecropping.

Sugarcane had been the number one cash crop in antebellum St. John, and planting slowly increased after the war. By the time Ory arrived, production levels were outstripping those of the prewar period, though the method of growing and harvesting had changed very little.

Late summer and early fall marked the busiest time in the parish. It was called “grinding season,” a reference to the process that yielded molasses, cane syrup, and sugar from the freshly cut stalks. The process began out in the fields, where laborers grasped the cane by the stalk with the left hand while swinging a machete, sharply and precisely, with the right. The field hands expended just enough effort to cut the cane cleanly, no more. Inexperienced hands learned quickly how to conserve their energy for those long summer days under the searing Louisiana sun. The cane was then loaded onto trailers that traveled along the cane rows and hauled to the sugar mill. There the sticky sweet juice was ground from the cane stalks and cooked until it crystallized. The process gives off a sweet (to some, sickly) aroma that can be smelled a mile away. The leftover stalks, reduced to a stinky pulp called baggasse, were piled up in mounds around the sugarhouse.

People living nearby would have smelled little else. For the Orys, who lived in the middle of a cane field across the dirt road from this industrial operation, the odors were accompanied by a cacophony. The roar of boiling caldrons of crystallizing cane juice, the hammering shut of barrels, and the clang and boom of uncoupling railroad cars would have filled Ory’s ears with a din not usually associated with such a rural setting.

His father, Ozeme Ory (1850–1901), was known to his friends as John. He was white, a child of the plantation and once slave-owning Ory family of St. John the Baptist Parish. In 1850, Ozeme and his extended family lived in a tiny village called Terre Haute on the east bank of the Mississippi River near Reserve. The family had been there for several generations.⁵

The patriarch of the family was Nikolas Ory (1705–ca. 1775) who came to America from the Alsace-Lorraine region of France in 1736. Nikolas settled in Berwick Township, York County, Pennsylvania, until around 1750, when he moved to Frederick County, Maryland, with his wife Anna Strasbach and their children. Anna died there in the 1750s, and Nikolas later married Christine Michel, a native of German-held Lorraine born in 1728. Nikolas and Christine had several more children.⁶

The Orys’ decision to move to Louisiana was rooted in the migration of the Acadians from British-controlled Canadian territories in the aftermath of 1763 Treaty of Paris, which ended the French and Indian War. After France ceded Canada and Nova Scotia to Britain, the French Catholic Acadians were forced out, and many came to French-speaking, Spanish-controlled Louisiana. There they were welcomed by Spanish authorities, such as Governor Antonio de Ulloa, who liked the idea of having colonists with anti-English sentiments. Other Acadian communities in exile, including the one in Frederick County, Maryland, heard favorable reports from their countrymen in Louisiana and soon joined their people there. The Orys and other German Catholics threw in their lot with the Acadians and relocated to Louisiana as well.⁷ They set sail in January 1769 aboard the schooner Britannia with 100 passengers, including 56 Germans, 32 Acadians, and 12 British sailors. Sailing in a heavy fog, the ship missed the mouth of the Mississippi River and went on to Galveston, arriving in February 1769. There, a perplexed Spanish Authority, apparently unaware of Governor Ulloa’s feeling on the matter, held them in detention. They had trouble understanding why a group of Germans would relocate to Louisiana. That they were traveling on a British ship whose passenger roster included a group of soldiers contributed to Spanish suspicions that they were spies. Their property was seized and they were detained until September, when they at last received permission to head to Louisiana, where they eventually settled in an established German Catholic colony. St. John and part of St. Charles Parish became known as the “German Coast.”

As early as 1724, there were 330 Germans farming upriver from New Orleans. In the generations between Nikolas Ory and Edward “Kid” Ory, the German language gave way to French. German surnames such as Heidel, Zehringer, and Traeger became Haydel, Zeringue, and Tregre. French-speaking census takers and bureaucrats who wrote down subjective spellings of German names on population rolls helped eradicate the German language, and over time the settlers married into French families, becoming Creoles like the French around them. In many cases, the German language disappeared in a generation.⁸

By the early fall of 1850, when Ozeme was born, the Orys were a prominent and successful family. Ozeme’s parents, Edmond Ory (1811–1853) and Marie Irene Tregre (c. 1816–1853), were first cousins who had grown up as neighbors in Terre Haute. They married around 1834 and had the first of their seven children in 1835. Edmond was a planter in partnership with his older brother, Omer. The pair bought property together, grew sugarcane, and thrived. Edmond and his family lived with his wife’s grandmother, Margarethe Vicknair Ory, and mother Marie Ory Tregre. Ozeme, the youngest of seven children, would never get to know his parents. They died when he was three.⁹ Their deaths coincided with a devastating yellow fever epidemic that killed about seven thousand people in New Orleans. The fever eventually spread to the outlying areas and proved just as deadly there, wiping out entire families.

The Orys’ movable property, including a steam engine and a sugar mill, was liquidated and the children were divided among Edmond’s siblings and friends. Each was to receive several thousand dollars in inheritance, a sum that grew when Ozeme’s great-grandmother Margarethe Vicknair Ory died in 1856. Responding to a petition from Omer Ory, the court made Evariste Triche, a neighbor, the guardian of three-year-old Ozeme. Triche owned a plantation, which included nearly two hundred acres and twenty slaves and had children about Ozeme’s age. The Triches lived in Terre Haute no later than 1870, when they appear on the parish property tax records downriver near LaPlace.¹⁰

Apart from a few items in the 1860s, little is certain about Ozeme’s childhood. All of his siblings owned property at one time or another; he did not. He is not on the 1860 census (though the Triches are), and he did not fight in the Civil War (though his brother Edmond did). In summer 1867 Ozeme stood as godfather for the baptism of brother Edmond Ory’s daughter Marie. A year and a half later, Edmond became Ozeme’s new guardian though Ozeme continued living with the Triches.¹¹

According to the 1870 census, twenty-year-old Ozeme was a journeyman. Benjamin Triche was also listed as a journeyman. The man listed on the census after Ozeme was a cooper, as were several other men enumerated after him. The young men were probably learning from the established coopers to make barrels to transport sugar, molasses, and other products produced on the Triche plantation. One of these coopers was named Jacques Thomas. He was the son of a free man of color and lived with his mother and sisters in the LaPlace area. In the summer of 1869 Jacques had a son, Charles Octave Thomas, with a woman named Octavie Devezin. They never married and apparently did not live together. A year later Octavie bore the first child of Ozeme Ory.¹²

Marie Octavie Devezin had light brown, reddish skin with straight black hair that “shined like polished ebony in the sunlight.” Ory remembered that she sang to him in French as she rocked him to sleep. Listed as mulatto on the 1880 census, she was born sometime between 1848 and 1852. She worked as a washerwoman and spent most of her life having children.¹³ Joy Lodrigues, a granddaughter of John L. Ory (one of the partners who owned the Woodland Plantation), remembered hearing tales about Octavie as a child. She was well-regarded on the plantation, where she watched the owner’s kids during the day. The Ory children, Lodrigues suggested, would have played with John L. Ory’s youngsters in the plantation yard. She said that was the way it was when she grew up and, from what she could tell, that was the way it always had been.

Octavie’s genealogy has proven elusive. On the baptismal certificates of her children she is listed variously as “Marie Octavie,” “Octavie Devezin,” “Octavie Devesin,” and “Octavie Ory.” On her son John’s death certificate her last name is given as “Madere.” There is no Octavie Devezin on the 1870 Louisiana census and the Octavie Madere listed is another woman. There were free blacks in St. John Parish named both Devezin and Madere prior to the Civil War but there is no definitive record of Octavie prior to 1869. Since Octavie is listed as native to Louisiana, she may have been a slave, which would explain her absence from the 1860 census. At the time she was born, around 1850, there were slaves named Devezin on the Berthelot, Sorapuru, and Balvet plantations in St. John Parish.¹⁴

Ory always referred to himself as a Creole, a distinction that is a tinderbox of controversy. There is agreement that the term was widely employed after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 as a way of distinguishing the native “Creole” population from the Americans who were flooding the city. In this context Creole is a cultural term that includes both whites and blacks.¹⁵ Beyond this, consensus is difficult to come by.

By some traditions, only the descendants of eighteenth-century French and Spanish settlers are Creole. Still, in The Settlement of the German Coast of Louisiana and Creoles of German Descent (1909), J. Hanno Deiler sought to apply the term to Germans, like Ory’s ancestors, who settled St. John Parish at the behest of the French. In another context, Creole applies to the pre–Civil War Gens de Coleur Libres or “free people of color.” This French-speaking, generally Catholic, mixed-race caste was, in part, the result of exploitive sexual relationships, termed plaçage, between white men and black women.¹⁶ More generally, Creole is sometimes applied clumsily to denote a mixed racial heritage within the African American populace, thus ignoring the cultural, linguistic, and religious components entirely.

Ory is a Creole by any of these definitions. His genealogy embraces French and German ancestry on his father’s side and African ethnicity on his mother’s. Further, he was a Catholic whose first language was French. Still, Creole is only a label, one that in Louisiana is applied to different peoples in different regions. Some French-speaking blacks living in proximity to the Acadian, or Cajun, people in south central and southwestern Louisiana call themselves Creoles. Theirs is a rural existence, not unlike that of the Cajuns around them, of hunting, trapping, farming, and fishing. Another rural Creole community, dating back to the late eighteenth century, can be found around Cane River south of Natchitoches, where...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Who Was Kid Ory?
• Chapter 1. 1886–1896: Le Monde Creole en Campagne
• Chapter 2. ca. 1897–1900: Music
• Chapter 3. 1900–1904: Orphan
• Chapter 4. 1905–1907: Walking with the King
• Chapter 5. 1908–1910: Kid
• Chapter 6. 1910–1916: New Orleans
• Chapter 7. 1917–1919: Creole Jazz
• Chapter 8. 1919–1925: California
• Chapter 9. 1925–1933: Chicago Sideman
• Chapter 10. 1933–1973: Epilogue
• Appendix I Autobiography
• Appendix II Autobiography
• Appendix III Selected Discography
• Appendix IV Lost Compositions
• Notes
• Index
• Color Plates