For a homebody like Monk, life was good in the summer of 1934. He was sixteen, enjoyed three square meals a day, a room with a piano, unlimited time to play and write, a girlfriend, and a high level of local popularity, as a handsome, prize-winning musician. But like most Depression-era teens, his pockets were rarely full. Although Marion secured a job at the Columbus Hill Community Center,1 the family lived mainly on Barbara’s meager wages. Thelonious earned a little playing solo or trio gigs here and there, and occasional rent parties, but he did not have a union card, nor was he pounding the pavement in search of a regular job. Barbara wasn’t opposed to his chosen career—as Thelonious recalled many years later, “She never figured I should do anything else. She was with me, you know. If I wanted to play music, it was all right with her.”2 But as hard as she worked, she would not allow Thelonious to just hang around the house, eating, sleeping and writing music. Working as a musician was perfectly fine, but he had to work, especially now that he decided not to attend Haaren High School in the fall.
He tried his hand at wage work, securing a job with the neighborhood ice peddler known to everyone as “Ice Joe,” like his father back in Rocky Mount some sixteen years ago. “[I]t was pretty strenuous work,” Thomas remembered. “He worked one day and said he’d never do that again.”3 He needed steady income from a piano stool.
Through an acquaintance of Barbara’s, Thelonious landed a job that not only kept him out of the house, it took him out of the city altogether. A devout Baptist (who would soon defect to the Jehovah’s Witnesses), Barbara befriended a black female evangelist and divine healer affiliated with a Pentecostal church. Some called her Reverend Graham, and she apparently earned the moniker “the Texas Warhorse,” but even her name has never been confirmed.4 She was preparing for a tour of the Midwest and Southwest in order to save souls and drive out affliction, and she desperately needed a band. She had heard Monk play, either in the family’s tiny apartment or while visiting Barbara’s church, so she asked him to organize a small ensemble consisting of a drummer, saxophone player, and trumpeter. As Monk later explained, the gig “wasn’t through the church. [It was] through other sources, other channels.”5 Now, all he had to do was convince his mama to let him go. Barbara wanted him to work, but traveling across the country at such a young age was not what she had in mind. “She finally conceded,” Thomas recalled, “ ’cause his heart was so bent on going. She was convinced that it was something that would be beneficial to him, ’cause he was playing the piano and that’s what he wanted to do. So she let him go. And when he came back, he had changed his style of playing.”6 He packed his bags, bid farewell to his mother, sister, brother, and Trotyrine, and piled into a car with his new quartet, pulling a small trailer loaded down with luggage, a small set of drums, a battered upright piano, and a box of Bibles. It would be more than two years before he returned home to West 63rd Street.
Unfortunately, Monk left no details about the tour. He didn’t talk about it with his family, and the journalists who interviewed him showed little or no interest. In 1956, he told Nat Hentoff, “While still in my teens, I went on the road with a group that played church music for an evangelist. Rock and roll or rhythm and blues. That’s what we were doing. Only now they put different words to it. She preached and healed and we played. We had trumpet, saxophone, piano, and drums. And then the congregation would sing. We would play in some of the biggest churches in the towns we went through. We traveled around the country for about two years.”7 Several years later, he told journalist Pearl Gonzalez, “I once traveled with an evangelist for a couple of years. It was in the Southwest, and I was a teenager.”8 That was it. He never mentioned the evangelist’s name, the names of the other musicians, or what towns they might have traveled through. Nor was he asked to describe the revivals, the music they played, or how many congregants they might attract on any given night. So why did he do it? Why abandon the center of the jazz world for the small towns and cities of Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri, Indiana, and Illinois?
He didn’t earn much money on the tour, and he didn’t need room and board living at home. Perhaps the best explanation is Monk’s own, from an interview in 1965: “It was a lot of fun!” And for him, he was essentially playing jazz. “I always did play jazz. I mean, I was playing [church] music the same way.”9
It’s also conceivable that the spirit moved Thelonious. Many years later, after his friend, the pianist Mary Lou Williams, converted to Catholicism, he occasionally joined her, Bud Powell, and her ex-husband Harold Baker for Mass at 6:00 a.m. When Mary Lou first invited him to Our Lady of Lourdes for Mass, Monk was apparently so nervous that he consumed a whole bottle of wine in advance. It only made matters worse; when he arrived that morning he was so drunk he collapsed on the floor of the church. Fortunately, they were the only two people there. Monk continued to attend Mass for a little while longer, though he never converted.10 On the other hand, most people who knew the adult Monk remember that he rarely attended church and did not speak about religion in the most flattering terms. His brother became a Jehovah’s Witness minister, and sometimes Thelonious would get into arguments with Thomas and various family members over religion. “He used to come when we were having our [Bible] study,” his niece Charlotte recalls. “Daddy would say to Uncle Bubba, ‘Why don’t you sit down and join us?’ and Uncle would say ‘I’m God.’ . . . He was never into religion. Religion was not his thing. He thought he was God. He never went to Kingdom Hall with my grandma. He never went to church or any of that. And his kids, he never took them to church. He said they had to have their own mind about things.”11
When photographer and journalist Valerie Wilmer asked him in 1965 whether he was a religious man, Monk responded, “I wouldn’t say so. I haven’t been to church in a good while.”
Valerie W.: Do you believe in God?
Monk: I don’t know nothing. Do you?
Valerie W.: No, I do not.
Monk: It’s a deep subject, you know, trying to think about it. I kinda go along with you.12
We will never know what the teen-aged Thelonious was feeling or experiencing at the time, but we can know what he was getting into. What was this religious movement and how did it differ from the Baptist church in which he was raised? What did these revivals look like or sound like? What kind of music was Monk expected to play? What were the conditions on the road?
Despite his silence on the subject, we can be certain of some things about his teenage tour. First, we know that his evangelist was affiliated with a “sanctified” church, most likely Pentecostal, because Monk described her as a divine “healer.” Besides believing in divine or miraculous healing, what set Pentecostals apart from Baptists and other Christian denominations was their belief that speaking in tongues is the principal element of being saved or sanctified.13 Pentecostals were even more exuberant in their style of worship than the Baptists Monk grew up with. Congregants fall to the ground as if asleep or shaking convulsively—what is referred to as “being slain in spirit.” Women and men struck by the Holy Ghost make prophetic statements as if God is speaking through them. The healers, always charismatic preachers, heal the sick and infirm through prayer, special oils, a laying-on of hands, and the application of sacred cloths. They might invoke the New Testament for its references to divine healing, but their rituals closely resemble the rituals Monk’s West African ancestors practiced. Consciously or not, the Pentecostals share with Africans the basic philosophical tenet that one must draw on spiritual power in the service of the believer.14 Monk’s evangelist left a deep and lasting impression on him. Despite his later skepticism, family members recall Monk occasionally referring to “miraculous” things he saw while on the road. According to his sister-in-law, Geraldine Smith, “He thought that what he was seeing was for real. He would actually see people throw away their crutches and get out of their wheelchairs and walk.”15
Reverend Graham could have belonged to any number of churches. During the mid-1930s, the more visible Pentecostal churches included the Church of Christ (Holiness); the Church of God in Christ; House of the Lord; Church of the Living God; the Church of the Living God, the Pillar and Ground of the Truth; Mt. Sinai Holy Church; and the United House of Prayer for All People, founded by the enigmatic pastor Bishop C. M. “Daddy” Grace. We can narrow down the list somewhat. The Church of Christ believed that the use of musical instruments in the sacred space of the church was sacrilegious.16 The most likely candidates are the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) and the Church of the Living God, the Pillar and Ground of the Truth. Both had a presence in New York City as well as nation-wide, and both utilized women evangelists.
The COGIC banned women from ordination, but women were known to preach as traveling evangelists. Indeed, the crucial role women played as missionaries, saving souls and preaching the gospel, drew criticism from mainline Baptist and Methodist churches, where women were largely relegated to social reform and church organization roles. This does not mean that women in the COGIC necessarily exercised more power than Baptist or Methodist women. The ban on ordination did not keep women in the Pentecostal or Holiness churches from preaching or even entering the pulpit. Lizzie Roberson, the head of the Women’s Department for the Church of God in Christ from 1911 to 1940, stressed the importance of women in missionary work. Women, more so than men, built the congregations by attracting wayward sinners with their fiery street-corner and countryside sermons and divine healing abilities, even if they were not in a position to pastor churches.17 So it is quite possible that Monk’s first employer was not an ordained minister, but rather an itinerant evangelist preaching without a pulpit.
In the COGIC, music was essential for converting sinners, saving souls, and healing the afflicted. Perhaps the most famous missionary in the church’s history was Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the great vocalist and guitar player who brought her brand of gospel blues to the very clubs and theaters from which sanctified churchgoers were banned. Just two years younger than Thelonious, Sister Rosetta was still a child when she accompanied her mother, the dynamic evangelist and mandolin player Katie Bell Nubin, throughout the South. Like Monk and his evangelist, Tharpe and her mother traveled from town to town, city to city, holding tent revivals, evangelizing in the streets, and even at night around places of amusement.18
If Monk’s evangelist was an ordained minister, she was probably affiliated with the Church of the Living God, the Pillar and Ground of Truth. Unlike other Pentecostal churches, the Church of the Living God not only ordained women but was founded by a woman, the Reverend Mary Lena Lewis Tate. Established in 1903, the church grew exponentially thanks to the missionary work of dozens of primarily female evangelists. By 1918, the church had a presence in forty-eight states with headquarters in Waycross, Georgia.19 All Pentecostal evangelists shared the same earthly mission: “preaching the Gospel (even to the poor); healing the lame, the infirm, and broken of spirit; freeing those who found themselves slaves to sin; restoring eyes that have been blinded to the truth; releasing hurting people from their oppressors; and letting the world know that now is the time of their visitation.”20
And saving souls. This was the evangelist’s raison d’être. Journalists and jazz critics mistakenly characterize Monk’s experience on the road as if it were analogous to joining the circus, with “healing” as a kind of sideshow or spectacle, and Monk merely providing music for the show. In reality, the life of an itinerant evangelist was demanding, highly exposed, and purposeful. For one thing, whenever a “prayer band” entered a town or a city, unless the evangelist was invited to preach at a local church, they had to “fish” for souls. Sometimes that meant handing out flyers announcing a tent revival, talking to sinners on street corners, recreation centers, or standing in front of job sites or places of amusement. An evangelist often would seek out a busy corner in the black community or, if at all possible, in sections of town where black and white gathered, and preach, either unaccompanied or backed by trumpet and drums. If it wasn’t convenient to roll the piano off the truck or trailer, Thelonious probably joined in on tambourine during these impromptu sessions. Once the word spread that a revival was to be held, they would set up a tent in an empty field—preferably near a river or lake and not too far from the road—and hold prayer meetings five or six nights in a week. Having access to water was important, since Pentecostals believe in baptism by immersion.21
As the congregants gathered, prayer bands typically opened with a familiar hymn—such as J. P. Webster’s “The Sweet By and By,” or “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” by Scriven and Converse. The evangelist would come to the makeshift pulpit and begin to expound upon a chosen text from the Bible. No matter where the scripture led, she would find her way to the essential point of the service: sinners must be saved and accept our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Her words would burn slowly at first, eliciting shouts, amens, interjections of “Preach, sister,” “Bring it home,” “That’s right,” “Lord,” “Jesus,” and “Heavenly Father.” The congregation’s “response” to her “call” was like gasoline on hot embers. The slow burn gave way to fire and brimstone, and invariably some soul would catch the Holy Ghost and begin speaking in tongues—the true language of the sanctified. At this point in the service, sermon became song, completely improvised and spontaneous, consisting of little more than a one- or two-line lyric, said to have been composed “under the spirit.” They were simple, blues-inflected melodic lines made of just three or four notes, sung by the preacher in a kind of gravelly, whining voice, and repeated by the congregation. The band was expected to jump in immediately and follow the preacher’s lead, punctuating at the right moments, building to a steady pulse. They had to pay attention to both the crowd and the preacher. (And it wasn’t unheard-of for a band member to catch the Holy Spirit.) The pulsing, syncopated rhythms joined, bodies moving, feet stomping, hand-clapping, and chants of “Power, Power Lord/We need Your power/Holy Ghost power . . .”22
Monk’s experience playing sacred music in the Baptist church did not fully prepare him for this. During the early 1930s, the music of the sanctified churches was more rollicking than in the black Baptist churches, possessing rhythmic elements we associate with blues, jazz, or even early rock and roll. In a 1965 interview, Monk compared the kind of gospel music he played on the road with contemporary rock and R&B. “The music I played with them,” he recalled, “seems to be coming out today. They’re playing a lot of it now.”23 Many of the black Baptist churches in the urban North, on the other hand, had eliminated congregational singing in lieu of the professional choir, and the hymnal had replaced the old Negro spirituals. The blues scales and chords and the heavy syncopation we tend to associate with black religious expression today were virtually absent in the mainline black churches in the North during the early part of the twentieth century. For most black Baptist and Methodist (AME) ministers at the time, those sounds, brought by southerners in the Great Migration, undermined refinement and decorum. Worse, many black clergy associated blues and jazz with the devil’s music. (Ironically, Pentecostal and Holiness preachers said the same thing, despite the jazz and blues elements in their own services.) Mainline church leaders sought to remake their flock according to middle-class mores. By the 1920s, most black Baptist churches developed a rift between ecstatic shouters and congregational singing, on the one hand, and refinement, quiet, “respectful” worship, on the other.24
Monk hit the road at the very moment when these tensions reached what can only be described as a musical revolution in the black Baptist churches. The very growth of the Pentecostal churches in the urban North had already compelled some mainline black ministers to adapt to the Southern folkways of their congregations. But the main force behind this “revolution” was a former itinerant bluesman turned preacher named Thomas Andrew Dorsey. Perhaps best known for composing “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” (1932), Dorsey was on a mission in the early 1930s to introduce his brand of “gospel blues” to the mainline black churches. He wrote and published new songs and sold sheet music, and he emphasized improvisation and the incorporation of “trills and turns and embellishments” associated with blues piano playing.25 Besides his own original compositions, the kind of music Dorsey hoped to introduce already existed in the sanctified churches, and some of that music had begun to circulate beyond the sacred walls of the storefront churches via radio and the phonograph machine. Such notable figures as the spectacular blind pianist Arizona Dranes, and Bessie Johnson and the Sanctified Singers, began recording on the “race record” labels in the late 1920s. Dorsey, a shrewd businessman, hired female vocalists such as Sallie Martin from the sanctified church in order to form “gospel choruses” in mainline churches.26 In other words, black female evangelists, not unlike the woman who employed Thelonious, laid the groundwork for the rise of gospel blues in the mainline black churches.
But even more than Dorsey, Monk was drawn to another important figure behind the revolution in black sacred music: the Reverend Charles A. Tindley. Tindley (1851–1933), an African-American Methodist minister based in Philadelphia, composed more than forty-five gospel hymns, including “Leave It There,” “Nothing Between,” “What Are You Doing in Heaven?,” “Some Day,” “Stand By Me,” and “I’ll Overcome Someday,” which, in a slightly altered form, later became the civil rights movement’s best-known anthem. Tindley’s gospel hymns not only had a tremendous influence on Dorsey, but they were hugely popular among Pentecostals and Baptists alike.27
Monk grew particularly fond of Tindley’s hymn “We’ll Understand It Better, By and By,” which he composed around 1906. Like so many “old school” gospel musicians, Monk always referred to Tindley’s composition by the first line of the chorus, “By and By When the Morning Comes,” and it was under that title that he recorded it in 1959 for the soundtrack to Roger Vadim’s film Les liaisons dangereuses.28 The tune’s medium tempo and swinging accents made it a perfect vehicle for Monk. In fact, Clark Terry and Monk’s version of “One Foot in the Gutter,” recorded in 1958, is based on the changes from “We’ll Understand It Better, By and By.”29 It is one of those songs virtually guaranteed to move a crowd. Because it embodied the theme of salvation, the idea that the road to heaven is paved with suffering and struggle and that only by traveling on that road with faith can we truly understand God’s will, Monk played it frequently at revivals. The lyrics were compelling in that setting, especially for poor souls:
We are often destitute of the things that life demands
Want of shelter and food, thirsty hills and barren lands
We are trusting in the Lord and according to His word
We will understand it better by and by.
CHORUS
By and By, when the morning comes
All the saints are gone to gathering home
We will tell the story of how we overcome
And we’ll understand it better by and by.30
The way the music “moved” congregants may have had a direct impact on Monk’s later performance style. Ecstatic expression in the sanctified churches involved the “shout step” and the “ring shout.” Worshippers stood up for the Lord, sometimes rocking from side to side or hopping up and down, both feet virtually glued to the floor in the shout step. The ring shout was a holy dance whose roots can be traced directly to West Africa. Although the ring shout occurs spontaneously at first, it merges into a kind of choreographed dance of men and women moving in a circle counterclockwise, shuffling their feet and gesticulating with their arms.31 Historian Sterling Stuckey suggested that in his mature career, when Monk left the piano bench to dance while his sidemen soloed, he was echoing the ring shout. His “dance” consisted of a peculiar spinning move, elbow pumping up and down on each turn, with an occasional stutter step allowing him to glide left and right. It was a deliberate embodiment of the rhythm of each tune: Every drummer interviewed who played with Monk said that he liked to get up to dance in order to set the rhythm; it was a form of conducting that required complete attention from the drummer. Was it also a sacred expression? Perhaps.32 At the very least, what Monk witnessed on the road with the evangelist reinforced for him the essential relationship between music and dance—music is supposed to move the body and touch the soul.
The world west of the Appalachians was an entirely different universe from the Manhattan he grew to know and love. And travel could be quite grueling. In those days, there were virtually no hotels or motels that accommodated Negroes, so like most traveling musicians they relied on the hospitality of strangers. Every black community in every small town and city had someone who took in guests or boarders passing through. They also secured housing through the local churches. For a small fee, commensurate with Depression prices, Monk and his band enjoyed a room, a couple of hot home-cooked meals, and perhaps a good conversation that took them out of the realm of the hereafter back to the here-and-now. Because they usually worked six or seven days a week, whatever free time Monk and his fellow band members had tended to be after hours.
But where could they go? After all, Monk was working for a devout Pentecostal preacher who forbade her followers to step foot in the Devil’s workshops: bars, theaters, movie houses, dances, parties, even community picnics. The Church of the Living God, like practically all Holiness and Pentecostal churches, preached total abstinence and maintained a long and detailed list of forbidden activities. Devotees had to refrain from all wines, liquors, medications that contain alcohol, “opium, morphine, cocaine, and any and all harmful drugs and habits.” There was no lying, stealing, cursing, gambling, or playing any “wicked and idle games,” including checkers, cards, or dominoes, nor could members attend “baseball games and horse races and all other wicked pleasures.”33
Monk clearly was not a true believer. He might have abstained, being a teenager, and perhaps he bypassed the movies and the gambling dens, but he certainly did not abide by the rule that “ragtime songs, jazzy songs, and all jazz and wicked festivals and all places of amusement for sinners are forbidden.”34 The only recorded sighting of him during this period is in Kansas City in 1935. Pianist Mary Lou Williams recalled, “I met Thelonius [sic] Monk, who came to K.C. with an evangelist. . . .”35 He wasn’t just hanging out, he was sitting in and playing every chance he could. Though still a minor, he looked old enough to get past the bouncers at Kansas City’s numerous nightclubs. Some of the better-known haunts included the Cherry Blossom, the Vanity Fair, the Lone Star, and the Sunset Club at 18th and Highland. The Subway Club, located just down the street at 18th and Vine, was notorious for its all-night cutting sessions. Williams, who was ten years Monk’s senior and a regular member of Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy when they met, was impressed with the new kid’s keyboard skills. “While Monk was in Kaycee [Kansas City] he jammed every night, really used to blow on piano, employing a lot more technique than he does today. . . . He was one of the original modernists all right, playing pretty much the same harmonies then that he’s playing now.”36 Although her last claim might be a bit of an exaggeration, especially in light of his brother Thomas’s remark that he “changed his style of playing” when he returned, it is conceivable that by the time he reached Kansas City the rudiments of his new approach were already in place. He had been on the road for at least a year.
Williams wasn’t the only one to discover Monk during his brief stay in K.C. Ben Webster saw Monk working with bassist Jimmy Blanton in a club, and Mary Lou hipped her boss, Andy Kirk, to Monk’s talent. A few years later, Kirk would hire Monk briefly to fill in for his regular pianist but it really didn’t work out since Monk was “too far out.”37 Given all the great musicians in Kansas City at the time, Monk probably made more than a few contacts. Trumpeter Hot Lips Page, who would later become one of Monk’s collaborators at Minton’s Playhouse in 1941, was with Bennie Moten’s band in Kansas City during the summer of 1935.38 Monk might have even run into Page’s former bandmate, pianist William “Count” Basie. Basie was the master of minimalism on the keyboard. In the Kansas City tradition of “riff-style” jazz—improvising over simple repeated phrases that formed the basis for melody and harmony—Basie played just a few well-placed notes over the riffs of the horn section, and generated tremendous musical excitement. There was also a minimalism to his arrangements: Instead of writing elaborate charts, the band relied on simple arrangements whereby Basie would play the first chorus of a tune—usually a 12-bar blues or a 32-bar pop song or a variation on “I Got Rhythm”—and signal each section to come in with the appropriate riffs. Often what they played was spontaneous and improvised. The streamlined arrangements and harmonies led to a greater emphasis on the rhythmic quality—swing. The music had to be propulsive, swinging, because all of these big bands were playing for dancers.39 After Moten died in 1935, Basie formed a new band out of Moten’s alumni. Although Monk left Kansas City before the legendary tenor saxophonist Lester Young joined the Basie band, he still could have caught Young holding court at the Reno Club.40
Monk, like Basie, chose his notes carefully and lived by the injunction that “Less is more.” He never sounded like Basie, nor did he ever identify Basie as an influence, but his travels introduced him to the Kansas City sound and the territory bands of the Southwest before most of his friends back home knew that sound. Monk had left New York thinking he was leaving the center of the jazz world, only to discover that, for the moment at least, the center had shifted. Kansas City was defining the shape of jazz to come. Pianist and band leader Jay McShann described Kansas City in those days as “a melting-pot of jazz, because you got musicians from everywhere, from the North, East, South, and West. And when cats came in . . . they’d hear different musicians. They’d hear sounds they’d never heard before.”41 Kansas City taught everyone the three principles of jazz: swing, swing, swing.
While traveling with the evangelist “was a lot of fun,” for Monk, after nearly two years away from New York he was ready to come home. And he was going stir-crazy in the House of the Lord. “I had enough of church. I was in the church every night.”42 Soon after the group hit Chicago, during the winter of 1936–37, Monk bid farewell, and, with the meager earnings he had accumulated on the job and perhaps from occasional gigs along the way, he bought a train ticket for New York City.43
• • •
Barbara hardly recognized the man who walked through her door. Nineteen years old, still clean-shaven and baby-faced and lean, he nonetheless had assumed an air of worldly confidence. Having traveled thousands of miles, met dozens of colorful people, saved Lord knows how many souls, and played lots of music, Monk was ready to make a name and a life for himself. Just as Thelonious had changed, however, the lives of those he left behind had changed as well. His baby brother Thomas was no longer a baby. He had just turned seventeen, was incredibly handsome, and was becoming a minor sensation in the boxing ring. Though still very bashful, now he was interested in girls—one girl in particular: Trotyrine Wilson. Much to Thelonious’s surprise, Trotyrine, just shy of her eighteenth birthday, was introduced as his new sister-in-law. As their son, Thomas, Jr., imagined it, “Monk was on the road for two years. She promised to wait, but after a while she said, ‘Well, he’s away, I don’t know what he’s doing.’ So she started hitting on my dad.”44
Thelonious wasn’t heartbroken. He gave “Baby” his blessings and moved on.45 They were men now. Besides, there was one unintended benefit to all this: Thomas had moved out of their tiny two-bedroom apartment, leaving more space for Thelonious, Marion, and Barbara. Committed neighborhood people that they were, Thomas and Trotyrine moved only a couple of doors down to 239 West 63rd Street. Their apartment was also part of the Phipps Houses; Barbara had secured it for them. On December 9, 1937, Trotyrine gave birth to twins, Thomas and Marion. 46
Sonny Smith was ecstatic to have his best friend back in the neighborhood. Sonny and his two sisters, Nellie and Skippy, had had a very difficult time during Monk’s absence. Their mother’s health deteriorated even further, finally succumbing to the disease that took most of her children. On July 19, 1936, Nellie Smith died at home of chronic pulmonary tuberculosis. She was thirty-seven years old. Four days later she was buried at Evergreen Cemetery in Brooklyn.47 “Aunt” Lizzie Brooks, who had already taken on the care of her own nieces Geraldine and Edith MacMillan and Millicent Henry, insisted that the Smith children move in. She lived across the street from Nellie and had tended to her on many occasions. Aunt Lizzie not only became a second mother to the children but she protected them from being taken by child welfare authorities and placed in an orphanage.48 Sonny was eighteen at the time of his mother’s passing. Nellie and Skippy were fourteen and twelve, respectively.
Geraldine remembered how Sonny practically worshipped Monk and constantly spoke of his return as if it were the Second Coming. “Sonny was always telling me how Thelonious was very good at almost everything he did. He beat everyone at this and that, and he was smart and played the piano. He was the idol of the neighborhood.” So when Geraldine finally met the legendary Thelonious Monk, playing at a Columbus Hill Community Center dance, she was expecting someone larger than life. She wasn’t entirely disappointed—he was good at practically everything and dazzled everyone in the neighborhood with his musical skills.49 But as she would discover over the course of their lives, he was still just a man, and often a difficult one at that.
Geraldine was more impressed with Monk’s friend and champion. She always thought Sonny was cute and now that they were living together—under the watchful eye of Aunt Lizzie—she became completely enamored. The feeling was mutual, and they found sly ways to acknowledge the budding romance between them. “We lived on the top floor,” she recalled, “and I would hear him play the mandolin, he would serenade me from the roof. I never knew whether to come out or just stay in and listen.”50 For the first couple of months after Monk returned, Sonny was in his element. He finally had his ace boon on hand and he was falling in love with one of the prettiest women in the neighborhood. Sadly, it came to an end when an aunt from Connecticut, one of their mother’s sisters, showed up to gather the three Smith children. Sonny, Nellie, and Skippy only moved to the next state, but it might as well have been China.51
Meanwhile, Thelonious tried to get back into the music scene immediately. He returned rich in experience, but as broke as he was when he left. He and his old drummer Morris Simpson got together for some community center dances, but Monk needed to make some real money. Surprisingly, he didn’t join the union right away, which severely limited his opportunities. Trumpeter Frank Williams remembered seeing Monk working in Albany, New York, some time around 1937.52 It’s likely that he also worked in Saratoga Springs, just thirty-five miles north of Albany, since his former mentor Alberta Simmons played there during the summers and she probably shared some of her contacts with Thelonious. Whatever the specifics, Monk ended up spending up to a week at a time outside of the city. This arrangement didn’t last very long, in part because the money was never great and all the real action was back home in Manhattan. But most importantly, he developed a compelling interest to return to the city. Her name was Rubie Richardson.