September was still hot in 1880 New Orleans, though not as bad at Number 3 South Basin Street, because that was a wide, tree-lined boulevard. It was already known for its massive houses of ill-fame such as those presided over by Kate Townsend and Hattie Hamilton. Number 3, though, was a less pretentious structure, flimsily built of clapboard, in a complex of four such buildings. It was just a few steps from Canal Street, the city’s main thoroughfare. The railway depot was just on the opposite side of Canal. Therefore the four brothels occupied an ideal location for their economic purposes. Single men, arriving by train, didn’t have far to go—just across the street—to be accommodated.
The proprietress of the establishment was a twenty-year-old black chippie whose name was Bessie V. Williams. On this particular fall afternoon, she was depressed because of the heat, because the living room was a mess, and because she was pregnant, a condition not conducive to potential prosperity in her line of work. “My God!” she said to herself, “If Loula hadn’t come to New Orleans to help out, there’s no telling how all this would resolve itself.” Loula and Bessie had had the same mother back in Selma, Alabama, on the plantation where they’d grown up. In those days, where black girls were involved, nobody cared who their father was. Bessie said she couldn’t properly remember what slavery was like.
The son she gave birth to the next month, on October 14, to be precise, was Spencer Williams. Loula went on to international notoriety as Lulu White, proprietress of Mahogany Hall and New Orleans’ whore queen. Spencer never tried to hide this part of his past, though as an adult he never told the truth if he could help it. When he did, it was hard to separate it from the lies. I knew him slightly in New York, years before he died and before events led me to undertake to write his biography.
When I first met him in 1946, it was in a dressing room normally used by main-event prize fighters in Madison Square Garden. He was on the endless talent list performing for the Pittsburgh Courier Charities annual fund drive, and I was sharing emcee duties with such distinguished colleagues as Manhattan disc jockey Freddie Robbins and Harlem’s Symphony Sid. This was a 24-hour marathon function, and our shift was on about two in the morning. I was sitting on a rub-down table with lyricist Andy Razaf (“Memories of You,” “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” “Honeysuckle Rose”). Also present was a thin man I took to be a professional animal trainer, since he had a mean looking monster on a leash. This beast was Billie Holiday’s boxer, which went everywhere she went. Billie cared not a tittle for the apprehension of persons into whose environment she had this feral canine herded. Also present were the super ragtime pianist Luckey Roberts and Dan Burley, the piano playing editor of Harlem’s Amsterdam News. Sissle and Blake had done their turns and gone. Billie was on stage; Herb Jeffries was waiting in the wings. Spencer sat on one of the two leather chairs. He was a huge, well-groomed elderly man of vaguely professorial mien, a type you’d never imagine telling a lie or otherwise compromising his dignity. I had just introduced myself and asked him what he was going to play. He said he’d do a few of his most famous hits. In fifteen minutes we could easily have presented “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home,” “Royal Garden Blues,” “Everybody Loves My Baby,” and “I Found a New Baby.” He said if we had time for an encore he’d do “Basin Street Blues.”
Billie Holiday never cared about the time. She was into a second encore, and we knew the crowd wouldn’t let her get off stage without singing “Strange Fruit.” It gave me time to ask Spencer some questions to satisfy my own interest. I asked him where he’d gone to school in New Orleans. He was obviously an educated man and had a polished manner not inconsistent with his having spent so much of his life abroad in London, Paris, and Stockholm. He told me he had attended the Arthur P. Williams School and St. Charles University. I told him I’d gone to St. Aloysius, and he seemed interested to learn that I, too, was a native of New Orleans. Neither of us knew, needless to say, that someday I would undertake to write his biography and in the process learn that New Orleans never had a St. Charles University and that the Arthur P. Williams School came into existence several years after he’d left town. He told me he was born in 1880. (Earlier, he told a Swedish interviewer he’d been born in 1889.)
Having no reason to doubt his veracity, I took this misinformation down in my notebook. He told me he liked living in Europe, that he was going right back, and that in 1936 he’d married an English lass. Meanwhile, Billie finished her set and came back to claim her beast and his handler. I told Spencer to wait while I introduced Jeffries. I told him he’d be next.
When the famed singer had finished, I announced that the celebrated composer, Spencer Williams, was coming out and that he’d play some of his most successful pieces. In fact, he didn’t play at all. Someone else I hadn’t yet seen appeared from nowhere, sat at the piano, and began to play as Spencer began to sing in his full, clear tenor the “Basin Street Blues.” After that he performed a number of pieces I’d never heard, pieces he was “plugging.” He did about twelve minutes of unrepresentative tunes, then he walked off stage, saying to me in passing, “We never got to talk much about New Orleans. Let’s do that sometime.”
As a matter of fact we did do that the following year in the same place, at the same time, under the same auspices. And he told me an entirely different set of lies.