Our story begins in the red-light district of New Orleans, an area no bigger than 38 blocks that was formally designated as The District but, in a sarcastic doff of the cap to city councilman Sidney Story, was known to one and all as Storyville.
Founded by the French (as La Nouvelle-Orléans) in 1718, New Orleans is a city with a colourful, confusing and occasionally violent history. In 1722, it became the capital of French Louisiana, but over the next 180 years, the area was first surrendered to the Spanish Empire before being handed back to France and finally, in 1803, being sold by Napoleon to the United States for a total of 68 million Francs.
New Orleans quickly became the largest port, as well as the biggest and most important city, in the South, exporting most of the country’s cotton as well as other products to Europe and New England. Unfortunately all of this new wealth and trade had an unpleasant consequence: by the middle of the century there were over 50 slave markets dotted around the city. Hot and humid, the ‘Big Easy’ grew rapidly with the arrival of American, African, French and Creole people, attracted to the business opportunities (legal and otherwise) to be had. Refugees fleeing from the revolution in Haiti brought slaves with them and massively increased the city’s French-speaking population.
As well as being prosperous, New Orleans was also one of the most dangerous cities to live in. Devastating fires in 1788 and 1784 saw the majority of the city’s original wooden buildings razed to the ground. Relationships between the different races were often tense (spurred on by the State of Louisiana’s attempt to enforce strict racial segregation), and race riots, marches by white supremacists and mob lynchings happened all too frequently. Despite this, with a large, educated coloured population that had long interacted with the whites, racial attitudes were relatively liberal for the Deep South. Regrettably, this liberal attitude did not carry through to all aspects of life: the Territorial Convention of 1805 imposed harsh sodomy laws, with a mandatory life sentence for indulging in ‘the abominable and detestable crime against nature’; however, before the end of the century this penalty was reduced to a maximum of ten years in prison.
The progressive Sidney Story noted the success of port cities in European countries that had legalised prostitution, and it was he that penned City Ordinance 13,485 – the guidelines that would legalise vice and would have to be followed by the people plying their trade in The District. These guidelines were adopted on 6 July 1897 and, by limiting prostitution to one area of town where authorities could monitor the practice, within three years Storyville had become the number one revenue centre of New Orleans. For 25¢, you could buy a copy of the Blue Book, a directory listing houses of ill repute as well as the names and addresses of the women who worked there. Black and white brothels existed side by side, although perversely black men were barred from using either by law, and dozens of restaurants and saloons opened up to cater for the huge influx of sex tourists. The great and good of other cities were shocked at the goings-on in New Orleans, so much so that in 1913 the National Commission for the Suppression of Vice, backed financially by John D. Rockefeller, sent a crew to Storyville to make a film about a good girl from New York’s fall from grace, which was screened around the country as a warning to others not to follow the lead of this modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.
By 1910 The District housed 200 brothels with 2,000 women, and there was at least one house – run by an effeminate man known as ‘Big Nelly’ – which provided boys rather than girls for entertainment. The bars, bordellos, honky-tonks and dives of Storyville offered more than sex: the better – and more expensive – establishments would hire a piano player or a small band to accompany dances and provide amusement for their guests. Houses like Lulu White’s Mahogany Hall, on the notorious Basin Street, were grand buildings with ornate fireplaces, coloured tilework, sweeping staircases and expensive drapes. Paintings in gold frames adorned the walls of the elegant parlours filled with velvet-covered chairs. Black, white and Creole musicians rubbed shoulders and a newly emergent style of music, which by 1915 had been christened jazz, flourished. Buddy Bolden (considered to be the first bandleader to play jazz), Jelly Roll Morton, Pops Foster and many others got their first break in Storyville, as did a young man by the name of Tony Jackson, one of the most accomplished musicians working in that part of town. As New Orleans banjo player Johnny St. Cyr told music historian Alan Lomax, ‘Really the best pianist we had was Tony Jackson’.1
Jackson (born Antonio Junius Jackson and alternately referred to as Tony or Toney) had been born into poverty in New Orleans on 5 June, 1876 (according to his sister Ida) – or was it October 1882 (as claimed in the 1910 census), or perhaps it was 25 October 1884, the date that appears on his draft card and which he signed to confirm it. Trumpeter Bunk Johnson, in a letter to noted jazz historian Roy J. Carew, was adamant it was the former: ‘I think he is a few years older than me. I was born December 27, 1879.’2 Yet Bunk Johnson’s memory was, at best, unreliable: author Donald M. Marquis has proved quite convincingly that Bunk added a decade onto his own age, and that he was actually born in December 1889, making the date that the infant Jackson drew his first breath much more likely to be 1882.3
Whatever his true birth date may have been, Jackson was the sixth child of a freed slave and one of a pair of sickly twins: his brother, Prince Albert, died when Jackson was just 14 months old. An epileptic since birth, legend has it that at around 10 years of age he constructed his own keyboard instrument out of junk found in the backyard and taught himself to play. Jazz historian Bill Edwards (writing at www.ragpiano.com) adds, ‘within a short time an arrangement was worked out with a neighbor exchanging dishwashing duties for time on the neighbor’s old reed organ,’ however his sister Ida claimed, ‘Tony never had any lessons. He taught his own self with the help of God.’4 One thing is certain: by the age of 13, he had landed his first job playing piano at a honky-tonk: just two years later he was already considered one of the best – and consequently most sought-after – entertainers in Storyville.
Described (by Tim Samuelson in the 2008 book Out and Proud in Chicago) as the ‘musical bridge between the multicultural sounds of his native New Orleans and the emerging syncopated music of his adopted Chicago,’ before he became the toast of Storyville, Jackson and his family had been living in a small apartment at 3920 Magazine Street. That apartment was a couple of miles from Storyville but less than ten minutes’ walk from one of his earliest regular gigs: Bunk Johnson recalled that ‘Tony Jackson started playing piano by ear in Adam Oliver’s tonk on the corner of Amelia and Tchoupitoulas. That was between 1892 and 1893.’5 Again, this date is probably out by a few years: Bunk claimed that he and Tony played together in Adam Oliver’s band in 1894, but this has never been substantiated. If they did appear together, it was probably around 1904.
Around the same time, a young boy, barely in his teens, could be heard playing piano in a local brothel. Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, later to find fame as Jelly Roll Morton, was overawed by Jackson – and why wouldn’t he be? There was no one to touch him. Morton looked up to Jackson (who was the best part of a decade older than him) and is quoted as saying that he was the only pianist better than he was. For a man as prone to self-aggrandisement as Morton (this is the same man that claimed to have single-handedly ‘invented’ jazz), that’s quite something. Jackson became mentor, tutor and surrogate father to young Ferd (as he was known to his friends), and their friendship was untouched by the racial, sexual and religious taboos of the time. Jackson was black, the child of a slave family, and openly, almost defiantly homosexual; Morton was a Creole-born Catholic and fiercely heterosexual. If he had not already been thrown out of the family home for playing ‘the Devil’s music’, there can be no doubt that his God-fearing relatives would have ensured that he had nothing to do with a ne’er-do-well like Jackson.
It would not take long for Jackson and Jelly Roll Morton to become favourites with the patrons of Storyville, and the pair were employed by the better-class white houses; according to Bunk Johnson, Morton and Jackson were the only black players able to work the white-run brothels. They dressed well and were paid well, too. Jackson, who could pick up almost any tune by ear, was known as ‘Professor’, an honorary title given to the best of Storyville’s piano players. ‘Tony Jackson played at Gypsy Schaeffer’s,’ Morton told Alan Lomax:
Walk into Gypsy Schaeffer’s and, right away, the bell would ring upstairs and all the girls would walk into the parlor, dressed in their fine evening gowns and ask the customer if he would care to drink wine. They would call for the “professor” and, while champagne was being served all around, Tony would play a couple numbers. If a naked dance was desired, Tony would dig up one of his fast speed tunes and one of the girls would dance on a little narrow stage, completely nude. Yes, they danced absolutely stripped, but in New Orleans the naked dance was a real art.6
Schaeffer’s house, on Conti Street, had a raised step (or banquette) in front, and it was standing there that Roy J. Carew first heard Tony Jackson play. Writing in Jazz Journal magazine (in March 1952) Carew recalled:
The piano was in the front parlour next to the street, and consequently a sidewalk listener could receive the full benefit of Tony’s performance, which always seemed to me to be perfect. I didn’t go inside, where I could watch as well as listen … those establishments were strictly business places. The house provided entertainment, but always at a substantial price, and patrons were expected to spend freely. So I took my fill of listening from the banquette. Some time later, however, I was pleasantly surprised while passing the corner of Franklin and Bienville Streets, to hear Tony performing in the café on that corner, lately identified as Frank Early’s Café. This was my opportunity, for it was a café for white patrons, so I strolled in, bought a drink at the bar, and took a seat at the little table close to the platform where Tony was playing the piano.
Legend has it that Tony wrote an early draft of his biggest hit, ‘Pretty Baby’, at Frank Early’s, and he was famed locally for the obscene variations on, and parodies of, popular songs that he would improvise at the piano.
Jackson’s standing on the local circuit increased, and in 1904 he was chosen to accompany the Whitman Sisters New Orleans Troubadours on their national tour. A high-class vaudeville show, it is said that ‘the singing of Tony Jackson and Baby Alice Whitman usually brought down the house’.7
Carew remembered how most people thought Jackson was ugly ‘largely because his rather weak chin accentuated the prominence of his lips. At that time, around 1905, he already had the little tuft of prematurely grey hair in his forelock. But Tony’s lack of beauty was immediately forgotten in his flawless performance, and his happy, friendly disposition. He was a happy-go-lucky person, and his actions seemed to evidence the fact.’8 It seems that most people remembered him as ‘happy-go-lucky’ with ‘not a care in the world,’ but as Al Rose put it in his definitive book Storyville, New Orleans, Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red-light District:
Oh, to be an epileptic, alcoholic, homosexual Negro genius in the Deep South of the United States of America! How could you have a care? Anyone would be happy, naturally, being among the piano virtuosi of his era, permitted to play only in saloons and whorehouses, for pimps and prostitutes and their customers. How could he be anything but “happy-go-lucky”? Tony Jackson discovered early in life that a young man of such beginnings as his, such “advantages,” had to try to please everybody simply to survive.9
Life certainly was not easy for a black male homosexual at a time when same-sex attraction was considered either criminal or a mental illness.
After hours, Jackson and his friends used to congregate at The Frenchman’s saloon, a known haven for cross-dressers where a number of musicians went. Every inch the flamboyant showman, a prostitute named Carrie recalled that ‘all them dicty [a slang word meaning well-dressed or pretentious] people used to hang by the Frenchman’s to hear that fruit Tony Jackson best of anybody. He play pretty, I give them that.’10 Composer Clarence Williams backed this up: ‘at that time everybody followed the great Tony Jackson. About Tony, you know he was an effeminate man – you know. We all copied him. He was so original and a great instrumentalist. I know I copied Tony.’11 Clarinettist George Baguet remembered how Tony would ‘start playin’ a Cakewalk [a dance that had been popular with slaves and which found its way into minstrel shows], then he’d kick over the piano stool and dance a Cakewalk – and never stop playin’ the piano – and playin’, man! Nobody played like him!’ Jackson’s exhibitionist style presaged the piano pyrotechnics of Liberace, Jerry Lee Lewis and Keith Emerson by decades.
It is Morton that we have to rely on for much of what we know today about Tony Jackson, and specifically the series of interviews he gave to Alan Lomax in 1938, which were later edited for the book Mister Jelly Roll:
All these men were hard to beat, but when Tony Jackson walked in, any one of them would get up from the piano stool. If he didn’t, somebody was liable to say, “Get up from that piano. You hurting its feelings. Let Tony play”. Tony was real dark and not a bit good-looking but he had a beautiful disposition. He was the outstanding favorite of New Orleans, and I have never known any pianists to come from any section of the world that could leave New Orleans victorious. Tony was considered among all who knew him the greatest single-handed entertainer in the world. His memory seemed like something nobody’s ever heard of in the music world. There was no tune that would ever come up from any opera, from any show of any kind or anything that was wrote on any paper that Tony couldn’t play from memory. He had such a beautiful voice and a marvellous range. His voice on an opera tune was exactly as an opera singer. His range on a blues would be just exactly like a blues singer.12
Carew recalled how ‘his repertoire included all types of music, anything a customer might ask for: ragtime songs, waltz songs, march songs, ballads, semi-classics … and he executed them all in his matchless style; he even sang duets, taking each part with equal facility. His voice was of an exceptional quality, clear and vibrant, of good timbre and wide range.’13
Jackson was tiring of playing bordellos in Storyville. He was earning good money, the tips were often huge (Morton boasted of earning up to $100 a night in tips alone) and he was easily able to support his family, yet he wanted more. Morton told Lomax that Jackson decided to move to Chicago because ‘he liked the freedom there,’ and on the original recordings (which still exist in the Library of Congress), Morton and Lomax joke about Jackson’s sexuality. When Morton reveals that ‘Tony happened to be one of those gentlemen that a lot of people call them a lady or a sissy or something like that, but he was very good and very much admired,’ Lomax counters this with ‘so was he … was he a fairy?’ Morton, laughing, replies, ‘I guess he was either a ferry or a steamboat, one or the other, I guess it’s a ferry because that’s what you pay a nickel for’.14 The inference is clear: Tony Jackson’s sexual favours were available to those with money in their pockets and could be bought for a lot less than the hookers he played piano for.
No one can seem to agree on when exactly Jackson moved to Chicago; however, his influence on the city’s music scene, and on every jazz pianist that came after him, is undeniable. He helped to lay the foundation for Chicago’s reputation as a jazz capital, and other musicians – including Morton – soon followed him there. Jackson found acceptance in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighbourhood, where the LGBT community flourished in the pre-war years. As well as enjoying the freedom that his new home afforded him, he found plenty of work amongst Bronzeville’s cabarets, theatres and cafes – and would have no doubt have taken advantage of the opportunity to socialise with other gay men. Black men and women were more than simply tolerated in Bronzeville, where prostitution, interracial relations and visible same-sex couples were the norm. ‘Chicago was segregated: the South Side was black and the North Side was white. It’s still a lot like that, but back then it was even more strict,’15 says historian St. Sukie de la Croix. ‘Right up until the 1960s, the black gay community and the white gay community were completely separate entities. The only blacks that appeared in the bars on the North Side were drag queens and piano players. All the bars were run by the Mafia. Bronzeville was entirely black: that’s where all the black clubs were. It was a great place, and white people were welcome there, but black people could not go to the North Side’.
Jackson lived in an apartment on the ground floor of 4111 South Wabash Avenue, Chicago, where he was joined by two of his sisters, a brother-in-law, a nephew and two nieces (according to his draft card, issued in 1918, the whole family later moved to 4045 South State Street). He tickled the ivories at venues including the Elite Café on Chicago’s South State Street (there were two Elite Cafés, both on State Street; Tony played at both) – often as part of a three-piece band with Oliver Perry (violin) and percussionist Charles Gillian backing singer Sallie Lee Johnson – and at Russell & Dago’s Grand Buffet: an advertisement for Russell & Dago’s features a photograph of ‘Toney’ above the statement, ‘Mr. Jackson is one of the best entertainers in the city, and is well liked. He is a good card.’ He quickly earned himself a reputation, not only for his playing but also for his manner: writer Columbus Bragg referred to him as ‘that spoiled and petted Black Paderewski,’ although he grudgingly admitted that Tony was ‘unequalled on the piano’.16 That part of State Street was known as the Stroll, and Jackson was the king of the Stroll: ‘Tony Jackson received an ovation, then played the piano dexterously and just took four bows and then had to do it all over again to please the feverish anxiety of that distinct clientele that patronise the Grand Theatre’.17
At a bordello known as Dago Frank’s, he met the singer Alberta Hunter, herself a lesbian who – although she had a brief marriage in 1919 – lived for many years with her partner Lottie Tyler. It was Hunter that revealed that Tony wrote ‘Pretty Baby’ for a ‘tall, skinny fellow,’ and it was her performances that helped popularise the song. ‘Everybody would go to hear Tony Jackson after hours,’ she revealed. ‘Tony was just marvellous – a fine musician, spectacular, but still soft. He could write a song in two minutes and was one of the greatest accompanists I’ve ever listened to. Tony Jackson was a prince of a fellow, and he would always pack them in. There would be so many people around the piano trying to learn his style that sometimes he could hardly move his hands – and he never played any song the same way twice.’18 One of his other compositions, ‘I’ve Got Elgin Movements in my Hips with Twenty Years’ Guarantee’, was plagiarised by a number of performers (Cleo Gibson’s 1929 recording ‘I’ve Got Ford Engine Movements in my Hips, Ten Thousand Miles Guarantee’, for example) but, unfortunately, Tony’s original – which he would sing in a high register, imitating a woman – was never recorded. A third song composed around this time, ‘We’ve Got Him’, was written for the now-forgotten female vaudeville duo Brown and Wallace.
‘Tony was instrumental in my going to Chicago the first time,’ Morton revealed to Alan Lomax. ‘Very much to my regret, because there was more money at home. We were very, very good friends and whenever he spotted me coming in the door, he would sing a song he knew I liked – “Pretty Baby”, one of Tony’s great tunes that he wrote in 1913 or 14 and was a million-dollar hit in less than a year.’ Glover Compton, another contemporary of Tony’s who had first encountered him at the Cosmopolitan Club in Louisville, Kentucky in 1904, insisted that he wrote ‘Pretty Baby’ when he was working at the Elite Number Two in 1911. Compton – who also performed with Alberta Hunter in Chicago in the early 1920s – said that his style ‘and the styles of Tony Jackson and Jelly Roll Morton were about the same, but Morton played better without songs (i.e. on instrumental pieces), while Jackson was better with songs’. Compton and Jackson became good friends: Tony called Glover ‘Bill’, and the two of them composed several songs together. Jackson wrote the song ‘You’re Such a Pretty Thing’ for Compton’s wife Nettie Lewis, and the men kept in touch: Compton played at Jackson’s funeral. Once, when Tony sent Glover a photograph of himself with an unidentified male friend, he wrote, ‘That medal you see on my coat I won down here in a contest on the piano’. Morton told a story about how he bested Jackson in a competition: ‘I finally stayed for a battle of music that came up and I won the contest over Tony. That threw me first in line, but, even though I was the winner, I never thought the prize was given to the right party; I thought Tony should have the emblem.’ Roy Carew, writing in The Record Changer in 1943, recalled how Morton ‘told me with considerable pride that he had beaten Tony once in a contest. Jelly Roll said that, as the other contestants were seated on the stage while Tony was playing, he (Jelly) was seated near enough to the piano to keep telling Tony, sotto voce, “You can’t sing now … You can’t sing now.” I don’t know if that affected Tony’s playing any, but Jelly Roll won the contest.’ Perhaps the medal Tony wore so proudly in that photograph was for second place, and Morton’s admission that Jackson should have won the competition was his way of assuaging his guilt.
It’s thanks to Morton’s Library of Congress recording that we have the only example of Jackson’s original lyrics:
You can talk about your jelly roll
But none of them compare with pretty baby
With pretty baby of mine
Pretty baby of mine
Those words might seem pretty tame by today’s standards, but ‘jelly roll’ was a slang term for both the penis and the vulva: Jackson’s words reveal that he was not interested in sex with anyone else, as they could not measure up to what he was getting at home. Although Tony wrote ‘Pretty Baby’ around 1911, the song as it exists today was copyrighted in 1916, is credited to Jackson, Gus Kahn and Egbert Van Alstyne and features very different lyrics to those Jackson first penned. The song was originally about one of Jackson’s male lovers: in his book Vaudeville Old and New: An Encyclopedia of Variety Performances in America, Frank Cullen states that the song ‘was inspired by a young male prostitute to whom Jackson was attracted’. The chances are that one cynical line that remains in the sugary confection we now know as ‘Pretty Baby’ – ‘Oh, I want a lovin’ baby and it might as well be you’ – is one of the few phrases to remain from Jackson’s original.
Kahn and Van Alstyne first heard Jackson performing his version of the song (then, according to Kahn’s son Donald, known as ‘Jelly Roll Rag’) in a black nightclub in Chicago, and they persuaded their publisher to buy it. After forking over the fee (a paragraph in the Xenia Daily Gazette of 15 January 1917, claims that he ‘only received $45 for the great song hit’ and that he was ‘still pounding the piano every night for a few dollars’), Van Alstyne rewrote some of the music, adapting one of his own earlier songs, and Kahn set about cleaning up Jackson’s somewhat bawdy lyrics. The new version of the song first appeared in The Passing Show of 1916 (also known as A World of Pleasure); it later featured in the MGM musical Broadway Rhythm. In the years that followed, Van Alstyne and Khan were often accused of plagiarism, but this is simply not true. Tony was no fool, and it was common practice for songs to be rewritten to suit their purpose. ‘Pretty Baby’ debuted in a musical revue where it would have been wholly unacceptable to use a song that repeatedly used the phrase ‘jelly roll’. Jackson certainly didn’t feel cheated, as he collaborated with the pair again the following year on the song ‘I’ve Been Fiddle-ing’.
Original sheet music for ‘Pretty Baby’
One of the many stories about Jackson is that he would not allow his songs to be published, saying that ‘he would burn them before he would give them away for five dollars apiece’19 but this is not borne out by the facts. Following the success of ‘Pretty Baby’, a number of Jackson’s songs were made available as sheet music, including ‘Some Sweet Day’ (first recorded in 1917 by Marion Harris: Louis Armstrong recorded a version in 1933. His version ‘provides a direct link with music performed in New Orleans before the turn of the century,’ according to jazz historian Floyd Levin), ‘Ice and Snow’, ‘Miss Samantha Johnson’s Wedding Day’, ‘I’ve Got ‘em! There Ain’t Nothin’ to That’, ‘Waiting at the Old Church Door’, ‘I’m Cert’ny Gonna See ‘bout That’ (recorded by Fats Waller) and ‘Why Keep Me Waiting So Long?’ (which was popularised by Sophie Tucker). ‘Why Keep Me Waiting So Long?’ is the story of young Mandy Brown, a girl who is desperate to understand why her beau refuses to make love to her when her ‘poor heart cries out for loving, good and strong’. Was Tony alluding to his own sexual desires in his lyrics?
Unfortunately, Tony Jackson never recorded, and sadly it appears that no examples of his playing have been preserved for posterity on piano rolls, unlike that of fellow ragtime maestro Scott Joplin. However, several of Jackson’s tunes were transcribed for player piano in 1916 by Jackson’s contemporary, the Chicago-based pianist Charley Straight, and listening to these ‘recordings’ is probably the closest any of us will ever get to experiencing Tony’s style. While he may not have recorded the song himself, ‘Pretty Baby’ became a jazz standard and has been recorded by dozens of acts from the Emerson Military Band and Billy Murray (who released the first recorded versions of the song in 1916), through to Al Jolson, Dean Martin, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Doris Day and Brenda Lee. Murray, one of the most popular singers of the early recording era, deserves special mention for having recorded the song ‘Honey Boy’ in 1907, a song about a girl missing her sailor boyfriend which, when sung by a male vocalist, takes on a whole new meaning.
By 1917, Jackson was back in Storyville, playing piano in a house owned by the opera loving and cornet-playing Madame Antonia Gonzalez when the US Navy – concerned at the open availability of prostitution to its young sailors – closed the area down for good. ‘Some sailors on leave got mixed up in a fight and two of them were killed. The navy started a war on Storyville,’ wrote Louis Armstrong in his autobiography Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans. ‘The police began to raid all the houses and cabarets. It sure was a sad scene to watch the law run all those people out of Storyville. They reminded me of a gang of refugees. Some of them had spent the best part of their lives there. I have never seen such weeping and carrying-on.’20 Tony Jackson packed up his few belongings and returned to Bronzeville: Lulu White and her girls moved to Bienville Street, a hovel compared with her former palace of passion, where she was regularly arrested and charged with ‘operating a disorderly house’. ‘Chicago was different,’ recalled jazz clarinettist Willie Humphries, who grew up around the musicians of Storyville and – like countless others – blew into the Windy City after the red-light district was forced to clean up its act. ‘It was wide open. We took root there. [But] The District’s where we learned to play the music that could corrupt the angels.’21
In August 1919 – the year that the city saw its worst race riots after 17-year-old Eugene Williams was killed by a hostile crowd of whites – Jackson was arrested in connection with a spate of recent murders on the South Side of Chicago. He was released without charge, but life in Chicago was becoming tougher: a stray bullet killed Alberta Hunter’s accompanist and she fled for New York. The introduction of prohibition in January 1920 – and the criminal activity, illegal underground drinking establishments and speakeasies that went hand-in-hand with the ban on the sale of alcohol – only made the city even more difficult to get by in, especially for a black man who was openly homosexual.
Although he was not yet 40, Jackson’s health was in steep decline. On 17 February 1921, knowing full well that the end was near, some of his friends held a fundraising benefit for him. The All Star Tony Jackson Testimonial took place at the Dreamland Café on South State Street, Chicago, arranged ‘as a proper and fitting demonstration of their loyalty and friendship’ to raise enough money to send Jackson on ‘a long and much needed vacation at Hot Springs’. The benefit, which raised $325, all of it handed over to Jackson,22 featured ‘one of the greatest programs ever arranged, in which the leading cabaret and vaudeville stars, as well as several boxers and wrestlers, participated’.23 Unlike many other jazz musicians, Tony Jackson was not interested in drugs, however he was a heavy drinker (in Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya Alberta Hunter is quoted as saying, ‘he always had a drink on the piano – always!’), and there’s no way of knowing what damage illicit liquor was doing to his already weak body. Jackson died in April 1921; the official line is that his rather bizarre end came as the result of a seizure after suffering ‘eight weeks of the hiccups which the efforts of doctors could not relieve’. Several accounts state that he was also suffering from the ravages of syphilis.
Outside the recollections of Carew and Morton, Tony Jackson would have been wiped from history had it not been for the many recordings of his most popular song. In 1978 ‘Pretty Baby’ provided the inspiration for the Louis Malle film of the same name, with the director describing Jackson as ‘a very extravagant, very brilliant, and quite extraordinary character’.24 The film, which outraged audiences by having a 12-year-old Brooke Shields portray Violet, a child prostitute working in a New Orleans brothel, featured Antonio Fargas (star of TV’s Starsky and Hutch) as Professor, a whorehouse piano player loosely based on Tony. In 2008, the year that playwright Clare Brown debuted Don’t You Leave Me Here, a dramatisation of the relationship between Tony and Jelly Roll, ‘Pretty Baby’ was used in the British TV soap EastEnders, during a heartbreaking tour de force by the actress June Brown.
‘Tony was a versatile performer,’ theatre manager Shep Allen told George W. Kay (in an interview for Jazz Journal magazine, February 1963). ‘As a singer, he sounded something like Nat “King” Cole but he had more power and greater range. He could reach very high notes without getting a falsetto. He could play a great piano and he could play anything.’ His influence on jazz, and on the musicians coming out of New Orleans and Chicago, is immeasurable: Professor Longhair, Fats Domino, Huey ‘Piano’ Smith and many, many more owe him a huge debt. ‘People believe Louis Armstrong originated scat,’ Morton told Lomax. ‘I must take that credit away from him, because I know better. Tony Jackson and myself were using scat for novelty back in 1906 and 1907 when Louis Armstrong was still in the orphans’ home.’25 ‘Pretty Baby’ may be the only song people remember, but many others have been attributed to him, including ‘Michigan Water Blues’ and ‘The Naked Dance’ (both recorded by Morton). Morton may have described him as ‘real dark and not a bit good-looking,’ but, as Carrie the prostitute and jazz trumpeter Bunk Johnson noted, Tony was ‘dicty’, and the way he dressed came to define the archetypical image of the ragtime pianist, with his bowler hat, diamond pin, waistcoat and sleeve garters. In his later years, Tony often performed, as if a concert pianist, in a dinner jacket and black tie, and it was said of other jazz pianists that if you couldn’t play like Jackson then you could at least look like him.
In 2011, some 90 years after his death, Tony Jackson was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame. He was honoured for his musical contributions and for living ‘as an openly gay man when that was rare. His influence on Chicago’s music scene was immense [and he] helped to lay the foundation for Chicago’s reputation as a jazz capital.’1