3

BRONZEVILLE

Sonny landed in a city alive with possibility. Workers who had come to Chicago to drive wartime production stayed there. More joined them, pursuing dreams of postwar prosperity. The majority of those new workers were black. While Chicago’s white population remained fairly steady during the forties and fifties, its black population burgeoned, rising from 8.2 percent of the total in 1940 to 22.9 percent by 1960.1 All that growth produced opportunities in every sector of black life, including entertainment and the arts. For Sonny, it meant the prospect of steady work in the company of top musicians who might share his interest in large ensembles at a time when smaller combos—thanks to first bebop and then rock and roll—were becoming the preferred format. The city seemed hungry for new sounds. Sonny could create them. So he found a small apartment in the heart of the Black Belt on Chicago’s South Side, where, as an African American, he was all but sentenced to live.

Blacks didn’t call this part of the city the Black Belt. Those were white words, used to mark a difference also deemed a deficiency. Blacks called it Bronzeville and had done so since 1934, when James J. Gentry, a writer for the Chicago Defender, inaugurated with the newspaper’s blessing an annual “Mayor of Bronzeville” election.2 Bronzeville became a place where African Americans could feel a lift, find some pride. However segregated the area was, it developed into an extraordinarily vibrant community, driven by powerful hopes and schemes of its own. To the west lived working-class whites, guarding their ethnic purity, and to the east resided affluent WASPs and Jews, protecting their lakefront property values. Room for black expansion lay in areas whites would abandon for the allure of suburbia.

Within this confined but expanding space, Chicago’s blacks created a world as rich and complex as the one that segregated them. Rural migrants moved in, amusing seasoned city dwellers with their country ways. People with a little money moved up, leaving mean streets and old tenements to the poor. Bronzeville had social distinctions and political intrigues of its own to complicate those imposed by the surrounding white city. Segregation had its uses, understood well by black political bosses such as William Dawson, who was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1942. He knew the power of “policy”—a word used to describe the gambling racket.³ Dawson opposed all efforts to shut it down, believing that money earned in Bronzeville, in however dubious a manner, should stay there. Gaming garnered millions for its sponsors, and to those who played the numbers, it offered some excitement and even hope. Dawson’s twenty-seven years as a congressman attest to his deep regard for Bronzeville’s way of life and the respect his legislative patronage won from his constituents.

“Segregated as it was,” writes Thomas Dyja, “Bronzeville shared White Chicago’s gargantuan energy for making money, and had used its segregation to consolidate capital and power.”⁴ Black Chicago created black institutions to sustain its thriving life apart. The black real estate magnate Jesse Binga founded the Binga State Bank and built a nearby row of shops that he called the Binga Arcade.⁵ The Chicago Defender had been appearing weekly since 1905, but new media outlets suddenly multiplied: the Associated Negro Press, Negro Digest, and, to even greater renown, Ebony and Jet. Ebony cannily represented the social aspirations of mainstream Bronzeville in its glossy spreads of fashionably attired women and its smiling endorsements of consumer culture. John H. Johnson, one of its founding editors, put its mission memorably: “In a world that said Blacks could do a few things, we wanted to say they could do everything.”6

Across a broad range of activities, from playing the policy wheel to purchasing the latest appliance, that spirit of possibility suffused everyday life and sustained hopes for a better future, doing so nowhere more powerfully than in the wildly profitable insurance industry. Headquartered in black Chicago, Supreme Liberty Life was the world’s largest black-owned insurance company, accruing 18 million dollars in assets by the 1950s.⁷ Insurance in Bronzeville was a medium for dreams, a symbolic investment transforming hard times in the present into future rewards. It secularized old-time salvation and made life after death imaginable in material terms. The fiscal gift of such a future gave social aspiration weight and heft. The right insurance policy could help build a better world for coming generations—at a tidy profit to the underwriter. Such prospects encouraged an entrepreneurial spirit in postwar Bronzeville. As Dempsey Travis put it, “Business was the pillar of optimism,” especially for blacks with middle-class aspirations.⁸

This sense of material possibility was more than matched by cultural achievements of black artists in Bronzeville. The thirties and early forties witnessed a magnificent flowering of artistic energies, a second renaissance of black culture in America (the first had occurred in Harlem during the twenties).⁹ A list of the era’s black artists puts Chicago—but more particularly Bronzeville—on any map of American cultural achievement. Richard Wright began his career there, publishing his disturbing novel Native Son (1940) to great acclaim and the promise of lasting literary achievement.¹⁰ Gwendolyn Brooks rose from the South Side’s squalid streets to become one of America’s most heralded African American poets. Katherine Dunham, who founded the first black ballet company—the Ballet Nègre—received a degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago and proceeded to reinvent modern choreography. Gordon Parks came to Chicago in 1940 and used his photography to chronicle life among poor blacks in Bronzeville. Then there were the musicians: Thomas A. Dorsey, “the father of gospel music,” who took the blues to church; his spiritual daughter, Mahalia Jackson, whose harrowing, sweet voice proved how close hell stands to heaven; the bluesman Muddy Waters, up from the Delta, playing a guitar so raw it conjured up a whole new kind of blues, the Chicago blues; and Muddy Waters’s cronies, too, including Jimmy Rogers, Little Walter, and Willie Dixon. Bronzevillle channeled the urban spirit of American black vernacular art.

As for jazz, Chicago was without peer. “By the end of the 1940s,” says Szwed, “Chicago was possibly the best city in America for jazz musicians.”11 Like industry and commerce, music was thriving. A player with decent chops and a union card could make a living. An abundance of clubs opened doors nightly to crowds eager for diversion—as many as seventy-five clubs in Bronzeville alone. They came in all sizes and catered to all tastes: Roberts Show Lounge (later called Roberts Show Club), a dance hall with a thousand seats; the Savoy Ballroom, capacity six thousand dancers; the Pershing Hotel, with its famous ballroom upstairs and the lounge called Birdland (later Budland) in the basement; the Grand Terrace; Casino Moderne; and many smaller venues, such as Duke Slater’s Vincennes Lounge, 5th Jack Show Lounge, Queen’s Mansion, Flame Lounge, and the Wonder Inn.¹² In the coming years, these and many other spots made Chicago an inevitable stop for gigging musicians in either big bands hawking fare to suit the fading taste for swing or small units pitching bebop, hard bop, and even avant-garde. Everybody passed through: Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford, and Benny Goodman; Coleman Hawkins, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Sonny Stitt, and Charles Mingus; and a host of other musicians, some well known, some less so. Chicago raised its own talent too—Gene Ammons, Johnny Griffin, and Von Freeman, all great tenor saxophonists, among others.¹³ It was a mecca of improvised music, an urban space peculiarly conducive to the sly alchemy of tradition and innovation, sustained by an avid audience of dancers, drinkers, hipsters, and hangers-on.

Racial uplift took a downturn, however, just as Sonny reached Chicago, particularly among creative and working-class blacks. Some of the artists associated with the Black Chicago Renaissance, weary of the city’s overt racism, departed for more hospitable climes: Wright, for New York; Parks, for Washington, DC; Dunham, for a career that would take her around the world. McCarthyism dampened the enthusiasm of those who remained, and not merely because of alleged connections with the Communist Party or the WPA. Civil rights organizations, the NAACP most prominent among them, openly endorsed Cold War policies limiting civil liberties.14 Between the aspirations of the black bourgeoisie and a general politics of conformity, Bronzeville politicians seemed more interested in tailoring democracy to the marketplace than in transforming a segregated society.

For poor blacks, that meant almost complete disfranchisement from the American dream and confinement to Bronzeville’s hardest neighborhoods. These were the people Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about when she turned her poetic attention to the places she lived and worked, buildings such as the Mecca, at the intersection of Thirty-Fourth and State Streets, where she spent her early days peddling tracts for a spiritualist named E. N. French.¹⁵ To accommodate increasing numbers of blacks, once-spacious apartments in such buildings were carved into “kitchenettes,” single rooms with a small kitchen—minus a sink—along one wall. Whole families inhabited them, sharing toilets with neighbors living behind thin pressboard dividers. Trash piled up in the hallways, adding a pungent odor to buildings meant for many fewer tenants than they contained. Between 1940 and 1950, the number of kitchenettes in Bronzeville increased by over 36,000 units.¹⁶ Brooks asks an implacable question about such spaces in a poem entitled “kitchenette building,” from her early collection A Street in Bronzeville (1944):

But could a dream send up through onion fumes

Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes

And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall,

Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms

Even if we were willing to let it in,

Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,

Anticipate a message, let it begin?17

The inevitable, unbearable answer is no. Such spaces throttle dreams. Confined to kitchenettes and cracked streets, Bronzeville’s poorest residents lived a life without song.

Or so it seemed to Sonny Blount. Sonny lived twenty blocks south of the Mecca in a building at 5414 South Prairie Avenue (now an empty parcel). His apartment was just a block from a train stop—Chicago’s famous “L”—and two from Washington Park, a wide, green space that would become important to his intellectual and creative development. It was cramped, not quite a kitchenette, but close quarters even for just one person, with cupboards above the stove, a bed tucked into a small second room, and, in the middle of the living room, a spinet piano with a small electronic keyboard (a Hammond Solovox) attached beneath the piano’s keys and used for creating organ sounds.

Something feels strange about the space,¹⁸ as if it contains more stuff than the laws of physics should allow: stacks of hand-scrawled staff paper, several music stands, a recording machine (using paper tape), a stuffed chair piled with sheet music, torn-open envelopes and densely typed papers and inky drafts of what look like poems on an old battered table under the window, empty glasses on the counter, shoes in a corner, books, books, books, a record player next to a leaning pile of 78s, several brown-paper and red-print sleeves scattered on the floor. A chaos of stuff, but orderly, too, as if the apartment warps to accommodate it. The piano vibrates softly as if just played, the player stepping away to make a phone call or order takeout. A vibration more felt than heard hangs in the air, a background radiation that sustains this particular arrangement of things in such a small space.

Sonny slept in his apartment between gigs. He began hearing and tentatively playing music he hoped would open new horizons in Chicago. The union placed him in good jobs with notable musicians: Wynonie Harris, whose randy rhythm and blues took Sonny to Nashville for three months, where he made his first recordings in March 1946; Lil Green, a country belter from Mississippi who would introduce Sonny to a drummer he would work with frequently over the years, Tommy “Bugs” Hunter; and Sir Oliver Bibb, whose unabashedly commercial band dressed like Revolutionary War–era fops, sporting tricorns, wigs, and ruffs.19 Sonny didn’t care. He was a seasoned sideman and performed the music he got paid to play with skill and precision. His heart, however, belonged to big bands, with their harmonically dense sound palette, vast canvas, and huge spectrum of sonic colors. When he wasn’t on a gig, he could usually be found at Club DeLisa, where five nights a week showgirls shimmied and dancers swayed to the elegant arrangements of the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra. The DeLisa was just a few blocks from Sonny’s place, and to him Henderson was the living god of the large ensemble.

Or something close. “Fletcher was part of an angelic thing,” Sonny once said. “I would say he wasn’t a man. [. . .] A lot of things that some men do . . . come from somewhere else, or they’re inspired by something’s that not of this planet.”²⁰ Henderson could take eleven musicians, all with their own distinct powers, problems, and presumptions, and—by the force of imagination, discipline, and Don Redman’s arrangements—forge them into an ensemble capable of communicating beauty with harmonious precision. Some felt Henderson and the swing sound he favored were both past their prime. Not Sonny. He heard there a commitment to possibilities higher than mere entertainment. He quickly made Henderson’s acquaintance, swapped ideas about tempos and voicings, and earnestly described his approach to composing.

Henderson no longer played piano with the band much. His regular pianist, Marl Young, himself a seasoned leader trying to mix music with law school, had suddenly left the band to start a recording label.²¹ Sonny could play like a veteran and read like a professor. Henderson asked him to fill in and eventually offered him a spot in his orchestra for the remainder of its contract with Club DeLisa. Sonny would rehearse the band and play nightly for the stage revues, which included costumes, choreography, and song—the whole range of club theatrics that would shape his sense of showmanship. The work was not without its challenges. Henderson’s musicians often ridiculed the strange harmonies of Sonny’s arrangements, a situation he once addressed by placing a straight razor on top of his piano.22 Henderson stood by his piano player, however, and his musicians backed down. When his contract with the DeLisa ran out in May 1947, Henderson left for California. Red Saunders and his orchestra took over the job. Sonny stayed on for five years as rehearsal pianist and copyist, tweaking otherwise staid arrangements into music that was always a little richer and stranger for his touch.

There was nothing rich and strange about the music Sonny played in the sweaty bars in Calumet City, south of Chicago—“Sin City,” as it was called, packed with sleazy clubs and strip joints run mostly by the mob. The money was good, but the hours were grueling, eight to twelve at a stretch, with strippers coming and going behind a flimsy partition hiding white bodies from black eyes. Bugs Hunter formed a trio with Sonny and Red Holloway on saxophone to comp the sex and sin that simmered in clubs such as the Capital Bar, Sid’s Oasis, and the Peacock Club.²³ Their music was the usual dive-bar bump and grind. Sonny played it straight, honking and tonking while the dancers bobbed. But Hunter and Holloway both noted his tendency to play outside the changes when the chance arose.²⁴ Calumet City put his spirit to the test, but Sonny was a master of any idiom—or maybe a medicine man. Late one hot night, the strippers hard at it, he leaned over to Bugs and said, “Watch this,” pointing to a drunk passed out at the bar. Staring fiercely, Sonny played a series of angular, weird chords. The drunk twitched, lifted his head slowly, swung his feet under him, and wobbled toward the door.²⁵ Sonny smiled at the effect. His own music could do so much more than paint the walls behind jiggling women. Even confined to dank spaces playing the rhythms of sin, he dispensed medicine for nightmares that might awaken the soul.