CHAPTER 10

Bandwidths

Red Cap, Red Cap,
Save the tips you get, for if you do,
Then, Red Cap, ol’ chap,
Perhaps someday you will be calling, “Red Cap!” too.

—LOUIS ARMSTRONG/BEN HECHT, “RED CAP,” 1937¹

Throughout the 1920s, the social whirl of Harlem coincided with the functional ballet of Grand Central Terminal. Chief Williams was expertly attuned to the rhythms of both. Indeed, his intimate awareness of Harlem’s numerous society orchestras perhaps convinced him that his palatial railroad station should have its own. Around February 1929—as a sixty-year-old colossal statue of Commodore Vanderbilt was being relocated to the terminal’s south exterior—the Chief actively set out to create a band. As several of his porters played instruments, he readily mustered a group to form the Grand Central Red Cap Orchestra. He put them under the baton of Leslie Davis, a Red Cap captain experienced as an assistant bandleader in France during the Great War. The versatile Harlem-based band soon was in demand for record, radio, dancehall, and concert dates that called for jazz, classical, choral, or a cappella repertoires.

As with his previous athletic ventures, Chief Williams’s impulse to organize a band took cues from his social activism. That February and March, Williams, an active NAACP member at least since the war, threw himself into selling fifty dollars’ worth of tickets among his men for the organization’s annual dance at the Renaissance, this one for its twentieth anniversary celebration. The affair on March 15, 1929, netted over $2,000, and Williams’s diligence in making it the association’s most successful ever did not go unnoticed by committeewoman Grace Nail Johnson, wife of the NAACP’s executive secretary. Two days prior to the event, the Chief found James Weldon Johnson’s letter from the national office in his mailbox on Strivers’ Row: “Mrs. Johnson has told me how you have followed up the interest which you have shown for so many years in the work of the Association by disposing of twenty-five tickets for the Twentieth Anniversary Dance to be given by our Women’s Committee next Friday night.”²

Johnson’s personal thanks were echoed in the press: “Much credit is given Chief Williams of the Grand Central for the fine co-operation given in selling tickets among his men at the station,” society writer Bessye Bearden (whose teenage son became the famous artist Romare Bearden) wrote the day after the event.³ Such commendations and a theatrical setting may soon have crystallized Williams’s idea for a band into an actual plan. On the evening of May 12, 1929, he was invited to Lexington Hall, where Broadway producer Lew Leslie was hosting a banquet to celebrate the first anniversary of Blackbirds of 1928, the latest in a musical revue series that had been a triumphant vehicle for its late star Florence Mills.

Williams’s dinner companion was his thirty-year-old daughter, Gertrude, the marcelled, statuesque flapper who was the face behind a recent Dr. Fred Palmer’s ad. One writer’s assessment of the evening as “the outstanding social event of the theatrical season” was not altogether hyperbolic, given its attendance and program. The evening’s most noted guest was New York’s flamboyant mayor James J. Walker. The self-dubbed “Night Mayor” paid his usual good-natured gibes to old friends, then sobered to claim that “for the first time in any public speech, I will make reference to race or color.” He assured the honored Blackbirds company that their success came as a result of their unselfish service. “People will take what you have to give no matter where it comes from,” the mayor averred, calling attention to an episode from the previous November, the sinking of the ship SS Vestris. The ship’s black quartermaster, Lionel Licorish, had personally saved some twenty passengers from shark-infested waters off Virginia. His bravery was still making headlines. Mayor Walker lauded the sailor: “When he was rescuing those white people from the water nobody asked him to hold up his hands to find out what color they were,” he told the diners. “The cruelty, the unfairness of it all, is that if he were in their position some discrimination might come in somewhere.”

Chief Jimmy Williams enjoys a jovial exchange outside of Grand Central with the famously wise-cracking Jimmy Walker, mayor of New York City from 1926 until his ouster in 1932. Schomburg/NYPL.

Alderman Fred R. Moore, the powerful editor of the New York Age, proclaimed it “a fine thing to see Mayor Walker so outspoken against intolerance.” The evening’s tribute to the current Blackbirds cast took a calculated moment to acknowledge the late great Florence Mills, whose untimely death in November 1927 was still felt as a palpable absence in the theater world. The Chief and Gertrude rose in concert with the entire banquet gathering—which included Florence’s mother, sister, and Ulysses “Slow Kid” Thompson, Mills’s widowed husband and co-star—and stood silently for two long minutes. Then the evening’s gaiety revived. Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh, the show’s lyricist and composer, raptly beamed as Aida Ward crooned their composition, “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.” She was followed by the nimble one-legged dancer “Peg Leg” Bates, the baritone and bandleader Lois Deppe, and the lyricist Andy Razaf, all of whom would soon have a role in the musical scheme the Chief was formulating.⁴

Russell Wooding, the music arranger for Blackbirds, drew a good share of the crowd’s attention. Wooding had been a principal bandleader in D.C., where he’d given some early professional gigs to another young Washingtonian commanding attention in Harlem’s music scene: Duke Ellington. Since moving to New York City in the summer of 1924—to be a manager at the Clarence Williams Publishing House—Wooding had been constantly mentioned in the same breath as other top arrangers on the city’s Broadway and dancehall scene like Vodery for Ziegfeld; J. Rosamond Johnson for Hammer-stein; Harry Burleigh, the father of concert spiritual arrangements; and William Grant Still for W. C. Handy. The Chief knew Wooding was a talent worth watching.⁵

Several weeks later, on July 3, “Jimmy and His Gang”—as Harlemites affectionately nicknamed the reception personae of the Chief and his station porters—“tossed a yachting party of huge proportions on the Hudson River.” The new Grand Central Red Cap Orchestra “played the hottest of dance music” as guests boarded, armed “with lunch baskets and bottles and proceeded to make whoopee in no uncertain terms.” The Chief’s wife Lucy was aboard, as well as his daughter Gertrude, his son Wesley, and his older brother and sister-in-law Charles and Jennie Williams. Although Wooding was not seen, other show and society folk who had attended Leslie’s Blackbirds party were there, including the Ford Dabneys, the Bill “Bojangles” Robinsons, Ulysses Thompson, and Wilhelmina Adams.⁶

In the fall of 1929, the Chief’s new enterprise was generating interest and exposure. Booked for October 4, the Red Cap Orchestra appeared on the billing for the Harlem’s Renaissance Casino below the bold letters of Vernon Andrade’s Orchestra, the house band.⁷ The Chief had good reason to feel optimistic about the band’s career, and some encouraging possibilities took root soon enough. A tiny, but significant, notice in a Baltimore paper reported that the Red Cap Orchestra “under the direction of Leslie Davis, who plays three trumpets simultaneously,” was preparing for a number of recording, broadcasting, and dance tour dates.

Despite the crash of the stock market on October 29, 1929, Chief Williams didn’t appear to break his stride. The Red Cap Orchestra enjoyed warm receptions both uptown and down during the bustling Christmas holidays, when they were in great demand. On December 27, 1929, they furnished music for a “holiday circus” to benefit the Boys’ Club of New York City. The event, which NBC Radio broadcast live from Grand Central, featured circus-clown-turned-radio-artist Bob Sherwood portraying the legendary showman P. T. Barnum, with “incarnations” of the “Swedish Nightingale” Jenny Lind, and “‘Major Tom Thumb.’”⁸ The public appeared to want more from the Red Cap Orchestra, and by late December, the Chief was seizing every opportunity to step up.

By the spring of 1929, Chief Williams was inspired to organize musical porters into the Grand Central Terminal Red Cap Orchestra. New York Central Lines, Terry Link Collection.

A big opportunity came in January 1930: word arrived that Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll would be coming in from Chicago early one morning on the 20th Century Limited. The two white “blackface comedians” were better known as their famous radio show characters, Amos and Andy. Their celebrity was just the ticket.

Blacks in some quarters winced at Amos ‘n’ Andy. An Arkansas preacher, the Rev. Arthur D. Williams, railed at the radio program’s white actors, complaining that “the characters they portray are lazy, shiftless and drifting.” The Pittsburgh Courier canvassed a million signatures demanding the program’s ouster from the airwaves, but the petition came shy of its goal.⁹ Even a white writer who disliked Amos ‘n’ Andy confessed he nevertheless found them intriguing “for the same reason that Rudy Vallee is––anyone who attracts so much popularity, regardless of merit, is an important sociological phenomenon, and should be treated as such.”¹⁰

But in fact, Amos ‘n’ Andy had avid black fans in New York. On Dean Street in Brooklyn, “the Amos and Andy Whist Club gave a very successful party.” On NBC Radio, Bill Robinson hosted an all-star Harlem Salute to Amos and Andy on Radio featuring several fellow Broadway stars and the bandleader Cab Calloway.¹¹ And the Chief knew fanfare for the radio celebrities would easily lend free publicity to both the Grand Central Red Cap Orchestra and the terminal.

Anticipating their arrival at Grand Central, Chief Williams summoned a few of his Red Cap musicians to welcome Gosden and Correll—and bring their instruments. Though the men were not due to report for work until three p.m., a handful “gladly complied with the chief’s request.” As if by chance (though doubtlessly orchestrated), a photographer from the New York Central Lines Magazine captured the Red Cap band greeting the two comedians on the platform at the moment of arrival. In the published photo, Chief Williams is flanked by the two stars, who themselves are flanked by the ad hoc fanfare. One writer noted the scene as “a great ad for the Red Cap outfit, who plan a concert shortly in Boston.”¹²

Only a few weeks into 1930, Harlemites were eyeing their social calendars for the imminent masquerades, Mardi Gras, and other pre-Lenten affairs that traditionally took place in the early months of each year. “Having always been wows of the first order,” one experienced reveler wrote of the free formals, “we are looking forward to another night of nights.”¹³

On Friday night, February 14, Valentine’s Day, James and Lucy Williams paid $1.50 admission for a St. Valentine’s night that promised phenomenal entertainment and free souvenirs. The Rockland Palace (formerly Manhattan Casino) at West 155th Street and Eighth Avenue was holding its 62nd annual Masquerade and Civic Ball, sponsored by the Hamilton Lodge no. 710. It was a costume ball, specifically a drag ball, ensconced in black Gotham’s tradition of festive abandon.

As far back as 1887, when Williams was a boy—though too young to attend, he probably heard about it—the Hamilton Lodge’s famous masquerade in the Tenderloin had attracted an “assemblage of very queer people,” according to the Herald, who included a good number of high-costumed and scantily clad whites as well: “The Hamiltons congratulate themselves upon their ability to bring such a jovial and motley crowd together, and as one of them remarked to the reporter, ‘the crème de la crème, too.’”

At this year’s Masquerade and Civic Ball, in Harlem, about seven thousand people filled the hall, to be part of, or to cheer, the spectacle of men decked in gorgeous feminine costumes “which, for their sheer magnificence, would make a Follies beauty envious.” Many of them were hard pressed to contain their “muscular bodies in their dainty French evening gowns.” Pianist Gladys Bentley, famous for her naughty “double-entendre” songs and her white cutaway tuxedo, was there, and John C. Smith’s Modern Dance Orchestra presided over the dance music for this fabulously risqué demimonde. The ball was a serious costume competition, drawing some judges from as far away as Chicago. The spectators were “some of Harlem’s most prominent lawyers, physicians, artists, writers and teachers,” who included A’Lelia Walker, hostess of the Dark Tower, Harlem’s most prestigious social salon; Lucille Randolph, wife of A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; singer Alberta Hunter; Wilhelmina “Willy” Adams, beauty queen and redoubtable civic leader; Wallace Thurman, novelist and literary gadfly; Nora Holt, composer and music critic; Edward G. Perry, acclaimed party planner (called “Harlem’s male Elsa Maxwell”); and the “Chief Williamses.”¹⁴

There was also collective anticipation for Williams’s next “Jimmy and His Gang” soirée. The Williamses hosted their own ball just a few days after Hamilton Lodge’s. On Wednesday evening, February 19, bandleader Sam Patterson (who formerly headed the Ziegfeld Roof Garden Orchestra atop the New Amsterdam Theater at Times Square) was now in Harlem, poised for his Syncopated Orchestra to heat up the Renaissance Casino. The “Renny,” Harlem’s most effervescent reception hall, on the southeast corner of West 138th Street at Seventh Avenue, was just down the block from Chief Williams’s home. Williams okayed Patterson to strike up the band, and the doors opened.

The guests poured into the banquet hosted by “umpteen swell fellows, who have thoroughly mastered the art of tossing a party”: Jimmy and His Gang. The hosts handed their guests little bronze elephants and dogs as party favors. Their prearranged boxes and loges throughout the hall were already laid out with “an inexhaustible supply of viands and liquids.” Lucy Williams and Gertrude were stately in complementary ballgowns of emerald green and white satin, respectively. Irene Jordan, wife of ragtime composer Joe Jordan, shimmered in a dress of canary satin. Martha Dabney, wife of composer Ford Dabney, was “stunning in coffee colored lace.” Dr. Gertrude Curtis, New York’s first African-American dentist, wore an “important silver and blue sequin gown.” From her apartment just across the street, the sensational blues singer and composer Alberta Hunter cut a figure in red velvet, and Lottie Tyler (Hunter’s longtime companion, niece of the late star Bert Williams) wore a gown of white hand-painted satin.

The Chief signaled an intermission in the festivities and introduced his Gang to the guests, as cheers flooded the Renaissance’s ornate hall. Then he pulled out a telegram from someone who was unable to attend but “nevertheless, wanted some part in the great celebration of Jimmy and His Gang.” It was from Gosden and Correll, the radio stars Amos and Andy. The Chief’s party was a hit. “We came early, we danced late and even then we complained,” one guest said, “because eventually they had to put us out to air the casino for a Thursday night dance.”¹⁵

Summer brought a new occasion for the Chief to prove himself a winsome host. His was one of two back-to-back events on the same day, setting many of Harlem’s fashionable set abuzz. The first was an afternoon tea party at the home of the celebrated heiress A’Lelia Walker, the renowned Joy Goddess of Harlem (as the poet Langston Hughes dubbed her). Walker wound up her tea party early, perhaps because she herself did not want to miss the second lavish event, an annual moonlight sail up the Hudson River. “There are sails and sails,” one observer wrote, “but you have never been on a sail until you are the guest of Jimmy and His Gang.”

On that evening, at the foot of West 132nd Street, the natty Chief and his men lined the gangplank to welcome illustrious guests aboard the Myles Standish. Dr. “Hap” Delany (brother of the centenarian Delany Sisters, and uncle of award-winning writer Samuel R. Delany, Jr.) was on board. So were the jazz singers and entertainers Adelaide Hall and Alberta Hunter; Hunter, along with cabaret performer Jimmie Daniels and schoolteacher Harold Jackman (“the handsomest man in Harlem”), would become iconic gay figures of the Harlem Renaissance. The Chief’s dear friend Jesse Battle was on hand. And of course A’Lelia Walker, Harlem’s premier hostess, bringing several guests in tow from her weekly “at home” tea.¹⁶ Having their pleasure entrusted to his hands, Chief “Jimmy” deployed two orchestras aboard the vessel.

Williams took “great interest and pride” in the Red Cap Orchestra and was confident in the men’s professional potential. Their demonstrable talent that summer may have made him more eager than ever to approach Russell Wooding, whose name as an arranger and composer was gaining traction in New York. Though cornetist Leslie Davis had been the band’s very qualified organizer, he was also a working Red Cap, which cramped the band’s ability to flourish. They needed a dedicated musical director. Unlike Davis, Wooding was a free agent, and better connected. The Chief wanted Wooding to sharpen up his musical porters into a truly reputable orchestra.

By 1930, the Chief was making a wise choice in Wooding, who was much in demand.¹⁷ For Blackbirds of 1928, his adept choral handling of W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” prompted Handy himself to state that Wooding “created a demand for choral arrangements.”¹⁸ For the revue of Hot Chocolates (1929), Wooding had winningly orchestrated Fats Waller and Andy Razaf’s classic song “Ain’t Misbehavin’”; the trumpet deity Louis Armstrong made his Broadway debut in that show, performing in the ensemble.

Sometime in early November 1930, Williams and Wooding powwowed about prospects for the Red Cap Orchestra. Ultimately, the porters must have convinced Wooding they had the chops, for he granted the Chief’s wish that he take charge of the band. By mid-November, word of their new affiliation was out and about.

On November 23 a Big Midnight Benefit was to be held, to kick off the Harlem Cooperating Committee on Relief and Unemployment, an ambitious early Depression-era initiative. The benefit would be held at the Lafayette Theatre, Harlem’s most famous entertainment stage; the theater’s general manager, Frank Schiffman, donated the house. The benefit show was being adapted from Lew Leslie’s current Broadway hit, Blackbirds of 1928, but Marty Forkins’s hit, Brown Buddies, would also bring its stars Bill Robinson, Adelaide Hall, and Ada Brown uptown to treat Harlem locals. The collaboration of big producers Leslie and Forkins, and their stellar performers, promised “to make sure that the night will be even bigger than originally planned.”¹⁹

The announcement also noted that the evening’s added attraction would be the first-time appearance “of that much spoken of array of musicians known as the Grand Central Red Caps Concert Orchestra, an organization which had the support of Chief Williams from the start.” And the Chief and the maestro both must have been thrilled to read that it was “under the personal leadership of the popular and well known Russell Wooding.”²⁰

The Grand Central Red Cap Orchestra opened the second half of the evening’s bill, which was constellated with such outstanding stars as Ethel Waters, Flournoy Miller, Aubrey Lyles, and Eubie Blake, as well as actors Richard B. Harrison and Leigh Whipper. For Chief Williams, Wooding, and the Red Cap Orchestra, the Lafayette Theatre benefit show appearance was most auspicious.

Opening the second part [of the concert] the Grand Central Red Cap Orchestra under the leadership of Russell Wooding made their bow. Lovers of good music who failed to be at the Lafayette when these gentlemen offered their numbers missed a treat, and it is with a great deal of satisfaction and pleasure to be able to extend congratulations to Mr. Wooding, one of the finest men on and off the stage it has ever been the good fortune of this writer to meet. A splendid array of men he has to lead, and the orchestra should be heard on some specially arranged occasion right here in Harlem.²¹

Meanwhile at Grand Central itself, passengers entering the main concourse—to buy a ticket, to catch a train, or to adjust a watch against the opal-faced clock—suddenly might hear strains of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” or some other familiar Americana. The source was often Chief Williams’s “office,” the balcony above Track 30. Music columnist Cora Gary Illidge, who was a black graduate of the New York Institute of Music and Art (a forerunner of the Juilliard School), offered mystified travelers two explanations: if the music was from an orchestra, “some thirty earnest Red Caps”—organized by Leslie Davis and directed by Russell Wooding—“may have been rehearsing for an appearance that afternoon at a tea dance, or at a formal banquet the next evening, or perhaps at a fraternity dance at a nearby hotel.” However, if they heard a quartet, the music was from “four men who do double duty—sing and play in the orchestra.”²²

The Chief, who did not play an instrument, was the founder and president of both the Grand Central Red Cap Orchestra and the a cappella Grand Central Red Cap Quartet. His drive behind the orchestra’s gaining popular momentum was more apparent, and notwithstanding Wooding’s role as maestro, many often referred to the group as Chief Williams’s Red Cap Orchestra—especially in its smaller, band-size aggregation.

If the Chief could trace their route by train, then generally nowhere was too far out of town to deploy his musical men. On December 29, 1930, they performed upstate, at a dance “to purchase fire fighting equipment for the new truck” that the Hillside Protective Association had bought from funds “raised at a clambake early in the fall.” Though the orchestra went only as a nine-piece band, one of them, who is unknown, “proved to be a singer and a tap dancer” whose skill halted the dancing couples and drew them around the stage.²³

The Chief also did well in establishing a corollary vocal group. The Red Cap Quartet comprised Eric Adams, William Robinson, Coyal McMahan (a later Broadway musical performer and recording artist), and Percy Robinson (who was also a reputable drummer and the brother of the Chief’s friend, dance lion Bill Robinson). The men executed a four-part close-harmony repertoire, both gospel and secular, in an African-American tradition, the a cappella style that had become popularly known as “barbershop quartet” singing. They frequently performed on the radio and at private concerts, and, as Illidge alluded, they might reach unwitting audiences from the tunnels or mezzanines of Grand Central. Indeed, the quartet’s success reflected the influence of Chief Williams’s singular musical hire, Robert H. Cloud, a composer-arranger, saxophonist, and pianist who trained and managed the singers.

Chief Williams met Robert Cloud at about the same time as he met Russell Wooding, or possibly a few months earlier: some discographies have Cloud recording in New York City as early as February 1929.²⁴ It isn’t known if he became a Red Cap at Grand Central around that time—or was perhaps in the earliest formation of the Chief’s new orchestra. As with Wooding, the Chief met Cloud in Harlem. But while Cloud’s professional reputation preceded him as an orchestra leader, the jazzman was an enigmatic figure.

Cloud hailed from Fort Wayne, Indiana, where as early as 1922 he advertised his services as a music arranger in Billboard. “Broadway” Jackson later reported the musician’s offer “to join the staff of the Clarence Williams publishing house” in New York—an offer possibly brokered by Wooding.²⁵ In 1927 Cloud was in Florida, performing variously as composer, arranger, pianist, and saxophonist, with a black Jacksonville jazz band called the Ross De Luxe Syncopators. Victor recorded two of Cloud’s original dance numbers, the “sizzling” foxtrots, as Variety praised the songs, “Mary Belle” and “Lady Mine”—“played as only native Ethiops can play ’em.”²⁶ New York was clearly next on Cloud’s horizon.

If the Chief did not meet Cloud in early 1929, he was likely aware of him by summer. On August 25 a big dance event at the Renaissance Casino featured Cloud’s fifteen-piece Orquestra Casi Latina—including “ten Latin-American musicians”—an eruption of Cuban-flavored rhythms.²⁷ If the Chief saw Cloud in action here, he understandably wanted to work with him—but he may already have set his sights on Wooding, whose social circles strongly overlapped with Williams’s own.

At any rate, over the next year, both of Chief Williams’s musical directors would noticeably enhance the traveling public’s experience in the terminal. And maybe that of the Red Cap porters themselves at Grand Central, Penn Station and stations elsewhere across the country. “These men, who are now Red Caps, deserve unstinted praise for remaining musicians,” posited Illidge. “The canned music of the present day sound pictures has thrown scores of them out of employment, so these men have had to seek other means of livelihood.”²⁸ Indeed, the men in the Chief’s Red Cap musical associations were finding Grand Central’s acoustic tunnels to be ready gateways toward achieving material advancement.

The year 1931 opened jubilantly for the orchestra Chief Williams had put in Russell Wooding’s capable hands. On January 3, a theater column in the New York Age commended Wooding for organizing “a jazz band from amongst the hundreds of colored musicians” who worked at Grand Central. Wooding had ramped up the Chief’s musical porters into a top-flight forty-piece outfit, “as fine a band as one would want to hear,” the columnist wrote. They would now “render all of the music for next week’s show at the Lafayette Theatre, which will be called Red Cap Follies.”²⁹

Leonard Harper, Harlem’s master spirit of rhythm-pulsed nightclub revues, staged the Red Cap Follies at the Lafayette Theatre. Robert Langmuir African American Photograph Collection, Emory University, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library.

More impressively, the weeklong Red Cap Follies would be staged by Leonard Harper, the master spirit of Harlem’s rhythm-chocked nightclub revues. At least two stars of Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds would appear in the show: the lovely soprano Aida Ward, also of Connie’s Inn and Cotton Club fame, and “Peg Leg” Bates, “the marvelous one-legged dancer.” A Harlem newcomer would also appear: young movie actress Mildred Washington, who was gaining stage fame as a “colored Oriental dancer,” a popular category of pseudo-Eastern exotic movement and bare midriff. Another projected cast member was Lois Deppe, from Vincent Youmans’s show Great Day!, whose character introduced the show’s title song and another, “Without a Song,” which would both become American standards. The Lafayette paired the live performance of Red Cap Follies with showings of the 1930 movie Wild Company, starring H. B. Warner and Joyce Compton, a combination aimed to guarantee full houses.³⁰

In January 1931, Leonard Harper’s weeklong Red Cap Follies at the Lafayette Theatre featured Grand Central’s forty-man band under Russell Wooding, Broadway jazz soprano Aida Ward, and neophyte tap dance legend Peg Leg Bates. New York Age, January 10, 1931.

February 17 was the eve of Lent, and as befit Mardi Gras, Chief Williams performed “with colors flying and trumpets in full blast.” Jimmy and His Gang again took over the Renaissance Casino. Unlike last year’s trinketry of bronze party favors, this time the Gang treated guests to “the new, long, slender fountain pens and stands right from Paris.” Vernon Andrade stirred the Renny’s house orchestra, but he gave the stage in alternate turns to the Grand Central Red Cap Orchestra, still charged up from wowing audiences at the Lafayette’s Big Midnight Benefit and the Red Cap Follies. Here at the Renny, the Red Caps wore black tuxedos—as was their wont when performing away from the terminal—as did the male guests. The women supplied the color—from peach crepe to colored chiffons, taffetas, velvets, lace, and jewels. At the intermission, the Gang’s grand march stoked deafening cheers from the guests as Chief Williams appeared “at the psychological moment . . . borne on the shoulders of his loyal and devoted men.”³¹

That same week the Red Caps band was on the agenda of an NAACP committee meeting. On February 24, the acting secretary Walter White sat with members Mary White Ovington; literary critic and civil rights activist Joel Elias Spingarn; and Philadelphia NAACP branch president Isadore Martin. Their first matter to discuss was the Grand Central Red Cap Orchestra.

White informed the committee that conductor Russell Wooding proposed “to have the orchestra play for dances under the auspices of the Branches of the Association, for the two-fold purpose of helping to raise money for the Association and to help build a reputation for the orchestra.” The orchestra, being made up wholly of Red Caps, could travel the states by railway free of charge. Moreover, Col. Miles Bronson, the Grand Central Terminal manager, appeared to be interested in the orchestra’s success. To gain the NAACP’s approval, Wooding arranged for the committee to attend a special audition in the terminal, on Sunday afternoon, March 1, at three-thirty.³²

The next day White briefed W.E.B. Du Bois, then the NAACP communications director, about Wooding’s invitation and half-hour audition appointment. “We would be very happy to have you and Mrs. Du Bois come and pass judgment upon the orchestra,” White wrote.³³ The NAACP was sympathetic to the proposal and agreed to send its representatives to hear the band. The prospect of Du Bois tapping his feet to the Red Caps might have reasonably excited Chief Williams, though he was ultimately disappointed. “Dr. Du Bois will be unable to hear the Grand Central Red Cap Orchestra Sunday, as he will be out of town,” Du Bois’s secretary Daisy Wilson wrote to White on February 27. As an alternative, she sent White’s letter “to Mrs. Du Bois, who may be able to attend.”³⁴

It’s unclear if Nina Du Bois attended the audition on March 1, but apparently Walter White did, as the following day he wrote excitedly to Miguel Covarrubias, a Mexican artist who was well known in Harlem. White wanted his friend to hear “solo numbers by [the] Grand Central Red Caps Orchestra, which plays the ‘St. Louis Blues’ as you have never heard it played before,” and invited him to the NAACP’s spring dance on March 16, at the Savoy Ballroom.³⁵ The upcoming gala, organized annually by the Women’s Auxiliary Committee, was the NAACP’s major fund-raiser. The event would now serve as White’s formal launch of Wooding and the Grand Central Red Cap Orchestra’s impending fund-raising tour for the NAACP—which was counting on them to play two solo numbers on the important evening.

Williams knew the significance of his band appearing at this high-profile showcase. For the event, White went over the program details with lawyer Eunice Hunton Carter, the chair of the advisory board (who would soon gain notoriety for bringing down mob boss Lucky Luciano). He reiterated that the orchestra would perform two solo numbers—which were “not for dancing.” He asked Carter to convey the information to Bill Robinson, the slated master of ceremonies.³⁶

On March 16, liveried ushers fanned open car doors to admit the elegant guests, black and white, to the Savoy. The lively inpouring of reservations had forced the event’s ticket handler to draw up a new table chart to accommodate more celebrity subscribers. Carl Van Vechten was arguably Harlem’s most recognizable white habitué, but most of the evening’s smiles were aimed at James Weldon Johnson, who was stepping down from fourteen years as the NAACP’s secretary in order to teach literature at Fisk University in Nashville.³⁷

Noël Coward attended, fresh from the Times Square Theater on Broadway, where he was starring in his own play, Private Lives. At the Savoy, he found himself “being introduced to the town’s sepia society by the brilliant Eslanda Goode Robeson”—the wife of Paul Robeson—“and the adorable A’Lelia Walker.” Among the other notables present were the author and poet Dorothy Parker; the journalist Heywood Broun; the prolific Harlem society columnist Bessye Bearden; the novelist Dorothy West; the philanthropist Julius Rosenwald; the novelist Blair Niles (whose Strange Brother, a gay-themed tale set in the Harlem Renaissance, appeared that year); and the ubiquitous Alberta Hunter.³⁸

Both of the Savoy’s own orchestras furnished the evening’s dance music, while Cab Calloway’s Cotton Club Orchestra headlined the entertainment. The gala also featured a midnight dancing exhibition by the national champions of the Lindy Hoppers contest, a group that was in great demand at the city’s leading night clubs.³⁹ Promptly at twelve-thirty, the Savoy’s hall dimmed and hushed as if for a concert. The Grand Central Red Cap Orchestra was ushered into the Savoy, flanked by Russell Wooding and Walter White, and masterfully executed “Body and Soul” and the “The St. Louis Blues.”

In fact, the orchestra played several variations of “The St. Louis Blues.”⁴⁰ Mr. Handy himself might have been all smiles. A Baltimore paper praised the renditions of “some grand solo music of popular songs”⁴¹ played by the Grand Central Red Cap Orchestra. The event’s success was no doubt timely as well for Wooding, whose mother-in-law died a week later.⁴²

There’s no doubt Chief Williams was jubilantly aware that this accolade enhanced the Red Caps’ image. The orchestra’s disciplined artistry under Wooding’s leadership, and its contribution to the NAACP dance, earned his attendants, as a whole, great cachet, which may well have impressed Colonel Bronson and other terminal officials.

In April the New York Central permitted the Harlem Cooperating Committee on Relief and Unemployment to open a booth in the terminal to sell tickets for an upcoming charity costume ball. The emergency relief group had grown rapidly since November, when the Red Cap band had played for its kick-off benefit at the Lafayette Theatre. The ball was to take place on May 1 at Harlem’s 369th Regiment Armory—the base of the Harlem Hellfighters, many of them former Red Caps who had distinguished themselves in World War I—and prizes would be awarded “for the most original, most beautiful, most grotesque costumes.” However, the opening of the ticket booth itself on April 17, two weeks before the ball, generated much fanfare. Chief Williams’s old friend Wilhelmina Adams, the ball committee chair, was to run the prominent booth. While it isn’t known if he played a role in arranging it, the site procurement was considered a unique privilege that was said to be “usually reserved solely for the use of Red Cross and American Legion representatives.” The booth’s opening would feature several theatrical stars and “a parade of Red Caps and music by the Red Caps orchestra.”⁴³

On May 13, Russell Wooding and the Grand Central Red Cap Orchestra traveled out to the RCA Victor Recording Studio in Camden, New Jersey. They recorded four songs, several of them behind white artists. Frank Luther, a popular country music and dance-band singer, sang “I Can’t Get Enough of You,” an original, upbeat foxtrot with words by Joe Goodwin and music by Larry Shay. The band also backed Dick Robertson, who sang “That’s My Desire”—its first of many recordings—with words by Carroll Loveday and music by Irving Berlin’s principal transcriber, Helmy Kresa. “Niagara Falls,” with words and music by Walter Brown, was sung by Willie Jackson, who also sang “Nina,” with words by Andy Razaf and music by Wooding and Edgar Dowell. This last title (pronounced to rhyme with Dinah), might well have been a tribute to the actress Nina Mae McKinney, a rising “race” movie star and sex symbol, or to Nina Du Bois, who possibly approved the Red Cap Orchestra’s appearance at the NAACP gala.⁴⁴

Five days after the Victor recording session, the Philadelphia Tribune featured a photo of Russell Wooding standing magisterially in front of the Red Cap Orchestra, whose assembly loomed around him three tiers high. The caption said the band was heading “on a countrywide tour, under the auspices of the NAACP.”⁴⁵ In mid-June, the Pittsburgh Courier commended the New York Central Lines for hiring Wooding, “undoubtedly one of the outstanding musicians of the race,” and for “giving these men a chance to earn some additional money during the present time.” It noted the release of the orchestra’s first record on July 3.⁴⁶

Williams basked in the artistic cachet that Wooding brought to the orchestra. These musical porters were now bona-fide Victor recording artists, and their success was recognized even inside the terminal. On the east balcony, a transportation exhibit displayed a replica of their first recording, mounted against an ornate wrought-iron frame on a floor stand. Upon it the words GRAND CENTRAL RED CAPS DIRECTED BY RUSSELL WOODING were emblazoned around the iconic Victor logo. Below were the titles of two foxtrots, “I Can’t Get Enough of You” and “That’s My Desire.”⁴⁷

But two weeks after the Red Cap Orchestra’s record came out, Russell Wooding left the band. Perhaps he and Williams had previously agreed on only a short collaboration. Wooding was probably compensated on contract—either by a terminal authority, or by Chief Williams, or by the musicians collectively—or perhaps he saw it as worthwhile to work pro bono. Wooding had given the band exposure around town and beyond to New Haven and Boston. “He also took the aggregation to the Lafayette Theatre and furnished the complete show for the usual week’s run,” Percival Outram wrote in his regular musicians’ union column. “This, I believe, was the premiere achievement of Mr. Wooding.”⁴⁸

Indeed, the achievement was mutually beneficial for Wooding, the band, and the Chief. For Wooding, the affiliation had bolstered his standing as a proficient orchestrator: he was soon being sought out for Broadway productions with renowned song stylist Ethel Waters, composer Irving Berlin, and director Vincente Minnelli. For the Red Caps, it gave them stronger candidacy as a top-flight band, which would afford many of them greater autonomy as individual artists. For Chief Williams, building up the reputation of the orchestra elevated the estimation of his Red Caps corps in general. His association with Wooding, the Red Cap Orchestra, and the NAACP combined to affirm his own position as a cultural arbiter both in Harlem and at Grand Central.

The orchestra continued to perform after Wooding’s departure, but it’s not clear who took up the baton. Nor do we know why the Chief did not hand it to the able Cloud. Concurrent with Wooding’s leadership of the orchestra, Cloud’s impressive artistry had been transforming the Red Cap Quartet into Sunday radio regulars on WMCA, WPCH, and other national broadcasts. Later Cloud’s quartet expanded to a score of men, as the Red Cap Choir, to appear on Phillips Lord’s weekly show, We, the People.⁴⁹ They also performed at schools and at church and secular socials. Indeed, their overheard rehearsals at work were transforming a grand transit hub into a holiday destination: in December 1930, New Yorkers filled the Grand Central concourse “to hear the chorus of Red Caps sing their annual carols from the balcony of the mighty depot,” popular syndicated columnist Alice Hughes wistfully noted, adding, “and a rich experience it is.”⁵⁰ The singers drew crowds every December for years. Although the Chief’s reasons for not putting Cloud at the helm of the Red Cap Orchestra are unknown, Wooding’s departure in the summer of 1931 may have prompted Cloud to get back in a recording studio.

On August 14, 1931, the Red Cap Quartet with Cloud recorded four tracks at Columbia Studio, most notably Cloud’s own “They Kicked the Devil Out of Heaven,” and his “My Little Dixie Home,” co-written with black theatrical manager Harrison G. Smith (“the man who owns Broadway,” whose influence had boosted the careers of Josephine Baker, Duke Ellington, and child star Sunshine Sammy).⁵¹

On August 17, three days after the quartet’s recording session, Cloud called on Walter White to propose that the NAACP sponsor a tour for the quartet, as the association had done for the orchestra under Wooding. Whatever transpired during their meeting, it apparently inspired Cloud to write a letter to White reiterating his impatient hopes. He enclosed a reference letter attesting to his musical activities before he became a Red Cap porter—or as he archly put it, “before I became associated with the Red Cap Personnel here at Grand Central Terminal”—his effusive lines bursting into caprices of uppercase type:

Mr. White:

. . . Am sending the printed letter head herein that you may see what my activities consisted of before. . . . THE ONLY REASON I BECAME A RED CAP was my firm belief that I could do more along the lines I have tried to explain to you

by being one of them. . . . It is my hope, though, that I can thoroughly impress upon you the fact that, WITH THE THINGS I AM DOING AND INTEND TO DO WITH THESE FOUR, I CAN INSPIRE AND HELP MANY MORE.

Returning to plans for the quartet’s “experimental trip,” Cloud reminded White that he had connections in Boston and was eager to make more in New Haven, Hartford, Springfield, and Providence. “Any assistance that you can give me in this matter will be very gratefully received,” Cloud wrote. He asked White for an audition, as Wooding had done earlier that year. But White’s response is unknown.⁵²

Cloud’s artistic temperament may have prevented him from realizing it, but people indeed loved his songs and arrangements. His musical talents were unassailable. In the mid-1930s, praise was lavished on his artistry: “a New York Negro, who is a lyric composer of talent, with more than a score of songs to his credit, for which he has written both words and music. His regular job, however, is that of ‘red cap’ at the Grand Central Station,” making him an “odd case of versatility.”⁵³ Gossip commentator Walter Winchell observed “that Robert Cloud, a sepia red cap at the Grand Central Station . . . has written words and tunes to 30 ditties.”⁵⁴ Cloud was known to withdraw if he sensed condescension toward his Red Cap vocation. “I write songs, good songs,” he once insisted to a snooty reporter. “There is heart and feeling in them and someday people are going to like them.”⁵⁵

But even if Cloud didn’t readily feel it, Chief Williams surely noticed how much the catchy beat of his musical notion was spreading infectiously beyond Grand Central. “It was bound to happen,” the Age’s music reviewer wrote in 1931. “Not to be out-done by the Grand Central Red Caps, the Pennsylvania Red Caps have organized an orchestra.”⁵⁶

In the spring of 1932, the Chief’s orchestra performed at the fifteenth reunion of the Princeton University class of 1917—the “War Babies,” as they dubbed themselves. F. Scott Fitzgerald would have been a member had he not delayed getting his diploma to join the military. Fitzgerald’s school friend Ludlow “Lud” Fowler (who inspired the 1926 short story “The Rich Boy”) presided over the reunion dinner, followed by top-drawer musical entertainment, “not the third-rate vaudeville variety . . . but a Grade A show.” Fowler introduced the Grand Central Red Cap Orchestra, “the jazziest aggregation of wind and brass acrobats this side of Nome.”⁵⁷

And downtown in Little Italy, the Red Cap Orchestra performed regularly at the annual Feast of San Gennaro. Amid the neighborhood’s colorful-bunting-clad tenement fire escapes and displays of sacred effigies, the black musicians from Grand Central held sway on a makeshift bandstand. They “blare[d] the familiar notes of a tuneful Italian opera,” a 1932 New York guidebook noted, enlightening the sightseer that “for some reason, the darky porters and redcaps have a monopoly on fiesta music.”⁵⁸ Notwithstanding the racial slur, it’s fair to speculate that the band’s appearances were influenced by Wesley, who had a considerable foothold in Little Italy. Another writer hailed their sets as “plenty Harlem at times!”⁵⁹

But while such gigs gave the musicians some extra income, they didn’t preclude their regular duties at the station. Passing through Grand Central early one morning, writer James Aswell was puzzled to come upon a group of Red Caps moving instrument cases around. A newsstand attendant explained that they were musicians and had been playing all night at an Italian event on Mulberry Street: “Now they are going to put their instruments away and work here all day.”⁶⁰

Of course, musical diversions coincided with the Red Caps’ interest in sports. As segregation was the norm in baseball, basketball, football, and other organized athletics, tennis was no different. In 1916 some black tennis players, rebuffed by the whites-only policy of the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA), formed the American Tennis Association (ATA). In 1929 the white organization barred two young black players from its National Junior Indoor Tennis Tournament. The players, Reginald Weir and Gerald L. Norman, Jr.—of the City College and Flushing High School teams, respectively—had already paid their entrance fees before the USLTA head explicitly stated that it did not permit colored players in national tennis tournaments.

The NAACP protested. On Christmas Eve, associate secretary Robert W. Bagnall wrote to Edward Moss of the USLTA: “The irony of the present situation will become more pointed when it is known that Mr. Norman [Sr.] is himself tennis coach at the Bryant High School [in Long Island City] and that some of the white boys he has coached have been admitted and will play in the tournament.” Bagnall said he would give copies of this letter to the press “in order that the question of the color and race bar in a sport supposed to draw from the best . . . may be made a matter of open and public discussion.”⁶¹

Moss dug in his heels:

December 26, 1929

Dear Sir:

Answering your letter of December 24, the policy of the United States Lawn Tennis Association has been to decline the entry of colored players in our Championships.

In pursuing this policy we make no reflection upon the colored race, but we believe that as a practical matter, the present method of separate Associations for the administration of the affairs and Championships of colored and white players should be continued.

Yours sincerely,

E. B. Moss

Executive Secretary⁶²

The ATA president at the time was Dr. D. Ivison Hoage, who could not avoid seeing the “reflection upon the colored race” in this contentious volleying. Hoage was also the ATA’s tournament organizer. Esteemed as an “implacable, hard-boiled, just” referee, he was the venerable arbiter of state opens and nationals since time immemorial—admired as “frequently amusing, occasionally alarming, always incisive.”⁶³

The ATA would hold its national championship tournament during the week of August 17–22, 1931, on the clay courts of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama—its first tournament in the Deep South. One of the most highly anticipated events was the intercollegiate championship match between Norman Jr. (the New Yorkers’ favorite), now studying at Howard University, and Tuskegee’s Nathaniel Jackson. Norman was the current champion of the Colored Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA, founded in 1912), and Jackson of the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association (SIAA, founded in 1913).⁶⁴ Dr. Hoage wanted to offer a prize that exalted their tennis prowess as well as their academic ambition.

And that was when he looked up Williams. Hoage and Williams were old friends for twenty-five years—they had been neighbors back on West 134th Street and now on Strivers’ Row. In the first week of August 1930, Chief Williams called together a few of his Red Cap captains to think of a possible prize. They pitched in $800 to buy a sterling silver “loving cup” that stood about two feet tall, perched on a curved wooden base. Known as the Williams Cup, it would become the highest in value and stature of all the ATA trophies. The very name of the prize for the intercollegiate champion reflected the unconventional range of Chief Williams’s influence. The winner’s college would hold the trophy for the ensuing year.

Arthur E. Francis, president of the New York Tennis Association, wrote in his sports column: “This cup was bestowed as a permanent symbol to the growth and development of tennis as a competitive sport among our group in the colleges, and through Chief James Williams and his fellow porters of the Grand Central Station in New York, the cup was bought and presented through Dr. Hoage to the American Tennis Association.”⁶⁵

Francis emphasized the importance of the August 1931 intercollegiate championship match. It revealed black colleges as the setting for advancing young black talent in the American tennis world. Tuskegee’s nineteen-year-old Nathaniel Jackson pointed up an increasing trend of college youngsters to assume the forefront of Negro tennis. For such young talent, Francis wrote, the Williams Cup was “favorable with any trophy of the white race for that event.”⁶⁶

A busload of New York tennis celebrities, including Francis and Hoage (who carried the Williams Cup), departed on August 13 for Tuskegee. Williams didn’t join them, as the Red Cap Orchestra had played for a moonlight sail up the Hudson River the night before.

Two summers later, at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, athletic director Charles H. Williams spoke effusively about how the Williams Cup had inspirited the ATA’s mission to promote the formation of tennis clubs in historically black colleges nationwide. “James Williams of New York City was instrumental in getting the employees of the New York Central Railroad to give the trophy,” he said.⁶⁷ For nearly three more decades the Williams Cup remained a symbol of wholesome tennis competition, while advancing the game’s popularity in middle-class black recreational and social life. Duly inspired, the Chief’s younger daughter Kay had a tennis pass for the city parks in the 1940s, and she may have met her husband Hal on the courts.

In 1937, Tuskegee University president Dr. Frederick Douglass Patterson presented student champion Ernest McCampbell with the esteemed Williams Cup trophy, the American Tennis Association’s top prize for three decades from the Grand Central Red Caps. Tuskegee University Archives.

As with tennis, the bridge world of card players was racially segregated. Black bridge enthusiasts across the country had been enjoying the recreation just as long as their tennis-loving friends and were often one and the same. Chief Williams himself led the “crack contract bridge team of the Terminal,”⁶⁸ and Florence Battle hosted at least one “ladies-only” bridge party on Strivers’ Row (that the Chief, Jesse, and other husbands playfully “crashed” with food). It was perhaps inevitable that the ATA would be instrumental in fostering a black bridge league.

In 1932, world-renowned bridge guru Ely Culbertson observed that “the tremendous popularity of bridge is due almost entirely to American and English women.”⁶⁹ He extended an uncommon invitation to the Mu-So-Lit Club, a black social association in Washington, D.C., to take part in a countrywide American Bridge Olympic tournament that October. The card maven was no doubt aware that numerous black players across the country had qualified as certified teachers of his own rigorous Culbertson contract bridge system. That same year a white woman in Lynchburg, Virginia, complained indignantly upon discovering he had recommended a local black woman as her instructor. Culbertson, a Russian Jewish immigrant, reportedly replied: “Dear Madam, Contract Bridge knows no color line.”⁷⁰

Culbertson’s view proved to be more idealistic than popular: black bridge players instinctively formed their own national league. In August 1933 the American Bridge Association (ABA) held its first national championships to coincide with the ATA’s national tennis championships in Hampton, Virginia. The venue was the Bay Shore Hotel ballroom at Buckroe Beach, a tidewater neighborhood on Chesapeake Bay. The elaborate preparations included an awards ceremony: one top honor was Culbertson’s silver Bridge World trophy, named for the magazine he had founded, offered as an incentive to winners in the contract bridge division.⁷¹

The Chief’s friends Jesse and Florence Battle played in that first ABA “nationals.” Following the example of his Williams Cup for tennis, they sponsored the silver Battle Trophy, “the gift of Lieutenant and Mrs. Samuel J. Battle,” to go to the auction bridge winners.⁷² The ABA also held elections at that same session, at which Jesse Battle was voted a league officer.⁷³

Despite his interest in both activities, personal events unfortunately made the court and card tournaments untimely for Chief Williams to attend.