Doc: The Story of a Birmingham Jazz Man

Doc: The Story of a Birmingham Jazz Man

Doc: The Story of a Birmingham Jazz Man

Doc: The Story of a Birmingham Jazz Man

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Overview

Autobiography of jazz elder statesman Frank “Doc” Adams, highlighting his role in Birmingham, Alabama’s, historic jazz scene and tracing his personal adventure that parallels, in many ways, the story and spirit of jazz itself.

Doc tells the story of an accomplished jazz master, from his musical apprenticeship under John T. “Fess” Whatley and his time touring with Sun Ra and Duke Ellington to his own inspiring work as an educator and bandleader.

Central to this narrative is the often-overlooked story of Birmingham’s unique jazz tradition and community. From the very beginnings of jazz, Birmingham was home to an active network of jazz practitioners and a remarkable system of jazz apprenticeship rooted in the city’s segregated schools. Birmingham musicians spread across the country to populate the sidelines of the nation’s bestknown bands. Local musicians, like Erskine Hawkins and members of his celebrated orchestra, returned home heroes. Frank “Doc” Adams explores, through first-hand experience, the history of this community, introducing readers to a large and colorful cast of characters—including “Fess” Whatley, the legendary “maker of musicians” who trained legions of Birmingham players and made a significant mark on the larger history of jazz. Adams’s interactions with the young Sun Ra, meanwhile, reveal life-changing lessons from one of American music’s most innovative personalities.

Along the way, Adams reflects on his notable family, including his father, Oscar, editor of the Birmingham Reporter and an outspoken civic leader in the African American community, and Adams’s brother, Oscar Jr., who would become Alabama’s first black supreme court justice. Adams’s story offers a valuable window into the world of Birmingham’s black middle class in the days before the civil rights movement and integration. Throughout, Adams demonstrates the ways in which jazz professionalism became a source of pride within this community, and he offers his thoughts on the continued relevance of jazz education in the twenty-first century.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780817386467
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Publication date: 08/25/2012
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 299
File size: 6 MB

About the Author

Dr. Frank “Doc” Adams (1928–2014) served Birmingham City Schools for more than forty years, both as a band director and as the district’s supervisor of music. For his contributions to Alabama jazz, he was a charter inductee, in 1978, to the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame.
 
Burgin Mathews is a writer and teacher who has written on the music of the American South. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama.

Read an Excerpt

DOC

THE STORY OF A BIRMINGHAM JAZZ MAN
By FRANK "DOC" ADAMS BURGIN MATHEWS

The University of Alabama Press

Copyright © 2012 The University of Alabama Press
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-1780-5


Chapter One

Family

I was born on Groundhog's Day, February the second, 1928—I think that makes me eighty-three. I was fortunate enough to be born into a family where my dad, Oscar W Adams, owned his own newspaper, The Birmingham Reporter, and wrote for the Birmingham News—its hard to believe—and at one time he was part-owner of the Birmingham Black Barons, when Satchel Paige was pitching. He'd carry me everywhere he would go. And he'd say, "When you go to the bank"—that was unheard of then, a little fellow going to the bank—"when you go in, you tip your hat. And when you ride the elevator, if a ladys on there, you take your hat off." Said that "if you're walking with a lady"—see, I remember these things—"if you're walking with a lady, you always walk on the outside, and that's to protect her." He was teaching me all kinds of lessons.

He said one day: "Because you are small, going to the post office, someone may stop you. And if they do that, you walk up to them." He said, "I don't care what color they are: they could be black, white, or blue." Said, "Grab their hand, and shake their hand, and say, 'I'm Frank Adams!' Look them in the face and don't blink." He'd say, "Squeeze their hand. They'll tell you who they are. If not, they'll let you go, and they'll go about their business—they're not worth knowing." I always think about that.

Both of my parents had college degrees; that was something unusual at that time, in the black community. My mother finished Talladega College, and Dad finished Alabama A&M College in Huntsville. As far as music was concerned, my brother, Oscar, and I were just beginning to play, and my dad would say: "I know music. I know all about music." He said, "I played music with W C. Handy, the Father of the Blues, at A&M College." But the thing that got us, he said: "I played the slide trambone." Mybrother and I said, "Tram-bone?" And Daddy knows music?"

The first thing I really remember is picking up my brother's clarinet. He was already in the elementary school band. My brother, Oscar, later became a Supreme Court justice-the first black Supreme Court justice in Alabama. I picked his horn up off the bed one day and puffed up my jaws and made a terrible sound. He snatched that horn away from me and said, "Roll your lip back! Don't puff out your jaws like that—and blow easy!"

That was my first music lesson. The first note I made was a G—a little, soft note. And that started me on my career in playing. When I got to the elementary school, I could already play everything the band played, because I lived about a block away from the school and I could hear them practice. Id pick up the instrument and try to find the note.

One Easter—I always think about this when Easter comes around—Dad said, "You boys are going to play 'The Old Rugged Cross' in Sunday school." It was just about three weeks away, and my mother panicked because she knew that we didn't even know, hardly, how to put the horns together; we'd just started. She said, "They can't do that—that's going to be so humiliating. Why would you let those boys go up there and embarrass themselves like that, Oscar?"

He said, "They're going to do it. So don't worm" Said, "I want it as a duet."

"How could they play it? They don't even know the melody of "The Old Rugged Cross'!"

"They'll do it"

So we packed up and went to the church, the Metropolitan A.M.E. Zion Church, and went down to the basement. There was a lady by the name of Elmonia B. Nix, I never will forget it. The piano was one of those pianos that, if you struck it hard, you'd think a rat would jump out of it. It was awful. It was out of tune and all of it; the keys were tarnished where someone had been pounding on them and knocked the ivory off—I know you've seen pianos like that, too. Our instruments had all kinds of rubber bands around them to hold them together. We went down there and worked for about forty-five minutes. She'd say, "Put your finger down there; put your finger up here ..." And she wouldn't know a note if it had an overcoat on—and walked up and said, "I'm a note!" But there we were, and we didn't know any better.

We came out of there, and believe it or not, we could play "The Old Rugged Cross" as a duet.

That Sunday, Easter morning, our dad announced—because he was the superintendent of Sunday school for twenty-some-odd years, twenty-seven years—he said: "Oscar and Frank are going to play 'The Old Rugged Cross."'Man, we stood up there. We looked at each other. My mother was just cringing. But Miss Elmonia Nix played a few chords, and we struck into "Old Rugged Cross"—we played it so well, the church stood up and gave us a standing ovation. And that sort of hooked me on music.

Mybrother, Oscar, was the one thatwas always so smart. The whole family, cousins and all, realized that at an early age: they realized that Oscar was just different. He got a couple of double promotions—you could double-promote, for instance, from the third grade to the fifth, if your grades were that good—and he got double-promoted twice. That made him finish elementary school very early. Of course, I didn't get any double promotions.

One day they were talking about it in the living room. They were saying, "Oscar is doing so well in school, he just catches on." They came up to me—I wasn't doing bad, but I was average. And they said, "We're concerned about Frank. He seems to not be getting things as quickly as he should." My grandmother was listening. And I was listening.

My grandmother—Mrs. Linette Eaton—was a magnificent person; I loved her so much. I loved Mother, too, but Grandma ... if you've got a good grandmother, man, you've got the best thing in the world going for you. Because Grandmother will forgive, when nobody else will forgive.

My grandmother said, "You know, Frank's all right. But," she said, "everybody can't be a lawyer, or a teacher, or a doctor. We've always got to have people to clean the streets."

I heard that—man, I went back to school and improved my grades. I could see myself cleaning the streets. So it made a difference: I started trying to study, trying to do a little better. I think it really changed my way of thinking about things.

Grandmother was probably the wisest person in our family, because of her age and experiences. She didn't have the formal education that my mom had or my dad had. She was less educated, but she had a way of doing things that was different. She insisted that I memorize everything. I can still remember poems that I was taught back there: Grandma would have you recite the words to get the diction and the pronunciation right, but it wasn't yours until you remembered it. I'd stand and recite it, and at the end of it I'd bow.

My grandmother—who came up not too long after slavery—when I would do something good, she would say, "No ladder child could do better." That was a compliment. That was Grandma. When I got to Howard University, I started thinking, what does she mean, "no ladder child"? And I found out, that meant no mulatto child. No mulatto! That meant, in her mind, in her experiences, that the mulatto children always had more educational advantages than the black ones—but I had done so well, they couldn't have done any better! So in her mind was always the superiority of the mulatto: that was her measuring stick. Now, I couldn't argue with Grandma. She had lived longer; she had been through all of this; and she was of a complexion, really, that could classify her as a mulatto. There was no way in the world that you could talk to her or explain, "Mrs. Eaton, there's no difference." Her experiences were that, when she came up, the mulatto child just caught on to things better.

Really, my grandma was my best buddy. I think if I had gone to prison, Grandma would be the only one that would sit with me or get me out; the rest of them would say, "Too bad." Grandmother was the one who, when you were starving in college, would send you a basket of chicken. By the time it got to you, some of it would be rotten, but the guys would see that package from Birmingham in the post office—they'd come to your room and eat it all up. I remember the first time I saw these little M&Ms with the peanuts in them—when they first came out, Grandma sent me a little tray of them.

My grandmother worked for the Levys. They were people that owned lots of property, and she would work parties for them. My mama would go with her sometimes. On cold nights, say, two o'clock in the morning, when they would finish the job, they would wake us up-and you talk about the biggest shrimp in the world that they brought back, shrimp as big as your hand, and the oysters, and the caviar. There was no refrigeration, so they had to eat it then or it would spoil. You wouldn't know what you were waking up for, but your little tummy would be full when you went back to sleep.

I have a happy remembrance of that.

Another thing that changed my life: we had a big library. This was where Daddy kept all the books that he studied. He was always reading. He said—he would tell older people, and everybody—"If you hang around me, you'll get a college education." He would buy these encyclopedias, and he had all the Harvard Classics. One Christmas we were thinking we were getting some toys—other guys were getting skates—and here comes the express wagon that delivers the packages. This big box was sitting in the middle of the floor—we knew it was some goodies. But when he opened it up, it was The Life of Abraham Lincoln—in about twenty volumes! He had them all around the wall.

At that time, we had what we called the Blue Back Speller. And the Blue Back Speller didn't use all the phonics and techniques that we use now. You would spell a word like baker: B-A-K-E-R, baker. M-A-K-E-R, maker. F-A-K-E-R, faker. All those words would rhyme, and I'd read that Blue Back Speller-until they got to the word chrysanthemum, and the rhyming scheme was all over! I kept trying to spell it. Dad would come home, and he'd be in the library. He had a fireplace, and the fire would be crackling, and he'd sit down. I was struggling.

He'd say, "Listen, Frank" He'd point at me. "If you don't spell those words by next Wednesday, I'm going to whip you until your nose bleeds." Good God almighty. He wouldn't do it, but I didn't know that. I'd take the book to bed; to the restroom. And when I got ready to spell, I was in such an excited situation-I was so afraid-that water just started running out of my eyes. I started spelling the whole book.

"Boy!" he said, "Hush! About face! And get out of here!"

The only whipping I ever got was when I was much smaller—and it was a defining experience, which I remember today. My mom was holding me, and I bit my mother. God, I bit my mother. He snatched me off of her and took me, BAM, across that floor—little fellow! I can remember now the way the tile on the floor looked; it was a black and white tile. He took a strap and said, BAM, "Don't you ever do that!" No matter how much he cared for me, that was his wife. I was his child, but he whooped me like I was another man. It was brutal: he didn't try to kill me, but he swung me around and around and around. I learned then that you don't bite a woman—especially a man's wife.

He put some things in my head that, the way he put them, are still there.

One time, they were talking about dope: that some entertainer, somebody, was using "dope." That was real popular during the Harlem Renaissance—morphine and heroin, all that kind of stuff. Cab Calloway was coming through Birmingham, and somebody said he would keep cocaine in this handkerchief he had. And my daddy said—I remember, we had just seen a Dracula movie—"You don't want to be a dope fiend." That meant that you would grow these fangs, the way he said it—like Dracula.

"Dope fiend."

When I got to college, and the guys started passing around a reefer ... my daddy came out from somewhere: "Dope fiend!" I could see that vision! I'd start screaming: "Get that stuff away from me!" And theyd accept that—they'd say, "He's a nice player, man, but don't mention dope to him—he goes crazy."

The thing about my daddy was: early on, he established a whole culture for us. He really worked tirelessly as a student when he got to A&M, and when he finished there, he came to Birmingham and organized his paper. He got involved in things like the Black Barons and the Pythian Lodge—he was the Grand Chancellor, for a long time, of the Knights of Pythias. And he didn't mind spending money on worthwhile things—in fact, my mother said that two months before he died, he retired the mortgage on our home. He'd borrow it, he'd pay it back, he'd borrow it—but before he died, it was mortgage-free. He had paid it off and had enough insurance left for my brother to get his books for law school.

My dad was such a strong superintendent in the church that he became the endowment secretary for the A.M.E. Zion Church nationally. The endowment secretary would go and buy property to start new churches. One time we celebrated the fact that he had bought a spa in Hot Springs, Arkansas. That was a big investment for the church. They made money off that, and he built other churches. In the meantime he was writing this newspaper, The Birmingham Reporter—and for many years he also wrote the only article in the Birmingham News by a black. It was called "What Negroes Are Doing,' and he would tell about the different meetings that the blacks were having: lodge meetings and church funerals and all that kind of thing. A lot of people bought that newspaper just for that one column.

I remember going out to see the Black Barons, out at Rickwood Field. By him writing about it and having some interest in it, we had a seat right behind the pitcher's mound. That's when Satchel Paige was at his height of glory; he would call the whole infield in, and strike out the team. It was monotonous, really he'd come in and take out the Kansas City Monarchs or anybody else, one by one. He had that ball jumping up and down.

I watched it real carefully. Satchel's ball would go out here and come back in, and it was just impossible to hit it. I watched him throw a ball at Rickwood Field, on a projectile—a straight line, not going up and down, but straight across the field—and drop, right at the plate.

All that magic was going on when I was coming up.

My family came from, I guess, pretty good stock, because my great-grandfather served during Reconstruction: Frank Threatt was one of the congressmen in Alabama during Reconstruction.

One of the earliest experiences I had was going to Demopolis, Alabama—I must have been no more than about six or seven—for the funeral of Frank Threatt. He was buried in the Catholic cemetery, the first black buried in there, so I guess that was the beginning of integration. In later years my brother had in his law office a picture of Frank Threatt, and my daddy would always talk about him, because he was on my mother's side and that was like royalty.

I have a picture of my mother's father, Charles Browning Eaton. He was a bartender at a place called the Funkenstein in Demopolis. I have his watch here; it still runs. Look at the date on the inscription: 1892. This was probably about all he had. I've got it now, and I'll pass it down.

He died before he was thirty some of these skeletons are beautiful—he died at the Funkenstein bar at twenty-one years old. A young guy, he just drank himself to death. So when you go through these family histories, you're going to find all sorts of things. You've got the legislator on one hand, and then you've got these others. But they all have their significance.

My dad grew up in a little town called Gulf Crest. When I was touring with the army band, years later, I went down there and I couldn't find Gulf Crest; it's not on the map now. They worked in the turpentine fields, where you tapped the trees for turpentine. When he got ready to go to A&M College—he often told me this—he said that he went to his stepfather to tell him he was going. My daddy had seven stepfathers. His stepfather climbed down from this tree, and all he said was, "Good luck, son." When Daddy got to the Terminal Station, he had a valise—the only thing he had in it was maybe a change of clothes, he was so poor—and he went to buy some fruit. When he got back, somebody had stolen his bag. So when he got to A&M College, he had nowhere to go. They told him that he could work in the mess hall, and he said he slept on the floor. The next year, they made him the bursar: he was the one to purchase the food for the lunchroom. That's how he worked his way through A&M.

My mother, Ms. Ella Eaton, before she got married to my dad, was an elementary school teacher. At that time, if a woman got married, she had to give up her teaching. It was prohibited: no married women could teach school. That wasn't right, but that was the way it was. She always said, the first check she got from teaching school, she bought a piano with. Even though she wasn't a musician, she just wanted to have a piano in the house.

(Continues...)



Excerpted from DOC by FRANK "DOC" ADAMS BURGIN MATHEWS Copyright © 2012 by The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Family
The Church
Schoolboy
“Fess”
Outer Space
First Gigs and Birmingham Clubs
Summers on the Road
Howard
Bounce, Bebop, Blues, and Swing
Teacher
Bandleader
Friends and Mentors
Building a Family, Making Ends Meet
The Movement
Keeping the Spirit
“Doc”
Index

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