Dixieland Quotes

I love the sounds of the French Quarter on mild nights…laughter, chatter, gaiety, Dixieland jazz drifting out of open doors, rock music pounding somewhere—an eternal carouse.

Like the New Orleans tradition that preceded it, and the Swing Era offerings that followed it, Chicago jazz was not just the music of a time and place, but also a timeless style of performance - and for its exponents, very much a way of life - one that continues to reverberate to this day in the works of countless Dixieland and traditional jazz bands around the world. For many listeners, the Chicago style remains nothing less than the quintessential sound of jazz.

Editor Maxwell Perkins had an eye for prose. Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were among the writers he had ushered through the publishing process at Charles Scribner’s Sons. Perkins took what was originally Wolfe’s 294,000-word, door-stopping tome and pared it down . . . to a still-whopping 223,000 (626 pages). The result was Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe’s novel about life in the mountain town of “Altamont” and the goings-on at a boardinghouse called “Dixieland.” His mellifluous sentences poured one over another, describing in sumptuous detail many a barely veiled reference to Wolfe’s hometown. Upon publication, Asheville’s families tore through the book looking for versions of themselves.

While Dixieland men may have struggled with a language inferiority complex, the opposite is true of Southern women. We’ve always known our accent is an asset, a special trait that makes us stand out from our Northern peers in all the best ways. For one thing, men can’t resist it. Our slow, musical speech drips with charm, and with the implied delights of a long, slow afternoon sipping home-brewed tea on the back porch. In educated circles, Southern speech is considered aristocratic, and for good reason: it is far closer linguistically to the Queen’s English than any other American accent. Scottish, Irish, and rural English formed the basis of our language years ago, and the accent has held strong ever since. In the poor hill country there haven’t been many other linguistic influences, and in Charleston you’d be hard pressed to tell a British tourist from a native. In the Delta of Mississippi and Louisiana, the mixture of French, West Indian, and Southern formed two dialects--Cajun and Creole--that in some places are far more like French than English.

banjo. A plucked, fretted lute where a thin skin diaphragm is stretched over a circular metal frame amplifying the sound of the strings. The instrument is believed to have evolved from various African and African-American prototypes. Four- and 5-stringed versions of the banjo are popular, each associated with specific music genres; the 5-stringed banjo, plucked and strummed with the fingers, is associated with Appalachian, old-time and bluegrass music, while the four-stringed versions (both the “plectrum” banjo, which is an identical 22-fret banjo, just like the 5-string instrument but without the fifth string and played with a plectrum, and the tenor banjo which has fewer frets [17 or 19], a shorter neck, is tuned in fifths and is played with a plectrum) is associated with vaudeville, Dixieland jazz, ragtime and swing, as well as Irish folk and traditional music. The first Irish banjo player to record commercially was James Wheeler, in the U.S. in 1916, for the Columbia label; as part of The Flanagan Brothers duo, Mick Flanagan recorded during the 1920s and 1930s as did others in the various dance bands popular in the U.S. at the time. Neil Nolan, a Boston-based banjo player originally from Prince Edward Island, recorded with Dan Sullivan’s Shamrock Band; the collaboration with Sullivan led to him also being included in the line-up for the Caledonia and Columbia Scotch Bands, alongside Cape Breton fiddlers; these were recorded for 78s in 1928. In the 1930s The Inverness Serenaders also included a banjo player (Paul Aucoin). While the instrument was not widely used in Cape Breton, a few notable players were Packie Haley and Nellie Coakley, who were involved in the Northside Irish tradition of the 1920s and 1930s; Ed MacGillivray played banjo with Tena Campbell; and the Iona area had some banjo players, such as the “Lighthouse” MacLeans. The banjo was well known in Cape Breton’s old-time tradition, especially in the 1960s, but was not really introduced to the Cape Breton fiddle scene until the 1970s when Paul Cranford, a 6-string banjo player, arrived from Toronto. He has since replaced the banjo with fiddle. A few fiddlers have dabbled with the instrument but it has had no major presence within the tradition.

A family friend had what I hear was the mother of all cool funerals. He died in his seventies and was a super-fun, super-funny guy. His funeral reflected that. Family and friends told their hilarious Vince stories, salted with the bad Vince jokes he used to tell. He was part of a band (I believe it was some sort of Dixieland affair) and they played at the gathering. There were many shenanigans. There was some sadness and there were some tears, but by and large the service reflected him and his legacy. The focus was on his life, not his death. And his life was awesome -- his deeds and influence and stories still very much alive.

He was born Feb. 10, 1893, in New York’s Lower East Side. At 17 he learned to play the piano, beginning his musical career in the beer gardens of old Coney Island, picking out tunes for $25 a week. In Terry Walsh’s club he played while a waiter named Eddie Cantor sang. By 1916 he had assembled a small Dixieland combo for the Club Alamo in Harlem. There he met Eddie Jackson, who was to become his partner. In 1923 he and Jackson opened the Club Durant and acquired a third partner, Lou Clayton. The club thrived, but the partners ran afoul of the law, and the business was closed by Prohibition agents. But Clayton, Jackson, and Durante arrived on Broadway in 1928.