The Reach of James Reese Europe

As the 20th century began to roll, the most influential Black musician was James Reese Europe, who Eubie Blake referred to as The Martin Luther King of (Black) music. What irony that both were murdered at the age of 39. Many think of James Reese Europe as the proto-Duke EIlington. I cribbed most of the following information from the great Archeophone album, The Product Of Our Souls, which features eight amazing recordings from 1914 (unfortunately, the only eight recordings) of James Reese Europe’s Society Orchestra, along with recordings others made of his songs. Also featured on the album are a number of White musical aggregations, which enable one to see how advanced Europe was over his contemporaries.

Europe was born in Alabama and shortly after his birth, his parents moved to Washington DC, the family living just a few blocks east of the Capitol Building. Both parents were musical. His mother taught him the piano and how to read music. Shortly after they arrived, John Phillip Sousa moved onto their block. What are the odds? Europe took violin lessons from a member of the Sousa band, a grandson of Frederick Douglass. As a child, he exhibited a talent for organizing people, even the kids he played with. His sister Mary recalled, “Wherever he went, boys flocked around him. He swayed them willingly. He organized them into clubs with wonderful names and still more wonderful aims and purposes.” The prominent characteristic of a band leader, a gang leader, hell, any true leader, is that they’re the ones who are able to think up activities that others want to do. In 1903, Europe moved to New York City and almost immediately became involved with the Marshall Community, hanging with them and working as a piano and mandolin player. He got his “big break” as a composer and music director in staging shows with Bob Cole and the Johnson brothers between 1906 and 1909. Europe, in time, became the most effective advocate of the Marshall community’s twin promotions of Black culture and Black modernity. In 1910, Europe organized over 200 Black musicians into the Clef Club, a combined labor union and booking agency, the first organization of its kind in New York City. In 1912, he desegregated Carnegie Hall for the first time in history with the 150-member Clef Club Symphony Orchestra, trading the burnt cork of minstrelsy for tuxedo tails, earning unprecedented esteem for his Black musicians. It was indeed the best band in the land.

Vernon and Irene Castle, the 1910s darlings of the modern dance and styling, backed by James Reese Europe’s Society Orchestra, captivated high society and the rest of the nation and introduced modern dancing to the entire world. The demand for this sophisticated new sound and dancing went through the roof, and the Clef Club provided an ample number of Black musicians who could provide it, earning $20 to $35 a night when the average Black worker made a dollar a day. But the Society Orchestra came to an end when the US entered the “Great War” (the war we now call World War One). Europe enlisted. He wanted to be a machine gunner, which he became, teaching the Black soldiers he led how to operate the French machine guns they would be using, because they were assigned to a French unit. The US Army didn’t want “them” to work side-by-side with the White units.

But that same Army wanted Europe to lead the all-Black Harlem “Hell Fighters” Marching Band, which became one of the earliest bands to perform the modern sounds of jazz and blues for European audiences. The French were particularly electrified by the band’s ragged-up version of their national anthem. The Hell Fighters, who were named by the French, became the most decorated American battalion of the war. The Germans called them “blood-thirsty Blacks.” I have read elsewhere that a substantial proportion of Black soldiers were pleased about the opportunity to kill as many white men as they possibly could, as I’m sure I would have been, had I been one of them. Despite their acclaim and medals, most of those Black heroes were treated just as poorly upon returning home as they had been before they left––just as after the Second World War, Blacks were denied the free college education offered to every White veteran by the GI Bill Of Rights.

Not so with James Reese Europe, who was feted as a conquering hero, leading the Hell Fighters in a triumphant march from Washington Square Park to 142nd Street and Fifth Avenue in Harlem. Unlike White soldiers, Blacks had been denied permission to march that route before leaving for France. But that moment in the sun ended in 1919 when Europe was stabbed with a penknife by one of his drummers after the first performance following a final recording session with the Hell Fighters Band. The band had two drummers, Steve and Herbert Wright, AKA the Percussion Twins. Europe had chewed them both out for giggling and wandering around in the middle of the performance. Herbert became agitated, stabbing Europe with a penknife. It didn’t seem like a serious wound but soon James Reese Europe was dead. For the first time in New York City’s history, a Black man had a public funeral procession, up the same Fifth Avenue he and his Hell Fighters had marched just a few months before. The scale of the world’s musical loss cannot be calculated. What would the man have accomplished if he had lived his normal span, which probably would have been well into the rock ‘n’ roll era?

In many ways, 1919 was a year from hell. Five waves of the “Spanish Flu epidemic” took place between early 1918 and the spring of 1920, eventually infecting a third of the world’s population and killing 675,000 people in the US alone. There were a series of labor strikes throughout the country, including the Actor’s Equity strike of 1919 (multiply cited in the 100-song notes), most of which were eventually crushed despite worker need and ample justification for better work conditions. And when things did change, they got worse. For example, despite frozen wages, the price of food doubled from 1915 to 1920 and the cost of clothing tripled. The conservative Republican right clamped down in early 1920s, with the Supreme Court banning picketing, overturning child labor laws and abolishing minimum wage laws for women. Nonetheless, getting back to the radical music and dance introduced by the Castles and James Reese Europe, F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “…the Castles were doing a stiff-legged walk in the third act of The Sunshine Girl––a walk that gave the modern dance a social position and brought the nice girl into the café, thus beginning a profound revolution in American Life.” The ‘20s were beginning to roar.

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