Kansas City Lightning (40 page)

At HarperCollins, my working team has included my editor, Calvert Morgan; his assistant, Kathleen Baumer; jacket designer Milan Bozic; managing editor Keith Hollaman; and publicist Gregory Henry. We were brought together by my agent, Georges Borchardt. I thank them all, and the many others not mentioned by name, who made such demands on my sensibility and intelligence.

Besides the in-person interviews noted in the Acknowledgments, other sources consulted in research for this book include:

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They All Played Ragtime,
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Publications, 1974.

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the FBI, 1933-34
. New York: Penguin, 2009.

Bushell, Garvin.
Jazz from the Beginning
. New York: Da Capo, 1998.

Calasso, Roberto.
La Folie Baudelaire
. Translated by Alastair McEwen. New
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_____.
Tiepolo Pink
. New York: Knopf, 2009.

Caplan, David.
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.
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Cardullo, Bert, ed.
Jean Renoir: Interviews
. University Press of Mississippi,
2005.

Crouch, Stanley.
Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz
. New York: Basic Civitas,
2007.

Dary, David.
Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries
. Lawrence, KA: University
of Kansas Press, 1989.

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Licensing, 2011.

Douglass, Frederick.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave
. New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2002.

Driggs, Frank, and Chuck Haddix,
Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop—A
History.
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Du Bois, W.E.B.
Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race
Concept
. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1983.

_____.
The Souls of Black Folk
. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1994.

Durham, Philip, and Jones, Everett L.
The Negro Cowboys
. Bison Books, 1983.

Ellison, Ralph.
Living with Music: Ralph Ellison's Jazz Writings
. Robert O'Meally,
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. Translated by Lydia Davis. New York:
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1939: Lost World of the Fair
. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.

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. New York: Penguin, 2001.

Giddins, Gary.
Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker.
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I Wonder as I Wander; An Autobiographical Journey.
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Johnson, Stephen.
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. Boston, MA:
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_____.
Conversations with the Blues
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_____.
Why New Orleans Matters
. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005.

Pierson, William Dillon.
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. David Emblidge, ed. Boston: Da Capo, 2001.

Russell, Ross.
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. New York: Da Capo, 1996.

_____.
Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest
. New York: Da Capo, 1973.

Smith, Willie “The Lion,”
Music on My Mind.
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. New York: W. W.
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Stearns, Marshall.
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Vail, Ken.
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. London: Castle
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Wallis, Michael.
Pretty Boy: The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd
. New
York: W. W. Norton, 2011.

Ward, Geoffrey.
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. New
York: Vintage, 2006.

Webb, Walter Prescott.
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Weil, Simone.
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. New York: New York Review Books, 2005.

Woideck, Carl.
The Charlie Parker Companion.
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_____.
Charlie Parker: His Music and Life
. Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 1998.

The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was made. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature on your e-book reader.

Page

5-36
: This account of Charlie Parker's arrival in New York with the Jay McShann Orchestra was reconstructed from interviews with McShann, Gene Ramey, Oliver Todd, John Tumoni, Panama Francis, and others. McShann's memory for dialogue was especially useful.

19
: The image of “knives being thrown at the audience” belongs to trumpeter
Johnny Carisi, as told to Loren Schoenberg.

19
: Charlie Parker's nickname “Bird,” short for “Yardbird,” is the subject of continuing and probably irresolvable speculation. Some believe that “yardbird” was slang for an unreliable person. Jay McShann told Robert Reisner that “yardbird” was the saxophonist's slang for chicken, one of his favorite meals. Once, McShann recalled, when the car Charlie was traveling in hit a chicken in the road, he shouted to the driver: “No, stop! Go back and pick up that yardbird.” The bird was brought back to the hotel and cooked up for the band. Reisner,
Bird,
150.

20-21
: Panama Francis and Gene Ramey, taped interviews, 1981.

22-27
: Ramey, McShann, Ralph Ellison, and John Tumoni in interviews and
in conversation.

27
: Oliver Todd, taped interview, 1981.

28
: Jay McShann, taped interview, 1981.

29
: Orville Minor, taped interview, 1981.

30-36
:
Ramey, Howard McGee, Jay McShann, taped interviews. Also drew on
conversation with
Chubby Jackson, the Blue Note, New York, NY.

37-42
: For background material on the Great Plains, I drew on Walter Prescott Webb,
The Great Plains
; William Loren Katz,
The Black West
; Philip Durham and
Everett L. Jones,
The Negro Cowboys
; and David Dary,
Cowboy Culture
.

42-43
: Rebecca Parker, taped interviews, 1981, and untaped conversations throughout the 1980s. Addie Parker told Robert Reisner that Charles Sr. “was playing and singing on the vaudeville stages around Kansas City” when they met. Reisner,
Bird,
159.

43
: Addie Parker's maiden name appears variously as “Boxley” or “Boxely,” or “Boyley,” “Bayley,” or “Bailey.” See Giddins,
Celebrating Bird,
26.

44
: Addie Parker to Robert Reisner, in
Bird,
159.

44-46
: Edward Reeves, taped interview, 1981.

47
: Addie Parker to Robert Reisner, in
Bird
, 163.

48-49
: Edward Reeves and Sterling Bryant, taped interviews, 1981.

50-51
: Edward Reeves, Rebecca Parker, Ophelia Ruffin Handy, taped interviews, 1981. Rebecca's age is difficult to pin down; to the author and other interviewers (see Giddins, 34) she gave her birth year as 1920, though Addie Parker told Robert Reisner that she was several years older (Reisner, 158ff).

52
: Ophelia Ruffin Handy, taped interview, 1981.

53
: Rebecca Parker, taped interview, 1981.

54-57
: Rebecca Parker, ibid.

60
: John Tumino, taped interview, 1981, and later conversations.

60-61
: Bushell,
Jazz from the Beginning
.

62
: Oliver,
Blues Fell This Morning,
5.

63
: Emma Bea Crouch, untaped conversations.

63
: Wallis, Michael.
Pretty Boy,
226.

64-65
: Edward Reeves, taped interview, 1981.

66-67
: Burroughs, John,
Public Enemies,
51ff; Gentry,
J. Edgar Hoover,
168ff.

68-70
: Rebecca Parker, taped interview, 1981

77
: Ophelia Ruffin and Rebecca Parker, taped interviews, 1981.

78
: The rumor may be apocryphal. See Caplan,
Questions of Possibility
, 9, 141–2.

80-81
: Ralph Ellison, untaped telephone conversation.

80-82
: Rebecca Parker, taped interview, 1981; detail of the forty-five-dollar alto comes from Addie Parker to Robert Reisner, in
Bird,
166.

83
:
Edward Mayfield, Jr. to Robert Reisner, in
Bird,
142; Julian Hamilton, taped interview, 1981.

85
: Harlan Leonard quoted in Russell, Ross,
Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest
.

87
: Marshall Stearns and Jim Maher, radio interview with Parker, 1953. Slightly differing transcriptions appear in Woideck,
The Charlie Parker Companion
, 93, and at http://www.plosin.com/milesAhead/BirdInterviews.html#500500. The interview itself is available on
New Bird — Rare Live Recordings & Interviews,
Swan Records/The Orchard, 1999/2010.

88
: Addie Parker to Robert Reisner, in
Bird,
162.

89-90
:
Fred Dooley, taped interview. 1981. Lawrence Keyes told Robert Reisner that his first band was called the Deans of Swing (
Bird
, 129). However, in
Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop—A History
, Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddix present contemporary evidence suggesting that, when Charlie Parker was a member in the summer of 1935, Keyes's original band was called the Ten Chords of Rhythm (or simply the Chords of Rhythm, after expanding to twelve pieces). Driggs and Haddix, 164-5.

91-92:
Ophelia Ruffin Handy, taped interview, 1981.

93-94
: Rebecca Parker and Oliver Todd, taped interviews, 1981.

100-1
: Billy Eckstine, conversations at Blue Note, New York, NY, 1985.

102-4
: This account draws on Ward,
Unforgivable Blackness
.

104
: Hughes,
Autobiography,
315.

104-09
: Rebecca Parker, taped interview, 1981.

105
: Charlie's union card, reproduced at http://www.birdlives.co.uk/index.php/adolescence.html, shows that he paid his first union dues just seven days before he proposed to Rebecca (though the Bird Lives site gives the number as four). The original marriage certificate, completed by hand (reproduced at http://www.birdlives.co.uk/index.php/adolescence.html), gives Charlie Parker's age as “under twenty-one” and Rebecca's as “over eighteen.” Giddins reproduces a 1961 typewritten
copy (
Celebrating Bird,
43).

114:
Jean Renoir, in
Jean Renoir: Interviews
, 164.

114:
Earl Coleman, taped interview, 1985.

116:
Hermann Broch, “The Style of the Mythical Age: On Rachel Bespaloff,” in
War and the Iliad
by Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, 109.