American Fun (28 page)

By age twenty-two he was already known as the dance-band leader with the loudest horn in town. His horn invited wild hyperbole—people said it could be heard blocks away, even twenty miles away, and his folk-hero status increased in proportion. The only record Bolden ever made has been lost, but testimonies to his uncanny musical voice, and his idiosyncratic hooks and quirks, fill the pages of early jazz history. More generally, they survive in the work of his descendants:
King Oliver,
Sidney Bechet,
Bix Beiderbecke,
Louis Armstrong. What mattered most to
this genial young fellow, who chatted in barbershops and caroused in bars and maintained an extramarital “
harem” of prostitutes and brawling lovers, was the life of his music down among the dancers. Crushing opponents in nightly cutting contests; conning their hits overnight and blasting them back better; hearing and repeating the sounds of the people and tailoring syncopation to the dancers’ needs, Bolden rose to fame—albeit local fame—right alongside the cakewalk craze. But Bolden had more of the Williams in him than the Walker. Absorbing the dance floor (not the parade), he improvised a brass-based
ragtime that sparked “
keen rivalry” among its dance members, taunted and tickled its demanding audience, and maximized the dancers’ fun.

Bolden had some Barnum in him, too. He rolled his bandwagon around the neighborhoods, spreading his trademark with his loud, crackling horn—but the real local Barnum was named
Buddy Bottley. Bottley was an enterprising balloon-ride operator who helped to manage Lincoln Park (the turn-of-the-century
Congo Square where Bolden’s band often performed) and staged competitions among Bolden’s audience members. His carny ride fell out of favor when the crowd’s “
best dancer,” “a cute little girl named
Annie Jones,” went up in his balloon and didn’t return for a week, having been found in a swamp thirty miles away by “some Cajun trappers.” Bottley and Bolden were “
bosom buddies,” two conspiring “lady killers” who dressed “like wealthy Southern gentlemen,” yet Bolden was more in the line of
Zab Hayward (kicking up
Thayer’s tavern floor) and Alfred Doten (touring the California gold fields with his banjo, fiddle, and obstreperous spirits). Steeped in folk culture, in love with the crowd, King Bolden was the avatar of old King Charles—because he was also a rebel. Jazz w
as disreputable, lowdown, and dirty, and its practitioners wore their notoriety with pride. His honky-tonk music was
so
low down that it barely reached the bass clef of New Orleans’s social scale. It was the scourge of the good
Creole society that disowned Ferdinand LaMothe—the great ragtime pianist known as Jelly Roll Morton—for descending into Bolden’s demimonde.

Upon the request of Lincoln Park’s proprietor, Buddy’s band could “
keep it clean” for the “real high class, respectable, influential, colored people who would be having an affair in the main dance hall.” But Bolden’s
fan base, whom he called his “Chillun”—“a bunch of youngsters … great dancers … fanatics,” as Bottley’s brother recalled—preferred it low and dirty. Case in point was his signature number, “Funky Butt.” This ribald little tune, and the dance it inspired, was a dynamite cap of American fun: loud, rude, angular,
sensual
. The song was born one hot, sticky night when the band was playing Odd Fellows Hall. Willie Cornish, the trombonist, heard Bolden crack an impolite joke about the foul,
nasty
air. He spun the joke into a song that thrilled his sporting set:

Bolden’s jazz headquarters, the Union Sons Hall on Perdido Street, soon became known as Funky Butt Hall, and the song itself became a mixing bowl for the people’s defiant wit and slang. Bolden legendarily would change its lyrics “on the spot,” improvising as always to suit the crowd’s needs. The versions ranged from the political to the profane. Jelly Roll Morton’s famous version softened the refrain—“You’re nasty, you’re dirty, take it away”—but it also took a swipe at the local judge who had convicted Bolden’s various band members for the occasional misdemeanor. The Funky Butt’s bard was the banjo player,
Lorenzo Staulz, a wit, rhymester, and dirty-dozens maestro who “
had the reputation of being the nastiest talking man in the history of New Orleans.” Trombonist Frankie “
Dusen and Bolden used to get a great big happy feeling when Lorenzo sang. He could sing ‘Funky Butt’ for an hour … because he would sing about all the notoriety whores, pimps, madams and even about the [white] policemen at the door.” Duke Bottley recalled one especially hazardous verse:

Sidney Bechet, who started out in Bolden’s original
Eagle Band, recalled: “
The police put you in jail if they heard you singing that song.”

“Funky Butt” was the young black rebels’ anthem, and the dance it inspired—exaggerating the city’s earliest hip-grinding techniques—waved its unapologetic essence in the face of high New Orleans society. The funky butt
flouted
couth. Not at all orderly like the quadrilles and schottisches that sometimes shared the same dance floor; not proud and prancing like its fraternal
cakewalk, the funky butt was purely a product of the folk—their street sounds (and smells), their vulgar jokes, and their ancestors’ unassailable music. It enjoyed an easy place among other pelvis-driven dances that were fashioned by African Americans; as the blues musician
Coot Grant recalled, these included “the Fanny Bump, Buzzard Lope, Fish Tail, Eagle Rock, Itch, Shimmy, Squat, Grind, Mooche … and a million others.” But when Grant was asked to put the funky butt into words, she “
hesitated and then explained: ‘Well, you know the women sometimes pulled up their dresses to show their petticoats—fine linen with crocheted edges—and that’s what happened with the Funky Butt.’ ” She went on to describe the dancing of “a tall, powerful woman” named Sue “who worked in the mills pulling coke from a furnace—a man’s job,” saying: “As soon as she got high and happy, that’s what she’d do, pulling up her skirts and grinding her rear like an alligator crawling up a bank.”

Bolden’s fame crumbled in 1906, when he began to show symptoms of “
dementia praecox, paranoid type”; he would spend the next quarter century in a mental hospital. While his musical contributions to early jazz are faint (he played mostly in B flat, and his riffs were just hints at the sophistication to come), his groundbreaking, ground-
shaking
take on ragtime, tailored to the whims of unbridled dancers, whipped up a genuinely
popular
culture that would define America’s funnest era.

IN THE FINAL WEEKS
of 1924, writer and
New York Times
editor
Robert L. Duffus welcomed America’s “Age of Play.” Writing for
The Independent,
he attributed Roaring Twenties joie de vivre to factors long since held commonplace: shorter workdays, longer vacations, the boredom of factory work, and the chance to make more money while exerting less energy. Duffus, who in college had been the houseboy for
Thorstein Veblen, eminent theorist of the “
leisure class” and “conspicuous
consumption,” ran through a list of largely commercial diversions that pleased the primed and ready nation: contact sports, “
recreation centers,” playgrounds, movies, phonographs, “cheap automobiles,” summer camps, et cetera. Praising Americans for altering their “ancient attitude,” he argued, with a nod to current race theories, that their seeming shift from the “unceasing industry” of the “temperate zones” to the noncompetitive ease of “tropical and subtropical areas” was liberating them from the chains of conservatism and letting them get “nearer a frank and full enjoyment of life than any people that ever lived.” At the heart of his argument, he pleaded with his readers to preserve what was “sacred” in all of this pleasure:

Duffus’s appeal for a constructive response to the nation’s sudden rush for enjoyment (“by guiding, not by restraining”) placed him in a demilitarized zone of the Jazz Age culture wars, a tiny zone indeed. His vague reference to play’s “evils” and “[un]wholesome” pleasures didn’t exactly put him in William Bradford’s old camp, the army of preachers and vice-squad bullies whose mission in the 1920s was to bomb America back to
Plymouth Plantation. Nor, however, did his clarion call to America’s “right to play” show him swinging drunk around the May-pole with the flappers, sharpers, and Lindy Hoppers who reveled in their own exciting permission. He wasn’t overjoyed to live in what has been called “
the Golden Age of the
roller coasters”; to him,
George C. Tilyou’s chutes and wheels looked like the flip side of factory work. Nevertheless, in his socially reforming way, Duffus admired fun—not so much P. T. Barnum’s fun, but the stuff the people came up with on their own. In it—“the spirit of play”—he saw the perfection of liberty. “The right to play,” he wrote, “is the final clause in the charter of democracy. The people are king—
et le roi s’amuse.
”

Duffus made a charming case, but in retrospect his thoughts on play and democracy may have been too timid. In the 1920s, the struggle against cops, parents, censors, and even well-meaning reformers like himself was built right into the people’s fun—certainly their most dangerous and democratizing fun. Essentially edgy, 1920s fun was had
in reaction
to cops, vice squads, racists—and especially to that popular villain,
the “Puritan,” who was widely viewed, in
Frederick J. Hoffman’s terms, as the embodiment of Freudian “repression,” “a man ignorant and rudely affirmative, who forced his religion and its strait-laced moral code upon a growing country.” But this villain also reflected a national reality, the long legacy of social, political, and legal institutions that anxiously defended what
Stanley Coben calls the “
Victorian character” in 1920s America: feminine domesticity, patriarchal manliness, Protestant faith, and white supremacy. If
Prohibition was the tallest monument to this “character,” then members of the Ku Klux Klan, which was gaining political dominance in Indiana and elsewhere, were its most vicious “guardians.”

Caricature or not, this would-be “Puritan” became the fall guy for
intellectuals, bohemians,
flappers, minorities, homosexuals, and other outsiders who aimed to liberate their nation and—as is the subject of the following three chapters—its libido through unapologetically liberal pleasure. Even when their fun was outrageously silly—flagpole sitting, goldfish swallowing, utterly fluffy and superfluous slang—Americans flicked a tooth at the modern severity of pragmatism and professionalism. And rolled their eyes at squares like Duffus. The “guiding” he proposed—who needed it? The people were happy guiding themselves.

But for this reason the Jazz Age
did
advance democracy—widen it, energize it,
modernize
it. If
Gilded Age entertainments, as we have seen, were designed to separate and segregate the people, then many of the risky new Jazz Age amusements, with which the culture industry struggled to keep up, did just the opposite. In the tradition of
Buddy Bolden’s Funky Butt Hall, and in their illegal and unregulated hideouts from Prohibition, the people engineered new pleasures of their own that not only fostered class and race mixing (in an otherwise politically volatile age), but also, most radically, gave new social power to many race and gender minorities who managed to have more fun than the majority.
The people’s fun, in the 1920s, may indeed have been “the final clause in the charter of democracy.” In the spirit of Merry Mount and the
Pinkster Days, though now on a national scale, Jazz Age fun allowed average Americans to revel in their two basic freedoms at once—their individuality
and
their community membership.

Duffus was one of countless contemporaries to debate the worth of fun. This discourse itself was quite new,
modern
. In earlier eras, “fun” was treated as the ineffectual aside to pressing political and social issues.
Jack Tar’s pranks were instruments of revolution; African-American festivals and balls were quaint displays of primitivism; public drunkenness was the bugbear of reformers. In the 1920s, however, fun qua fun advanced to the forefront as either proof positive of the great American spirit or a warning of civilization’s decline. Its presence was too great to be dismissed. It was also just too interesting. The voices in this debate were varied and forceful, and they addressed the subject in every medium. Duffus,
Walter Lippmann,
Constance Rourke,
Max Eastman, and countless other intellectuals parsed, debated, and defended the value of fun. Preachers and lawmakers argued for and against it.
Newspapers and magazines bulged with the subject and reveled in its culture wars.
H. L. Mencken, the decade’s most jaundiced culture critic, assessed his home state of
Maryland’s rage for fun as a dismal reaction against both a “
stiffening, almost a deadening in” moral and political “manners.” In such an overregulated society, he argued, “To be happy takes on the character of the illicit: it is jazz, spooning on the back seat, the Follies, dancing without corsets, wood alcohol.” He blamed his contemporaries’ “almost complete incapacity for innocent joy” on antics that to twenty-first-century Americans look exceedingly joyful and innocent, if also quaintly roaring.

Those who got closest and most embroiled in fun’s details were the composers, musicians, novelists, poets, playwrights, comedians, filmmakers, actors, and painters who animated popular, pleasurable rebellion and tried to understand its social power. Down among the funmakers themselves—the dancers, drinkers, pranksters, and jokers who animated the “age of play”—were cultural leaders and innovators, especially young ones, who recognized fun as the great American difference and worked
to elevate its dignity.
Harlem’s most brilliant “
New Negroes” saw fun as a mark of racial pride. America’s most daring “
New Women” saw fun as a mode of liberation. Stars of both groups wrote poems, plays, stories, and songs that explored the risky pleasures of American rebellion. Jazz Age fun wasn’t as simple as it looked, and as these rebels’ works revealed (by slowing their era down to a vivid freeze-frame), the personal costs of having fun reflect the dangers of democracy itself.