Month: February 2025

Reopening the Scrapbook, Part Two

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

So, what’s in that scrapbook? There were a bunch of clippings from magazines or newspapers, sometimes pictures from them, sometimes articles, often about people in the entertainment business. A couple of letters. Ephemera from places, like business cards, tickets, a cocktail napkin. A few things related to Hollywood movies. A theater program. A restaurant menu. And photos, some posed “publicity shots” for musical combos or performers, some amateur snapshots. Even more than 40 years ago when I received the scrapbook, the pages these things were attached to were starting to fragment, and stuff that was likely attached to the dried-out paper was now loose inside the book, making it hard to leaf through. Alas, there were almost no captions or notations anywhere by the scrapbook’s maker. From clothing, cars, and dates on the clippings it was from the 1940s and 50s.

I think I tried when I received it in the 1980s to determine if it had a story, but I couldn’t really figure it out. Because a majority of faces in the scrapbook were Black, I thought it was safe to assume it was kept by someone who was also Black. On thinner grounds, I made another likelihood assumption: that it was made and kept by a woman. Somehow, it seemed feminine to me, and I could imagine someone fan-crazy about music collating this book. But there was a lot of miscellany to it too. One plurality thread seemed to be in the entertainers’ pictures and clips: a band that called itself The Cats and the Fiddle.

Cats and the Fiddle Collage

Stuff from the crumbling scrapbook that I’ll be examining this month.

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I’d never heard of them, and back in the pre-Internet age it wasn’t easy to find out about them. In the pictures they were an all-Black group in sharp suits. The “fiddle” was the bass fiddle — a standup bass player* was in all the pictures of the band. The rest of the small combo were playing a range of fretted stringed instruments. I could see one of the guitars had just four strings, and I knew that was a tenor guitar, an instrument that otherwise looked like the acoustic guitar I was playing with Dave in our punk folk band then. I knew that it was developed to allow 4-string tenor banjo players to transition over to the guitar as the banjo faded out as a Jazz instrument. Another would hold a regular archtop hollow-body guitar. And there as an odd instrument I could make out in some pictures: smaller than a conventional guitar, with more than 6 strings. The Cats and the Fiddle looked pre-rock’n’roll, but it didn’t look particularly like the Chicago Blues bands I knew of then, nor was it a typical modern Jazz combo that I listened to. No keyboards, no drummer.

I somehow located an LP record, a reissue collection of some of their recordings. They played hot tempo, small combo, hard swinging Jazz backing accompanying their own tightly-grouped vocal blends. This was a genre I knew only a little about. It had largely faded out as popular music by the time I was aware of music, but I had encountered something like it in acts that were reviving 40s-era genres, nationally: The Pointer Sisters, Bette Midler, Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, and locally a band called Rio Nido. As a guitarist The Cats and the Fiddle were easy for me to take a liking to. Though a vocal group, the energetic short solo breaks on the guitars still sounded fresh to me, a fellow stringed instrument plucker. I’m not sure if I stole any licks, but I would have liked to have.

What is this group doing in cold Minnesota? A movie clip shows they can take to the snow!

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There was something else about the songs: many of them were lyrically about what might have been called the Jazz life: referencing the music itself, but also things connected with it: drinking, partying, hepcat slang, and those “Jazz cigarettes.” There were a handful of lovelorn ballads, but the approach more often was near-hypermania good times. No drummer, but the combo’s rhythm was solid, and that accompaniment was not mixed down low way behind the vocals.

Proof that Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughn didn’t invent the behind-the-back guitar strum

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There were liner notes on the LP sleeve. Yes, they were a ‘40s group. I can’t recall if the notes mentioned where the musicians were from or what region the band worked out of, but I know I was looking for a tie to Minnesota where the scrapbook ended up, and didn’t find any. One thing the reissued LP did reveal: one of the members was Tiny Grimes. I’m not a hard-core Jazz historian, but I knew of Grimes — a contemporary, though longer-lived, of electric guitar pioneer Charlie Christian. Guitarist Grimes, like Christian, was present at the creation as Swing music morphed into Be-Bop.

I put that scrapbook away, and when I moved to my present home, it stayed on an upper shelf in my study where I work on the pieces you read here. Did I decide I had hit a dead end with the scrapbook, or was I just busy with my life then as sometime gigging member of a band? Probably a little of both. I’d sometimes look up at it, look at it looking down at me, and I’d think: I should get back to it sometime, see what more I can determine.

And this is the month I did that. More to come, as I examine the scrapbook again for Black History Month 2025.

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*Well, not always an upright bass player, as you can see in the second video clip.

Black History Month 2025: There is a house…

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

In the past few years I’ve enjoyed focusing here on Afro-American poets during the month of February. Last year, I dug in and did a bit more research on an understudied but fascinating Chicago poet Fenton Johnson, whose published work sits between the emergence and premature death of Paul Lawrence Dunbar and the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson became easily identifiable as a Modernist before his access to extant publications dried up in the 1920s, and I suggested last year that his poetry allows us to see —albeit silently on a page until I did some musical settings — into the formative years of Afro-American Gospel and Blues music before it made it onto recordings.

Here’s something I formulated for myself early in this Project as I found myself often looking at the rise of Modernism in the 20th century: a part of why Americans became highly significant innovators in Modernism has to do with Afro-Americans. Literary-only scholars might not focus on this inside their silo, but at the same time Pound, Eliot, Frost, Moore, Stevens, Millay, Williams, H.D., Sandburg, et al were reforming poetry, Afro-Americans were spearheading a revamped approach to music. Black poets like Johnson and Langston Hughes were hip to how those two things should be viewed together from the start, and after all, Modernism took root during the last decade called The Twenties under the banner of “The Jazz Age.”

That 2024 series on Fenton Johnson let me further express the musical part of the Parlando Project: “Where Music and Words Meet” — and it should also be obvious by now to regular readers that history is one of my interests. So, this February, like the Fenton Johnson series of last year, I’m going to get into the deep weeds a bit this on some lesser-known stuff.

I’m unable to schedule the Parlando Project work in a fully professional manner, so it’s likely you, if you follow along this month, will be going on a journey with me as I look into elements in real time. I may be revising myself before the finish, and if that gets awkward, let me say at the start that this isn’t some plotted-out documentary, I don’t know what all I’ll find. It’s likely going to be very first-drafty, so put on your reading sweater.

If this was an audio presentation, at this point there’d be one of those audio fades with reverb to suggest a passage of time now. From out of the echo my voice will be saying: “It all started in 1976 when I moved to Minnesota from New York…”

I was looking for a new start. It wasn’t entirely clear if I was going to continue intermittent attendance at college, which was both logistically and financially limited to me at the time. One advantage I had: doing nursing work in an Emergency Department was an easily transferable skill, I could go most anywhere that had a hospital, and maybe it would be good if where I moved also had a college. I settled on Minneapolis because I knew a couple living there from my Iowa college experience in The Sixties. One of that couple, Dave Moore has remained a friend (and contributor to the Parlando Project). Dave and his then wife had plotted out a plan for themselves. They were going to run a small mail-order used book business and needed a place to collect stock, store it, and run that business. They purchased (for an attractive low price) a large old house on Park Avenue in Minneapolis. Park Avenue was, in the last Gilded Age, a place where newly rich Minneapolitans built their mansions along a wide tree-lined street leading into the business center downtown. Now in 1976, this couple I knew were going in big on the sweat equity thing, rehabbing that house. The place, 3132 Park Avenue South, was built as a sort of a Junior-Grade Mansion. The 3rd floor, where the original owners had servant’s quarters would hold their stock of books which Dave was obtaining from aging bookstores that were beginning to close down or dump old stock. The other two floors would be their living space and nursery for the child they were planning to have. I could help a bit with the enterprise and rehab, and stay with them for a while.

It was a grand adventure. I had no builders skills, but mainly helped with the stripping of paint off the old woodwork and general lifting and toting. Work was already more than half done when I arrived. Dave told me that around mid-century the house had been turned into a set of small rentable spaces part-way between a rooming house and a set of apartments. Most of those changes had been removed already, and the book business part of things was more at my interests. For that, I’d go with Dave on trips to the basements of sole-proprietor bookstores, some closed, closing, or soon to close, to clean out old stock in their basements or back rooms. There was so much stuff from the 50s and the early 60s — before, you know, The Sixties.  From ruined books I collected a small batch of lurid pulpy covers on these expeditions. The packrat in me wished I’d grabbed more.

Pulp Joyce cover

It’s James Joyce’s birthday today. This cover from those ‘70s bookstore hauls was stuck up in my studio space for years. There’s no music directly for this essay today, but here a Joyce poem conveyed in the early years of this Project.

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This house on Park Avenue is just a location for the drama, a set for one of the acts I want to present haphazardly this month. The whole play is not extant. It exists only in fragments, a bad quattro. How do we raise the curtain?

Dave knew I had an interest in old Blues music, and somewhere in an interval after I was staying at 3132 Park Avenue and maybe as late as when I moved into the rented part of a duplex next door a few years later, he gave me a tattered scrapbook found when they were cleaning out those rooming house remnants. I’ve learned a lot since that scrapbook came into my possession. Let’s take a look inside as this series continues.