Drummer and bandleader Chick Webb was a major figure during the Swing Era. His orchestras toured the country and were the host bands at several different clubs and ballrooms, including the famous Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, where his Savoy Stompers held forth for many years. Webb’s bandleader contemporaries included Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie, Fess Williams, Benny Goodman and, of course, Duke Ellington, with whom he had a close relationship, often exchanging bandmembers like general managers of a baseball team.
An innovative drummer who was there when the modern trap set was invented, Webb was also a talent scout, finding and hiring young musicians who would go on to greater things, such as Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams, Mario Bauza and, most famously, Ella Fitzgerald. The legendary singer came to prominence with Webb’s orchestra with whom she had her first big hit, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” When Webb died of complications of spinal tuberculosis at the age of 34, Fitzgerald took over the orchestra for a time.
Stephanie Stein Crease’s biography about Webb, Rhythm Man: Chick Webb and the Beat that Changed America is about much more than his life story. She folds into the narrative her research on the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the Savoy Ballroom and the rise of the Swing Era. Crease spoke with me about Chick Webb and his impact on American music.
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Lee Mergner: There is so much more to this book than Chick Webb’s life story. Your book also captures the music scene of Baltimore, the rise of the Harlem Renaissance and the history of the Savoy Ballroom. But before we get into all that, why did you decide to write this book? What about Chick Webb’s life attracted you to tell his story?
Stephanie Stein Crease: I've always been interested in the people that haven't been written about as much. Ella lived so much longer. She's such an iconic figure in American music, American song, jazz, popular music. I sort of just got a bug about someone like Chick. Both became famous together and they were really at the peak of the band's national popularity and breaking out across the country stardom, when he died so tragically. I just really wanted to dig into that.
I've written a previous biography of Gil Evans, and while it's not at all the same thing, there is an underappreciated time period of Gil’s life. Everybody thought, “Gil, he's born with The Birth of the Cool.” But his career began well before that when he was actually an apprentice band leader himself during the swing years. The Swing Era is just so fundamental to how we think about the rest of modern jazz or American pop music or just the whole world that we know, that we've lived in jazz history. I had never gone into the Swing Era.
I’ve done a bunch of projects over the years in different capacities, but it just gave me a different window to look into the time. The miracle of Webb being able to work through the Depression, which is amazing. Part of the process that was so challenging is, unlike Ella where there's a huge collection at the Smithsonian and at the Library of Congress, with Chick, there’s very little.
Various people have so many vast collections of Ella. She kept notebooks, scrapbooks and the address books. With Chick, I could barely find one piece of paper. Happily, one of the things that I did find was from a collector friend of mine who had a souvenir of the band pre-Ella. On the back he'd written his set list and I was like, “Oh my God, this is amazing.” I wished I had found more of that, but part of it became a group biography of the people he interacted with, the way his band was kind of a farm team, and most importantly, the way he took chances on people.
He was raised in Baltimore, which produced jazz legends such as Eubie Blake, Cab Calloway and Billie Holiday. How did the Baltimore scene shape the early Chick Webb?
I had a really good time kind of trying to dig into the early Baltimore scene as much as I could. Eubie Blake was a tremendous figure in Baltimore because he of course got more famous when he left, as did other people, but the success of Shuffle Along was sort of a beacon. It’s like “Okay, come to New York.”
Blanche Calloway, who's Cab's older sister, migrated more to Chicago where she really became a star, but then she also came to New York. I feel like there was really a tight circle of musicians who would mentor younger musicians. I was very surprised to find out that Cab Calloway was a multi-instrumentalist before he started really being a showman in Baltimore. He played the drums for a bit and he really looked up to Chick as a drummer way back before anybody really knew who he was. I'm always charmed when I find details like that or details about Blanche Calloway, who was there during a very vibrant scene of Black music in the church, parade bands, picnic bands, bands on the Chesapeake.
I found out about a person I'd never heard of that was just so fascinating to me—A. Jack Thomas, who was very broadly a James Reese Europe type figure in Baltimore, starting around World War I. He had his own regiment band in Europe and then ended up coming back to Baltimore because he founded a very vital musical center. He started a lot of huge ensembles. He started his own conservatory. Things like that were just kind of really fascinating to me. I really think there was a lot there, but we don't have the kind of body of recordings because there wasn't a recording center as much as there was in New York.
I'm sure somebody can come up with recordings of some of these early bands made in Baltimore, but I was not able to find them. The closest thing I could come to was Eubie’s first records. In New York, a little later on, I think everybody was influenced by James Reese Europe. He did visit Baltimore with a couple of the different clef club ensembles. I think everybody was sort of onto what he was doing.
But apparently Baltimore was really a big piano ragtime center. And Eubie was in the middle of all of that and songwriting too. It was more fertile than I even imagined. It was kind of fun to think about that. But of course, we don't read Chick's name as a sideman. Sidemen didn't really get listed in theater bands or whatever, so we don't really see his name in the press until he's in New York.
Duke Ellington and Chick Webb were in some ways competitors, but there also seemed to be a lot of mutual respect. And over the years, they even traded bandmembers like two sports teams. Talk about their unique relationship.
One of the things I found interesting, back to Baltimore, is that when Duke first performed, it was with the banjo guitarist Elmer Snowden. Snowden was the first leader of the Washingtonians in New York City at the Kentucky Club and the Hollywood Club. Then Duke took over the leadership of the band. I think the sound of Duke's band in midtown Manhattan, as well as Harlem, was one that everybody wanted to hire bands that sounded like his.
Duke had already been a contractor in DC before he'd moved to New York so he was very facile and a talent scout. But most of these young men who were musicians, and women too, were hanging out in Harlem. Chick already had the nucleus of the band that Duke knew about. Among those players was Johnny Hodges. That's kind of how that started. I can't really pinpoint exactly when Johnny started playing with Chick, but you see him in photos with some of these early bands, like the Harlem Stompers, in 1927 and 1928, until Hodges went on with Duke.
The other really amazing relationship was with Cootie Williams, who had quite a story of his own. Coming to New York from Alabama, then playing in Florida, then coming to New York by ship and landing in Brooklyn. Chick heard him at a jam session in Brooklyn and he's like, “You’ve got to be in my band.” He [Cootie] even lived with him for a while. Those stories really seem to be true. A lot of my resources came from listening to oral histories at the Institute of Jazz Studies and through the Smithsonian Archives and other places and it sounds like it really happened that way.
Duke gave him the opportunity to be a band leader, it seemed within a year or so. He liked that role. He liked being kind of a big shot in Harlem, and just being able to help out his friends by giving them some work. But as we have found out he scuffled for quite a few years himself getting work. It was a really competitive time in Harlem, in midtown Manhattan. Once he really started being ensconced with the Savoy, I think that was really critical for his career.
Indeed, the Savoy Ballroom looms large in Chick’s story. It was white-owned but Black-run, with progressive ideals. Talk about that landmark venue and the significance in Harlem’s history and jazz history.
It's a wild story. I was actually able to get ahold of some tapes that revealed more about the Galewski family from one of the youngest brothers, Conrad. The ballroom itself opened in 1926 and it was a hit right away even though it was white owned. I think it was because of the leadership by I. Jay Faggen who'd already been an entrepreneurial figure in New York's theater and ballroom scene. Faggen just had the feeling that it was time for a beautiful ballroom in Harlem for the Black dancers and for the Black population that wasn't a jazz age nightclub.
They really wanted it to be the most beautiful, elegant place they can think of and they wanted it to not have booze. It was still the age of Prohibition, and it would get even more as a place where people could go and feel safe and have a good time. It doesn't mean that people didn't smuggle in booze but that was the idea. Part of the idea, which was quite a brilliant idea, to the credit of Charles Buchanan, who had grown up in Harlem, was from the West Indies and was a very sharp businessman of color. One of the smartest things they did was hire him. A lot of it was about, “How can we make this a piece of the community?” It succeeded beyond everybody's expectations. As soon as they opened, lots of people came in the doors. The manager and owners did things that sound so quaint and charming now, but they were really a big deal. They opened a Chinese kitchen in the middle of the summer and around 2,000 people showed up to eat there at the Savoy’s Chinese kitchen in the middle of the afternoon. There were breakfast dances.
It really became, I would say, a rock in the community during the Depression. There were balls for the Scottsboro Boys Defense Fund as well as for all kinds of relief efforts like hunger, hospitals, funds for children. Chick was very much part of all of that, which was kind of a beautiful thing to see. I felt if you lived there through the Depression, that was just what you did. But the Savoy was very central to the community and the great dancers. The other part of the Savoy Ballroom was not just the great musicians, but of course the dancers that came through there. The creation of the Lindy Hop, which kind of went hand in hand as music went from the pre-swing to the swing of Chick.
Frankie Manning used to say, “We had nothing else to do. Of course, we'd go dancing every night.” It was affordable, it was cheap. You could get in most nights for free for one thing or another. That was kind of how that went.
Famously, they often held battles of the bands in the venue, in which Chick and his orchestra often participated. How was it determined that a band won the battle?
It sounded like by applause. There weren't any grand prizes, but I think it was kind of a marketing ploy. Anything to get more people in there and to build the reputation of the place. There were band battles early on starting in, I think, 1926 and 1927, but it was more for like everybody to get out and show off their stuff. They'd have these battles sometimes with five or six bands in one night and among them was with Fletcher Henderson. He was the biggest deal in New York in the ‘20s, among Black musicians and white dancers at Roseland. Whenever they showed up, it'd be like a really big deal. Same with Duke. He got more famous, but Chick Webb and his Harlem Stompers could compete.
I was charmed to read that their first band battle was with the resident bands at the time, Fess Williams' Band and King Oliver's band was also in one of those battles where Chick was the dark horse, but the way the press described it, Chick stole the day. Whether that was true or not, I have no idea. I think these were just incredible experiences. Kind of fabulous spectacles, like a cutting contest to the nth degree between musicians. But the dancers also got to show off. Those, as you know, got elevated even more so as the ‘30s wore on.
The battle with Benny Goodman’s band seemed to be a big one also because of the racial aspect, because at that time the white bands were sort of co-opting the music, and it seemed to be a focal point there.
I think it really polarized the press. Everybody kind of dug into it with glee. That was all going to come out but in the long run, I also feel like these musicians really admired each other. There was no way you couldn't do that, but I know it was definitely a turf battle. By all accounts it sounded like Chick won. I'm sure the Goodman Band played brilliantly. The other thing that really got me was some of the photos, like such as during the really big band battles like that one between Goodman and Webb. In the photos, the one with Basie, people are so packed. I don't know how anyone could have danced at all. They were squished in there, like a bunch of sardines.
While it was pretty amazing to just look at the photos, I just felt like you had to be there. Sometimes I feel people often minimize Chick's recordings because they were three minutes long and he didn't have enough soloists and this and that. But when I heard a couple of these radio transcriptions or broadcasts from the ballroom or from other dances, that's when you really hear this band come to life. Helen Oakley, who had been his publicity person for a while, has an amazing history in herself, Jo Jones, Max Roach and others would say, “When you walked into the ballroom, you could hear Chick’s bass drum resonate through this whole huge building.” It was just mesmerizing and the music itself was so buoyant and joyous, you just couldn't help but get swept away.
A lot of the band leaders led the band with a baton. But of course, Chick was famous for just leading from the drum set. You also demonstrate just how important he was as an innovator on the drums. I didn’t realize how drum kits were just evolving during his lifetime. The basic drum kit we know now was just then sort of coming up but all the drummers—Jo Jones, Max Roach, Sonny Greer, all of them—they said he was the guy, he was the man.
They worshiped him including Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich.
Buddy, who rarely said a good word about anybody or at least any drummer. Compliments didn't come easy, but boy, Buddy was effusive about his admiration for Chick.
I just think there's so many layers that in 2023 are just so hard to remember, like all of those metal parts on drums, all of those things that got refined by some of these leading drum manufacturers in the thirties. Until then, people were inventing their own pedals or cymbal holders. The thing that's so amazing though is that he really was a forerunner in many ways.
That doesn't mean that other people weren't virtuosic or didn't have incredible skills. For instance, Buddy Gilmore, an early drummer that played with James Reese Europe. Some of the things that he did were kind of incredible, and that was really in the era when you get narrowed down to a trap set. Something that just strikes me again and again when you listen to the recordings, whether they're live or on the radio, is just how much Chick was an arranger on the drums.
Even though he had these people writing for him, he led everything. He led the dynamics. He shaped the phrasing. He let people know when they were soloing, when they weren't, when to push, when to come back. You can really hear that in his playing. But when he lets loose on some of a few really extended solos that you hear like on “Liza” or “Harlem Congo.” It's like, “This guy could do anything.”
When looking at the oral histories of people like Jo Jones talking about him, or Cozy Cole, it’s not like it just came to him. He really practiced. He tuned his drums methodically. He spent hours a day just tuning his drums. He used timpani heads on the bass drums. If you spend time looking at percussionists in an orchestra or jazz bands, now they have even more equipment.
I think the idea of using even a rack…his rack was minimal. He'd have the gongs and chimes and bells and cowbell—everything right at his fingertips. I'm just in awe of the power he had considering he really was challenged by having chronic spinal tuberculosis. While this didn't seem to impair his playing, tragically in the end, he did get really ill.
I think Chick would be happy to know that we didn’t lead our conversation with his physical issues as an early victim of spinal tuberculosis. But he was often described in the most disparaging terms as a midget, hunchback or dwarf. For his part, he seemed to be undaunted by all that and he seemed to do well with the ladies, even though he was not a classically handsome man. I just found it remarkable despite the way that people would talk so poorly about him, his own self-image seemed to be so strong.
I agree with that. Jeff Kaufman made a beautiful film years ago called The Savoy King, and he actually was able to get to a few distant relatives that I was not able to talk with. They said he really grew up in a very tight extended family with a mother who said, “You can do this, you can do this, you can do this.”
I feel Chick said to himself, “I'm going to do this.” Teddy McRae, who was his music director for a while, said, “Chick Webb was a self-made man.” Chick would get it in his head, “I'm going to do this. I'm going to have the greatest band. Nobody's going to stop me, I'm just going to do it. I'm going to keep trying until I do.” That's what happened.
He was just persistent to the maximum and I think that his passion came across and really inspired the band. It's not like people didn't have squabbles or they didn't have rivalries or band stuff happened all the time, but he just kept going.
The other thing that I found so remarkable because the disease had really started impairing other organs in the last two years of his life was that he and Ella, along with the band, were having more hits. They were on the road, playing five shows at the Apollo than four dances at the Savoy. How do people even do that? They don’t work like that today, going to other cities, being on the road, on the bus and just pulling it out all out. Eventually, the travel and the intensity really did catch up with him, but people thought he’d always bounce back.
Reading about these instances where he had to go into the hospital and he was having some treatment or minor surgery. The band carried substitute drummers including a couple of really prominent ones. For the last year in his life, like Big Sid Catlett went out on the road for a few weeks with them, and Kaiser Marshall at the very end.
The other younger drummers would just like warm up the set for him. Even members of his band just kept thinking he's going to come back, he's going to spring back—nothing can get this guy. During their last tour it really took people aback, including some of his very dear, close sidemen that he actually didn't make it.
He died young, at just 34 years old and his funeral in his hometown of Baltimore was a madhouse, like those funerals for Prince or Whitney Houston or Michael Jackson in our time. The scene you describe is just remarkable with thousands and thousands of people mobbing the streets and into the church.
It was like a state funeral in a city that has this really rough racial divide that even to this day is affecting life in Baltimore. Thousands of people just flocked the church. They flocked the cortege as it went to Memorial Park where he's buried. It was quite a scene. I did talk to one woman, a beautiful historian herself, who said, “It was family lore for anyone who'd had grandparents that got to go or were even in the street.” It's something they talked about for generations.
What do you hope his legacy will be for future generations?
Part of Chick's legacy was taking a chance on Ella when she was young and virtually unknown, living a pretty sketchy existence in Harlem. He didn't hire her over overnight, but seeing her through and letting her work out her own style, trusting her, in a way. People said you could tune the band by this woman's voice. Her phrasing was so impeccable. There’s this synchronicity between the evolving swing style and Ella's own evolving style as a young vocalist during this time, working with one of the greatest swing masters of the period.
[Read this excerpt from Rhythm Man: Chick Webb and the Beat that Changed America about Ella Fitzgerald’s early years with Chick Webb.]
There are other people he took a chance on such as Mario Bauza. He was a Cuban jazz trumpet player who actually grew up as a prodigy on clarinet and played with the Havana Symphony but was so in love with jazz. I think part of the legacy of Chick is taking a chance on people who were so in love with early jazz at the time that Chick was creating it. Chick really took a chance on him and that was Mario's first job with an American swing jazz band. It’s an incredible story that I delve into in the book. Mario went on with Dizzy Gillespie to be the forerunners in Afro-Cuban jazz in New York. Also, Louis Jordan.
I also think part of the legacy is about being kind of foundational to what we think of as American pop music, and American jazz when it overlapped with pop. There were so many cross-cultural things going on. If you look at some of the material or hear the joy in his music, I think a lot of the legacy is about getting together, about bringing people together. How do we bring this music and dance together that is such a magnet for thousands and thousands of people? I came away feeling even though a lot of people decried the more commercial stuff, that a lot of his music is foundational to what we do. If you really listen to Ellia sing “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” there's a shuffle in there, a bit of a back beat. There's spoken word which is just fabulous. I feel like that's a very big part of our musical legacy today.
But as a human, I really walked away feeling humbled by how hard he worked, how much he went through just to keep doing what he was doing. It’s an incredible thing to think about a person who just managed to do all that in such a packed short lifetime.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Ms. Crease will be doing readings and interviews at various venues.
May 3: Writer’s Live talk with Professor Lawrence Jackson at Enoch Pratt Library, Baltimore, Md.
May 4: Panel with RJY-Chick Webb Council, Huber Memorial Church, Baltimore, Md.
May 22: Conversation with Ulysses Owens, Jr., Library of Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, New York, N.Y.
June 5: Reading and conversation with Judith Tick, author ofBecoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song
