From+Steamboat+Brass+to+Swinging+Jazz

Original Author: Christina Sanders-Ring, ENG346 FA12 Revision Author:
 * From Steamboat Brass to Swinging Jazz **


 * The Recollections of Davenport Musical Historian Wayne Rohlf **

The rich musical history of the Quad Cities is well-documented, partly due to the efforts of Wayne Rohlf, Davenport trumpeter, high school friend and sometimes-bandmate of Bix Beiderbecke, and highly-regarded jazz historian.

Little is written about Rohlf, except to credit him as a Bix expert in various publications. Due to longtime friendship with Bix and his established reputation, his letters and opinions were oft-quoted in jazz literature, magazines, and scholarly research, almost always with a focus on Bix. In summarizing the friendship for Shapiro and Hentoff, Rohlf includes extra trivia: “Bix played a pretty knocked-out piano in high school, although he couldn’t read a note…[i]t was while Bix was with (Jean) Goldkette[‘s orchestra] that he learned to read music, and his teacher was none other than the famous Freddy Farrar, and, as far as I know of, Freddy is the only real teacher that Bix ever had.”

Rohlf’s Mississippi Valley music knowledge was not limited to Bix Beiderbecke. In Johnson’s //Bix: The Davenport Album//, Rohlf’s expertise, collection and crafty story-telling are commemorated thus: “I’ll always remember the late Davenporter Wayne Rohlf at earlier Bix festivals, always spiffily decked out, his wide-brimmed Panama hat at a jaunty angle, always near the tent where then Bix Society President Don O’Dette presided over a group of musicians, many whose names can still be found on old Dixieland records. Wayne, a fine musician, who could recall times of playing with Bix and other celebrities, was also an extraordinary jazz historian with a musical collection larger than those of most museums. It was great to sit alongside his canvas chair while Festival bands played and he spun stories of the very same kind of music filling the air around us. He had compiled an extensive history of the bands and boats that delivered music and entertainment to the Quad Cities. […] His files bulged with photos and typed histories of other bands of an earlier era, including many studded with still-famous personalities…”


 * Rohlf’s Quad Cities Music Memories **

Perhaps the richest single source of information about the music and musical culture of the Quad Cities area before it became the Quad Cities is Rohlf’s 1975 lecture, “Music: Yesterday and Today,” during which, Rohlf invited his audience to “travel back in our memories to the “Roaring Twenties” or even a few years before that.” The following paragraphs are excerpted from the script of this lecture, currently held by the Rock Island Historical Society.


 * //On Riverboats and Theaters //**

“There were a number of excursion boats plying the Mississippi River in the summers, from St. Louis to St. Paul…the G.W. Hill, the J.S.,the Majestic, and later the Washington, the Capitol and the Admiral…in the evening, they would float downstream ten or fifteen miles to about Linwood, then anchor in mid-stream and allow the passengers to dance until eleven o’clock p.m….[t]hese trips were called “Moonlight Excursions…about 90% of the orchestras hired to entertain on these boats came from either St. Louis or the Quad Cities. The Quad Cities has always been known for its fine dance musicians and orchestras. Famous musicians like Louie Armstrong, Claude Thornhill, Bix Beiderbecke, Fate Marable, Jess Stacy and many others got their start on these riverboats.”

[…]

“The earliest theater I can remember, in Davenport, was really a saloon, near the government bridge. The orchestra consisted of a piano player, and singers and dancers comprised the acts. This was called a variety house and was much like some of the saloons you see, in westerns on TV today. Charlie Berkell opened the E-Lite Theater…located on West 2nd Street, downtown Davenport. Berkell’s daughter-in-law was the pianist and [t]he rest of the show consisted of a male quartet and a couple of dancers.Brick Monroe and Roy Oelkers opened The Family Theater on West 3rd Street. […] The attraction at this theater was variety acts and the orchestra was composed of pianist Charlie Morgan and drummer Rex Jessup.Brick Monroe also ran a saloon that featured singing waiters and—believe it or not—the famous “Mammy Singer,” Al Jolson, once worked there as a singing waiter. Luckman’s Gardens opened about this time, in Rock Island. This was an outdoor movie theater and was probably the first forerunner to our modern drive-in theaters.”

[…]

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 16px;">“I may be a year or two off on this date, but about 1916, Charlie Berkell built The American Theater…probably the first real Vaudeville theater in Davenport…I was about ten years old at that time and I well remember my parents taking my brother and I to the American Theater to see a minstrel show. The six original Brown Brothers’ Saxophone Sextet was the feature act. That was before racism put the evil eye on minstrel shows. The Columbia was the next theater to come into the picture...[a]ll the best acts of the Orpheum and RKO circuits played at The Columbia…Edgar Bergen, Houdini, Singer’s Midgets, Sophia Tucker, Nora Bayes, Marilyn Miller and the Five Columbians, Van and Schenk, Gallagher and Shean, and many, many moreheadliners of that period.”

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 16px;">[…]

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 16px;">“There were quite a few smaller theaters cropping up, all over the city at this time, because movies were now definitely a big attraction! Each of the following theaters used either a piano, an organ, or a player piano, which some boy or girl would have to pump with their feet…much later, the electric (automatic) player piano arrived. There was The Star Theater…The Victor…The Garden…The Liberty Burlesque Theater…The Olympic…The Home Theater…The Davenport…The Zenith, later called The Sunset…and Pariser Gardens…[w]hen I was thirteen years old, I had a six-piece juvenile orchestra and on several occasions, we appeared at the Zenith and Pariser Gardens. We would do a couple of specialty or novelty numbers in front of the movie screen…then they’d take the spotlight off of us and we would play for the comedy movie which was usually a one- or two-reeler. For this we receive the magnificent sum of two dollars per night…two shows per night.”


 * //<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 16px;">On Dance Halls and Big Bands //**

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 16px;">“In the late 1920s, the Burtis Opera House held sway, along with the Grand Theater, in the old Central Turner Hall building, and soon the Capitol and Orpheum came onto the scene…[d]ancing was beginning to become very popular and there were many dance halls in this area. Such places as the Claus Groth Hall, Lahrmann’s Hall, Thiedeman’s Hall, Flambo’s Gardens, Washington Gardens, the Schuetzen Park Pavilion, Suburban Island Inn (now Credit Island), the Watch Tower Inn (now Blackhawk State Park), the Labor Temple in Rock Island, the Coliseum, Danceland, the Goodfellows Hall, the Outing Club...held weekly dances.

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 16px;">[…]

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 16px;">“Brass bands were much in demand from the early twenties to the mid-fifties. Besides playing summer concerts in Vanderveer, Fejevary, Bellaire and Schuetzen Parks, band music was prevalent at Suburban Island Inn and the Watch Tower Inn. Bands also played a prominent part in picnics, “beer busts,” parades and the Mississippi Valley Fair, which also used to send a band out each fall to tour the small surrounding towns where they would play a short concert to advertise the fair.”

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 16px;">[…]

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 16px;">“About 1917 or 1918 up to the late thirties, many high school and college fraternities and sororities sponsored weekly Friday night dances, many of which were held at the Blackhawk Watch Tower or The Outing Club. The Davenport Central, The East Davenport, The Northwest Davenport, and Moline Turner Societies held many dances for members and friends. [T]he famous Central Turners Annual New Year’s Eve “Sylvester Ball”…started at nine p.m. and lasted until six or seven o’clock the next morning. Two halls and two orchestras. They were “killers”…I know, because I played for several of them. Then in February, the Central Turners would always have a children’s masquerade ball with prizes for the best costumes.”


 * //<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 16px;">Musical Evolution //**

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 16px;">“In the 1940’s, along came “Swing Music,” real swinging jazz and Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey and a host of other top-notch dance and stage bands. “Jazz” might be described as “music that creates tension and arouses empathy through rhythmic and counterpuntal patterns, featuring free improvisation by individual instrumentalists.” I don’t know who to attribute that definition to, but to me, it fits the bill. The various stylized orchestras were also popular in this era. Bands like Shep Fields and his Rippling Rhythm, Richard Himber and his Cascading Chords, Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Music, and many others.”

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 16px;">“Before the advent of Rock-and-Roll, Latin music made a little headway towards popularity, but it was pushed out of contention by country music. Country music is usually associated with folk songs, sung by a nasal singer, twanging an out-of-tune guitar, however, Eddie Arnold, Hank Snow, Roy Clark, Chet Atkins and a few other top-notch country singers and composers are an exception to the rule. Eddie Arnold’s composition, “Anytime,” is one of the all-time favorite pop tunes.”


 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 16px;">Closing **

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 16px;">Rohlf’s commitment to the promotion and preservation of live and local music and the highly-detailed presentation of his BQC-era recollections to a Toastmasters group in 1975 provides a wealth of referential information and diminishes the risk of modern-day Quad Cities losing its memory for the music and music-loving society that once thrived here. Full text of Rohlf’s lecture, including handwritten edits and annotations, can be viewed at the Rock Island Historical Society.

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 16px;">Johnson, Rich J., Jim Arpy, and Gerri Bowers.//Bix: The Davenport Album//. Barnegat, NJ: Razor Edge, 2009. Print. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 16px;">Rohlf, Wayne. "Music: Yesterday and Today." IL, Rock Island. Jan. 2013. Speech. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 16px;">Shapiro, Nat, and Nat Hentoff.//Hear Me Talkin' to Ya; the Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made It.// New York: Dover Publications, 1966. Print.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 16px;">Works Cited **

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 16px;">Return to Popular Music

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 16px;">Return to Home