John Hammond

S = Standifer
H = John Hammond

H Well the thing is I was one of those premature gospel fanatics. When I say premature, this goes back to the late 20s and early 30s. When I first started getting to the deep south and when I was a record collector, listening to people like Mitchell's Christian Singers -- and the raw harmonies of the old Baptist Hymnal I used to be taken to concerts to listen to Rollin Hayes, who was a wonderful man, and obviously later on, Paul Wilson, and to all the singers who would have Negro spirituals at the end of their program. Of course, I would listen to the Fisk Jubilee Singers.

S Incidentally, I was a Fisk Jubilee Singer but when I was there in the 50s.
H They made records for Columbia back in the 30s

S The funny thing about it...

S Are some of those still in print?
H None is in print except that they are somewhere around, some place in England because they were done for the Columbia Gramophone Co., Ltd. of England. They were the first black people on records, actually.

S Now this is an incredible revelation for me because I have been looking for anything on the Fisk Jubilee singers, the beginning group, of course.
H I tell you who you might talk about this with, that was Dave Robeson, did you ever know him. He was the father of Paul Robeson, this marvelous.... and Dave was teaching at Fisk when I was covering the Scottsboro case in the 30s. It was Civil Rights and was on the Executive Board of the NAACP, but I was covering the Scottsborough case in 35 and 36 for the New Republic -- I covered it first for the Nation. This was another excuse to hear more music. Let's go back to the spirituals. When I used to listen to all these, what I thought was corruption of Negro folk music, I thought some day white people are really going to hear the pure, the purist form of religious music which to me was gospel, which would be holiness church, Baptist, and the rest. Mahalia came and made it all possible back in the 40s.

S This is very interesting. How did you, you don't come from a typical family because how did you get into the holiness, the Baptist, which every black who has breathed this American air we know of, we know how to put all the different cults for the Baptist church.
H Well, I guess maybe it was revolt against my family. I had a first cousin whose name was William J. Sheffler, he was the Chairman of the Board of Tuskegee and of Hampton and he, as a matter of fact, I changed his whole life and that is in my book which you will read about sometime.

S Do I have it on record?
H Yeh, but anyway when I was covering the Scottsborough Case I got down to Tuskegee. There was a great guy down there called Max Bond, who is Julian Bond's uncle. He was teaching sociology. I asked him, I wouldn't stay in the house they had for white folks, so I stayed with Max Bond when I went down there. I asked him why wasn't there anybody at the trial from Tuskegee. They said, are you kidding, Dr. Moten won't let us even discuss it. Anybody who is caught talking about Scottsborough is just told to leave the campus. I said this is a lie.... I got back to New York and was dinner a couple of months after this, I guess this was in 34, Willie Sheffler were at dinner I really had him trapped one night. I said, how come you can't discuss Scottsborough. He said, it is very simple, John Henry, those men are guilty. I pushed my father, who was a conservative republican but who knew the whole Scottsborough frame-up from A to Z, said Willie Sheffler, you don't know what you are talking about and for two hours after dinner he took Sheffler and explained the whole case, how the farmed had been, whose candidacy for governor it was trying to.... and within two months Sheffler was the head of the Scottsborough defense committee, number 1. Within two years he and Sydney Hillman started the American Labor Party, this was a left -- wing party, and it change this one -- thing changed Sheffler's whole life. This is one of the things that even his family didn't know about. I am so glad I have it in my book anyway.

S Is that Scottsborough movie, have you seen that and would you say that's...
H Yeh, sure, the book on Scottsborough, published by Louisiana State University Press is superb.

S That is what I was thinking.
H In fact, I am quoted throughout the book quoted 17 times I think from my various articles on Scottsborough. I think Ray Daniels of the New York Times and myself knew about as much, we knew the inside doing, how.... and how the New York Daily News was all involved in the thing, trying to get circulation. It is a fascinating story.

S That brings me to another question. Who really, in the readings I have done about you, I heard you talk, you are such a broad comprehensive individual, who is John Hammond. I am not.... musician, John Hammond the humanist, John Hammond the ....in various areas, John Hammond the specialist in this form of music or that form of music. I see, as all of us have many facets to our lives, but....
H I don't know what. I am sort of a frustrated musician I guess. I was a lousy viola player, but I played in the string quartet for years. That was only because I couldn't play jazz, which I would have loved to have played more than anything else.

S How did you get into jazz, per se?
H Through records.

S Were you ever a performer, even as a...
H No, I played in string quartets. I was a classical musician as my mother was, but I just loved jazz and I guess that first James P. Johnson record I heard in 1924 was what changed my whole life as far as music was concerned. Then we had a player piano.... I also had all Fats Waller and James P. Johnson's roles, and Lem Fowler's roles, and the rest. Then as soon as I could I had a fantastic record collection. Starting back in the early 20s. Then I thought of going into black theatres in the mid 20s and I heard Betsy Smith in the flesh in 1927. Then in 1932 I opened a black theatre in New York.

S Prior to this and during.
H My mother was a Vanderbilt, my family was ultra conservative and they thought they had a madman for a son, and they probably did. But then when they saw that I was very interested, I mean seriously interested in race relations in the country, I mean I wouldn't go to Union Theological Seminary where another cousin of mine was the head because the church wasn't straight on race. I think I could do more in music to help race relations than I could in the ministry.

S Did this happen or did someone grab you as a child and begin to take you into black areas or black churches?
H No, this happened because I was, well, I don't know. It would take too long really t0 go into the how somebody who is a natural rebel like myself.... I will tell you one of the ways it really happened. My family had a big place up in Mt ....and I can remember when I was about, long before I was 10, when I was about 7 years old, I think. We had a little sort of shack on our farm and my family rented it to two lovely school teachers from the West Indies, a Miss Green and a Miss Cameron. I used to go and see them. Now these are the first black people I ever met in my life and they are wonderful. I then found out that there was hell to pay because.... father rented this place to them. I thought well, you know, my father was from the south too, from Louisville, so I was sort of real proud of him as far as this was concerned.
Prof. S. I read somewhere that you were most influential perhaps for Benny Goodman....
H I was responsible completely....

S How did you do that? ...That time this was still quite a challenge...
H I'll tell you what happened, right. I thought of recording Benny in 1933. I had a contract with English Columbia to make some records. I wanted to use a mixed band and Benny would hear of it. He said that if he had blacks in this recording band he would lose all his radio jobs and he couldn't do it.

S And he probably would have, I guess.
H And he would have.... New York was as racist as Birmingham. I was very friendly with Benny Carter. I guess Benny was really the closest to me of all the musicians that I knew. He was the most sophisticated. One day I was listening, I always had a good radio in my car, and I could get WMAQ in Chicago directly here in New York. In my car I was listening to what I thought was the Earl Hines band one night from the Grand Terrace, but it wasn't....; it was a band called Grant Moore. They had a wonderful piano player. I couldn't believe the piano player so I called up WMAQ and, cause I had some friends on the Chicago Daily News which owned WMAQ, and I found out the name of the substitute, the substitute band was Teddy Wilson.

S Teddy Wilson from Texas?
H Yeh. Teddy was from Texas originally, but also from Tuskegee and Taladega.

S He taught at Tuskegee, didn't he?
H No, his father was the professor of history at Tuskegee

S And he studied music composition and theory?
H No, not really there. He was a student.

S But he was in the music department...
H No. They wouldn't hear of jazz at Tuskegee. It wasn't until he left Taladega, he went to Chicago and he moved in with a girl called Irene Eddy who was a great piano player. I have a record of hers even. She used to record for Paramount. She probably taught Teddy everything he knew about jazz.

S She taught him well.
H She sure did. He was the best. So I, Benny Carter, I was backing Benny Carter's band in 1933 so I said, Benny I want to give you some dough to go to Chicago and bring this guy back to your band. Benny said fine, you have no idea how great he is. I am surprised you could tell from the radio. This guy and Art Tatum used to work together at WSPD in Toledo in the winter of 1932. So I said fine. He brought Teddy in, I think it was something like Oct. 4, 1933 and I had already done two sessions with Benny Goodman and the day that Teddy Wilson came in I recorded him with the Chocolate Dandies. It was a small group with Benny Carter. Then I did some solo records including Rosella. The old Columbia Studio on 5th Ave. and 12th St. This was never released.

S Was this the Rosetta that went to first?
H That was the first solo piano playing that Teddy had ever done. But Teddy, I found out later, had worked in a pick -- up band with Louis Armstrong the year before, in 1932. 1 think one of the things he did with Louie was I got the world on a string, I'm not sure. He did four sides I know with Louie. We brought Teddy Wilson in and then that was when I was determined that we were going to have a trio because Teddy was the first pianist that I have heard technically who could match Benny, who had as good an ear and technique and the rest, and sophisticated. Sense of form. And then, of course, in those first records that I made wit Benny, Gene Kruppa was the drummer because I brought him in from Mell Hallis' band in Boston. We got this trio together and about the fourth recording session I had with Benny, Benny had relaxed and Bill Holiday had made her first record with Benny when she was 18 in 1933.

S This was before you had the mixed band.
H Before I had. This was the first time Benny had ever worked with black people on records. He had Shirley. Clay

S You mean when Billie Holiday sang with him it was his first time.
H Yeh. Shirley Clay on trumpet because he had heard Shirley with Don Redman's band Shirley was a wonderful trumpet player. I just twisted his arm so he had to put Billie Holiday on record. She was so revolutionary in those days. She didn't sing the melody and the rest, she sang an improvising horn player. She made "Your Mother's Son -- in -- Law" and "Ripping the Scotch," two sides of Benny in 1933. It was a year and a half before I could get Billie and Teddy Wilson together on.... because nobody in record companies would even listen to them.

S That brings up another question. Did you pursue the blacks as you seem to indicate here or did the blacks who couldn't be recorded easily come to you? How did that happen?
H Oh, I had to pursue them. I didn't have an office or anything. I was the American correspondent for the Melody Maker and then for the Gramophone, two English papers because nobody in the United States took jazz seriously. There were only two music magazines were Orchestra World and Metronome, and they didn't discuss black musicians at all. Maybe they would say that Duke Ellington was at the Cotton Club or something, but that was it. I was hanging out at Small's Paradise, the Saratoga Club and every gin mill there was. I didn't smoke or drink. I was a complete boy scout. Nobody could accuse me of chasing girls or anything. I wrote about these guys, got pictures of them, had them published in these magazines in Europe, in Paris. I was just sort of known as this crazy kid who drank lemonade and loved jazz musicians.

S .....This is getting in the..... questions I wanted to ask but with all these materials that you have, what do you intend to with them or have you already done something with them? I am thinking about your mementos of musicians, your recordings, your pictures?
H Well, I don't know. My book, John "Hammond on Record," is coming out in paperback on Penguin by the end of the summer, I don't know exactly when. All the various, I've got 33 mistakes, I think, in the book. They will have been corrected, I hope, by that time. Then I have two more years on my CBS contract. But I am going to be 70 this year. I think I'll run out of steam pretty soon.

S I ask that question because I think personally and I hope you do it for a long, long time to come, but I am sitting here in awe of a man who is just oozing with information and as a professor the first thing that comes to my mind, quick, how can we get to this information on John if he is not with us.
H Let me tell you something. I am going to do a whole lot of taping on my early days at the NAACP. I was with a couple of people from the Department of Justice.... earlier this week. We had dinner together... Marshall and John Dorr, and I was trying to persuade them how really reactionary the NAACP was in the early 30s. They hated unions, they had a right to, unions were prejudiced. It was until the Detroit Chapter of the NAACP made the association . . . with Henry Ford and backed the UAW . that the NAACP ever took a union position. I was by far the youngest member on the board of the NAACP in those days, I was considered a reb because I wasn't a lawyer, and I wasn't an undertaker, and I wasn't a preacher, which was the basis, really, of the black people on the board. And the white people on the board, and there were some very nice ones, were basically social democrats. I had to go on through Scottsborough Case seeing the Communists at least were willing to bring up the question of Negroes on the jury whereas the white lawyers at the NAACP had employed to defend the Scottsborough boys had a back door deal with Ben Graves the governor of Alabama and they were not willing to raise the only issue, which is bias of the jury, which could get it from a state to a federal court. I learned earlier Walter White tried to get me to go on the board of the NAACP in 33. 1 said, no indeed.... I am not going to compromise myself because you are wrong on Scottsborough. But in 1935 I did.

S Being the gadfly that you were, that was probably a catalyst for the NAACP.
H Maybe so. I still have awful good friends in the NAACP, like Henry Moon is retired and he is my good friend.... and I always argued when he was there, but he is my good friend Roy Wilkins. I had a long discussion the other day with Roger Wilkins, a nephew of Roy, and Roger I think is on my side.

S ....to hear that. Roy Wilkins, well you must have been tough enough to get into.
H What happened was that Roy was. He was a good newspaper man, good journalist, he was on the Kansas City Call when he came to the NAACP. I was in the NAACP before Roy was there. But Roy was bugged by Walter White always. Just so jealous of Walter. So I finally went to Walter and said listen, you got an enemy here who is stabbing you. After that Roy and I never were good friends.

S Did they ever reconcile their differences?
H No. That was Roy, of course, when Walter married Poppie Cannon you know engineered Walter's exit from the NAACP.

S That sounds like the University of Michigan almost.
H Oh, boy. This was really murder.

S I am going to ask you a few quickie questions.
H I am going to have to leave soon? . Which John Handy you seeing today?

S W.C. Handy's brother, Charles. Also W.C. Handy's daughter, Katherine.
H I made the first record with her.

S I was going to get to that. I didn't realize that though. When was this?
H 1932. "Underneath the Moon"and I was so mortified. There was a horrible line in that song "and that's why darkies were born." I said you can't sing that and she said I have to that is in the lyrics.

S That is the thing that is interesting, Mr. Hammond, is that you have been sometime.... Negro blacks. This is what is so wonderful. You have very often been more black in your philosophy than some of the blacks.
H Well, I hope so.

S ....you are, you have been...
H I hope so. My gosh because in the first place when I grew up middle class blacks were, were, you know .... The great influence on my life was E. Franklin Frazier, that is the guy that saved me. If it hadn't been for Frazier I might have been a Communist. Frazier just knew it, had been through everything and knew everything that was wrong about self -- determination.... and the black.... and of course was a great wit. I always stayed with Frazier when I went to Washington. Frazier was really a close friend of mine.

S If you had to choose five or more performers that you had the opportunity either to record or to work with, who would they be.
H J.P. Johnson. I have to start with J.P. Johnson because he was one of the really, he was the complete influence of Fats Waller's life. Bessy Smith.... I had heard Bessy in 1927 and thank God I was able to record her in 1933. Frankie Newton, believe it or not one of the great trumpet players whoever lived. Again was one of the people ...He had a nervous breakdown in 1933 and he was never really the same after that. He was as exciting a trumpet player as far as I was concerned as Louie. Obviously Louie and Earl, Louie Armstrong and Earl Hines -- were, neither of whom I ever recorded I might add, but I just loved them both. I did an enormous amount of recording obviously with Teddy. Basie is perhaps my favorite band leader and band pianist of all times. He's still good, he's still wonderful.

S I have just spent two hours with him in...
H He's doing his autobiography, you know, with Al Murray. Let me see whom else. I love Red Nichols and I worked with Red. I Lionel too, but Lionel is not the musician that Red was.

S I'll be talking with him at Interlocken this summer, with Lionel Hampton.
H Well, what do you know. They are both .... Lionel with Bennie too.

S So all of these people with the exception of...
H And of course the two great, Charlie Christian and Lester Young. Those have got to be the most creative improvising musicians that I have ever met. And there's a new one that nobody's ever heard of and that nobody's ever recorded. A guy called Billie Pierce from Boston, 29, with a coat train follower. Then he went back to Lester and he is just incredible.
Prof. S. Let me mention some names like Sippie Wallace
H Sippie, I like Sippie and she is one of many good singers, a delightful woman. I know she is out there in Michigan now.

S She's making a comeback similar to Alberta.
H I know it, but she's not Alberta.

S Victoria Spivey
H Oh, marvelous woman. Black Snake Blues by.... I had it when I was at Hotchkiss.

S This is great. I am having myself a ball here. Clara Smith.
H One of the nicest woman I ever knew. Really great. She used to sing literally in my back yard. She worked at a joint down on Hopkins Street and I was living on Sullivan Street in those days. Some terrible monster had this place, she'd go down there and I'd go and listen to her. Fats Waller played Piano for her.

S This is curve now, Ormandy, Eugene.
H No where. Eugene Ormandy was the conductor of the Capital Theatre Orchestra when I was a kid. He was, you are bringing me a memory that, as you know he worked with the Dorsey Brothers band on records. Some of the worst records in the history of the phonograph. But occasionally he would work in some jazz at the Capital Theatre presentation. I was already a fanatic in those days and I couldn't take Ormandy seriously.

S Do you find that there are more readers in blues, jazz, popular music than there were when you were younger.
H Oh, sure. People read music? Oh, sure.

S And this obviously had something to do with the quality or has it had anything to do with the quality of blues.
H It has not helped the quality.

S Some people say it is worse now that we have fewer people who are really very...
H No. The great singers that I have recorded, now Mildred Bailey could read music.

S Compare Mildred Bailey with Billie Holiday.
H Well, Mildred was intensely jealous of Billie I can assure you of that. They were both geniuses. Billie was much more revolutionary than Mildred. Mildred really was a pop singer. Red would tell me well John it is you who made Mildred into a jazz singer with those records that you made with Johnny Hodges, Buddy Berrigan and Teddy Wilson, because she didn't want to be tagged as a jazz singer because she thought it would hurt her.... Billie was through and through a jazz singer.

S If you were in my shoes, and you wanted to interview, and I shall, 30 elderly, over 60 let's say, musicians, who would you choose?
H I would immediately choose a man called Bennie Morton, trombone player who was with Fletcher Henderson and McKinnie's Cotton Picker in the twenties and is still playing today. Wonderful. Doc Cheetum, obviously. I have just been making records with him with Alberta and he is just marvelous.
Prof. S.... came to my mind. You were just saying
H I said Bennie Morton,... Dickinson, people who are still alive and who are still great and were great when I first knew them.

S What about some that you knew that wasn't very great, they were great, but they weren't discovered?
H One of the greatest of them all was Hobart Banks. He was a piano player with Ernie Fields band in 1939 in Tulsa. I brought them up to New York to record, Ernie Fields came but he left Hobart home. I didn't meet up with Hobart again until I was in the army in Muskogee and I was put in jail for my effort, but Lil Brother Montgomery or somebody had a band there and I went to hear it. Not only was Hobart on piano, but Claude Williams was playing guitar with the group. He was a guy who had been Bassie's original guitar player whom I replaced with Freddie Green in 1937.

S Freddie Green spent an hour and a half with me.... Those are some names that I certainly am on.
H Hobart was never known. Then I got Barnie Josephson to bring Hobart Banks to New York, but I was in the army.
Prof. S. He's at the Cookery.
H I got Barnie Josephson to bring Hobart Banks to New York. He brought him to New York but I wasn't there to help so Barnie let him go after a couple of weeks because he couldn't see how different Hobart really was.

S That is funny you should mention Barnie because is he as much of a devotee in this area as you are.
H Well I got him into it. He was a shoe salesman when I first knew him. He scraped together his last penny to open Cafe Society and after about six weeks it was about to fold and Bennie Goodman.... Alexander and I got the money together to be able to continue it

S Now this is a loaded question. Do you think that there any, or did you think because right now I think we have changed, but there was some significant difference between say black performers and white.
H Never, my idea was always to have black and white performers work together because I thought they would stimulate each other. I was always completely an integrationist and this got me in real trouble with my communist friends because I'll tell you a typical thing in New York. I am not a red beater but in the days, I used to have a column in a black paper in Harlem called People's Voice which was published by Adam Powell and Charlie Buchanan, and it had become pretty left. I wasn't working to integrate pit bands in New York and bands in nightclubs and the rest. The communist fraction, they called it fraction, in local 802 was campaigning for higher scales of the Savoy Ballroom and Paradise... and not lifting a finger to have black musicians to work downtown. I consider this a sellout and I thought of doing a series of articles blasting the communists in 802 ....very embarrassing because .... in those days was backed by the transport workers union and Mike Quill in his left days. Finally they told me to stop. So I stopped writing because I wasn't being paid for it anyway.

S Is the record industry in trouble now. You keep hearing these little things about the record industry.
H Well, sure it's in trouble. The dopes, when I grew up in the record business they had, they only allowed 10% return privilege and when people bought records in stores they had to pay for them. Since the competition has gotten so great in the record business they have been unloading whole bunch of records and guaranteeing sales ....obviously when the economy started to crack the first thing to go was these record companies who had loaded store with a whole bunch of records they couldn't sell. It is going to be a couple of years before they get out of that dilemma too.

S Some of the record producers, the younger, smaller companies, say black, they are intimidated by the larger companies.
H Excuse me for saying bull .... but the fact of the matter is that you remember the stacks (Stax?) record.... those people ripped Columbia for something like $11, $12 million.

S How?
H The kind of sales practices they indulged in were unbelievable. This whole.... Philadelphia.... naturally they sold a lot of records at the same time. These companies were entirely backed by the majors and naturally, and the sad part is that there was a lot of hustling going on.

S I've talked to a few, in Philadelphia, a few months ago and some of the blacks say that the thing that they hate most is the fact that they would discover a talent, carry that talent along for a few years and the very time that talent made big they went to the big companies. Do you agree with that?
H I don't really think it has been true because look at Motown. Motown has done pretty damn well. There may be some --

S They were blaming Motown too, they were saying that look, I will discover this person and of course it is the individual performer who says look, I could do better with...
H It is not only racial though. In the first place, greed has no true color. Remember, Ray Charles and Atlantic records for instance ...Atlantic records made Ray Charles and then as soon as ABC started waving some money in front of him he went over there and lost his identity. It is true that Atlantic was not a black company, but it was run as if it were a black company because I think they really, they were really the people that made R & B ....

S Do you believe that?
H Chuck Berry, for instance, was with a small label but then he went to Mercury, you know, because he wanted money.

S What about the trend of some of the performers forming their own company?
H I think that they should be, performers should be interested in making good music. I think that this whole wanting to be a super capitalist, I don' t think capitalism and art should particularly get along very well together.

S I'm going to You said in your speech ten years ago.... here's what you said and I quote. There are record companies like Columbia, RCA, Motown, Chess, Atlantic, Savoy, and others who reach the market of black people. I think a lot of these companies are tremendously interested in black jazz and the popular music of composers, black composers. Less so in the more formal compositions of blacks although this will come, although this will come. Has it come?
H Yeh, I think so.

S What are some examples?
H Well, it hasn't come to any great degree but I mean, for instance Cecil Taylor is taken very seriously these days. They're gangs of serious black composers David Baker, I was happy to say I was at the recording of of David Baker's cello sonata

S David was one of the persons who asked you....
H I know this, and I was there but I was just furious that he didn't have a piano player like David who could have given the kind of pulse the.... really needed. That's a wonderful piece.

S Hale Smith thinks that...
H Hal's a good friend of mine.

S He still thinks that there is still not enough attention given to black composers' music especially so far as it being recorded because...
H Well, you know, since my time there.... I was a cousin of the Symphony of the New World was with the interracial symphony orchestra we had in New York.

S What happened, that is something...
H The racists took over, the black nationalists took over. They got rid of the conductor who founded it, Steinberg, marvelous man. They killed him.

S Was Sanford Allen one of those revolutionaries?
H No but the cellist was Kermit Moore. I'll never forgive him. No Sanford was a complete gentlemen in every way.,

S Was he married to Dorothy Rudd at the time?
H I don't know.

S That's very interesting. I called Sanford right now.... Volatile in the way he criticize the establishment.
H He got the worst screwing that there has ever been.

S Since he's been with the philharmonic, you mean.
H Just the most disgraceful thing thing ever. As a matter of fact there are people in the philharmonic who I don't speak to anymore. I feel the treatment of blacks is so contemptible. I testified against them in court. I've done everything I could even though they were recording for Columbia. I am outraged at Lennie Bernstein not lifting a finger for black musicians. One of my great friends is Skylar Chapen, I don't think the Met has done what it should with musicians.

S You have a lot of company. I interviewed Todd Duncan this time yesterday and he felt that while he was discovered in a sense by the New York City Opera but again there are a lot of.
H Yeh, how many blacks are there in the New York City Opera Hall? It is all shocking. When I was the chairman of the music committee of the New York Urban League we integrated the. Radio City Music Hall Orchestra, I am happy to say, and I was of course able to integrate radio stations with musicians, I was able to integrate CBS back in 1942. I integrated NBC for a very short time until I was drafted and then the three guys that they had they fired the week I was drafted. New York is so close to the deep south that I always said that when integration came it would come much better in the south than it did in the east, and I am right

S But could the south have produced a Eubie Blake, or the New York Group. You haven't said anything about Minton's, I find that interesting.
H Oh, my God. Minton's was one of my favorite places. This is where George Benson was really developed, George is 20 years younger than but in the 60s. This was the main place that George worked around New York, with that great baritone player, the white kid and Lonny Smith was on, great ... -- Billy Kaye, I loved it.

S Last week I spoke to Carmen McCray and she mentioned some of the same things about Minton's and some of the people...
H I'll tell you one wonderful story about Minton's if you like. I've known Teddy Hill since he was a band leader. One night when I was up there listening to George Benson, Teddy looked at me and said, John, I always want to know how do you get up here at night. I said I drive up, He said you what. I said I drive up. He said where do you park. I said usually on St. Nicholas near a light if possible. He said, John, these people up here are junkies, the don't know who the hell you are. I can't let you come up here alone because it's worth your life. I said, now listen Teddy. I've been coming up to Harlem since 1925 and that is 40 odd years ago. I said I figure if something happens to me I'm due, but so far I am all right.... tonight, please let me do something, please let me take you back to your car. I said fine Teddy. He took me back to my car, my little Ambassador, Rambler convertible or something, I never had a fancy car. I said good night and drove home. Two nights later I was up there and I said hello to the bartender and said is Teddy in tonight. He said didn't you hear? I said what do you mean didn't I hear.: He said the night that Teddy walked you back to your car we were held up, they busted up the safe, and he's in pretty bad shape. I said good God, you know

S You are something of a miracle yourself you know.
H Teddy and I have been friends forever.

S It is incredible when I talk to all these people that I have talked to and you are just sort of a throwback or ahead of your time or whatever. Do you find even now that in the New York Society music world that you still have to fight for certain things that you did before Or have they gotten much better?
H Of course. Incidentally, I found myself getting more not less radical as I go on. Because in the first place one of the things that is as discouraging as anything is the lack of militancy on the part of black people who have made it. It is a damn shame. One person that you should interview when you are here east is Willie Roth. He is the best French horn player I think we've got, number 1. Number 2, he's a hell of a bass player. The Mitchell -- Roth School, you remember Dwight Mitchell, he's a full professor of music up at Yale. What Willie has done one of the great musicians, he has brought Yale close to the inner city in New Haven. The Yale kids are teaching all sorts of music courses with the black youth of New Haven. He's from Sheffield, Alabama, originally and this is one of the great people that I know of in his

S That's interesting. I taught at Southern Connecticut University, Yale is right across the way, and here Yale is.
H Yeh, way ahead. How long ago did you teach there?

S This was about 10 years ago.
H Willie only started there about 7 or 8 years ago.

S We used to admire our music orchestra director at Michigan was at Yale for awhile.
H Yeh, they had a wonderful Dean at the Music School at Yale called Phil Nelson.

S Phil and I are good friends.
H But Phil has retired I gather. That's what I was told Monday night when I was meeting with these Civil Rights people. They have a new guy. He was in a very bad automobile accident with his wife.

S The new dean....

END OF INTERVIEW