[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 35 (Thursday, March 24, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[Congressional Record: March 24, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
TRIBUTE TO THE LEGENDARY DANNY BARKER
Mr. JOHNSTON. Mr. President, on Sunday, March 13 New Orleans lost one
of our most beloved, respected and well known jazz greats, Mr. Danny
Barker. A member of one of New Orleans' famous musical families, the
Barbarin Family, Danny Barker began his career playing music in a
street band called the Boozan Kings, but soon rose to play with other
New Orleans legends in New York including Jelly Roll Morton, Louis
Armstrong, and Sidney Bechet, to mention just a few.
A musician, an historian, and an entertainer Danny Barker also was a
songwriter. Who could ever forget the tune and words of ``Save the
Bones for Henry Jones'' which was recorded by Nat King Cole and Johnny
Mercer? It was as back up to his beloved wife, Blue Lu Barker, a great
jazz singer, that some of his most classic work was recorded.
Like many of New Orleans renowned musicians, Danny Barker returned to
the home he loved in the 1960's. In the 1970's he founded the Fairview
Baptist Church Brass Band, which was the training ground for some of
the most outstanding classical jazz musicians we have today in the
Crescent City: Lucian Barbarin, Greg Stafford, Leroy Jones and Michael
White all participated in this tremendous gift Danny Barker gave back
to the City from which he came.
I met Danny Barker when I chaired a hearing in New Orleans on a very
hot Friday July afternoon on a bill I had introduced directing the
Secretary of the Interior to conduct a feasibility study on
establishing a new unit of the national park system to preserve,
commemorate and interpret the origin, development and progression of
jazz in New Orleans. Part of our concept was to look at educational
programs for kids in New Orleans, and we invited Mr. Barker to testify.
He agreed without a moment's hesitation to make time to come down to
the Theater for the Performing Arts and be the lead witness on one of
our panels.
Danny Barker's words were heartfelt and straight-forward. He told us
that he prayed that our project would go forward, because he was so
concerned about so many kids sitting around doing nothing. I well
remember what he said: ``You give a kid a horn, he becomes identified
in the neighborhood as something special. And that is what youngsters
look for. To be identified with something. All of them cannot be 7-foot
basketball players * * * You should not leave youngsters laying around
doing nothing, because they are inventive, one way or another, and it
is a bad influence. It is about time something is done about it.''
Danny Barker did ``something about it.'' Over 125 kids went through
his program; 20 or 30 of them are still playing music in New Orleans
today. I think he may have been proudest of this effort, and he had
much to be proud of in his life.
All of us will miss Danny Barker, but part of him will remain with us
through the many contributions he made to our City and to the world of
music.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that an article from the Wall
Street Journal and two articles from the New Orleans Times Picayune
about this great, generous and very modest man be printed in full at
the end of my remarks.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Wall Street Journal, Mar. 23, 1994]
Jazz Purist Gets His Solemn Send-Off
(By Roxane Orgill)
Danny Barker made it clear before he died: No jazz funeral,
please. The man who played guitar with everybody from Bunk
Jounson to Cab Calloway and then came home to mount a one-man
crusade to preserve traditional New Orleans jazz didn't like
the way funeral parades had deteriorated. The bands played
rhythm and blues now instead of slow hymns and dirges on the
way to the cemetery. Second liners danced in a cloud of
reefer smoke, and youngsters jumped on the roofs of cars,
even the hearse. The jazz funeral had become just another
rowdy party in a party town. No way was Barker, who died on
March 13 at age 85, going out like that.
But his wishes put his musician friends in a pickle. How
could they not give Danny Barker a jazz funeral? Even
nonmusicians are entitled to a funeral parade complete with a
seven- or eight-piece band and grand marshal. How could they
let the man who wrote the song ``Save the Bones for Henry
Jones,'' made many recordings with his wife, singer Blue Lu,
and got elected to the Jazz Hall of Fame go to his grave
without a peep?
So of course Barker got a jazz funeral, a great big,
beautiful, noisy funeral with a band of 40 musicians or more,
six grand marshals and a second line numbering in the many
hundreds. Not as grand as the great clarinetist Alphonse
Picou's funeral, which drew 10,000 people in 1961, but close.
More to the point, it was a traditional jazz funeral, or as
near to one as organizer Gregg Stafford, a 40-year-old
trumpet player in Barker's band, the Jazz Hounds, could make
it, given such modern-day hindrances as freeways and Reeboks.
Jazz funerals date back at least as far as 1819, when
architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe noted that funeral parades
were ``peculiar to New Orleans alone among all American
cities.'' Also peculiar to the ``city of pleasure'' was a
mania for brass instruments. Every social club and benevolent
society had its brass band. For a funeral, the practice was
to assemble at the club in the morning and parade to the
church, delivering a steady stream of dirges and slow marches
along the way. After the ceremony the band escorted the body
to the cemetery, again playing slow, mournful music. There is
some dispute as to whether the musicians entered the cemetery
or stayed respectfully outside. In any case, after the
burial, they burst into spirited marches and popular songs,
to represent the joy of everlasting life, and paraded back to
the club. The whole affair might last nine hours, most of
which were spent in motion, making music.
Times change. Freeways dissect the city now, and not even
the determined Stafford could persuade band members to trek
out to St. Raymond Catholic Church, three miles from the town
center. So they assembled three blocks from the church,
paraded to the gates, and after the service, drove to a point
seven blocks from St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 for the final
cortege.
The musicians gathered with vigorous handshakes all around,
even though most had seen each other only minutes before at
the service. The grand marshals adjusted the sashes across
their chests bearing the names of their bands (Olympia,
Tuxedo) or clubs (Money Wasters), and the paper doves perched
on their shoulders, representing the flight to the hereafter.
At the first drumroll, adults and children appeared from who
knows where to dance alongside, forming the so-called
``second line'' that was no line at all but a throbbing mass.
The marshals led with a halting sideways two-step. One of
them waved a picture of Barker.
The colorful scene was not lost on the throng of
photographers, shooting excitedly away, but the music!--the
music was the thing. Trumpets, trombones and saxophones
locked in harmonic and melodic step formed a thick block of
sound, from which countermelodies on a clarinet or soprano
sax spiraled up like cigarette smoke. ``In the Sweet By and
By.'' ``Lord, Lord, Lord,'' ``What a Friend We Have in
Jesus''; second liners sang along. One could see their open
mouths and ecstatic eyes but their vioces were all but lost
in the mournful march of bass drum and blasts of tuba.
The music is difficult. It calls for musicians to improvise
not as soloists, as they would in later jazz (Louis Armstrong
was the first to play solos, in the 1920s), but as a unit.
The individual is encouraged to express himself freely but
must not lose step with his fellow musicians and with the
tune. No wonder that most brass bands today prefer the easier
route of rhythm and blues, in which improvisation is minimal
and melody comes mostly in riffs--rhythmic snips of music,
played over and over.
They normally play in jeans, T-shirts and sandals, too,
which would never do for the funeral of Danny Barker,
grandson of Isidore Barbarin, a member of the mighty Onward
Brass Band in its prime. Stafford insisted on the standard
uniform: black jacket, tie, trousers and shined shoes; clean,
pressed white shirt; special black cap with a band's name
emblazoned across the front. The shined shoes were especially
important. Clarinetist Michael White, who is 39, remembers
gazing in awe at the senior musicians' ``shoes that shone
like glass.''
White came up through the Fairview Baptist Church bands,
which Barker founded in a hugely successful attempt to jump-
start the brass band in the '70s. He is dedicated to carrying
the torch for traditional jazz, and he is worried. ``The
tradition is in a lot of trouble, because of
commercialization and people dying like this,'' he says.
Catching his breath at parade's end, Stafford, also a
Fairview band alumnus, said he was ``95% pleased with his
attempt to deliver an authentic jazz funeral. Included in the
5%, one can assume, were the single pair of black Reeboks and
the brief episode of rhythm and blues. That came near the
end, after many, many hymns, minutes before the band marched
single file into Trombone Shorty's for liquid refreshment. A
short while later, a few of the musicians could be seen
marching up the street to a rocking R&B beat, surrounded by
second liners like a swarm of bees.
____
[From the Times-Picayune Publishing Co., Mar. 14, 1994]
Legendary Jazz Man Danny Barker Dies
(By Scott Aiges)
Danny Barker, a musician, historian and humorist who played
with many of the seminal figures of jazz and left a lasting
legacy on New Orleans music died Sunday of cancer at his
home. He was 85.
Barker rose from playing music on New Orleans streets in a
makeshift ``spasm'' band called the Boozan Kings to a
distinguished career playing with a who's who of jazz: Jelly
Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Sidney Bechet,
James P. Johnson, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Dexter
Gordon.
He was fond of saying that since he had begun playing music
for tips as a teen-ager, ``I was never an amateur.''
At 20, he followed his uncle, bandleader Paul Barbarin, to
New York. He remained there as a journeyman musician for 35
years.
It was in New York that Barker began a decade-long
association with Morton, a fellow New Orleans expatriate who
is considered the first great Jazz composer.
Morton ``never called me nothing but Hometown as long as I
known him,'' Barker once said. He knew my name, but he called
me Hometown. He felt a feeling for me, ``cause I was a little
catfish in a sea of sharks.''
Barker considered himself an entertainer more than a
stellar musician. His strength was making an audience smile
with innuendo-laced songs while strumming a guitar or a six-
string banjo. But it was backing up his wife of 64 years,
singer Blue Lu Barker, that Barker achieved some of his
greatest renown in the late 1930s. Their recordings were too
risque to become hits, but they remain classics.
Barker's songwriting talents were such that some stars of
the day, including Nat ``King'' Cole and Johnny Mercer,
recorded his ``Save the Bones For Henry Jones.''
Barker was self-deprecating about his own abilities
compared with the flashy young guitarists who came after him.
But he also was proud of his wide knowledge of popular song
and solidity as a rhythm section accompanist.
He could play ``extremely subtly on the guitar,'' jazz
historian Richard B. Allen said. ``In an apartment or a home
he could show you some of the soft things. Danny could play
those sweet love songs from the '20s and '30s--play these
beautiful harmonics that you just don't get in a nightclub
atomoshere. It's a shame that was never captured on a
recording.''
In the 1940s, Barker was a featured artist on the
nationally broadcast ``This Is Jazz'' radio program. His
performances helped to rekindle interest in traditional jazz
after the music had gone out of style.
After returning to New Orleans, Barker made perhaps his
greatest contribution to jazz: He helped revive the dying
brass band tradition by starting the Fairview Baptist Church
Brass Band in the 1970s.
Through its ranks passed many of the players who today are
the most outspoken advocates for the traditional New Orleans
sound, including Lucian Barbarin, Greg Stafford, Leroy Jones
and Michael White.
Yet he accepted changes in the music easily.
``Nobody wants to do what their grandparents did,'' Barker
said in 1993. ``You can't expect youngsters to play `Didn't
He Ramble' and so on.''
To Barker, as long as there are brass bands in which young
people can learn to play, jazz will take care of itself.
``I wouldn't fret the least bit about this music dying
out,'' he said. ``People love a parade. There's always going
to be `When the Saints Go Marching In.'''
A quintessential jazz man, Barker had a strut in his step,
and hepcat expressions such as ``You dig?'' and
``monkeyshine'' peppered his speech long after they fell from
common use.
He often stood up for common people, pointing out that jazz
developed as a pressure valve for African-Americans who
``caught hell the rest of their lives.''
In recent years, Barker was a familiar sight around New
Orleans. He played at private events and he could be heard
weekly at the Palm Court Jazz Cafe in the French Quarter
until illness curtailed his activities in January. His last
performance was at Preservation Hall on New Year's Eve.
Barker made guest appearances on several albums, including
a Jelly Roll Morton tribute by the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. In
1993, Barker capped his recording career with ``Save the
Bones,'' a collection of solo performances released on
Orleans Records.
In 1991, he was named a Master of Jazz by the National
Endowment for the Arts. Two years later, he was inducted into
the American Jazz Hall of Fame.
He wrote an autobiography, ``A Life In Jazz,'' and a study
of New Orleans music, ``Bourbon Street Black.''
As a historian, Barker ``had a real knack for capturing the
flavor of music and musicians and the people around it,''
said Allen, the dean of New Orleans jazz scholars. ``When
he's in top form, he's my favorite writer for writing about
jazz.''
Barker is survived by his wife; their daughter, Sylvia
Barker; and a grandson.
Funeral arrangements are incomplete.
Musician, historian and humorist Danny Baker, who died
Sunday, played with the who's who of jazz from its beginnings
to today.
____
Danny Barker: A Jazz Great's Legacy (By John McCusker, Staff
photographer)
``Danny's dead,'' my friend said sadly over the phone
Sunday. Though awakened from a late afternoon nap, I knew
exactly what she was talking about. The man with the pencil-
thin moustache and river-wide sense of humor was gone.
Danny Barker, the beloved musician who to many WAS New
Orleans jazz, will not soon be forgotten. His was a life that
touched so many others that it is truly impossible to make an
accounting of his legacy.
I know this because I knew Danny. I am calling him Danny
now, but I never called him that to his face. It was always
Mr. Barker.
Part of that was my Algiers upbringing; you always called
someone older ``mister.'' But in his case, it was strictly a
sign of respect. ``Mr. Barker'' deserved that.
I have no special claim to Danny's memory. I knew him only
17 months. Still, I find it impossible to imagine a world
without him.
We met in 1992. I called him up out of the blue to see if
he would help me ``learn about jazz'' for a story I was
working on. ``Can you come over this afternoon?'' he asked
without skipping a beat.
That was Danny. If the subject was jazz, he was always
willing to tell you what's what.
Danny's career started when he was a child playing the
streets of the city with his kid's band, the ``Boozan
Kings.'' He left New Orleans in 1929 and found fame in New
York.
Over the next three decades, he played with about every
major name in jazz including Jelly Roll Morton, Billie
Holiday and Louis Armstrong. He achieved success any musician
would envy. But, to me, this was not his greatness.
The most remarkable phase of Danny's life took place after
his years of fame in New York when he moved back to New
Orleans in the '60s. Seeing the musical traditions of the
city fading, he started a one-man crusade to preserve them.
He founded the Fairview Baptist Church Brass Band in his
neighborhood and taught young musicians the musical heritage
of the city. He wrote books, gave lectures and entertained
practically any request for an interview, all in the name of
keeping the jazz tradition alive.
The fruit of Danny's preservation efforts will, ironically,
be evident in his funeral procession on Thursday. His casket
will be escorted by a black-hatted brass band playing a
funeral dirge; a band, no doubt, featuring some of Danny's
prodigies. There too, will be the multitude of others who,
like myself, feel indebted to this very special man.
So when I grieve for Danny, it will not be for the man who
played guitar for Cab Calloway or wrote ``Save the Bones for
Henry Jones.'' I will grieve for the elderly, yet energetic
stranger who invited me into his modest Sere Street home and
taught me about jazz.
Thanks for the lesson, Mr. Barker. I will miss you.
____________________