[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.

                          ____________________