The Celestial Monochord

Hey Hey Mister Larson! (part three)

This is the third in a series about the first seven seconds of "Moonshiner's Dance," recorded in Saint Paul in 1927 by Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra.  It was included in the Anthology of American Folk Music, sometimes called the Harry Smith Anthology.
See also Part One and Part Two.

Tonight, the Bedlam welcomes the Republicans with a circus (link)

         

At the start of the Moonshiner's Dance, the leader of The Victoria Café Orchestra grandly calls out to you, the listener, and he renames you "Mister Larson."

I've explained why I think Mister Larson was probably not a specific person but a cultural caricature — a generic audience member being welcomed into The Victoria Café.

He's a butter-and-egg man, in other words, getting a Texas Guinan routine in a 1920s speakeasy.

Hey hey, Mister Larson!

Thinking over questions like Mister Larson — trying to reconstruct the meanings the recording would have had in Minnesota in 1927 — has fundamentally rejiggered the Moonshiner's Dance in my imagination. 

And those reconstructed meanings, I've come to decide, reverberate across the meaning and argument of the Anthology itself.

Today, as the Republican National Convention slouches toward Saint Paul, I insist that Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra were definitely NOT "from the Minnesota area," as the 1997 liner notes to the Anthology "assumed."

They were not even from Minneapolis.  They were vividly, and elaborately, and specifically from the city of Saint Paul. Should it surprise us that the Moonshiner's Dance is about its place and time, and that the geographical specifics matter to the music?

As with Dylan and Hibbing, if we want to understand the Moonshiner's Dance, we need to understand a little about the history of Saint Paul.

—

In 1900, the Saint Paul police chief initiated a policy, called the O'Connor System, that intentionally established the city as a haven for criminals. 

I've chosen these words carefully. They sound like the kind of local jack-a-lope folklore every city feeds to tourists. They aren't.

The O'Connor System's method was this: protect all criminals from prosecution under the conditions that they (A) announce themselves at police headquarters, (B) pay bribes, and (C) limit themselves to vice and conspiracy within city limits — ruder behavior was to be conducted elsewhere. 

Violators of this compact were brutalized, either by the police or by the very criminal element that benefited from the arrangement. 

And benefit they did, for more than 30 years. In 1932, for example, 21% of all bank robberies in the USA occurred in Minnesota, but exactly zero occurred within Saint Paul's city limits.

Liquor, prostitution, and gambling (and so, music) flourished within the city limits, and residents enjoyed them with gusto and relative impunity.  So did visiting tourists. Larry Craig could have tapped his foot all day and all night.

—

Chief O'Connor's system was not a huge break from the past.

Saint Paul began as a little encampment on the Mississippi around Fort Snelling, providing the fort's soldiers with all the comforts not issued to them by the government. 

In 1838, thanks to "beastly scenes of intoxication among the soldiers of this garrison," the fort's administrators had had enough — especially of a moonshiner named Pierre Parrant, known affectionately as Pig's Eye.

The little village was burned to the ground and its residents were moved eight miles upstream.  The new location was called Pigs Eye for several years, until its first Catholic priest proposed the name Saint Paul.

As it grew, the city was always about trade and transportation, unlike industry-heavy Minneapolis. Brewing was the main manufacturing activity in Saint Paul, and a vice economy was supported by, and supported, these other sectors.

Prohibition, in particular, did not go well for the Feds in Saint Paul.  The city — with its profoundly anti-prohibition population, its proximity to the Canadian border, and its great regional transportation system — was one of the wettest places in America.

Businessmen from all over the US knew Saint Paul was a good destination for business trips.  Truly, what happened in Saint Paul stayed in Saint Paul. 

—

It was Mister Larson, and not the Victoria Cafe Orchestra, who was from "the Minnesota area."

Saint Paul was insular — a cultural island — and thus a peculiar state capital. Most Saint Paulites had ethical qualms about traveling and spending money beyond city limits, with Minneapolis in particular being another planet, and a hostile one. 

Larger and wealthier Minneapolis was, especially in the popular imagination, a straight-laced, class-stratified, Republican town of Lutheran factory owners and non-union workers. The workers were Scandinavian, even more so than the rest of the state, and the owners were old-stock Yankees.

By contrast, especially in the popular imagination, Saint Paul was an island of drunken, unionized, Irish-Catholic Democrats who were not enamored of the law.

And the popular imagination was tolerably close to the truth.

Saint Paul's political machine was overwhelmingly Irish, and the city's many Yankees, Germans, and Scandinavians figured they may as well be Irish too, given the circumstances. In Saint Paul, ethnic diversity could have a strange way of drawing the city even closer together, increasing its insularity.

—

Hey hey, Mister Larson! 

So Saint Paul welcomed a generic son of Lars — a pleasure-seeking visitor from the more culturally conservative city of Minneapolis or from the mining and farming communities across "the Minnesota area."

Here we are now — entertain us. 

After one strong whiff of cultural history, the Moonshiner's Dance morphs into the shape of countless other recordings, one after another.

Viva Las Vegas, New York New York, I Love LA — the Moonshiner's Dance is an advertising jingle. 

In the shadow of its richer and more sober neighbor across the Mississippi River, Saint Paul knew its place and was not afraid to advertise. The name of the Victoria Cafe is right there on the record label, as are the cafe's main attractions of moonshine and dancing. 

Suddenly, I hear a lot of Rum And Coca-Cola — a lot of working for the Yankee dollar — in the Moonshiners Dance.  Whether the Andrew Sisters' version or Lord Invader's, who's to say?

It's a cynical thing — a small, casual violence — to rename your listener with a cultural stereotype. Living and working in a place like Saint Paul, a satirical ear must've come easily to a cafe musician like Frank Cloutier.

So Cloutier makes it seem natural to me, for the first time, that F. Scott Fitzgerald was from Saint Paul — both men must've seen the Jazz Age in something like the way a blackjack dealer sees Las Vegas.

Mister Larson now becomes Mister Jones, the unprepared square of Bob Dylan's Ballad of a Thin Man.  In the Moonshiner's Dance, you, Mister Larson, have sneaked into The Victoria Cafe the same way you, Mister Jones, were about to find yourself squarely in the middle of Woodstock.

Suddenly, as Larson and Jones stroll into the Victoria Cafe together, Cloutier's Jazz Age comes into view as Dylan's sixties, with their respective collisions of cultural whiplash and bootlegged intoxicants.

—

But for now, obviously, much of this oversteps the evidence I've shown you.  It's in the actual music later in the recording, for example, that you really get to know Cloutier's satirical cynicism.  All in good time.  For now, I think I know who Mister Larson is and what he meant in his place and moment. 

Now I have to write about the meaning of the other, unintelligible part of the introduction — and about the first seven seconds as a whole.  It has to be done before I put this series of entries to rest.  In the last installment, I'll try to work out some of what I can say about what I can't understand.

_

Selected References (more than any other blog!)

Claiming the City: Politics, Faith, and the Power of Place by Mary Lethert Wingerd — The best book on the Moonshiner's Dance so far, and she may not even know the recording exists.  Hugely important.  I've made Saint Paul sound more like a riot, but Wingerd emphasizes the compacts and balances and civic identities that made Saint Paul a great place to live.

John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crooks' Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul, 1920-1936 by Paul Maccabee — The title makes it sound like it could be about any city.  Every place thinks it was an Al Capone hangout.  But Maccabee has written, in a sense, a chronicle of the consequences of the O'Connor System.  Fun read, too. 

They Chose Minnesota: A Survey of the State's Ethnic Groups edited by June Drenning Holmquist — An unbelievable, exhaustive treatment of every damned ethnic group that ever set foot in the state.  That it was done at all is dumbfounding. 

  

_

Hey Hey Mister Larson! (Part Two)

This is the third in a series about the first seven seconds of "Moonshiner's Dance," recorded in Saint Paul in 1927 by Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra.  It was included in the Anthology of American Folk Music, sometimes called the Harry Smith Anthology.
See also Part One and Part Three.

Early in my research into "The Moonshiner's Dance," I knew the identity of Mister Larson would be easy to uncover.  It's the low-hanging fruit. 

After all, Frank Cloutier addresses him the instant the recording begins. Hey hey, Mr. Larson! 

I knew Larson would wind up being a musician in Frank's band, or the owner of the Victoria Cafe, and I'd write up a neat biography of this Larson guy and explain why he's so prominently placed at the start of Frank's only recording.

 

Today, deep into my third year of research, it hasn't turned out that way. 

 

I've seen hundreds of thousands of advertisements, newspaper articles, obituaries, theater programs, union newsletters, graves, birth and death certificates, draft cards, photos, letters, and much else.

 

I'm a resident of the Twin Cities of 1927.  Driving around St. Paul, I once saw a product of the WPA and caught myself thinking, "Hey, THAT'S new."

Living like this — hanging around the dance music scene of Prohibition-era Saint Paul— I keep encountering the same guys over and over.  I notice when their wives have kids.  I know when they finally get their own bands.  I hear about it when a good pitcher joins their kittenball team. 

 

And I'm sorry.  I don't know any Larson — at least nobody associated with Frank Cloutier or the local dance scene or the management of the Victoria Cafe. 

 

—

 

Maybe I'm not hearing the muffled 1927 recording correctly.  Maybe it isn't "Mister Larson" at all, but something else.  Here's an mp3 of the first few seconds.

I briefly considered whether Frank might instead be saying "Mister Nelson" as in Gordon Nelson, the drummer who seems to have played on "The Moonshiner's Dance."  For a bit longer, I considered the Cafe's manager at the time of the recording, Sammy Markus. 

 

But listening again to the recording, I find they just won't do.  Hey hey Mr. Markus.  Hey hey Mr. Markus.  Hey hey Mr. Markus. 

 

No.  It's "Hey hey Mr. Larson."

As a last resort, I scoured the entries for "Larson" and "Larsen" in the St. Paul and Minneapolis city directories, which they started to call "phone books" once everybody got phones. 

 

Ordinarily, I adore city directories, intimate and teasing as they are.  But searching every Larson in the Twin Cities directories is tedious work — there are roughly 2700 entries in the 1927 editions and they have to be scanned line by line, by hand and eye. 

St. Paul is striking for its lack of prospects. I found one music teacher named Bertha Larson who was presumably not a Mister. 

There are more prospects in Minneapolis.  There was a piano mover named Gustaf Larson and a piano tuner named Martin Larson — unlikely professions for Mister Larson, even though Frank Cloutier was a keyboardist. There was also a movie house manager, a cashier at a dance hall, a radio salesman, and another woman music teacher.

There was a family of musical Larsons, and I've done a longitudinal study of them — followed them around town like a shamus.  So far, none of these Larsons seems to have a connection to Frank or to the Victoria Cafe or even to St. Paul.  They were not well known, and other than their name, nothing seems relevant about them. 

The 1930 census counted about 11,900 individuals named Larsen or Larson in Hennepin and Ramsey counties, the counties of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Limiting myself to the right age and gender brings the number down, but I have to face the fact that I may never find the Larson that Frank had in mind.

—

One last prospect has occasionally troubled my mind for about two years.  In 1927, the leader of the Minneapolis Police Department's band was a cop called Curly Larson. 

I've tried to find out more about him, but so far, he's been a tough nut to crack, probably because of that Curly nickname. We know he was probably bald.  I'll keep searching.

But no matter the details, it's a delicious idea. 

Smack in the middle of Prohibition, the leader of the Minneapolis policeman's band puts on his uniform every Friday and Saturday night, crosses the river into St. Paul, and plays "The Moonshiner's Dance" at the Victoria Cafe with Frank Cloutier and his boys. 

Playing that soused polka in uniform on the bandstand ... I desperately want him to have done this. There is exactly zero evidence that he did.

But could he have?  Could a Minneapolis cop have played such a drunken, reeling tribute to bootleg liquor without being fired, or even arrested?  Especially if he was prominently featured on a 78 rpm record?  And might a St. Paul officer have made the same trip to Minneapolis, maybe in a pickled cop exchange program?

During many long days in archives and libraries, I've often bounced these questions about Curly Larson off my findings.  Partly thanks to that habit, I've slowly evolved from being the archivist of "The Moonshiners Dance" to being its cultural historian.

The shift felt complete the day I finally decided to trust my findings about all these Larsons.  There's always so much more work to be done, but so far, nobody has presented himself as the likely Mister Larson.

Therefore, according to my current research results, there probably was no Mister Larson. Or rather, there were many thousands of him.  I've come to suspect that Mister Larson is a product of Frank Cloutier's imagination.  He's the generic audience member — just your typical Minnesotan off the street. 

Hey hey Mister Larson!

If so, this would make him a founding citizen of Lake Wobegon. Like Garrison Keillor's townspeople, he's a caricature invented for the sake of Minnesota humor.  To this day, Mister Larson still lives next door to Pastor Inkvist and across the street from Carl Krebsbach.

It would also make Mister Larson an ancestor of Mister Jones, Bob Dylan's main character in "Ballad of a Thin Man."

Just as with Dylan's character, the inclination is to imagine Mister Larson as somebody other than you.  But Frank and Bob both address the listener — both are talking to and about you, no matter what name they give you.  You are Mister Larson.

Something is happening, therefore, and you don't know what it is.  To understand who Mister Larson was, we have to sort out what he might have meant to somebody like Frank Cloutier in a place like Saint Paul at a time like 1927. 

We have to reconstruct a meaning that no longer exists.  We have to do cultural history. 

I'll present some initial findings in Part Three.

_

Hey Hey Mister Larson! (part one)

This is the third in a series about the first seven seconds of "Moonshiner's Dance," recorded in Saint Paul in 1927 by Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra.  It was included in the Anthology of American Folk Music, sometimes called the Harry Smith Anthology.
See also Part Two and Part Three.

Alessandro Carrera
Bob Dylan Symposium in Minneapolis
March 27, 2007

At the 2007 Bob Dylan symposium in Minneapolis, Alessandro Carrera, the leading Italian translator of Bob Dylan's lyrics and prose, told a story about his first awareness of Dylan. I keep remembering it as I think about Mister Larson.

The gist of the story was this:

When Carrera was a teenager in Italy in the late 1960's, he was obsessed with American music — even though it was very difficult to get a hold of, and he could count all the words in his English vocabulary on one hand.

Listening to albums by Joan Baez, and by the Byrds, and by Peter Paul and Mary, what excited him most on each album was always the one or two songs that had been written by this guy — one "Bobe Dee-lahn", as Carrera pronounced it. 

Of course, he couldn't understand the lyrics at all — it was Bob Dylan's melodies that attracted him.

It took some doing, but Carrera finally got a hold of a recording by Bob Dylan himself — a 45 rpm single, one side of which was "Mister Tambourine Man."  He put it on the turntable, and was elated to hear that the first word out of Dylan's mouth was one of the few English words that the teenage Carrera knew. 

"Hey!" 

Carrera didn't just know what the word meant — that is, he didn't just know its Italian translation — he also deeply recognized the word.  He appreciated it.  It spoke to him. 

"Hey!"

It meant, "You! LISTEN TO ME." And that was cool.

—

"The Moonshiner's Dance" begins with a 7-second spoken introduction. A prologue.

Here's an mp3:

Download MoonshinerIntro.mp3

In its first two seconds, someone — almost certainly the leader of the Victoria Cafe Orchestra, Frank E. Cloutier — practically shouts "Hey hey, Mister Larson!"

In the next five seconds, in the same declarative voice, he rattles off about 20 more syllables. But because of some rasping and, maybe, needle-bouncing at start of the recording, all but a few of these syllables are completely indecipherable. 

To just count the syllables in the introduction, I had to transcribe it phonetically, without worrying about its meaning.  The words sound something like this:

Hey hey, Mister Larson!  These boys geeky entwine anonymous spectacle play pen! That's it, go boys!

We may never know what Frank E. really said (and I doubt I've made a lucky guess).  Maybe the Gennett recording engineer in 1927 used a blank wax disc that was rough or soft near the outer edge. Preparing the wax was skilled labor and results could be slightly uneven. If that's the source of the noise, every released copy of the 78 is similarly indecipherable.

On the other hand, the Smithsonian-Folkways' reissue on CD is the only version I've heard.  It may be that their "source copy" of the 78 rpm record was damaged just there. Perhaps another copy of the 78 has a prologue that can be understood.

In any case, after this spoken introduction someone whoops "WAH hee!", and the band strikes up its reeling, careening medley of tunes played as one-steps.

—

I, and possibly you, listen to these old recordings to put our minds through an intense exercise.  It's, like, mind-expanding. 

We lean into the noise and try to tease out the delicate signal as it leaks across a divide as impenetrable as a world war, a depression, and a cold war.  The Mason-Dixon line.  The color line.  Class and gender and religious and educational and technological divides.  And, for us, those divides are not so much obstacles to our listening pleasure as they are at the root of the pleasure. 

Among the recordings on the Harry Smith Anthology, The Moonshiners Dance comes to me across the shortest distances. 

The first seven seconds are in English, it seems.  Frank E. would have had a Rhode Island accent, but his audience at the Victoria Cafe was an Upper Midwestern one — it still is, given that nobody is listening but me.  In fact, the Victoria Cafe is still standing, just a couple minutes' drive from my house.  Frank E. was even raised Catholic, like me — and unlike almost everyone else on the Anthology (except the Cajuns, who do not speak my language). 

You'd think I'd have a shot at understanding Frank E. 

Instead, I'm like Alessandro Carrera.  There's a world between me and the speaker, and I can only pick out a few translatable syllables.

But I recognize something in the gesture. Hey hey, Mister Larson!

Frank could hardly have imagined our existence.  We're eavesdropping on his message to Mr. Larson, but somehow the message seems intended for us. But what does it mean?

_

Louis Armstrong in Minnesota, 1939

used by permission of the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder
and the Minnesota Historical Society

 

As a side trip from my regular research, I've spent a week or so of evenings and weekends looking into the facts surrounding Louis Armstrong's appearance at the Coliseum Ballroom in St. Paul on Friday night, July 28, 1939. Please forgive any errors, and let me know what you think.

The 1939 show was advertised as Armstrong's first appearance in the Twin Cities — a point repeatedly stressed in the twin African American newspapers, the Minneapolis Spokesman and the St. Paul Recorder.

But he might also have appeared in Minneapolis in the spring of 1931. That earlier show is mentioned in Jones and Chilton's Louis: The Louis Armstrong Story, but I haven't been able to confirm it despite a grueling newspaper search.

Regardless, today we know Armstrong had visited the Twin Cities about 20 years earlier. From 1918 to 1921, he'd played for the Streckfus line of riverboats — paddle-wheelers that were still (or already) trading on nostalgia for the Mississippi's 19th Century heyday with picturesque excursions up and down the river. That's the gig that brought Armstrong through St. Paul and Minneapolis for the first time.

For Armstrong, then, his 1939 appearance in Minnesota might have been a kind of nostalgic excursion of his own.

The Coliseum

One of the only facts you might still hear about the Coliseum Ballroom is that a lot of famous acts played there — Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Jack Teagarden, Ben Pollack, Lawrence Welk, the Andrews Sisters.

During its 38 years, the Coliseum was a quirky, unavoidable, and irreplaceable center of St. Paul's night life, love life, and imagination. It's rarely remembered today, but Garrison Keillor provided a gratifying exception a few months ago, 22 minutes into a speech for the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

I began thinking about the Coliseum two years ago, on my first day researching the Victoria Cafe, the orchestra of which recorded the strange "Moonshiner's Dance," which eventually found its way onto Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music.

It turned out that the leader of the Victoria Cafe Orchestra, Frank Cloutier, later acted as the leader of the house orchestra of the Coliseum, four blocks to the Cafe's west. He stayed there for thirteen years (1929-1942).

It must have been a good gig. The Coliseum boasted the world's largest dance floor, and offered $100 to anyone who could prove otherwise. Its floor was a rebuilt hockey rink with a 250 x 90-foot playing surface, so a packed house at the Coliseum Ballroom could mean more than 3000 dancers at one time. Leading the Coliseum Orchestra regularly brought Frank Cloutier to the radio all across the Midwest.

The Coliseum's owner — the husky, gregarious, and scrappy John J. Lane — was widely known as "The Musician's Friend." He was also a Ramsey County commissioner at the time Frank Cloutier took the job.

Satchmo Returns Triumphant

In the late 1930's, national fame had only just come to Louis Armstrong.

A front page article in the African-American weekly Spokesman-Recorder credited Armstrong's sudden wave of popularity to his film appearances. An ad featured a photo of Armstrong goofing around with Bing Crosby.

And indeed, in 1936, Armstrong had played a fairly substantial role in Crosby's Pennies From Heaven. The next year, he was in both the Jack Benny musical comedy Artists and Models and Mae West's Every Day's A Holiday. In 1938, Armstrong sang "Jeepers Creepers" to a horse in Going Places, with Dick Powell, Anita Louise, and Ronald Reagan. A New York Times film critic didn't think much of Going Places, but it left him wanting more of Satchmo.

On the day of the Twin Cities show, a wry editorial in the Spokesman-Recorder described how Walter Winchell himself, "the 'Patron Saint' of many an American column reader," had declared Louis Armstrong the King of Swing. The paper seemed to almost grudgingly agree that Armstrong "has brought something to modern music that defies definition, and reams of paper and tons of ink have been used trying to describe it."

Jazz was now being taken seriously as an art form and scholarly work had begun to appear about it. Scarcely three months after his show in St. Paul, Armstrong appeared at Manhattan's enormous Center Theater portraying Bottom in Swingin' The Dream, a jazz adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Benny Goodman co-starred, and Walt Disney designed the sets.

Things To Do Around The Twin Cities

There were plenty of other things to do around town without paying 80 cents to see Louis Armstrong on that clear, mild summer night.

Several area theaters were showing Dark Victory with Bette Davis for 25 cents. Or you could see Errol Flynn, Olivia De Havilland, and Ann Sheridan in Dodge City, or the W. C. Fields comedy You Can't Cheat an Honest Man, with Edgar Bergen and the somewhat wooden Charlie McCarthy.

Alternately, there was the "Melodies Around The World" ice show at the St. Paul Auditorium — 25 cents in the bleachers, 50 cents to sit at a table. The Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus wasn't scheduled to arrive for another week.

And the Streckfus line ran the paddle-wheel steamer Capitol out of the dock at the foot of Jackson Street. You could take day trips down to the lock and dam at Hastings, or one of the "moonlight dance trips" leaving every night at 9:00 pm. Armstrong had worked on the Capitol in his youth — there's even a 1919 photo of him aboard that boat.

So far, I don't see that the Streckfus excursions were racially segregated in Minnesota in 1939 as they had been elsewhere, before and long after. Maybe, while he was in town for the Coliseum show, Armstrong could have taken a ride on the Capitol, this time as a passenger. Nor do I know for sure if the idea would have appealed to him.

In spite of these other temptations, the 1939 appearance was a rare opportunity for Twin Cities jazz fans. It was their chance not only to see Louis Armstrong, but also to vote with their dollars. On the day of the show, an editorial in the Spokesman-Recorder stated:

Somewhat off the beat theatrically, the Twin Cities seldom have an opportunity to see and hear internationally known Negro artists. When they do come along, we think we should support them.

The week after the show, the Spokesman-Recorder reminded its readers how lucky they were to have Armstrong play here.

In St. Louis, where there are 100,000 Negroes to draw a crowd from, the Missourians pay $1.10 to hear the same band Twin Citians heard for 80 cents.

It must have helped that jazz, and Armstrong in particular, had a fast-growing white audience nationwide — the 1940 census found fewer than 9000 African Americans in Minneapolis and St. Paul combined.

The Trio Club

The 1939 concert was sponsored by either the Trio Club or the Tri Club, depending on whether you believe a news article in the Spokesman-Recorder or ads appearing on the day of the show in St. Paul's mainstream papers. A Spokesman-Recorder columnist describes the club as "three St. Paul men who invested several hundred dollars."

Beyond that, I don't know much about the Tri or Trio Club. There's no entry for them in the 1939 St. Paul city directory — either in the yellow or the white pages, as we would say today — and my search of the records of Minnesota's Secretary of State showed no clear sign that they ever incorporated.

The Spokesman-Recorder did report that the three investors barely made a profit from Armstrong's appearance, thanks to a rumor circulating prior to the show.

Rumor Cuts Attendance

A thousand people saw Armstrong at the Coliseum that night, according to a follow-up article in the August 4 Spokesman-Recorder. Hundreds more would have attended, had it not been for an apparent act of sabotage:

Some irresponsible individual several days before the date of the dance spread the rumor that the Armstrong band would not appear. Attempts are being made to ascertain the guilty party.

On the day of the show, the Spokesman offices in Minneapolis and Recorder offices in St. Paul got more than 100 calls from people trying to find out if the show was really canceled.

We'll never know the motives behind the rumor. For me, the natural hunch would be racism and an accompanying hatred of jazz, although whatever I know about that isn't very specific to late 1930's Minnesota.

Certainly, Armstrong's sudden fame must have made his shows an obvious target for reactionaries along the tour's route. And two years earlier, a scene in Artists and Models with Martha Raye had drawn controversy for its hints that Armstrong's trumpet made the white actress horny.

Closer to home, I can say that 16 years earlier, the St. Paul musicians union experienced friction over the popularity of jazz, and I've stumbled upon a series of 1927 news articles detailing Klu Klux Klan meetings about a mile east of the Coliseum. These sightings seem underscored — literally — by a note appearing immediately below the Spokesman's article about the cancellation rumor. It reports that The Minneapolis Star, a major paper, had used the word "pickaninny" on its front page a few days before.

So it's interesting that the Coliseum's owner, John J. Lane, had a strong ethic of tolerance, according to his daughter: "there was no color line in our house, we had Fats [Waller] over for dinner." Lane often loaned the Coliseum free of charge to organizations needing a place to hold fund-raisers — the musicians union, the Knights of Columbus, the Urban League, the B'nai B'rith. Probably, he called in these favors during his successful bid for County Commissioner in 1926 and his abandoned campaign in 1938.

All this being said, in my experience, the "natural hunch" about history is usually wrong. I simply don't know why the rumor started. Maybe the Tri or Trio Club had enemies I haven't imagined. Certainly, John J. Lane had both friends and enemies in many walks of life, accumulated during his decades-long, high-profile life in the politics and commerce of the Twin Cities. One of Lane's other nightclubs had even been bombed by mobsters a decade earlier.

Armstrong on the Coliseum Stage

So far as I know, there are no detailed accounts of Armstrong's show that night, but I've pieced together a few clues.

Identical ads in two of St. Paul's mainstream papers on July 28 claimed that the "Trumpet King of Swing" would be backed by "17 Swing Artists."

The Spokesman-Recorder repeatedly promised Luis Russell — an arranger and pianist, and a pioneer of "swing" who led the band that Armstrong was indeed working with at the time. Also mentioned is the innovative trumpet player Henry "Red" Allen. This squares, so far as it goes, with the personnel for Armstrong's 1939 recording sessions for Decca, including those in New York on June 15 and December 18:

piano and arrangements: Luis Russell
trumpet: Shelton Hemphill, Otis Johnson, Henry Allen
trombone: Wilbur de Paris, Geo. Washington, J.C. Higginbotham
clarinet and alto sax: Rupert Cole, Charlie Holmes
tenor sax: Joe Garland, Bingie Madison
guitar: Lee Blair
string bass: Pops Foster
drums: Sidney Catlett

But the Spokesman-Recorder also names three other veterans of Luis Russell's band. One of the great jazz drummers, Paul Barbarin, was presumably touring in place of Sidney Catlett. There was also the "romantic tenor" vocalist Sonny Woods, and two articles mention the "petite song stylist" and "torch singer" Midge Williams — little remembered today, but a much-admired, rising radio star at the time.

The number of backing musicians listed for the Decca recordings, plus Woods and Williams and Armstrong himself = 17, the number of swing artists given in the July 28 ad in the major papers.

The following week, a columnist for the Spokesman-Recorder wished "a million scallions" to the rumor monger who cut attendance, but wished orchids for the audience that did attend, which he found refreshingly peaceable. "Maybe the presence of one of Chief Hackert's skull-busters had something to do with it, but we think not." Brawls and other unseemly behavior appeared to be going out of style, the columnist said. Another follow-up article in the Spokesman-Recorder comes to a trustworthy conclusion:

Armstrong Great Showman

Armstrong gave the crowd its money's worth and the people left the Lexington Avenue dance palace in good humor feeling that they had enjoyed a treat.

— — —

Thanks

Thanks to the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder — this year celebrating its 75th anniversary — for kind permission to reprint the article at top.

The excellent staff of the library at the Minnesota History Center is forever essential to my work. Thanks also to the Minneapolis Public Library, and the University of Minnesota's Wilson and Music Libraries.

My wife Jenny is unbelievably kind and patient, as you might imagine.

Selected References — More Than Any Other Blog!

St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 28, 1939 ad "Tri Club Presents Louis Armstrong" and "Moonlight Dance Trips" p. 9

St. Paul Dispatch, July 28, 1939 ad "Tri Club Presents Louis Armstrong" p. 8

"Moonlight Dance Trips" and other ads for rides on the Capitol were ubiquitous in the warm seasons of 1939 in the Twin Cities. The one above happens to be from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 28, 1939, from the University of Minnesota newspaper collections.

Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, 1939:

— July 21 "Louis 'Satchmo' Armstrong Coming to Coliseum Ballroom, Friday, July 28" p 1
— July 21 ad with Crosby/Armstrong photo, p 3
— July 28 "Louis Armstrong and Band Play at the Coliseum Ballroom Tonight for Swing Fans" p 1
— July 28 "Hear a Noted Artist Tonight" p 2
— Aug 4 "Crowd Applauds Louis Armstrong Band; Rumor Cuts Attendance" p 1
— Aug 4 "Twin Town Talk" p 4

Bergreen, Laurence. 1997. Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life. Broadway Books.

Jones, Max, and Chilton, John. 1988. Louis: The Louis Armstrong Story, 1900-1971. Da Capo.

Kenney, William Howland. 2005. Jazz on the River. U of Chicago.

Maccabee, Paul. 1981-1995. Research collection for John Dillinger Slept Here. MN Historical Soc. library.

Rust, Brian A. L. 1978. Jazz Records, 1897-1942. Arlington House Publishers.

 

What's In A Name?

Moe Thompson founded The Victoria Cafe

 

My article on the links between "The Moonshiner's Dance" — one of the selections on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music — and Minnesota's Jewish communities has just been published at Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture. None of that article's information has appeared here at The Celestial Monochord, or anywhere else, so Monochord readers and enthusiasts of "Anthology-type music" may want to check it out.

It's a little anxiety-producing to publish on a subject in which I am so inexpert — the history of Minnesota's Jews — especially for what must be Zeek's fairly erudite audience. Also, because I'm constantly finding new insights, I'm painfully aware that anything I write will quickly seem outdated to me.

But as soon as I began researching The Anthology's "The Moonshiner's Dance" in early 2006, I saw that the Jewish aspects of the story I was uncovering would need to be told somewhere, by somebody. The Jewish connections to the recording made me sit up straight and listen, because of a certain hazy constellation of issues I'd already been toying with for some time ...

 

In November 1963, Newsweek ran an infamous article "exposing" Bob Dylan as the middle-class son of a Midwestern appliance dealer. It included a photograph of Dylan with the caption "What's in a name?" — a sardonic reference to the revelation that Bob Dylan started life as Robert Zimmerman.

Exactly why this was presented as scandalous is open to interpretation. The article attacks Dylan for portraying himself as real and authentic while simultaneously hiding and misrepresenting his past. But as I read it, the article treats the specifics of Dylan's past as the real scandal, as what really undermined Dylan's authenticity. The implication was that Dylan turned out to be the least authentic things you can be — Midwestern, middle class, and Jewish. If a folksinger is supposed to be one of "The People," surely he can't be THAT.

And it wasn't just Newsweek. The post-War folk and blues revivals often seem to me pathologically obsessed with authenticity and commercialism, as abstractions, and the idea of Jewishness seems to have gotten drawn occasionally into those neuroses (in part, by conflating Jewishness and commerce — a conflation my own arguments have a habit of reproducing).

Those revered pre-WWII Southern musicians on The Anthology and so many other reissues actually played and loved quite a lot of Tin Pan Alley popular songs and tunes from the New York stage. Dock Boggs himself based much of his repertoire on "blues queens" who gave stridently commercial, nontraditional, and "inauthentic" performances.

Today, younger revivalists like myself have benefited from writers like Elijah Wald (Escaping the Delta) and Norm Cohen (Long Steel Rail) for whom boundaries between authenticity and artifice, between commerce and tradition, are pretty much gone from their world views. You might say it's the new orthodoxy among today's authorities. I think Bob Zimmerman and Elliott Adnopoz could have kept their birth names today.

I often think of Jon Pankake, who Dylan remembers unkindly in Chronicles Volume One ("a folk music purist ... breathed fire through his nose"). But you should read Pankake's liner notes to New Lost City Ramblers: Out Standing in their Field, dedicated as they are to showing a constant sloshing back and forth between professional popular music and supposedly pure amateur folk music — the permeability of those boundaries.

In a 2006 article in the New York Times, Jody Rosen wrote about his work to reassert the important influence that the professional and commonly Jewish music-makers of Tin Pan Alley have had on Rock n' Roll. The "roots" of Rock, he argues, run through the Brill Building as much as through Robert Johnson and his supposed crossroads.

He even takes a jab at the "rock snobs" who would not be caught "without Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music and an Alan Lomax field recording or two" in their record collection.

At least in the text of that particular article, Rosen takes the wrong approach. He's absolutely right to assert the importance of Tin Pan Alley to today's popular forms, but in doing so, he lets The Anthology keep its "authenticity," the myth that it's the pure product of amateur, oral transmissions stretching back to antiquity.

Instead of trying to sweep The Anthology (etc.) off the table and replace it with Tin Pan Alley as the proper source of Rock, why not keep The Anthology on the table, and show that it's a much more commercial, worldly document than we've been told? To me, that's the more deeply transformative insight.

And so ... all of this, rightly or wrongly, was one of the threads running through my thinking on the day I first discovered that Moe Thompson, the Tin Pan Alley-style songwriter and vaudevillian, was behind the founding of The Victoria Cafe.

 

The Celestial Monochord now an "author blog"

A pidgeon contemplates St. Paul history atop the Victoria Cafe

 

I've always puzzled over how — and whether — to present my research into Frank Cloutier and Victoria Cafe here at the The Celestial Monochord.

My goal has always been to understand "the complete circumstances" surrounding the recording of the "Moonshiner's Dance" in 1927, knowing that "the complete circumstances" surrounding anything are ultimately unknowable. They're sure-as-hell too complicated to fit within the here's-what-I'm-thinking-today format of the blogosphere.

Well, after more than a year of research, the picture I've uncovered is so sprawling, complex, and transformative that it's outgrown my ability to post it sensibly at The Monochord.

So here's my plan: I'm working toward an article, or series of articles, for Minnesota History (or Minnesota Monthly, or Ramsey County History, or The Old Time Herald, or Sing Out), or conceivably a book to be published by somebody like the Minnesota Historical Society or the University of Minnesota.

Therefore, The Celestial Monochord is now officially an "author blog" — at least with respect to my history research. This resolves some of my confusion about what to post here, what not to, and how often. And it gives me a genre of bloggery to work in, providing some models for how to proceed.

This should result in MORE of my research being posted, not less. I'll feel less of a need to be "complete" and "authoritative" when, in fact, that is a life-long quest.

In the next week or two, I'll start with a mini biography of the founder of the Victoria Cafe — the guy who opened the little dance hall and managed it for its first two years. And needless to say, I'll also continue posting other stuff too, about Dylan, Waits, Prine, banjos, symposiums, fulgurite, kittens, nickles, etc.

 

My Dodo

(photo from Wikipedia)

The January 22 issue of The New Yorker featured an article on the dodo, the large bird that became extinct around 1690. Its only habitat was the island of Mauritius, on which no human beings ever lived until the Dutch landed in 1590. It therefore took just one century of carelessness, and wee bit of malice, to wipe the species out. "Nor were they afraid of us," a contemporary wrote, "but just remained sitting, allowing us to beat them to death."

The New Yorker article mostly concerns the history of dodo skeletons and the men who love them. But just as with most pieces in that magazine, other stories come rushing in once the door is left open. Well-meaning scientists are caught up in post-colonial cultural politics. Local politicians argue that the dodo's extinction was the best thing to ever happen to the Mauritius tourist trade. A lone, obsessive amateur tries to redirect the wide world's attention toward his curious little plot of ground.

Naturally, it was this last story with which I identified most:

Alan Grihault, a retired teacher ... was surprised to learn that there was no standard glossy dodo book ... He began to gather material for one. He, too, found his way to the Mare aux Songes [a site with many underground dodo skeletons] and, in his mind, became the site's unofficial caretaker. "It was my place, a tranquil place," Grihault said ... [His wife] told me that her husband's dodo interest "sometimes gets to be a bit too much. Only two of us at home, so I hear everything, and sometimes twice, when he explains it to friends. Luckily I have the ability to switch off."

And believe me, my wife identifies with this story, too. She and I both immediately recognized that Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra are like this for me — they are my dodo.

After my hundreds of research hours and all the conclusions I've drawn, my most pressing conclusion that almost nothing is known about virtually everything — certainly these old musicians remain almost wholly ignored. I would have guessed, for example, that there would be several people in the United States working on each and every performer on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music. There isn't.

When I bought the Anthology in 1997, the authoritative heft of the thing left me with the sense that there was little more to say. Surely, the Smithsonian must be delivering to us the limits of what is knowable, particularly given all those citations to scholarly journals. That's really why it took me nine years to finally try a little research on my own. But when I did, I was stunned to realize that nobody had bothered to do even the laziest, most casual investigation. Even after discovering a second researcher interested in Cloutier and the Victoria, I still find that ... well, I'm it. I'm the world's leading expert.

Mountains of undiscovered material are waiting to be unearthed about an infinite variety of the past's important people and events. One reason for all this ignorance may be we've been tricked into thinking it's been researched. We picture Sherlock Holmes, with the hat and the pipe, or we Google up all sorts of interesing sites, and we think everything's been sorted out already. Well, it hasn't.

Maybe this sad, universal forgetfulness is due to everybody trying to make a living and reproduce themselves. Who's got the time? More likely, I think it's just a rare personality trait, to want to know everything that is knowable about one thing.

Minnesota Public Radio recently broadcast an interview with the author of an illustrated biography of Django Reinhardt. You can almost hear MPR reporter Tom Crann struggling to understand how someone can focus on one idea — one story — for most of his life. He seems to ask Michael Dregni the same sort of question, over and over, again and again, finding new ways to ask it until he finally blurts out, "Why do you care about him so much?"

It could easily be my imagination, but what I hear is a reporter — someone who tells at least one new story every day — struggling to come to terms with why someone would choose to know everything about one subject. Dregni is very gracious in his response, but I want him to just say, "Look, Crann. Django's my dodo, OK?"

 

Editor's Note: Today was the coldest day in three years here in Minnesota. And you wonder why I chose February to sit behind my computer and try to write one post every stinking day all month long. This is the sixth installment. Do you hear those helicopters?

 

The Moonshiner's Dance — A Progress Report

 

In 1927, a Minnesota dance band called Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra made a recording entitled "The Moonshiners Dance." This freaky recording was little-noticed until 1952, when Harry Smith included it on his influential Anthology of American Folk Music. But unlike almost all the other performers on this influential collection, nobody had ever bothered to look into the story behind Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe.

Then, back in July, The Celestial Monochord published the first research ever made available about the story of "The Moonshiners Dance." It was the product of about 9 weeks of hard work.

In the subsequent 6 months, my research has continued, white-hot. In fact, I've been completely obsessed — a big reason for the low volume of entries here at the Monochord.

Since that entry in July, I've discovered two photos of Frank Cloutier, figured out the basic facts of his childhood, his life in Minnesota, the fate of his marriage and his children, and the circumstances of his death. The day after Thanksgiving, I drank beer in a bar he used to own and left flowers on his grave.

I've also seen many surprising revelations about the Victoria Cafe, its other entertainers, its owners and managers, and the jazz-age St. Paul dance band scene that gave rise to it. I've read about movie theater bombings, a suicide at a skating rink, the music of Whoopie John Wilfahrt, the draftees of the Black Hawk Division of WWI, and some Klu Klux Klan meetings held at the midpoint between Minneapolis and St Paul in 1925. I've driven over 2000 miles, spent a minimum of $1000, and clocked at least 500 hours of research time.

Perhaps the greatest revelation of all has been that of the existence of a second researcher looking into the life of Frank Cloutier. In early October, I was contacted by someone who, for several years, has been researching the life of Frank Cloutier in order to put a face, you might say, on "The Moonshiner's Dance." The few results this researcher has shown me (so far ... ) have been amazing, tantalizing, and helpful to my own work — which has the broader goal of understanding the total milieu of the recording.

Now, dear reader, here's the rub:

In a short time, this other researcher will unveil a mother lode of information to the general public. So far as I can tell, it's likely to be the most important event in the life of the Anthology since at least 1997, when it was reissued on CD. If you are a fellow devotee of the Anthology, I think you will be extremely pleased with the events of the coming months. I am pumped, psyched, and jazzed to help maximize the impact and reach of this project.

So, I've decided to keep pretty quiet about my research for a few more months ... but just a few. I find that every round of research I conduct results in startling new revelations, so the more work I do before I write, the better — right? Why not follow Bob Dylan's advice and know my song well before I start singing? As a bonus, I get to do a good deed for a project that (let's face it) will clearly be more important than my own, when all is said and done.

On the other hand, The Celestial Monochord remains a slow place for its readers. Like every other blogger on Earth, I vow to try harder in the near future.

Editor's Note: In January, I will write just a little bit about Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe, mostly to "clear the decks" for this other project's release. I'll clean up some little gaffs I later uncovered in my July entry — not everything there was strictly correct. Plus, there were a few things I hadn't sorted out yet in July, and after having untangled them later, they're now just a little bit of an embarrassment to me. Once the other project blows over, I'll revisit how, when, and where to publish the stuff I have up my sleeve.

 

KFAI covers Frank Cloutier

Dakota Dave Hull has asked me to talk about Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra on his radio show.

I'm scheduled to appear on August 3rd. The show airs every Thursday from 9:00 - 11:00 a.m. (Central Time) and can be streamed live on the web. Each show is also archived for two weeks.

Or, if you live in the Twin Cities, just turn your radio dial to 90.3 or 106.7 FM. Maybe you can drive by the Victoria Cafe while you listen ...

 

Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra

 

- Editor's note: This is the information I had after a couple weeks of research. The research had now gone on for years! See various updates. -

 

In recent weeks, I've discovered quite a lot of previously-unknown information about Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra.

Cloutier's orchestra recorded "The Moonshiner's Dance, Part 1" in 1927, and Harry Smith included it in his 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music (as entry #41). The liner notes to the 1997 reissue state:

The members of the Victoria Cafe Orchestra are unknown. [ The orchestra ] does not appear in any jazz or dance band discography, but is assumed to have been from the Minnesota area.

After many revelations during more than 100 hours of research, the phrase now seems almost comical — "assumed to have been from the Minnesota area."

When I first heard the Anthology in 1997, Cloutier's recording caught my attention. For one thing, I thought at the time if you slowed it down and played it in march-time, "The Moonshiner's Dance" could sound a bit like Bob Dylan's "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35." More importantly, I wondered whether I could find out more about its origin, given that so little was known about it and given that it was recorded in St. Paul, Minnesota (I live in Minneapolis).

But then, absolutely everything about the Anthology caught my attention. It took nine years to finally feel as if I'd exhausted the Anthology's deep well of distractions and drive, one Saturday morning, over to the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul. My first step was to look in the 1927 St. Paul city directory — a precursor to the phone book — and there was Frank Cloutier, musician, living two blocks from The Victoria Cafe. I've done a fairly thorough literature search of the kind I learned to do in grad school, and it seems as if nobody else knows what I've uncovered.

But why? Harry Smith's Anthology is surely the most influential anthology of sounds in history. It's widely regarded as the founding document of the 1960's Folk Revival, which so strongly defined popular music forever after. Many of those on the Anthology were sought out and found in the 1960's, had a second career, and have been written about seemingly endlessly. Why was NOTHING known about Frank Cloutier and his orchestra until May 13, 2006, when I looked him up in the phone book?

Frank Cloutier presents certain problems specific to him. Despite the heavy influence of jazz on "The Moonshiner's Dance," he's missing from Brian Rust's authoritative "Jazz Records, 1897 to 1942." The recording is a mish-mash of French-Canadian, Mexican, and Klezmer dance-band influences, but can't be found in Dick Spottswood's "Ethnic Music on Records." It's too ethnic and jazzy — perhaps — to have been included in Rust's "American Dance Band Discography." I don't really know why it has been so ignored, but I wonder if "The Moonshiners Dance" has fallen through nearly every crack there is because it is both everything and nothing in particular. No wonder it took a character like Harry Smith to rescue it from oblivion.

Another reason the recording seems never to have been researched before, I suspect, is that it's from Minnesota. As such, it doesn't fit the story we usually tell ourselves about American "roots music" (if you'll forgive the term). To an extent, interest in American music has been a subset of interest in the American South. Reasons, when given, usually involve the South's gumbo of races and ethnicities — a deep mix indeed, which necessitated and enabled profound musical innovations.

As a devotee of Southern music myself, I won't disagree. But what I hear in "The Moonshiner's Dance" is the arrival of the Jazz Age in St. Paul, and the adaptation of jazz to that city's "always-already" multiethnic musical environment. A Klezmerized, French-Canadian, red-hot Scanda-jazzian, beer-garden polka, the recording deserves the prominence given to it by its inclusion in the Harry Smith Anthology — even if Smith was roughly the last person to understand its role in the Anthology's argument.

One last thing is critical to understand about why this work seems to have waited until now. The US Census keeps personally-identifying data confidential for 72 years, so the full details of the 1920 census were released in 1992. The details that were collected in 1930, you might say, "swept through" the events of the 1920's — probably the critical decade in the history of American "roots music." And on the release side, the decade from 1992 to 2002 swept through the years of the information revolution. In other words, in 1992 all we had was 1920 and no computers, whereas in 2006 we have 1930 searchable on our desktops.

For those interested in the Anthology — or for any devotee of American music of the 1920's and 1930's — the information landscape has very recently been significantly improved. Those of us relying on discographies and other conscientious research from the 1940's through the 1990's should consider getting back to work all over again.

To be merciful, I've left an awful lot out. But below, I summarize the highpoints of what I've discovered about Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe, thus far. Much of it may seem mundane, but I keep remembering that six weeks ago, the best of our knowledge was a single, modest question mark in the Anthology's 1997 liner notes.

 

-------------------------------

 

Prior to 1926, hard facts about Cloutier are still few.

According to the 1930 United States Census, Frank E. Cloutier, the St. Paul orchestra musician, was born in Massachusetts to a French-Canadian mother. His father was born in New York and, considering his surname, I imagine he had a French-Canadian background too (although many Cloutier's immigrated from Ireland). Frank E. served in the military during World War I, and the census gives his age, in 1930, as 32. I haven't been able to find Frank E. in any previous census — at least not with confidence.

 

(Frank E. Cloutier and his family, from the 1930 Census)

(Frank E. Cloutier's "occupation" and "industry", respectively)

 

There is a 1917 WW I draft card signed in Manitowac, Wisconsin for a Massachusetts-born musician named Frank E. Cloutier, but he's four years too old to be the Frank E. of the 1930 census. Maybe the 1930 census taker underestimated our Frank's age (the census records contain a lot of errors and guesses). Maybe Frank E. was anxious to defend France and lied to the military about his age. Maybe they're just not the same guy, however unlikely that may seem.

In any case, in 1930, Frank E. has a wife, Olive (sometimes "Oline," maiden name probably Olson), and two young children — Alene (b. 1923) and Alden (b. 1926). Frank's wife and son were both born in Minnesota, but his daughter and mother-in-law were born in North Dakota. Maybe Olive and Frank E. met in Minnesota after the Great War, and then went in 1923 to stay with her family in North Dakota to have their first child.

From 1926 to 1933, the information is more easily available. Frank E. Cloutier first appears in the St. Paul city directory in early 1926, listed as a musician living in what's called the "West Side". In June, his son Alden is born.

From at least August to October 1926, Frank E. and musician Thomas M. Gates are the co-leaders of The Gates-Cloutier Metropolitans, the house orchestra for the Metropolitan Ballroom, an apparently short-lived, downtown dance hall. The Metropolitan, together with The Coliseum and the Oxford Ballroom, seems to be one of a few venues owned by one John J. Lane.

 

(From the September 1, 1926 St. Paul Daily News)

 

Lane would play an important role in Cloutier's life — and a lot of other people's lives — for the next several years. An Irish immigrant and former dance instructor, by 1926 Lane was a beefy, 46-year-old businessman who, on November 2, was elected to the Ramsey County Board of Commissioners. One wonders, among other things, whether having a dance hall owner as a county commissioner helped to maintain "high spirits" in St. Paul during Prohibition.

 

(John J. Lane, from a
November 3, 1926 article
reporting his election
as County Commisioner)

 

Of course, the year 1927 is the critical one for us, because of "The Moonshiner's Dance." By May 1927, Tom Gates is leading orchestras at John Lane's Coliseum and Oxford Ballrooms, and Frank E. Cloutier has moved to St. Paul's Frogtown neighborhood (which got its name, in my opinion, from its history of French settlement).

 

 

Frank's new home is near two of Lane's dance halls, and is just two blocks from another venue, The Victoria Cafe at 825 University Avenue, near the corner of University and Victoria. Unlike all the other venues mentioned here, the building that housed The Victoria Cafe is definitely still standing today.

 

(the former Victoria Cafe, near the corner of University and Victoria)

(the former Victoria Cafe, 825 University Avenue, St. Paul --
click for larger view)

 

It was built in 1915 as The Victoria Theater, one of St. Paul's early movie houses. It operated as a theater only until around 1921, and then stood vacant for several years. In 1925, a building permit was issued for the property, probably to convert it to The Victoria Cafe. The Cafe appears in the city directory the same year. Moe Thompson is listed as proprietor — so it was probably Thompson who dreamed up The Victoria Cafe.

 

(from the 1926 St. Paul city directory ...
telephone number Dale 4664)

 

About 37 years old in 1925, Moe Thompson was born in New York to Jewish parents. He was already in Minnesota by World War I, and married a Swedish girl from Iowa sometime before 1920. From 1917 through 1930, he lists his calling alternately as music and the theater.

In late 1926 or early 1927, Thompson moved to New York City. It's unclear if he remained the owner of The Vic or sold it to Lane, but the city directory gives the venue's manager as one Samuel E. Markowitz. Everybody associated with The Vic in 1927 is listed as his employee. Markowitz — who went by the last names Markus and Markhus during this period — was an auto mechanic, driver, and car salesman before and after his association with The Vic.

 

(from the 1928 St. Paul city directory)

(from the 1927 St. Paul city directory ...
r = renter, h = homeowner)

 

The first newspaper ad I've found, so far, for The Victoria Cafe is from Saturday, April 23, 1927 (see the top of this entry). It announces the premier of a new revue starring "Cloutier's Victorians" and 10 pretty dancing girls. In all the ads for the venue, its dancers, bright lights, Chinese food, and affordability all seem more prominently highlighted than Frank E.'s band.

 

(ad from May 21, 1927)

(ad from May 14, 1927)

(ad from June 19, 1927 — everyone named
is a dancer except, presumably, Cloutier)

 

Frequently, other dance bands appear with Cloutier's Victorians, such as Wally Erickson's and Tom Gates' Orchestras. These bands were from John Lane's venues just a few blocks away, perhaps signaling some financial involvement by Lane in the cafe — but I haven't confirmed this. Certainly, it hints at a closely-knit community among the neighborhood dance bands.

In May 1927, the label that recorded The Moonshiner's Dance, the Gennett record company, comes to town and begins recording local acts, including Erickson, Gates, and Cloutier. On May 29, the St. Paul Daily News carries a front page article announcing that recording sessions had begun at the Lowry Hotel the day before.

 

(front page story, May 29, 1927, St. Paul Daily News —
the Minnesota historical society has a hard-copy original print
of the photo on file, and a good scan online)

 

Although the article doesn't mention Gennett, it does specify that the accompanying photograph shows Harold Soule at the controls of "the recording device." We know from archives housed today at the Indiana Historical Society that Soule was a Gennett employee.

I'm now working with the Indiana HS to get photocopies of the original company ledgers from the St. Paul sessions by Gennett. In the meantime, I must rely on redhotjazz.com for most of my information about those sessions -- but I can't determine precisely where they get any given piece of information.

Redhotjazz.com does not mention "The Moonshiner's Dance." However, it lists the personnel from a session by the Tom Gates Orchestra held on either May 28 or July 25 — maybe the line-up was the same for both dates.

Lee N. Blevins (trombone)
Earl Clark (banjo)
Frank Cloustier (piano, director)
Bob Gates (bass brass)
Tom Gates (tenor saxophone)
Tracy "Pug" Mama (clarinet, alto saxophone)
Victor Sells (trumpet)
Nevin Simmons (alto Saxophone, vocals)
Harold Stoddard (drums)

Note the mysterious "Frank Cloustier" who is listed, strangely, as the director of the Tom Gates Orchestra — wouldn't Tom Gates be its director?

We already know that Gates and Frank E. Cloutier were billed a few months before as the joint leaders of a single band, and that Gates and Cloutier continued to work together in the same venues on the same nights — indeed, they did precisely that at The Victoria Cafe six days before the May session. This should be proof enough that it was actually Frank E. Cloutier, not "Frank Cloustier" who played piano on at least one of the Gates Orchestra recordings.

But there is additional proof in the St. Paul and Minneapolis city directories. Nobody with the surname "Cloustier" appears in any directory of either of the Twin Cities from 1920 to 1936, nor any other year I've checked. Frank E. Cloutier, however, regularly presents himself.

Furthermore, searching the US Census from 1790 to 1930 — that is, in 15 consecutive decades of US history — nobody with the surname Cloustier was ever encountered by any census taker, anywhere. One family pops up in searches for the surname — a Rhode Island family in 1910 — but previous and subsequent census records list the same family as Cloutier. "Cloustier" is a spelling error.

The alternative possibility — that the only Cloustier in the history of the American Republic happened to be named Frank and happened to show up in St. Paul in 1927 to record with Frank E. Cloutier's partner, taking a one-day turn as the director of the band — is absurd.

This discovery of at least one "lost recording" by Frank E. Cloutier raises an issue that might be resolved in the next few weeks, when I get my hands on copies of the company ledger. I don't know the date of The Moonshiner's Dance recording (I've seen September 29, but there's contadicting evidence). If the recording was made on the same date the members of the Gates Orchestra were documented, there's a chance that Frank E. was not the only musician shared by the two outfits. There's some small hope that the recording members of The Victoria Cafe Orchestra could be — or now have been — discovered.

Frank E. seems to have been involved with The Victoria Cafe for a very short time. Although there's more research left to do, I've so far found strong evidence for an association only in April, May, and June of 1927. He's missing from a September 22 ad for The Vic, where the featured attraction that night was the broadcast of the Tunney-Dempsey boxing match. Mostly, The Vic itself is missing from the ad sections of the local newspapers.

 

(ad from September 22, 1927)

 

The Victoria Cafe appears again in the 1928 city directory, but disappears in 1929. The property at 825 University Avenue is listed as vacant for the next five years.

By 1928, Frank E. is listed in the directory as a musician at the Coliseum Ballroom -- he's again clearly working for John J. Lane. In 1929, he's now a manager at Lane's Coliseum Amusement Company and he's moved west about six blocks to a home only a stone's throw from the Coliseum. In September 1929 (at least), Frank Cloutier's Orchestra is appearing on WCCO radio every Wednesday night at 10:30. Wading through newspaper listings could reveal when this radio gig began and ended.

 

(radio listings for Wednesday, September 11, 1929)

 

The 1930 census (discussed above) now finds Frank E. and his family right there, living next to the Coliseum. Frank E. remains in the same neighborhood for several more years, usually listed in the directories simply as "musician," but in 1933 as "musical dir." at the Coliseum Ballroom.

The 1933 directory contains Frank E. Cloutier's last known address, and I don't yet know what happened to him thereafter. ("Improvise, Frank E.!") There is pretty good evidence that the family moved to North Dakota, where his wife's mother was born.

A 1939 high school yearbook from Minot, North Dakota contains an entry for an Alene Cloutier. The name is the same as Frank E.'s 7-year-old daughter from the 1930 census, who would have been 16 in 1939. The entry is hard to interpret, but it appears the student has a connection with St. Paul's Central High School.

It's certain that Alene's younger brother, Alden M. Cloutier, was assigned a Social Security Number in the state of North Dakota, a strong confirmation that the family moved to that state. Alden went on to serve as an Army sergeant in the final year of World War II. He died in 1981, barely 55 years old, and is buried at Wood National Cemetery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

In 1934 — the year after the Cloutier family disappears from St. Paul — activity resumes at the former site of The Victoria Cafe. The unfortunately-named La Casa Grande Cafe opens at the address, under the management of John McNulty, who was previously a chauffeur, cab driver, and then cab company owner.

In 1935, McNulty wisely changes the establishment's name back to The Victoria Cafe. Nevertheless, the property is vacant again in 1936, and McNulty goes back to driving a cab. He then works as a solicitor for a small local newspaper and soon moves in with several McNulty women — his widowed mother, apparently, and several of his sisters or possibly aunts. His wife and profession disappear from the listings.

It seems the property at 825 University has been associated with the Muska lighting company for most of the past 70 years and was, for a long time, a lighting fixture showroom. The "bright lights" of The Victoria Cafe shined on for a long time, one way or another.

The property is vacant today. In 2004, it was evaluated for possible eligibility for the National Registry (see the 4.6-MB PDF, pages 211-213). The evaluation was part of a survey conducted by The 106 Group Ltd. to evaluate the historical impact of a proposed light rail line running along University Avenue (see the 1.5-MB PDF). The report is very interesting and useful. However, the evaluation of 825 University Avenue completely misses the entire second half of the 1920's, as well as the building's close (but never studied) association with one of the most influential documents in the history of American music.

Although I was a copy editor and report production manager for a cultural resource management company for two years, I'm not qualified to say the report's recommendation of "not eligible" for the National Registry was appropriate or inappropriate. It's very clear, though, that the most historically and culturally important events and people associated with the property were entirely missed during the evaluation. I think the recommendation needs to be revisited by professionals — especially if the former site of the Victoria Cafe is to be negitively impacted by the project.

 

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Future Research
I didn't publish this now because I've squeezed out all the information that can be gotten. I had other reasons, including a degree of fatigue. Much more can be uncovered (or has been uncovered, but not discussed here) and I hope to continue my research, but perhaps at a more leisurely pace.

For example, my research on Frank's activities in St. Paul after the Gennett recordings is spotty, and light can be shed on his years from 1928 to 1933. It's possible some clues as to why he left Minnesota could be found. I also think I can discover more about Olive Cloutier's early life in Minnesota (and thus, when and where she met Frank E.).

Certainly, much more can be discovered about all of the characters recorded during Gennett's 1927 sessions in Minnesota (not to mention Vocalion's in 1929, etc.) and all of the venues in which they played. (I have seen, for example, the WWI draft card of the brother of Grace Slovetsky, the stenographer standing next to Harold Soule in the newspaper photo.) This is one reason for my choice to fixate exclusively on the obscure "Moonshiner's Dance" — the vast quantity (if not necessarily quality) of information available on other people and venues is staggering.

Again, I'm working with the Indiana Historical Society to get copies of some of their extensive archive on the Gennett record company.

It would be easy enough to trace more of the career of John J. Lane, including his term as a Ramsey County Commissioner — and were I to write a book (or long article, Master's thesis, etc.) about the Twin Cities music scene in the 1920's and 1930's, Lane would figure prominently. I don't know how likely such a book (etc.) is without additional funds or other enabling conditions.

Many resources located in North Dakota and Wisconsin would be of great interest and value in finding out about the Cloutier family before and after St. Paul. But without being both unemployed and divorced, it's hard to see how I'll be able to access them in person any time soon. I'm exploring various possibilities. Certainly, I would love to hear from music fans in these states who have the deep enthusiasm and skepticism needed to do this work well. Ditto if you live in Minnesota, by the way — there is a lot of work to do, and I'd love to have partners in getting it done.

I'll update The Celestial Monochord in the event any interesting discoveries are made.

 

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Acknowledgments
The resources at the library at the Minnesota History Center, especially city directories and newspapers on microfilm, have been extremely useful. So have the History Center's patient staff members, even when I've been a pain in the ass.

The census information, military records, veterans' cemetery information, and yearbook entry were all accessed through Ancestry.com. The site is available at many libraries that have institutional subscriptions, such as the MnHS. Individual home subscriptions can also be purchased at monthly or yearly rates. They're not cheap, but they're really useful.

Many sincere thanks to my wife, Jenny, for sharing her husband with various dead hillbillies — morning, noon, and night — for about a decade now. Thanks, especially, for listening ... and listening ... and listening.