“Longshoremen’s Hall was not the only labor-run space where the “blues for dancing” took hold. Bolden was also frequently featured at Union Sons Hall, which was located on the corner of Perdido and South Rampart Streets. The building was owned, and its dances were organized, by the Union Sons Relief Association. It had roots in Reconstruction and dated back to 1866, providing aid to freedpeople migrating to New Orleans. Officers of the organization were laborers in a variety of occupations, and their work was intimately tied to the union movement.149 Bolden played here so frequently that it became known as “funky butt hall,” a tribute to the reinvented sense of time and bodily connection that resisted the mechanization and alienated time of the New South.150
Music was one of several offerings at Union Sons Hall. Saturday night dances, lasting until five in the morning, would be turned over to fulfill a different medium of spiritual need a few hours later. “On Sunday mornings,” writes Marquis, “the hall served as the First Lincoln Baptist Church.”151 This was no standard gig for Bolden, for he could call the Union Sons Hall his family: his sister, Cora, was married to Alex Reed, who was the organization’s third deputy Marshall in 1904.152 Thus, within twenty-four hours, one might attend a meeting discussing rights and strategies for the Black laborer, an all-night blues dance, and then a Baptist service, with close family, friends, and coworkers present at all three. Two of Bolden’s main regular performance spaces were thus union-run halls, and these concerts directly benefited, and were defended by, organized labor. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that jazz would not have developed the way it did without the protective power and sociality of the Black labor movement.
The ability of unions to shield practitioners from police shutdown also allowed dissident messaging through music to become widespread. In addition to his depiction of working-class life and abusive bosses in “Don’t Go Way Nobody,” Bolden critiqued police harassment. Jazz historian Donald Marquis has shown through cross-checking the New Orleans Police Department arrest records that the lyrics of “Buddy Bolden’s Blues” reference the arrest of his friend Frankie Dusen for “loitering” in 1904.153 Police brutality was a major concern for Black residents and Black musicians in New Orleans, as Pops Foster and others attested in numerous interviews.154 The “Robert Charles Ballad,” which commemorated the Black revolutionary who attacked the white police officers who were harassing him and led to an explosion of indiscriminate white mob violence against New Orleans’s Black citizens, was likely a union hall standard.155…
It was precisely musicians’ ability to organize popular dissent and communal pride that made them effective partners for unions. The dissident consciousness they transmitted facilitated the type of base-building that union organizers needed to develop if they were to be successful in resisting the hegemony of capital and white supremacy on the docks. Such linkages between organized labor and the blues were theorized by Clyde Woods: “Later labeled Jazz, the right of individual and community self-defense, the ethic of social justice, the critique of plantation relations, the desire to create sustainable communities, and the sound of rebellion against fascism were deeply embedded in the Blues movement led by ‘King Bolden.’” Bolden’s embodiment of such values was not incidental, but rather was the fruit of organized space-making that unions enacted. LPUBA president William Penn’s prior experience as the manager of the Excelsior Brass Band thus emerges as an even more relevant detail in this arc of movement-based art making….
Labor Day celebrations were spaces where traditions of brassroots democracy were deepened among musicians and wider publics. They reflected another prerogative of Black working-class activism: the reclaiming of the body, away from the demands of capitalist industry and in the service of communal self expression and solidarity. Musicians who performed in the union halls were well represented in the parades, including Buddy Bolden, who was frequently contracted for Labor Day parades by the dockworker unions. In fact, the 1906 Labor Day parade was where Buddy Bolden played his last professional gig.162 In parades, musicians Freddie Keppard, Buddy Bolden, and Louis Armstrong could play for, and inspire, new generations of musicians, as their music came to embody a Black labor alliance that cut across caste and cultural divisions. Violinist Paul Dominguez credited Buddy Bolden for “cause[ing] these younger Creoles, men like Bechet and Keppard, to have a different style altogether from the old heads.”163 The growing hegemony of Black musical aesthetics reflected the organizational power of the labor movement itself, since, as Clyde Woods wrote about the new blues-based style, “the music emerged from, and was placed at the service of, a growing New Orleans Black working class attempting to impose its social vision upon a region organized around its brutal exploitation.” (p.268)
from Brassroots Democracy (2024) by Benjamin Barson
