James Humphrey: The Professor of Brassroots Democracy
Image from The Second Line, Vol. XXIV, Winter 1982
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, African American Civil War veteran James Humphrey turned plantation districts into classrooms. Known to students as “the Professor,” he carried the militancy of the Civil War and Reconstruction into sugar parishes where brass bands doubled as schools, unions, and traveling assemblies. Payment moved through gardens as often as through ledgers: figs, sweet potatoes, pecans, all evidence of solidarity economies rooted in Black land practices that predated emancipation and outlasted planter control.
Humphrey’s pedagogy was methodical and situational. He began with the battery—bass, trombone, drum—then layered trumpets, clarinets, and reeds. He wrote exercises on the fly, calibrating technique to what the ensemble and the moment demanded. At times he serviced five plantations at once, bands of sixteen or more, arriving in a swallowtail coat to be met by students at the depot and, if rehearsal ran late, sleeping on site. The result was a cohort whose time feel, tone, and reading fluency made possible movement between rural dance halls and New Orleans’s elite Black parade bands. Names that later anchor jazz history—Chris Kelly, Kid Ory, William “Bébé” Ridgley—first learned to read charts and march tunes under Humphrey’s eye.
These bands did political work. In Thibodaux and across the sugar belt, they scored mass meetings, excursions, and school fundraisers, sounding out a commons where planters had abandoned education and health. Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs in rural parishes underwrote instruments, uniforms, and sick benefits; lodges convened twice-monthly meetings where music practice bled into discussions of parish politics and upcoming actions. After the 1887 Thibodaux massacre, municipal bans on bands concede how threatening this sonic infrastructure had become to white power—and how necessary it was to Black survivance.
Humphrey’s practice linked music-powered gardens and garden-powered music. His family remembered taxes paid from fig sales and country visits that returned with produce instead of cash. Teaching was a “labor of love,” but it was also a labor ecology—mutual benefit organized around provisions, charts, and drills. His daughters, Lillian and Jamesetta, played basses and taught at places like the Bulb Orphanage in Plaquemines Parish, confirming a gender-expansive pedagogy already visible in rural bands where women held saxophone, clarinet, and trumpet chairs.
By the 1890s Humphrey was ferrying “country boy bands” into New Orleans parades, valves freezing in Mardi Gras cold, stitching river parishes to the city’s commercial circuits while repurposing those circuits for communal ends. Work songs—“I want to leave this place,” “When the Saints Go Marching In”—traveled with them, recomposed as repertoire that indexed both migration and refusal. Plantation dance halls sustained a lively circuit that drew New Orleans musicians, including a young Louis Armstrong, back upriver; rural players in turn carried counter-plantation habits of collective decision-making into urban ensembles.
What emerges is a clear throughline: brass bands as infrastructure. Instruction, notation literacy, benefit societies, school fundraisers, and provisioning networks converged to produce a brassroots democracy—a practical politics rehearsed in sound. Humphrey’s students learned how to keep time and how to keep each other; how to read charts and how to read the room (or the road, for that matter). In their marches from Woodland to St. Sophie, their ferry rides to Deer Range, their parades that repurposed extractive mercantile geographies toward community celebration, we hear the rehearsal of a world in the making. Early jazz took shape inside that rehearsal, carrying forward practices of improvisation and shared governance first cultivated in fields and gardens.
Daniel Desdunes
Photograph of the Dan Desdunes Band outside of a train car number 6920. Desdunes is on the far right. Date and location unknown. Courtesy of Douglas County Historical Society, UNAC0422.
Daniel Desdunes was a Haitian-Louisianan cornetist and violinist who marched with a popular New Orleans brass band that bore his name. He was also a militant Creole of color activist who leveraged his fame as a musician to draw attention to an act of civil disobedience in a case that tested Louisiana’s segregationist laws—a case he won in 1892. He cooridinated his sit-in of a segregated train car with the Comité des Citoyens, which included the activst Homer Plessy.
Daniel Desdunes was significant figure in the New Orleans music scene, but he made an arguably bigger impact in his adopted home of Nebraska. Eight years after the defeat of Louisiana’s equal rights provisions with the Plessy vs. Ferguson case, he moved to Omaha. Starting as a janitor, within three years Daniel Desdunes had built one of Omaha’s leading Black bands. Daniel Desdunes’s organizational work was remarkable here, particularly his efforts to combat inequality through a mutual aid institution known as “Boys Town.” In December 1917, Father Edward J. Flanagan, an Irish immigrant priest, established Boys Town as a racially integrated antipoverty center for young boys who were homeless or formerly incarcerated.[1] Daniel Desdunes convinced Flanagan to create a “show wagon troupe” where students could perform on the road to raise money for the center.[2] Desdunes trained fifteen of Flanagan’s youth for a show in January of 1921. It was considered a huge success and the students “enthusiastically wanted more,” and so Desdunes returned and drilled the students for several months.
Daniel Desdunes performed desegregation as an embodied act through his sit-in on a segregated train car and in his later work as the brass band instructor of an interracial Omaha orphanage. His life, as well as that of his father’s, reveals how brassroots democracy is the organic expression of revolutionary cultural currents from the Haitian Revolution and its diaspora that profoundly inflected the tenor of jazz musicianship, not only in New Orleans, but throughout the Americas at large.
[1] Hugh Reilly and Kevin Warneke, Father Flanagan of Boys Town (Omaha, NE: Boys Town Press, 2011).
[2] “Father Edward J. Flanagan,” Boys Town, https://www.boystown.org/about/father-flanagan/Pages/default.aspx, accessed September 19, 2020.
Lorezno Tio Jr.
Lorenzo Tio Jr.
Lorenzo Tio Jr. is a New Orleans-born Creole of Color clarinetist and part of a lineage of clarinet teachers who profoundly impacted early jazz. It is hard to overstate the influence of the Tio family among New Orleans musicians of color. They mentored an upcoming generation of jazz musicians including George and Achille Baquet, Alphonse Picou, Tony Girdina, Harold Dejan, Eddie Cherrie, Elliot Taylor, Louis Cottrell, Jr., “Big Eye” Louis “Nelson” Delisle, Sidney Bechet, Jimmy Noone, and Willie J. Humphrey.[1] As Jelly Roll Morton remembered, “These were the men who taught all the other guys how to play clarinet.”[2]
Lorenzo Tio Jr. had a deep connection to the development of jazz norms and contemporary improvisation. Lorenzo Jr. came of age during and participated in the heart of New Orleans’ jazz revolution. As Peter Bocage remembered, “He was all musician…He could play jazz, too, and he could play anything you put up there in front of him…He was gifted; he could fake, and he knowed the chords and everything. You see, that's what it takes.”[1] He not only played in high society functions but with plantation to urban migrants, such as in the Tuxedo Band led by former cane-cutter William “Bébé” Ridgley.[2] As Bruce Boyd Raeburn notes, this band “created relationships that subverted the dehumanizing effects of racism,” and Lorenzo Tio Jr. both shaped and was shaped by this socializing process.[3]
Like his father and uncle, Lorenzo Jr. was also an important teacher of the next generation. His students included Sidney Bechet, whose professional career began in earnest in the early 1910s, when he succeeded Lorenzo Tio Jr. in Bunk Johnson's Eagle Band, which was composed of Buddy Bolden alumni.[4]
Lorenzo Tio Jr. had an impact in Harlem beyond the tight-knit circle of New Orleans up-south migrants. Louis R. Tio, Lorenzo Jr.’s brother, claims that Lorenzo wrote the melodies for the jazz standards “Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated Lady,” and “Moonglow” recorded by Duke Ellington.[1] These claims are corroborated by the Creole of Color clarinetist Barney Bigard, who studied extensively with Lorenzo Jr. before playing with King Oliver and later in Duke Ellington’s orchestra.[2] As historian and jazz purist Al Rose surmises: “[A]ll of us in New Orleans knew that tune [“Mood Indigo”] and we knew it was the Tios.’”[3] According to Kinzer, early Ellington releases of the recording listed the song as “Dreamy Blues,” which was the name of a song also played by Lorenzo Tio Jr. and the Piron Orchestra. Further supporting the claim is that eventually Bigard himself would be credited as a co-composer, but twenty-five years after the song’s 1930 release.[4] (A blog, without much in the way of sources but possibly echoing New Orleans oral history, claims that Lorenzo Tio Jr. initially called the song “Mexican Blues.”[5])
Tio’s contribution to the jazz repertoire places Lorenzo Tio. Jr at the intersection of New Orleans style and swing. Much like Desdunes’s move to Omaha, Tio’s move to Harlem reflected how the ripples of brassroots democracy reverberated and interfaced with other emancipatory strains of African American culture. It demonstrates his outsized impact on the development of jazz clarinet and his contributions as a composer, player, and pedagogue who contributed an important timbre and technique. Ellington’s famous “mike-tone” (whereby the overtones of the lower register of the clarinet interacted with an upper-register, muted trombone) would sound different, or be nonexistent, had a clarinetist recorded with a less robust tonal production as Bigard.[6]
In 1932, Lorenzo Tio Jr. began running the house orchestra at the Nest, a popular nightclub and dance hall on 133rd Street. Sidney Bechet joined his old teacher in the ensemble after returning from Paris the same year. He recalled that trumpetist Roy Eldridge made a guest appearance with the band.[7] The band provided financial stability for Tio, but in 1933, Lorenzo Jr. died of heart disease at Harlem Hospital Christmas Eve. The Louisiana Weekly wrote in his obituary that “Lorenzo Tio. Jr…contributed to the gaiety of ‘America’s Most Interesting City’ and its reputation as a musical center for more than half a century.”[8]
Top: Black and white photo of A. J. Piron’s Society Orchestra, New Orleans, 1920. Lorenzo Tio Jr. is in the front row, third from the left, with a tenor saxophone and a clarinet by his feet. The other musicians are A. J. Piron, violin and leader; Steve Lewis, piano; Louis Cottrell Sr., drums; Louis Warnecke; alto saxophone; Peter Bocage, trumpet; Charlie Bocage, banjo; Bob Ysaguirre, tuba; and John Lindsey, trombone. Courtesy of the Louisiana State Museum 1978.118(8).05935.
Bottom: Lorenzo Tio Jr.’s 1925 Solo on “Red Man Blues” with the A. J. Piron’s New Orleans Orchestra, measures 5-9. Tio’s use of blues and gospel scales and lower neighbor tones to the third of the subdominant reflects an engagement with a distinctly African American, blues-based language prevalent in early jazz. Based on recordings of prominent swing bands of the era, his move to Harlem soon after this time period would have deepened his commitment and mastery of this language. This solo was transcribed by the author in dialogue with Charles Kinzer. From Piron’s New Orleans Orchestra, “Red Man Blues,” Victor (19646-B), 1925.
[1] Charles Kinzer, “The Tio Family: Four Generations of New Orleans Musicians, 1814-1933,” PhD diss., (Louisiana State University, 1993), 293-294. He credits this oral history to an interview with Lorenzo Jr.’s daughter Rose Tio Winn, interview by Martyn, May 11 1990; Louis R. Tio, Interview; Wellam Buad [Duke Ellington’s longtime bassist], interview, 30 May, 1957, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University.
[2] Bigard, With Louis and the Duke, 54.
[3] Al Rose, I Remember Jazz: Six Decades among the Great Jazzmen (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 109.
[4] Charles Kinzer, “The Tio Family: Four Generations of New Orleans Musicians, 1814-1933,” PhD diss., (Louisiana State University, 1993), 293-294
[5] See Carl, “Duke Ellington Records ‘Mood Indigo’ 89 Years Ago Today,” The Daily Music Break (blog), October 17, 2019, https://dailymusicbreak.com/2019/10/17/duke-ellington-records-mood-indigo-89-years-ago-today/.
[6] For a discussion of Ellington’s “mike-tone,” see Chadwick Jenkins, “A Question of Containment: Duke Ellington and Early Radio,” American Music 26, no. 4 (2008): 433; see also Aaron J. Johnson, “A Date with the Duke: Ellington on Radio,” The Musical Quarterly 96, no. 3/4 (2013): 390.
[7] Bechet, Treat It Gentle, 158-59.
[8] Louisiana Weekly, January 13, 1934; quoted in Kinzer, “The Tio Family,” 295.
[1] Peter Bocage, interview, 29 January 1959, Hogan Jazz Archive. See also Kinzer, “The Tio Family,” 296.
[2] William “Bébé” Ridgley, Interview, April 7th, 1961, Hogan Jazz Archive.
[3] Bruce Boyd Raeburn, “Foreword,” in The Original Tuxedo Jazz Band: More Than a Century of a New Orleans Icon, by Sally Newhart (Charleston: The History Press, 2013), 1–2.
[4] Charles E. Kinzer, “The Tios of New Orleans and Their Pedagogical Influence on the Early Jazz Clarinet Style.” Black Music Research Journal 16, no. 2 (1996): 286.
[1] Pamela J. Smith, “Caribbean Influences on Early New Orleans Jazz,” M.A. thesis, Tulane University, 1986, 36.
[2] Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz” (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950). 90.