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.