He mortgaged his house to pay off the piano note. Professor Henderson’s credo was “I never drink, smoke, or dissipate in any manner,” but he wagered all he owned for that piano. The contract allowed Fletcher’s schoolmaster father to skip the payments in summers, when he had no salary coming in. Henderson, Fletcher’s father, signed that contract on September 25, 1906, the day after the Atlanta Race Riot, when poor whites attacked, burned, and looted middle-class black neighborhoods and businesses. It is carved mahogany, an upright model with brass pedals, purchased from Phillips and Crew on Peachtree Street in Atlanta for $275, payable in monthly installments of $10. The Henderson family piano is a venerable old beauty, now enshrined in the Amistad Collection in New Orleans.
No blues, no degrading coon songs, no ham fat. Henderson’s parents were the salt of the earth and the sugar, too, but they decreed there would be no music under their roof on Andrew Street that did not dignify the lives of black people. A cadence of mule-trot through an open window. An arpeggio of rose thorns scraping on the mailbox. A commotion of younger siblings with the chickens in a swept-earth yard. Whatever the boy heard, he heard as music. Even at an early age, he showed signs of what the great white jazz mahout John Hammond would one day call “lassitude.”įletcher was born with the burden of perfect pitch. Sometimes the house grew quiet and Fletcher curled up on the floor to take a nap.
RIGHT FOOT STOMP LEFT FOOT STOMP SKIN
He was a sweet-faced child, with his mother’s light skin and his father’s old eyes. This is where they used to lock Fletcher Henderson in the parlor with a piano, beginning about 1903 when he was six. The fountainhead of swing, children, is a little white frame house with a tin roof, on the black side of the tracks in Cuthbert, a red-dirt Georgia cotton-gin town. Benny Goodman would be the first to tell you so. Jazz owes its origins to the bump and grind of turn-of-the-century brothels and the colored waif orphanages of the South’s great cities, but where is the wellspring of swing? If you say Chicago, the answer is no.