All That Jazz

John McCusker’s New Orleans jazz tour led him to write a biography of music pioneer Kid Ory

John McCusker, a New Orleans native whose family roots date to the Spanish colonial period, worked for nearly thirty years as a photographer for the Times-Picayune. He was part of the team that shared the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for public-service journalism for coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

In 1993, he and fellow staffer Scott Aiges were assigned to do a series on musicians from the era of Louis Armstrong (1901–71) who were still living.

It helped that McCusker is a musician himself—although he is modest about his ability. “I’m not a musician,” he stated. “I play music. I play well enough that I can understand the mechanics. I played in rock cover bands, and Scott and I had a funk and blues band. I tried to pick up the clarinet, but I mostly play guitar and banjo.

“Scott had moved here from New Jersey, but he knew more about New Orleans music than I did. He really introduced me to The Meters, The Neville Brothers. But he didn’t know jazz. I shared that with him.”

For the series, “I called [musician] Danny Barker [1909–94], and he said, ‘Come on over,’” recalled McCusker. “We sat in his living room and I asked him, ‘Who’s left?’ He gave me a list of twelve guys of Armstrong’s generation. I spent from December 1992 to August 1993 finding these people and photographing them and [recording] oral histories of them, crafting a series. Out of that I researched where they had lived and played and made a jazz map. I said, ‘This would be a really great tour.’”

In 1994, McCusker developed the New Orleans Jazz History Tour, taking tourists and residents to visit the old haunts of such musicians as Armstrong, Buddy Bolden (1877–1931), and Joe “King” Oliver (1881–1938).

On one of his earliest tours, McCusker was challenged by Dave Ruffner, a musician and teacher from Fresno, California, who insisted that McCusker was overlooking the importance of trombonist Edward “Kid” Ory. Ruffner said that Ory (1886–1973) had helped shape the evolving jazz scene in New Orleans at the beginning of the twentieth century. He was more than a sideman on records by Oliver, Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton (1890–1941), Ruffner said; he was a link between early pioneer Bolden and Armstrong, and an essential figure in the evolution of jazz. He had made the first record by a black New Orleans jazz band, had written the standard “Muskrat Ramble,” and had been a bandleader from 1900 until he retired in 1961. “But this information wasn’t part of Ory’s official history at the time,” McCusker said.

Incensed, McCusker consulted Bruce Boyd Raeburn, curator of Tulane’s Hogan Jazz Archive, who, to McCusker’s surprise, agreed with Ruffner. Raeburn told McCusker that there was some controversy about Ory’s reputed birth date of Christmas day 1886. He noted that nobody had written a biography of Ory and suggested that McCusker was the man for the job.

Ory had grown up on Woodland Plantation in LaPlace in St. John the Baptist Parish. McCusker had worked in the Picayune’s River Parishes bureau and knew that the Catholic Ory would have attended St. Peter Church in Reserve. He wrote to the Archdiocese of New Orleans for Ory’s baptismal certificate and got back a copy that confirmed the birth date as 1886.

“I was thinking, ‘Gee, this is easy!’” said McCusker, who was soon enmeshed in researching Ory’s life, a process that would consume him for twelve years.

To keep up with his collected information, McCusker made an Excel spreadsheet. “I wasn’t sure how to organize my material, so I created a timeline based exclusively on primary sources,” he said. “It begins with his father’s family and covers all the way up to 1973 [when Ory died].”

His early research revealed that Ory’s father was white, a descendant of one of the plantation owners. By 1910, Ory had moved to New Orleans and begun to gain fame in music circles. He was a mentor to the young Louis Armstrong. In 1919, he moved to Los Angeles, where in 1925 he made his first record. That same year, he moved to Chicago, where he recorded with Armstrong, Oliver, and Morton.

“When I was writing the book, I made a playlist of Ory’s most emblematic recordings from the 1920s,” said McCusker. “I listened to it every night. Sometimes you get caught up in the research and forget that the reason we care is the music.”

In 2000, McCusker tracked down Babette Ory, the musician’s daughter by his second wife Barbara GaNung. Among other things, Babette had an autobiography that Ory had dictated to her mother, who wrote it down in Gregg shorthand, “translated” it into English, and rearranged it into a series of anecdotes.

McCusker checked them against his research and realized that the stories were out of chronological order—but more important, he now had vignettes in Ory’s own voice. “There was so much material that I just tried to get out of the way,” said McCusker, who quotes extensively from Ory’s autobiography in his book.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, and chaos ensued. McCusker’s house in Gentilly took on eight feet of water, and he lost everything—except his research on Ory. On his way to the Picayune, he grabbed the boxes and hauled them to the office, where he stored them in the photo studio. A day later, that research was all McCusker and his family—wife Johanna, son Ian, and daughters Ellen and Katie—owned. Everything else was gone.

“For a year after Katrina I could not even look at [the research],” said McCusker. “I had to rebuild my house, pay the mortgage on a house we couldn’t even live in, and pay rent [on a temporary dwelling].”

In 2010, his wife’s sudden death dealt McCusker yet another blow. That was followed two years later by the loss of his career at the newspaper, when the Picayune announced it was going to publish only three days a week and began laying off scores of employees—including McCusker.

Fortunately, he was soon offered a job with the Baton Rouge Advocate, which had seen an opportunity to fill the coverage gap. “I jumped,” said McCusker. “I left the Picayune on a Monday and started with the Advocate the next day.”

Meanwhile, he dove into writing the Ory book, partly as therapy to help him deal with his losses.

“I didn’t know anything about St. John the Baptist Parish,” he said. “The biggest challenge was just starting it—I wrote an omnibus chapter about the milieu Kid Ory was born into.”

In 2007, Tulane included that chapter in its publication Jazz Archivist. An editor at the University Press of Mississippi read it and asked to see more; the press eventually offered McCusker a book contract. “I was lucky because I really didn’t have to go looking for a publisher,” he said.

Creole Trombone: Kid Ory and the Early Years of Jazz was published in 2012, and McCusker was invited to speak at the 2013 Louisiana Book Festival. In a lively talk, he played Ory’s “Muskrat Ramble” and showed early photographs of the pioneer musician. He recounted Ory’s Depression years, when he worked as a janitor, and his comeback in the 1940s.

McCusker relishes one tale: “One day in 1942 [musician] Barney Bigard asked Ory what kind of royalties he was getting from ‘Muskrat Ramble.’ Ory said, ‘I don’t get nothing.’ Bigard tracked down the man who had the rights and took Ory to see him. Ory walked out of there with twelve years’ worth of back royalties—eight thousand dollars. He went out and bought a big house.”

McCusker’s intimate jazz tour, limited to five persons, is still going strong. He drives his van through Treme, the Seventh Ward, the former Storyville, South Rampart Street, and Central City while spinning yarns and playing CDs of music by Ory, Armstrong, Morton, and others.

The tour includes the homes and music venues of the pioneers. Among the stops are the Little Gem Saloon; the Karnofsky Tailor Shop where Armstrong once worked; the Iroquois Theatre, a black vaudeville and silent-movie house; and the Eagle Saloon/Oddfellows Masonic Hall ballroom where Bolden thrilled audiences before 1907.

Another stop is the Jackson Avenue house, complete with commemorative plaque, where Ory lived from 1910 to 1916. It was saved by the Preservation Resource Center.

Some stops are disheartening—the vacant lot where once stood the house of saxophonist-clarinetist Sidney Bechet (1897–1959). McCusker fears there will be more such losses but hopes his tour will awaken the city to the need to save the remaining sites.

“One day all of these buildings are gonna be gone,” he said. “And we’re gonna scratch our heads and wonder how that happened.”

Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net. For information on McCusker’s tour, go to facebook.com/NewOrleansJazzHistoryTour.