In Search of Buddy Bolden

Donald Marquis spent years pursuing a legendary musician, and found himself

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“You sit in a patio in the French Quarter and have a few cool ones, early one morning when there is no worry or commitment. About four-thirty or five o’clock the sky begins to lighten, and you slowly distinguish the outlines of buildings and treetops against the sky as it turns from black to grey. It is the quietest time of the twenty-four hours. The city is so still, you strain to catch a familiar sound and you realize what they meant—Jelly Roll and Albert Glenny and the rest—about the way sound used to carry so far in the New Orleans night. And over where Globe Hall used to be (seven or eight squares away), if Buddy were playing you know you could hear him clearly, along with the people applauding and laughing. You want to go back there, but can’t; you can only imagine how it was on a New Orleans morning in 1905.”

**

So begins Donald M. Marquis’s book In Search of Buddy Bolden, which makes palpable his yearning to be part of New Orleans’ storied past, when musicians first broke free of tradition and cornet player Buddy Bolden pioneered a new sound that would come to be known as jazz.

Marquis was an unlikely candidate for the post. Born in Goshen, Indiana, in 1933, he spent four years in the service during the Korean conflict, then majored in English at Goshen College. He briefly considered becoming a lawyer.

But in high school he had fallen in love with the music of Louis Armstrong—and even managed to meet the fabled Satchmo, who thrilled him by calling him “one of the cats.” While working in Cleveland after college, Marquis heard such New Orleans jazzmen as Kid Sheik, Punch Miller, Kid Howard, and Noon Johnson. He joined the New Orleans Jazz Club and devoured its publication The Second Line. 

But in high school he had fallen in love with the music of Louis Armstrong—and even managed to meet the fabled Satchmo, who thrilled him by calling him “one of the cats.”

In March 1962, lured by the music and by the fact that his college girlfriend had moved there, Marquis bought a one way bus ticket to New Orleans. He arrived on Mardi Gras weekend with $100 in his pocket. After spending Carnival with his girlfriend, he rented a room on the corner of St. Peter and Dauphine Streets for $10 a week. “It was on the second floor with a corner balcony,” recalled Marquis, who spoke at the Louisiana Book Festival last fall. “Being in New Orleans was just such a thrill.”

At the jazz clubs—Preservation, Dixie, and Icon Halls, the Paddock, the Famous Door—he was “welcomed home” by musicians he had met in Cleveland. Having published a few articles on the music, he soon conceived an ambitious undertaking: to write the history of New Orleans jazz.

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He had planned to earn his living as a freelance “idea writer” for gag greeting cards, but that wouldn’t support him, although he lived on the edge of poverty, with no car and few expenses. “My meals often consisted of a bag of popcorn and a six-cent Coke,” he told The Second Line in 2002.

He found a job as a proofreader for the Times-Picayune, a nighttime gig that gave him the freedom to pursue his passion. “It left me time during the day to go to the jazz archives or interview musicians,” Marquis said. “It was an ideal situation.”

After writing a few chapters, Marquis came to the early, seminal musician Buddy Bolden. “He was a legendary figure in the history of New Orleans jazz,” he said. “They credited him—or blamed him—for starting it around 1895. His reputation grew mostly by word of mouth. He never recorded, but his name lived on.”

Marquis soon discovered that most of what had been published about Bolden was myth. “I realized nobody knew who he was,” he said. “Nobody had done any research. [According to legend] he played a loud horn, drank a lot, and had a lot of girlfriends.”

“He was a legendary figure in the history of New Orleans jazz,” he said. “They credited him—or blamed him—for starting it around 1895. His reputation grew mostly by word of mouth. He never recorded, but his name lived on.”

After flourishing as a player at the turn of the century, Bolden had crashed and burned, with tragic results. “At a Labor Day parade in 1907 he cracked up,” says Marquis. Bolden was declared insane and committed to the asylum in Jackson, Louisiana, where he would remain until his death in 1931 at the age of 54. “It was a one-way trip in those days,” said Marquis, who later found documents relating to Bolden’s stay in Jackson.

Intrigued by the mystery, Marquis abandoned his jazz-history project and embarked on a search for the facts of Bolden’s life. “It was an obsession that lasted for fifteen years.” An obsession that changed Marquis’ own life.

Doggedly, Marquis pursued his quarry. He looked up friends and relatives of Bolden, prowled the neighborhood where he had lived, talked to musicians who remembered him. He also haunted the archives, ferreting out information in court documents, city directories, and old newspapers.

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He spent a fruitless day searching for Bolden’s grave at Holt Cemetery. “It was 110 degrees, full of weeds, rats, mosquitoes. I spent about five hours tramping around.” The sexton told Marquis that he’d never find the gravesite because cemetery records were so poor.

In 1975, Marquis took a “not very demanding” job at the New Orleans Public Library and continued his research. “Some of it was luck,” he said. “I was in the right place at the right time. It wasn’t a very important job, and it gave me time to concentrate on the book.” During his time there, the NOPL became the repository for birth, death, and marriage certificates, as well as for police arrest records. Marquis had access to a rich vein of information, and he mined it tirelessly, finding the only example of Bolden’s signature and the only known portrait photo of him. “I did a lot of accurate documentation,” he said. “It opened the door to an entirely new way of doing research on important jazz musicians.”

Like many obsessed persons, Marquis had trouble letting go of his work. His relationship with his girlfriend foundered, partly because of his obsession, and neither ever married. “Every day I did something, even if it was just to look at an old newspaper,” he said. “I had a notebook with thirty pages of notes of things to check out. Some of them I never got around to, or the people [to interview] had died. Finally I said, ‘I’ve got to get the damned thing done.’”

By 1976, he had a book-length manuscript, which was accepted by Louisiana State University Press. “I got thirty pages of instructions about how to do the footnotes and bibliography,” said Marquis. “Fortunately I had kept pretty good records, plus a journal. But it wasn’t easy [documenting his work].”

LSU called the book In Search of Buddy Bolden, First Man of Jazz, although Marquis had a mild objection. “The press said we had to put the word jazz in there. I never said that he was the first man of jazz, but he certainly was a pivotal figure in it. Jazz probably didn’t come in until about 1910.”

The book came out in 1978. “It’s a kick, seeing it in a bookstore window,” said Marquis. “You’ve really done it. Instead of saying, ‘I’m working on it,’ you can say, ‘There it is.’”

He was no Ph.D., and he had struggled with the academic requirement for notes and bibliography, but his work was rewarded. Reviewers called the book “meticulously researched,” “superbly intelligent,” “a magnificent piece of work.”

That same year, Marquis’s journal of his search was published by Pinchpenny Press as a chapbook called Finding Buddy Bolden. “I realized I was exploding a lot of myths, so I kept a journal of my research,” he said. “I’m amazed that it’s been used in various universities and colleges about how to do research.”

Reviewers called the book “meticulously researched,” “superbly intelligent,” “a magnificent piece of work.”

So many good things happened in 1978 that Marquis joked, “Life began at forty-five.” That year he also became editor of The Second Line, the publication he had been reading since the 1950s. Next, a job opened up as jazz curator of the Louisiana State Museum. Marquis won a one-year appointment, at the end of which he was hired permanently. (He retired from the museum in 1996 and from the Second Line editorship in 2002.)

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In 1996, Marquis spearheaded the installation of a memorial monument at Holt Cemetery. On September 6 of that year, the 119th anniversary of Bolden’s birth, a jazz funeral was held, attended by two thousand persons. “Buddy’s granddaughter and great-granddaughter came down,” said Marquis. “It was just like old New Orleans.” In May 2002, the New Orleans city council renamed the 4900 block of Toulouse Street; today it is Buddy Bolden Place. “Now he’s part of the city,” said Marquis.

On September 6 of that year, the 119th anniversary of Bolden’s birth, a jazz funeral was held, attended by two thousand persons. “Buddy’s granddaughter and great-granddaughter came down,” said Marquis. “It was just like old New Orleans.”

In 2005 LSU Press issued a revised edition of the Bolden book, including new information Marquis had uncovered since its publication twenty-seven years earlier. “Don has an academic’s attention to detail and getting the story right,” says David Fulmer, who read Marquis’ book until it literally fell apart while writing his novel Chasing the Devil’s Tail, which uses Bolden as a character. “For every fact in there, you think of how much stuff he had to sift through,” says New Orleans music writer Ben Sandmel. “It’s like panning for gold.”

Marquis marveled that he has been able to “make a career out of being a jazz fan,” traveling all over the world to deliver talks on New Orleans music. But his crowning achievement will always be the Bolden book. “It’s just something I wanted to do,” he said. “I didn’t want to go down in history as a proofreader. I loved the music so much I wanted to do something to pay back.”

Ruth Laney is fascinated by those she calls Antiquarians—people who are in love with the past. “What distinguishes them all is passion—a love of history and a desire to inhabit the mysterious realm of the long-ago.” A writer based in Baton Rouge, she has written for national magazines. She can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.